Well ...how’s that for equal time? It’s a hell of a lot more than you pompous big-time bullies ever even thought about giving me, and if you want to add anything else, there’s always the Letters to the Editor page in RS.... But the next time you whack some idle bystander in the chest with one of your deeply felt expert opinions, keep in mind that you might hit somebody who will want to insist on betting real money.
Some people write their novels and others roll high enough to live them, and some fools try to do both—but Ali can barely read, much less write, so he came to that fork in the road a long time ago, and he had the rare instinct to find that one seam in the defense that let him opt for a third choice: he would get rid of words altogether and live his own movie.
A brown Jay Gatsby—not black and with a head that would never be white: he moved from the very beginning with the same instinct that drove Gatsby—an endless fascination with that green light at the end of the pier. He had shirts for Daisy, magic leverage for Wolfsheim, a delicate and dangerously vulnerable Ali-Gatsby shuttle for Tom Buchanan, and no answers at all for Nick Carraway, the word junkie.
There are two kinds of counterpunchers in this world—one learns early to live by his reactions and quick reflexes—and the other, the one with a taste for high rolling, has the instinct to make an aggressor’s art of what is essentially the defensive, survivor’s style of the counterpuncher.
Muhammad Ali decided one day a long time ago, not long after his twenty-first birthday, that he was not only going to be King of the World on his own turf, but Crown Prince on everybody else’s ...
Which is very, very High Thinking—even if you can’t pull it off. Most people can’t handle the action on whatever they chose or have to call their own turf; and the few who can, usually have better sense than to push their luck any further.
That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer—he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.
Res ipsa loquitur.
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The Palm Beach Story
In 1982, after a few years of mostly false starts, failed stories, and missed deadlines, Hunter took an assignment from the magazine to cover what was shaping up to be the most scandalous and lurid divorce trial in recent history: Herbert “Peter” Pulitzer Jr. versus his estranged wife, Roxanne, in Palm Beach, Florida. “Big names in the mud, multiple sodomies, raw treachery, bad craziness—the Pulitzer gig had everything,” he wrote. Hunter embedded himself with the local culture of the idle rich, became mesmerized by both the details of the trial and what it seemed to represent (“What is a judge to make of two coke fiends who spent $441,000 last year on ‘miscellaneous and unknown’?”), and delivered a piece that announced his return to form. The fact that he became lifelong friends with Roxanne Pulitzer in the process—after describing her in the piece as like “a jaded Pan Am stewardess”—is a testament to Hunter’s legendary charm.
A Dog Took My Place
July 21, 1983
West Palm Beach, FLA., Dec. 28, 1982 (AP)—Herbert Pulitzer Jr., the millionaire publishing heir, won custody of his twin five-year-old sons today as a Circuit Court judge awarded less than $50,000 in alimony to Mr. Pulitzer’s wife, Roxanne.
Judge Carl Harper, citing “flagrant acts of adultery and other gross marital misconduct,” ordered the thirty-one-year-old Mrs. Pulitzer to move out of the couple’s lakefront home in Palm Beach, where she had maintained custody of the children since the separation. Judge Harper’s ruling came after an eighteen-day trial in which there had been testimony about cocaine abuse, extramarital affairs, incest, lesbianism, and late-night séances. The trial ended in November.
The decision was so aggressively harsh that even veteran courthouse reporters were shocked. “I couldn’t believe it,” one said afterward. “He whipped her like a dog.”
All history is gossip.
—Harold Conrad
There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days. Not even the rich feel safe from it, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can’t understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt. The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually means they are feeling anxious or confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.
That is the situation in Palm Beach these days, and the natives are not happy with it. There is trouble on all fronts. Profits are down, the whole concept of personal privacy has gone up for grabs, and the president might be a fool. That is not the kind of news these people want to hear, or even think about. Municipal bonds and dividend checks are the lifeblood of this town, and the flow shall not be interrupted for any reason.
Nor shall privacy be breached. The rich have certain rules, and these are two of the big ones: maintain the privacy and the pipeline at all costs—although not necessarily in that order—it depends on the situation, they say; and everything has its price, even women.
The autumn months are slow in Palm Beach. The mansions along Ocean Boulevard are closed up and shuttered for the hurricane season, which ends sometime in December, when the rich come back to the island.
That is when the season starts, the winter social calendar. From the Patrons Opera Guild Luncheon in November at the Colony Hotel, to the premiere of the Lannan Foundation Museum in early March, the action is almost continuous: white ties and golden slippers, charity balls at the Breakers, cotillion dances at the Bath and Tennis Club, and endless cocktail parties.
“Eighty percent of the world’s wealth is here during the season,” said a local decorator one night over dinner at Dunhills in the heart of the off-season. “It’s a very exciting scene to be part of.”
The autumn months are boring, he said. But it is a nice time to be here, if you don’t mind staying inside. The sea is wild, the beach is like Norway, and relentless monsoon rains lash the island day and night. Only servants go out in this kind of weather, and the only cars on the street are people taking care of business, for good or ill.
The business of Palm Beach is business, even on a rainy day in the off-season. Despite the town’s image of terminal leisure and luxury, the people who live here are very aware of their money, and they tend to watch it carefully. Displays of naked greed are frowned on, and business is done discreetly—or, failing that, in private. Some people sell real estate, some spend all day on the telephone, raving at their brokers and making $1,000 a minute on the stock market, and others buy fistfuls of speedy cocaine and spend their afternoons playing frantically with each other and doing their own kind of business.
There are hideous scandals occasionally—savage lawsuits over money, bizarre orgies at the Bath and Tennis Club, or some genuine outrage like a half-mad eighty-eight-year-old heiress trying to marry her teenage Cuban butler—but scandals pass like winter storms in Palm Beach, and it has been a long time since anybody got locked up for degeneracy in this town. The community is very tight, connected to the real world by only four bridges, and is as deeply mistrustful of strangers as any lost tribe in the Amazon.
The rich like their privacy, and they have a powerful sense of turf. God has given them the wisdom, they feel, to handle their own problems in their own way. In Palm Beach there is nothing so warped and horrible that it can’t be fixed, or at least tolerated, just as long as it stays in the family.
The family lives on the island, but not everybody on the island is family. The difference is very important, a main fact of life for the people who live here, and few of them misunderstand it. At least, not for long. The penalty for forgetting your place can be swift and terrible. I have friends in Palm Beach who are normally very gracious, but when word got out that I was in town asking questions about the Pulitzer divorce trial, I was shunned like a leper.
The Fastest Lane in the World
br /> That’s the way it was last fall at the start of Pulitzer v. Pulitzer, and not even the worst winter rains in forty years could explain why the town was so empty of locals when Palm Beach had a world-class spectacle to fill the dull days of the off-season.
The Miami Herald called it the nastiest divorce trial in Palm Beach history, a scandal so foul and far reaching that half the town fled to France or Majorca for fear of being dragged into it. People who normally stay home in the fall to have all their bedrooms redecorated or to put a new roof on the boathouse found reasons to visit Brazil. The hammer of Palm Beach justice was coming down on young Roxanne Pulitzer, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had married the town’s most eligible bachelor a few years back and was now in the throes of divorce.
The trial was making ugly headlines all over the world, and nobody wanted to testify. Divorce is routine in Palm Beach, but this one had a very different and dangerous look to it. The whole lifestyle of the town was suddenly on trial, and prominent people were being accused of things that were not fashionable.
Some of the first families of Palm Beach society will bear permanent scars from the Pulitzer v. Pulitzer proceedings, a maze of wild charges and counterchargers ranging from public incest and orgies to witchcraft, craziness, child abuse, and hopeless cocaine addiction.
The Filthy Rich in America were depicted as genuinely filthy, a tribe of wild sots and sodomites run amok on their own private island and crazed all day and all night on cocaine. The very name Palm Beach, long synonymous with old wealth and aristocratic style, was coming to be associated with berserk sleaziness, a place where price tags mean nothing and the rich are always in heat, where pampered animals are openly worshipped in church and naked millionaires gnaw brassieres off the chests of their own daughters in public.
Fire in the Nuts
I arrived in Palm Beach on a rainy night in November, for no particular reason. I was on my way south to Miami, and then out to Nassau for a wedding. Black ties, big boats, high priests, fine linen, and fresh crab meat: a strange gathering of a strange clan, but it would not be happening for two weeks, so I had some time to kill, and Miami, I felt, was not the place to do it. Two weeks on the loose in Miami can change a man’s life forever. It is the Hong Kong of the Western world, an extremely fast track for almost anybody, and dangerously fast for the innocent.
Anyway, I decided to stop in Palm Beach and have a look at the Pulitzer divorce proceedings, which were already infamous. The Denver Post, which I read for the sports, had carried enough bizarre headlines about the case to pique a layman’s interest. Big names in the mud, multiple sodomies, raw treachery, bad craziness—the Pulitzer gig had everything. It was clearly a story that a man in the right mood could have fun with.
And I was in that mood. I needed a carnival in my life: whoop it up with the rich for a while, drink gin, drive convertibles, snort cocaine, and frolic with beautiful lesbians. Never mind the story. It would take care of itself. It was ripe in every direction.
That is a dangerous attitude to take into anything serious. It mandates a quick hit, wild quotes, and big headlines. “The good old in-andout,” as they like to say in the trade. Take it all on the rise, skim the top of the news, and run with it: let the locals do the legwork. We are, after all, professionals.
Divorce court is not a prestige beat in the newspaper business. It is a cut above writing obituaries or covering the Rotary Club, but it is basically a squalid assignment. Too much time in the courthouse can drive even cub reporters to drink. The trials are tedious, the testimony is ugly, and the people you meet on the job tend to have incurable problems.
The Palm Beach County Courthouse is not much different from others all over the country. It is just another clearinghouse on the street of broken dreams, a grim maze of long corridors full of people who would rather not be there. Young girls wearing neck braces sit patiently on wooden benches, waiting to testify against young men wearing handcuffs and jail denims. Old women weep hysterically in crowded elevators. Wild Negroes with gold teeth are dragged out of courtrooms by huge bailiffs. Elderly jurors are herded around like criminals, not knowing what to expect.
Only lawyers can smile in this atmosphere. They rush from one trial to another with bulging briefcases, followed by dull-eyed clerks carrying cardboard boxes filled with every kind of evidence, from rusty syringes to human fingers and sworn depositions from the criminally insane with serious grudges to settle.
The Pulitzer divorce trial was held in a small hearing room at the end of a hall on the third floor. The only furniture in the room was a long wooden table, a dozen chairs, and two coffee tables that were quickly converted for press seating. There was no room for spectators, and the only way to get one of the nine press seats was to be there in person at seven o’clock in the morning—or even earlier, on some days—and put your name on the list.
It was an odd situation, considering that the story unfolding inside was making daily headlines all over the world, but Judge Carl Harper said he liked it just fine. He was not especially fond of reporters anyway, and he clearly viewed the whole trial as a shame on the human race.
Under Florida law, however, he was compelled to allow one stationary TV camera in the courtroom so that the trial could be filmed for the public and watched on closed circuit in a room across the hall, where anybody who didn’t feel like squatting in the courtroom all day could watch the proceedings in relative comfort, with cigarettes and doughnuts from the courthouse coffee shop. Nobody checked credentials in the TV room, and on most days there were fifteen or twenty reporters around the monitor, along with a handful of spectators who wandered in off the rain-swept streets outside.
These were the bleacher seats at the Pulitzer trial, a strange and sometimes rowdy mixture of everything from CBS-TV producers to lanky six-foot women with no bras and foreign accents who claimed to be from Der Spiegel and Paris Match. It was a lusty crowd, all in all, following the action intently, sometimes cheering, sometimes booing. It was like a crowd of strangers who came together each day in some musty public room to watch a TV soap opera like General Hospital. On one afternoon, when Roxanne Pulitzer lost her temper at some particularly degenerate drift in the testimony, the bleachers erupted with shouting: “Go get ’em, Roxy! Kick ass! That’s it, Rox baby! Don’t let ’em talk that way about you!”
The Best Piece of Ass in Palm Beach
On the surface, the story was not complex. Basically, it was just another tale of Cinderella gone wrong, a wiggy little saga of crime, hubris, and punishment:
Herbert “Pete” Pulitzer Jr., fifty-two-year-old millionaire grandson of the famous newspaper publisher and heir to the family name as well as the fortune, had finally come to his senses and cast out the evil gold digger who’d caused him so much grief. She was an incorrigible coke slut, he said, and a totally unfit mother. She stayed up all night at discos and slept openly with her dope pusher, among others. There was a house painter, a real-estate agent, a race-car driver, and a French baker—and on top of all that, she was a lesbian, or at least some kind of pansexual troilist. In six and a half years of marriage, she had humped almost everything she could get her hands on.
Finally, his attorneys explained, Mr. Pulitzer had no choice but to rid himself of this woman. She was more like Marilyn Chambers than Cinderella. When she wasn’t squawking wantonly in front of the children with Grand Prix driver Jacky Ickx or accused Palm Beach cocaine dealer Brian Richards, she was in bed with her beautiful friend Jacquie Kimberly, thirty-two, wife of seventy-six-year-old socialite James Kimberly, heir to the Kleenex fortune. There was no end to it, they said. Not even when Pulitzer held a loaded .45-caliber automatic pistol to her head—and then to his own—in a desperate last-ditch attempt to make her seek help for her drug habits, which she finally agreed to do.
And did, for that matter, but five days in Highland Park General Hospital was not enough. The cure didn’t take, Pete’s attorneys charged, and she soon went back on the whiff and also
back to the pusher, who described himself in the courtroom as a “self-employed handyman” and gave his age as twenty-nine.
Roxanne Pulitzer is not a beautiful woman. There is nothing especially striking about her body or facial bone structure, and at age thirty-one, she looks more like a jaded senior stewardess from Pan Am than an international sex symbol. Ten years on the Palm Beach Express have taken their toll, and she would have to do more than just sweat off ten pounds to compete for naked space in the men’s magazines. Her legs are too thin, her hips are too wide, and her skin is a bit too loose for modeling work. But she has a definite physical presence. There is no mistaking the aura of good-humored outfront sexuality. This is clearly a woman who likes to sleep late in the morning.
Roxanne blew into town more than ten years ago, driving a Lincoln Continental with a sixty-foot house trailer in tow, a ripe little cheerleader just a year or so out of high school in Cassadaga, New York, a small town of nine hundred near Buffalo.
After graduation from Cassadaga High, she got a job in nearby Jamestown as a personal secretary to the general counsel for the American Voting Machine Corporation—a serious young man named Lloyd Dixon III, who eventually committed suicide. His father, who was later sent to prison, was president of AVM at the time and took such a shine to the new secretary that he hastened to marry her off to his other son, a callow youth named Peter, just back from the air force reserve, whose life would soon turn strange.
It is a long road from the outskirts of Buffalo to the inner sanctums of the Palm Beach Bath and Tennis Club, but the first long step was easy. The newlyweds hauled their trailer down to West Palm Beach, where young Peter had often spent winter vacations with the family, and set up housekeeping in a local trailer park. The first year was tranquil. They both enrolled in local colleges and lived more or less like their neighbors.