The reality of Rockefeller's life behind closed doors on Pinckney Street was far from perfect. The marriage between Rockefeller and Boss had been rocky for years. They had even separated once, before Reigh was born, but Rockefeller managed to woo her back. Finally, in January 2007, Boss filed for divorce. Rockefeller eventually moved into a second-floor walkup on Beacon Street, close to Reigh's bus stop. Weeks after he moved in, boxes still sat unpacked against the wall. Around this time he responded to a friend's e-mail with a terse reply: "Life not particularly happy right now. Will get back to you soon." The friend never heard from him again.
In times of crisis, Rockefeller sought solace in story lines he could control. He had once boasted to Emma of being the inspiration for the fussy character of Dr. Niles Crane on Frasier, and now he decided that they would write a sitcom of their own. They called it Less Than Proper and penned 18 episodes, often doing their best work at the Starbucks. The Café Society was part of the inspiration for the show, which would revolve around four men who hung out at a coffee shop. One recurring trope would involve the mayor of Boston popping up in unlikely places to dispense advice to the Rockefeller character. "It's so interesting that his mind would go there," says Emma. "That the mayor would have these conversations with him like he was really important." Not content to merely cowrite the scripts, Rockefeller planned to star in Less Than Proper as well. The man who had only months earlier ducked a society photographer had seemingly abandoned all of his concern for anonymity. He began brushing up on his acting skills in a comedy class at ImprovBoston.
Just as Landon Clay had funded the observatory at Reigh's school, Rockefeller wanted one plot of the sitcom to involve his character donating a huge science center. Over time, Emma assumed the duty of dialing back Rockefeller's outrageousness. "He's very smart, he's a dreamer," she says. "A smart dreamer is going to knock everything out of proportion."
By that summer, Rockefeller's divorce had grown even more contentious. Boss hired a private investigator to look into Rockefeller's background. She wondered if he was squirreling away money, but the investigator found no hidden assets. (Rockefeller's scheming probably would've been less ambitious: He once advised a friend going through a divorce to fill up her Starbucks gift card before her husband cut off her bank account.) The curious thing, the investigator told Boss, was that he couldn't find any record of Rockefeller at all from before they met in 1993. Boss filed an affidavit with the probate court that said she now doubted who her husband was.
When Rockefeller responded by refusing to provide proof of his identity—if anyone found out he had overstayed his visa he might never see Reigh again—he effectively guaranteed that the resulting visitation rules would be strict. And they were. The agreement finalized in December 2007 called for Boss, who was transferring to McKinsey's London office, to bring Reigh to visit her father three times a year, and for each meeting to be supervised by a social worker.
Rockefeller's carefully constructed life was falling apart. Without his wife's bank account, he couldn't really afford to live on Beacon Hill. Without his daughter, .jpg)
he had lost his most reliable companion, one who helped him blend in with the neighbors. He stopped going to the Paramount for dinner, and would resign as a director of the Algonquin the next spring, saying he could no longer pay his dues.
To friends, Rockefeller seemed particularly unhappy when he didn't have a plan for himself. He and Emma would regularly walk over the Fiedler Footbridge to the Esplanade to work on the sitcom. They'd inevitably choose the same bench, one that has a plaque sunk in the concrete that says, "Enjoy yourself! It's later than you think." Rockefeller now often turned the conversation to his personal life, and to how he would get his daughter back. "Clark was trying to figure out how to be who he was," Emma says. "He was a lost soul.
