This relationship? It’s just crazy
By Peter Gelzinis
They say it takes two to tango.
After watching Sandra Boss recall the 15 years she spent with her lunatic ex-husband, Clark Christian Gerhartsreiter Rockefeller, one thing becomes crystal clear: She’s as daffy as he is.
Boss admitted earning $40,000 a week . . . a week, for dispensing economic counsel to the world’s blue chip clients, yet she couldn’t find a way to keep a hunk of meatloaf in the fridge, or a little heat in their Cornish, N.H., love nest.
During cross-examination yesterday, Boss told defense lawyer Jeff Denner that she’d go to bed and wake up cold and hungry. Obviously, a rare form of battered women’s syndrome.
Lots of people marry “strangers.” We’re all fools for love until the day we’re just plain fools - left to wonder: “Who the hell is this person sleeping next to me?”
I can understand Sandra Boss getting suckered in at the start by a fancy name and a pretentious line of bull, because these things obviously mattered to her. It’s when pretension gives way to the preposterous that things get whacky.
When Clark, who wasn’t contributing a dime to their merger, tells Sandy a story about having to pay off Daddy Rockefeller’s $50 million debt so that the U.S. Navy wouldn’t come after her . . . and she buys it with a shrug - now that’s crazy.
She makes 40 grand a week as a consultant for McKinsey & Co., which boasts on its Web site: “Our clients talk to us when information is difficult to get and insights are scarce.” Yet, Sandy still swallowed her deadbeat husband’s whopper about being appointed to the Federal Reserve Board.
Clark told her he sold a company called Propulsion Physics, for a billion dollars, but Sandy conceded yesterday the only checkbook she ever saw in Clark’s hands was hers.
When Denner asked her if she knew what a “bizarre delusion” was, this comely WASP let a wry smile creep across her face and said, “I don’t know what ‘bizarre’ means.”
Obviously.
If, as his lawyers suggest, Clark Whats-His-Name, was lost in his own grandiose, narcissistic delusions, then his wife - for a large part of their marriage - found all his rarified ragtime plausible.
Does that really make her a victim of his nutty designs? Or simply a highly functioning neurotic in her own right? Maybe she tolerated his craziness, not because she was enslaved by it, but possibly because she was too lazy or insecure to break away from it.
To paraphrase Gnarls Barkley: Does that make them crazy? Definitely.
