IS NY STILL RULED BY ROCKEFELLERS?
With the passing of a patriarch, a great dynasty’s power fades
WHEN David Rockefeller Sr. died March 20, at the age of 101, he was worth $3.3 billion, according to Forbes. And with his passing, the city lost one of the last of its brand-name billionaires.
The Rockefeller name has long captured the American imagination, becoming shorthand for “richest of the rich.” For more than a century, the family has ranked among the most important clans in New York. It is no understatement to say they helped build this town. Their moniker is stamped all over local institutions — Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller Fountain, Rockefeller University for medical sciences. A Rockefeller co-founded the Museum of Modern Art. Family members have also helped fund everything from the YMCA to the Asia Society and have driven the development of projects such as Battery Park City.
There was a time when having a Rockefeller at an event could elevate an up-andcoming hostess. “They were the most desirable guests,” says a source who knows that world well. “It could cement a person’s place in society.”
So what does it mean to be a Rockefeller today, when few New Yorkers would be able to name members of the current generations?
“The name still means a lot,” said Michael Gross, editor of Avenue magazine. “But they have collective power, not individual power.”
THE family’s money was first earned by John D. Rockefeller — David’s grandfather — who founded Standard Oil in 1870, and was America’s first billionaire. “[He] is the quintessential robber baron,” Gross said.
Indeed, despite all the good he did for early-20th century Manhattan, John D. operated as a brutal businessman. “[He was] no angel,” said David Nasaw, who’s written about America’s great dynasties. “You make his kind of money by driving hard bargains, destroying competitors and paying the lowest wages.”
It all fostered the luxurious lifestyles of family members. David and his siblings — including brothers who grew up to be the governors of New York and Arkansas, as well as one of America’s first venture capitalists — could’ve inspired the comic-book character Richie Rich with their over-the-top childhoods. When David skated down Fifth Avenue, a limousine rolled behind him in case he got too tired. He grew up in Manhattan’s largest private residence and summered at a 107room “beach cottage” in Seal Harbor, Maine..
When con artist and murderer Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter wanted to pass himself off as a wealthy heir in the 1990s, he renamed himself Clark Rockefeller. During the same decade, a striving Jay Z launched the Roc-AFella Records label — sending a clear mes-sage about his hip-hop ambitions.
In our collective imagination, “Rockefeller”” has come to stand for massive yachts, buck-ets of diamonds and flowing champagne. Butt the family never flaunted its wealth. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was even squeamish about putting his name on Rockefeller Center. “He thought it ‘flamboyant and distasteful,’ ” wrote Dan Okrent in his book “Great Fortune,” “but the prospect of empty buildings was distasteful, too.” And he knew putting the family stamp on it would attract tenants eager for a bit of that success to rub off on them, too.
Yet some in New York society say the family’s power has been diluted a bit as they’ve grown in numbers and their level of wealth has become increasingly common. In an age of tech billionaires and hedgefund titans, America’s oldmoney families have struggled to keep up. The Vanderbilts, who built Grand Central Station, are “wealthy but not fabulously wealthy. The Carnegies are worth nothing [now],” said Nasaw.
“The older Rockefeller generation did a lot to help New York,” said a prominent Manhattan socialite. “But the younger generation is more spread out geographically and financially. They don’t have the [financial] wherewithal to do what their relatives did.” There are Rockefellers in Montana, Vermont, even Arkansas, where Andrea D. Rockefeller, granddaughter of that state’s onetime governor Winthrop, is a cop. Divorces, remarriages and prolific numbers of children — living blood-descendents of John D. Rockefeller exceed 150 — have divided the family fortune.
Today John D. Rockefeller’s lifetime haul would be worth around $336 billion. But Forbes estimates that the collective family bankroll hovers at around a thinly spread $11 billion. (David — who served as president of Chase Bank — died with a personal fortune of $3.3 billion.)
A chunk of it has gone to philanthropy. John D. Rockefeller’s ethos was, “I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.” He underscored this by giving away $530,853,632. David donated some $900 million in his lifetime. Relatives today continue the tradition with organizations such as Rockefeller Philanthropy, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
“[High-profile philanthropy] is in their DNA,” said another socialite. “They have given funds to improve health care, to foster international trade and to enliven the arts.”
But while there are family institutions, there is no money-making family business, per se. By contrast, the Hearst family, with their active media holdings, continue to roll in the dough and are said to be worth $28 billion.
Robert Frank, who’s chronicled the rich for The Wall Street Journal, has expressed doubt about the money lasting through the current crop of Rockefellers. Sean O’Reilly, who has written extensively on the family, concurs: “You have five generations . . . start chopping up a billion dollars and it disappears.”
THE Rockefellers have largely been outshined, in terms of glamour and ostentatiousness, by West Coast dynasties like the Hearsts and the Gettys. But that’s not to say they haven’t had scandal and tragedy.
When former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller passed away in 1979 of a heart attack, it was allegedly after having made love to his secretary. Steven Rockefeller shocked everyone by marrying Anne-Marie Rasmussen, his family’s housemaid, in 1959. In 1951, Winifred Rockefeller, great-niece of John D. Rockefeller, killed herself and two of her children inside their Greenwich, Conn., home.
Ten years later, in 1961, while hunting down art in New Guinea, 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller was supposedly eaten by cannibals.
Lately, though, the name has been untarnished and those deep in the philanthropy scene said it still goes a long way. “When you have a Rockefeller on your committee it is a bonus,” said a society chronicler. “People want to hobnob with them.”
Among the glittering lights on the gala circuit are several women who married into the family: Renee Rockefeller, who is on the board of public art organization Creative Time and is the wife of Nelson’s son Mark; Allison Rockefeller, who founded Audubon’s Women in Conservation and is wed to Nelson’s grandson Peter; and Susan Rockefeller, who’s on the board of Oceana and is married to David Jr.
Still, if finances keep eroding, one wonders what might become of NYC’s most valuable name. Perhaps a relative could take a stint on the “Real Housewives,” a la Sonja Morgan — whose ex-husband was an heir of Industrial Age banking tycoon John Pierpont Morgan.
Gross admits it could happen. “My hope, though,” he said, “would be that somebody in the family would stage an intervention.”
The younger generation . . . doesn’t have the [financial wherewithal] to do what their relatives s did. — A socialite speaking of the Rockefeller family