by Bella Stumbo
Quietly, she turned to the housekeeper and asked, "Whose pie was this?" And the woman told her. Linda's.
She picked it up and walked upstairs to his bedroom. There, with a satisfaction that the years have not dimmed in the telling, Betty ventilated two years of pent-up frustrations in an orgy of custard and chocolate frosting. She dug her fingers into Linda Kolkena's Boston cream pie and flung hunks of it onto the bedspread and the walls. Then she opened his closet doors and stared in. What an anal asshole, she thought to herself, as she peered at the tidy rows of jackets and shirts and slacks, all arranged by color. All those fucking gaudy colors. Pinks, oranges, scarlet. Prints, paisleys, madras, plaids. Dapper Dan. What a cheap asshole! What a piece-of-shit Boston cream pie! She flung it at the clothes, crying, wiped her hands on his bedspread, and left.
Later Betty would minimize the damage, but even her favorite daughter, Lee, would not. "Man, she made a real mess," marveled Lee, who was home at the time. Apparently one small cake can go a long way if the assailant is committed to maximum mileage.
"Why the hell not?" she asked years later. "Here it was, months after the bastard had walked out, and he's still telling me there is no girlfriend—but there it was, my first direct evidence that the little cunt was not only in his bed, she was even baking her shitty little pies in my house!"
Dan's response was swift. Two days later, he applied for a restraining order to keep his wife from setting foot on their Coral Reef property without his consent.
Betty only laughed. Now the sonofabitch was going to try keeping her out of her own home? Good luck, Dan.
Two days later, on a Saturday morning, she marched into the Coral Reef house and flung a wine bottle through a window. She did it, she said later, because Dan had refused that day to let her son Rhett play in a soccer game at Francis Parker—where she had signed on as a coach. The only reason she was even at the Coral Reef house that morning, in fact, was to pick up Rhett for the game. But he was gone. Dan later said that he had taken the boy for a haircut instead.
When he returned to find his shattered window, Dan didn't pause. He called the police. He would have this insufferable witch jailed that very day if he could.
Instead, two bored La Jolla cops arrived, surveyed the scene—another petty domestic war among the affluent—and advised Dan Broderick to stop wasting their time. As an attorney, he should know as well as they did that "It's the lady's house. She can do whatever she wants to it."
It was the first and last clean victory Betty would ever score over her husband in the legal wars that ensued. Days later, a judge granted Dan's restraining order. Henceforth, Betty Broderick was forbidden from setting foot in her house without Dan's permission. No more traipsing in and out to see her children whenever she felt like it. Not unless Dan said so.
It was more than her mind could absorb. They weren't even divorced. The house was half hers. Her children lived there. How could he just order her off her own property, away from her own kids? This was justice? Just when she thought her rage had peaked, it peaked again.
Finally, it began to dawn on her that she needed an attorney. And not just any attorney. She needed the best one in town to take on Dan Broderick.
She first called Thomas Ashworth, a leading San Diego divorce attorney she had known socially for years—and one she had often heard Dan praise. But Ashworth turned her down on grounds, she says, that he was about to be appointed to a judgeship and was therefore unloading his case file. The next time she saw him, he was sitting across a courtroom from her, representing Dan. Ashworth served as Dan's lawyer for nearly a year, until he became not only a judge, but presiding judge of the San Diego family courts, where the Broderick war was unfolding.
But well before that, Betty Broderick began to understand that she had a serious problem. None of the other topnotch local attorneys she called wanted her case either. They either knew Dan too well, they told her, or they had impossibly crowded calendars. Finally, Betty says, a well-regarded woman attorney told her flatly, "Go to Los Angeles, because no good divorce lawyer in this town is going to take on Dan Broderick." She gave Betty the name of a friend in Beverly Hills. Daniel Jaffe. Betty jotted the name down.
But she didn't call him. Instead, her mind was now playing new tricks on itself: none of this nonsense was necessary. Divorces took months and months. 'There was still plenty of time for Dan to wise up. Their friends, his family, everyone would be aghast once they heard. He would never go through with it. Best of all, she had the children on her side. They would never let him destroy their family. All she had to do was sit tight. Don't panic. Don't go running to take them back—which was, of course, exactly what she knew Dan expected her to do. No. She would outlast him. She was the perfect mother, and he knew it.
He did, too. Later on, Dan testified in divorce court that never in his life did he expect to become a single father. "I thought she would be a much better parent than I could be," he said. "Bets was home full-time and for many, many years in our marriage a first-class, excellent mother. I mean just an outstanding mother … She was a much better parent before our divorce, our separation, than I am now. She was everything that you could want in a mother, loving and supportive and encouraging …"
But now he had changed his mind. Well before the divorce was final in 1986, he said, he decided that Betty was not only an unfit mother but mentally unbalanced, too—and he had told their children as much.
"In a nutshell," he told the judge, "Bets has taken upon herself to involve the children in an unbelievable way in this divorce. She does not leave them aside and out of this but brings them … to the center of the disputes between us, and on countless occasions has told them that they're to blame for this … that it's their fault that I have gone with another woman now, that they should do something to prevent this … She has just done the exact opposite of what I have always understood parents were supposed to do in divorces … [her] hatred of me has consumed her to the point that she has lost it. She needs to get it back and structure her life … [then] she would still be the better parent."
In the margin of the court transcript, next to those lines, Betty wrote: "Five years of HELL in court. Anyone would hate him or kill him."
Chapter 11
Merry Christmas, Bets
For nearly three long years Dan Broderick had worn the hair shirt of guilt. He had tried not to leave his wife. He had made Linda miserable with his indecision. But, he was finally finished with his suffering. He had done his Hail Marys, he had at last made his choice. He was no longer going to be the good Catholic boy in perpetual pain. He was going to be with the woman he loved, and that wasn't Betty.
Having made that decision, it was not in the nature of Daniel T. Broderick III to look back. Nor was it in his nature to be held back. He was, as all his friends agree, not a man given to much emotional sensitivity, not a man who bent to the will of others, once his own will had been defined. And now he was about to get on with his life. With Linda.
And so, at last, there came the night in October when Dan Broderick did the right thing: he finally told Betty the full truth about Linda.
What happened that evening isn't clear, because Betty still can't stand to talk about it; she evades and omits.
According to her, she had asked Dan to come over "so I could tell him, again, how stupid all this was …" She tried, one more time, to talk him out of leaving her. "I told him he was a fool, that it wouldn't last, and that, when he got over it, she would turn around and sue him for sex discrimination. I said, 'Dan, what are you doing here? I love you, we have a wonderful family, we've accomplished everything we've been working so hard for. The only person who's going to win in this whole thing is Linda Kolkena. Everyone whose last name is Broderick—you, me, and the kids—are going to lose.'" It was the first and last time in this story that Betty Broderick would ever mention the word "love" in reference to her husband—and she did it now with the breezy speed of a woman who still did not want to admit it.
Finally, when it was clear to her that he wasn't going to change his mind, "I demanded the truth about Linda. I wanted him to tell me what I already knew—that I wasn't crazy, that I hadn't been imagining it!"
And he did. He told her, she says, that she had been right all along—he had been having an affair with Linda Kolkena for years. Not only that, he was in love with Linda.
So. There it was. Finally. She had known, but refused to know. Now there was no more hiding from it. She screamed, cried, and, in general, fell to pieces.
Years later, during her first criminal trial, Betty cried again, throughout the testimony of Dr. David Lusterman, an expert on infidelity, who said victims of cheating are fully entitled to their feelings of rage and betrayal. Little is more emotionally devastating, Lusterman said, than the loss of trust and self-esteem that comes when the truth finally emerges, when the “victim" finally realizes that he or she has been lied to, day in and day out, by the one they most trusted. And the longer the lie goes on, the worse the psychological damage; typically, victims of infidelity temporarily lose all confidence in their judgment about everything else, too, including their parenting skills. Not least, said Lusterman, no real healing can occur until the "infidel" not only admits to the truth but also helps restore the victim's topsy-turvy sense of sanity by apologizing for the lies, thereby validating the victim's precarious clutch on mental health.
* * *
But Dan Broderick wasn't apologizing, not that night or ever. Instead, as he later agreed in divorce court, having finally confessed to his affair, he then wanted to take Betty to a mental hospital that night because he told her in court, "I thought you were going to commit suicide …" Betty still has trouble tracking that logic. Granted, she says, she was hysterical. But didn't she have a right to be angry and upset "when my husband has just announced to me that, yes, he's been looking me in the eye and lying for years and now planned to destroy our family?" Why was it that suddenly the blame had shifted again? Why was she now the sick one, the poor crazy person who needed help? Wouldn't any normal woman have reacted the same way? And where was Dan Broderick's responsibility in all of it? How was it that he always so smoothly turned the tables?
Instead of going to see Dan's doctor, Betty got into her car and drove one more time over to the Coral Reef house, marched into the bedroom, undressed, and got into bed. That is where she slept that night.
She still can't explain why she did that. "Because … I don't know …" She flounders, she flails. "I just wanted to sleep in my bed! It was my bed!"
Dan followed her home. And he slept with her that night. Maybe he thought it was therapeutic.
A few days later, a doctor prescribed a tranquilizer for the sobbing woman who complained, according to records, that she had just degraded herself by having sex one last time with her philandering husband. She never filled the prescription because, she said later from jail, "I was afraid, at that point, I would just eat them all." And she won't discuss the sex question at all.
But reality had finally hit. That week she pulled herself together, got dressed to the teeth, and drove to Beverly Hills to see Daniel Jaffe, the divorce attorney she had been told was a match for Daniel T. Broderick III.
She hired him, with the understanding that Dan would pay his $10,000 retainer. To celebrate her deal with Jaffe, Betty went revenge shopping again. This time, she bought herself a maroon Jaguar, which she spotted parked on a Beverly Hills street with a for-sale sign in the window. It cost $15,000.
She was as thrilled with her new car as a teenager. Later, she cruised by the house of her neighbors, Brian and Gail Forbes, to show it off. Gail was gone, but Brian was there. She invited him for a spin. More than any other La Jolla couple, the Forbeses had been caught in the center of the Broderick divorce for years. A career attorney at Gray, Cary, Brian had known Dan since his first week on the job. Gail was one of Betty's closest friends, so loyal that, after Dan left her, she refused for a long time to invite Dan Broderick and his girlfriend into her house.
But, in the end, they both became chillingly overeager witnesses for the prosecution at Betty's trials. Among other details, Brian Forbes vividly recalled a remark Betty had made about Dan on the day they went riding in her new Jaguar. "She said she'd like to shoot his balls off," Forbes testified primly. According to him, he had admonished Betty for such talk. Whereupon, she had only laughed and said, "Oh, well, they're too small to hit anyway." Even a couple of jurors hid their smiles. Later, compounding the hypocrisy, Gail Forbes would be obliged to admit on the witness stand that she had been the one who taught Betty the word cunt in the context of a dirty joke. Among its other lessons, the Broderick story was a glaring reminder that "friendship" is often just one more frivolous, fleeting term. Some of Betty's very closest "friends"—most of them wives of attorney friends of Dan's—wouldn't talk to either the defense or the prosecution, for fear of aggravating their husbands. Instead, they either ran for cover, or, like Gail Forbes and Helen Pickard, served the prosecution. In the end, it was only the second circle of Betty's friends who stepped forward to try to help her.
The week after Dan "confessed" to Betty, his conscience at last cleared, he took Linda to his brother Larry's annual Oktoberfest party in Denver, and then to the Notre Dame-USC game in South Bend. It was the first game Betty had missed since she met Dan. Of all the hurts, real and imagined, self-imposed or inflicted by others, that she would experience over the next four years, the melancholy pain of college football always colored Betty's autumns—right up to November 5, 1989.
Finishing off the month of October, she also wrote to her mother-in-law, the same woman who had told her a year before that she was being silly, that Dan would never leave her:
"Dear Yo,
"I feel a little better now—(but am still totally devastated by this)—because after all this time Dan FINALLY told me the truth. As I knew all along, he has been sleeping with his cheap office girl for over 2 YEARS. He has also made a concerted effort to make me out a worthless lunatic so he could feel better about destroying our family. Larry knew about the whole thing and helped cover it up and foster it along.
"I will never believe he could come to this.
"—He has now sued me for divorce
"—Put restraining orders on me to keep me away from my house
"—Had me found in contempt of court and subject to incarceration.
"What has happened to the wonderful man I married? He's gone absolutely mad.
"Is there anything you or Dad can do?
"Love, Bets"
She never got an answer. And, she says, her own family simply wouldn't listen to her troubles. At her father's birthday party in May, "I was told not to discuss my marriage in front of their friends—to lie, to pretend everything was just fine."
Her life was falling apart, piece by piece. She was learning the hard way a truth that luckier people learn much earlier: her world was only as secure as she was. She was all by herself now—alone, independent of people, places, and things, inside her own head. And the interior of Betty Broderick's head was fast becoming a desperate place to be. She was a defeated woman even then, although she was a long way from realizing it. She had gambled and lost. She had thought that forcing the children on Dan would end his love affair, bring him to his senses, bring him home. It hadn't. She had asserted her rights to enter and vandalize her own house. What had resulted instead was a restraining order, now making her a criminal if she set foot on property still in her name. She had settled meekly for less in her monthly support payments while he made up his mind. She had tried to use the age-old weapon of sex to win him back; and she had resorted to the equally pathetic female tool of tears and helplessness in her dealings with family, friends, and even strangers—only to watch
them shift the burden back to her. Wherever she turned, the message was always the same: it was up to her to move on, to let him go, to let him have it his way, everyone told her. He didn't want her anymore. Their contract was canceled, because he said so. She was young and intelligent and healthy. She could start over, the way millions of other women do. The way women must do.
Her head was bursting with her inability to assimilate these nonstop messages. The more she talked, the more she tried to make people understand, the harder the barrage was returned. Now, because he was the one who had taken the offensive, she was on the defensive. If you don't shape up, Betty, her best friends told her, people will think you're crazy. You must take the children home. They were shocked at her militant behavior, just as much as Dan was. Forget money, they told her. Get the children. That's what mothers do.
No no no.
Then he would have won. He would have had it all his way. Where were her rights? It wasn't fair. Whatever else can be said about Betty Broderick, somewhere along the way she developed a deeper, more deadly definition of "fair" than most of us. To her, "fair" always translated not so much to money, as the prosecutor would later insist, but to an equal say in what would happen next. She always likened her marriage to a business contract. If one partner wants to dissolve the company, doesn't he have to buy out the other partner's interest? "That was my job, and I was fired without cause. I hadn't done anything wrong. It wasn't fair."
Dan and Linda spent the first weekend in November in San Francisco, following their Notre Dame trip. So much fun. And now, so little guilt. Now they were an open couple. He had filed for divorce, he had confessed to his philandering, now he was going on with his life—and Betty was home in La Jolla, taking care of their children. That's what they were doing to her now—turning her into their baby-sitter whenever it suited their plans.