Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (75 page)

I spent a lot of time poring over copies of the Pulitzers’ personal tax returns and financial ledgers submitted as evidence by the Pulitzer family accountants, and I have made a certain amount of wild sense of it all, but not enough.

I understood, for instance, that these people were seriously rich. Family expenditures for 1981 totaled $972,980 for a family of four: one man, one woman, two four-year-old children, and a nanny who was paid $150 a week.

That is a lot of money, but so what? We are not talking about poor people here, and $1 million a year for family expenditures is not out of line in Palm Beach. The rich have special problems. The Pulitzers spent $49,000 on basic “household expenditures” in 1981 and another $272,700 for “household improvements.” That is about $320,000 a year just to have a place to sleep and play house. There was another $79,600 listed for “personal expenses” and $79,000 for boat maintenance.

“Business” expenditures came in at $11,000, and there was no listing at all for taxes. As for “charity,” the Pulitzers apparently followed the example of Ronald Reagan that year and gave in private, so as not to embarrass the poor.

The 441 Club, or the Rich Are Different from Us

There was, however, one item that begged for attention. The figure was $441,000, and the column was “miscellaneous and unknown.”

Right. Miscellaneous and unknown: $441,000. And nobody in the courtroom even blinked. Here were two coke fiends who came into court because their marriage didn’t seem to be working and the children were getting nervous.

And the servants were turning weird and on some nights there were naked people running around on the lawn and throwing rocks at the upstairs bedroom windows and people with white foam in their mouths were jacking off
like apes in the hallways . . . people screeching frantically on the telephone at four in the morning about volcanic eruptions in the Pacific that were changing the temperature of the ocean forever and causing the jet stream to move south, which would bring on a new ice age—and that’s why neither one of us could get any sleep for two years, your Honor, and the sky was full of vultures so we called a plastic surgeon because her tits were starting to sag and my eyes didn’t look right anymore and then we drove halfway to Miami at 100 miles an hour before we realized it was Sunday and the hospital wouldn’t be open so we checked into the Holiday Inn with Jim’s wife and ye gods, your Honor, this woman is a whore and I can’t really tell you what it means because the children are in danger and we’re afraid they might freeze in their sleep and I can’t trust you anyway but what else can I do, I’m desperate—and, by the way, we spent $441,000 last year on things I can’t remember.

Welcome to cocaine country. White Line Fever. Bad craziness. What is a judge to make of two coke fiends who spent $441,000 last year on “miscellaneous and unknown”? The figure for the previous year was only $99,000, at a time when the Pulitzers’ cocaine use was admittedly getting out of hand. They said they were holding it down to just a few grams a week, at that point, a relatively moderate figure among the Brotherhood of the Bindle, but the evidence suggests a genuinely awesome rate of consumption—something like thirteen grams a day—by the time they finally staggered into divorce court and went public with the whole wretched saga.

The numbers are staggering, even in the context of Palm Beach. Thirteen grams a day would kill a whole family of polar bears.

Mandatory Death Penalty for Drunk Drivers;
Blame It on the Blow

With Mrs. Pulitzer sitting at a table only an arm’s length away, Cheatham went on to say, “Your Honor, Jamie told me Roxanne was the wildest, strongest, best piece of ass that he ever had in his whole life.”

—
New York Post
, October 4, 1982

That is not bad publicity in some towns, but it is definitely wrong for Palm Beach. And it is not the kind of thing most men want to read about their wives in the morning paper. A pimp might call it a windfall, but it is bad press with bells on for a fifty-two-year-old socialite known to big-time society page writers as a dashing millionaire sportsman from Palm Beach.

Or maybe not. History has judged F. Scott Fitzgerald harshly for allegedly saying to Hemingway that “the very rich are different from you and me,” but perhaps he was on to something Ernest couldn’t grasp.

What is the
real
price, for instance, of a seat on the Palm Beach Express? The island is more like a private club than a city. It is ten miles long and one mile wide, more or less, with a permanent population of 9,700. But these figures are too generous, and the real ones are lower by half. The real Palm Beach—the colony itself, the gilded nexus—is only about five miles long and three blocks wide, bordered on the east by a fine stretch of white beach and Atlantic Ocean, and on the west by palm trees, private piers, and million-dollar boathouses on the Intra-coastal Waterway. There is North Palm Beach and South Palm Beach and the vast honky-tonk wasteland of West Palm Beach on the mainland, but these are not the people we’re talking about. These are servants and suckfish, and they don’t really matter in the real Palm Beach, except when they have to testify.

The Rich Have Problems Everywhere

That is the weak reed, a cruel and incurable problem the rich have never solved—how to live in peace with the servants. Sooner or later, the maid has to come in the bedroom, and if you’re only paying her $150 a week, she is going to come in hungry, or at least curious, and the time is long past when it was legal to cut their tongues out to keep them from talking.

The servant problem is the Achilles’ heel of the rich. The only solution is robots, but we are still a generation or so away from that, and in the meantime, it is just about impossible to hire a maid who is smart enough to make a bed but too dumb to wonder why it is full of naked people every morning. The gardener will not be comfortable with the sight of rope ladders hanging
from the master-bedroom windows when he mows the lawn at noon, and any chauffeur with the brains to work a stick shift on a Rolls will also understand what’s happening when you wake him up at midnight and send him across the bridge to a goat farm in Loxahatchee for a pair of mature billys and a pound of animal stimulant.

Nakedness is a way of life in Palm Beach, and the difference between a picnic and an orgy is not always easy to grasp. If a woman worth $40 million wants to swim naked in the pool with her billy goat at four in the morning, it’s nobody’s business but hers. There are laws in Florida against sexual congress with beasts, but not everybody feels it is wrong.

“My roommate fucks dogs at parties,” said a sleek blond in her late twenties who sells cashmere and gold gimcracks in a stylish boutique on Worth Avenue. “So what? Who gets hurt by it?”

I shrugged and went back to fondling the goods on the shirt rack. The concept of victimless crimes is well understood in Palm Beach, and the logic is hard to argue. No harm, no crime. If a pretty girl from Atlanta can sleep late in the morning, have lunch at the Everglades Club, and make $50,000 tax free a year fucking dogs in rich people’s bedrooms on weekends, why should she fear the police? What is the difference between bestiality and common sodomy? Is it better to fuck swine at the Holiday Inn or donkeys in a penthouse on Tarpon Island? And what’s wrong with incest, anyway? It takes two hundred years of careful inbreeding to produce a line of beautiful daughters, and only a madman would turn them out to strangers. Feed them cocaine and teach them to love their stepsisters—or even their fathers and brothers, if that’s what it takes to keep ugliness out of the family.

Look at the servants. They have warts and fat ankles. Their children are too dumb to learn and too mean to live, and there is no sense of family continuity. There is a lot more to breeding than teaching children good table manners, and a lot more to being rich than just spending money and wearing alligator shirts. The real difference between the Rich and the Others is not just that “they have more money,” as Hemingway noted, but that money is not a governing factor in their lives, as it is with people who work for a living. The truly rich are born free, like dolphins; they will never feel hungry, and their credit will never be questioned. Their daughters will be debutantes and their sons will go to prep schools, and if their cousins are junkies and lesbians, so what? The breeding of humans is still an imperfect art, even with all the advantages.

Where are the Aryan thoroughbreds that Hitler bred so carefully in the early days of the Third Reich? Where are the best and brightest children of Bel Air and Palm Beach?

These are awkward questions in some circles, and the answers can be disturbing. Why do the finest flowers of the American Dream so often turn up in asylums, divorce courts, and other gray hallways of the living doomed? What is it about being born free and rich beyond worry that makes people crazy?

Nobody on the Palm Beach Express seemed very interested in that question. Instead, the community rallied around poor Pete Pulitzer when the deal started going down—even through eighteen days of weird courtroom testimony that mortified his friends and shocked half the civilized world. The most intimate aspects of his wild six-year marriage to an ambitious young cheerleader from Buffalo were splayed out in big headlines on the front pages of newspapers in New York, Paris, and London. Total strangers from places like Pittsburgh and Houston called his wife at home on the telephone, raving obscene proposals. Vicious lawyers subpoenaed his most private belongings and leaked whatever they pleased to giggling reporters. Any tourist with a handful of dimes could buy Xerox copies of his personal tax returns or even his medical records for ten cents a page in the Palm Beach County Courthouse. His privacy was violated so totally that it ceased to exist. At the age of fifty-two, with no real warning at all, Herbert Pulitzer became a very public figure. Every morning he would wake up and go downtown with his lawyers and hear himself accused of everything from smuggling drugs to degrading the morals of minors and even committing incest with his own daughter.

The only charge Judge Harper took seriously was Roxanne’s “adultery,” which was denied so many times by so many people that it came to be taken for granted.

No adultery was ever proved, as I recall, but in the context of all the other wild charges, it didn’t seem to matter. With all the vile treachery among friends and cheap witchcraft and champagne troilism all day and all night in front of the servants while decent people were asleep or at least working at real jobs for sane amounts of money, what mainly emerged from the testimony was a picture of a lifestyle beyond the
wildest and lewdest dreams of anything on
Dallas
or
Dynasty
or even
Flamingo Road
.

Nowhere in the record of the Pulitzer trial is there any mention of anybody who had to go to work in the morning. There were nannies and gardeners, hired boat captains and part-time stockbrokers and a Grand Prix driver and a French baker and at least one full-time dope dealer. But there was nobody who ever had to get time off from work to come in and testify.

I did the dirty boogie but they called it something else.

—Terry McDonell

He told me that if I didn’t sign those documents, he would take my children. He said he had the power, the money, and the name. He said he would bury me.

—Roxanne Pulitzer in court, November 15, 1982

The husband was never pressed to confirm that quote, if only because of the general gag order imposed by Judge Harper on all parties involved in the trial, in order to prevent any loose talk with journalists until he made his decision. The order was routinely violated, but not flagrantly, and in the end it didn’t make much difference. The judge performed the burial for his own reasons, which he explained in a brutal nineteen-page final opinion that destroyed Roxanne’s case like a hurricane. In the end she got even less than her lawyer, Joe Farish, whose fee was reduced by two-thirds. He got $102,500 for his efforts, and the wife came away with $2,000 a month for two years, no house, no children, a warning to get a job quick, and the right to keep her own personal jewelry and her own car. The whole package came to not much more than Pulitzer had spent on the day-to-day maintenance of his boats in 1981, which his accountants listed as $79,000.

The $441,000 the couple spent that year on “miscellaneous and unknown” was four times what the wife was awarded as a final settlement after six and a half years of marriage and two children.

It was nothing at all. A little more than $100,000 on paper and in fact less than $50,000. There are dentists all over Los Angeles who pay more alimony than that.

But we are not talking about dentists here. We are talking about a dashing millionaire sportsman from Palm Beach, the town’s most eligible bachelor—a wealthy jade of sorts who married an ex-cheerleader from the outskirts of Buffalo and took her to live sex shows and gave her jars of cocaine for Christmas.