Conned

Walter Kirn’s new book Blood Will Out is an account of his friendship with the conman and murderer Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who charmed many in high society under the alias Clark Rockefeller. In an excerpt from the book, Kirn considers the place of the impostor in the American imagination – and his own complicity in “Rockefeller’s” deception:

The kidnapping, which made international news and later inspired a TV movie, exposed Clark Rockefeller as a fraud, the most prodigious serial impostor in recent history. It also connected him to a lineage older, and in a certain fashion richer, than that of the founding family of Standard Oil: the shape-shifting trickster of American myth and literature. In Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, this figure takes the form of a mutating devil aboard a riverboat who feeds on his fellow passengers’ moral defects. In Huckleberry Finn, he again stalks the Mississippi River as the Duke and the Dauphin, flamboyant mock aristocrats whose swindles are cloaked in Elizabethan claptrap. In The Great Gatsby he’s a preening gangster sprouted from a North Dakota farm boy. In Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels he’s a murderous social-climbing dilettante. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 he’s Milo Minderbinder, the blithe wheeler-dealer who’d blow up the world if he saw a profit in it. He’s the villain with a thousand faces, a kind of charming, dark-side cowboy, perennially slipping off into the sunset and reappearing at dawn in a new outfit.

But if Clark was all that (I’d learn after the trial that he understood his literary provenance and took great pride in it), then what was I?

A fool. A stubborn fool. When his story began to unravel during the manhunt, and the Rockefellers claimed not to know him, I told a fellow reporter that they were lying, a family of cowards running from a scandal. I only backed down when his German name was published and the word Lebensraum echoed through my head. The disclosure unsettled me but it also softened me, especially when more facts about his background trickled out in the days after his capture. I too had a German name and German blood, and I’d spent a summer during college living in Bavaria, his home province. I was 18 then, about the same age he was when, in 1979, two years before my stay in Munich, he left the small town of his youth for the United States. I’d left my own small town that year, for Princeton. I knew the yearning. No wonder we’d been friends.

Laura Miller calls the work “an absorbing spectacle of self-surgery,” detailing the psychology of the mark as well as that of the con man. Meanwhile, Meg Wolitzer shivers:

[T]he way Kirn tells it all makes me feel it’s entirely possible that I too might’ve allowed Clark Rockefeller to stay in my life because of a kind of lazy vanity and the pleasurable, ongoing thought that a really rich and powerful person likes me – despite the fact that I don’t like him at all. Even as the absurdities mount up, I could still imagine passively allowing a joyless friendship to continue. Life can feel so ordinary. You get up in the morning, you go to work, you pay taxes like all the other poor schlubs. The idea that someone in your midst doesn’t have to do any of that opens up a little fantasy door in the brain, a door unlocked by a pathetic magic key.