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

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.
    Everything about this place instantly put a smile on my face.
    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.
    Â 
    They’ve got a Police Force, Fire Department
That they don’t need
’Cause there’s no crime, no riots, they’re
Securitied
    Â 
    There’re five limousines
In every carport
The schools are all so rich
They’re teaching every sport
    Â 
    The streetlights burn all night
The trees are trimmed just right
What is its name?
San Marino
    Christopher Mountbatten Chichester landed here in 1981. Having mastered English, he was ready to launch his most impressive identity to date—not in Los Angeles, where there is a poseur on every corner, but in the gardens of earthly delight.
    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 .
    When I asked him about Christopher Chichester, he bellowed, “All right!”—one of his favorite expressions, I soon learned. “He sat right there,” he said, pointing to his antique barber chair, which bore a plaque stating that it dated back to 1886.
    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.
    â€œI think he was living off a lady down on Bedford Road,” Jann said.
    â€œ Off a lady?” I asked, thinking that the phrasing was due to his broken English, and