Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (74 page)

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.

It was an odd situation, considering that the story unfolding inside was making daily headlines all over the world, but Judge Carl Harper said he liked it just fine. He was not especially fond of reporters anyway, and he clearly viewed the whole trial as a shame on the human race.

Under Florida law, however, he was compelled to allow one stationary TV camera in the courtroom so that the trial could be filmed for the public and watched on closed circuit in a room across the hall, where anybody who didn’t feel like squatting in the courtroom all day could watch the proceedings in relative comfort, with cigarettes and doughnuts from the courthouse coffee shop. Nobody checked credentials in the TV room, and on most days there were fifteen or twenty reporters around the monitor, along with a handful of spectators who wandered in off the rain-swept streets outside.

These were the bleacher seats at the Pulitzer trial, a strange and sometimes rowdy mixture of everything from CBS-TV producers to lanky six-foot women with no bras and foreign accents who claimed to be from
Der Spiegel
and
Paris Match
. It was a lusty crowd, all in all, following the action intently, sometimes cheering, sometimes booing. It was like a crowd of strangers who came together each day in some musty public room to watch a TV soap opera like
General Hospital
. On one afternoon, when Roxanne Pulitzer lost her temper at some particularly degenerate drift in the testimony, the bleachers erupted with shouting: “Go get ’em, Roxy! Kick ass! That’s it, Rox baby! Don’t let ’em talk that way about you!”

The Best Piece of Ass in Palm Beach

On the surface, the story was not complex. Basically, it was just another tale of Cinderella gone wrong, a wiggy little saga of crime, hubris, and punishment:

Herbert “Pete” Pulitzer Jr., fifty-two-year-old millionaire grandson of the famous newspaper publisher and heir to the family name as well as the fortune, had finally come to his senses and cast out the evil gold
digger who’d caused him so much grief. She was an incorrigible coke slut, he said, and a totally unfit mother. She stayed up all night at discos and slept openly with her dope pusher, among others. There was a house painter, a real-estate agent, a race-car driver, and a French baker—and on top of all that, she was a lesbian, or at least some kind of pansexual troilist. In six and a half years of marriage, she had humped almost everything she could get her hands on.

Finally, his attorneys explained, Mr. Pulitzer had no choice but to rid himself of this woman. She was more like Marilyn Chambers than Cinderella. When she wasn’t squawking wantonly in front of the children with Grand Prix driver Jacky Ickx or accused Palm Beach cocaine dealer Brian Richards, she was in bed with her beautiful friend Jacquie Kimberly, thirty-two, wife of seventy-six-year-old socialite James Kimberly, heir to the Kleenex fortune. There was no end to it, they said. Not even when Pulitzer held a loaded .45-caliber automatic pistol to her head—and then to his own—in a desperate last-ditch attempt to make her seek help for her drug habits, which she finally agreed to do.

And
did
, for that matter, but five days in Highland Park General Hospital was not enough. The cure didn’t take, Pete’s attorneys charged, and she soon went back on the whiff and also back to the pusher, who described himself in the courtroom as a “self-employed handyman” and gave his age as twenty-nine.

Roxanne Pulitzer is not a beautiful woman. There is nothing especially striking about her body or facial bone structure, and at age thirty-one, she looks more like a jaded senior stewardess from Pan Am than an international sex symbol. Ten years on the Palm Beach Express have taken their toll, and she would have to do more than just sweat off ten pounds to compete for naked space in the men’s magazines. Her legs are too thin, her hips are too wide, and her skin is a bit too loose for modeling work. But she has a definite physical presence. There is no mistaking the aura of good-humored outfront sexuality. This is clearly a woman who likes to sleep late in the morning.

Roxanne blew into town more than ten years ago, driving a Lincoln Continental with a sixty-foot house trailer in tow, a ripe little cheerleader just a year or so out of high school in Cassadaga, New York, a small town of nine hundred near Buffalo.

After graduation from Cassadaga High, she got a job in nearby Jamestown as a personal secretary to the general counsel for the American Voting Machine Corporation—a serious young man named Lloyd Dixon III, who eventually committed suicide. His father, who was later sent to prison, was president of AVM at the time and took such a shine to the new secretary that he hastened to marry her off to his other son, a callow youth named Peter, just back from the air force reserve, whose life would soon turn strange.

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.

—Judge Carl Harper

All the evidence in the case was trundled around the courthouse in a grocery cart that some bailiff had apparently borrowed from a local supermarket. It contained everything from family tax returns to the tin trumpet Roxanne allegedly slept with while trying to communicate with the dead. The cart was parked next to a Xerox machine in the county clerk’s office on all days when the court was not in session, and under the curious provisions of Florida’s much-admired public-records statute, it was open to public inspection at all times. The contents of the cart were shuffled and reshuffled by so many people that not even the judge could have made any sense of it by the time the trial was over, but journalists found it a source of endless amusement. You could go in there with a satchel of cold beers on a rainy afternoon and whoop it up for hours by just treating the cart like a grab bag and copying anything you wanted
for a dime a page. That was the press rate. The price to the general public was $1 a page, but nobody paid it, and the people in charge were more interested in collecting autographs than money. As long as we kept an honest page count, they left us alone.