The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (8 page)

“Too German,” Chris said dismissively of his real name as he leafed through the phone book, looking for one that would set him apart from the pack.

When he couldn’t find a name he liked in the phone book, he began to tick off those of people he knew. Returning in his mind to Berlin, Connecticut, he recalled the teacher of his dreams, Joan Chichester, a class adviser who taught science and biology. She was blond and beautiful, in an almost British sort of way, and the young Gerhartsreiter had had a crush on her. Ed Savio told me so, even though Joan Chichester herself said she had no recollection of the young man. “It’s a horrible thing to say,” she told me. “I’m older, but I don’t think it’s senility. I was the class adviser and probably had him in class. He was just not outstanding to me at the time. I really don’t have anything to add.
You’ve
told
me
everything I know about him.”

“Oh, she’s
so
fantastic!” Chris Gerhart had often told Ed Savio. In addition to her striking looks and intelligence, she had the perfect name: Chichester, which Chris pronounced
Chee-
chester. It was
so
beautifully British, especially when paired with an august first name, like Christopher.

He suddenly had it: Christopher Chichester! And to gild the lily a bit, he threw in a fancy middle name: Mountbatten. Christopher Mountbatten Chichester. Elmer and Jean couldn’t help but smile. It was brilliant, and seemingly harmless, and they were happy for him. Their young German friend was ready for Hollywood! He had come so far since that day the couple met him, a soaking wet hitchhiker on the side of the highway in Germany. Since then he had clearly learned how to flatter and acquiesce, when to speak and when to remain silent, and how to work the American system.

In Hollywood, they all knew, reinvention was a way of life. But Christopher Mountbatten Chichester decided not to base his new life in Los Angeles. That would be too “on the nose,” to use the screenwriters’ term for too obvious, too predictable. Instead, he would launch himself in a bucolic enclave twelve miles to the east of L.A., a tiny, self-contained, all-American town of true-blue believers, all too eager to embrace a stranger, especially one with a stellar name.

CHAPTER 4

Christopher Chichester: San Marino, California

D
eep in the dossier of documents I had been given by my secret source in Boston, an interesting item caught my eye, a report from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, dated July 4, 1994:

Detectives say that Chichester dresses well, is very clean cut and very articulate. He attends church services and ingratiates himself with older people in wealthy communities. He has passed himself off as a computer expert, film producer and stockbroker. He has told people that his father was a lawyer, an archaeologist or a British aristocrat and his mother an architect, an archaeologist or an actress. He is very knowledgeable on subjects of which he would speak. Although Chichester speaks with what people have described as an English accent, detectives say he is not British. He is believed to be from another Western European nation.

Nearby in the dossier on the young immigrant were the following lines:

May 26, 1981: Moves to California, becomes Christopher Chichester.

February 7, 1983: issued California drivers license No. C309973—sometime between this date and 2-08-85 moves into the rear house at 1920 Lorain Road, San Marino.

I had never been to San Marino, but once I learned more about it, I could see immediately why the German who now called himself Christopher Chichester had chosen to move there. GARDENS OF EARTHLY DELIGHT, read the headline of a
New York Times
article about the place. A 1996 story in the
Los Angeles Times
listed the city’s impressive statistics: area in square miles, 3.75; population, 12,959; median age, 41.2; median household income, $100,101.

The story read:

San Marino, known for the size of its estates and incomes, is a city of superlatives.

Consider one of its many distinctions: One of its founders, rail tycoon Henry E. Huntington, ultimately had his name on nearly as much Los Angeles real estate as the county assessor. The city’s first mayor was George Patton, father of the famed “Blood and Guts” general of World War II. As a boy the younger George swam in Lake Vineyard, which would become a 35-acre verdant jewel called Lacy Park. . . .

A rigorous set of regulations are enforced to maintain a posh lifestyle: a car can be visible in a driveway for no more than 48 hours continuously, only one family is allowed for each home, trash cans cannot be in view of the street, door-to-door hawkers and chain-link fences are expressly prohibited. The only salvation for some jittery souls is a double espresso, the strongest drink for sale in the city.

One day in the fall of 2008, I took the 110 freeway from downtown Los Angeles until it stopped and suddenly turned into an ordinary road. After I drove through a short and scruffy patch of Pasadena, the sky suddenly opened, the foliage thickened, and the air turned cool and clear. The road widened into a six-lane boulevard. Suddenly I was in a different world, the antithesis of the metropolis twelve miles away. San Marino seemed to be stuck in another era, a flashback to Norman Rockwell’s America, a pristine little town framed by the San Gabriel Mountains, dotted with palms and filled with good, honest, churchgoing citizens. The town felt immediately safer than the urban sprawl I had just left behind.

The eyesore double-decker strip malls that had taken over Los Angeles had not encroached here. Instead, the main road, Huntington Boulevard, was lined with tidy and quaint little shops: the Huntington Drive Service Station (with real attendants, not the standard serve-yourself computerized pumps), Diana Dee’s Gifts, Carriage Trade Coiffures, the Plantation House, Fashion Cleaners, the Collenette School of Dancing (specializing in ballet), Deluxe Shoe Repair. There were shops offering skin care, ballroom dancing lessons, custom tailoring, arts and crafts, and hobbies. Churches seemed to be on every other corner. I immediately spotted a Christian Science Reading Room alongside the First Church of Christian Science. By noon, the locals had packed the Colonial Kitchen—OPEN DAILY, 7 A.M., SPECIALS! read the sign out front. Through the windows I could see laughing waitresses pouring coffee for proper gentlemen eating bacon and eggs.

Everything about this place instantly put a smile on my face.

This was San Marino, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter’s first real permanent home as an American citizen. Around the time of his arrival, a local wrote a song about the city:

I’ve heard of a town
Where millionaires stay
That’s only 20 minutes outside of L.A.

They’ve got a Police Force, Fire Department
That they don’t need
’Cause there’s no crime, no riots, they’re
Securitied

There’re five limousines
In every carport
The schools are all so rich
They’re teaching every sport

The streetlights burn all night
The trees are trimmed just right
What is its name?
San Marino

Christopher Mountbatten Chichester landed here in 1981. Having mastered English, he was ready to launch his most impressive identity to date—not in Los Angeles, where there is a poseur on every corner, but in the gardens of earthly delight.

My first stop was the Jann of Sweden Hair Studio, in one of the charming little collections of shops on the main road. Stepping through the door, I felt I’d stumbled into a saloon instead of a salon. The room was covered floor to ceiling with silver-studded saddles, bronzes of cowboys and horses, mounted deer and steer heads, guitars and mandolins, rodeo ribbons and trophies, and endless framed photographs of a blond, bearded cowboy in decades of Rose Bowl parades.

The proprietor appeared, an enormous man so tall that he practically touched the ceiling, wearing a bright red western shirt, a bandanna around his neck, and snakeskin cowboy boots, into which he had tucked skintight jeans held up by a hand-tooled leather belt with a mammoth silver rodeo buckle. His hair was long and snow white, and I could hardly tell where it stopped and his long beard began. Hanging below the beardline was a swirling walrus mustache. He flashed a big, broad, snaggletoothed smile, and his turquoise blue eyes lit up as he introduced himself.

Jann Eldnor had arrived in the United States in 1971. “I was cleancut—I looked like Ross Perot,” he said, referring to the Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate. Then someone took Jann horseback riding, and he caught the bug that would turn into an obsession. “My hair grew long; my mustache grew out; I started to decorate my shop like the Wild West. I became the Swedish Cowboy!” Ever since then he had been riding on horseback in parades, and once he even rode onto the set of
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
.

When I asked him about Christopher Chichester, he bellowed, “All right!”—one of his favorite expressions, I soon learned. “He sat right there,” he said, pointing to his antique barber chair, which bore a plaque stating that it dated back to 1886.

Having been the town barber since 1972, Jann said he knew almost everyone in San Marino. I laid out for him what little I already knew: that an immigrant calling himself Christopher Chichester had chosen this place because of its reputation as an old-money enclave of wealth and sophistication. I repeated what Elmer Kelln had told me: “He wanted to be where the rich people were.” But exactly when he arrived and where he stayed weren’t known, it turned out, even by Jann of Sweden.

“I think he was living off a lady down on Bedford Road,” Jann said.

“
Off
a lady?” I asked, thinking that the phrasing was due to his broken English, and that he meant “
with
a lady.” No, he assured me, he meant
off.
And the ladies of San Marino were happy to have him; they welcomed him almost instantly, because he was a young man of not merely wealth, taste, and sophistication. He was royalty. “He said to people he was from royalty in England and that his name was Christopher Chichester.” Jann pronounced the name
Chee
-chester, accent on the
Chee
. “And even though he was only twenty-six, he acted like he was forty. Every time he meets a lady, he takes her hand and kisses it before he presents himself. These ladies were thinking Chichester was sent by God or something,” he continued. “Because he acted so well. So
not
like the other guys out in this country. He could talk about the stock market, about politics, about everything. These ladies would invite him to come and stay in their big houses. They always had a guest room or something. And they fed him and bought him clothes.”

“How did
you
meet him?” I asked.

He’d heard about him before he met him, he said, and had started seeing his photograph in the local newspaper, always dressed in a suit and a tie. “And I wonder, ‘All right, who the hell is this?’ This guy Chichester starts showing up at the city council meetings and different things. And then for sure he’s all of a sudden at the clubs.”

“The clubs?” I asked.

“The City Club and the Rotary and all the others,” he said. “I know all the people, and they all told Chichester, ‘Since you’re British, you should go to Jann for your haircuts, because he’s from Europe too!’ So suddenly he shows up in his suit and wants a haircut. And then he starts to tell me the stories—that he was a Mountbatten and all that.”

Not only was he a Mountbatten, he added, he was the nephew of Lord Mountbatten, which was a
monumental
relative to have, as anyone would have known had they read the biography
Mountbatten
, by Philip Ziegler, whose flap copy reads:

He was born in 1900. His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, nephew of the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, cousin of the King of England. He became Lord Louis Mountbatten, the young idol of the British Navy and eventually one of the Three Supreme Allied Commanders of World War II (the others were Eisenhower and MacArthur) with a quarter of a million Americans under his direct command; the last Viceroy of India, who orchestrated, in circumstances of horrifying difficulty, India’s independence from Britain. . . .

It is a life that almost defies description. Mountbatten wielded power over millions of people across the globe. Yet this unwavering champion of nationalist freedom and democracy was also extremely royal: best friend of his cousin, the Duke of Windsor; uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh and architect of his marriage to Elizabeth; beloved “Honorary Grandfather” of Prince Charles.

He was glamorous, indecently handsome, married to one of Europe’s richest and most beautiful heiresses. . . . Everything about him was on a gigantic scale.

Yet here was a young man claiming to be his nephew . . . in a tiny Southern California town. But no one had any reason to disbelieve him. Everything about him—his clothing, accent, education, and charm—seemed to be real.

Jann pointed to his antique barber chair. “Many assholes have sat in that chair since 1886,” he said, which is what he told every new client. Then he made a sweep of his hand, a gesture that I took to mean, “Have a seat and see how it feels.” I sat down, and Jann resumed his story: “So Chichester started coming to me for his haircuts, at least twice a month. And like so many other customers, they come to me to tell their stories and talk about their problems. They know that I will listen. They kind of use me like their cheap psychiatrist, like a bartender.”

I sank deep into the chair, which was old and creaky but soft and comfortable. Jann, as well as his fellow townspeople, had one hell of a story to tell.

A young man seeking to make his way in the higher echelons of San Marino would do well to start with Kenneth Veronda, a pillar of the local community and headmaster of Southwestern Academy since 1961. Southwestern is an exclusive prep school in San Marino that Veronda’s father, Maurice, founded in 1924. As headmaster, the younger Veronda, who earned his master’s degree from Stanford College, had guided countless young men and women into adulthood, through both his prep school’s rigorous curriculum and his own intelligent and insightful guidance.