The Beautiful and the Damned

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.

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