Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(180)
It is a long road from the outskirts of Buffalo to the inner sanctums of the Palm Beach Bath and Tennis Club, but the first long step was easy. The newlyweds hauled their trailer down to West Palm Beach, where young Peter had often spent winter vacations with the family, and set up housekeeping in a local trailer park. The first year was tranquil. They both enrolled in local colleges and lived more or less like their neighbors.
Welcome to the Palm Beach Express
What happened next is inscrutable. Roxanne can’t remember and Peter Dixon won’t talk about it. The marriage turned sour, and the couple soon separated. The divorce was apparently bitter, although there were no children and no real property to get bitter about. The trailer was sold to gypsies, and Roxanne got half, which she used to finance the rest of her education at West Palm Beach Junior College. After she graduated, she went immediately to work for a local insurance agency, selling policies.
That is where she met Randy Hopkins, a main player in this drama, who at the time was also selling policies, to supplement his income as an heir to the Listerine mouthwash fortune. Everybody in Palm Beach is an heir to something, and there is no point in checking them out unless you want to get married. Hopkins was the real thing, for Roxanne, and soon they were living together.
These were the weird years in Palm Beach, with a sort of late-blooming rock & roll crowd, champagne hippies who drove Porsches and smoked marijuana and bought Rolling Stones records and even snorted cocaine from time to time. Some ate LSD and ran naked on the beach until they were caught and dragged home by the police, who were almost always polite. Their parties got out of hand occasionally, and the servants wept openly at some of the things they witnessed, but it was mainly a crowd of harmless rich kids with too many drugs and a giddy faith in the notion that rock & roll might really set them free.
Which it did, for a while—and it was just about this time, in the heat of the mid-Seventies, that Roxanne Dixon, who would later gain fame in newspapers all over the world as the best piece of ass in Palm Beach, moved in with Randy Hopkins and took herself a seat on the Palm Beach Express.
One of Hopkins’ good friends at the time was Pete Pulitzer, a forty-five-year-old recently divorced millionaire playboy who bore a certain resemblance to Alexander Haig on an ether binge and was known in some circles as the most eligible bachelor in town.
Pulitzer was also the owner of Doherty’s, a fashionable downtown pub and late-night headquarters for the rock & roll set. Doherty’s was a fast and randy place in the years when Pete owned it. John and Yoko would drop in for lunch, the bartenders were from Harvard, and Pete’s patrons were anything but discreet about their predilection for dirty cocaine and a good orgy now and then.
It was the place to be seen, and Pulitzer was the man to be seen with. He had his pick of the ladies, and he particularly enjoyed the young ones.
When his friend Randy Hopkins introduced him to Roxanne one night, he liked her immediately.
Fiends
Pulitzer’s final pretrial offer, the last exit before going public in court and creating an international scandal, was $45,000 a year, plus a $200,000 house in Palm Beach, along with the Porsche and the jewelry—and the children.
They were Roxanne’s idea all along, said the husband. She took out her IUD without telling him, and suddenly she was pregnant with twin boys. Pete was shocked, he said. She knew all along that he didn’t want any more children. He already had three, in their twenties, from a seventeen-year marriage with his first wife, Lilly, a prominent fashion designer. One daughter had been hospitalized for heroin addiction, the son was accused in the courtroom of being a drug dealer, and the other daughter, a beautiful twenty-six-year-old ex-model, with whom he allegedly committed incest when she was sixteen, was now married to a Palm Beach stockbroker.
At the age of fifty-two, Pete Pulitzer, described in Town & Country as a “dashing millionaire” sportsman from Palm Beach, was not anxious to have babies. There was considerable testimony on this point later during the actual trial, but Pulitzer never flinched, and nobody asked him if he’d ever considered a vasectomy. Custody of the twins was the big issue, in fact, until the final week of the trial, when Roxanne’s lawyer outmaneuvered the judge and formally divulged pretrial testimony showing that Mack and Zack had been part of the husband’s final outof-court settlement offer a few months earlier, an offer Roxanne had rejected.
Most reporters covering the trial were surprised at this revelation, but it was not mentioned in stories detailing the judge’s final decision, and it made no headlines in Palm Beach.
No one will emerge from this unscathed.