How a phoney Rockefeller ‘helped’ J D Salinger

A bizarre link has been established between JD Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye who died last week, and Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, the German-born con artist who for years passed himself off as Clark Rockefeller and is now doing jail time for kidnapping his daughter, Snooks, from his English ex-wife.

It turns out that the reclusive author (left) and the phoney Rockefeller (right) both lived in the same small town of Cornish, New Hampshire and that the German unwittingly played a part in the endless effort of townspeople to protect the author from prying journalists and Catcher fans.

The story goes that one of the residents of Cornish, Peter Burling, a neighbour of Salinger's, built his son a red bus stop and erected it at the bottom of the hill he shared with the writer.

After websites began to instruct anyone searching for Salinger's house to turn at the bus stop, Burling managed to sell it to Gerhartsreiter, with the result that unwanted visitors would end up badgering the German instead.

"People would turn into his driveway, demanding to meet J D Salinger," Burling told the New York Times.

The story illustrates how Salinger's neighbours in Cornish and other local communities dotted around Windsor on the New Hampshire-Vermont border helped preserve his privacy during the half-century he lived there.

Any strangers asking for directions to Salinger's farmhouse would get short shrift. Instead of finding the house, they would invariably end up on a wild goose chase. How wrong the directions were "depended on how arrogant they were," said Mike Ackerman, owner of the Cornish General Store.

Many of the locals who spoke to the New York Times after Salinger's death at the age of 91 would never have deigned to be interviewed during the writer's lifetime and even now were reticent, reflecting what one called "the code of the hills".

But they said enough to spoil the long-held myth that Salinger lived a hermit-like existence in Cornish, since he stopped publishing in 1965. He was not a recluse, insisted Nancy Norwalk, a librarian at the Philip Read Memorial Library in nearby Plainfield. "He was a towns-person."

He would drive his beige Toyota Land Cruiser across the covered bridge to Windsor  to shop at the Price Chopper supermarket or have lunch at the Windsor Diner. He went to the general store in Plainfield most days, often stopping to chat to the children of local families, used the library at Dartmouth College and regularly went to church suppers in Hartland.

According to a church member, he was never late for the $12 roast beef dinners at the First Congregational. Dressed in corduroys and a sweater, he would invariably arrive more than an hour early to get a seat at the head of the table, near the pies.

He last went to a church supper in December. For the two Saturdays before his death, his wife of 20 years-plus, Colleen O'Neill, collected a take-out instead. By then, it seems, he was too weak to leave the house. ·