New York: On the Rocks

Out of the offices of the Rockefeller Bros, in mid-Manhattan one evening last week marched nine messengers. Minutes later, they delivered to the city’s seven daily newspapers and to two national wire services a bare-boned, four-paragraph announcement. After 31 years of marriage, Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller, 53, and Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller, 54, had agreed to an “amicable” separation that will lead to a divorce.

The news caught New York almost completely by surprise; even the New York Times, which is ordinarily not much interested in such mundane matters as divorce, made it the leading story of the day. Raising their five children while ranging from Manhattan to the family estate at Pocantico Hills in Westchester County to Seal Harbor, Me., to a ranch in Venezuela, Nelson and “Tod” Rockefeller had long appeared to be a happy couple. Last week they were tight-lipped about the specific reasons for the breakup—and so were their friends and agents.

Summer Apart. But in retrospect, many New Yorkers could see that the Rockefeller split had been in the making for quite a while. They had not been seen together—at least in public—since last March, when fire badly damaged the Governor’s Mansion in Albany. After Tod awakened Nelson by pounding on the door of his adjoining bedroom, they escaped through windows to a porch roof. While the mansion was being repaired, Rocky checked into an Albany hotel alone. Tod summered at Seal Harbor, he at the Venezuelan ranch. Since then, Rocky has appeared at scores of ceremonial functions; Tod showed up at none.

A socialite from Philadelphia’s Main Line and wealthy in her own right from Pennsylvania Railroad holdings, Tod Clark married Nelson Rockefeller six days after his 1930 graduation from Dartmouth College. She was hardly the sort to feel at home in the political milieu. But when Rocky boomed into elective politics in 1958, swamping Democrat Averell Hardman for Governor, Tod tried to make the best of it. “I certainly think it’s a challenge and enjoyable,” she said, not quite convincingly, of political life. “I think you have an opportunity to get close to the real life of the community.”

Action in Camera. With their deepest interests plainly diverging, it was Nelson Rockefeller who made the basic decision for separation. Before taking the big public step, he sought advice from his brothers Laurance, Winthrop, John and David. They pointed out, among other things, that divorce might damage his position as a top contender for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. No divorced man has ever been elected President; only two —Democrats James M. Cox and Adlai Stevenson—have been nominated. Nevertheless, Rocky was adamant.

It was arranged that Tod Rockefeller would sue for the divorce—not in New York, where adultery is the only ground, but probably in her native Philadelphia, where divorce hearings can be held in camera. The prospect of divorce had not changed his political plans, and aides announced that he meant to keep scheduled impending speaking engagements in Kansas, Maine and North Carolina.

This week Nelson and Tod Rockefeller’s youngest son Michael, 23, was reported missing on an anthropological expedition in New Guinea. Upon getting the news, Governor Rockefeller made immediate plans to fly to the area.