The Fake Rockefeller



Remember the fake Rockefeller? No, not Jay-Z, silly -- the con man known as Clark Rockefeller, aka Christopher Rocancourt, aka Christian Gerhartsreiter. He's fascinating in that overcoated Robert Stack emerging from the rambling mists on "Unsolved Mysteries" kind of way. Creepy, yet oddly compelling. Vanity Fair, a magazine which always seems to be at its best when covering the nexus where high power and criminality, has a story on him in the January issue. From the press release:

"(Vanity Fair contributing editor Mark Seal) reports that Clark told Henry his parents were killed in a car crash when he was 16, and that he never ate in restaurants, 'because you can’t trust the kitchen.' His diet consisted mainly of cucumber-and-watercress tea sandwiches—only on Pepperidge Farm bread with the crusts removed—and Pepperidge Farm cookies, preferably the Nantucket variety, and he said his favorite food was haggis, and his drink of choice was Harveys Bristol Cream sherry. 'You just think, Oh, well, he’s a Rockefeller, he’s eccentric,' Henry tells Seal."

And:

"A friend of Clark’s from the Boston area tells Seal that Clark seemed to find solace in impressing women (and men), telling one that he was the model for the effete and phobic Dr. Niles Crane character on Frasier."

There's a thin line between charming Old Money eccentric and The-eccentric-goddam-batshit-crazyface. More here.