The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (11 page)

“Certainly,” he would always reply, “but not tonight. Mother and Father asked me to keep up the house, but I’m not doing a very good job, and I couldn’t abide your walking into a messy house. I’ll invite you over for tea once I get things in order.”

He never did.

“I thought, ‘Maybe he’s a remittance man!’” she told me, meaning the black sheep of the Chichester family, sent to America to gain education and experience while, best of all, staying out of the way of the working members of his prominent clan. It never occurred to her that he had fabricated the entire Christopher Chichester persona from whole cloth.

In San Marino, where eligible young bachelors were rare, especially one with good manners and a royal pedigree, Chichester found several ladies who accepted his request for a date.

“I produced
The Prisoner
,” he told the daughter of one prominent San Marino family. He had met her at a San Marino library event where they were both volunteers, and with her parents’ prodding, she accepted his invitation to go out on a date.

“You know, the Patrick McGoohan series,” he said. “It was big in Great Britain.”

She had never heard of
The Prisoner
, and she never checked to see if Christopher Chichester produced it. If she had, she would have discovered that
The Prisoner
—the classic 1960s British television series about a former secret agent perpetually trying to escape from a congenial community that is actually a prison for people who know too much—was on the air when Christopher was all of seven years old.

“I just love musicals!” another young San Marino woman trilled after her parents introduced her to Chris at the San Marino Public Library Book Fair.

“What a coincidence!” Chichester replied. “So do I.”

He was
so
accommodating in that way. Whatever his listener loved, he did too. And he could back up that love with knowledge. In the case of the musicals, he began to rave about the glories of, say,
My Fair Lady
and
West Side Story
, and the subtle differences between them, making his listeners feel that they had something deeply in common with the young British nobleman.

He took the girl he met at the book fair on a date to see the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. He led her higher and higher, until they were in the last row in the highest balcony.

“Darling, you’re just going to
love
the
Hebrides
Overture!” he said, once they were seated in the nosebleed section, referring to the Felix Mendelssohn work, composed in 1830. “It will change your world.”

It didn’t. But he was unrelenting in trying to “educate” her on the finer things in life. A few days later, they were strolling past the shops of Lake Avenue in the nearby community of Pasadena.

“Of course, you’ve heard of Godiva chocolate?” Chichester asked his young companion.

“Well, no,” she replied.

“Come with me,” he said, taking her arm and whisking her into the Godiva shop. He led her over to a counter and picked up one of the company’s trademark gold boxes of chocolates tied with a big red ribbon.

“They’re the best chocolates,” he told her. “And gentlemen give them to their ladies, and after they’ve eaten the chocolates they keep their love letters in the box.”

After moving to San Francisco, the young woman opened her door to find a Federal Express delivery from C. Chichester, San Marino, with a gold box of Godiva chocolates inside.

“Enjoy the chocolates and keep the box for your love letters,” read the accompanying note.

When Chichester’s name hit the headlines twenty-five years after he was last seen in San Marino, none of the young women whom he had squired came forward in the media, save for one: Carol Campbell. A sunny, dark-haired mother of three, she invited me to her solidly San Marino house and gave me a tour of the city.

For Carol, however, her interaction with Christopher Chichester was still a sore wound. It began, she said, when her father met him at one of the local clubs—the Rotary or the City Club—where the men of San Marino had bought the story of the thirteenth baronet. Carol’s father, Dick Campbell, decided to play matchmaker. Carol was visiting from Texas, and one day her father asked Chichester, “Hey, Chris, would you like to meet my daughter, Carol?”

“Certainly,” Chichester replied.

Introductions were made the following Sunday at the San Marino Community Church.

“And you must be Carol,” said Chichester.

“Yes,” she said.

“I’d be honored if you would go out with me,” he said. “How about eleven-thirty tomorrow?”

Assuming that meant a lunch date, Carol Campbell accepted. But instead of a knight in shining armor on a stallion, Chichester came riding up to her parents’ house in his broken-down car. She noticed that his clothes were beginning to show some age. This wasn’t a traditional date so much as just going with a guy on a series of errands. They rode around town, getting his mail from the post office, taking his clothing to the cleaners, before he finally dropped Carol back at home—without lunch, without explanation. But what most struck Carol was the interior of his car. Yellow Post-it notes were plastered to every available surface, reminders to himself, she later thought they must have been, about all of the things he had said and done in his sojourn in San Marino.

“Mom, that guy is creepy!” she said when she returned home. That was their one and only encounter. But after she returned to Texas she received a couple of letters from Chichester, expressing his admiration of her in his precise block handwriting. The letters just made her shake her head, she said.

Around the same time, a San Marino friend who worked as a wedding coordinator called Carol in Texas.

“Didn’t you go out with Christopher Chichester?”

“Well, I guess.”

Her friend told her that Chichester was crashing weddings. She’d been too busy to bust him, she said, and probably wouldn’t have anyway, because that wouldn’t have been the San Marino way. But the previous weekend, she said, she was coming out of the church to close the doors before the ceremony began, just as he was coming in, dressed immaculately but looking sheepish. When he saw her, he turned around quickly and walked back to his car.

As his star rose even higher in the community, he considered going into local politics, beginning with a seat on the San Marino City Council.

“I’m presently staying with friends and don’t feel comfortable asking them if I can use their address,” he said, referring to campaign documents he’d need to file for the race. He was in the home of Carol and Joe Iliff. “Would it be too much of a bother if I use your address?”

It wasn’t that much of a stretch to use their address, as he was always stopping by their house, inviting Joe to breakfast—and never having cash for the tab, since royalty rarely carries cash. He and Joe Iliff would talk investments; Chichester always had some new and seemingly ingenious idea on how to make money. Like bringing over Chichester Cathedral to San Marino—he wouldn’t give up on the notion of that—or all manner of other financial and investment schemes, none of which came to fruition.

He also felt sure he could make a difference in San Marino, either by being elected to the city council himself or by being the puppetmaster of a city council member. “He felt that he had ideas and that if he pushed either me or my husband into running for office that he could sit behind the scenes and tell us what to say,” Carol Iliff said, adding that Chichester even suggested moving in with the couple.

“Actually, I’m wearing out my welcome a bit with the friends who have been giving me lodging,” he told the Iliffs one day. “Would you mind if I stayed with you for a month or so, until I can get resettled?”

Joe, who was on the road most weeks, didn’t think that was a good idea. It was only a two-bedroom house and not nearly large enough for his wife and Christopher Chichester. “My husband traveled every other week and he wasn’t going to have some guy living here in the house with me,” Carol later recalled.

After his first year in the area, Chichester was growing in confidence and attitude—not just in San Marino, which was becoming too provincial for a man of his name and nobility. With all of his social and television activities, it was a wonder that he had time for anything else. But he was living yet another active life as a student. He loomed extremely large as a big man on campus nine miles down the freeway, at the University of Southern California film school.

“I met Chris through my aunt Victoria,” said Dana Farrar, a dark-haired, friendly woman. It was a sunny Southern California afternoon and we were sitting on her back patio staring at a stack of photographs of the young man who called himself Christopher Chichester. She had not seen him for a very long time, but the pictures brought him back in all of his glory.

The first one showed Dana, then a fresh-faced beauty, grinning beside Chichester, an extremely thin young man in tight jeans and a V-neck sweater smirking crazily with three cone-shaped party hats on the top and sides of his head. In a second picture, he was peering contemplatively into a glass of wine, which he held with his pinky extended. In a third picture, he was making a funny face and twisting his fingers menacingly toward the camera—posing, Dana Farrar said, he was always posing.

“Aunt Victoria lives in San Marino,” Dana continued. “She’s ninety-two years old.”

Victoria was a true Super Marino matron. She met Chichester shortly after his arrival, at a Friends of the Library dinner.

“She was sitting with a neighbor, some old man from across the street, and Chris somehow struck up a conversation with her,” Dana continued. “At the time he used to give out business cards that said, ‘Christopher Chichester, Thirteenth Baronet,’ or something.”

“The Friends of the Library dinner was some kind of a charity event, where mostly it would be retired people, senior citizens, philanthropists,” said Dana. “I don’t know how he, Chichester, got there. But that’s where she met him.”

He had charmed her aunt, convincing her that he was involved in film production or something having to do with the film industry at USC, referring to the celebrated film school. “I was a student at USC at the time in journalism, and my boyfriend wanted to get into the film school very badly. Aunt Victoria thought Chris could help my boyfriend get into film school.

“She took us out to brunch with him,” Dana continued. “Oh, he was very charming. He was a lot of fun. He knew a lot about a lot of things.” But he was affected. He spoke in a clipped half-British, half-indiscernible accent, she said. “He would draw out the vowels at the end of every word.”

“Day-
nahhhhhh
,” she said, mimicking the way he said her name. “I think he must have studied American movies or something. It’s amazing to me. I speak German. I studied German for six years, and I couldn’t pick up a German accent with him at all.”

The accent was difficult to pinpoint, as were the details of his studies at USC.

“I can just remember being in the restaurant with Aunt Victoria and Chris and trying to pin him down, saying, ‘
What are you actually doing? What is your job?
’ He kind of just danced around everything.”

But he knew enough to keep the interest of his companions. Shortly after that he dropped the name Arthur Knight, the most impressive teacher of that era in the school. Dana and her increasingly starryeyed boyfriend took him to mean,
I’m a teacher’s asssistant in Arthur Knight’s class.
Arthur Knight was the famed author, film critic, and teacher who had taught future directors like George Lucas in his fabled Introduction to Film class, and had brought in guest lecturers like Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Clint Eastwood, and Chichester’s personal favorite, Alfred Hitchcock.

He gave the impression that he would “have a word with Arthur,” meaning he would talk to Arthur Knight about seeing what influence he might be able to bring to help Dana’s boyfriend get into film school. After the brunch, which Chichester ate ravenously, the parties said goodbye. Although Chichester never quite got around to introducing Dana’s boyfriend to Arthur Knight—or to helping him get into the film school—the brunch was the opening bell on Dana Farrar’s increasingly peculiar friendship with the young Englishman.

At USC, Dana began seeing him
everywhere
—in the library, at film screenings, dashing between classes. Always with a film script under his arm, he insisted that he was completing studies for his master of fine arts in film.

Dana and her friends could never bring themselves to ask why he was driving an old Plymouth Arrow if he was so wealthy. Nor did they question why his preppy clothing sometimes smelled from lack of dry cleaning—or was it just the musty scent of old money?—or why he had a habit of showing up unannounced at Dana’s apartment at mealtimes. “Oh, that smells so delightful,
Day
-nah!” he would say, until she either showed him the door or, more often, gave him a meal. He would wolf down food as if he hadn’t eaten for a week, and Dana thought what everyone else did: it all went with the territory of being rich, royal, and eccentric.

The professors knew him as well, and one of them, his English professor Geoffrey Green, assumed he was enrolled, because he was somehow on his roster of students. “I had a printed list from the registrar, and to get on it he would have had to sweet-talk someone in the registrar’s office into letting him into the class,” he remembered. “I did not admit him or add him to the class. His name was on the list.” However, the USC admissions department had no record of a Christopher Chichester, or a Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, enrolled in the school or ever paying tuition.

“He came to my attention because he was in my prose fiction class in the English department at USC,” Green continued. “He was a very active participant in the class and he came to see me during office hours. He was going by the name Christopher Chichester and he claimed at that time that he was descended from the Earl of Chichester, and he showed me some coat of arms, and he also said he was related to the Chichester who had sailed around the world.