The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  “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.

  When the tea was over, I rode home with Peggy Ebright, one of the all-trusting Virgos, a perky blonde. We went to her comfortable house in the flats of San Marino, and she pulled out yellowed newspaper clippings and production schedules.

  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.

  One day, the phone rang in the home of Peggy Ebright.

  “Hello, Peggy, Christopher Chichester here.”

  “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.

  “Chris, that sounds like fun! I’d love to do it!” said Peggy.

  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.”

  She joined the show, becoming the face of Inside San Marino.

  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, whic
h 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.

  Chichester booked all the guests. “Lovely, ten a.m. at your home,” one can imagine him telling the mayor’s wife, the chief librarian, or the museum curator. “Just dress as you normally do, and don’t be nervous, dear. You’re a natural.”

  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.”

  Off camera, but always in control, Chichester flashed cue cards and shouted directions. “And, Chief Gates, you are responsible for the safety of how many people?” he instructed Peggy to ask.

  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 would tell him, ‘I’ve always loved that house, I’d love to see the inside,” Peggy said of the many evenings when she dropped him off at the grand hacienda, which he told her was owned by his parents.

  “They let me live in it to keep it properly maintained,” Chichester said, before bidding Peggy good night.

  “Well, I would love to come in and take a look someday,” Peggy said.

  “Certainly,” he would always reply, “but not tonight. Mother and Father asked me to keep up the house, but I’m not doing a very good job, and I couldn’t abide your walking into a messy house. I’ll invite you over for tea once I get things in order.”

  He never did.

  “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.

  In San Marino, where eligible young bachelors were rare, especially one with good manners and a royal pedigree, Chichester found several ladies who accepted his request for a date.

  “I produced The Prisoner,” he told the daughter of one prominent San Marino family. He had met her at a San Marino library event where they were both volunteers, and with her parents’ prodding, she accepted his invitation to go out on a date.

  “You know, the Patrick McGoohan series,” he said. “It was big in Great Britain.”

  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.

  “I just love musicals!” another young San Marino woman trilled after her parents introduced her to Chris at the San Marino Public Library Book Fair.

  “What a coincidence!” Chichester replied. “So do I.”

  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.

  He took the girl he met at the book fair on a date to see the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. He led her higher and higher, until they were in the last row in the highest balcony.

  “Darling, you’re just going to love the Hebrides Overture!” he said, once they were seated in the nosebleed section, referring to the Felix Mendelssohn work, composed in 1830. “It will change your world.”

  It didn’t. But he was unrelenting in trying to “educate” her on the finer things in life. A few days later, they were strolling past the shops of Lake Avenue in the nearby community of Pasadena.

  “Of course, you’ve heard of Godiva chocolate?” Chichester asked his young companion.

  “Well, no,” she replied.

  “Come with me,” he said, taking her arm and whisking her into the Godiva shop. He led her over to a counter and picked up one of the company’s trademark gold boxes of chocolates tied with a big red ribbon.

  “They’re the best chocolates,” he told her. “And gentlemen give them to their ladies, and after they’ve eaten the chocolates they keep their love letters in the box.”

  After moving to San Francisco, the young woman opened her door to find a Federal Express delivery from C. Chichester, San Marino, with a gold box of Godiva chocolates inside.

  “Enjoy the chocolates and keep the box for your love letters,” read the accompanying note.

  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?”

  “Certainly,” Chichester replied.

  Introductions were made the following Sunday at the San Marino Community Church.

  “And you must be Carol,” said Chichester.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’d be honored if you would go out with me,” he said. “How about eleven-thirty tomorrow?”

  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.

  Around the same time, a San Marino friend who worked as a wedding coordinator called Carol in Texas.

  “Didn’t you go out with Christopher Chichester?”

  “Well, I guess.”

  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.

  As his star rose even higher in the community, he considered going into local politics, beginning with a seat on the San Marino City Council.

  “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.