The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (6 page)

“I was working at Berlin High School, in the guidance office,” said a local woman who came to know him, who is also of German descent. “Mia McMahon, the gal in the library’s media center, knew that I was German and that he was German. Mia figured he was lonely and thought maybe he would like to speak German and just be with a German person.”

She sighed at the thought of the lonely immigrant boy, adrift in America. “Being a mother, I felt sorry for him!” she continued. “Not that he felt sorry for himself. He was very confident.”

“There was a big German community in the nearby town of New Britain, and my mother is very much into her German heritage,” the German woman’s son told me. “She spoke German to me from the time I was five, and she’s a
schuhplattler
folk dancer—the German dance where you slap your shoes. She wanted to keep the German culture alive in our family.”

And what better way than to bring a
real
German into their home? “We invited him for a few holidays—Easter, Thanksgiving,” said the woman. He was very sweet, but very lost. He didn’t fit in anywhere.” In an attempt to ingratiate himself, he embellished his life story. “He kept telling us about his father being a great importer of fine wood from South Africa. And his mother was some kind of professional, I can’t remember what.”

“He was smart, obviously, but he had this
odd
side to him,” the son said. That side of Gerhartsreiter was on display when the family took him to their lake house in New Hampshire.

“None of our children really bonded with him,” the mother said. “He had no interest in sports, but he
loved
music, especially classical music. He’d bring a Scottish bagpipe every time we came to the lake, and he loved to play it. And when he would come up for the weekend, he would wear nothing but a bathing suit and cowboy boots, which my boys thought was ridiculous.

“My husband was an attorney, very involved in stocks and bonds,” she continued. “He and Christian had lengthy conversations, and Christian was knowledgeable—he knew stocks and bonds and banks.” In these areas, Christian knew how to make a connection.

Back in Berlin, Gerhartsreiter parlayed his love of classical music into a part-time job. He had been blowing smoke when he told people back in Bergen that he was going to America to work as a radio disc jockey, but that’s exactly what he wound up doing.

“I had just gotten an educational FM station at Berlin High School,” said Jeff Wayne, who as the town’s media director supervised Berlin’s libraries and schools, ensuring that they had top-of-the-line audiovisual equipment. Around the time Christian Gerhartsreiter was at Berlin High, a Hartford radio station donated to the town of Berlin a vast collection of classical music albums, Wayne told me: “The really high-end stuff—Chopin, Mozart. An unbelievable collection of music, cabinets full of it—probably a thousand albums. We couldn’t have just anybody spinning these records. They had to know something about classical music. But high school students weren’t interested in classical music.”

Except for one.

“One day the librarian Mia McMahon showed up with Christian, a long-haired, European-looking lad with a German accent,” Jeff Wayne continued. “ ‘He’s an expert in classical music,’ she said, ‘and he’s interested in your radio program.’

“I jumped at the opportunity,” Wayne told me. Impressed by Gerhartsreiter’s knowledge, he put him on the air immediately. “Pretty soon we had a lot of people listening to it, and they couldn’t believe that there was a high school student doing it. He’d announce the music, give a little commentary about it, and go right into it—very professional. Not quite NPR, but for somebody his age? If you were an aficionado of classical music, it would knock your socks off.”

I tried to imagine Gerhartsreiter at the controls, purring into a microphone in what was left of his German accent: “And now, Charles Gounod’s haunting ‘Funeral March of a Marionette,’ from back in 1872.”

Looking back on it, Wayne said, Gerhartsreiter was perhaps too professional, too smart. “I didn’t see him blend in or really have friends. He came across as more mature than the average high school student. I have doubts that he was really high school age. He seemed older, more sophisticated.”

On some evenings in the Savio house, Gerhartsreiter would join Edward in his bedroom, where there was a writing table, a stereo system, and an upright piano, on which Edward composed songs for high school musicals. Just as Christian had always been determined to leave his hometown of Bergen, Germany, Edward was intent on leaving Berlin for new horizons. His dream was to move to Los Angeles and become a screenwriter and director. “I wanted to make movies,” Savio told me. “I knew this when I was in sixth grade. Chris and I would have conversations about it.”

“How could you grow up like this?” Gerhartsreiter would ask Savio. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be here.”

“I
love
growing up here,” Savio would reply. “I don’t want to
live
here, but this is a great place to be from. My goal is to go to school and get out to California.”

“But New York—that’s the city,” insisted Gerhartsreiter.

“Yeah, New York is a world-class city,” Savio agreed, “but California is where they make the movies. That’s where all the action is.” He said he planned to attend film school at USC or UCLA, then blaze a trail through Hollywood. As always, Gerhartsreiter paid close attention, absorbing every word.

Even as he tried to befriend Edward, Gerhartsreiter began acting increasingly haughty toward his host family. With his position as a classical music DJ, his weekends in the country with the German family, and his observations of Thurston Howell on TV, he began thinking of himself as being more than he actually was, and more important than those who hosted him in their home. “My
fah
-ther,” he would say in a faux-aristocratic accent, “wouldn’t let me speak to peasants.”

“We would
never
eat like this,” he would complain at the dinner table. “We would have
servants
bring the food.” When he grew tired of Gwen Savio’s everyday Italian American fare, he would say, “Oh, this is what we’re having,
again
?”

“I’d never marry an Italian,” he said once. “They’re just too emotional.”

“Well, thank God for that!” Mrs. Savio shot back. “Lucky for Italian girls.”

Time and again, Gerhartsreiter said, “I would
never
live like this,” meaning in a modest house in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

“But Chris, you
are
! You
are
living like this,” Edward reminded him.

The German teen’s transformation extended to his name. “He was Christian Gerhartsreiter when he arrived in our house,” explained Savio. “Then it was Chris Gerhart. Then it was Christopher Kenneth Gerhart.” He must have liked the sound of that—very American. And how easy it was to take a new name! As with so much in America, all you had to do was
assume
it, grab it, and no questions would be asked.

Still, Chris Gerhart behaved much like Christian Gerhartsreiter, commandeering the Savios’ living room, where he watched television day and night from the couch on which he slept.

“Quiet, please!” he would say in the morning as his hosts were preparing for the day and he was still trying to sleep, having been up until all hours watching TV. He needed his rest, and when he awoke he expected his laundry to be done and his meal prepared.

A couple of months into his stay at the Savios’, he was reclining on the couch, watching TV, perhaps
Gilligan
—maybe laughing at the way Lovey sucked up to Thurston, or practicing the way Thurston said his lines. He was so engrossed that either he didn’t hear a knocking on the door or he heard it and ignored it. Whatever the case, he didn’t get off the couch to open the door for Snooks as she stood outside for hours in the cold.

Gwen Savio returned home to find her young daughter shivering on the doorstep. “You’re going to have to find somewhere else to live,” she told Gerhartsreiter.

“My mom is very polite, even when she is angry, but she was pissed off,” Savio recalled. “She told me the story, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s unacceptable. But what are you going to do? It’s wintertime. Are you going to kick him out on the street?’”

“I need him to leave,” she said.

Gwen called around, and Mia McMahon, the school librarian who had made many of Gerhartsreiter’s early introductions, offered to let him stay at her house. Christian unceremoniously left the Savio residence.

“I’m ready for something better anyway,” he said as he left.

I attempted to reach Mia McMahon, but she declined to speak with me, preferring to keep her memories to herself. However, I found a brief synopsis of an interview she had given to the police years after the young man left her home:

She related: that Chris Gerhartsreiter appeared at her residence back in 78/79, after staying with the Savio family. That Chris indicated to her then that he was from Germany but had left the country to avoid being drafted into the army. That his father was an engineer, with his mother being a South African citizen. That Chris made several lengthy calls to Germany and South Africa during the time he stayed at her residence. That Chris and her departed on bad terms, due to Chris’s attitude about paying for overseas telephone calls.

Having left (or been kicked out of) three different homes in less than a year, he was finished with Connecticut altogether. He didn’t bother waiting until the school year ended, for he was off to bigger and better things: college. He’d been accepted as a foreign student at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, an extension of the school’s main campus in Madison and thus easier to get into.

I studied the application forms that Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, the name he still went by for official purposes, had filled out. It wasn’t clear how he managed to get into the college—he was intelligent and well educated, having spent much of his time reading and studying in the Berlin public library, but he never got a diploma from Berlin High School. Regardless, there was an admission certificate that read, “University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. The student named herein has been accepted for a full course of study.”

Where the F1 immigration form asked the applicant to identify “the person most closely related to me who lives in the United States,” Gerhartsreiter gave the name and address of the Berlin woman of German descent with the lake house. “We had one phone call from him,” she told me when I asked if she had ever heard from him after he left Connecticut. “He said his mother had just gone through a cancer operation and needed a place to recoup, and could he use the cottage.” He was referring to the family’s lake house. “He was trying to tell us that he was attending university. He kept talking about stocks and bonds. I just remember it was October and after that he never called again.”

Chris Gerhart listed his major field of study as political science and stated that he intended to stay at Stevens Point for the full four years required to obtain his bachelor’s degree. By August 1979 he had moved to Wisconsin and was living in a dormitory called Baldwin Hall, which housed many of the university’s international students. They were encouraged to participate in social activities aimed at fostering their language and cultural skills—a perfect environment for Gerhartsreiter, who, despite all he had learned, was still working at becoming American.

I contacted the university administrators whose names appeared in the paperwork in my file. No one seemed able to provide any information about the young man. “We wanted to help but have no records in the foreign student office (where I once worked) and have no memory of this guy,” Gerhartsreiter’s college adviser e-mailed me. Finally, I found his first roommate, Chris Newberg, who had an indelible memory of the freshman, who arrived in the dormitory with new black luggage, a set of golf clubs, and an aristocratic air. “Supposedly his mother or father was an ambassador who had come from back east,” said Newberg. “He said he was from Boston, Massachusetts.

“I had a wall where I put my posters and I had a big American flag that was tattered on the end,” Newberg continued. “I thought it looked cool, that it represented what our country had been through with battles.” But Christopher thought it looked tawdry. “I’m sorry but you’re going to have to burn that. It’s in disarray,” he told his roommate in his formal English accent.

He buttressed his image as the son of a Boston ruling class family by regularly practicing his golf and by what he ate and drank: Irish coffee, exclusively, and Boston cream pie, not on occasion but every single day. “We all thought his dad was in the FBI or the witness protection program because he was so secretive about his family,” recalled another fellow student, Richie Riddle. He was
so
secretive that he insisted that his name and biographical details be blacked out from the book that listed Baldwin Dormitory’s students—and their emergency contact information—at the dorm’s front desk. One night, at a party in the girls’ wing of the dormitory, Christopher so adamantly refused to leave when the party ended at midnight that the girls had to call the resident assistant to force him out. “Do you know who I am?” Christopher snarled. “I don’t have to take orders from you.”

“That was the last time we saw him,” said Richie Riddle.

In fact, he spent only one three-month semester at Stevens Point. In January 1980, he transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where, he wrote in his application papers, his education objective was “a B.A. degree in Communications.”

Filed about the same time as his University of Wisconsin transfer application was a flurry of other documents—Application for Change of Nonimmigrant Status, Application by Nonimmigrant Student (F-1) for Extension of Stay. They were all approved with remarkable swiftness, signed by a succession of Johns and Cynthias and Joes, busy bureaucrats who most likely never met the enigmatic young German and accepted what he had written on paper as the truth.