A Dog Took My Place
July 21, 1983
West Palm Beach, FLA., Dec. 28, 1982 (AP)—Herbert Pulitzer Jr., the millionaire publishing heir, won custody of his twin five-year-old sons today as a Circuit Court judge awarded less than $50,000 in alimony to Mr. Pulitzer’s wife, Roxanne.
Judge Carl Harper, citing “flagrant acts of adultery and other gross marital misconduct,” ordered the thirty-one-year-old Mrs. Pulitzer to move out of the couple’s lakefront home in Palm Beach, where she had maintained custody of the children since the separation. Judge Harper’s ruling came after an eighteen-day trial in which there had been testimony about cocaine abuse, extramarital affairs, incest, lesbianism, and late-night séances. The trial ended in November.
The decision was so aggressively harsh that even veteran courthouse reporters were shocked. “I couldn’t believe it,” one said afterward. “He whipped her like a dog.”
All history is gossip.
—Harold Conrad
There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days. Not even the rich feel safe from it, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can’t understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt. The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually means they are feeling anxious or confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.
That is the situation in Palm Beach these days, and the natives are not happy with it. There is trouble on all fronts. Profits are down, the whole concept of personal privacy has gone up for grabs, and the president might be a fool. That is not the kind of news these people want to hear, or even think about. Municipal bonds and dividend checks are the lifeblood of this town, and the flow shall not be interrupted for any reason.
Nor shall privacy be breached. The rich have certain rules, and these are two of the big ones: maintain the privacy and the pipeline at all costs—although not necessarily in that order—it depends on the situation, they say; and everything has its price, even women.
The autumn months are slow in Palm Beach. The mansions along Ocean Boulevard are closed up and shuttered for the hurricane season, which ends sometime in December, when the rich come back to the island.
That is when the season starts, the winter social calendar. From the Patrons Opera Guild Luncheon in November at the Colony Hotel, to the premiere of the Lannan Foundation Museum in early March, the action is almost continuous: white ties and golden slippers, charity balls at the Breakers, cotillion dances at the Bath and Tennis Club, and endless cocktail parties.
“Eighty percent of the world’s wealth is here during the season,” said a local decorator one night over dinner at Dunhills in the heart of the off-season. “It’s a very exciting scene to be part of.”
The autumn months are boring, he said. But it is a nice time to be here, if you don’t mind staying inside. The sea is wild, the beach is like Norway, and relentless monsoon rains lash the island day and night. Only servants go out in this kind of weather, and the only cars on the street are people taking care of business, for good or ill.
The business of Palm Beach is business, even on a rainy day in the off-season. Despite the town’s image of terminal leisure and luxury, the people who live here are very aware of their money, and they tend to watch it carefully. Displays of naked greed are frowned on, and business is done discreetly—or, failing that, in private. Some people sell real estate, some spend all day on the telephone, raving at their brokers and making $1,000 a minute on the stock market, and others buy fistfuls of speedy cocaine and spend their afternoons playing frantically with each other and doing their own kind of business.
There are hideous scandals occasionally—savage lawsuits over money, bizarre orgies at the Bath and Tennis Club, or some genuine outrage like a half-mad eighty-eight-year-old heiress trying to marry her teenage Cuban butler—but scandals pass like winter storms in Palm Beach, and it has been a long time since anybody got locked up for degeneracy in this town. The community is very tight, connected to the real world by only four bridges, and is as deeply mistrustful of strangers as any lost tribe in the Amazon.
The rich like their privacy, and they have a powerful sense of turf. God has given them the wisdom, they feel, to handle their own problems in their own way. In Palm Beach there is nothing so warped and horrible that it can’t be fixed, or at least tolerated, just as long as it stays in the family.
The family lives on the island, but not everybody on the island is family. The difference is very important, a main fact of life for the people who live here, and few of them misunderstand it. At least, not for long. The penalty for forgetting your place can be swift and terrible. I have friends in Palm Beach who are normally very gracious, but when word got out that I was in town asking questions about the Pulitzer divorce trial, I was shunned like a leper.