Full Transcript for My Sister the Rockefeller [from Very Special Episodes]

She's Anne Rockefeller. 00:04:13 Speaker 1: Welcome to Very Special Episodes, an iHeart's original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is Phone Pals. 00:04:25 Speaker 6: Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. My name is Jason English. I'm joined, as always, by Dana Schwartz. 00:04:32 Speaker 5: Hey, hey. 00:04:33 Speaker 6: Zarin Burnett. 00:04:34 Speaker 2: Yo. 00:04:35 Speaker 6: Guys, there used to be a, I think it was a Tumblr page. It was called Awesome People Hanging Out Together, where you just get stories of unexpected pairs of people like, John Travolta and Princess Diana or Dr. Ruth and Shaquille O'Neal. And this story reminds me of that. Two people who under no circumstances would you think had anything in common or any interactions. And in fact, they talked several thousand times over many years. 00:05:04 Speaker 1: I love it. 00:05:05 Speaker 7: Yeah. This one, the disparate aspects of America, they get braided together in such a beautiful way. 00:05:10 Speaker 1: I also just love when humans from very different places can just show that people can be friends because people aren't that different after all. It just takes empathy and listening. And you know what it takes? And I thought that this was a, I mean, we'll get into this, but effort. I think a lot of times in this era where we feel like we're catching up with friends just because we follow them on social media or see what they're up to on Instagram, I find this episode, without spoiling anything, an excellent reminder that real friendship requires effort. 00:05:44 Speaker 2: Beautifully said. 00:05:48 Speaker 1: Iron Wing got that call from Ann Rockefeller and felt a little confused. This woman was a stranger. They had chatted once or twice seven years ago. Most surprising part, the lady's name, Ann Rockefeller. You know, like the Rockefellers. She was an heiress, scion of an American dynasty. Her dad, Nelson, had been governor of New York and the 41st vice president of the United States. Her family built Rockefeller Center. Oh, and her great-grandpa, John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, history's first billionaire. This wasn't just some random caller. She was living American history. And she was randomly calling DZ just to say, Hi? Seven years after meeting? She asked how he was doing. If he was still singing. How was his health? His wife? 00:07:01 Speaker 3: And when we got done talking, she said, Anytime you want to call me, say hi or whatever, just call. 00:07:07 Speaker 2: She gave me her number. 00:07:09 Speaker 1: DZ wrote the number down and hung up. Outside, the Dakota winds howled. His family turned and asked, who was that? He didn't know where to begin. Deezy never really needed Ann's number, because she would call again, again, and again. 00:07:32 Speaker 3: She would call at like 8 or 9 o'clock at night, and I would visit for. 00:07:39 Speaker 2: About an hour. 00:07:42 Speaker 1: Night after night, an heiress in a New York mansion would call a man living in a freezing trailer on a South Dakota reservation just to chat about life. It was, frankly, innocent. She asked about his family, life on the reservation, when he'd be singing next. Months passed, and each evening, sure enough, the phone rang. The talks stretched long past sunset. Anne sharing stories from her life. DZ talking about the world he'd grown up in. DZ was born and raised on the reservation. He had ten brothers and six sisters. Home life was crowded, chaotic, and too often tragic. On DZ's fifth birthday... June 4, 1952, his mother died. 00:08:42 Speaker 4: I remember being awake, and my brother and I were laying on the floor in front of her, where her body is. 00:08:52 Speaker 5: So I didn't really get to know my mother. 00:08:56 Speaker 1: A short time later, D.Z. was sent to Marty, South Dakota, to an Indian boarding school. He was young, but he knew these schools had a reputation. They weren't built just for learning. They were built for forgetting. They were a relic of the Civilization Fund Act, a 19th century law aimed at exterminating Native American culture through so-called forced assimilation. Captain Richard Pratt, one of the pioneers of the boarding school movement, said the goal was to, quote, kill the Indian... and save the man. 00:09:39 Speaker 8: Hundreds of thousands of kids were forced to drop their tribal names, stop practicing their religions, cut their hair, toss away. 00:09:45 Speaker 1: Their Hundreds of thousands of kids were forced to drop their tribal names, stop practicing their religions, cut their hair, toss away their native clothing. They were forced to adopt Christianity. And above all, they were forbidden from speaking their native language. 00:10:09 Speaker 3: When my uncles and my dad and them were all in school, and they used to get beat by the nuns and the priests whenever they spoke. 00:10:21 Speaker 1: The beatings worked. DZ's dad didn't want his kids to suffer like that, so he refused to teach them their language. Instead, he taught them another skill, one that allowed DZ to literally punch back. Boxing. 00:10:39 Speaker 2: I never did forget that. He always says, you're going to need To know this, you need to learn this in order to survive where you're going. 00:10:52 Speaker 1: On the phone with Ann, he'd describe how he became a master of right hooks and uppercuts, and how they came in handy. One day at school, a kid waved him down. 00:11:04 Speaker 7: He stopped. 00:11:04 Speaker 2: He said, there's going to be a fight. I said, who's fighting? And he said, you are. 00:11:10 Speaker 1: A bully had thrown down the gauntlet. DZ was just a little guy, but he wasn't afraid of bullies. A ring of kids quickly circled around. The bully put up his fists, but DZ couldn't. He had a bunch of textbooks tucked under his arm. 00:11:30 Speaker 3: I'd walk right up to him, and I'd raise my books, and I'd drop them. 00:11:34 Speaker 2: Let them fall to the floor. 00:11:35 Speaker 4: But I'd

watch his eyes, and his eyes would be following my books to the floor. 00:11:39 Speaker 2: As soon as they hit the floor, then I hit him. 00:11:44 Speaker 1: The bully crumpled like a paper bag. A few more fights, a few more knockouts, and DZ got a reputation. Little guy, big fist. Still in high school, he started giving lessons. Before long, he was playing basketball, football, baseball, softball. By his senior year, it looked like the boarding school had done the job. DZ spoke English. He played American sports. He was even punching out fellow Native kids. By all appearances, they had, quote, killed the Indian. Until one day, while playing in a softball tournament, Deezy heard something in the distance. It was coming from the old Sioux powwow grounds. For decades, powwows had been illegal. Now they were returning. 00:12:43 Speaker 2: I would run across the street and go over to the powwow. And I'd just stand by the fence and I'd just listen. I'd just watch the singers. 00:12:52 Speaker 1: For decades, powwows had been illegal. Now they were returning. The drums shook his chest. The voices made him sway. Something sparked. He felt a calling. 00:13:08 Speaker 2: And I used to always say to myself, I'm going to do this. One of these days I'm going to do this. when I'm done playing ball. 00:13:22 Speaker 1: History is full of unexpected pen pals. President Ronald Reagan exchanged hundreds of letters with a six-year-old boy named Rudy Hines. The composer Tchaikovsky relied on his pen pal, a Russian businesswoman, for income. When Tupac was in jail, he shared letters with... Get this, Tony Danza. Fast forward to the 90s. D.Z. Ironwing and Ann Rockefeller had added themselves to the list. Though pen pal might not be the right word. 00:13:56 Speaker 2: I called it a phone pal. 00:13:59 Speaker 1: Phone pals. 00:14:01 Speaker 3: I'd be watching TV or whatever, or cruising with my wife or something, and like I said, it'd be 9 o'clock or so at night, and the phone would ring, and it would be Ann. 00:14:11 Speaker 1: For most people, a random call from an heiress would be a once-in-a-lifetime event. But for DZ, it was a once-every-few-days sort of thing. 00:14:22 Speaker 2: Like three or four times out of the week, I would call her or she would call me. 00:14:28 Speaker 1: Often, the conversation turned to what it was like living as an indigenous person in America. 00:14:36 Speaker 2: Should say something like, anything new going on at the reservation? 00:14:41 Speaker 1: Sometimes Deezy's answers were hard to hear. 00:14:44 Speaker 3: So everybody else is in poverty, living in poverty. And then you have somebody stabbing this person, somebody shooting at this person. 00:14:54 Speaker 2: I mean, there's nothing to do. It's just a good show. Oh, she didn't like it, but she's just... No matter how much money she had, she couldn't help everybody, you know. 00:15:08 Speaker 1: There were times Anne cried. Because what Deasy was describing wasn't just cyclical

poverty. It was the legacy of generations of government policy. Deasy grew up at a time when the American legal system denied Native Americans the basic rights many of us take for granted. He told Ann that, as a kid, he could literally see the discrimination on the ball fields. 00:15:38 Speaker 3: Being a young dog, the first time I start learning about prejudice, the white parents would be hollering, strike him out. 00:15:47 Speaker 2: He's just a blank little ass Indian. 00:15:51 Speaker 1: DZ and his teammates responded by going 23-0. 00:15:57 Speaker 2: Back in the day, the prejudices were pretty bad. 00:16:00 Speaker 3: It's like they were always intimidated by the white. 00:16:04 Speaker 2: Man, you know. 00:16:05 Speaker 1: As he got older, he became suspicious of white people. One day, between a doubleheader, a priest from the boarding school called D.Z. 00:16:16 Speaker 2: Over. 00:16:17 Speaker 3: So I walked over and he introduced me to this old baseball scout for the Pawtucket Red Sox. 00:16:24 Speaker 2: So he gave me his card. He said, as soon as you get out of school this summer, give me a call. 00:16:31 Speaker 1: He said, I'll send a plane to pick you up and you can try out for the Red Sox. Deezy took the card, his heart racing. It was his favorite team. But then he met up with his teammates. 00:16:44 Speaker 3: And then my brother said, what is that? So I said, it's a business card. That one made it come out to the East Coast, the China Pro Bowl team. Then one of my nephews said, do you believe him? 00:16:56 Speaker 1: Deezy thought about it. A white guy sending a plane for him? A poor Native kid in South Dakota? It's hard to blame him. Forget baseball, Native Americans weren't granted blanket U.S. citizenship until 1924. When that scout gave D.Z. his card, many Indigenous people were still fighting for the right to vote. Indigenous religious ceremonies were still illegal in many parts of the U.S. And in the 1970s, the Indian Health Service became the subject of a shocking investigation into the sterilization of Native women. One study estimated that as many as one in four American Indian women had been sterilized without consent. Most Americans were clueless. In New York, And Rockefeller was not. 00:17:57 Speaker 3: In the late 60s, Native Americans launched their own civil rights struggle, what was called the Red Power Movement. 00:18:24 Speaker 1: Native protesters stormed and claimed Alcatraz Island. They occupied the Mayflower Ship in Boston, Mount Rushmore, Wrigley Field in Chicago, even the Bureau of Indian Affairs in D.C. Anne followed the protests. She watched in horror as activists were greeted with arrests, tear gas, and even bullets. She decided to do something about it. Anne started a non-profit aimed at reviving native languages, ceremonies, and culture. All of the things the federal government had tried to eliminate. It was a mission she maintained for the rest of her life. And years later, it led her to pick up the phone and call DZ. 00:19:13 Speaker 2: A lot of Indian. 00:19:15 Speaker 3: People, they don't want nothing to do with anything traditional. Anything ceremonial, go to a ceremony. Go to a sweat lodge. Take your pipe out and pray with it. They don't want nothing to do with that kind of life. They say them days are gone. I don't need them, whatever. But there's people like myself that say, they're not gone, they'll never be gone as long as I'm alive, you know. 00:19:43 Speaker 2: I'll always pray. 00:19:44 Speaker 3: I'll always go to the ceremony if I can make it. 00:19:48 Speaker 2: I'll always go to Apollo. 00:19:50 Speaker 3: Or I'll always be Indian all my life. 00:19:58 Speaker 1: While Ann was fighting those policies, D.Z. enlisted in the Army. He joined in 1968 and was flown to a base in Alaska. 00:20:09 Speaker 1: He hated the Alaskan cold so much, he requested a transfer to someplace warmer, Vietnam. Sarge said no, and eventually D.Z. returned to the reservation. But he remembered the promise he made to himself when he first heard those voices soaring across the ball field. 00:20:31 Speaker 3: We got our own drum group together on the reservation, my relatives and I, and then we started learning. 00:20:38 Speaker 1: Deasy didn't know how to play the drum, or sing, or any of the traditional songs, but he was hell-bent on learning. 00:20:47 Speaker 3: Because like I said, I didn't grow up speaking the language, so it's important for me to know the songs, especially the traditional songs. 00:20:57 Speaker 1: The Red Power movement was making real gains. Kids could no longer be forced into boarding schools. And in 1978, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, affirming Native people's right to practice their traditional religions. And D.Z., for the first time in his life, was free. Free from the boarding schools. Free from the rules of military life. Free to explore his roots. His drum group, called Red Tail, practiced harder. Deezy's voice grew stronger, louder. 00:21:45 Speaker 2: It was a singing contest. It was kind of like, well, let's go and see how good we really are. 00:21:52 Speaker 1: Deezy picked up his drum and went east to a powwow competition in Baltimore. The band won. 00:22:00 Speaker 3: At that powwow, we got invited by five or six other People from outside of New York City or Pennsylvania or down in Florida. 00:22:12 Speaker 1: They were getting invites. Play here. No, play there. 00:22:16 Speaker 2: We pretty much went from north to south on the East Coast singing. 00:22:20 Speaker 1: The band went on a spontaneous tour. They hit up more than 20 singing contests and won nearly all of them. One listener was so inspired, they invited the band to play for a stadium concert in a place even farther away. 00:22:38 Speaker 9: We got invited to go to France on Switzerland. 00:22:43 Speaker 1: Suddenly, Deezy was singing traditional Sioux songs in front of roaring crowds in the French Alps. It was whiplash,

but the more he sang, the more invitations came in. One day, Deezy decided he would walk into an audition for an off-Broadway play. 00:23:02 Speaker 2: Before long, Deezy was onstage. 00:23:25 Speaker 1: Singing in a major off-Broadway production of the play Black Elk Speaks. By the early 90s, Deezy would find himself in New York, singing at the church of St. John the Divine, shaking hands with a stranger who would someday become much more than just a friend. For more than 30 years, Ann Rockefeller and D.Z. Ironwing called multiple times a week, sometimes for hours at a stretch. 00:24:03 Speaker 3: I just felt I was getting closer and closer to her as a friend. 00:24:07 Speaker 1: They talked about life, local politics, religion. 00:24:11 Speaker 2: She was pretty interesting. And the tribe, you know, our Indian way of life. 00:24:16 Speaker 8: So I used to tell her little things, you know, talk and I'll say, we don't pray to statues of whoever. We pray to Mother Earth. 00:24:29 Speaker 3: Father Sky, Grandmother, and Great-Grandfather Sky, or Grandfather Sky. 00:24:35 Speaker 2: I mean, son. I should build our way preacher. Shirley, Shirley liked that a lot. 00:24:44 Speaker 1: One night, Deezy's phone rang. As usual. It was Ann. She had a question. A big one. 00:24:53 Speaker 2: She wanted me to adopt her. 00:24:57 Speaker 1: In Sioux families, brother and sister don't need to share blood. If two people feel a kinship, they can adopt one another. And it's not just a title. In Sioux tradition, when someone adopts you, you literally become brother or sister. Your new sibling becomes your responsibility. Deezy didn't hesitate. 00:25:20 Speaker 2: Aaron, I said, I'd love to adopt you. And my sister. 00:25:26 Speaker 1: Usually, an adoption is celebrated with a hunka ceremony. Peace pipes, sacred songs, a crowd of well-wishers. But Anne didn't want to wait. She wanted to be his sister now. 00:25:40 Speaker 2: And she said, can we just adopt each other over the phone? 00:25:45 Speaker 1: DZ thought about it for a second. The drums, the fanfare, the ceremony. It's not a requirement. 00:25:53 Speaker 2: I said, sure. We can do that. So we adopted each other over the phone. Became adopted brother and sister. 00:26:02 Speaker 1: Just like that, Ann became bonded to a lineage of Sioux warriors. And DZ became brother to a Rockefeller. DZ didn't tell his friends about his new sister. At least, not for a while. 00:26:17 Speaker 2: When I told them, they would just say, oh really? And I'd go, who's that Rockefeller? 00:26:24 Speaker 1: He simply said, Ann is my sister. Usually, his friends would just shake their heads. 00:26:31 Speaker 2: If they did say something, they would say, you know, you shouldn't use the drum. 00:26:39 Speaker 1: As the years passed, brother and sister kept their routine. By the late 2010s, DZ was in his 70s. He had spent four decades teaching boxing lessons to kids on the reservation. It was starting to take its toll. Anne, then in her 80s, was moving slower too, though she was still doing philanthropy and activism. 00:27:03 Speaker 3: She returned the favor. 00:27:05 Speaker 9: A few years back, Deezy's trailer home was falling apart. The windows were broke. 00:27:22 Speaker 3: The door wasn't on right because whenever it snowed, my floor would be full of snow. Or whenever there was a rainstorm or whatever, then my floor would be all wet. Because the rain always told my landlord. 00:27:34 Speaker 2: To fix them. He wouldn't do it. 00:27:37 Speaker 1: When Ann heard about it, she didn't hesitate. 00:27:40 Speaker 2: She said, well, look for a place to live. Look for a better place to live. 00:27:45 Speaker 1: Deezy tried to explain. He didn't have the money to move. He was retired. He had already suffered multiple heart attacks. Getting a new job wasn't happening. Ann's answer was simple. I'm your sister now, and you are getting a new house, and I'm going to help pay for it. And so Deezy got a new home off the reservation in Sioux Falls. Big Ann's sister covered half the rent. 00:28:14 Speaker 2: So I've been here going on five years now. 00:28:21 Speaker 1: By 2024, there was more silence between calls. When Ann did get on the line, she still asked, how can I help? Money? Groceries? 00:28:32 Speaker 2: And I would always tell her, no, I need anything. And she would say, you don't? I said, no. 00:28:37 Speaker 3: And I don't really need anything because I already got what I need. And I said, I got you. You're my friend. 00:28:46 Speaker 5: That's all I need. 00:28:49 Speaker 2: And as a friend, I talked to her. I don't need anything else. 00:28:53 Speaker 1: There was silence on the other end of the line. Deezy couldn't see it, but he knew. She was crying. In December 2024, Ann Rockefeller Roberts died at age 90. The memorial service took place at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Deezy flew to New York for the service, and he didn't just sit in the pews. 00:29:21 Speaker 3: I had to go up on those little stages they made, and I got to sing. 00:29:28 Speaker 1: The first time DZ sang there, a stranger walked up and told him she loved his voice. This time he was there to say goodbye to his sister. He sang the opener. and the closer, even an interlude in the middle. 00:29:44 Speaker 2: I was the only performer that got to sing three times. 00:29:46 Speaker 3: It was pretty nice. 00:29:49 Speaker 1: In the beginning of his life, America's institutions tried to beat the Indian out of him. They worked tirelessly to erase his culture. Now, 70 years later, one of America's most prominent families had invited him to share it and sing it proud. 00:30:12 Speaker 6: Dana, Zarin, I'm not a big phone fan, so the idea of anyone calling me regularly for much of my life makes me a little uncomfortable. But if the phone is going to ring, it might as well be a Rockefeller on the other end. 00:30:28 Speaker 2: Right. 00:30:28 Speaker 7: And you better answer it because you don't know

where that friendship or relationship will go. 00:30:31 Speaker 1: I want to talk to people on the phone. I want to phone pen pal. 00:30:35 Speaker 7: Do you talk to people on the phone still? Do you use the phone that way? 00:30:38 Speaker 1: I call my mom like every day. Is that embarrassing to admit? 00:30:41 Speaker 7: No, I call my mother every day or she calls me every day, but I answer every day. 00:30:45 Speaker 8: Yeah. 00:30:46 Speaker 6: Did you guys ever have actual pen pals in school or adult life? No, I had. 00:30:55 Speaker 1: Well, when I went to summer camp, we would write letters to people, but never really. 00:30:59 Speaker 7: I had friends who like we were young writers. And so when we would leave and be separated for like summer or whatever, we'd write like long letters to each other. But that's about it. We knew each other before. So and we were going to see each other again. 00:31:12 Speaker 1: I wrote a book in emails. 00:31:14 Speaker 2: Did you? There you go. 00:31:15 Speaker 1: I did. I wrote this book called The Arcane Arts. And I wrote the perspective of one character. And my co-writer, Dan, wrote the perspective of the other character. And we wrote the emails back and forth. And the first version of the book was only emails. And then we ended up adding actual chapters. But that sort of counts, right? 00:31:33 Speaker 7: Totally counts. That's super cool. 00:31:34 Speaker 6: Commercially viable pen pal story I've ever heard. 00:31:38 Speaker 1: I just monetize my friendships. 00:31:41 Speaker 3: We had. 00:31:42 Speaker 6: This was probably in, like, 1990, and we had pen pals in our school in Denville, New Jersey, had pen pals in Chelyabinsk, Russia. I might be pronouncing that wrong. And then there was all this talk, like, well, if the Iron Curtain falls, we'll probably get to meet each other and... Probably it was four letters over the course of a year and never happened. So maybe one day. 00:32:09 Speaker 7: So when you were writing the letters back and forth, were you just constantly talking about the state of America? Or were you guys just like two kids basically relating to each other at that level? 00:32:16 Speaker 6: I think it was heavily sanitized by... You would get stuff with some cross ads on it and white out. I think I was trying to sell him that we had... figured this out, and our countries are not so different, and we'll probably go on and be allies in the future. Didn't have that one quite right. 00:32:36 Speaker 7: Well, it was a naive hope, but it was hopeful nevertheless. 00:32:39 Speaker 6: Zarin, as our in-house casting director, did you happen to do this one? 00:32:44 Speaker 7: Yes, I was able to do some casting. I casted Deezy Ironwing. And I went with one of my favorite Ogallala Lakota actors, Moe Brings Plenty. He's the actor who wears the long braids from Yellowstone and Marshall. So I thought he would just absolutely nail this part. He has a great humanity that just like comes out of him, like just right from his eyes. And then for Anne Rockefeller, based on her appearance, I had to like look her up to see what she looked like and her vibes just in general from the story. I went with Anne Hathaway because I think she can do both wealthy woman of extreme privilege and then also has a heart of gold and they kind of favor each other. 00:33:16 Speaker 1: I do love Anne Hathaway. 00:33:18 Speaker 2: Right? 00:33:19 Speaker 7: Now, did you guys have a very special character in this one? Because it was kind of limited to only a few. So I did not personally. 00:33:25 Speaker 1: I mean, it's the two very special characters are the main characters. 00:33:28 Speaker 2: Good call. 00:33:30 Speaker 6: I'll throw one other nomination in here. Lucas Riley, who wrote this episode, his story of how he learned of this is pretty remarkable. He sat next to DZ on an airplane when he was flying to go sing at the memorial at Anne's funeral. 00:33:47 Speaker 1: Are you kidding me? 00:33:48 Speaker 6: So then they became phone pals. And then you could probably hear in the interview tape, these are phone calls. But maybe we all need a good phone pal. 00:33:58 Speaker 2: For real. 00:33:58 Speaker 7: Or at least start calling people more often. 00:34:01 Speaker 1: Met him on a plane. 00:34:02 Speaker 7: Yes, that's awesome. 00:34:04 Speaker 1: Or talking to the people we sit next to on a plane. 00:34:06 Speaker 2: Right. 00:34:09 Speaker 1: Asking them what their story is. 00:34:10 Speaker 6: All right, I'm not going to go that far, but. 00:34:13 Speaker 1: Hey, do you have any relationships with Rockefellers? 00:34:19 Speaker 6: Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. Today's episode was produced in partnership with School of Humans. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zarin Burnett, and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Lucas Riley. Editing and sound design by Jesse Neiswanger. Our story editor is Virginia Prescott. From School of Humans, producers are Edelise Perez, Amelia Brock, and Lucas Riley. Original music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott and Jason English. Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.