The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (10 page)

“Well, I would certainly consider a proposal,” Chichester said.

The next day the woman lobbied the San Marino city manager, extolling the glories of Chichester Cathedral and explaining that San Marino’s illustrious new resident was prepared to bring it to town. It would rival the Huntington Library as a must-see destination in the city! “Is there
any
way we could bring this over?” she asked.

“Not if we have to pay for it,” the city manager replied.

“Well, Chris has plenty of money,” she said. But when she brought up the matter with him again, he said he didn’t think his parents would allow him to take the large sum necessary for such an enterprise out of his trust fund.

No matter what the locals said in hindsight, it was clear that back then much of San Marino was in Christopher Chichester’s sway. One afternoon I was invited for tea with a few of the area’s prominent matrons. We sat on chintz-covered chairs in the large living room of a grand home in Super Marino. “We’ve got money on this street,” the lady of the house acknowledged. “We’ve got a billionaire two doors down, a millionaire next door, and a billionaire next to that.”

The women were exceedingly friendly and generous. They were determined to remain civil even when we got on the subject of Christopher Chichester. One woman told me that she had driven him to and from church nearly every Wednesday. Because his dilapidated Plymouth Arrow was frequently not running, the ladies of San Marino had taken turns ferrying him around town. Whenever she went to pick him up, she said, he would be waiting for her in front of a lovely Super Marino home, and when she dropped him off, he would say, “Don’t turn down the street. Just drop me on the corner.” She would roll to a stop as instructed, and the young man would step out of her Cadillac and disappear into the night. After a year of Wednesdays, he still hadn’t let the widow know exactly where he lived.

Another woman took up the subject. “We sent out a little bulletin to the local paper, the
San Marino Tribune
, asking anybody who could to help paint the high school,” she said. It was a typical San Marino effort, with countless members of the community pitching in. Local mothers delivered home-cooked lunches for the painters, and one resident sent over a jukebox with 1950s music to entertain them. People thought it was absolutely splendid that Chichester, a baronet and scion of the Mountbatten family, would volunteer to perform such manual labor.

“I introduced him around,” she continued ruefully. “We were all there, painting, and I would say, ‘Do you know Christopher Chichester?’ We were all so friendly! He made a
lot
of contacts there at the high school. He was well mannered and dressed so well—there was nothing suspicious about him.” She put down her teacup, and I thought for a moment that she was finally going to lose her cool and lay into Chichester. But she retained a firm hold on herself, even as she recalled, “He wasn’t a very good painter.”

After helping to paint the high school, Chichester inserted himself into the most cherished social event in San Marino: Fathers’ Night, in which the town fathers—leading politicians and businessmen, mostly—sang and danced in an original musical show. It had been a tradition since 1932, and the 1982 production featured a hundred of San Marino’s most important citizens. They performed numbers from such Broadway classics as
Cabaret
,
Guys and Dolls
, and
The Music Man
, with the lyrics adapted to apply to San Marino. (“You got trouble, my friend. I say trouble. Right here in San Marino!”) To add to the fun, many of the town fathers appeared in drag.

In fact, the whole community went a little nutty over Fathers Night. Businesses took out lighthearted ads in the local paper saying “Break a Leg!” and “We Gave at the Office.” But the women at tea assured me that the event had a serious purpose; it was a major fund-raiser for San Marino’s City Club, which supported local charities and the PTA. Our hostess, in fact, usually organized the event, but in 1982 Chichester had stepped in and insisted that
he
coordinate everything. He was very proficient with computers, he said, and he’d do it all electronically. It would save everyone a huge amount of effort.

But when it came time to actually do the work, Chichester found himself faced with a mountain of paper—production notes, lyrics, cast lists—and he gave up on the project without having contributed anything at all. Then, with no explanation, he showed up at the first week of rehearsals expecting to be in the show. “I said, ‘Put him in a dog suit,’” our hostess recalled. So the illustrious baronet came out on the Fathers’ Night stage in a dog outfit, and the only thing he had to do was pantomime peeing on a fire hydrant.

“He was a
flake
!” the hostess said, a crack finally beginning to appear in her sunny façade. She pointed to two of her friends, who had introduced her to Chichester, and said, “I
told
them he was a flake. But they said, ‘No! He’s wonderful!’ ” She shook her head. “These two Virgos,” she continued, “are just so
trusting
! They just love
everybody
! Everyone’s perfect, and nothing bad ever happens. The world is just as it should be, in their eyes. We never dropped the atomic bomb and there has never been a war or catastrophe.”

I looked over at the two Virgos under attack. They continued smiling as their friend railed away at them. The hostess then pointed to one of the women, who I had been told was among her best friends, and said, “I called
her
one morning and said, ‘We had lightning strike last night!’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, we didn’t.’ We were the most trusting little town, the most innocent people you’ll ever know. We went right along with the gag. That’s how he got away with it.”

She explained, “I’m from San Francisco, and I turned up my nose at San Marino at first. I thought, ‘Who wants to live in this flat, icky place?’ ” She motioned to her garden outside and the hills beyond. “You see, I settled on the biggest hill I could find. But the people here were so nice. San Marino was charming! That’s why he—Christopher Chichester—could get by. I can’t say that’s true today.”

Today San Marino is less homogeneous and likely feels a bit less like a community than it did in the early 1980s. Its population is about half Asian American, mostly affluent Taiwanese, who moved to the city in great numbers in the 1980s and 1990s, attracted by its top-notch public school system—consistently rated among the best in California—and its small-town way of life.

The ladies agreed that a great deal had changed in San Marino in the past twenty-five years. The era of trust, openness, and innocence was over, and it wasn’t due solely to demographic changes. In large measure, it ended with the mysterious arrival, and the equally mysterious departure, of the young man who called himself Christopher Chichester.

When the tea was over, I rode home with Peggy Ebright, one of the all-trusting Virgos, a perky blonde. We went to her comfortable house in the flats of San Marino, and she pulled out yellowed newspaper clippings and production schedules.

She showed me an article from the January 15, 1984, edition of the
Pasadena Star-News
. It was a society column about a party given by Joyce and Howard Morrow, the owners of Morrow Nut House, a national chain of roasted-nuts shops. They had donated $40,000 to fly in twenty-two Olympic athletes from San Marino’s namesake, the tiny Republic of San Marino, the microstate of thirty thousand people nestled in Italy’s Apennine Mountains. While competing in the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the athletes were wined and dined by the citizens of San Marino, California.

The party given by the Morrows was attended by 150 people, the paper stated. The fare was “champagne and nuts, nuts and more nuts,” the society columnist wrote, but the hosts seemed to take a backseat to the star of the evening:

Another guest with a story was Christopher Chichester, a former member of the British peerage and grandson of the legendary sailor, Sir Francis Chichester, who is now an American citizen and a resident of San Marino.

“I’m the one who put Howard Morrow together with the fund-raisers for the Republic’s Olympic team,” said Chichester, whose mother owns a construction business located in the
other
San Marino.

Peggy Ebright pulled out more clippings, including a newspaper advertisement illustrated with stars and klieg lights shining down on the following copy: “What is everyone talking about? Watch
Inside San Marino
and find out. 7 p.m. on Channel 6—Cable Vision.
Inside San Marino
is a Gipsy Moth Production.” Gipsy Moth, the name of the production company, was also the name of the ship Sir Francis Chichester sailed around the world.

It was 1984, and the era of cable television had arrived. The San Marino City Council awarded its first cable TV franchise to a car dealer in Pasadena, mostly as an advertising vehicle for them. The first requirement for a fledgling channel was to produce a local TV show. As he vaulted between church socials, city council meetings, and various clubs, Christopher Chichester heard about the cable TV opportunity—and seized it.

One day, the phone rang in the home of Peggy Ebright.

“Hello, Peggy, Christopher Chichester here.”

“Oh, hi, Chris!” she exclaimed. Of course, Peggy knew who he was. By now, everyone in San Marino knew Christopher Chichester; he was ubiquitous. He told her some very exciting news: cable TV was coming to San Marino! And
he
had been given the honor of producing the city’s first cable TV show, which he wanted
her
to host.

“Peggy, you’re a natural!” he said, and that much was true. Petite and perfectly dressed, Peggy always got the Doris Day roles, people said, because she looked and acted like Doris Day: perpetually cheerful. Peggy would be the perfect face of his show, Chichester said, an interview program he would call
Inside San Marino
. She would be Barbara Walters and he would be the producer pulling the strings behind the scenes.

“Chris, that sounds like fun! I’d love to do it!” said Peggy.

Sitting in her living room on the day of my visit, Peggy Ebright laughed—and kept laughing, her laughter punctuating our conversation, her sunny disposition clouded not one whit by the mysterious stranger. “We just couldn’t have believed people would not be telling the truth,” she said. “In San Marino? No way.”

She joined the show, becoming the face of
Inside San Marino.

Although it was essentially a three-person shoestring production—Christopher Chichester, Peggy Ebright, and a high school student cameraman—with minuscule viewership, Chichester pursued the program as he did everything: full tilt. “
Inside San Marino
—7 p.m., American Cable Vision Channel 6,” read the now-yellowed little ads that Peggy Ebright showed me, which Chichester had placed in the local newspaper. He typed the schedules, which he would give to Peggy, who would pick him up in her car for the day’s shooting, and they would meet their cameraman and storm the offices and playgrounds of the Super Marino elite.

Chichester booked all the guests. “Lovely, ten a.m. at your home,” one can imagine him telling the mayor’s wife, the chief librarian, or the museum curator. “Just dress as you normally do, and don’t be nervous, dear. You’re a natural.”

The guests enjoyed the attention, even though they almost never watched themselves on the show.
Nobody
watched cable TV back then, and
Inside San Marino
wasn’t catnip enough to make them subscribe to newfangled channels. But Chris! How could anyone deny sweet, cultured, darling Chris? So many of the good citizens of San Marino wanted to help Christopher Chichester in whatever he wanted to do. And he certainly
looked
like a rising show-business star. On shoot days, he would replace his customary Ivy League jacket and tie with “L.A. casual” attire: white jeans, V-neck sweater over a striped polo shirt, its collar points turned up to frame his neck, and aviator sunglasses.

“Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy will be the featured guest on the May 29 edition of
Inside San Marino
,” trumpeted one newspaper article, which included a photograph of Chichester smiling at the camera, alongside Peggy Ebright, with his hands crossed. “Above, Mountjoy discusses the program’s format with producer Christopher Chichester.”

The local notables Chichester roped into appearing on the show—the mayor, the headmaster, various Super Marino powerhouses—were soon depleted and Chichester began looking beyond San Marino for guests. Within a couple of months his roster expanded to include L.A. luminaries, growing so large in scope that Chichester changed the show’s name from
Inside San Marino
to just
Inside.
“Welcome to
Inside
,” went one intro. “I’m Peggy Ebright, and today we are in the offices of Mr. Daryl Gates, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Off camera, but always in control, Chichester flashed cue cards and shouted directions. “And, Chief Gates, you are responsible for the safety of how many people?” he instructed Peggy to ask.

After filming
Inside
segments, Peggy would chauffeur her producer home—at least to what she assumed was his home, in lower San Marino. On the day of my visit, Peggy drove me over to the house, which sat on an expansive corner lot. It was “a Monterrey house,” she said, referring to its Spanish style: red terra-cotta in color, a haven of arches, lush landscaping, and, most auspiciously for Chichester, she added, stained-glass coats of arms on the windows.

“I would tell him, ‘I’ve always loved that house, I’d love to see the inside,” Peggy said of the many evenings when she dropped him off at the grand hacienda, which he told her was owned by his parents.

“They let me live in it to keep it properly maintained,” Chichester said, before bidding Peggy good night.

“Well, I would love to come in and take a look someday,” Peggy said.