Barbara Sears Rockefeller, divorce deal was noteworthy

Barbara Sears Rockefeller was photographed as she left the Park Avenue apartment of her estranged husband in 1953. (John rooney/associated press)

NEW YORK - Barbara Sears Rockefeller, a Pennsylvania coal miner's daughter who married one of the richest men in America and, after their divorce six years later, won a settlement regarded as a record in its day, died Monday at her home in Little Rock, Ark. She was 91 and had lived in Arkansas for the last few years.

The Ruebel Funeral Home in Little Rock confirmed the death, saying that Ms. Rockefeller died of natural causes.

Familiarly known as Bobo, Ms. Rockefeller was the former wife of a governor of Arkansas and the mother of a lieutenant governor. From 1948 to 1954, she had a highly public marriage to Winthrop Rockefeller, who went on to serve two terms as governor, from 1967 to 1971. He was a grandson of John D. Rockefeller, a founder of Standard Oil.

The couple's only child, Winthrop Paul Rockefeller, was lieutenant governor of Arkansas from 1996 until his death from a blood disorder in 2006. She leaves eight grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, Ms. Rockefeller was born Jievute Paulekiute near Noblestown, Pa., in September 1916. (Jievute is a Lithuanian diminutive of Eva.)

Her father was a coal miner and a railroad worker. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and she spent her later girlhood with her mother and stepfather in the stockyard district of Chicago. The family later moved to Indiana.

Considered a beauty, Ms. Rockefeller was named Miss Lithuania at 17 in a pageant sponsored by The Lithuanian Daily News. She studied briefly at Northwestern University before becoming a model and actress.

Under her first stage name, Eva Paul, she appeared in a production of "Tobacco Road" in Boston. There, she met Richard Sears Jr., the son of a prominent Boston family. They were married in 1941, and afterward she changed her name to Barbara Paul Sears. As Barbara Sears, she had small roles in a few Hollywood films, including "That Night With You" (1945), starring Franchot Tone.

After World War II, Richard Sears Jr. was named third secretary at the US embassy in Paris, and the couple became fixtures in the Parisian social whirl. They divorced in 1947.

Ms. Rockefeller met Winthrop Rockefeller at a dinner party in 1946. At the time, she was living in Manhattan with her sister in a fourth-floor walkup hard by the Third Avenue El. Rockefeller, who had never married, was considered the most eligible bachelor in the country. He soon gave her a square-cut diamond set in platinum. She later pawned the ring, said to be worth $30,000, and lived on the proceeds for five years while waiting for her divorce settlement to come through, the Associated Press reported in 1966.

Rockefeller and Sears planned to marry, perhaps inauspiciously, on Friday the 13th of February 1948.

But because of the 72-hour waiting period then imposed by Florida law, the wedding, at the Palm Beach estate of the sportsman Winston Guest, took place just after midnight on Valentine's Day. The guests at the reception included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The union of the miner's daughter and the billionaire's grandson was described widely in the news as a fairy tale straight from the pages of "Cinderella." As Time magazine's account said, "Bobo's mother and stepfather, who were unable to attend the ceremony because they were making a batch of Lithuanian cheese on their Indiana farm, both announced that they were happy."

They separated less than two years into their marriage, and very public divorce proceedings ensued. Winthrop Rockefeller offered a settlement of $5.5 million. Barbara Rockefeller requested $10 million instead. After all, she pointed out to Time magazine in 1954, a man had just tried to repossess her vacuum cleaner. She eventually took the $5.5 million.

For many years after her divorce, Ms. Rockefeller lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side in a neoclassical townhouse that included a full-size, wood-lined squash court with an 18-foot ceiling. She also kept a home in Paris.

Ms. Rockefeller, who did not marry again, learned early to economize, at least in the relative sense of the term. As the Associated Press reported in 1952, when she was already separated from her husband, Ms. Rockefeller had a fail-safe tactic for striking a good bargain. When a merchant demanded a price she considered too high, she would simply respond, "Who do you think I am, a Rockefeller?"