The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

Deep in the dossier of documents I had been given by my secret source in Boston, an interesting item caught my eye, a report from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, dated July 4, 1994:

Detectives say that Chichester dresses well, is very clean cut and very articulate. He attends church services and ingratiates himself with older people in wealthy communities. He has passed himself off as a computer expert, film producer and stockbroker. He has told people that his father was a lawyer, an archaeologist or a British aristocrat and his mother an architect, an archaeologist or an actress. He is very knowledgeable on subjects of which he would speak. Although Chichester speaks with what people have described as an English accent, detectives say he is not British. He is believed to be from another Western European nation.

Nearby in the dossier on the young immigrant were the following lines:

May 26, 1981: Moves to California, becomes Christopher Chichester.

February 7, 1983: issued California drivers license No. C309973—sometime between this date and 2-08-85 moves into the rear house at 1920 Lorain Road, San Marino.

I had never been to San Marino, but once I learned more about it, I could see immediately why the German who now called himself Christopher Chichester had chosen to move there. GARDENS OF EARTHLY DELIGHT, read the headline of a New York Times article about the place. A 1996 story in the Los Angeles Times listed the city’s impressive statistics: area in square miles, 3.75; population, 12,959; median age, 41.2; median household income, $100,101.

The story read:

San Marino, known for the size of its estates and incomes, is a city of superlatives.

Consider one of its many distinctions: One of its founders, rail tycoon Henry E. Huntington, ultimately had his name on nearly as much Los Angeles real estate as the county assessor. The city’s first mayor was George Patton, father of the famed “Blood and Guts” general of World War II. As a boy the younger George swam in Lake Vineyard, which would become a 35-acre verdant jewel called Lacy Park. . . .

A rigorous set of regulations are enforced to maintain a posh lifestyle: a car can be visible in a driveway for no more than 48 hours continuously, only one family is allowed for each home, trash cans cannot be in view of the street, door-to-door hawkers and chain-link fences are expressly prohibited. The only salvation for some jittery souls is a double espresso, the strongest drink for sale in the city.

One day in the fall of 2008, I took the 110 freeway from downtown Los Angeles until it stopped and suddenly turned into an ordinary road. After I drove through a short and scruffy patch of Pasadena, the sky suddenly opened, the foliage thickened, and the air turned cool and clear. The road widened into a six-lane boulevard. Suddenly I was in a different world, the antithesis of the metropolis twelve miles away. San Marino seemed to be stuck in another era, a flashback to Norman Rockwell’s America, a pristine little town framed by the San Gabriel Mountains, dotted with palms and filled with good, honest, churchgoing citizens. The town felt immediately safer than the urban sprawl I had just left behind.

The eyesore double-decker strip malls that had taken over Los Angeles had not encroached here. Instead, the main road, Huntington Boulevard, was lined with tidy and quaint little shops: the Huntington Drive Service Station (with real attendants, not the standard serve-yourself computerized pumps), Diana Dee’s Gifts, Carriage Trade Coiffures, the Plantation House, Fashion Cleaners, the Collenette School of Dancing (specializing in ballet), Deluxe Shoe Repair. There were shops offering skin care, ballroom dancing lessons, custom tailoring, arts and crafts, and hobbies. Churches seemed to be on every other corner. I immediately spotted a Christian Science Reading Room alongside the First Church of Christian Science. By noon, the locals had packed the Colonial Kitchen—OPEN DAILY, 7 A.M., SPECIALS! read the sign out front. Through the windows I could see laughing waitresses pouring coffee for proper gentlemen eating bacon and eggs.

This was San Marino, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter’s first real permanent home as an American citizen. Around the time of his arrival, a local wrote a song about the city:

I’ve heard of a town
Where millionaires stay
That’s only 20 minutes outside of L.A.

They’ve got a Police Force, Fire Department
That they don’t need
’Cause there’s no crime, no riots, they’re
Securitied

There’re five limousines
In every carport
The schools are all so rich
They’re teaching every sport

The streetlights burn all night
The trees are trimmed just right
What is its name?
San Marino

My first stop was the Jann of Sweden Hair Studio, in one of the charming little collections of shops on the main road. Stepping through the door, I felt I’d stumbled into a saloon instead of a salon. The room was covered floor to ceiling with silver-studded saddles, bronzes of cowboys and horses, mounted deer and steer heads, guitars and mandolins, rodeo ribbons and trophies, and endless framed photographs of a blond, bearded cowboy in decades of Rose Bowl parades.

The proprietor appeared, an enormous man so tall that he practically touched the ceiling, wearing a bright red western shirt, a bandanna around his neck, and snakeskin cowboy boots, into which he had tucked skintight jeans held up by a hand-tooled leather belt with a mammoth silver rodeo buckle. His hair was long and snow white, and I could hardly tell where it stopped and his long beard began. Hanging below the beardline was a swirling walrus mustache. He flashed a big, broad, snaggletoothed smile, and his turquoise blue eyes lit up as he introduced himself.

Jann Eldnor had arrived in the United States in 1971. “I was cleancut—I looked like Ross Perot,” he said, referring to the Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate. Then someone took Jann horseback riding, and he caught the bug that would turn into an obsession. “My hair grew long; my mustache grew out; I started to decorate my shop like the Wild West. I became the Swedish Cowboy!” Ever since then he had been riding on horseback in parades, and once he even rode onto the set of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Having been the town barber since 1972, Jann said he knew almost everyone in San Marino. I laid out for him what little I already knew: that an immigrant calling himself Christopher Chichester had chosen this place because of its reputation as an old-money enclave of wealth and sophistication. I repeated what Elmer Kelln had told me: “He wanted to be where the rich people were.” But exactly when he arrived and where he stayed weren’t known, it turned out, even by Jann of Sweden.

“Off a lady?” I asked, thinking that the phrasing was due to his broken English, and that he meant “with a lady.” No, he assured me, he meant off. And the ladies of San Marino were happy to have him; they welcomed him almost instantly, because he was a young man of not merely wealth, taste, and sophistication. He was royalty. “He said to people he was from royalty in England and that his name was Christopher Chichester.” Jann pronounced the name Chee-chester, accent on the Chee. “And even though he was only twenty-six, he acted like he was forty. Every time he meets a lady, he takes her hand and kisses it before he presents himself. These ladies were thinking Chichester was sent by God or something,” he continued. “Because he acted so well. So not like the other guys out in this country. He could talk about the stock market, about politics, about everything. These ladies would invite him to come and stay in their big houses. They always had a guest room or something. And they fed him and bought him clothes.”

He’d heard about him before he met him, he said, and had started seeing his photograph in the local newspaper, always dressed in a suit and a tie. “And I wonder, ‘All right, who the hell is this?’ This guy Chichester starts showing up at the city council meetings and different things. And then for sure he’s all of a sudden at the clubs.”

“The City Club and the Rotary and all the others,” he said. “I know all the people, and they all told Chichester, ‘Since you’re British, you should go to Jann for your haircuts, because he’s from Europe too!’ So suddenly he shows up in his suit and wants a haircut. And then he starts to tell me the stories—that he was a Mountbatten and all that.”

Not only was he a Mountbatten, he added, he was the nephew of Lord Mountbatten, which was a monumental relative to have, as anyone would have known had they read the biography Mountbatten, by Philip Ziegler, whose flap copy reads:

He was born in 1900. His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, nephew of the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, cousin of the King of England. He became Lord Louis Mountbatten, the young idol of the British Navy and eventually one of the Three Supreme Allied Commanders of World War II (the others were Eisenhower and MacArthur) with a quarter of a million Americans under his direct command; the last Viceroy of India, who orchestrated, in circumstances of horrifying difficulty, India’s independence from Britain. . . .

It is a life that almost defies description. Mountbatten wielded power over millions of people across the globe. Yet this unwavering champion of nationalist freedom and democracy was also extremely royal: best friend of his cousin, the Duke of Windsor; uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh and architect of his marriage to Elizabeth; beloved “Honorary Grandfather” of Prince Charles.

He was glamorous, indecently handsome, married to one of Europe’s richest and most beautiful heiresses. . . . Everything about him was on a gigantic scale.

Jann pointed to his antique barber chair. “Many assholes have sat in that chair since 1886,” he said, which is what he told every new client. Then he made a sweep of his hand, a gesture that I took to mean, “Have a seat and see how it feels.” I sat down, and Jann resumed his story: “So Chichester started coming to me for his haircuts, at least twice a month. And like so many other customers, they come to me to tell their stories and talk about their problems. They know that I will listen. They kind of use me like their cheap psychiatrist, like a bartender.”

A young man seeking to make his way in the higher echelons of San Marino would do well to start with Kenneth Veronda, a pillar of the local community and headmaster of Southwestern Academy since 1961. Southwestern is an exclusive prep school in San Marino that Veronda’s father, Maurice, founded in 1924. As headmaster, the younger Veronda, who earned his master’s degree from Stanford College, had guided countless young men and women into adulthood, through both his prep school’s rigorous curriculum and his own intelligent and insightful guidance.

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.)

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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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 thought, ‘Maybe he’s a remittance man!’” she told me, meaning the black sheep of the Chichester family, sent to America to gain education and experience while, best of all, staying out of the way of the working members of his prominent clan. It never occurred to her that he had fabricated the entire Christopher Chichester persona from whole cloth.

She had never heard of The Prisoner, and she never checked to see if Christopher Chichester produced it. If she had, she would have discovered that The Prisoner—the classic 1960s British television series about a former secret agent perpetually trying to escape from a congenial community that is actually a prison for people who know too much—was on the air when Christopher was all of seven years old.

He was so accommodating in that way. Whatever his listener loved, he did too. And he could back up that love with knowledge. In the case of the musicals, he began to rave about the glories of, say, My Fair Lady and West Side Story, and the subtle differences between them, making his listeners feel that they had something deeply in common with the young British nobleman.

When Chichester’s name hit the headlines twenty-five years after he was last seen in San Marino, none of the young women whom he had squired came forward in the media, save for one: Carol Campbell. A sunny, dark-haired mother of three, she invited me to her solidly San Marino house and gave me a tour of the city.

For Carol, however, her interaction with Christopher Chichester was still a sore wound. It began, she said, when her father met him at one of the local clubs—the Rotary or the City Club—where the men of San Marino had bought the story of the thirteenth baronet. Carol’s father, Dick Campbell, decided to play matchmaker. Carol was visiting from Texas, and one day her father asked Chichester, “Hey, Chris, would you like to meet my daughter, Carol?”

Assuming that meant a lunch date, Carol Campbell accepted. But instead of a knight in shining armor on a stallion, Chichester came riding up to her parents’ house in his broken-down car. She noticed that his clothes were beginning to show some age. This wasn’t a traditional date so much as just going with a guy on a series of errands. They rode around town, getting his mail from the post office, taking his clothing to the cleaners, before he finally dropped Carol back at home—without lunch, without explanation. But what most struck Carol was the interior of his car. Yellow Post-it notes were plastered to every available surface, reminders to himself, she later thought they must have been, about all of the things he had said and done in his sojourn in San Marino.

“Mom, that guy is creepy!” she said when she returned home. That was their one and only encounter. But after she returned to Texas she received a couple of letters from Chichester, expressing his admiration of her in his precise block handwriting. The letters just made her shake her head, she said.

Her friend told her that Chichester was crashing weddings. She’d been too busy to bust him, she said, and probably wouldn’t have anyway, because that wouldn’t have been the San Marino way. But the previous weekend, she said, she was coming out of the church to close the doors before the ceremony began, just as he was coming in, dressed immaculately but looking sheepish. When he saw her, he turned around quickly and walked back to his car.

“I’m presently staying with friends and don’t feel comfortable asking them if I can use their address,” he said, referring to campaign documents he’d need to file for the race. He was in the home of Carol and Joe Iliff. “Would it be too much of a bother if I use your address?”

It wasn’t that much of a stretch to use their address, as he was always stopping by their house, inviting Joe to breakfast—and never having cash for the tab, since royalty rarely carries cash. He and Joe Iliff would talk investments; Chichester always had some new and seemingly ingenious idea on how to make money. Like bringing over Chichester Cathedral to San Marino—he wouldn’t give up on the notion of that—or all manner of other financial and investment schemes, none of which came to fruition.

He also felt sure he could make a difference in San Marino, either by being elected to the city council himself or by being the puppetmaster of a city council member. “He felt that he had ideas and that if he pushed either me or my husband into running for office that he could sit behind the scenes and tell us what to say,” Carol Iliff said, adding that Chichester even suggested moving in with the couple.

Joe, who was on the road most weeks, didn’t think that was a good idea. It was only a two-bedroom house and not nearly large enough for his wife and Christopher Chichester. “My husband traveled every other week and he wasn’t going to have some guy living here in the house with me,” Carol later recalled.

After his first year in the area, Chichester was growing in confidence and attitude—not just in San Marino, which was becoming too provincial for a man of his name and nobility. With all of his social and television activities, it was a wonder that he had time for anything else. But he was living yet another active life as a student. He loomed extremely large as a big man on campus nine miles down the freeway, at the University of Southern California film school.

“I met Chris through my aunt Victoria,” said Dana Farrar, a dark-haired, friendly woman. It was a sunny Southern California afternoon and we were sitting on her back patio staring at a stack of photographs of the young man who called himself Christopher Chichester. She had not seen him for a very long time, but the pictures brought him back in all of his glory.

The first one showed Dana, then a fresh-faced beauty, grinning beside Chichester, an extremely thin young man in tight jeans and a V-neck sweater smirking crazily with three cone-shaped party hats on the top and sides of his head. In a second picture, he was peering contemplatively into a glass of wine, which he held with his pinky extended. In a third picture, he was making a funny face and twisting his fingers menacingly toward the camera—posing, Dana Farrar said, he was always posing.

“She was sitting with a neighbor, some old man from across the street, and Chris somehow struck up a conversation with her,” Dana continued. “At the time he used to give out business cards that said, ‘Christopher Chichester, Thirteenth Baronet,’ or something.”

He had charmed her aunt, convincing her that he was involved in film production or something having to do with the film industry at USC, referring to the celebrated film school. “I was a student at USC at the time in journalism, and my boyfriend wanted to get into the film school very badly. Aunt Victoria thought Chris could help my boyfriend get into film school.

“She took us out to brunch with him,” Dana continued. “Oh, he was very charming. He was a lot of fun. He knew a lot about a lot of things.” But he was affected. He spoke in a clipped half-British, half-indiscernible accent, she said. “He would draw out the vowels at the end of every word.”

But he knew enough to keep the interest of his companions. Shortly after that he dropped the name Arthur Knight, the most impressive teacher of that era in the school. Dana and her increasingly starryeyed boyfriend took him to mean, I’m a teacher’s asssistant in Arthur Knight’s class. Arthur Knight was the famed author, film critic, and teacher who had taught future directors like George Lucas in his fabled Introduction to Film class, and had brought in guest lecturers like Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Clint Eastwood, and Chichester’s personal favorite, Alfred Hitchcock.

He gave the impression that he would “have a word with Arthur,” meaning he would talk to Arthur Knight about seeing what influence he might be able to bring to help Dana’s boyfriend get into film school. After the brunch, which Chichester ate ravenously, the parties said goodbye. Although Chichester never quite got around to introducing Dana’s boyfriend to Arthur Knight—or to helping him get into the film school—the brunch was the opening bell on Dana Farrar’s increasingly peculiar friendship with the young Englishman.

Dana and her friends could never bring themselves to ask why he was driving an old Plymouth Arrow if he was so wealthy. Nor did they question why his preppy clothing sometimes smelled from lack of dry cleaning—or was it just the musty scent of old money?—or why he had a habit of showing up unannounced at Dana’s apartment at mealtimes. “Oh, that smells so delightful, Day-nah!” he would say, until she either showed him the door or, more often, gave him a meal. He would wolf down food as if he hadn’t eaten for a week, and Dana thought what everyone else did: it all went with the territory of being rich, royal, and eccentric.

The professors knew him as well, and one of them, his English professor Geoffrey Green, assumed he was enrolled, because he was somehow on his roster of students. “I had a printed list from the registrar, and to get on it he would have had to sweet-talk someone in the registrar’s office into letting him into the class,” he remembered. “I did not admit him or add him to the class. His name was on the list.” However, the USC admissions department had no record of a Christopher Chichester, or a Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, enrolled in the school or ever paying tuition.

“He came to my attention because he was in my prose fiction class in the English department at USC,” Green continued. “He was a very active participant in the class and he came to see me during office hours. He was going by the name Christopher Chichester and he claimed at that time that he was descended from the Earl of Chichester, and he showed me some coat of arms, and he also said he was related to the Chichester who had sailed around the world.

“He told me that he lived in a mansion, that he had an extra room in the gatehouse where someone could stay as a guest, and various other things. He said he wanted to make films. He said he was going to be a significant writer, filmmaker. Like a philosopher of aesthetics. He was very outspoken, and he needed to be right.”

Chichester frequently invited Dana Farrar to movie screenings, including repeated showings of his two favorite films—Double Indemnity and All About Eve—at the art houses he loved, like the New Beverly in Beverly Hills. She went with him often. He also managed to get a friend of hers tickets to a special premiere of Barbra Streisand’s new movie Yentl at USC, tickets that were very tough to get. But when he asked Dana and her friends to the opening of the Marcia Lucas Post Production Building, a state-of-the-art multimedia facility named for the wife of Star Wars director George Lucas, she thought he had to be kidding. Chichester insisted that he wasn’t, adding that, of course, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, director Robert Zemeckis, and other Hollywood stars would also be in attendance.

“He loved dangerous women,” Dana said, recalling the films they saw and discussed when they went for coffee and conversation. His talk usually centered on his obsession with film, especially film noir, and the queens of the genre, like Barbara Stanwyck, whose performances fascinated him.