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Jacquie Kimberly, meanwhile, denies any sexual involvement with Roxanne or Peter in any permutation. "It's so ludicrous," she told the Miami Herald. "Pulitzer is definitely deranged and desperate for the almighty buck. How can one take him seriously?" The Kimberlys met when she was 17, and seven years ago, they came close to divorcing. Both Jacquie Kimberly and Sportsman James Kimberly, who affects a single earring, have been subpoenaed to testify. Says Jacquie: "It's fortunate for me that my husband is such a strong, secure person." At least "in our fight," she adds, "no one else was involved."
In the present fight, it sometimes seems that no one is uninvolved. Liza Pulitzer Leidy, 26, one of Peter's three children by his first marriage (to Lilly Pulitzer), was dragged in by Roxanne, who alleged that father and daughter had had a sexual encounter in Europe in 1972. The putative incest allegedly occurred two years before Roxanne and Peter met, and both principals deny any such intimacy. Rather, according to Leidy, her stepmother Roxanne made an untoward advance in 1979 after the two had sniffed cocaine in the bath room of a West Palm Beach disco. Testified Leidy: "She said that if I ever felt I wanted a lesbian relationship [that] she wanted to be the one I got involved with."
Retainers had vivid recollections as well. The Pulitzer twins' former nanny, Estelle Godbout, testified last week about surfside lovemaking, in view of Mack and Zack between Roxanne and Race Car Driver, Jacky Ickx. Another servent, Johnny Capers, testified about trysts between Mrs. Pulitzer and two other men. One of her lovers, Peter Pulitzer charges is a drug dealer who threatened to kill him. For her part, Roxanne claims Peter threatened to shoot her if she did not check into a hospital for drug abuse therapy. She obeyed, and was hospitalized for five days last year.
Perhaps the most damning witness against Roxanne was her former "psychic adviser." Janice Nelson, who moved into the Pulitzers' house last March, six months after Peter had moved out to live aboard his 73-ft. yacht. The psychic says she ultimately decided that Peter was "being used unfairly by his wife," and in court last week Nelson described in detail Roxanne's sexual profligacy. Nelson assisted Roxanne is running periodic bedroom seances involving a dozen or more Pulitzer friends. On the foot of the bed were a black cape and a trumpet. Roxanne explained in court that she was hoping "the dead would speak to the living through the trumpet." Said Peter of the occult sessions: "I don't believe in spirit voices. I was kicked out for falling asleep." Judge Harper reluctantly allowed the trumpet to be admitted as evidance. "I don't know for the life of me how this is relevant," he said, and added: "I've made so many rulings in this case, if I haven't made an error by now I ought to get the Pulitzer Prise." —By Kurt Andersen.
Reported by Marilyn Alva/Palm Beach