The Fastest Lane in the World
That’s the way it was last fall at the start of Pulitzer v. Pulitzer, and not even the worst winter rains in forty years could explain why the town was so empty of locals when Palm Beach had a world-class spectacle to fill the dull days of the off-season.
The Miami Herald called it the nastiest divorce trial in Palm Beach history, a scandal so foul and far reaching that half the town fled to France or Majorca for fear of being dragged into it. People who normally stay home in the fall to have all their bedrooms redecorated or to put a new roof on the boathouse found reasons to visit Brazil. The hammer of Palm Beach justice was coming down on young Roxanne Pulitzer, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had married the town’s most eligible bachelor a few years back and was now in the throes of divorce.
The trial was making ugly headlines all over the world, and nobody wanted to testify. Divorce is routine in Palm Beach, but this one had a very different and dangerous look to it. The whole lifestyle of the town was suddenly on trial, and prominent people were being accused of things that were not fashionable.
Some of the first families of Palm Beach society will bear permanent scars from the Pulitzer v. Pulitzer proceedings, a maze of wild charges and counterchargers ranging from public incest and orgies to witchcraft, craziness, child abuse, and hopeless cocaine addiction.
The Filthy Rich in America were depicted as genuinely filthy, a tribe of wild sots and sodomites run amok on their own private island and crazed all day and all night on cocaine. The very name Palm Beach, long synonymous with old wealth and aristocratic style, was coming to be associated with berserk sleaziness, a place where price tags mean nothing and the rich are always in heat, where pampered animals are openly worshipped in church and naked millionaires gnaw brassieres off the chests of their own daughters in public.
Fire in the Nuts
I arrived in Palm Beach on a rainy night in November, for no particular reason. I was on my way south to Miami, and then out to Nassau for a wedding. Black ties, big boats, high priests, fine linen, and fresh crab meat: a strange gathering of a strange clan, but it would not be happening for two weeks, so I had some time to kill, and Miami, I felt, was not the place to do it. Two weeks on the loose in Miami can change a man’s life forever. It is the Hong Kong of the Western world, an extremely fast track for almost anybody, and dangerously fast for the innocent.
Anyway, I decided to stop in Palm Beach and have a look at the Pulitzer divorce proceedings, which were already infamous. The Denver Post, which I read for the sports, had carried enough bizarre headlines about the case to pique a layman’s interest. Big names in the mud, multiple sodomies, raw treachery, bad craziness—the Pulitzer gig had everything. It was clearly a story that a man in the right mood could have fun with.
And I was in that mood. I needed a carnival in my life: whoop it up with the rich for a while, drink gin, drive convertibles, snort cocaine, and frolic with beautiful lesbians. Never mind the story. It would take care of itself. It was ripe in every direction.
That is a dangerous attitude to take into anything serious. It mandates a quick hit, wild quotes, and big headlines. “The good old in-andout,” as they like to say in the trade. Take it all on the rise, skim the top of the news, and run with it: let the locals do the legwork. We are, after all, professionals.
Divorce court is not a prestige beat in the newspaper business. It is a cut above writing obituaries or covering the Rotary Club, but it is basically a squalid assignment. Too much time in the courthouse can drive even cub reporters to drink. The trials are tedious, the testimony is ugly, and the people you meet on the job tend to have incurable problems.
The Palm Beach County Courthouse is not much different from others all over the country. It is just another clearinghouse on the street of broken dreams, a grim maze of long corridors full of people who would rather not be there. Young girls wearing neck braces sit patiently on wooden benches, waiting to testify against young men wearing handcuffs and jail denims. Old women weep hysterically in crowded elevators. Wild Negroes with gold teeth are dragged out of courtrooms by huge bailiffs. Elderly jurors are herded around like criminals, not knowing what to expect.
Only lawyers can smile in this atmosphere. They rush from one trial to another with bulging briefcases, followed by dull-eyed clerks carrying cardboard boxes filled with every kind of evidence, from rusty syringes to human fingers and sworn depositions from the criminally insane with serious grudges to settle.
The Pulitzer divorce trial was held in a small hearing room at the end of a hall on the third floor. The only furniture in the room was a long wooden table, a dozen chairs, and two coffee tables that were quickly converted for press seating. There was no room for spectators, and the only way to get one of the nine press seats was to be there in person at seven o’clock in the morning—or even earlier, on some days—and put your name on the list.