A quirky visionary
Edith Rockefeller McCormick reigned as a queen of Chicago’s elite
Edith Rockefeller McCormick was certainly the most unconventional of Chicago’s grande dames, but she was also a visionary — even if she wasn’t always thinking straight.
Brookfield Zoo was made possible because Rockefeller McCormick wanted to bring to America what she had seen in Europe: a zoo where people and animals wouldn’t be separated by bars, where elephants and apes were contained by moats and pits instead of cages. Dec. 30 marks the 100th anniversary of the announcement of her gift of between 60 and 150 acres to make that dream a reality. (Accounts of the total acreage varied.)
Upon hearing that Cook County’s Juvenile Court, the nation’s first, didn’t have the money to pay probation officers, Rockefeller McCormick cut a check and that was that.
She provided financial support to James Joyce when he was writing “Ulysses,” a novel considered a landmark of literary modernism.
Still, it wasn’t their philanthropy that made Rockefeller McCormick and her husband, Harold Fowler McCormick, dream copy for newspapers.
“The McCormicks were noted for a certain not undistinguished goofiness,” noted Arthur Meeker, a novelist and chronicler of Chicago’s upper crust, to which he belonged.
In 1923, Rockefeller McCormick announced at a dinner party that, in an earlier life, she’d been the child bride of Tutankhamen, an ancient Egyptian king whose tomb had been recently opened. “Only the other day, while glancing through an illustrated paper, I saw a picture of a chair removed from the King’s chamber,” Rockefeller McCormick told reporters. “Like a flash I recognized that chair. I had sat in it many times.”
She was actually a member of the industrial ruling class. Her father was John D. Rockefeller, the oil baron. Her husband was a son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper that transformed farming.
Rockefeller McCormick’s extravagant lifestyle put her at odds with her father, who was known for his frugality. She bought her dog a $1 million diamond collar and matching tiara. She herself wore a $2 million rope of pearls and a $1 million emerald necklace.
Rockefeller McCormick and her husband each inherited sufficient wealth to sustain persistent flights of fancy plus finance projects that touched down on reality. At a banquet in her honor, Rockefeller McCormick explained that her donation for what would become Brookfield Zoo was motivated by a fascination with the psychology of animals, as the Tribune reported.
“This is a science of which little is known,” she told guests at the posh Union League Club. “We must get nearer to animals to reach the human soul.”
A decade earlier, she had gone to Zurich to be treated for depression by Carl Gustav Jung, a founding father of psychoanalysis. She contributed generously to Jung’s institute and stayed in Europe for eight years, traveling and going from being Jung’s patient and patron to a practitioner and teacher of his therapy, a methodology tinged with mysticism.
In his wife’s absence, McCormick continued their patronage of Chicago’s opera company and indulged his passion for sailing. Though he occasionally visited Rockefeller McCormick, their long separation begat rumors of a pending divorce.
On her return, Rockefeller McCormick denied and confirmed them in the same interview. “I can assure you that nothing is further from my mind,” she told the Tribune. “If he finds entertainment in anybody’s company it is all right.”
She was accompanied by a Jungian psychoanalyst, who got $50,000 to see her to her home, and she was met at the ship’s dock by the business manager of the Chicago Opera Company.
The strain on the McCormicks’ marriage was nothing new; it had been rocky virtually from their 1895 wedding day. Marital bliss hadn’t accompanied fabled material comfort. Edith and Harold McCormick lived in a mansion at 1000 Lake Shore Drive furnished with a Persian rug that had belonged to the Russian czar Peter the Great. They dined on plates of gold that Napoleon had given his sister.
They had a second, 44-room home on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Lake Forest. Modeled after an Italian palazzo, and built at a cost of $5 million, Villa Turicum was fully staffed at all times just in case they might show up. They rarely did, being preoccupied with the emotional fallout of Rockefeller McCormick’s years abroad.
McCormick had become enamored of Ganna Walska, a Polish singer. He aimed to make her a star of the Chicago Opera Company, though her resume was thin. In Havana, she’d been pelted with rotten eggs during a 1917 appearance. Four years later, she backed out of a Chicago debut for which McCormick had bought every seat in the theater. She told the Tribune it was because of a dispute, an “artistic one between her and the opera director.” Others said that in rehearsal Walska’s voice didn’t carry beyond the orchestra pit. She was said to be the model for the inept opera singer championed by a newspaper czar in Orson Welles’ film classic “Citizen Kane.”
For her part, Rockefeller McCormick had a human souvenir of her European stay. There she had met Edwin Krenn, an architect who moved in Jungian circles. He came to Chicago, and she made him her business manager and set him up as a real estate developer. As they were constant companions, it was assumed there was more to their relationship.
Yet their story didn’t generate a fraction of the newspaper coverage of Harold McCormick’s love life. He was still smitten by Walska, who had married a millionaire she had met on the voyage back to France. But that relationship hadn’t flourished. They were each taking turns locking the other out of their posh Parisian home.
So when Rockefeller McCormick consented to a divorce, a McCormick-and-Walska nuptial looked imminent.
But first, McCormick, who was 15 years older than Walska, had a mysterious operation at Wesley Memorial Hospital. The transplant surgeon got a $50,000 fee, prompting speculation that he had discovered a method by which “atrophying tissues might be infused with new life and vigor.”
Whatever the doctor did, it didn’t come with a lifetime guarantee for the marriage. In 1931, McCormick sued for divorce, charging Walska with desertion, as the Tribune reported. “Mr. McCormick testified that his wife preferred to live abroad; that she had rarely been in Chicago since their marriage, and not at all since
March, 1929.”
Walska wasn’t left penniless. She inherited $3 million from the estate of the ex-husband she’d divorced to marry McCormick. Asked about the secret of her success in finding husbands — she had six, most of them wellheeled — Walska replied: “It’s not trying. Most women try too hard.”
By the 1930s, Rockefeller McCormick’s fortunes were on a precipitous downslope. Whatever his financial skills, Krenn the Jungian architect couldn’t protect her from the 1929 stock market crash. Her debts quickly outran her assets. Her mansion couldn’t be kept up. She would have been destitute if it weren’t for her brother, John D. Rockefeller Jr. He gave her an allowance of $1,000 a day, and moved her into the Drake Hotel.
When she died in 1932, her remains were returned to the mansion for her funeral. The service attracted a mob of socialites and social climbers. “It was remarked that only the intimate friends progressed farther than the doorstep,” the Tribune reported. McCormick came by to pay his respects, but Krenn was a no-show.
Rockefeller McCormick died two years before Brookfield Zoo opened to the public. That the zoo was built at all was something of a surprise; the onset of the Great Depression didn’t stop its construction. Of all her passions, it alone continues to give visible testimony to her abiding selfconfidence.
“My object in this world is to think new thoughts,” Rockefeller McCormick reportedly said. And who is to say that she didn’t?