Friends Cast Skeptical Eye on TV Multimillionaire

Last week’s “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” drew rapt attention from millions of television viewers and disgust from women’s groups, and spawned office chatter nationwide.

Back in San Diego, people who know the millionaire groom, Rick Rockwell, were howling with laughter and surprise.

“I thought, ‘That’s your millionaire?’ You’ve got to be joking,” said Barbara Summers, the owner of a San Diego-area dating service who has known Rockwell since the early 1990s.

“He’s a likable guy and he’s funny, but we’re all wondering when did he become a millionaire? How did we miss that?”

Summers and her husband, Bob Horn, invited Rockwell to their wedding in 1995 and recalled that his present was a $25 gift certificate.

“He’s known as one of these guys who has 50 cents left from his first-communion dollar,” said Horn, an Internet consultant and former San Diego Chargers linebacker.

Rockwell, now on his Caribbean honeymoon with wife Darva Conger of Santa Monica, couldn’t be reached for comment. Fox TV checked out his finances and confirmed that he’s worth “at least $2 million” and had $750,000 in the bank, a spokeswoman said Friday.

The network also said Rockwell and Conger, a 34-year-old nurse and Gulf War veteran, were not acquainted before the two-hour show in which 50 women vied to become his bride.

The 42-year-old Rockwell, who was born Richard Balkey in Pittsburgh, told Fox he is a real estate developer.

In San Diego, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, he was a regular on the Southern California comedy club circuit and appeared on a comedy show on KFMB-TV as a geeky beach bum.

Steve Kelley, a comic and editorial cartoonist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, said Rockwell was not particularly popular with his colleagues on the circuit.

That changed last week. Viewers flocked to the Tuesday-night broadcast--including one-third of all women viewers ages 18 to 34 for the final half-hour.

Fox TV executives said they knew about his entertainment background and chose him in part because he was able to handle himself well on camera.

Rockwell has bought and sold several Southern California properties in recent years. The Union-Tribune reported Friday that he bought a home in La Jolla in 1993 for $270,000 and sold it last June for $580,000.

His current San Diego house is no mansion. The Union-Tribune published a photo of a single-story, 1,200-square-foot home in Encinitas. The paper said he reportedly owns another home in Vancouver, British Columbia.