The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (66 page)

But Mitchell, according to court papers, testified that he left behind

not only my clothing and various photographs, but all of my personal effects…books, papers, records…two to four file cabinets of personal materials…twelve binders of newspaper clippings and documents…voluminous papers relating to the hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Watergate, and the trial in the Southern District of New York,
United States v. Vesco, et al
[
sic
]…many bound and loose-leaf volumes containing complete records of various trials and hearings which were important to me…testimony before various congressional committees, private papers within the Justice Department, extensive personal correspondence accumulated during the years of private practice and with the government…speech materials…bank statements…various valuable pieces of jewelry…autographed pictures from several former presidents of the United States; various gifts bearing the presidential seal; [and] golf clubs.

Few of these items, including Mitchell’s official papers and correspondence from his years as attorney general, were ever recovered.
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Mitchell’s legal bills, meantime, were going through the roof. The lopsided terms of divorce in the 1970s, in which men were invariably held liable for all fees and debts their ex-wives incurred—combined with Martha’s particular talent for spending—quickly laid waste to the fortune Mitchell’s innovations on Wall Street had earned him. It was now clear that, as one of Martha’s lawyers noted, “both parties are obviously going to have to cut back in their means of living.” Mitchell offered to provide Martha with “a gracious and comfortable existence” amounting to $350 a week, which was in addition to his assumption of responsibility for “all [her] household and personal costs…charge accounts, credit cards, travel, entertainment and medical expenses.” In their first year of separation, he paid her $51,500, about $215,000 in current figures.
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But by the time his Watergate trial commenced, in October 1974, Mitchell’s patience, and bank account, had run out. He told the court Martha had “abused” his “largesse,” that due to “changed circumstances” and “severe debt obligation,” his “continuing ability to sustain [her] payments is now at an end.” Far from exercising the “expected self-imposed limitation” on her spending, Martha was burning Mitchell’s money faster than ever. Her monthly phone bills averaged $400 ($1,700 in current dollars), her dry-cleaning tab up to $600 ($2,500 today). On one occasion she stuck him with the bill for an Amtrak seat, along with the cost of three surrounding, unoccupied seats, to “insure her privacy.” She also demanded Mitchell absorb the cost of her personal secretary, a luxury she never enjoyed during their marriage.
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Though it pained him to bare such matters in public documents, Mitchell was forced to provide the court with detailed accountings of his rapidly diminishing finances. His income of $5,281 per week, he explained, consisted of weekly payments of $5,000 from Mudge Rose—an arrangement “based solely on an informal agreement, subject to termination at any time,” he warned—and $281 from accrued interest on municipal bonds. Mitchell then detailed his
weekly
expenditures: $630 for payments on an unsecured joint loan of $112,000; another $530 for insurance premiums; $500 for a Chase Manhattan Bank loan; $480 for carrying charges on the Fifth Avenue co-op, now occupied solely by Martha; $275 for interest on loans he took out against his insurance policies, worth a total of $257,000; and some $200 on various other charges. Then there was poor little Marty, whose tuition and board ran $3,600 a year, not counting clothing and medical needs. Finally, and not least of all, Mitchell had to bankroll his four-and-a-half-room dwelling at the Essex House; his own living expenses; a car and driver who performed “general household duties” for him; and all his and Martha’s taxes.

Additional details emerged, however, in pleadings by Mitchell’s attorney, Marvin Segal. While acknowledging Mitchell’s “total assets” were “appreciable,” Segal cautioned they were “encumbered” and did “not actually represent a financial picture…as generous as [Martha] claims.” Segal maintained that “any negative result in the District of Columbia,” where
U.S. v. Mitchell
was under way, would devastate the former attorney general’s “viability as a wage earner.” Already, he had shelled out $90,000 for lawyers’ fees (almost $380,000 in current figures), an exigency that had necessitated “further borrowing.”
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Mitchell’s continuing alimony payments to his first wife, two decades after their divorce and notwithstanding Bette’s remarriage, filled Martha with rage, and formed the basis of still another of her legal challenges. “It is a rather peculiar situation,” her lawyers argued, “where the defendant [Mitchell] will be paying…more alimony to his first wife who has remarried than to his present wife who is totally without funds.” Segal shot back that Martha seemed to have forgotten that the unusually steep alimony payments imposed under the terms of Mitchell’s first divorce “[had to] be accepted in order that the marriage to [Martha] could be undertaken.” Segal pleaded for the court to recognize the “almost certain eventuality” that Mitchell would go broke and to help the former attorney general avert “financial disaster” by forcing Martha to sell the Fifth Avenue property. Instead, on December 4, 1974, New York State Supreme Court Judge Manuel A. Gomez ruled Mitchell had to pay Martha a whopping $1,000 a week, retroactive to November 1.
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Despite the increasingly hostile tone the proceedings had acquired by the end of 1974, Mitchell calculated it would still be financially advantageous for him and Martha to file a joint tax return for the preceding year. Ironically, 1973 had shaped up as one of the most lucrative years of Mitchell’s legal career: Despite his indictment in the Vesco case in May, and his grilling before the Senate Watergate committee in July, Mitchell racked up $302,000 in fees, working mostly out of his old Broad Street office.

Without advising Mitchell, however, Martha had already filed her own tax return, attaching to her 1040 form a pitiable note she scrawled on yellow legal paper:

I may have other income which is taxable. I do not know the amount of this income. My husband has always prepared our joint income tax returns.

After being persuaded they could save $25,000 by filing jointly, Martha finally relented. The former attorney general signed their joint return and sent it off to the IRS on August 12, 1974, four days after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. For Mitchell, these were unbearably dark days; indeed, the Internal Revenue Service soon informed him he was being audited.
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While her father stood
trial in Washington, Marty Mitchell commuted between boarding school in Connecticut and the Essex House, where they spent weekends together. Only in “sporadic instances” was Marty looked after by others, Mitchell argued in court, and in such cases the supervisory figures were “old family friends” or “parents of contemporaries.” The child herself, he said, had “repeatedly expressed the desire to be with [him], and specifically not be under the aegis of [Martha Mitchell].” On the few occasions where she saw her mother in those days, Marty rebuked her for causing Mitchell so many problems: “It’s your fault that Daddy’s in trouble.”
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Certainly the most sensational charge in the saga of the Mitchells’ divorce was Martha’s claim of physical abuse at her ex-husband’s hands. In court papers she charged that Mitchell, on or about November 1, 1972, “punched [her] with a clenched fist in the mouth, causing great physical discomfort, pain and disfigurement.” Winzola McLendon recounted the incident in her 1979 biography,
Martha
. “Soon after dinner on November 1, my telephone rang. It was Martha.”

“Winnie, come help me,” she screamed. “Please help me!” “Where are you?” “The Watergate! Hurry!” I heard her shout at someone, “Yes! I called Winnie and she’s coming over!” The phone went dead.

My husband, Navy Captain John Benjamin McLendon, drove me to the Mitchells’ apartment. I went up alone and John Mitchell answered the door. He looked terribly annoyed. With his uncombed hair and flush face, his white dress shirt opened at the neck and the tail partly out, he also looked like he’d been in a brawl. The shirt was wet, too. But I couldn’t tell if it were from perspiration or if something had been thrown at him.

I asked, “Where’s Martha?” He answered by calling to her, “Your
friend
is here.” Martha, her face tear-stained and blotched, walked down the stairs, wearing slacks and a rumpled sleeveless overblouse that didn’t hide large red marks on her arms. “Well, I’ll leave ‘you two girls’ alone,” John Mitchell said, sarcastically, before stomping up the steps. Martha said, “Thank you, Winnie, for coming,” and started to cry. Only then did I see that one of her front teeth was out.

“I wanted to get her out of there,” McLendon wrote, but Martha said no: “Just stay with me until I know he’s sound asleep.” Asked why she stayed with Mitchell if he beat her, Martha replied, “I have to.” Mitchell hadn’t exactly punched her tooth out, she explained: “The tooth isn’t
out
. It’s the cap he knocked off. All of my teeth are capped. John Mitchell didn’t like my teeth from the day he met me. He made me have them capped.”

With Martha’s consent, McLendon summoned her husband, the navy captain, and the three talked for four hours, calming Martha down. During this time Martha placed several unanswered calls to an unidentified friend “in suburban New York” (possibly Ken or Peggy Ebbitt in Bronxville) and confided she was “scared to death” Mitchell was going to institutionalize her. By midnight she was feeling “all right,” rejecting pleas she stay at the McLendons’, or that they stay with her; in fact Martha “insisted we go,” McLendon recalled.
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Absent any basis to challenge McLendon’s account, the scene she found at the Mitchell apartment that night bespoke a physical confrontation that occurred shortly before her arrival. If history offers any guide, however, Martha most likely lunged at her husband and hurt herself in the process. She was prone to physical outbursts: the altercation with her son; the smashing of the chair over John Alexander’s head; her unfortunate swing at Steve King; a brazen smack to Marty’s face, right in front of the nuns at the child’s Sacred Heart school; and the occasion outside the Mitchells’ New York building, in June 1973, when she cursed and struck a female reporter three times.

Finally, there was Martha’s reply to a reporter’s question, in September 1973, about whether Mitchell tried to force her into psychiatric care. She called that “a goddamned lie” and added: “I never had a fight with him.” This was ten months after the alleged incident.
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Martha made her last
public appearance at a party at the Museum of Modern Art in September 1975. There she encountered a record producer and playfully asked why he hadn’t invited her to record. “I didn’t know you sang,” he responded. With that she launched into a rendition of “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” “She was good,” the producer marveled, “right on pitch.”
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The rest of Martha’s life was given over to acute pain of body and soul. “Martha Mitchell Has Blood Disease,” the
Times
reported three weeks later; she had been undergoing tests for a month in Northern Virginia Doctor’s Hospital. She was suffering from multiple myeloma, a rare and extremely painful form of cancer, diagnosed in less than 8,000 cases a year and cause unknown, in which the patient’s bone marrow produces excessive numbers of white blood cells, creating multiple tumors in the marrow. The
Times
reported the disease was “uniformly fatal” the
New York Post
said Martha’s case was discovered at a “fairly advanced” stage. She had already suffered two cracked ribs and two fractured vertebrae.
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The following month, she entered New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for treatment and remained there for seven months, with Mitchell reportedly paying the bills. Though Martha’s few remaining friends cursed him for choosing to “ignore” her in these dark final days, the fact was she barred him from visiting and forbade her doctors from updating him. Peter Fleming, Mitchell’s attorney in the Vesco trial, recalled him calling “with emotion in his voice” and asking Fleming to find out what he could about Martha’s condition: “It was evident…that he cared about her.”
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