THE TALENTED MR. ROWE-PRICE: THE MALCOLM ROCKEFELLER CHRONICLES

The Strange Story of Frognall Dibdin

Forget architecture and design, today we have breaking news in the blogosphere.  I've been holding this one in for months and am glad to finally get it off my chest:

Many of you may remember Frognall Dibdin's Shelves, an erudite and often entertaining blog about books by a Boston book lover, which disappeared abruptly last summer.  I've known a lot more than met the eye about this story for quite awhile but only this weekend did it become public and the myriad conflicting facts fall into place.  It's a very long tale, with more twists than an Agatha Christie mystery. I'm not going into nearly all of it today, but here's a short version:

Last March, I received an email from a Harvard student address, from one Eric Jonathan Price.  In it he paid elaborate and flattering compliment to this blog, and revealed himself to be the writer of Frognall Dibdin's Shelves.  He signed the email with "my full name, 'Eric Rowe-Price".  This hyphenated discrepancy intrigued me, for I had already noticed things in his blog posts that didn't add up either---a picture of his summer house in Maine for example, only the house pictured was one in New Canaan Connecticut that had been featured  in Luxist a few months before.  In the post he told his readers of how carefully he had been trying to restore the gardens to the original plans by Beatrix Farrand, originally created for his grandmother, and lovingly tended by the great aunt who had left him the house.  Interesting.  Beatrix Farrand's job records show no commissions at Prout's Neck, nor any for the Price family.  Curiouser and curiouser.  He further told of his late great aunt's loving care of the garden, and of her going out carelessly in her Chanel flats to tend her flowers.  Whoa, here something went off in my brain:  a ninety year old aunt of a certain class tending her garden in Maine in Chanel flats?  Those are city shoes.  She'd have gardened in Belgians, maybe, Keds more likely but the Chanels would be home in Boston, if she had them at all.  Hmmmm. 

'Wisteria Hill' in New Canaan Connecticut, featured by Eric on Frognall Dibdin as his summer home on Prout's Neck in Maine (Luxist photo) 

Then, a few days later, I was invited to join his Facebook page.  At first, my acceptance wouldn't work, so I emailed my regrets.  I immediately received a reply that it was the result of his privacy settings, and to please try again.  Having long since decided that he was a fabulist---so many stories  on his blog of his aristocratic family's antics were either lifted from books such as Cleveland Amory's The Proper Bostonians and John Marquand's The Late George Apley, or just plain didn't ring true.  The same with pictures.  A photo of the library of Rotch and Tilden's William Mason House on Commonwealth Avenue, published in Bainbridge Bunting's Houses of Boston's Back Bay, for example, became his Price great-grandparent's library on Beacon St.  Yet I still gave him benefit of the doubt---I kid you not.   And then, curious, I opened his Facebook page.  It was like looking into the sun---blinding, dizzying, stupefying.

The Facebook page was full, nay, crammed with scrapbook images and ideas that a twelve year old might come up with for how the jet set lived and played.  He had created albums of 'family' houses, all lifted straight from real estate ads, some of them touchingly tagged with with labels like 'Eric's bedroom'.  Party pictures from many sources pretended to be one party for his father's birthday.  There were pictures and videos with friends on yachts and private jets.  His resume would take one's breath away, let alone strain one's credibility---all the best boarding schools, Harvard, Oxford, Harvard graduate school; multiple degrees in everything imaginable, from art conservation to law.  'Eric Rowe-Price' had set himself up to be a renaissance man.  The list goes on: Trustee of the T.Rowe Price Family Foundation (ain't no such foundation, kiddies).  Special Attache for the State Dept. to Iraqi Ministry of Cultural Heritage.  A modeling career with the Ford Agency (and he even posted a stock Ford Agency video from Youtube, supposedly showing him getting pedicured in the background). There were so many that I cannot remember them all.  I admit it---I was spellbound.  I had never seen such large scale make-believe.  His Facebook page became one of my morning must-reads, just to see what that wily devil was up to today.  Group photos had grand captions: 'Grandfather Price and friends and family at the house on Hedges Lane, East Hampton'.  The tags on these photos were amazing when one ran a mouse over them---One photo included both 'Grandfather-Ambassador Charles Price' and 'Liliane de Bettancourt',(the embattled L'Oreal heiress), etc.  It was all so amazing that I'd often need a jack to get my jaw off the floor.  And of course, Ambassador Price, in this fiction Eric's proper Bostonian 'grandfather', was actually born in Kansas City and lives in California.  As for 'Great Grandfather', T. Rowe Price himself (unhyphenated), he was actually a Baltimorean, and not the father of Charles Price. But Eric never let minor details like these interfere with his fantasy.

'Cragmere' made appearances on Facebook as 'Tangled Tide' at Prout's Neck, designed by Eric's famous architect 'ancestor' Bruce Price.  In reality the house is in Cape Neddick, Maine, 40 miles south, and was designed by Antoine Dorticos. In his first Facebook posting, the house was in Cape Elizabeth, a suburb of Portland, but Eric apparently later realized that Prout's was the better summer address, and moved the whole kaboodle there.

Nevertheless, the artist formerly known as Eric Price continued on unaware.  Knowing that he was claiming 22 Louisburg Square, as good an address as exists in Boston as his house, I put my researcher's skills to work and checked the Boston Assessor's records.  I constantly wanted to give this scoundrel benefit of the doubt, why I don't know---probably because that someone could make up this much stuff, so easily debunked,  so publicly, just didn't make sense.  Of course, he was not the owner of 22 Louisburg, which incidentally belonged long ago to old friends of the Dilettante.  Finally, a picture was posted by his 'brother' (more about the brother in a minute) of him sitting in a grand room, obviously and unmistakably in an English house, saying how amazing it was that Eric had filled his library in so short a time.  That library was no more in that house than I am right now.  I could stand it no more, and confess that I wrote him a disingenuous letter commenting what pleasure it gave me to see Kay and George's old library at 22 Louisburg, knowing full damn well that the room wasn't in that house.  I hoped for his sake that this would produce a reply that he didn't live there, but of course, he overplayed his hand, and wrote back that I had such good eyes to recognize it, and yes, he adored the house, though not as much as 'Tangled Tide, my summer home in Maine', and intended this house to be the one he was carried out of feet first.  Game set match.  I decided this was not a good game that he was playing, regardless of motive, then still unclear, and we only once more had any correspondence, when he offered via Facebook to send me family snapshots of his great-grandfather Rockefeller's house at Seal Harbor for a blog post (needless to say, they never arrived).

Winslow Homer's studio at Prout's Neck, owned by the Portland Museum of Art, pictured in Facebook as the guest house at Tangled Tide.  (Doug Jones, staff photo from Portland Press Herald)

So, now he was claiming outright what he had only implied before.  That he was one of THE Rockefellers.  The Pocantico branch.  Not even clever enough to bury himself into the more difficult to trace genealogy of the Greenwich branch.  Surely, so soon after the very public blow-up of the Clark Rockefeller scam, he wouldn't be claiming that---would he?  Nobody could be that stupid.  Wrong.  Eric Rowe-Price could be.   And eventually that would be his downfall.  But I'm ahead of our story---two more paragraphs.  He had something over 400 Facebook friends, though only a very few ever posted.  My particular favorite was the kind woman who took pictures of 'his' Ogden Codman townhouse  in New York (you thought 'Tangled Tide' and 22 Louisburg were the only ones?) for him, prompting his 'brother' to say how kind it was of Suzanne to take photos, and Aunt Helen to admire the job of having the front doors restored 'your father would be proud'.  Of course the house pictured was neither his, nor by Ogden Codman.  Aside from these rare postings from outsiders, 27 of those friends and relatives posted on his facebook page in rotation almost daily, always admiringly, even fawningly, and only about Eric.  Another favorite was cousin C.S. Rockefeller saying that he never took his shirt off at the beach because he'd never have abs like Eric's. Their names, patrician to the core, evoked old line Boston and big money New York.   Brother Thomas Rowe-Price IV, cousin Douglas Duck Forbes with his bride Alexandra Minot Rockefeller, cousin Eliot Handsyd Price (how he decided which Prices were hyphen-worthy, and which were not, beats me).  his twin brother, whose name now eludes me--referred to as the 'spare for the heir', his best friend Gabriella Crowninshield, his aunt Ada Vanderbilt-Price, Malcolm Rockefeller (pay attention, you'll need to remember this one in a minute), Aunt Helen Price Saltonstall---the list goes on, as did their  boundless admiration for their beloved 'Jonty'.

22 Louisburg Square, Boston.  Claimed by Eric on Facebook as his own, a fact quickly refuted by a glance at Boston Assessor's records.

I finally told a couple of people about what I'd found, and that I was unsure what to do with the information.  Little did I know that the story was about to get even more interesting.  One morning, as I was giving the adventures of 'Jonty Rowe-Price' its daily glance right after the New York Times and before 'Old Long Island', Doonesbury or If The Lampshade Fits, I was looking at Aunt Helen Price Saltonstall's Facebook albums.  In an album titled 'Misc. Family at Prout's Neck' (or some such), were photographs of "Malcolm's house".  Except that it wasn't of a house at Prout's at all, but a house in Bridgehampton for sale by Daniel Gale realty (the New York Times real estate section is my friend).  Following it was a picture captioned 'Watching old movies at Tangled Tide', of an empty , obviously staged, room with a too clear television picture.  Within minutes, knowing by now his preferred sources, I'd identified it from a Sotheby's real estate ad for a house named Killybracken in Gloucester.  It was my Hercule Poirot moment----'Mon dieu, aunt Helen is not real, he is writing her lines too!"  And sure enough, within seconds, it became clear that the 27 friends and relatives and their profiles were ALL robots whose dialogue was controlled by the master puppeteer.  Their friend lists only included each other, and absolutely no web search turned up any of them as real people in any way shape or manner.  Nor did other avenues of research, including the Social Register, the very volume that should have bound them together.   Except for Malcolm Rockefeller.  There was one lone entry for him, a wedding registry entry online at an antique shop.   I no longer found the story amusing or interesting.  It had definitely gotten creepy, but I still paid attention, and what transpired over the next few weeks got very manic, and not a little confusing.

'Watching Old Movies at Tangled Tide, Prout's Neck' on 'Aunt Helen's' Facebook page, in reality 'Killybracken', for sale in Gloucester, MA, lifted again from the Sotheby's Real Estate site.

Eric had promoted a big birthday party, to be held either at 22 Louisburg Square, or at 'Tangled Tide, my summer home in Maine'.  Naturally I wondered how he'd get out of this.  He did so by giving himself Lymphoma, even posting pictures of his brain scan for his readers.   He turned the blog over to his Aunt Helen, who though 88, carried on for her brave little soldier.  Amazingly, her posts were exactly like his own, the same sort of picture posting, the same sorts of elegant family tales. My favorite was a tale of her late sister, she of the Chanel gardening pumps, and her old Maine cook Ora, who made the best blueberry scones, with ginger.  At that, I'd had enough.  One's old Maine cook may have made blueberry muffins, blueberry pie, or blueberry buckle, but the chances of an old Maine cook, even with a sophisticated employer, making blueberry scones with ginger fifty years ago were between slim and none.  But I needn't have worried.  Aunt Helen had served her usefulness, and was dispatched to Africa for a six month safari, and cousin Malcolm Rockefeller took over the blog for his ill cousin.  This was an interesting development, for Malcolm, who had the same birthday as Eric, had been moving front and center also on the Facebook page, with a new profile.   Malcolm carried on, giving us updates on Eric's fragile health, making trips up the Maine coast, visited booksellers, incluing a couple known personally to the Dilettante, and seemed much more a credible sort than 'Eric Rowe-Price'.  That of course was all an illusion, for gentle reader, if you've come this far, I must tell you that not only is Malcolm not one bit more credible than Eric, in fact he IS Eric.   But you'd already figured that out, hadn't you?  The gig is up.  He then foolishly overplayed his  hand yet again, and accepted an invitation from some real Rockefellers who have a place in Camden, while there he stole some papers, and they cried foul.  And now the police are looking for him.  

For the rest of the story, here are  links to articles in the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal, and a Boston Fox news clip found by a friend cleverer than I during my search for the truth.  And that, for the several of you who have asked if I know what happened to Frognall Dibdin over the last few months, is the rest, but not nearly all, of the story.  I've kept it to myself and a few friends until now, because I didn't want to cause hurt or harm if any part of his wild tale was true.  Events have unfolded in several arenas over the last couple of weeks, and now that the story is public, so is my take on it.  I have dozens more details, and may share them later.  I think you will very likely get a lively take on it from another quarter soon, but until I know for sure, I'm mum.  "Oh, What a Tangled Web Tide We Weave, When First We Practice to Deceive"

For a more recent discovery and follow-up to this story, click this link to my next post: 

http://thedowneastdilettante.blogspot.com/2011/01/deception-frognall-dibdin-postscript.html

Click these links for the news stories: 

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/01/07/the-art-of-becoming-a-rockefeller-in-the-facebook-age/

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2011/01/07/another_phony_rockefeller_meet_eric_price/

 http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/local/another-faux-rockfeller-emerges-in-maine-20110107