The Art of the Con
Walter Kirn’s Blood Will Out, reviewed
In March 2013 a court in Los Angeles convened to try a murder which occurred 28 years earlier. There was only one person charged — a slight, bespectacled man sitting in the courtroom with an aloof, almost bemused expression — but many personae, the known aliases each named in the criminal trial: “The People of the State of California, Plaintiff, vs. Christian K. Gerhartsreiter, aka C. Crowe Mountbatten, aka Christopher Chichester, aka Christopher Crowe, aka Charles ‘Chip’ Smith, aka Clark Rockefeller.”
Years of separate and combined investigations by the FBI and the law enforcement agencies of several states had finally exposed Gerhartsreiter’s sins — which, in addition to murder, included custodial kidnapping, possible art forgery, and the large and small cons of a lifetime of manipulation and lying — and unmasked the identities he’d adopted as a serial impostor. “Clark Rockefeller,” his most audacious identity, was only the last in a series, each with its own set of victims and unwitting accomplices.
Present in the courtroom was one of those victims and unwitting accomplices — writer Walter Kirn, whose memoir Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade recounts his fifteen-year acquaintance with the man he knew as Clark Rockefeller. Kirn, a novelist and essayist who has frequently drawn on his own life for material, was accidentally friends with a predatory psychopath: any writer’s best luck.
The memoir opens with Kirn on a mission to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from Montana to New York, where he first meets an eccentric, secretive member of the Rockefeller family who claims never to have eaten a hamburger or dined in a public restaurant. It closes with Kirn’s final conversation through bullet-proof glass in a California prison with the pathetic compulsive liar who once passed himself off as a Rockefeller, a British aristocrat, a “freelance central banker,” a rocket physicist, an Ivy League graduate, and an art collector but was unmasked as a one-time German exchange student. In-between Kirn bounces around in time and place: from the courthouses and prisons of California to Montana ranch country to the high-WASP environs of New York and New England, where Clark Rockefeller spun his most impressive fictions.
The book is partly a psychological sketch of Gerhartsreiter and partly a true crime exposé, but it’s more a memoir that says as much about its author as about his subject. Kirn, whose novel Up in the Air inspired the George Clooney movie, has a fluid, frank style exemplified by engaging personal essays like “All Lost in the Meritocracy,” about his transition from Midwestern farm boy to discontented Princeton and Oxford student, and “Confessions of an Ex-Mormon,” his reflection on the most American religion.
At the time he agreed to a strange mission to deliver a paralyzed Gordon setter to New York, Kirn was undergoing a strained personal period. He had bought a ranch in Montana, spurred by a masculine return-to-the-land fantasy, and was struggling to make it pay. He was a writer — “even more importantly, a writer between books” — stringing together an income as a freelancer, driving around, gun in glove compartment, to interview strung-out meth addicts, leaning on Ritalin to meet deadlines and Ambien to battle insomnia. He was expecting a child but suspected that his marriage to a woman half his age was already starting to disintegrate. Then he encountered Clark Rockefeller.
Like most writers, Kirn exploits anything and everything around him for potential material, and he’s honest about the fact that his friendship with an eccentric, dog-loving Rockefeller was partly motivated by his potential as a muse:
…We both understood the terms of our new friendship. He would delight me with comic songs and dog menus and access to a circle I’d thought closed to me, and I would repay him with the indulgent loyalty that writers reserve for their favorite characters, the ones, it’s said, we can’t make up.
Kirn recognizes that, like most writers, his friendships and acquaintances have a Faustian element. But would it be a betrayal to one day write about the man he’d just come into contact with, this strange but generous character, with a famous last name, who’d allowed him into his confidences?
…I felt a rising qualm — not about Clark, about myself. Would it be wrong to write about him someday? If I masked his identity? If I changed his name? He knew I was a writer …. But did he know what a writer really is?
Probably not. Few people do. A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking, but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
Kirn charts their somewhat tenuous relationship — it seems to have consisted largely of his occasionally tagging along to the various private clubs Clark belonged to, and serving as an audience for his rambling, self-indulgent monologues — and then cuts to present day, covering Clark’s trial for murder and, the mask cast aside, backtracking to fill in the details of his career of serial imposture.
Christian K. Gerhartsreiter came to Connecticut as a foreign exchange student in the early seventies and immediately began embellishing his background. He got a green card marriage in Wisconsin. By the time he ended up in California, he had changed his name at least twice, and was claiming to be an English baronet named Christopher Chichester.
In 1985, when he was living in a guest house in wealthy San Marino, he killed his landlady’s adult son, John Sohus. His motives in killing the geeky, mild-mannered Sohus are unclear; given his predatory nature it was probably a murder of opportunity, or even, Kirn suggests, an attempt inspired by vintage cinema to commit the “perfect murder” purely for its own satisfaction. He cut the body into three parts and buried it in the backyard. He held a lawn party there not long after where guests played a game of Trivial Pursuit near the patch of freshly-turned dirt. He is also alleged to have killed Sohus’ wife, Linda Sohus, but her body was never found.
He was named a “person of interest” by the California authorities but fled the area and made his way to the East Coast, reinventing himself as he went. He married Sandra Boss, a successful businesswoman, and began leeching off her income to enable his lifestyle as “Clark Rockefeller,” entrenching himself with surprising success in the gentlemen’s clubs of the patrician elite despite the fact that no one in the Rockefeller family had ever heard of him.
His wife grew frightened of his behavior and divorced him. His eventual undoing was not the murder — or double-murder — that he’d committed 28 years earlier, but pride: his kidnapping of their daughter during a custodial visit, an act of hubris which triggered an Amber Alert and the involvement of the FBI.
At Gerhartsreiter’s LA murder trial, having seen that the man he knew as Clark Rockefeller was only one facet of a shape-shifting monster, Kirn starts soul searching, as does the reader. The mutual self-interest that had defined their relationship — Kirn tolerating Rockefeller’s bizarre behavior, and Rockefeller’s pathological narcissism feeding on a captive audience — somewhat explains the book’s biggest question: how was it that a man as intelligent as Kirn — and, even more importantly, a writer, a professional observer of human nature, fell for a career con man whose life was built on such retrospectively ridiculous lies and non-sequiturs? When Kirn first encountered Clark Rockefeller, he recognized instantly his potential as a character; yet he never realized just how literally he was one.
Ironically, the eventually unmasking of Christian K. Gerhartsreiter provided Kirn with greater material than he had ever hoped for, but at the cost of some unpleasant self-reflection: “‘You can’t cheat an honest man,’ goes the old saying,” he writes, “the notion being that falling for a charlatan requires moral softness in the victim.”
Kirn draws on parallels from literature and pop culture as he tries to understand Gerhartsreiter — a real-life Mr. Ripley — and his own accidentally complicit role. Is it possible that, as a writer, he was actually the most natural mark for a psychopath?
Our history ran both ways, a partnership, meaning that whatever I’d seen in him, he had also spied something in me. These characters read you, according to the books, and all the time they’re talking, they’re really listening, alert for pings and echoes. They use sonar; not questions…. Instead of shrinking from his loopy stories, I helped him refine them by teasing out their details and nudging them toward heightened vividness. It’s one of the services Nick performs for Gatsby, consolidating his fabricated self by playing the role of its ideal audience.
We learn that Gerhartsreiter — no more a Yale graduate than he was a Rockefeller — was a pop culture junkie, a small-town German boy who’d grown up idolizing American television, affecting different accents, mimicking characters. His personae were golem identities, cobbled together not only from characteristics of his victims — “a flourishing secret garden grown from cloned bits of people he’d gained some knowledge of” — but from television shows and movies he’d seen. He fed on pop culture not only to flesh out his aliases but possibly even based his crimes themselves on plot conceits stolen from film noir.
Kirn is most effective when he traces Gerhartsreiter’s intense pop culture obsessions to his psychopathy. Mundane conversations he’d once had with his eccentric friend, reconsidered, take on a different edge. At one point, Clark mentions that he was planning to write a series of novels. Your books, asks Kirn: What are they about?
“Oh, those,” he said. “They’re homages. They’re reworkings. Amusing things to write, but I can’t claim they’re original.”
“Literature’s never original,” says Kirn. Clark tells him he’s planning to adapt episodes of Star Trek. Kirn, an accomplished writer embarrassed at the idea of an unapologetic pastiche, mumbles a tactful response.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, Clark explained. “You’re probably thinking of the original series. Are you? I suspect you are. The original series never grabbed me. I found it terribly inferior. I much preferred the sequel.”
Throughout their relationship Kirn failed to realize that his friend’s theatrical affectations were symptoms of something darker. But neither did almost anyone else with whom Gerhartsreiter came in contact: Small comfort. The most curious thing is that Gerhartsreiter, at least in Kirn’s telling, never comes across as especially creepy. He seems like the sort of self-absorbed but essentially harmless middle-aged man you might meet at a local country club. The banality of evil? Boat shoes.
Blood Will Out is engrossing, but Kirn weaves his own story and that of his subject together almost too skillfully. Gerhartsreiter is a fascinating subject in the hands of a highly effective writer, but perhaps Kirn makes too much of his own place in the story, and it at times feels grasping. He brings the eye of a personal essayist and memoirist to a true crime reconstruction, and sometimes that works better than others.The small personal details that color a confessional essay or autobiographical novel — I took a wrong turn on the highway; my wife was upset with me — feel incongruous when they frame a tabloid story about a murderer-impostor.
Kirn’s speculations about Gerhartsreiter’s methods and motives (including his belief that he himself might have been the intended next victim) are astute, but they lack the punch they might have had if he’d made the leap beyond memoir to dig deeper than his own experiences with his subject. Still, even if the book doesn’t completely satisfy, the reader hardly regrets being along for the ride.
Blood Will Out is more effective as a meditation on the relationship between artist and subject. The most interesting question, of how Kirn was deceived so easily by a fraud whose life was built on increasingly absurd lies, is never completely answered. Kirn himself doesn’t seem quite sure of the answer. Either way, anyone who writes for a living is left unsettled when they consider the terrifying ease with which the table was turned on this professional writer, who suddenly realized that his ostensible subject was the most powerful storyteller of all.
This review originally appeared at Open Letters Monthly.
