The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (45 page)

Gerhartsreiter arrived at his college dorm with a set of golf clubs and an aristocratic air. “Supposedly, his mother or father was an ambassador,” said his college roommate. “He said he was from Boston.” To buttress his Boston background, he would eat a Boston cream pie every single day, added another college acquaintance.

This U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service photograph shows Gerhartsreiter on his 1978 arrival in the United States. After landing in Boston, he traveled to the small town in Connecticut that was home to a high school student who had met the friendly German on a train while traveling through Europe on a Eurail pass the summer before.

“He said to people he was from royalty in England and that his name was Christopher Chichester,” said the Swedish cowboy hairdresser Jann of Sweden, shown here in his cowboy regalia. “Every time he meets a lady, he takes her hand and kisses it be fore he presents himself. These ladies were thinking Chichester was sent by God or something.”

This clipping from the San Marino, California, newspaper shows Christopher Chichester as the producer of the local cable TV show
Inside San Marino
. Also pictured is the show’s host, Peggy Ebright.

SACRAMENTO CONNECTION.
Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy will be the featured guest on the May 29 edition of “Inside of San Marino,” scheduled for 7 p.m. on American Cablevision Channel 6. Above, Mountjoy (center) discusses the program’s format with producer Christopher Chichester and moderator Peggy Ebright. Mountjoy represents the 42nd District, which Includes San Marino, and is one of the state’s leading conservatives. On the cablecast, Mrs. Ebright asks him about reapportionment, legislative reform, the school finance bill and his grassroot political beginnings.

Christopher Chichester became a well known presence in San Marino. Not only was he an in demand man about town, popular with the city’s wealthy widows, he also posed as an aspiring film student, telling some he was a teacher’s assistant at the prestigious University of Southern California film school. Here, he’s seen partying with friends.

Ruth Detrick “Didi” Sohus (top photo, far right) was a former debutante. She and her third husband adopted a son, John, who was something of a loner before he met the woman who would become his wife: the redheaded, part–Blackfoot Indian Linda Mayfield. Standing over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds, Linda dwarfed John, who stood five feet five. The couple are shown in the bottom photo, on the day of their wedding.

“I don’t know why he came up here,” said a local in Cornish, New Hampshire, where Rockefeller turned a historic home into a never-ending construction project. “I guess he wanted to be in the sticks. He said he was looking for a place he could do a lot of fixing up.” The house was blocked off with a heavy chain and surrounded by signs reading KEEP OUT, CAUTION, and BEWARE OF DOGS.

“As I recall, he played Mars, and his daughter played a nymph,” said a representative of the Saint Gaudens Historic Site in Cornish. The god of war was an appropriate role for him, because by that time Rockefeller was fighting with many of the locals.