Arkansas: Opportunity Regained

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It was a marked contrast to the popular impression of Winthrop Rockefeller. At night he was a leading swinger in the pre-jet set; as the handsomest, rovingest Rockefeller, and the hardest to catch, he kept society mothers in an agony of hope. Pelle Aavatsmark, who still works for the Greater New York Fund, recalls fondly: "He ate lunch with the staff, and some nights after work he took us to his apartment and he would cook a meal, serve some drinks and have some fun. There would be girls around. Win was a ladies' man, you know. I didn't know a person who didn't like him."

Brother Rock. Forsaking the bright lights, Rockefeller enlisted in the Army as a private nearly a year before Pearl Harbor. He earned a commission at officers' candidate school, became a company commander in the 77th Division, and sailed to the Pacific battles behind a swashbuckling D'Artagnan mustache. An able infantryman who enjoyed the challenge and camaraderie of military life, he was popular with the troops, who called him "Brother Rock." He gave each soldier a silver dollar for Christmas, and woolens knitted by Mother Rockefeller and her friends. The 77th went through the Guam and Leyte campaigns, and Rockefeller became a major on the 305th Regimental staff.

Six days before the Okinawa invasion, a kamikaze fireballed into the troopship Henrico, killing or wounding 225 members of the regiment. Rockefeller was the senior surviving army officer, and though seriously burned about the face and hands—it cost him his mustache and six weeks in hospital—he assumed command until help arrived the next day. He came out of service in 1946 wearing a lieutenant colonel's silver leaves and a bronze star with oakleaf cluster.

The war had deepened his interest in people and their problems, and at his own expense he made a national survey of veterans' readjustment problems for the War Department. Back in New York he took up personnel work at Socony-Vacuum, and immersed himself in half a dozen philanthropic causes.

Valentine Day. Then Bobo happened. Born Jievute Paulekiute in the Pennsylvania coal country, renamed Eva Paul, then Barbara Paul as a show-business title, then Bobo by the chic set she moved up to, the comely blonde had been married to Richard Sears Jr., a well-to-do Bostonian who went into the Foreign Service after the war. After first meeting the onetime model and bit actress in a New York restaurant, Win Rockefeller burbled: "I saw her and I knew I was gone." He was 35. The wedding took place at 14 minutes past midnight on Valentine Day, 1948. Their son was born the following September, and the next year they separated. Gossip columnists, who had promoted the union as a real-life sequel to Cinderella and Prince Charming, billed it subsequently as Beauty and the Beast, casting Win as the brutish, skinflint millionaire.