In February of 1923, the richest daughter of the richest man on earth gathered the reporters of Chicago and told them without a tremor that she had once been the wife of a pharaoh. She had recognized her own chair, she said, in a photograph taken from his tomb. She could name a throne three thousand years gone, and yet she had three living children who, by every account, had to make appointments to sit with her. Her fear of the world had grown so complete that she had not, it was said, slept a night beyond her own front door in years.
She owned forty million dollars, a palace of forty rooms, and a rope of pearls worth two million. She could not make herself leave the house. The pharaoh’s bride was only the part the papers remembered. What was she reaching for that none of it could give her?
She was born into the largest fortune the world had ever made and raised as though there were almost none of it at all. Edith Rockefeller came into the world on the 31st of August 1872 in Cleveland, Ohio, the fourth surviving daughter of John Davidson Rockefeller and Laura Celestia Spelman, whom everyone called Cettie. Her father was building Standard Oil into the first great American monopoly, and within Edith’s own childhood he would climb past every other fortune in the country, then past every fortune on earth, until his name became a byword for money itself. He was a quiet, controlled, deeply religious man, sparing with warmth as he was sparing with everything else, a father who expressed love through discipline and instruction and the careful management of his children’s characters.
He was not cruel. He was simply withholding in the way of a man who believed that ease and indulgence would ruin the young as surely as poverty. For a daughter of a tender and inward nature, hungry for a warmth the house rationed as strictly as it rationed its allowances, that quiet withholding would prove to be the wound beneath all her other wounds. The frugality sat on top of a fortune almost beyond imagining, and the two grew up together under the same roof.
Standard Oil had begun in the refineries of Cleveland and had spread through a decade of ruthless and brilliant maneuver until it held the great bulk of the oil business of an entire industrializing nation in a single set of hands. It was the first monopoly of its scale that the world had ever produced, and it made her father not merely rich, but rich in a way that had no real precedent: a private citizen commanding the resources of a small state. And yet the money changed almost nothing about the way the family actually lived. They kept to comfortable rather than palatial houses.
They gave enormous sums to the Baptist church and to the causes her father judged worthy, and they accounted for every remaining dollar with the care a careful shopkeeper gives his till. The lesson pressed on the children from every direction was that the fortune was a trust held from God, to be multiplied and then given away, and never under any circumstances to be enjoyed for its own sweet sake. The Rockefeller house ran on ledgers and scripture. The children were given small allowances and made to keep account books, entering every cent they spent and every cent they gave away, and answering to their father for the totals.
There was no wine at the table and no display of any kind. Cettie was a devout Baptist of the plainest sort, and her husband, for all the empire rising under his hands, believed to the bottom of his soul that money was a moral test a person could fail simply by enjoying it. Wealth was a stewardship. Pleasure in it was a kind of sin.
Edith was taught at home by tutors, with a short spell at the Rye Female Seminary, and she never had the glittering society debut that the daughters of the other new fortunes took as their birthright. She learned languages instead. She learned to sit very still. She grew up bright and watchful and formal, a serious girl in a serious house shaped by a mother who prayed and a father who counted.
And somewhere in those quiet, accounted rooms, a pressure began to build that would define the rest of her life. A child raised to believe that wanting things is a weakness learns one of two lessons: she learns to want nothing at all, or she learns to want without any limit, in secret, storing it up against the day she is finally free to spend. Edith would spend the whole of her adulthood revealing which lesson she had learned. There is one small thing she carried out of that childhood and kept to the very end.
She had promised her father she would never serve alcohol under her own roof, and she never did, not once, across decades of the most lavish entertaining the city of Chicago had ever seen. On the 26th of November 1895, at the Buckingham Hotel in Manhattan, Edith Rockefeller married Harold Fowler McCormick, heir to the McCormick Reaper fortune, the harvesting empire that would grow into International Harvester. On one side of that wedding stood Standard Oil, the master of the age’s most important fuel. On the other stood the machine that had remade the American field.
Their marriage joined two of the largest industrial fortunes the country had ever produced and made the young couple, for a time, arguably the richest pair in Chicago. Chicago in those years was the perfect stage for such a union: a raw and roaring new money city, rebuilt in stone and steel after the great fire, growing so fast that its society had barely finished inventing its own rules. Where the old money of the eastern seaboard guarded its gates, Chicago was still deciding who its aristocracy would be. For a golden while, the answer was Edith and Harold McCormick.
Her instrument of rule was the opera. In an age when a woman could not sit on a board or run a company, cultural patronage was one of the few great public roles open to her, and Edith played it like a monarch. To keep a grand opera company alive in Chicago was to decide which singers the city heard, which works it saw, which nights the whole of society gathered under one roof and looked to her box to know how to feel. She underwrote it year after year, covering the losses that would have closed it.
In return, she held a court that even the proudest families had to attend. Harold was the sunlit opposite of the house Edith had grown up in: handsome, athletic, sociable, restless, a man who loved company and pleasure and motion. In the beginning, that difference looked like balance. Their seat in the city was a mansion of forty rooms at 1000 Lake Shore Drive, a great block of Bedford limestone that filled the whole frontage from Oak Street to Bellevue Place and looked out across the water.
Inside it, she built the life of a queen. The inventory of that life ran like this: a rope of pearls valued at around two million dollars, a necklace worth close to a million more, a house of forty rooms on the finest street in the city, something near five million given across the years to keep grand opera alive in Chicago. She helped found and then personally sustained Chicago’s resident grand opera company. She was a charter supporter of the Art Institute.
She set up a French kindergarten in a ballroom so that her daughters might learn as European children learned. She put money behind a program for young offenders. And in 1913, one of the first flying boats in the country was christened Edith in her honor. The same woman who kept detectives and timed her dinners was among the first in her city to embrace the motorcar and the airplane.
She reached eagerly toward the future in everything except the one direction that mattered: out through her own front door and into the ordinary flow of a single unguarded day. From the street, it was the happiest and grandest empire in the Midwest. Inside its own dining room, something had already begun to go quietly and terribly wrong. At the greatest table in Chicago, the footmen were forbidden to speak to the woman at its head.
Dinner in the McCormick house was less a meal than a rite. At every place lay a menu printed in French with a gilt edge, however small the party. The whole service was timed to end at exactly thirty-five minutes, measured against a jeweled clock. When the time was up, the dinner was over, whatever the state of the plates or the flow of the conversation.
The servants moved around her in a practiced hush because they were not permitted to address her directly. She sat at the head of a table worth more than most American towns, wearing pearls worth two million dollars, and she governed the one thing left to her that would still obey a command: she governed the minutes. It reached even her children. The three who lived to grow up learned that the way to see their mother was to make an appointment.
A son or a daughter who wanted an hour with the woman who had given them life put in a request, waited for it to be granted, and then was received at her side as a caller is received. The throne at the very center of that house was hers, and the people who loved her most had to ask in advance for leave to sit near it. The age had firm ideas about women like Edith, and those ideas were part of the cage, too. Even the richest woman of the Gilded Age was expected to adorn a fortune rather than command it.
The money was her husband’s to direct. The great decisions were his to make. Her sphere was the drawing room, the wardrobe, the guest list, and the good cause. Edith lived that arrangement in its most extreme and painful form: she carried one of the largest personal fortunes any American woman had ever held, and she had almost no real authority over the shape of her own days, her own marriage, or her own fears.
And so she ruled the only territory that was truly hers. The timed dinner was not vanity. It was command exercised in the one place she was still sovereign. She could not decide where her husband spent his nights or whether her fears would let her leave the house in the morning.
But she could decide that the meal would end in thirty-five minutes, that the menus would be French, that the servants would keep their silence, and that even her children would come to her by appointment. Every ritual in that mansion was a hand closing around the one thing left within her grip. People called her cold and imperious, and from the outside she was both. From the inside, she was a woman holding on to the last few levers a life had left her.
The jewels told the same truth in another language. The two-million-dollar pearls and the million-dollar necklace were made for the world, for galas and openings and the great staircases of other people’s houses. Edith wore them at home, at dinners in her own rooms, on a body that went almost nowhere at all. The reports of these years, repeated for decades by people who loved a strange tale, describe a woman closing in on herself.
She is said to have kept a detail of detectives, commonly numbered at six. She is said to have walked the same route at the same hour of every day and never to have varied it. She is said to have developed so complete a horror of water that she rarely bathed. Weigh each of those claims with the caution it deserves, but the shape they draw together is consistent, and it is the shape of a cage.
In the plainest terms, she had everything the age worshipped and almost no power at all over her own ordinary day. In 1901, a fever took the one thing her money was powerless against. His name was John Rockefeller McCormick, and they called him Jack. He was four years old when scarlet fever came for him, and against scarlet fever in the year 1901, the greatest fortune on earth was worth precisely nothing.
There was no medicine to buy, no specialist to summon by fast train from the coast, no sum of money in the world that could be laid on the sick bed and made to matter. In that year there were no antibiotics and no reliable defense against a disease that swept through the nurseries of rich and poor alike and carried off children by the thousand every year. A wealthy family could buy the finest doctors in the country and the cleanest, quietest sick room money could arrange, and still they could only sit and nurse and wait and hope the fever broke before it reached the heart or the kidneys. The one advantage the Rockefeller money could not buy was the one that mattered: a cure that did not yet exist.
The richest young mother in America sat beside her small son and watched him slip away exactly as the poorest mother in the city would have watched, with her hands open and empty. What she did next tells you what kind of grief it was. She and Harold founded and endowed a research institute in the boy’s name, the John Rockefeller McCormick Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases, and set it to work against the very illnesses that had killed him, so that other people’s children might be spared what hers had not been. It was grief turned outward into science, and it saved lives that history did not trouble to count.
It was also for her not the smallest comfort. Then in 1904, the losses doubled: a daughter, the infant Aditha, lived only briefly and died. By the time Edith Rockefeller McCormick was thirty-two, she had buried two of her children. Three others survived her into adulthood — Fowler, Muriel, and Matilda — and each of them would grow up in the long shadow of the two small graves and of the mother the graves had made.
It is from these years that the withdrawal dates: the panic, the depression, the terror of the ordinary open world that a later age would learn to call agoraphobia. Read the story forward from the nursery in 1901, and the strange woman at the head of the table stops being a curiosity to laugh at and becomes something you recognize with a chill. First the frugal childhood that taught her to distrust every single thing she wanted. Then the marriage that had promised warmth and slowly, coldly failed to give it.
Then the dead son and the dead daughter, and the discovery made at the worst possible cost that all the money on earth could not reach into a small bright bedroom and hold back a fever for even one hour. A woman builds a cage like that for one reason only: she has learned the hardest way there is that the world will take whatever she loves the very moment she looks away. So she stopped looking away. She stopped going out.
She built her walls and set her clocks and kept her routs, and she governed her minutes because the years had proved beyond argument that she could govern nothing else. On a bluff above Lake Michigan, she raised an Italian palace of forty-four rooms, and history records that she may have spent one night inside it. The house was called Villa Turicum, and it stood at Lake Forest, north of the city, on a high plateau above the water. Edith wanted an Italian Renaissance dream made real, and she pursued it like a woman for whom cost was only a rumor she had heard about the lives of other people.
She turned away designs from Frank Lloyd Wright, already the most original architect the country had produced. She turned away James Gamble Rogers as well, and gave the commission instead to the East Coast classicist Charles A. Platt, who understood exactly the formal columnar grandeur she was reaching for: the look of an old European villa transplanted whole to an Illinois shore. The estate ran to somewhere between 260 and 300 acres, the accounts differ on the exact figure.
The building alone is said to have cost around five million dollars, with something close to two million more spent on the land itself. The house held around forty-four rooms, and is reported to have contained a run of near-identical master bedrooms, one much like the next, a detail that has always sounded like a riddle and has never quite been solved. There were formal gardens laid in the Italian manner, a great garage, wings for the staff, polo grounds, and a double staircase cut down the face of the bluff to a pool set beside the beach. The choice of architect is its own small window into who she was.
To turn away Frank Lloyd Wright in those years was to turn away the most daring and original mind in American building, a man inventing a wholly new and native way of making houses. She wanted nothing so untried. She wanted Europe and age and the settled authority of the old world, a villa that looked as though it had stood on its bluff for four hundred years rather than four. It was the taste of a woman reaching backward for permanence, for the solidity of things that had already lasted, at the very moment her own life was beginning to come loose at every seam.
And then the single detail that turns the whole triumph into a portrait: Edith is said to have slept at Villa Turicum perhaps once, perhaps not even that. Harold, by most accounts, never stayed there at all. The great house on the bluff outlived its brief glory by only a little. After her death, it slid into abandonment and long neglect, its fountains choked, its terraces cracking, its near-identical bedrooms standing empty above the lake, a ruin photographed by the curious for decades.
In 1956, it was torn down for good. The palace that had cost seven million dollars and been slept in perhaps once ended as rubble on a hillside. In 1913, she left husband, children, and country behind and went to sit for the better part of eight years in a consulting room in Switzerland. The doctor was Carl Gustav Jung, and the city of Zurich was where the new science of the mind was being invented almost from one month to the next.
Edith arrived as a patient, seeking relief from the depression and the panic and the housebound terror that had closed slowly around her over the years since the nursery. She stayed on and off for something near eight years, and in that time she became far more than a patient. She trained as a Jungian analyst in her own right and by some accounts carried a full case load of her own: a Rockefeller from Chicago, listening gravely to the dreams of strangers in a rented room above a lake in the Alps. She was also quietly one of the movement’s most important early patrons.
She paid to have Jung’s writings translated into English. She helped underwrite the founding of the Psychological Club of Zurich in 1916. Some of the very machinery of modern psychology in its first fragile and uncertain years ran on Rockefeller money, channeled through the hands of a woman who had come to be cured and had stayed to build. Set that decision against its time, and it grows stranger and braver both.
In 1913, the whole science of the unconscious mind was only a few years old, disreputable in many quarters, argued over in a handful of European cities by a small circle of pioneers who were themselves still falling out with one another. For a married American woman of the highest social rank to leave husband and children and country and cross an ocean, to place her mind in the hands of one of these new doctors, was close to unheard of. It cost her the ordinary life she had, and exposed her to every whisper the society columns could invent. She did it anyway, because the alternative was to go on drowning quietly inside her own house.
It was here, too, that her money briefly carried a genius. During these Zurich years, she gave the then unknown James Joyce a monthly stipend of a thousand Swiss francs, from February of 1918 to October of 1919. The income helped keep him and his family afloat while he labored over the book that became Ulysses. Then in October of 1919, she stopped the payments.
The reason has never been firmly established. It is often said that she wished Joyce to submit himself to analysis and that he refused. If that account is true, it is a small and perfect emblem of her entire life: she believed the examined interior was the only road to salvation, and cut off one of the century’s greatest artists for declining to walk it. What is certain is that for a year and a half, a landmark of modern literature was underwritten by the daughter of Standard Oil.
A dozen years earlier she had been the frozen queen of a Chicago dinner table, governing her servants by the clock. Now she was a working analyst above a Swiss lake, listening to strangers unburden their hidden lives and pouring her fortune into a movement that would go on to change how the whole modern world understood itself. It was in its way the freest she would ever be. The tragedy is that she could not stay inside it.
She came home to Chicago in 1921, a stranger to her own city, remade from the inside out, trailing a young Austrian companion named Edwin Krenn, and walking straight into the news that her husband was about to marry an opera singer in front of the whole watching world. The voice belonged to Ganna Walska, a Polish opera singer of enormous ambition and, by the unkind consensus of the critics, uneven gifts. Harold had drifted for years as Edith withdrew ever deeper into ritual and analysis, and while she was abroad, his wandering attention settled at last and decisively upon Walska. In December of 1921, Edith divorced him on the grounds of desertion.
In 1922, in Paris, Harold married his singer. What he did to win her became one of the most mocked episodes of the entire decade: in middle age, hoping to renew his vigor for a much younger wife, Harold submitted himself to a fashionable and faintly grotesque surgery associated with the doctor Serge Voronoff, a gland transplant procedure that the newspapers gleefully christened the monkey gland operation. The humiliation carried a cruel and exact symmetry, because it played itself out on a stage she had paid for. Edith had kept the Grand Opera of Chicago alive with her own fortune for more than a decade.
Walska’s own operatic career, meanwhile, was famously propelled less by a claim than by the money and influence of the wealthy men around her, and it is widely said that she became one of the inspirations for the hopeless, husband-funded opera singer in Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane. So the wife who had bankrolled the opera house was made to watch her husband try to push his mistress onto the very kind of stage her own money sustained. It would be unfair, though, to make Harold only a villain in her story. He was a warm and living man who had married a woman slowly turning to stone, and who had waited through eight years of her absence while she sat in Switzerland with another man’s theories and, in time, another man at her side.
He chased his own comfort the way such men do. There are no simple monsters in this story, only two people who could not give each other what they needed, and a great fortune that let them both fail on a stage far larger than most marriages are ever asked to perform on. That winter the whole world went mad for Egypt, and Edith Rockefeller told it she had been there first. In November of 1922, the archaeologist Howard Carter had opened the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamen, untouched for more than three thousand years.
By the following winter, a global fever for all things Egyptian was at its full and dizzy height. Into that fever, in February of 1923, Edith made her announcement to the reporters of Chicago. She had been, she told them, the first wife of the boy king himself, married to him at sixteen, in a life she had lived three thousand years before the one she was living now, and she had proof of a kind that only she in all the world could offer. Glancing through an illustrated paper, she had seen a photograph of a chair taken from the pharaoh’s own chamber, and she had known it on sight.
Her words were carried in the press of the day: “I married King Tutankhamen when I was only sixteen years old. I was his first wife. Only the other day, while glancing through an illustrated paper, I saw a picture of a chair removed from the king’s chamber. Like a flash, I recognized that chair.
I had sat in it many times. ” She had not come to the belief overnight. “My interest in reincarnation is of many years standing,” she is reported to have added. It would be easy to read the announcement as a bid for attention, and easy to read it as the plain evidence of a mind coming apart.
Neither quite fits the woman who made it. She did not need the newspapers. She had spent her whole life trying to keep them out, and she was, by every serious account, brilliant to the end, sharp and cultured, and entirely able to run a national real estate empire. The claim was something stranger and more human than either madness or vanity: it was the settled conviction of a woman who had studied the deep mind for years, who had lost more than she could carry, and who had found in the idea of many lives a way to make her present one bearable.
To have been a queen once, loved by a king, is a gentler story to tell yourself than to have been a lonely woman in a cold house whose husband left and whose children knocked before entering. The wealthy of her era were steeped in the occult to a degree a modern listener can find hard to credit. Spiritualism and séances, astrology, theosophy, the belief in past lives and messages from the dead had been fashionable enthusiasms in the great houses on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century. Against that background, a rich and serious woman announcing that she remembered a former life was not the raving of a lunatic, but the far end of a road her whole class had been walking for decades.
Remember the woman making the claim. She had lost a four-year-old son to a fever her fortune could not so much as bribe. She had buried a daughter in her arms. She had then spent eight years steeped in a science of deep and shared and timeless memory, in the daily care of a man who taught that the self reaches down into layers far older than any single lifetime.
She had come home from all of that to public abandonment and the slow beginning of private ruin. In this life she sat at the head of a table where her own children had to book a seat beside her and where the servants were forbidden to speak. In another life, she told herself, she had sat upon a throne so entirely and unquestionably her own that she could know it again across three thousand years and a single grainy photograph. The pharaoh’s bride was a confession of loneliness dressed in gold and handed to the newspapers with a steady voice.
Back in Chicago, she poured five million dollars of Standard Oil stock into the ground and set out in her fifties to build a city. On her return from Zurich, Edith turned the full weight of her fortune toward real estate. She set up a property trust, capitalized with around five million dollars of Standard Oil securities, and installed as her agents a firm known as Krenn and Dato, run by her companion Edwin Krenn and a partner named Edward Dato. The firm, formed in 1922, grew with astonishing speed into one of the largest subdividers of land in the entire nation.
By the reported figures, more than sixteen thousand people bought lots from her developments, land worth in total over twenty-eight million dollars. There were garden apartment schemes spreading out through the suburbs, whole subdivisions carved from open ground, and luxury apartment buildings raised along the length of Lake Shore Drive itself. And at the very far edge of that ambition sat a dream that tells you exactly who she still was underneath the fear and the ritual: she planned an entire new city, a lakeside utopia near Kenosha in Wisconsin, to be built up from nothing to her own design, complete with mansions and an airport and a university of its own. In her own accounting, the whole real estate venture was meant one day to be worth some forty-five million dollars.
She meant to call the city Edithton. It was never built, and it never rose above the paper it was drawn on. The 1920s were the great age of the American land boom. For a woman who had spent twenty years unable to act on the world, real estate offered something intoxicating: a way to reshape the actual ground, to leave a mark on the map that would outlast her, to build in dirt and brick the permanence she could not find in her own fragile days.
It was vast, almost past reason. It was ambitious far beyond the point of good sense. And it was at heart a way of imposing order and permanence upon a world that had already taken her son and her marriage and left her afraid of open water and open doors. She could not master her own single day, so she set out to master the map of a whole region instead.
She could not command the people who loved her, so she would command the shoreline of a lake and raise a city she could rule the way she still ruled the thirty-five minutes at her dinner table. The losses did not arrive all at once. They came the way a tide goes out so slowly that you do not notice the water leaving until the boats are lying on their sides in the mud. The trouble had in fact begun even before the great crash.
By around 1927, the property market that had made Krenn and Dato was already softening under them, and the firm’s fat profits were curdling steadily into losses. Then came the autumn of 1929 and the collapse of the entire American economy, and it fell upon Edith’s empire with a particular violence, because her empire was made of land, and land is the slowest wealth there is. You cannot sell three hundred half-finished suburban lots in a single afternoon of panic the way you can dump a parcel of shares. She was left holding vast quantities of ground that no one on earth now wanted, mid-development, heavily borrowed against, and worth a little less with every week that passed.
Worse, land under development eats money as it sits, in taxes and loans and the cost of roads and pipes already laid for houses no one was coming to buy. She had converted the soundest paper fortune in America into the most illiquid form of wealth there is, and then the tide had gone out and left it stranded on the mud. Behind the great abstract numbers stood real families: the sixteen thousand and more ordinary people who had bought lots from her firm, who had put their savings into a piece of ground on the strength of the Rockefeller name, and who now watched the value of it fall away beneath them. When she sold off her good securities in the crisis, it was in part to shield those buyers from the collapse, to hold up the developments they had trusted.
It is reported that she sold something like eighteen million dollars in securities in an effort to protect the households and the small buyers whose money and whose homes were tied up in her developments. The woman who kept her own children at arm’s length spent the last liquid millions of her fortune trying to keep faith with strangers who had bought her dirt. It was perhaps the one form of love she found easy: the love that could be paid rather than felt, given at a distance in money to people who would never ask to sit at her table. You will read again and again that Edith Rockefeller died bankrupt, penniless, flat broke.
The plain truth is more precise and far more interesting. The famous forty-million-dollar fortune was the figure from the peak, from before the crash, the number the New York Times reached for in her obituary in order to measure just how far she had fallen. What remained at the end still amounted to a fortune. By one estimate, it stood close to ten million dollars, roughly a quarter of the peak, but almost all of it was locked up in devalued, mortgaged real estate, and very little of it survived in the Standard Oil stock that had made her family what it was.
Against that frozen and unreachable wealth, she carried debts reported at more than eight hundred thousand dollars, run up by borrowing against her income while she waited and waited for a market that was never coming back. Her jewels, the great pearls among them, were sold through Cartier near the very end. And in her final years, the daughter of the richest man in America lived at the Drake Hotel on an allowance from her family. She died cash poor and deep in debt, sitting on a paper fortune of millions she could not turn into a single spendable dollar at the hour she needed one.
Her money had become at the last as far out of her reach as the world beyond her own front door had always been. She died in a hotel suite in August of 1932, six days short of sixty, of the one thing her father’s money had never once been able to buy off. The cancer had first shown itself in 1930, when a growth was taken from her breast. It returned in its own time in her liver, and against it there was no institute she could endow quickly enough and no specialist she could summon by fast train, any more than there had been for the small boy in the nursery in 1901.
In her last weeks, she left the great limestone mansion on Lake Shore Drive for a suite at the Drake Hotel. There, on the 25th of August 1932, she died. At the very end, her former husband Harold was there in the room, and so were her three surviving children, Fowler and Muriel and Matilda, the ones who had lived, gathered at last around the mother they had always had to ask to see. One person was not in the room.
Her father, John D. Rockefeller, was ninety-three years old that summer, and by every account too frail to travel to her side. But the absence was older and far deeper than any single day’s frailty. She had left for Zurich in 1913, and in the roughly two decades since, across all the estrangement and the letters that crossed the ocean and came back answered in a cool and distant hand, there is no evidence that father and daughter ever met again.
The frugal man in Cleveland who had taught her first of all the lessons of her life, to distrust the things she wanted, outlived his extravagant daughter and did not at the very last come to her. Then the will was read, and it delivered the final surprise of a surprising life. The largest share of everything that remained, she left not to her children, but to Edwin Krenn, the young Austrian she had first met on the couch in Zurich and kept at the center of her days for a decade after. Of the divided remainder, her daughter Muriel received four twelfths, her daughter Matilda two twelfths, and her son Fowler a single twelfth.
It is reported that Dato later bought out Krenn’s five-twelfths share for two thousand dollars a month for the rest of his natural life. Whatever Krenn had truly been to her — companion, confidant, fellow dreamer of unbuilt cities, the one steady presence through her strangest and loneliest years — she had placed him at the end of everything, above her own blood. The world has never quite decided what to make of him, and the record does not settle it. Some saw a devoted friend who had stayed when a husband left and a family kept its distance.
Others saw an opportunist who had attached himself to a lonely and vulnerable heiress and steered her fortune into the ground. The truth is likely tangled somewhere between the two, and she took it with her. What the will makes plain is the shape of her heart at the last: the one person she chose to reward above all others was not a child of her body, but a man she had met in the depths of her breakdown in a foreign country, at the loneliest hour of her life. And there is a last image, reported and very hard to shake, that closes the account better than any figure could.
Because the estate was such a tangle of frozen land and unpaid debt, her body is said to have been placed for a time in a receiving vault at Graceland Cemetery. It was held above the ground while the lawyers fought the wreckage of her fortune into some kind of order. Only later was she laid to rest near the two small children she had buried thirty years before. Treat the detail as the report it is, but sit a moment with the picture: a Rockefeller kept waiting in storage because no one on earth could yet work out what her fortune was truly worth.
And yet she did not vanish without a trace, whatever the vault might suggest. The grand opera she kept alive with her own money helped seed a tradition that outlived her by generations. The infectious disease institute she raised in her dead son’s name carried his memory into the work of saving other children. The Art Institute she supported still stands among the great museums of the country, and land tied to her family’s giving fed the growth of the zoological gardens west of the city.
Somewhere in the history of modern literature there is a permanent footnote recording that the daughter of Standard Oil once paid month by month to keep James Joyce at his desk. Even the ruins of Villa Turicum lived on for decades in photographs, and the strange afterlife of Ganna threaded, some say, into one of the greatest films ever made. A woman who felt she could hold on to nothing turned out to have scattered more into the world than she ever knew. In the end, they laid her to rest at Graceland Cemetery in the city she had ruled and lost, near the two children she had buried three decades before: the small son whose fever had broken her, and the infant daughter who had followed him.
There is a mercy in that last arrangement, whoever made it. The woman who had spent her life unable to keep anyone close was gathered at the last beside the two she had never stopped grieving, the two whose loss had built the cage around the whole of her remaining years. Whatever peace she had been unable to find in the great houses and the crowded seasons, she found at last in the ground beside her children. She had spoken once of a chair she knew across three thousand years.
“There was my little chair,” she is remembered to have said of the pharaoh’s tomb, and that in the end may be the truest thing she ever said, though she did not mean it in the way it turned out to be true. She had spent an entire life reaching for a seat that was wholly her own, a throne no one could take from her and no one had to be invited to share. She never once found it in this life. She sat at the head of the richest table in Chicago and had it waited on in silence by servants forbidden to speak to her.
She made her own children book their hours at her side. She raised a palace of forty-four rooms she may have slept in a single night and drew up a whole city with her name along the shore. The seat she was really looking for all along was a far humbler thing than a throne: it was the ordinary chair beside another person who loved her and stayed. And it was the one thing the greatest fortune on earth could not buy her.
That is what her money at the last could not do. It could not raise her son. It could not keep her husband or reach the fear that kept her indoors, or at the very end even keep itself. It bought her pearls and palaces and analysis and an empire of Chicago dirt, and it left her dying on an allowance in a rented room, while the man who had taught her to want nothing declined to come.
The seat at her side stayed empty. The pharaoh’s bride was never the scandal of her life. It was only the loneliest woman in America telling the truth the one way she had left.
