The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (9 page)

One day in the early 1980s a young man named Christopher Chichester walked into Veronda’s little office in a quaint cabin on Southwestern Academy’s pristine grounds.

“He was new to town, and someone sent him here to ask how he could get a little more involved in the community,” recalled Veronda, a heavyset, well-mannered man, sitting behind an enormous cluttered desk. I sat in a chair across from him, in exactly the same spot where Christopher Chichester had sat so many years before, and I could easily imagine the well-dressed new arrival in the business suit in this office, speaking to this friendly, eminently hospitable older man and instantly charming him. “He said that he was a descendant of the Chichester family in England, and that his mother was at the family home in Switzerland. He had come over here to attend USC, to study communications or television. He was relatively modest, saying, ‘Oh, yes, we’re British nobility, but I am a poor relation.’”

Everyone welcomed him, especially Veronda, who gave the young man his entrée into San Marino society. “I invited him to come to a chamber of commerce mixer, which is simply a meet-and-greet with fifty or so people, which he did,” said Veronda. “Then he wanted to join the Rotary, which he did. He came to the weekly Rotary lunches. Of course, he was much younger than most of the guys—most were in their fifties or older. New members have to sit at a back table, where I often sat. He was always well dressed—nicely cut English suits, shirt and tie. And he was polite, pleasant. But at these kinds of meetings, there really isn’t much time to talk. Once you get your plate served at the buffet, there’s business and announcements, then a program and a speaker.”

Soon, Christopher Chichester was a regular at the clubs, the city council meetings, and the parties of the wealthy, well-heeled citizens, who seemed happy to have a royal in their midst.

“This town is divided into three,” said Jann Eldnor. “Super Marino, on the hill with houses $5 million and up; San Marino, on the flats, good, big houses for doctors and professionals; and Sub Marino, where the houses are cheaper, for engineers, schoolteachers, and lower income.” We were on a driving tour of the three strata of San Marino. I met Jann at his salon and waited out front while he went to pull his car around—a big white GMC pickup truck with a roaring engine, caked with horse manure from his stable. Like everything else about Jann, it seemed out of place in placid San Marino, but the Swedish cowboy had long since become something of a character in the city and people expected him to do the unexpected.

“Before I got this truck, I had a red one, with Texas longhorns on the front,” he said. “I kept a double-barreled shotgun on a gun rack in the back and a bale of hay in the bed, just for decoration. The cops were always stopping me to ask, ‘Jann, is that gun loaded?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s not a gun if it’s not loaded!’” He laughed and told me it was never loaded—he simply liked the look of it.

I climbed in, and Jann, as usual, started talking. We were in the flats of San Marino, with the town’s lowest-rung neighborhoods—Sub Marino—behind us. But Jann didn’t want to start there. He headed straight to the upper-class areas. As we drove through the town’s middle strata, he explained, “The houses are bigger and nicer here—one-or two-million-dollar houses. Doctors and lawyers and everything. But they’re not the
big
money, the
old
money. Chichester wrinkled his nose at all of
this
. He wanted to be with the
real
people, the
rich
people.”

As the truck climbed into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the houses grew larger and statelier, and I could make out a grin beneath Jann’s Santa Claus beard. This was Super Marino, the rarefied world upon which Christopher Chichester’s eyes had been fixed.

The neighborhood begins at the Huntington Library, the 207-acre former home of Henry Huntington, the railroad baron and town patriarch. Today it houses an art gallery, a botanical garden, and a research library containing more than six million rare books and manuscripts, collected by Huntington from all over the world.

It made sense that Chichester had chosen to live in a city with one of the foremost libraries in America, since libraries were a key part of his existence wherever he went. He spent much of his time in them, studying how to become someone else.

The Huntington Library brought to mind San Simeon, the storied castle of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, just up the California coast, and I mentioned that to Jann. “Huntington was
bigger
than Hearst, all right,” he said with pride. “He owned the Pacific Railroad. He had ranches in Australia, in Washington State—all over the place. He’d go to England and buy up whole libraries for nothing and bring them back to San Marino.”

We were heading to the house that Chichester had given as his first address in San Marino: 1405 Circle Drive, which, Jann told me, wasn’t merely Super Marino, but
Super
Super Marino, at the apex of the town. “I’m not sure where he lived in the beginning—nobody is,” he said. “Before he met people, he was probably living in a motel.” Not in San Marino proper, of course, he added—hotels, much less cheap motels, were not allowed there. Most likely, he said, the young immigrant would have had to find a place in the relatively plebeian environs of Pasadena, San Gabriel, or Alhambra—only a few minutes’ drive but a world away from lovely, leafy San Marino.

Jann hadn’t heard about Chichester’s supposed address on Circle Drive, so he was as eager to see it as I was. Circle Drive is a half-moon of a street at the summit of a high hill. Its privileged residents can look out on all of San Marino. I knew that Chichester had claimed to live at 1405 Circle Drive, because he had listed it as his address in one of the documents I had been given. The estate at that address was huge—the biggest estate on a street full of big estates. “Oh, all right!” Jann exclaimed when we got to it. Chichester had presumably lived in the guesthouse out back, near the swimming pool and tennis court—if he had ever really lived there at all.

But if he
hadn’t
lived there, where
had
he lived? Jann couldn’t answer that question, but the next day I met some people who could.

After my tour with Jann, I dropped by to see one of the many Super Marino matrons who had been charmed by Christopher Chichester. “I met him in church,” the woman told me, “the Church of Our Saviour. He was
so
nice. We were on the terrace, having coffee after the Sunday morning service, when he came up and introduced himself.”

The Church of Our Saviour lies just across the San Marino line, in the town of San Gabriel, but it was central to the lives of Super Marino’s Episcopalians. It had been founded by General George Patton Sr., whose famous son, the World War II hero, is memorialized in the garden, with a statue of him in jodhpurs.

Few people took notice the first time Chichester showed up at the Church of Our Saviour and claimed a seat in a front pew. But when the congregants gathered for coffee and conversation on the patio after the service, he readily shared his story and handed out calling cards.

“Hello, so pleased to meet you,” he would chirp, grasping a lady’s hand and raising it to his lips. Then he would reach into his suit jacket, pull out a card printed on heavy stock, and present it ceremoniously. It read:

Christopher Chichester XIII, Bt.

SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA

SAN RAFAEL, CALIFORNIA

The Bt. stood for baronet, he would explain if asked, and the Roman numerals identified him as the thirteenth baronet. (If the citizens of San Marino had been motivated to do some research, they might have discovered then and there that the eleventh baronet, Sir Edward John Chichester, was still alive, which meant that a thirteenth baronet could not yet exist.)

The card featured what appeared to be a family crest—a coat of arms depicting an egret, wings spread, with an eel in its beak—and what was obviously the family motto:
Firm en foi
. “Firm in faith,” he would translate for intrigued acquaintances.

Soon the baronet was not only worshipping at the Church of Our Saviour every Sunday but also working on special committees and helping to prepare the sanctuary for services. He was so quiet, so deferential, and so obviously alone that certain of the friendly female parishioners felt compelled to adopt him. Among these was a stay-at-home mom named Betty Woods, who wasn’t Super Marino by any measure, but solidly San Marino. She invited Chichester for breakfast, and soon after that, lunch. Eventually she asked him to join her family for dinner on Christmas Eve. “I like to take in the strays for Christmas,” she would say.

The literature given to newcomers to the Church of Our Saviour includes the following passage:

People will welcome you . . . as worship creates an extended family. Last but not least of worship’s many gifts to us is community. Sitting around us are imperfect, messy, wonderful people on the same path as we are. They, too, are trying to make sense of life and to be better people. They want to be challenged to grow and to make the world a better place. You will find friends of the heart to travel with over years of dinners and walks and family cookouts.

No one found the residents of San Marino and the congregants of the Church of Our Saviour more welcoming than Christopher Chichester—particularly the town’s kindly widows. I spoke to several of these women, who told me that Chichester became a regular at their church, often attending the 7:30 a.m. service, the 11:30 a.m. service, and the 11:45 prayers for healing, which were followed by coffee and desserts.

“I met him at the Church of Our Saviour, and he would be out on the patio after church, talking, looking very dapper, being very friendly,” said Meredith Bruckner, a longtime San Marino resident. “He had a very cultured voice and he was very anxious to be friendly and talk to people. He wore a navy blue blazer with a crest on it, not a family crest, just a crest that the manufacturer put on the pocket. He always looked classy. If you’re going to get people to accept you in San Marino, you have to look classy. When he was accepted by a few people on the patio, he was accepted by everybody. People were just really nice to him.

“Good old Christopher could talk on any subject,” she continued, and his versatility showed most vividly while playing the board game Trivial Pursuit. Meredith Bruckner played Trivial Pursuit with him several times, and, she added, Christopher Chichester
always
won.

It was by no means an easy task. Indeed, if someone were seeking a crash course on America by board game, the subjects in Trivial Pursuit would be an excellent choice. I found a few sample questions from the game during the time that Chichester became so proficient at it:

What was Rhoda’s maiden name? (Morgenstern)

How many days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination was Lee Harvey Oswald shot? (2)

How many original seasons of
Gilligan’s Island
were TV viewers subjected to? (3)

What did 100,000 self-conscious American women buy 200,000 of in 1980? (Breast implants)

It wasn’t just board games at which the young man was proficient. A letter that Chichester would later write to a friend showed his dexterity with the classics of literature. “So glad to hear that you got into Shakespeare,” he wrote. “Probably the best writing ever! Richard II and Richard III count as my favorites. Of course, I can help you. Whenever you need anything, just let me know the play, the act, the scene. Read the line number to me, and I can give you my opinion.”

“He knew everything about everything,” Bruckner continued of Chichester’s prowess. “He knew about sports, theater, movies. . . . He just had a great knowledge about everything. He was fabulous. . . . He was a charmer! A very charming guy!”

Chichester’s legend increased when a story appeared one day in 1982 in a local newspaper. It revealed that the young man, who had recently become a resident of San Marino, was a descendant of Sir Francis Chichester, the legendary adventurer who had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1967 for being the first person to sail alone around the world. One woman recalled Christopher showing her the article proudly. Then he blushed and added that he was also rather embarrassed by the attention the newspaper had brought on him and his famous relative.

“And we all thought, ‘Wow! This is exciting! He has credentials!’ ” said the woman who saw the newspaper. His periodic mentions in the local newspaper made him the talk of the town and a popular dinner guest. He was also a favorite at the San Marino Public Library, where he spent a lot of time. Volunteers there would ask, “Are you really related to Sir Francis Chichester?” The young man would always be eager to fill them in with details.

As luck would have it, there was then a popular song by the rock band Dire Straits called “Single-Handed Sailor,” about Sir Francis Chichester and his 226-day journey, which began and ended in Plymouth, England, with only one brief stop, in Sydney, Australia. How could the citizens of San Marino, if they listened to the song, resist the temptation to regard Chichester’s grandson as potentially heroic too?

“I was named after the town of Chichester, in England,” he told one San Marino woman as she drove him home from a Wednesday night church service.

“Chris, I’ve been there!” she exclaimed, and they shared memories of the historic town, which is best known for its eleventh-century cathedral.

“I’ve actually recently inherited the cathedral,” Chichester said. “I’ve been considering bringing it to the United States, but I’ve found no municipality ready and able to take it on.”

The woman apparently didn’t consider the incalculable difficulty and expense of dismantling and transporting a medieval cathedral, nor did she stop to consider how preposterous it was to think that such a historic monument could be owned by an individual family.

“Oh, Chris, wouldn’t it be wonderful to bring the cathedral to San Marino?” she said, adding that she owned a property that could be an ideal spot for it.