5
Friday, January 14, 1933
etar 'E udoinilliy-dloiiy Etaainiinie
axed
It is something of a rule, recognized by almost every
one, that people are responsible for their own actions.
Tlus is true in both law and psychiatry but not, it appears,
in Palm Beach County, where a judge settled the noto
rious Pultizer divorce trial by finding Peter Pulitzer
responsible neither for his wife's behavior nor even his
own. He got the cluldren and she got the gate.
The judge, Carl Harper, pinned something of a scar
let letter on the rambunctious Roxanne, holding her to
Richard
Cohen
a standard of conduct that not only had precious little
to do with her qualities as a mother, but one that her
former husband himself could not have met. Neverthe
less, Peter got sole custody of the five-year-old twins
and the legal equivalent of a sterling reference.
It is no easy chore to take the side of the former
Mrs. Pulitzer. Witnesses testified that she made love with
a handyman, a French baker, a Grand Prix driver and
another woman - a millionaire, but still a woman. In
addition (and presumbly in her spare time) she dragged
her husband to discotheques, kept him up until dawn and
engaged in seances during which - and for reason I
think I prefer not to know - she took a trumpet to bed.
At the trial, Peter Pulitzer said he took up cocaine
just to keep going although at his age and with that
schedule not even liquid oxygen would have sufficed. He
evidently lacked her energy, not to mention her Borgia
like tastes, but physical stamina was the least of his
problems. His problem was that he either chose to share
some of her lifestyle or acquieced to her demands.
Either way, the word "no" was apparently sparingly
used. ci
Consider for a moment that Peter Pulitzer admitted
taking cocaine and marijuana - to please her. Consider
that he went to the discos. Consider also that he admitted
joining his wife and another woman in bed and consider
finally that if, as the Freudians believe, there are no acci
dents, then this marriage was not one, either. Instead,
until things got out of hand, it was probably a meeting
of the minds.
And consider that Peter Pulitzer was not one of the
Pulitzer cluldren - too young to know better - and not
even the junior partner in the marriage. He was - and
is - a man in advanced middle age, 21 years older than
his wife. Nevertheless, he financed and participated in
what he described as her lifestyle, although just not to
the degree she did. One wonders if it was his morals or
simply his ace that governed his temperance.
But as far as the judge was concerned, none of this
seemed to matter. Peter Pulitzer's behavior was just
hunky-dory while Roxanne's was despicable. The judge
was just half right. But he was totally wrong in thinking
that Roxanne's late-night shenanigans necessarily meant
she was a bad mother - or, at the very least, a worse
mother than Peter Pulitzer was a father. In fact, we have
the testimony of the nanny (no day-care in Palm Beach),
that Roxanne was a good mother. There was no testimony
that she abused or neglected them - or made them
suffer.
What did suffer, though, was the concept that men
and women should be judged equally. Instead, the judge -admittedly
given an awful choice - lambasted Roxanne,
quoted a country-western song to characterize her finan
cial demands ("She got the gold mine, I got the shaft")
and felt nothing but sympathy for Peter when he saw
"the . . . painful hurt and frustrating concern exuding
from his doleful eyes and aging face" - a face, inciden
tally, that had been lifted.
So completely did the judge side with Peter that he
gave him sole - not joint - custody of the children. As
for Roxanne, he gave her the label of "gross marital mis
conduct" - as if Peter's coke sniffing, pot-smoking,
disco-dancing, menage-a-troising was coerced at gun
point or that the man, at 52, had slipped into senility.
Whatever Pulitzer's reasons - love, weakness or just
plain sloth - he did what he did and should, like anyone
else, have been held accountable for it. It took the sexism
of the judge to make him into w hat he was - an innocent
victim. Peter Pulitzer made his own bed. It's nobody's
fault but his own that he found a trumpet in it.
(c) 1933, The Washington Post Company
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