The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (7 page)

By then Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter—a.k.a. Chris Kenneth Gerhart—was in search of the ultimate document, one that could keep him in America forever: a marriage certificate.

CHAPTER 3

Becoming American

I
knew him as Chris Gerhart,” said Todd Lassa, who was a student at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee when Gerhartsreiter arrived in January 1981. “I was twenty-two and taking film classes. We both were. One of the classes I had with Chris was a class in film noir. He told me he’d spent the previous semester at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. He befriended me.”

Lassa, a writer for
Motor Trend
magazine, recalled, “He had a German accent when I met him. It wasn’t anything he was trying to hide. He was living in a suburb of Milwaukee, Elm Grove. I went there once. He invited me into the house, an upper-middle-class house, which is the way I saw him. I can’t remember if he said it was his parents’ house or his aunt’s. But there was nobody else there. It would have been a very strange house to rent. It cost quite a lot. Maybe he was house-sitting.

“He and I and another classmate went out for beers a few times, so it was surprising when he asked me to be the best man for his wedding in a civil service in Madison,” said Lassa. “This is after I knew him three or four weeks. But I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’”

The lucky bride’s name was Amy Janine Jersild.

Chris Gerhart had met Amy through her younger sister, Elaine, who must have seemed a miraculous gift to him. She was the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a hardworking middle-class couple, Arthur Jersild and Bertha M. Geiger Jersild, of Elkhart, Indiana. He had met Elaine through a church group. She was not a beauty, but she was very spirited and vivacious. More important, she was an American citizen and thus had the power to obtain for Gerhart what he wanted most at this juncture of his life: a green card, which grants permanent resident status to an alien who marries an American.

Chris broached the subject of marriage with her, saying that he wanted to stay in America to avoid begin drafted into the German army, where he would surely be put on the front lines, directly in the line of fire in the cold war against the Russians. Elaine sympathized—the cute, friendly, and diminutive Chris Gerhart would seemingly have no chance on the front lines of any war—but she had no intention of helping him. Though Elaine wasn’t game, she said that maybe her older sister, Amy, might be.

I called Elaine Jersild to get an explanation of what happened next. She responded immediately, sunny, cheerful, but as soon as I mentioned Chris Gerhart, her tone turned cold.

“Honestly, hon, I must say
no comment
,” she snapped, adding, “I thought this was over, but I guess it’s not.”

Amy Jersild, however, could not refuse to comment. She was subpoenaed for the trial in Boston, where all the reporters and spectators in the courtroom eagerly anticipated her entrance. Finally, we would hear evidence from someone who had actually known the strange young man in his early, unstoppable years in America.

When Amy Jersild Duhnke walked in, the media pack looked at one another as if to say,
That’s her?
She was fifty, weathered and gray, with a long white braid snaking down the back of her drab business suit. The toll of spending several decades in the food service industry—most recently as a cook in a Milwaukee restaurant called the Twisted Fork— was etched in the deep wrinkles of her face. It was impossible to imagine her as the first wife of the budding bon vivant.

One would expect that the sight of his first wife reemerging in his life after thirty years would elicit some reaction from the defendant. But he stared straight ahead. He registered no emotion whatsoever.

“Describe the first time you met him,” asked the prosecutor after Amy was sworn in.

“He came in with my sister to visit me expressly to ask me to marry him,” she said in a dry midwestern monotone.

I knew from the documents I’d read that when Amy met Chris, she was earning $5,800 a year as a clerk at a delicatessen called East Side Foods, which meant she had a take-home pay of a little more than $100 a week. I also knew that she was then living in a small apartment near her workplace with her boyfriend. What could have persuaded her to marry a complete stranger? Had he offered her money? In those days, a hungry immigrant would without hesitation have paid for a quickie marriage to a willing young American. Later, the prosecutor would say that Amy didn’t recall whether money was ever offered, but she did recall that she never received a dime from the immigrant.

“Who brought up the idea of you marrying him?” Amy was asked next.

“My sister, Elaine,” she said.

“And did she tell you
why
she wanted you to marry him?”

“I can’t remember verbatim . . . all the information. But because he wanted to stay in this country. He was a foreign exchange student.”

Over the course of an hour, she said, she listened to Chris and Elaine explain how Chris could become a resident of the United States if Amy married him. She was not asked in court whether the question of money came up. The prosecutor simply asked her, “Did you come to a decision?”

“Yes,” she said, “that I would in fact marry him.”

The prosecutor didn’t probe any further, and Amy certainly didn’t volunteer anything further about her motivation for agreeing. “It was easy,” she explained—all she had to do was learn how to pronounce and write her future husband’s name. “I just know we made an arrangement for him to pick me up to go to Dane County in Madison, which is in Wisconsin, to get married.”

Shortly after Amy said yes, Gerhart asked Todd Lassa to be his best man. The two students had spent a semester studying the great examples of film noir, which usually features conniving people doing dastardly things to one another in a very black-and-white world. Gerhart’s request—to have a near stranger as his best man at a wedding that had come out of nowhere—perhaps seemed almost normal compared with what they had been watching in class on film. Lassa readily agreed.

“It was a Saturday afternoon,” Lassa told me. “He picked me up, and we drove into an older neighborhood of Milwaukee.” They were in Chris’s 1980 Plymouth Arrow, and Chris and Todd were both wearing suits. The Jersild sisters were waiting for them at the door. Strangely, though, the sister Todd thought Chris was dating—the younger one—was not the sister he was marrying.

“They seemed in on the joke,” said Lassa, “as did Chris. He gave me a crazy explanation that he was marrying his girlfriend’s sister for tax purposes, that he had a book he was publishing. And secondly, he didn’t want to make a big commitment to his girlfriend. It was obvious that he was bullshitting, that he was out to get a green card.”

It was also obvious to Todd back then that Chris was accustomed to getting what he wanted. And why not? He was young, smart, handsome, and on his way. On February 20, 1981, one day before he turned twenty, Chris Gerhart stood solemnly beside Amy Jersild in the Dane County Courthouse as circuit judge Richard W. Bardwell read the simple, straightforward questions and waited for their responses.

“Do you, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, take Amy Janine Jersild to be your lawful wedded wife . . .”

Within minutes the modest ceremony was over, and there was no reception. Immediately after saying “I do,” the newlyweds went their separate ways. Chris and Todd dropped the Jersild sisters off back home and returned to college. A few weeks later, Chris picked up Amy again and drove her to the federal courthouse in Milwaukee, drilling her on the spelling and pronunciation of his real, full name—Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

On April 7, the marriage would be consummated, not in bed but on paper. “He gave me a sheet of paper with his name on it so I could memorize it, because there are quite a few letters in his name,” Amy told the prosecutor. “And I had to look at it so I would be able to write it down on the document that I was going to be signing.”

“And what would those documents accomplish?” she was asked.

“Getting his legal status to stay in the United States of America.”

“Did you have any intention to be together as husband and wife?”

“None whatsoever,” she answered defiantly, with the first hint of emotion in her tone.

When the documents were presented for her to sign, she had no trouble and aroused no suspicion that this was anything less than a marriage forged in love. I found the marriage certificate and related papers in my dossier of documents and could see where Amy had flawlessly filled out the affidavit of support, stating that she was “willing and able to receive, maintain, and support” her husband. She filled in her annual salary but left blank the space where the applicant is asked to list savings deposits and personal property. She agreed to the provision that asked if she would be willing to deposit a cash bond, if needed, with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to ensure that her husband would not become a liability or “public charge” to America.

She wrote as the reason for her filling out the affidavit, “Application for permanent resident status of my husband.” Then she signed—Under oath—Mrs. Amy Gerhartsreiter, with the same flair and loops her husband used in his signature.

“And after that day in the courthouse, did you ever see him again?” Amy was asked.

“No,” she said, adding that twelve years passed before she obtained a divorce so that she could marry a man she actually loved. By then, Chris Gerhart had moved far from Milwaukee, and Amy had no intention of advising him of a divorce that would probably mean nothing to him. All she had to do, she testified, was place a public advertisement in the local newspaper announcing her divorce from Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter and it would be final.

“For the last several weeks of class, he just stopped showing up,” said Todd Lassa.

Nobody in Milwaukee ever saw Gerhart again. He had gotten all he needed from Milwaukee, and all he had had to do was say “I do” to Amy Jersild and a circuit judge. With that, the welcoming arms of America opened wide to him.

The documents told the story succinctly:

February 11, 1981: State of Wisconsin . . . Certificate of Marriage, Groom, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter . . . Bride, Amy Janine Jersild. Marriage ceremony held on February 20, 1981. Duly signed and authorized.

April 7, 1981: United States Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service . . . Application for Status as Permanent Resident. Duly signed and authorized.

Once he had a legal wife, Chris Gerhart climbed into his Plymouth Arrow and hit the road to a better future, barreling toward all he could and would become. There was only one destination for a dreamer of his stature: Los Angeles, where dreams are an industry.

Shortly after he informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service of his new address in California (that of Elmer and Jean Kelln), the most important document of his new life was dutifully signed and filed: “June 16, 1981: Memorandum of Creation of Record of Lawful Permanent Residence, Approved, U.S. Immigration, Chicago, Illinois.” The document was signed Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

It was the last time he would use that clunky name. Even his new name, Chris Gerhart, was too dull and German for where he was headed. For the new life he was about to launch, he would adopt something regal and wondrous, a name hinting of Old World money, power, and prestige.

He tried on various names for size on his drive west, including Dr. Christopher Rider, which he employed on a brief stopover in Las Vegas. He had the good fortune to meet a cardiologist in that city, which was such a wonderful coincidence, he told the doctor, for he was a cardiologist too. He said he was moving to Las Vegas and was hoping to find an established physician whose practice he might join.

“Do you think we might be a good fit?” the young man asked.

The Las Vegas doctor was charmed by him, so he offered to drive him around the finer residential neighborhoods of the city to help the newcomer find a suitable house. Along the way, Dr. Rider cajoled and persuaded his new cardiologist friend to lend him $1,500. The doctor gladly gave him the money, but before Dr. Rider could repay the loan he left town without a word.

The young man was still searching for the new name when he arrived in Loma Linda, California, at the home of Elmer and Jean Kelln, the couple he had met while hitchhiking in Germany, whose names he had used without their knowledge as his sponsors on his immigration papers. He used them once again, without their knowledge or consent, as his permanent address in California, although he never paid more than brief visits to their home.

They almost didn’t recognize him when he showed up. His hair, once long and cut in the popular shag style of the day, was short and businesslike, and his clothing, which had evoked the 1970s American hippie style, was now strictly Ivy League. But there was something still missing in his transformation, his dream of becoming a player in the film industry, he told Elmer and Jean. He needed a better name. Sitting in the Kellns’ living room, he began leafing through the San Bernardino telephone book, searching for a new name for himself.

“What’s wrong with your own name?” asked Jean, but Elmer understood completely. Chris was going to work in Hollywood, where adopted names are commonplace, where a Bernard Schwartz can become Tony Curtis, and where the only thing that separates falsehood from fairy tale is the extent of one’s success.

“Nobody in the movie business uses their own name!” Elmer admonished his wife. As he later explained, “You have to remember you are in California, where changing your name is not illegal. Many people have aliases. I used to be academic dean at the university and I used to order students’ diplomas. If a student came in just before graduation and says, ‘This is how I want my diploma to read,’ that was how his diploma read for the rest his life when he would be practicing dentistry. Many of them were Asian students. I particularly remember someone’s last name was Duc, but they didn’t want to be known as Dr. Duc, so they were allowed to change their name. This is legal in California, so I thought nothing of him picking a new name.”