Memory Lane: John D. Rockefeller's granddaughter had ghostly connections that led to Palm Beach

Before joining 1920s Palm Beach society as the bride of a World War I lieutenant’s ghost, Muriel McCormick, a Chicago-area granddaughter of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, confronted her own restless spirit.

She’d get to Palm Beach by 1924, but first flame-haired McCormick tried a string of careers after the 1921 divorce of her rich parents, Edith Rockefeller McCormick and industrialist Harold Fowler McCormick.

When becoming an opera singer didn’t pan out, she ran a dress shop and then acted under the stage name Nawanna Micor, insisting at age 20, “I have something more than money to offer. I want my talent acknowledged.”

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Then she turned to the “psychic research” that led her mother to tell straight-faced society friends she’d been an Egyptian pharaoh’s wife in another life.

At a Chicago “spiritual” meeting the young McCormick attended, a “spirit” called her by name, a “specter” friend later identified as the deceased and “dashing” George Alexander McKinlock, Jr.

Who was he? A wealthy Chicagoan who’d volunteered to serve in World War I after his 1916 graduation from Harvard University, where he played football. Known as “Alex” to his friends, he was shot in France in 1918.

After McCormick attended more meetings and seances, “the spirit's love-making” became “increasingly passionate," 1920s newspaper articles rhapsodized.

Still, her “gallant specter” spiel left skeptics cold. Alex’s parents were intrigued.

Enter Palm Beach.

George Alexander McKinlock Sr. and his wife, Marion, had wintered since 1914 in Palm Beach, where Marion later became founder-president of the Garden Club.

In 1924, they moved into a new and now-gone Clarendon Avenue home designed by Palm Beach architect Marion Sims Wyeth.

The manse featured a music room, terraces and lush gardens by William Lyman Phillips, according to the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.

The McKinlocks named the property Casa Alejandro after their son, whose death had left them childless and bereft. Prior to his confirmed 1918 death, Alex had been presumed missing in France while serving as a second lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force.

At the time, Marion buried herself in work as head of the Red Cross canteen in Chicago, where observers noted it was as if “every boy there was her Alexander.”

When she was called to France for Red Cross activities, she is said to have found her son via a grave in Berzy-le-sec marked “McKinlow.” A helmet on the plot bore her son’s correct name, according to the American Legion Post 264 in Lake Forest, Illinois, which is named after McKinlock Jr.

By all accounts, Marion (who would later have her son’s remains cremated and returned home) was a level-headed woman. When McCormick introduced herself and told of her “spiritual bridegroom,” it may have been consoling to Marion.

After all, the McKinlocks had been trying to memorialize their boy, donating $500,000 for a Harvard dormitory in his name, according to James Carl Nelson’s “Five Lieutenants,” about Harvard grads who fought in World War I.

Before long, McCormick and Marion McKinlock seemed inseparable.

Palm Beach society mavens quickly noticed McCormick wore a locket around her neck that Marion had given her with her son’s miniature inside.

McCormick also wore a black-inlaid platinum wedding band “as if bound to the fallen war hero as firmly as if he were alive,” according to newspaper reports.

Tabloids posited a private wedding ceremony at Casa Alejandro occurred one day “between lunch at the Bath & Tennis Cub and dinner at the Everglades Club.”

Whether or not that happened, McKinlock and McCormick arranged other affairs, hosting opera performances in Casa Alejandro’s music room.

Other hostesses in town — who made note of Muriel’s “short Deauville shingled bob” hairdo — always invited both Marion and Muriel; never one without the other.

“Mrs. McKinlock and Miss Muriel McCormick are seen everywhere,” The Palm Beach Post, echoing similar observations, noted in 1926.

The two women remained friends for years. In fact, when McCormick in 1931 married a living man, Elisha Dyer Hubbard of Connecticut, the nuptials took place at the McKinlocks’ summer home near Bar Harbor, Maine.

McCormick and McKinlock did have their own separate interests.

In 1930, McCormick opened a short-lived theatrical playhouse in a former Royal Palm Way nightclub. After her husband died in 1936, she supported World War Il-related causes, joined the Women's Army Corps and adopted four children.

In 1946, McCormick purchased a home on Via Bellaria. She died in 1959.

For her part, Marion McKinlock, after being elected president in 1928 of the Garden Club (she remained a member for decades), served on the town’s first Planning Commission with other Garden Club members.

She had a hand in the early years of The Society of the Four Arts and became a permanent Palm Beach resident by 1950, living in a South Lake Drive apartment.

Days after Marion died in 1964, a Palm Beach Daily News reporter recalled something she’d said: “There were private houses, private parties, private yachts, private railroad cars, private everything. Now everything is public, even one’s private life.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: John D. Rockefeller's granddaughter had love affair with a ghost