The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal Read Free Book Online Page A

industrialist, and he implied that his father had something to do with Mercedes. He tried to make it sound like he was from a family that had money.”
    Christian went to school with Edward, a sophomore, but he got his real education in front of the television set in the Savios’ living room. His favorite show was Gilligan’s Island , and he took to mimicking the behavior of Thurston Howell III, the millionaire castaway played by Jim Backus. When speaking, he would stretch out the syllables in each word, attempting to affect an English or Ivy League–type accent. “Ehhhd,” he would say to Savio at the dinner table, “paaahhss the breaaahhd, please.” Savio recalled, “The accent was like a cross between Thurston Howell III and John Wayne.”
    Savio tried to help his houseguest adjust to his new school, but he wasn’t particularly successful. “The reaction to Chris from most of the guys was, ‘What’s up with him?’ Some of the girls were interested, though. He always gravitated toward the females.” One even picked him up in her car to drive him to the senior prom. Gerhartsreiter wore a black suit with brown socks; Savio tried to tell him that brown doesn’t go with black, but he refused to change his socks, saying, “It’s not a problem.”
     
    In those early days, Gerhartsreiter was the caterpillar dreaming of becoming the butterfly, Edward Savio told Dateline —he had little of the polish he would later acquire. But despite his awkwardness and his tendency toward faux pas, he was tremendously outgoing, and he tried to get to know as many people as possible in his effort to learn about America.
    “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