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

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