Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
Good writing announces its intentions from the get-go.
Whether it’s the beginning of a novel or the lede on a deep-dive piece of journalism, the best openings encapsulate the ideas and themes to come.
Mark Seal accomplished just that in his Vanity Fair profile of a con man (and more) who was born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, but was known by a host of aliases including Christopher Chichester, Christopher Crowe and Clark Rockefeller – yes, one of those Rockefellers.
Seal’s 10,000-word piece depicts a man who was not what he seemed to be – a man who fooled a wide range of people, including the Harvard M.B.A. who married him and the writer Walter Kirn (who wrote a New Yorker article and a book about his ersatz friend) into believing he was a scion of wealth.
Seal’s opening conveys much of this in a scene of unexpected twists that moves seamlessly from high to low, from light to dark, from pleasure to panic:
On a sunny Sunday last July, Clark Rockefeller left his stately accommodations in Boston’s venerable Algonquin Club, the gentlemen’s establishment founded in 1886. Dressed in khakis and a blue Lacoste shirt, he was carrying his seven-year-old daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Boss, whom he called Snooks, on his shoulders, walking toward Boston Common, where they were going to ride the swan boats in the Public Garden.
“Good morning, Mr. Rockefeller,” people greeted him, for he was well known in this Beacon Hill neighborhood. He had lived here for a year and a half in a $2.7 million, four-story, ivy-covered town house on one of the best streets. But that was before his wife, Sandra, left him and dragged him through a humiliating divorce, taking not only the Boston house but also their second home, in New Hampshire. In addition, she won custody of their daughter, moving her to London with her, and restricting him to three eight-hour visits a year, in the company of a social worker, who was tagging along that morning like a third wheel.
Nevertheless, he was still Clark Rockefeller. At 47, he still had his name, his intelligence, an extraordinary art collection, close friends in high places, and his memberships in clubs up and down the Eastern Seaboard, where he could sleep and take his meals, having long ago decided that hotels and restaurants were for the bourgeoisie. He also had a divorce settlement of $800,000, at least $300,000 of which he had converted into Krugerrands and then into gold U.S. coins, keeping the rest in cash. And now he had his beloved daughter with him again, for a blissful day together.
As they approached Marlborough Street, a tree-lined avenue on which Edward Kennedy has a house, a black S.U.V. limousine cruised to the curb. Rockefeller had told the driver that he and Snooks had a lunch date in Newport, Rhode Island, with a senator’s son, and that he might need help getting rid of a clingy friend (the court-appointed social worker), who might try to get into the limo. Having assured Mr. Rockefeller that nobody would get into the car without his consent—the ride, after all, was costing him $3,000—the driver wasn’t surprised, as he looked in his rearview mirror, to see Rockefeller with Snooks on his shoulders and a clingy sort of guy right behind them.
Suddenly, Rockefeller pushed his pursuer away, put his daughter down, yanked the car door open, and pulled the child into the limo so fast that she hit her head on the doorframe. “Go! Go!” he shouted, and the driver stepped on the gas, dragging the social worker, who had hold of the back-door handle, several yards before he let go and fell to the pavement.
Good writing often ends where it began, reminding reader that it has delivered on the story it promised. So, 10,000 words later, Seal concludes his piece with another story of reinvention – this time by Gerhartsreiter wife, Sandra Best, the high-powered Stanford graduate and Harvard M.B.A. he snookered for a dozen years with “the famous name, the distinguished career, the maniacal security, even the incredible collection of modern paintings that hung on her walls, which Rockefeller’s attorney Stephen Hrones now says are fakes.” Seal continues:
She’s doing her best to forget all that. She has a new life in London, and she wants to leave her former life behind, just as her ex-husband so often did.
