For one week during the summer of 2008, the nation was transfixed by the story of a child, Reigh “Snooks” Boss, who had been kidnapped by her father, Clark Rockefeller. The notion of idea of someone named Rockefeller stealing his own child seemed unthinkable.
Then the truth came out, and it was even more unthinkable. Clark Rockefeller was actually a German named Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, and he had been masquerading for more than a decade as a man born into one of America’s most august families.
That bizarre story is the subject of Lifetime’s movie, “Who is Clark Rockefeller?” Eric McCormack (“Will & Grace”) plays Rockefeller; his wife, Sandra Boss, is played by Sherri Stringfield, who once seemed on the verge of TV stardom when she was on “ER.”
The headline-making story attracted the attention of film producer Judith Verno (“Natalee Holloway”). “It became clear that this story wasn’t an ordinary abduction between two parents who were arguing,” she says.
McCormack, 46, says he read everything about the case: “[NBC’s] ‘Dateline’ in particular did a great interview with him, and that I studied a lot. He was originally German and had abandoned his German accent by watching ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ He based his upper-crust accent on Thurston Howell’s [played in the series by Jim Backus]. That combination of being German and trying to go for Thurston Howell created a very odd manner of speaking.” McCormack creates a portrait of an eccentric but charming man. When Gerhartsreiter first met Boss, he seduced her with wealth, knowledge and adoration. Boss is a brilliant woman who entered Stanford at 16, received her MBA from Harvard Business School and earns $2 million as a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey and Co.
It’s hard to believe a woman as smart as Boss could believe — for 12 years — she was married to a Rockefeller. Like everyone else, she was taken in by Gerhartsreiter. As Boss says, “Do you think business intelligence has anything to do with emotional intelligence?”
Gerhartsreiter managed to perpetuate this huge lie even though he had no identity and no job: he never flew; he never drove; he rode around town on a Segway. People just chalked his behavior up to his being a wealthy eccentric.
“I think it just comes down to balls,” says McCormack. “The man had courage — or perhaps that’s the wrong word –—audacity. He decided that he was going to live way beyond his means and trust that it would all work out.”
Eventually, Boss figured out her husband was a fraud, divorcing him in 2007. During a custodial visit with his daughter on July 27, 2008, Gerhartsreiter decided to grab his little girl and vanish. Within five days, the FBI had figured out the many identities he had assumed — cardiologist; physicist, and a talk-show host named Christopher Chichester — and posted pictures of him all over the airwaves. Several people called in tips, until he and Snooks were finally located in Baltimore, Md.
Today, Gerhartsreiter is in a Massachusetts state prison serving a 6-to-8- year sentence for kidnapping and assault.
“Clark Rockefeller was able to fool people by adopting the mannerisms of the upper echelons of society,” Verno says. “Because of our habit of making judgments based on superficial criteria, we tend to feel that if someone has outwards signs of a life that they belong to it.”
WHO IS CLARK ROCKEFELLER
Saturday, 9 p.m., Lifetime