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"The question was," says Ron Chernow, cheerfully settling in for an interview, "was there an interior life?"
He is talking about John D. Rockefeller Sr., the subject of his new and highly praised biography, "Titan."
And Chernow's is not a frivolous question: Rockefeller was clearly not a warm and fuzzy, emotionally revealing person, and no one had previously produced anything close to a fully rounded story of the man. He was, in fact, something of a biographer's nightmare, and Chernow was reluctant to take on the dour, taciturn titan of Standard Oil without accessing what he calls "the music of his mind."
Chernow's editor at Random House, Ann Godoff (now Random House executive editor, having replaced Harry Evans), was keen on the idea. But Chernow resisted until he made a trip to the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., and saw a 1,700-page verbatim transcript of an interview with Rockefeller originally intended for an authorized biography. The biography was never published, but this material offered the view of a man who was more approachable at times, even funny.
Still, finding Rockefeller's voice wasn't an easy task. "Rockefeller was a very closed, impenetrable man," says Chernow, who speaks in rapid-fire, beautifully constructed sentences. "You tear away one veil, only to uncover another." The first year of this five-year project ("It requires an enormous amount of patience and the psychology and stamina of a marathon runner," he says) was very rough.
"With some subjects," says Chernow, "you feel the characters have lived expressly for the delight of their biographer. Rockefeller seemed to live expressly to elude me. Even his personal letters were on the order of, `The sky is blue, the grass is green,' "...