Chapter One

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The very rich really are different from you and me. They can afford more dogs. Geraldine R. Dodge, for example, had opulent kennel space for a hundred and fifty. Ten or twelve dogs always lived in the house with her. The house had thirty-five rooms.

Geraldine R. The R was for Rockefeller. She was me with money.

Or that's how I'd always thought of her. From her birth in 1882 until her death in 1973, she broke record after record for looniness on the subject of dogs, dogs, and more dogs, exceeding even the most maniacal excesses of yours truly, because she could afford to indulge this joyful madness, and I can't. Speaking of dogs, as Mrs. Dodge, I am sure, habitually did from woofy sunrise until late into the drooly, furry night, I was raised with, and to a large extent by, golden retrievers. I eventually emerged from a belated psychosocial identity crisis with an independent sense of self, by which I mean that I got a new dog of a new breed. He was and most vibrantly remains a male Alaskan malamute named Rowdy. He, together with my malamute bitch, Kimi, is overwhelmingly who I am. Should you lack fluency in the dialect of purebred dogdom, let me point out that in calling my lovely Kimi a bitch, I am not talking dirty about her. I myself, I might add, am a female dog person and a bitch only when the situation warrants it.

The daughter of William Rockefeller, John D.'s brother, Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller didn't exactly start out poor. In 1907, when she married Marcellus Hartley Dodge, the Remington Arms heir, the two were heralded as the richest couple in America. The groom, at the age of twenty-six, was worth about sixty million dollar