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

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.
    “I think he was living off a lady down on Bedford Road,” Jann said.
    “ 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.”
    “How did you meet him?” I asked.
    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 clubs?” I asked.
    “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