Divorce Pulitzer-style: the wild side of high society
Florida has plenty of small towns, but one is famous above all the rest: Palm Beach (pop. 9,700) is a plush, pastel resort for the very rich. Florida also has plenty of divorces: 75,000 last year, more than any other state but California and Texas. But the divorce trial under way at the Palm Beach County courthouse has, like the town, achieved an overcharged notoriety. For starters there is a prize surname: Herbert ("Peter") Pulitzer Jr., 52, who filed suit to dissolve his six-year marriage to the former Roxanne Dixon, nee Ulrich. Peter is one of Newspaper Publisher Joseph Pulitzer's flock of grandchildren. He has money and local roots old and deep enough to prompt invitations to the oligarchs' parties and all the charity balls. Then there are the grounds for the divorce action. So far Pulitzer or his witnesses have testified that Roxanne, 31, went to bed with a local real estate salesman, a French baker, a Belgian race-car driver, the beautiful young wife of a handsome old Kleenex heir, an alleged drug dealer and a supernatural trumpet. That's right, trumpet. There are charges of drug use. And menages a trois. And incest. And death threats. "It doesn't sound very American or normal," admits a rich young acquaintance of the Pulitzers, a Palm Beach resident for more than 20 years. "But it's Palm Beach. Palm Beach is not very normal in itself."
Indeed not, but the Pulitzers at least seem to be fighting over the customary prerogatives: money and child custody. Roxanne, who was unemployed and living in a mobile home before she met Peter in 1974, wants a good chunk of his fortune (he owns citrus groves and hotels). He says he has only $2.5 million; she reckons it to be $25 million. Just her basic living expenses, she claims, will amount to some $246,000 a year. Some prominent items: $25,000 for vacations, $12,000 for entertainment, $18,000 for her clothes, another $18,000 to dress Twins Maclean and Zachary, 5, and $3,000 to buy the birthday presents "Mack" and "Zack" are obliged to give their Palm Beach playmates. Peter Pulitzer, athletic and severely good-looking, hopes to convince Circuit Court Judge Carl Harper that Roxanne is a wastrel unfit to raise the boys.
Dad does not claim to be unswervingly wholesome. He admits that he sometimes joined his wife in the use of cocaine. He denies, however, her charge that he once flew a load of marijuana from the Bahamas to Florida on board his plane. He also said in pretrial testimony that twice he joined in a drugs-and-sex frolic with Roxanne and Jacqueline Kimberly, 32, the third wife of James Kimberly, 76, an heir to the papermaking Kimberly-Clark fortune. But most of the time, according to Peter, his wife and Mrs. Kimberly carried on their love affair without him. Roxanne claims that two years ago, Peter gave Jacquie a gift-wrapped ounce of cocaine (value: $2,000) for Christmas. In a pretrial deposition Peter denied it and suggested that Roxanne was the source of the coke.