Megan Ruth Marshack, the journalist and press aide who was widely rumored to have had a romantic relationship with Nelson Rockefeller at the time of his death and later made a quiet life far away in Northern California, has died.
Marshack died Oct. 2 at a live-in medical facility in Sacramento. She was 70. The cause was kidney and liver failure.
Marshack was with Rockefeller — former vice president under President Gerald Ford, a scion of one of America’s wealthiest families and former governor of New York — at the time of his death in January 1979.
Rockefeller, 70, was married at the time. Rockefeller’s sudden passing in Manhattan sparked fevered media speculation about its circumstances — with the young Marshack, then just 25, at its center.
The rumors and push by the press for answers into her relationship with Rockefeller dogged Marshack on both coasts.
She was “The Woman Who Was There,” a New York Times obituary recalled, citing a headline of a Washington Post profile.
In her native California, a Sacramento Bee headline dubbed her “Mum Megan.” Bee reporter Diane Alters had tracked her to the Davis apartment of her younger brother in the weeks after Rockefeller’s death.
Marshack’s words to Alters: “I’m sorry. I have nothing to say.”
Marshack, was an assistant press secretary to Rockefeller when he served as vice president in 1975 under Ford. She worked as his deputy press secretary, directing his art collection and assisting in other ventures, when he returned to New York and private life.
She later moved into television news production at CBS News, with credits including the 1984 Winter Olympics and the criminal trial in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. She worked at the network until 1998 when she left New York for Northern California. Marshack settled in Placerville and was a courts reporter for the city’s Mountain Democrat newspaper.
It was in Placerville where she met her late husband, journalist and editor Edmond Madison Jacoby Jr. The two were married at the El Dorado County courthouse on Placerville’s historic Main Street in August 2003. The Superior Court judge who performed the wedding ceremony once commented that Marshack “never got a ‘three-strikes’ case completely right, but never made the same mistake twice.”
Jacoby died in a car crash in 2023. Marshack later moved to Sacramento to be closer to her brother, according to the Times’ obituary published Tuesday.
Marshack would remain silent about her relationship with Rockefeller until her final days. The Times’ obituary quotes her surviving brother, Jon Marshack, who said Marshack last year wrote her own death notice . The obituary appeared on the website of midtown funeral home W.F. Gormley and Sons.
In an interview with the Times for the obituary, Jon Marshack said he understood his sister had signed a non-disclosure pact with the Rockefeller family at their request.
“That’s why she never spoke of it,” he recalled with the Times. “I think she had a desire to tell the story all along but held on to her obligation.”
Megan Ruth Marshack was born Oct. 31, 1953, in Los Angeles and was adopted by Sidney and Credwyn Marshack.
She graduated from Cal State Northridge in 1975, but had already covered a number of signal events of the tumultuous 1970s from the kidnapping of publishing heiress Patty Hearst, the revelation of the secret audio tapes that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon; to the assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford in San Francisco and Sacramento in 1975.
The same year she was in the middle of a six-month audition with the Associated Press and assigned to a Rockefeller news conference in Los Angeles to get comment about the bailout plan for then-bankrupt New York City. She recalled that first exchange with the man to whom she would forever be linked in her self-penned obituary.
Rockefeller was answering questions in Spanish when Marshack broke in.
“Señor Vice Presidente ...” Rockefeller paused, responding, “Un momento, por favor.”
“No, ahora, por favor,” Marshack demanded. “Si?” asked Rockefeller graciously.
“Now about New York City,” Marshack continued in English. The room of reporters broke up in laughter. Marshack got her quote and apologized for interrupting as she and Rockefeller walked out of the news conference together.
Weeks after meeting, Rockefeller offered her a job.
In her epitaph, Marshack asked there be no memorial service or formal funeral ceremony.
“Associated around the world,” she wrote, “with the death of the former vice president,” Marshack ended her obituary with lyrics from “A Chorus Line”
“Wish me luck, the same to you ... (But I) won’t forget, can’t regret what I did for love.”
Marshack is survived by younger brother, Jon, a retired water quality scientist for the California State Water Board, and his husband, the Rev. Rik Rasmussen.
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