Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (76 page)

In a nut, Herbert “Pete” Pulitzer rented the Best Piece of Ass in Palm Beach for six and a half years at a net cost of about $1,000 a month in alimony, and when it was over, he got the house and the children, along with everything else.

Roxanne was awarded about 10 percent of this, to be paid out over two years or until she remarries. The judge gave her two weeks to get out of the house where she’d been living for seven years, and Herbert took physical custody of the twins immediately.

Judge Harper had run the whole show with an evil glint in his eye, enduring a shitrain of perjury from both sides and day after day of relentless haggling and posturing by teams of Palm Beach lawyers and a circus parade of rich fools, dumb hustlers, and dope fiends who were all getting famous just for being in his courtroom—where smoking was not allowed, except for the judge, who smoked constantly.

That should have been the tip-off, but we missed it. The judge had made up his mind early on, and the rest was all show business, a blizzard of strange publicity that amused half the English-speaking world for a few months and in the end meant nothing at all.

Let the Trials Begin

Toward the end of the trial, it rained almost constantly. Logistics got difficult, and my suite overlooking the beach at the Ocean Hotel was lashed by wild squalls every night. It was a fine place to sleep, wild storms on the edge of the sea—warm blankets, good whiskey, color TV, roast beef hash and poached eggs in the morning . . .

Fat City, a hard place to wake up at six o’clock and drive across the
long, wet bridge to the courthouse in West Palm—just to get your name on a list so that you could spend the rest of the day locked into the bowels of some sleazy divorce trial.

But it had to be done. The trial was big news on the Gold Coast, and even the common folk were concerned.

One morning, when I got there too late to make the list for a courtroom seat and too early to think straight, I found myself drifting aimlessly in a dimly lit bar on the fringes of the courthouse district—the kind of place where lawyers and bailiffs eat lunch and where the bartender has a machine pistol and the waitresses are all on probation, or maybe parole, for one reason or another . . .

The bartender was trying to find limes for a Bloody Mary when I asked him what he thought about the Pulitzer divorce case.

He stiffened, then leaned quickly across the bar to seize my bicep, wrapping his long, gray fingers around my arm like tentacles, and he said to me: “You know what I think? You know what it makes me feel like?”

“Well . . .” I said, “not really. I only came in here to have a drink and read the newspaper until my trial breaks for lunch and—”

“Never mind your goddamn trial!” he shouted, still squeezing my arm and staring intently into my eyes—not blinking, no humor.

I jerked out of his grasp, unsettled by the frenzy.

“It’s not the goddamned Pulitzers!” he shouted. “It’s nothing personal, but I know how those people behave, and I know how it makes me feel.”

“Fuck off!” I snapped. “Who cares how you feel?”

“Like a goddamn animal!” he screamed. “Like a
beast
. I look at this scum and I look at the way they live and I see those shit-eating grins on their faces,
and I feel like a dog took my place
.”

“What?” I said.

“It’s a term of art,” he replied, shooting his cuffs as he turned to deal with the cash register.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You are now a Doctor of Torts.”

He stiffened again and backed off.

“Torts?” he said. “What do you mean,
torts
?”

I leaned over the bar and smacked him hard on the side of his head.

“
That’s
a tort,” I said. Then I tossed him a handful of bills and asked
for a cold beer to go. The man was slumped back on his rack of cheap bottles, breathing heavily. “You whoreface bastard,” he said. “I’ll kill you.”

I reached over and grabbed him by the flesh on his cheek.

“Where
is
your dog, swinesucker? I want to see the dog that did this thing to you. I want to
kill
that dog.” I snapped him away from me, and he fell back on the duckboards.

“Get out!” he screamed. “
You’re
the one who should be on trial in this town! These Pulitzers are
nothing
compared to monsters like you.”

“I’ll be back,” I said, lifting a small can of Mace out of my pocket and squirting it at him. “You’d better find a dog to take
your
place before you see me again—because I’m going to come back here and rip your nuts right off your ugly goddamn body.”

The man was still screaming as I got in my car and drove off. People in the street stopped to stare—but when he begged them for help, they laughed at him.

He was a Doctor of Torts, but in the end it didn’t matter. A dog had taken his place anyway.

Why Would They Testify Against Me?

Roxanne is a star now. She was on the cover of
People
and a featured celebrity guest on network TV shows like
Good Morning America
. The Best Piece of Ass in Palm Beach is a curious case these days: from the ashes of scandal and defeat, she has emerged as a cult figure of sorts, a kind of National Bitch for the Eighties.

The courts have yet to make themselves or even the law comfortably clear with regard to Roxanne’s status as a public figure in terms of libel law, so I think we should watch this aspect of the story with a keen eye. Remember Mary Alice Firestone. But my own working guess is that the courts will continue to kick the shit out of Roxanne at every opportunity. Her own lawyer made her a public figure when he deposed Herbert and got all that buzzword-headline talk about cocaine and lesbians and trumpets, which he then leaked to the
Miami Herald
.

“Ten pounds,” she said. “That’s how much I would have to take off.” We were talking about the possibility of her doing a nude spread for one of the men’s magazines, something on the order of a Rita Jenrette appearance in
Playboy
, with a little less leg. Dark humor, and it was out of the question, of course, until the trial was over. What would that horny old bastard of a judge say if she suddenly turned up in a naked centerfold in some skin magazine on sale in the courthouse newsstand?

What indeed? There is much in the evidence to suggest, in fact, that the judge would not even have blinked. He had seen all he needed to see of Roxanne Pulitzer at that point, and a handful of naked pictures wasn’t going to make much difference either way. She had already made her personal impression on the court, and it was not one that she and her lawyers had hoped for.

The language of Harper’s final judgment in the now infamous Palm Beach divorce case of
Pulitzer v. Pulitzer
left little doubt that he had taken one long look at Roxanne and concluded that she was a raging slut, a homosexual adulteress so addicted to drugs and drink as to pose a direct threat to the welfare of her own children, who were removed at once from her custody.

The decision stripped Roxanne Pulitzer naked in a way that no
Playboy
or
Penthouse
photographer would want to put on film. The message was clear: let this be a lesson to all gold diggers.

The Death of Rock & Roll

Long after the Pulitzer divorce case was finally over—after the verdict was in and there were no more headlines, and the honor of Palm Beach had been salvaged by running Roxanne out of town; after all the lawyers had been paid off and the disloyal servants had been punished and reporters who covered the trial were finally coming down from the long-running high that the story had been for so long that some of them suffered withdrawal symptoms when it ended ... Long after this, I was still brooding darkly on the case, still trying to make a higher kind of sense of it.

I have a fatal compulsion to find a higher kind of sense in things that
make no sense at all. We are talking about hubris, delusions of wisdom and prowess that can only lead to trouble.

Or maybe we are talking about cocaine. That thought occurred to me more than once in the course of the Pulitzer divorce trial. Cocaine is the closest thing to instant hubris on the market these days, and there is plenty of it around. Any fool with an extra $100-bill in his pocket can whip a gram of cocaine into his head and make sense of just about anything.

Ah, yes. Wonderful. Thank you very much. I see it all very clearly now. These bastards have been lying to me all along. I should never have trusted them in the first place. Stand aside. Let the big dog eat.

Take my word for it, folks. I know how these things work.

In the end it was basically a cocaine trial, which it had looked to be from the start. There was no real money at stake: Peter Pulitzer ended up paying more money to lawyers, accountants, “expert witnesses,” and other trial-related bozos than Roxanne would have happily settled for if the case had never gone to court in the first place. A few of the reporters covering the trial sat around a gray Formica table in the Alibi Lounge during one of the lunch breaks and figured out that the trial had cost Pulitzer about a half-million dollars in real money and perhaps a million more down the line, for no good reason at all. Here was a man who normally earned almost $700,000 a year just by answering his phone a few hours a day and paying a secretary to open his mail—something like $60,000 a month just to mind his own store, as it were—who somehow got himself whipped into such a hellish public frenzy that he didn’t even have a bed to sleep in except on his boat for at least a year, and he was spending all his time raving crazily at his own lawyers at $150 an hour instead of taking care of business, which was naturally going to pieces, because all the people who worked for him, from his accountants and psychiatrists all the way down to his gardeners and deckhands, were going mad from fear and confusion and constant legal harassment by vicious lawyers and always worried about saying something by accident that might get them either fired or locked up for perjury, and in the midst of all that he let one of his hired dingbats come into court with a financial statement so careless and flagrant and arrogant that the simple
fact of his filing it would have been cause for public outrage almost anywhere else in America except in Palm Beach County. There are a lot of people in this country who spend $1 million a year, and some of them pay no income tax at all. Nelson Rockefeller was one of them, for at least one year in the late Sixties or early Seventies, and there were two other years around that same time when he paid less than I did . . .

Epilogue: The Song of the Gilded Swine

It is to the poet a thing of awe to find that his story is true.

—Isak Dinesen

I am living the Palm Beach life now, trying to get the feel of it: royal palms and raw silk, cruising the beach at dawn in a red Chrysler convertible with George Shearing on the radio and a head full of bogus cocaine and two beautiful lesbians in the front seat beside me, telling jokes to each other in French . . .

We are on our way to an orgy, in a mansion not far from the sea, and the girls are drinking champagne from a magnum we brought from Dunhills, the chic and famous restaurant. There is a wet parking ticket flapping under the windshield wiper in front of me, and it bores me. I am giddy from drink, and the lesbians are waving their champagne glasses at oncoming police cars, laughing gaily and smoking strong marijuana in a black pipe as we cruise along Ocean Boulevard at sunrise, living our lives like dolphins . . .

The girls are naked now, long hair in the wind and perfumed nipples bouncing in the dull blue light of the dashboard, white legs on the red leather seats. One of them is tipping a glass of champagne to my mouth as we slow down for a curve near the ocean and very slowly and stylishly lose the rear end at seventy miles an hour and start sliding sideways with a terrible screeching of rubber past Roxanne Pulitzer’s house, barely missing the rear end of a black Porsche that protrudes from her driveway . . .

The girls shriek crazily and spill champagne on themselves, and the
radio is playing “The Ballad of Claus von Bülow,” a song I wrote last year with Jimmy Buffett and James Brown and which makes me nine cents richer every time it gets played on the radio, in Palm Beach or anywhere else.