The Pulitzers of Palm Beach

take this for what it's worth: when our reporter sat in on the celebrated divorce trial, the most rational thing he saw and heard was hunter s. thompson

The Dreams started soon after I arrived in Palm Beach to attend the closing weeks of the Pulitzer divorce trial. The queen of England was in one of them, giggling on a four-poster water bed while Pete Pulitzer stood on an outside balcony, throwing grenades at swans in an ornamental pond.

For two consecutive nights, I dreamed that Howard Cosell had arrived to do the television commentary, sitting on a large spotted mushroom in the courtroom, whispering into the microphone in his howardly manner, while Dr. Hunter S. Thompson--who was there, larger than life and twice as dangerous--ran amuck and sprayed the court with the can of Mace that he carried with him into every session he attended.

In retrospect, I feel that the television people missed a great opportunity; Howard should have been there; the occasion demanded it. I can still hear parts of his narration. . . .

"Yes, folks, this has been a truly momentous event, one that reminds this reporter of the time when a young Cassius Clay told me personally that he was black. And now, here in the Palm Beach County Courthouse, a wonderful venue overlooked by the fabulous Dixie Court Hotel, we've got two wonderful Palm Beach people locking horns for big bucks and their five-year-old twin boys.

"We have the wife, 31-year-old Roxanne Pulitzer, pretty little thing from Cassadaga, New York. Used to be a cheerleader. Came into the marriage with an old Chrysler and a half share in a trailer home. And we've got the husband, Herbert 'Pete' Pulitzer, 52 years old. Grandson of Joseph, the publisher, who once shot a man for calling him a liar. Pete's an heir to a great American name and a great American fortune.

"It was Pete who filed for the divorce. Said that Roxanne was sleeping around. Guys and gals, a switch-hitter. She was doing cocaine. She was drinking. She was practicing the occult. OK.

"What does Roxy say to that? She says, 'Uh-uh, no way, André.' Pete's the bad apple, she says. He's the one who diddled the fiddle. Fondled a 14-year-old cupcake on his boat. Slept with his own daughter from a previous marriage. Smuggled drugs. Threatened to shoot Roxy and himself. OK.

"So there we have it. Tough people, tough questions, tough business. And big prize money at stake. We're talking serious numbers here, maybe 30 mil, maybe more; hey, maybe less. And we'll have more about these and other developments right after this word from the Church of the Sacred Hairpiece. . . ."

She said if I wanted to divorce, she was going to make it as nasty and public as possible. --Pete Pulitzer

He told me that if I didn't sign those documents, he would take the children away from me. He said he had the power, the money and the name. He said he would bury me. --Roxanne Pulitzer

So what? That's the first question that comes to mind. A Palm Beach divorce. Four lawyers at the table, two a side, each making $150 an hour. A trial that lasted for nearly five weeks of court time with 18 days of testimony, dozens of witnesses, lies by the score. Did it matter, did it mean anything, or was it just another soap opera?

All the ingredients of bad television were there: a set filled with stereotypes, a plot that was predictable, shallow, banal. Pete, a multimillionaire who looks like a picture without a caption from a Palm Beach society magazine. Boyish good looks, white hair, deep tan, immaculate tailoring; a preppie not yet gone to seed, a long way removed from the Hungarian-Jewish roots of his great-grandfather. He has an engaging difficulty with the letter R and his hair is thin at the back. In court, he rarely showed emotion, frowning at the ceiling, steepling his fingers, examining his nails.

Roxanne sat facing him across the table, about four feet away. Sometimes, while the duller witnesses testified or the lawyers traded insults, husband and wife outstared each other, two bored and petulant children who had been forced to stay indoors on a wet Saturday. It was usually Pete who gave in. One of their contests lasted six minutes.

Roxanne smiled when she won, pulled herself up in her chair and carried on doodling on her legal pad, scratching deliberately and audibly with a yellow pencil, making arcs and jagged patterns and filling them in. While Pete's witnesses droned on about her affairs--the drug dealer, the French baker, the racing driver, the real-estate salesman, Jackie Kimberly--she would shake her head in disbelief or resignation, tossing her hair, laughing openly and moving restlessly in her seat. She is an attractive young woman with a touch of vulnerability and defiance and a mouth of mobility and strength. At the end of each session, one of her lawyers would remove her legal pad and stuff it into his briefcase.

"Why am I here? Must answer this," Hunter Thompson wrote in his notebook after sitting in court for less than an hour. He, like me, was attending this trial as an observer. But why were we really there, any of us? Nobody could benefit from the outcome, apart from the lawyers, the paid witnesses and the media. I half expected the judge, a large, amiable man named Carl Harper, to stand up and shout, "All right, I've heard enough! You're all liars and deadbeats! Get out of my sight!" Of course, he didn't, though he often gave the impression he might, especially when the lawyers' endless wrangling threatened to escalate from verbal to physical violence.

He's making fun of my Southern accent, Your Honor.

--Joe Farish, Roxanne's attorney

Judge Harper comes from Pensacola and speaks with the soft country drawl of the Florida-Alabama border, but sometimes--and this would be signaled by a disgusted shake of his head--the warm, easy voice would suddenly harden and cut across the lawyers' nonsense like the crack of doom.

"You're costing Mr. Poo-litzer some bucks," he said once. "Get on with it now. What's relevant, how does it apply to the issues? I want you gentlemen to get right down to the meat of the coconut."

In the Pulitzer case, the meat of the coconut, apart from the question of who was to get custody of the twins, was the Pulitzer fortune. How much was it and how would it be divided in a settlement?

According to Farish, a veteran of Palm Beach divorce trials, Pete had an income of $850,000 a year and assets worth more than $28,500,000. Pete's lawyer, Robert Scott, rejected those figures and said the assets amounted to less than a tenth of the Farish estimate, to which Farish, a self-styled plain old Georgia boy, replied that Pete was worth plenty and produced a list. It included hotels in Europe and the United States, orange groves in Florida, gas and oil wells, a $300,000 stamp collection, four cars, a bowling alley, a 74-foot trawler, a twin-engine plane and a $1,500,000 house in Palm Beach.

Scott countered with Pete and Roxanne's joint Federal income-tax return for 1981, when Pete reported gross income of $338,199 and filed for a refund of $37,490.

They spent millions on themselves. A summary of personal expenses for 1981 showed that in that year, they spent $973,851.30, almost half of it listed under a column headed Miscellaneous/Unknown. Vacations for the year cost more than $31,000; house improvements exceeded $250,000; almost $50,000 went for household expenses; $79,684 for "personal"; almost $80,000 for upkeep of the boat.

When asked about money, Pete tended to reply, "I don't know," "I'm not sure," "You'd have to ask my financial advisors." In court, he scrutinized his nails and showed no great interest in the discussion of his expenses. It was only money, and he had never known that to be much of a problem.

He corrupted this farm girl. He switched her from milk to champagne and, finally, drugs.

--One of Roxanne's attorneys

She wanted a vibrator, so I bought her one. --Pete Pulitzer

Pete attended St. Mark's School in Massachusetts, entered Stanford and the University of Virginia, dropping out of both. His mother died when he was eight and he was raised by two women, a half sister and a nanny. His father was a war hero, an unconventional American hero who went to England at the outbreak of World War Two and flew with the Royal Air Force from 1939 to 1945.

Pete was rejected by the military, 4-F, because of a bad leg from football.

At the age of 21, he inherited $110,000. At 38, he got a legacy from his father of slightly more than $2,000,000. His first marriage, to Lillian Pulitzer, ended after 17 years with her divorce for mental cruelty. There were three children: One daughter was accused of sleeping with her father; another daughter became a heroin addict, since cured; the son, according to Roxanne, supplied his father with marijuana brownies.

Pete takes considerable pride in his physical appearance and condition; he had an eye job a couple of years ago. "I call it constructive," he said when Farish tried to provoke him about cosmetic surgery. He has been working out in a gym for the past 16 years. Three or four days a week, he drives from Palm Beach to Miami, where he owns a Howard Johnson hotel, and puts in a few hours at the office. "I make a lot of decisions on who we're going to fire and not fire." He leaves at noon, goes to the gym for an hour and drives home.

His hobbies are fishing, hunting, boating and "roughing it." He leases a 24,000-acre ranch, where he shoots duck, pigs, deer, turkeys, snakes and quail--"all that stuff," as he said in his pretrial deposition. He goes to Colombia to shoot doves, duck and pigeons--not to buy marijuana, as his wife charged--and he goes to Alaska to shoot elk.

Describing their client as a gentleman and a loving father, Pete's lawyers saved a few words for Roxanne: "The proofs will show that Mrs. Pulitzer is addicted to dangerous drugs--cocaine, Ritalin--and that she is also an inebriate. She had an adulterous relationship with a drug pusher. Now she has an adulterous relationship with another man. She sleeps until late in the day and she stays out all night, carousing with men and abusing herself with drugs and alcohol." Furthermore, one of them said, "She is not domesticated. She cannot cook, sew, clean, make a meal or take care of a child and makes no effort to do so."

In the end, the "proofs" failed to support any of those allegations, but by then, Roxanne Pulitzer had been indelibly labeled in the public eye as a combination of nympho dyke, cocaine slut and black-magic voodoo queen. As with so many accusations on both sides of the case, they turned out to be unprovable, headlines without stories.

The most publicized exhibit was Roxanne's séance trumpet, which looked more like a telescope than a musical instrument and consisted of four lengths of tapered aluminum tubing, measuring about three feet long when fully extended.

"Roxanne would lie on the bed and at the foot of the bed would be a trumpet with a black cape," Pete testified. While a group of the Pulitzers' friends sat around the darkened room, chanting, Roxanne spoke through the trumpet. "It sounded like an Indian," Pete said. "The voice would give some kind of fortunetelling gibberish. To me, it was all a bunch of baloney." He said he had been kicked out (continued on page 96)The Pulitzers of Palm Beach(continued from page 86) of the sessions for falling asleep.

The New York Post reported the séance evidence under the headline "Pulitzer Sex Trial Scandal: I Slept with a Trumpet." Farish took out his calculator for that one and filed a libel suit for $10,000,000, saying the paper had falsely implied that his client had used the trumpet for purposes other than spiritual.

Reporters covering the trial referred to it as the Dildo Factor and reminded newcomers from out of town that this thrust at the media jugular was a familiar Farish ploy. In the Sixties, he sued Time for $6,000,000 during the Firestone divorce. "I just love those big, rich magazines," he told a Miami reporter when he heard that correspondents from two national publications had joined the Pulitzer-case press corps.

We all sleep with trumpets: The real question is, Is Peter Pulitzer jealous of the trumpet? Did the trumpet affect their marriage? That's the legal point.

--Dr. Thompson, in an interview with Ann Krueger of The Palm Beach Post

It was because Pete couldn't stay awake that he began taking cocaine. Roxanne liked dancing, eating and drinking, late nights and music, and cocaine was the only thing that helped him stay the course. Eventually, even that didn't help, Pete said; he was always falling asleep, at discos, séances, bars.

"Did you ever try NoDoz?" Farish asked.

Pete didn't deny using drugs. "Drugs ruined my marriage," he said. "They've thrown my whole life into a turmoil, almost ruined me emotionally and mentally." There were times, he added, when he shared cocaine and sex with his wife and other women in the same bed.

"Did it happen more than once?"

"I believe it was two or three times."

"Who was involved?"

"Jackie Kimberly."

There had been Pulitzer sex sandwiches with Jackie in the Holiday Inn in South Palm Beach and aboard Pete's boat and with another woman in Colorado.

"Was anybody taking drugs while you were in these encounters?"

"Yes, Roxanne, Jackie Kimberly and myself. That was one of the eight or nine times I tried it."

"What, cocaine?"

"Yes."

Almost as an afterthought, he testified that his wife and Jackie were lesbians.

"On what basis do you make that statement?" Parish asked him.

"She told me."

"Roxanne?"

"Yes."

He went nuts for a period of his life when he was convinced into going to discos and staying out late.

--Robert Scott, Pete's attorney

Naked lies and swinish behavior.

--Hunter Thompson, on his first day at the trial

My incorrigibly distinguished colleague and celebrated author Dr. Thompson was profoundly shocked by the sordid revelations about drug abuse and carnal lust among the higher echelons of what passes for an aristocracy in South Florida. It was that feeling of distress that must have compelled him, during a court recess, to address the bailiff as follows: "You must have the heart of a goddamned lizard"--a remark that left the bewildered man standing in the corridor with a nervous smile twitching at his lips. It was not long after that episode, while still deeply disturbed by the evidence he'd heard, that he suggested to the night clerk of his motel that the man was "an anal-compulsive shit-eating fruitcake." However, the fact that the clerk had flatly refused to cash a check at three in the morning, which is when Hunter does his most vigorous thinking, may have contributed to his sense that the world had turned a dark and terrible corner.

On those occasions, he was inconsolable, so deep was his feeling of betrayal and grief, not to mention the affront to his standing as a doctor of divinity. We were often obliged during recess to seek adjoining cubicles in the courthouse men's room, and there, between medications of an improving nature, undisturbed by the ceaseless coming and going of judges and policemen, he would define the principle upon which he believed justice would best be served in the Pulitzer case and in other legal matters, the foundation of which was his unswerving contention that all lawyers should be put to death.

It was clear to us that many people would enrich themselves from the trial: four attorneys at $150 an hour apiece; accountants whose fees amounted to untold thousands of dollars; paid witnesses; the media; and others who hopped and squawked like vultures over the remains of this Palm Beach marriage, this fairy tale that turned to sewage.

As journalists of the old school, the good doctor and I found ourselves confronting the traditional questions of the fourth estate; namely, how could we make money from this tragic business and how much could we make? Clearly, there were paths that had not yet been fully explored, so we decided to ask Roxanne if she'd be interested in posing nude, with or without Jackie Kimberly. We would act as agents and split the commission, a large commission, we assumed, to be paid in cash or Krugerrands. Mrs. Pulitzer's first response was that she'd have to lose ten pounds; but later, to our considerable regret, she rejected this insolent proposal. It was then that Dr. Thompson and I came to the reluctant conclusion that we had no alternative but to expose our professional colleagues at the trial for the leeches and bounders they undoubtedly were.

One night, we found ourselves driving along the well-ordered, soothing streets of Palm Beach in Hunter's rented convertible. It was his fourth car in just over a week. All of them were convertibles, all were brand new, and the first had died horribly, spewing broken pieces of hot metal and tattered fan belts. One of the cars, a red model, drowned after prolonged exposure to a South Florida monsoon. Another was towed away to a swamp on the edge of the Everglades. Hunter believed there were parallels between the behavior of his cars and the behavior of the people in the Pulitzer case; his theory revolved around shoddiness.

He was elaborating on this theme when the police car started to follow us. Hunter muttered something about degenerate swines and crammed his clinking glass of Chivas between the seats. Four in the morning, only a mile to go to the Abandoned Motel--his name for the spacious and oddly remote beachside digs he occupied--and suddenly, the new day had taken an ominous turn.

The police must have heard our tires when we rounded the last bend, 90 degrees taken at about 50 miles an hour, rubber smoking, both of us leaning optimistically toward the center of the road, all four wheels drifting into the wrong lane on a blind turn. We had the top down, radio full blast, making enough noise to wake every drug-sodden gigolo in Palm Beach. By the time we saw the patrol car facing outward in a driveway, it was too late.

Hunter's head was bobbing up and down like some querulous species of bird, cigarette holder clamped between his teeth. He was wearing his red hat, the one with the Royal Bangkok Yacht Club badge.

"Did they see us?"

"Looks like it; they're moving."

"What are they doing now?"

"Coming up behind us."

"Vicious bastards. What did you do with the, er . . . ?"

(continued on page 218)The Pulitzers of Palm Beach(continued from page 96)

"Hid it."

"Christ! I hate this car. Goddamned useless piece of junk."

"He's put his roof lights on. Better pull over."

We stopped, the patrol car stopped and Hunter got out, holding an arm over his eyes against the glare of the headlights. I remembered that he hadn't slept in three days and was, I believed, irretrievably locked into a state of high-intensity brain jangle. He was trying to smile at the policeman, a young man in glasses, but the effect was that of a skull with a twisted leer. With luck, we would get only ten years.

"What's trouble?" Hunter said, lurching confidently toward the flashing lights. Another officer, a mournful woman with no chin and a large flashlight, got out of the police car and stood behind our rear fender, one hand on the butt of her gun.

Hunter explained that he had been driving well within the limit, that he was nearly home and that he had no idea why we should be pulled over and stopped. The young policeman listened with an amused grin on his face, then shook his head. "Ah, Hunter," he said. "You really ought to be more careful. I'm going to have to give you a warning."

Hunter! Hunter, indeed! And in a friendly tone: no ticket, no handcuffs, no warning shots in the back of the head, just a tut-tut. The shock of being simultaneously recognized and exonerated appeared to be too much for the good doctor. He seemed to lose his memory of the English language.

"Farft," he said. "Plarggen kwarp," waving his arms about and grinning horribly at the chinless police lady. She stepped warily backward. When excited, Hunter sometimes resembles a large, powerful stick insect. Now he was gesturing wildly up and down the empty road. "Wawa. Gunga kooblegar."

The policeman was still trying to smile. "Are you--all right, Hunter?"

"Brargle."

"OK. Hey, tell you what, let the other guy drive. You go on home. Good night."

"God!" Hunter said as we pulled off the shoulder and drove sedately toward his motel. "I couldn't get my throat to work. Guy must have thought I was having some deadly spasm. Babbling like a demented Arab. It was the shock of being recognized like that. . . ."

I relate these details only in an attempt to convey the extent to which we were both preoccupied with l'affaire Pulitzer, which had been the topic of our conversation when we were interrupted. Hunter had formed the theory that "bestiality is the cutting edge of this trial." As the owner of six peacocks, he felt that he would be personally repelled by evidence of bestiality if it were presented in court; but he knew that as a professional, he would have to record the gruesome revelations. Fortunately for all animal lovers, no such evidence was offered. The Farish question to Pete about having sex with women and dogs in the same bed seems to have been prompted by unverifiable motives. Not that this necessarily weakens the Thompson theory about the legal profession in general.

Dr. Jose Almeida, psychiatrist, former medical officer for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro's prisoner for two years and witness for Roxanne, was asked, "Are you married?" and replied, "Yes, I do."

Judge Carl Harper, to the accountant for Roxanne's side, when he presented a bill in court for $17,868, for services rendered in the trial: "I bet they had to twist your arm to get that out of you."

•

Roxanne's parents divorced when she was three, and her mother married a policeman, moving to Cassadaga, a town with a population of 900 and a long tradition of psychic and spiritualist activities. There Roxanne finished high school, earning money during vacations by picking grapes and cherries and graduating as a B student.

At 19, she married the son of the president of the company where she worked as a secretary to the firm's attorney. The marriage lasted four years half of which she spent at Palm Beach Junior College, where she got a degree in either liberal arts or physical education; she says now that she doesn't remember.

She was separated from her first husband during much of the marriage. She became pregnant in 1973 and had an abortion. When she met Pete, she was 24 and he was a 45-year-old divorced millionaire. She told the court about his romantic proposal, in the back seat of a limo, sipping champagne.

The wedding was in 1976. After the birth of the twins the following year, two nannies were employed so that Roxanne could be free to accompany her husband when he traveled. The nannies and the travel were his idea, she said; he wanted her to be available at all times.

"Our life was so good then," Pete said. "We would go to the ranch on the weekends. She would help me on my boat. I used to see her in blue jeans every day. She was happy; she was happy doing the things I was doing."

His lawyer asked, "Is there any circumstance under which you would ever live with her as husband and wife?"

"Never."

"When did you fall out of love?"

"I don't think it was any particular day. It was just bit by bit and now it's gone."

Roxanne, after her husband had been questioned about adultery, incest, homosexuality, bestiality, drug smuggling, impotence and threatening to kill her and himself: "I'll always have a special love for him."

•

Every morning at the trial, the clerk of the court wheeled in a shopping cart full of evidence. Petitions, motions, affidavits, depositions, excerpts from the transcript, the séance trumpet, tax returns, financial records and statements, court orders, subpoenas. A color snapshot showing Roxanne and an alleged lover, a tall, good-looking young man with a pompadour of black hair. They were both dressed in velvet for a Palm Beach party. There was a grainy black-and-white photo of Roxanne's Porsche next to a BMW in a condo parking lot. On the back, a date--February 7, 1982--and a note written by the private detective who had taken the picture: "Time of Photo, 8:40 A.M. Night Moisture Still on Both Cars. Car was There Until Approx. 11 A.M." Pete had detectives working on the case for three months. This was the only piece of their evidence that was used; the company billed him for $5000.

Dozens of witnesses testified for both sides. The ex-mate from Pete's boat said that three years ago, while still working on the boat, which was tied up at the dock behind the Pulitzer house, he had seen Roxanne, in a sheer nightgown, on her bed with Jackie Kimberly, who was naked. Roxanne's mother flew in from Cassadaga to say that Pete and Liza, his daughter from his first marriage, would lie on a couch, kissing. A nanny who testified that she had seen Roxanne in bed with the racing driver said that one of the Pulitzer twins had asked, "Is that guy still here?"

A procession of Roxanne's alleged lovers and drug dealers appeared. They denied everything: no sex, no drugs.

Pete's attorneys called Janis Nelson to testify for their side. She had once been a friend of Roxanne's, billing her regularly for psychic readings and art lessons and teaching her how to make juices.

Roxanne was asked, "Is Janis Nelson a psychic?"

"She says she is, yes. It's on her business card."

Nelson testified about Roxanne's love life after the separation from Pete in September 1981. She said she had gone over to Pete's side of the case after meditating with friends at a religious retreat in New Jersey. She went on to tell the court that Roxanne bought cocaine and slept with the dealer.

Farish had to be restrained from referring to the witness as Janis the Swami. "The Florida 'Gators have got a seven-point spread against LSU," he said. "Do you think that's a good spread?"

"Objection," said Pete's lawyer.

"Sustained," sighed Judge Harper.

(continued overleaf)

There's no doubt that Roxanne Pulitzer has lied in this trial. We've counted them up. There's a hundred lies.

--Pete's Attorney, summing up

The much-maligned Jackie. Kimberly was never questioned about threesomes with the Pulitzers--neither was Roxanne--but she was called to testify about her relationship with Mrs. Pulitzer.

"Have you ever been in bed naked when Roxanne Pulitzer was naked?" Pete's lawyer asked.

"You're disgusting," she snapped, closing the discussion. To reporters afterward, she said, "It's ludicrous. Pulitzer is definitely deranged and desperate for the almighty buck."

She is a radiantly beautiful young woman of 32, a former fashion model and now the wife of James Kimberly of Palm Beach, a 76-year-old heir to the Kimberly-Clark holdings. He and Pete were once friends. Kimberly came to court, one of the last witnesses to appear, a trim, elegant, white-haired man with an incongruous gold earring. He was asked if he knew Pete, and the old man glanced at him for a long moment, looked away and said, "Yes, we have met."

His wife was supposed to testify again at the end of the trial, but she didn't make it. In her place came a doctor, a stooped, cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and gray hair plastered to his skull. The doctor told the court that Mrs. Kimberly hadn't eaten or slept in four days and was completely exhausted. She needed intravenous feeding; she was nervous and upset; she was having trouble completing a train of thought; she was worn out after campaigning for her husband, who had just unexpectedly been voted out of office as port commissioner for Palm Beach.

"She's not emotionally capable of testifying," the doctor said. "She's not competent to stand in front of a judge or jury or anyone else." Yes, it was true, he admitted under questioning by an irate Robert Scott, her pulse and blood pressure were normal; he had checked them that morning. He had prescribed cough medicine for Jackie and he was going directly from the courtroom to the hospital to inject her with pentobarbital. "Something to alter the mind and its cognitive ability," the doctor said blandly, adding that his patient would probably be in bed for a week, maybe two.

Scott jumped to his feet and denounced the proceedings as a joke, a hoax and a travesty and demanded that the court rush to the hospital forthwith to take a bedside statement from Mrs. Kimberly about her relationship with Roxanne--now, before she was put to sleep. Judge Harper declined. "I'm not about to jump into my car and try to beat her to the hospital," he said. "Besides, she won't be in there forever."

That was a keen disappointment to the press corps, especially as Nelson had told the court earlier that she'd once had a two-hour telephone conversation with Mrs. Kimberly about the trial and Mrs. Kimberly had said something to the effect that she dreaded going to court because she had too much to lose.

"Didn't she refer to a part of her anatomy?" Pete's lawyer asked.

Yes, replied Nelson: "She said, 'I have to save my ass.'"

You didn't see Jim and Jackie Kimberly? They're here somewhere.

--Farish, at his firm's annual barbecue, less than a week after Mrs. Kimberly's doctor had said she would be in the hospital for at least a week

The question of whether or not Pete had slept with his daughter Liza hung over the trial like a dirty black cloud and in the end just drifted away, uncorroborated, unproved. It was Roxanne who raised the issue. She said Pete had told her about it, that it had happened when Liza was much younger and that the relationship had lasted a couple of years.

"They would lie on the bed together, drinking champagne," she said. "She would sit on his lap, talking and kissing for hours. On the boat, she would sun-bathe without a top. Then they would lie together while she was naked from the waist up. That's not normal."

Liza burst into tears in court. "Roxanne said this to hurt my father. It's a disgusting lie. She tried to turn a wholesome father-daughter relationship into something dirty and disgusting." She admitted to having shared cocaine with Roxanne, then added, "She said that if I ever felt I wanted a lesbian relationship to please let her know, because she wanted to be the one I got involved with."

Pete was brought back to the witness chair for his last word on the subject. "It's a lie; it's the cruelest accusation my wife could have made." He said he had often visited his daughter's home recently and had found her crying. "I don't know the damage that lie has done to my daughter, to her kids or her husband." He leveled a shaking finger at Roxanne, who was wooden-faced. "If she has a conscience, I don't know how she can live with that for the rest of her life."

The skipper of Pete's boat was called. He rose from his chair as if to lunge at Farish when he was asked if it were true that Pete had fondled and cuddled the skipper's 14-year-old daughter. "I do not appreciate that type of questioning," he said. "There's no truth whatsoever."

At the close of the trial, three divorce lawyers were called by Farish to testify to his reputation as a divorce lawyer and to tell the court why, in their opinion, he deserved to be paid rather a lot of money. Farish said that to date, his firm had logged 836 hours and 40 minutes on the case, but there was still much more to be done and many more hours to count before it would be settled.

The three lawyers, testifying separately, explained to a fascinated courtroom that there were eight factors to consider when assessing the value of a lawyer's services and that when all of those were added up, it should mean that in the Pulitzer case, Farish's firm should be looking at a check for $250,000 or $325,000, tops.

For their services as expert witnesses, the three lawyers charged between $1000 and $1250. One of them was in the courtroom for almost half an hour.

Scott called in an expert-witness divorce lawyer of his own, who said the other side should get no more than $135,000.

Judge Harper rumbled something about having charged a flat rate of $300 for a divorce when he was a lawyer. "I just don't want to make this issue the highlight of the trial," he said, starting to look agitated. "I can see it's a major issue in the minds of the lawyers, but it's not in mine."

•

The Palm Beach press corps held a Pulitzer costume party after the trial. There were two or three Petes and Roxannes, a spurious drug dealer who gave away sugar in plastic wrap and a man who came as James Kimberly, with Kleenex stuffed into his ears and pinned to his clothing. A scandalous incident was alleged to have occurred in a car parked at the front door, but those accused boldly denied everything.

Before everyone went home, the veterans of the trial debated the probable verdict that Judge Harper would deliver; without exception, they believed the result would favor Pete. I disagreed. His confession of adultery with Jackie Kimberly and the consequent betrayal of her husband, Pete's friend, would, I thought, weigh heavily in Harper's deliberations. I was wrong; the judge didn't mention it.

The final judgment was a curious mixture of bad spelling--laudible, credance, affectionally and copius--and moral stricture. Judge Harper described Pete as a sportsman, "a man's man" who had throughout the marriage been faithful and loyal to his wife, while her "gross moral misconduct involved more than isolated discreet acts of adultery."

As to the value of the Pulitzer assets, Harper said a fair estimate would be in the neighborhood of $12,500,000--"a nice neighborhood, to say the least"--but that since Roxanne had destroyed the marriage, she could hardly expect to profit. Accordingly, he ordered her out of the house but allowed her to keep the Porsche and about $60,000 in jewelry, and Pete would repay $7000 that Roxanne had invested in his boat. She would receive $48,000 in alimony, spread over two years. After that, nothing: She was young and attractive; she should go out and get a job, make an honest woman of herself. The twins would go to Pete.

The homespun judge invoked many precedents in his 18-page order and may have established one of his own when he wrote, "The wife's exorbitant demands shock the conscience of this court, putting the court in mind of the hit record by country-music singer Jerry Reed that laments, 'She got the gold mine, I got the shaft.' "

Farish filed a petition for a rehearing, saying that Harper's ruling constituted "a deterrent upon [the] lifestyles and conduct" of the wives and mothers of Florida and that it not only was contrary to the evidence and the law but also "ignored completely [Pete's] devious, immoral conduct throughout his entire life." Furthermore, there was a surprise, though unnamed, witness who would testify to Pete's unsuitability as a father. Farish was also a little upset because his fee had been "grossly devaluated" in the Harper order to $102,500. He then withdrew from the case and on his way out cited his own country-music statute to counter the judge's, from the legal brain of Kenny Rogers: "You've got to know when to hold 'em,/Know when to fold 'em."

Enter Marvin Mitchelson, Hollywood divorce lawyer, who told People magazine, "First I dump the lawyer, then I dump the judge." Roxanne, he said, had been branded as the Scarlet Woman of the South.

Old Joe Farish didn't buy that one. "She's a pawn again," he said. "Mitchelson is using her to hype himself."

And in Palm Beach, those who know about this sort of thing said they wouldn't be in the least surprised if Pete and Roxanne were reconciled. He was still madly in love with her. Hadn't they been seen holding hands at the twins' school, and weren't they, several weeks later, kissing under a Christmas tree?

I believe that every accusation made on both sides in the Pulitzer case is the literal truth. He did it, she did it, they all did it. They should give the money to charity and sell the kids to the Arabs.

--Dr. Thompson, rendering his final judgment on the trial

Thompson celebrated the end of the trial by setting fire to me in the dining room of the Abandoned Motel. It's an old trick he has, filling his mouth with lighter fluid and igniting the jet when he forces it out. I was drinking coffee at the time and had seen him approach the table in the mirror on the wall, his mouth suspiciously and uncharacteristically shut. As the ball of flame lapped around my ears, I carried on drinking the coffee, a little embarrassed, as if I had drawn the kind of attention to myself that another diner might have created by throwing a plate of spaghetti across the room. An elderly couple at a nearby table broke and ran for the door, their meals unfinished.

Hunter was, by this time, in the latter stages of a week--or perhaps it was ten days--without any appreciable amount of sleep. Earlier, he had focused the beam of his Taser gun between my eyes, but since he lacked the wire-guided steel darts and the violent electrical charge the Taser needs for maximum effect, I had felt nothing but a strong sense of discomfort when it was aimed in my direction.

Now he sat at the table and ordered something nourishing: a bloody mary, black coffee and a large glass filled with Chivas and ice. "You know what this trial reminds me of?" he said.

"No, what?"

"The Great Gatsby."

"Oh."

"That was the great American novel, you know."

"Yes, you may be right about that."

"Tom and Daisy. The carelessness of the rich. All that wreckage they left behind them. These are people who don't care. They don't know how to behave, because they've never learned how to behave. They don't have to know how to behave. There's a movie here."

"What would you call it?"

"Swines at Bay. It would need dogs and cocaine. Voodoo potions and human sacrifices. A musical with geeks and lawyers falling out of planes. Something for the family. I think I'll have the poached eggs and corned-beef hash."

"Dr. Thompson was profoundly shocked by the sordid revelations about drug abuse and carnal lust."