The Family: A Question of Custody

THE FAMILY

At trial’s end, there was a brief vignette that presaged what was to come. Dr. James Slater Murphy threw his arms around his lawyer and kissed him on the cheek. Mrs. Nelson (“Happy”) Rockefeller, handsome second wife of the Governor of New York, stood in the corridor smoking cigarette after cigarette. “You are nervous!” said a deputy sheriff sympathetically. She was.

Last week Happy learned that her premonitions were all too justified. New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph F. Gagliardi denied Happy’s suit to regain custody of her children, ruled that all four should stay with their father.

Health & Personality. The drama began with the terms Happy accepted 18 months ago as a price for her divorce from her virologist husband. Then, in proceedings behind closed doors in an Idaho court and with a sealed agreement, she relinquished custody of the children. She was obviously aware that as long as she was happily remarried, while Dr. Murphy remained unmarried, neither public opinion nor the law would view sympathetically any effort to take the children away from him.

Last June, when Dr. Murphy married Victoria Thompson, one of the children’s teachers at the Chapin School, Happy plucked up hope. Whether or not her husband’s dashed hopes of being a presidential candidate had anything to do with it is an interesting speculation. In any case, two days after the nomination of Barry Goldwater in San Francisco, Happy brought suit to change the custody arrangement, alleging that the health and personality of at least one of the children were being affected. (The Rockefellers—who now have an infant son of their own—had not returned four-year-old Malinda to the Murphys after all four children stayed with them during the Murphys’ honeymoon.) As chance would have it, the man Happy’s suit came before was an old Rockefeller appointee. Justice Gagliardi, 52, had been named to his first judgeship in Westchester County by Governor Rockefeller, and later, as supreme court justice, had waived the obligatory three-day waiting period between blood test and wedding to expedite the Governor’s marriage to Happy.

Witnesses & Principals. The judge imposed total secrecy and the kind of decorum that the Rockefellers can still command in an egalitarian society. Friends and relatives trooped into the courthouse in White Plains. The Murphys’ housekeeper and the Rockefellers’ children’s nurse made their appearance in turn, but reporters were reduced to watching them emerge from closed limousines. Occasionally, an enterprising reporter caught glimpses of the witnesses and principals through the windows, performing as in a dumb show. Twice the Murphy children—James, 13, Margaretta, 11, Carol, 8, and Malinda, 4—were shepherded into the judge’s closed chambers.

Judge Gagliardi spent three hours talking to the children, with neither parent present. Dr. Murphy was subjected to a grueling eight hours of examination and cross-examination by Happy’s attorney, during which he became visibly angry. Happy was on the stand for seven hours. She was not happy when her first cousin, Mrs. Richard S. Parker, turned up to testify for Dr. Murphy and pointedly ignored her in order to sit next to Dr. Murphy’s new wife. In fact, all during the trial Happy seemed a rather forlorn figure. Governor Rockefeller apparently considered it inappropriate to accompany her, and only occasionally did Happy have a relative or close friend with her to lend moral support.

Obviously, little Malinda was the most difficult and perilous problem. Judge Gagliardi was well aware that in recent practice courts have decided that a child under five belongs with the mother, unless she is drastically unqualified. He proposed that a psychiatrist called in to testify for Dr. Murphy examine Malinda. Reporters caught a glimpse of mother and child as Happy arrived at the psychiatrist’s office from the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills holding Malinda in her lap.

No Change. After all the evidence was in. Judge Gagliardi took two weeks to deliberate. His decision reflected his awareness that any choice was painful, and would be made between the conflicting loyalties of two people of good will. Both parents were well qualified to raise the children, he declared. But “the court finds that neither the health nor the welfare of the children is being adversely affected by reason of the fact that the father has custody of them. He has succeeded very well in his role, and the children are normal, healthy and contented. The evidence adduced does not warrant a change in the custodial arrangement which the parties themselves concluded.”

As for Malinda, “the youngest daughter shall be returned to the father,” the judge directed. “The evidence overwhelmingly establishes that all four children should be kept together as a unit. This is where their great strength lies, and it would be a mistake of the first magnitude to separate any one of them from the others.”

In a concession to Happy, the judge declared that “the lack of specific visitation details has been a constant source of annoyance to all concerned, and is, to some degree, detrimental to the children’s well-being.” He gave Murphy until Oct. 15 to work out a reasonable visitation agreement with Happy, or the judge would write one for him. The terms of this agreement will determine Happy’s decision whether or not to appeal Judge Gagliardi’s ruling. But legal authorities agree that the higher courts rarely reverse a presiding judge in a custody case.

Estates & Brownstones. When it was over, the two sides spoke only through counsel. Dr. Murphy’s lawyer said that “the decision completely vindicates all his acts to date.” If the Murphy children never live with the easy spaciousness the Rockefellers can command, they are scarcely condemned to squalor. Dr. Murphy, a descendant of Samuel Slater, the Rhode Island textile pioneer, is, well-to-do in his own right. Dr. Murphy’s father was head of the cancer-research laboratory of the Rockefeller Institute for 40 years.

Physically, the Murphys (and children) will live close to the Rockefellers, as their parents did for many years. The Murphy family has long had a comfortable summer house in Seal Harbor near the Rockefellers’ place on Mount Desert Island, Maine. (As a boy, Dr. Murphy was a particular chum of Nelson’s brother David, now board chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank.) About ten years ago, the Rockefellers sold Dr. Murphy 13 acres near their large estate in Pocantico Hills, up the Hudson River at Tarrytown, and Dr. Murphy built himself a handsome one-story house there in what might be described as Japanese modern.

Most of the year, the Murphys live in a comfortable brownstone town house on Manhattan’s 64th Street, just around a couple of corners from the present Rockefeller apartment. James Murphy is at Buckley School, the two older girls at Chapin, Malinda at Central Presbyterian Nursery School, and no parent can do better than that.

Happy’s lawyers simply described her as “deeply grieved.” Tangible symbol of that grief, and of the optimism that preceded it, was the Rockefellers’ addition of an entire children’s floor—complete with playroom, nurse’s quarters and library—to their Fifth Avenue apartment.