Who’s Conning Whom?

 

By Mark Howell

 

Once upon a time we asked a famous Key West writer and film director, who has long since settled out west on the mainland, whether he felt that one of his famous girlfriends back when he was still a single man here in town, who was herself a famously troubled Hollywood character, might perhaps have been, maybe, bipolar?

 

 

 

“If the bottle in one hand was gin and the bottle in the other was brandy,” he replied, “then she was bipolar.”

 

 

 

But his week’s column is not about Tom McGuane, who wrote and filmed “92 in the Shade” set in the Keys and whose famously failed follow-up novel “Panama” remains one of the most disturbed books ever about Key West.

 

 

 

This edition of Howelings features instead an appearance by Maggie Kirn, who is McGuane’s daughter.

 

 

Maggie’s husband, Walter Kirn, has just published an extraordinary book called “Blood Will Out: True Story of a Murder, a Mystery and a Masquerade,” which is about his strange relationship with a character known as Clark Rockefeller, who is not only “the most prodigious serial imposter in recent times” but also a murderer and, worse yet, a person who ran over two of his pet dogs.

 

 

In a now notorious review of “Blood Will Out” in last month’s New York Review, Nathaniel Rich questions why, in 1998, did Walter Kirn drive from Montana with his own decrepit old dog all across country to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in order to meet this character supposedly called Clark Rockefeller (not yet charged with murder), leaving his 23-year-old wife, McGuane’s daughter, then pregnant with Maggie and Walter’s first child, in their ranch home in Livingston that Walter had just purchased for half a million dollars with his earnings as a highly successful essayist and journalist?

 

 

In “Blood Will Out,” Kirn himself explains the trip as a favor to Maggie, who happens to be the president of the local Humane Society that had rescued their own dog after it was run over by a car and to assuage his guilt for running over with his pickup truck a different dog from his wife’s shelter a few months earlier.

 

 

With us so far?

 

 

Rockefeller turned out not to be a Rockefeller at all but a fellow whose real name was Christian Karl Gerhartstreiter, who never went to high school but conned his way into Yale at 14 and then got a second degree at Harvard. As Kirn describes it, Gerhartstreiter learned how to speak like people who use “summer” as a verb and began calling himself a “freelance central banker.” As it turned out, the main inspiration for his impersonation was Thurston Howell III of “Gilligan’s Island.”

 

 

In 2008, Rockefeller / Karl Gerhartstreiter was arrested for abducting a young woman revealed to be his daughter and was quickly exposed as having actually been born in Bavaria to a housepainter and seamstress; his earlier impersonations were revealed to be as film director Cameron Crowe’s brother and a British royal named C. Mountbatten.

 

 

Weeks after his arrest, investigators connected him to a 1985 murder of his landlady’s son in Los Angeles. He was finally convicted of the crime last year. The young man’s wife had also disappeared and has never been found.

 

 

The fact that Gerhartstreiter conned Kirn so thoroughly is weirdly echoed, of course, by Kirn conning him for several years as the unwitting subject of his latest book. Now “Blood Will Out” has found its way into the pages of The New Yorker and the air waves of CBS news and PBS radio and finally into the New York Review with Nathaniel Rich’s scathing interpretation of Walter Kirn, husband of Maggie McGuane, as a con man himself.

 

 

 

This review is what led to a letter of complaint to the Review from Kirn in early June, calling the suggestion unforgivable:

 

 

 

“Gullibility is a mysterious human phenomenon,” explained Kirn in his recent letter. “I was fooled. Gerhartstreiter’s wife of over a decade, a Harvard MBA, was also fooled, as was her entire family. And all three major investment firms where the accomplished deceiver found employment. And the exclusive Algonquin and Lotos Clubs of Boston and New York … It was a bizarre and bewildering episode in my life. I am here to tell you that it was not I who misled readers but your reviewer, Mr. Rich.”

 

 

End of story?

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