WOMEN: End of a Princess

After pausing for two weeks at the door of a bedroom in Chicago’s Drake Hotel, last week Death came, as it must to all women, to Edith Rockefeller McCormick. Once she was called the world’s richest woman. But cancer makes no distinctions. Two years ago she had a growth removed from her breast. It reappeared in her liver. When she moved to the Drake from her mansion on Lake Shore Drive in June (TIME, Aug. 1), she and her doctors knew the end was near.

Beside her in the last two weeks, during which her indomitable rallies amazed every one, were her onetime husband, Harold Fowler McCormick, their three living children, and her brother John. They had all come to her after years of an estrangement that was more of her making than theirs. A chief cause of the estrangement was also in devoted attendance—the plump little Swiss named Edwin D. Krenn with whom she had shared her last eleven years. Her brother John did not wait for the end. Itching painfully with an attack of shingles, he rejoined their father, John Davison Rockefeller, in the East. Long estranged too, and querulously jealous of his own health at 93, Father Rockefeller had not gone to see her at all. “He travels only between Florida and his home,” John D. Jr. explained. In her last days, with the flesh fallen from her face and the death mask showing. Edith Rockefeller had come to resemble her father closely.

As near to royalty as it is possible to come in the U. S. was Edith Rockefeller when, in 1895, she married that most handsome and eligible of contemporary Princetonians, Harold McCormick. The newspapers called her the Princess of Standard Oil. He was the Prince of International Harvester. She was a demure little blonde, with a high forehead, grey eyes and a mass of ringlets under her hat. She swam, skated, rode a horse and bicycle, but preferred to read and study. The newspapers wrote of a regal wedding but actually it was a quiet, private ceremony in a parlor of Manhattan’s old Buckingham Hotel. The first two years of their life together were spent in the quiet little river town of Council Bluffs. Iowa, and it was not until the McCormicks moved to Chicago that her imperiousness began to assert itself and the strange things that happen to the very rich began to happen to her.

The massive grey stone house on Lake Shore Drive, with a cone-topped tower that she called the “bastion,” was not a wedding gift from her father. Harold McCormick bought it, and later she bought it from him. Late in her life the bastion was one of her favorite haunts. The other was a group of trees on her lawn which she called the “bosky.” New, lusty Chicago loved display. Edith McCormick fed her guests off Napoleonic gold plate. She brought grand opera to Chicago, spent $5,000,000 keeping it alive. When her eldest son died of scarlet fever she gave the John McCormick Institution for Infectious Diseases. The scarlet fever germ was isolated there. Upon retirement of beauteous Mrs. Potter Palmer, Mrs. McCormick with her $2,000,000 string of pearls became Chicago’s social dictator. Before the opera she served 35-minute dinners, timing each course by a jewelled clock beside her plate, allowing the men ten minutes for coffee & cigars. She opened conversation at her table by asking someone : “What has been interesting you lately?” After the opera she drove home always by the same route. Her chauffeur had police orders never to vary the route and to drive last. She was the first woman in Chicago to wear an anklet.

In 1911 she recalled 120 invitations to a cotillion without an explanation. Then Chicago heard she had had a nervous breakdown. With her husband she went to Italy, moved up to Switzerland. In Zurich she became a pupil of Psychologist Carl Jung, conceived the notion that her mission was to teach psychoanalysis. She claimed Jung had thrice cured her of tuberculosis through psychoanalysis. To practice humility she scrubbed the floor of her hotel. She took 99 patients, one of whom was her small, plump gardener, Edwin D. Krenn. Krenn improved his position, returned with her to the U. S. in 1921. When she landed she announced that her husband was coming by another boat.

But Harold McCormick had spied Ganna Walska on another boat, betAlexander Smith Cochrane he would meet her first. Cochrane won the bet, married Walska. When Mr. McCormick reached Chicago he went to his Lake Forest home and announced to the Press: “Mr. & Mrs. McCormick are not living under the same roof.” Edith Rockefeller divorced him on grounds of desertion. Later Walska divorced Cochrane. Harold McCormick had a gland operation by Dr. Victor Lespinasse and married her.

Back in the Lake Shore mansion, Mrs. McCormick never spent a night out of it until she went to a hospital in 1930. No guest ever spent a night in it. She became more imperious, more eccentric. She practiced astrology, celebrated Christmas on December 15. She believed in reincarnation, decided she had been King Tutankhamen’s child-wife Anknesenpaaten. “Then they opened the mummy chamber and when I saw the pictures of it, I knew. There was my little chair.” She wrote the words to a Love Song Cycle and a play in Italian, collected Persian rugs. She took daily walks, always over the same route. When someonesuggested another route she said: “It doesn’t matter. I am not really here.” She developed phobias, kept six detectives in the house. She feared water, seldom bathed. Like Anknesenpaaten, she was not buried. Her body was put in a receiving vault next to that of her son John, which had been there for 31 years, the cemetery people never having had any instructions what to do.

Her son Fowler had married Mrs. Anne Urquhart (“Fifi”) Stillman, 19 years his senior; her daughter Muriel, Major Elisha Dyer Hubbard, 24 years her senior; her daughter Mathilde, Swiss Riding Master Max Oser, 30 years her senior. Each of these marriages upset her. In her will she left Muriel only four-twelfths of her estate. Mathilde two-twelfths, faithful Fowler only one-twelfth.

All the rest she gave to curious Edwin Krenn. Upon him she had depended entirely in her fading years. She forced him upon Chicago society, planned with him a $45,000,000 empire of realty. Last year she had to sell $18,000,000 in securities to protect her small householders. The faithful Krenn threw in his all—$1,260,000. Her brother John was said to have guaranteed her $1,000 a day for life, but neither he nor his father could swallow Krenn.

Last week came one more ironic twist in her story, about which she never knew. Krenn’s business partner was a Russian, Edward A. Dato about whom Chicago knew nothing until last week when, bristling and important, he explained to newshawks :

“Krenn and I went to school together in Zurich. His family liked him to associate with me. . . . Then I came to this country. I worked for the International Harvester Co. as a consulting engineer. One day in the papers I read of Mrs. McCormick’s divorce. The papers mentioned Krenn. I think: That is my schoolmate. I will look him up. . . . Mrs. McCormick wanted to put her money into civic projects which would be great things for the community. Of course it was against my wishes that I was drawn into it. We formed a trust, the three of us. Mrs. McCormick and Krenn said to me: ‘Here is $5,000,000 to start with.’ Krenn carried on the social end of it. I carried on the practical end.”

He said that a few days before Mrs. McCormick died he had bought from Krenn, for $2,000 a month for life, his five-twelfths share of the estate and his interest in Krenn & Dato. Asked a newshawk: “Why?”

“That is a delicate matter. Krenn was not friendly with the Rockefeller or the McCormick families. It was for the good of the firm. I will attend to the business. I am a fighter. I like to be in the thick of things. I like to take a chance. I like to make decisions. Maybe I am like Mussolini. . .”