by Bella Stumbo
On this particular fall day, as the drumbeat continued in her head, she was standing, once again, inside her old home on Coral Reef, looking in Dan's refrigerator. At her house, the refrigerator always bulged with wonderful foodstuffs. To Betty, a full refrigerator was synonymous with good parenting. She took occupational pride, as a mother, in her refrigerator. Kids should be able to find healthy, fun snacks there at any hour of the day. Food was warmth, food was love. She had always believed that. She could still hear her father exhorting everyone to eat more at their Sunday family dinners.
But now …
She stared into Dan's refrigerator. It was a disgrace. One more sign of his selfish disregard for their children. Nothing fun there to eat. Only the basics. Frozen meats, milk, a few vegetables. Not even a box of Wheat Thins. No frozen yogurt bars.
But there was a bottle of champagne.
Not Dan's drink, she knew. He liked to suck on a cheap bottle of Gallo wine all weekend.
Thus, it could only be the cunt's. Champagne for the cunt, but no tasty, lovely snacks for her children …
Uh-huh. Right.
She picked the bottle up and hurled it through a plate-glass window and watched, fascinated. The glass seemed to pause in shock as the web of cracks flew out around the hole where the bottle had crashed through. Then, almost in slow motion, the whole panel slid down, like melting ice, and shattered onto the floor. Actually, it was pretty. "It was fun!" she said later. Not since she had burned his clothes two years earlier had she felt such satisfaction. What Betty Broderick had discovered, as many women have, is that when all else fails, smashing things can feel good. She had discovered her own extended form of scream therapy, without having to go to a psychologist to pay for it. She had permanently crossed the line from ‘Perfect Mrs. Everything’ to ‘Madame Who Gives a Fuck?’
What's more, she discovered that, even if he wouldn't talk to her, even if he hung up the phone when she yelled, this sort of activity definitely got his attention. In hindsight, everyone involved in this story would debate whether the final outcome might have been different if Dan Broderick had only reacted to Betty's early outbursts of anger with greater tolerance, or simply ignored them altogether, as a parent might ignore the attention-getting tantrums of a child. But Dan would instead become an increasingly punishing parent.
Yet, at other times, he seemed to almost cruelly nurture her hopes that the marriage wasn't over—while steadily building his case that she was truly nuts.
A couple of weeks after he had finally told her about Linda, for example, he took the kindly approach and talked her into going with him to see a psychiatrist. The purpose of that trip remains in dispute to this day. In divorce court later, Dan said, he was only trying to lead Betty, like a horse to water, to professional help because her "rampages of destruction" so alarmed him. "I didn't know what to do," he told her in court. "I did not want to have you thrown in jail. What I really wanted was for you to get psychiatric counseling so you could cope with this rage that you felt." He had only gone along that day in order to get her there, he said.
Betty's version is very different. According to her, Dan had deliberately led her to believe that they were going to see a therapist together for purposes of marriage counseling. So she had gone gladly, thinking again that there was hope. But, she says, once in the doctor's office, it became instantly clear that only she was to be "treated," not them as a couple. Furious, she walked out. Later, she decided that the visit had been just another of Dan's sneaky legal ploys: he had only been trying to set her up to confide in a therapist of his choice, who would later appear during their divorce trial, as a witness for Dan to further indict his crazy wife.
And, even by then, three years before the Brodericks ever got to divorce court, Betty Broderick, her world in shreds, was definitely beginning to feel crazy.
No doubt, Dan Broderick himself was probably beginning to feel a little off-balance, too. Like Betty, he could only make do with the emotional tools he had—and they were evidently severely limited, at least when it came to reading the woman he was trying to leave. A man accustomed to being in control, to living by the book, all he could now see was that, however belatedly, he had done all the right things. He had, at long last, told his wife that he was in love with another woman. He had filed for a divorce. He had tried to get her to see a therapist to cope with the loss of him, to channel her anger. He had gone the extra mile.
And he wasn't going one step further. Patience was not Dan's strong suit. Nor was introspection or self-doubt. From beginning to end, everything wrong with their marriage, everything that occurred afterward was, in his mind, all her fault. It never occurred to him, any more than it did to Betty, that fault might be shared. Until the end of their tale, both Brodericks saw themselves as blameless.
And now, Dan was sick of her refusal to behave like an adult. His concern for her mental health evaporated faster than his memory of yesterday's malpractice client, whose tragic "pain and suffering" he argued so masterfully in court. Now, Dan Broderick decided, the only way to tame his wife was within the arena of the law. His arena.
His weapon of choice was a judicial procedure called an Order to Show Cause, or OSC, in legal shorthand. In the next year he used it repeatedly to haul Betty before a judge to explain why she should not be held in contempt for violating the restraining order Dan had obtained in October to keep her away from him and his property.
The barrage started in November, two days before her thirty-eighth birthday. The first OSC cited the Boston cream pie mess and the broken windows. In time, the list of OSCs would expand to include a tossed toaster, a smashed stereo switch, a broken bedroom mirror, more windows, and countless other similar offenses against his property. No incident was too small to escape him. In divorce court four years later, he was still able to itemize every single bit of damage from those autumn months so many years earlier: "You pounded a hole with a hammer into a wall," he accused. "You broke the answering machine with the hammer. On another occasion, you broke the sliding glass doors. You spray-painted the wallpaper in several rooms, including the fireplace. You broke the television. . . . You broke the Plexiglas cover of the stereo, on another occasion you broke the front window of the house …" Etc..
Moreover, he told the judge, his wild wife had made it impossible for him even to drop the children off on her quiet, respectable La Jolla Shores street without risking an embarrassing sideshow. Once, he complained, she had "thrown a rock at my car." On another occasion, "She had torn the antennae off my car. . . . She tried to pull the door open too far, so it would come off the hinge. It didn't. [But] there was a dent that had to be painted …"
Betty admits to some of it, but, almost amused, denies the rest. "Oh, what bullshit, he's such a liar," she said later from jail. "Where would I get a rock? Our yard was all grass and concrete. And let's be logical here: do you think I'm strong enough to try ripping off a car door?"
Either way, thinking to cheat him of his newest form of authority over her, she promptly ceased all her petty vandalisms. And, for the next several months, there were no more OSCs—not until she discovered his answering machine and began leaving messages on it, ranging from the merely nasty to some so creatively obscene that Sister Claire Veronica would've fainted to hear them.
It never occurred to her that she could be punished for words alone. She was of course wrong again. Her phone messages, in fact, turned out to be Dan's richest source of OSCs. For the next three years, Betty Broderick's kitchen calendar was a tangle of OSC notations—OSCs served, continued, dropped, and heard. She would be scolded, threatened, fined, jailed twice, and threatened again. But she could not, would not stop. He would not strip her of this last little weapon. Whatever happened to freedom of speech in this country? Let them cut out her tongue. Sometimes she refused to even show up in court.
The mind games these two played would get much sicker, but they were never more baffling than at the very beginning.
Once, for exa
mple—two days after serving her with an OSC—Dan sent her roses for her thirty-eighth birthday, along with this handwritten card:
"Dear Bets,
"I know the circumstances will make it impossible for you to have a happy birthday this year. But I wanted you to know that the kids and I are thinking of you and hope you start to feel better soon. Dan."
Maybe he meant well. Or maybe, as she would always insist, he was merely taunting her.
Even so, on Dan's birthday two weeks later, she sent him "a gorgeous plaid shirt." He returned it. She gave it to Brian Forbes.
Meantime, by late fall, while the vandalisms were still ongoing, her new attorney, Dan Jaffe, was ready to tear his hair out—although, judging from his correspondence, he had a far better understanding of Betty than her former husband ever would.
Following yet another contempt summons filed by Dan, this one over a window-breaking spree, Jaffe wrote Betty a frustrated letter, begging her to shape up: "The wanton-damage nonsense has to cease," he warned her. If it did, he would be able to get the pending contempts dropped and proceed with her divorce case. Otherwise he was going to dump her as a client. "I cannot spend what talents I might have and what little time I have to utilize them in trying to justify to a court the unjustifiable, and I will not do so … Although I am not a psychiatrist, I believe I understand the source of your rage at Mr. Broderick … but your anger simply has to be diverted through legitimate channels, one of which is to proceed with a divorce from him and get your rightful share of the assets and support to which you are entitled.
"… If you can live within the guidelines, I will continue to represent you … but I want to spend my time on finding out what happened to the Broderick monies and getting you some of them, rather than spending my time keeping you out of jail." He finished by urging her to seek psychiatric assistance.
Dan had decided, in the meanwhile, to sell Coral Reef and move to a different house downtown—a house that would be his, not theirs. Betty at first lent the idea lip service and even suggested a La Jolla realtor, although, within the next weeks, she would change her mind. Betty could never just say yes or no, at the risk of displeasing anyone. Later on, she would refer to it sardonically as her "wimp" factor. It hobbled her throughout her life.
But, however childish she was growing, her husband, in his own way, was displaying an equally petty streak. The only difference was that, while she was still refusing to live with any of their furniture, instead inhabiting a nearly empty house, Dan was now busy cataloguing and evaluating every piece of it, right down to the last cheap coaster.
In a letter to Betty the day before Thanksgiving, he advised that he was moving into his new house on January 3. She had until then to let him know what pieces of furniture she wanted from Coral Reef. Anything she didn't claim, he wrote, "I intend to take with me or sell."
Nor would this be any casual transaction. He laid out his instructions in meticulous, tedious detail:
"I will arrange for [the furniture transfer] as soon as you provide me with a WRITTEN list of what you want. I am well aware that you want the desk, armoire, and love seats that have been stored in the garage, but I am not sure about the piano, the living room couch, the dining room set, the pewter flatware, the red easy chair and stool, the pink swivel chairs … the end tables, the table lamps, the serving table/china cabinet that used to be in the dining room …"
Then, in admonishment: "Since June, I have been asking you for a proposed budget IN WRITING of the improvements you would like to make in your house and the furniture you want for it. For reasons I can't begin to understand, you will not give this to me. As a result, you continue to live in a state of relative deprivation. Why you want to do this to yourself is beyond me, but when you're ready to stop it, send me the budget and we'll get started … Sincerely Yours, Dan."
"Fuck you. I've had the budget for months and you won't look at it," she scribbled at the bottom of his letter. By now, these furious little notes, which he would never even see, were her main form of emotional release, since he would no longer talk to her on the telephone. Her anger annoyed him too much. At his insistence, all communication was now either by mail or by courier—i.e., the Broderick children. Because Dad wouldn't talk to Mom, they were now obliged to act as go-betweens in arranging their weekend visits to her house. Sometimes Dan would let them go, other times not, depending on how Betty had behaved that week. And, as his daughters later testified, he would never render his final decision until Thursday night.
Meantime, at Francis Parker School, teachers were beginning to complain about the deterioration in the condition of the Broderick boys since the separation.
Danny and Rhett would frequently arrive at school improperly dressed, without even jackets in cold weather, admissions director Beverly Dewart later testified in Betty's trials. And so the school would provide for them from "the lost and found," she said. Also, Rhett sometimes came to school with "dirt caked behind his ears, his hair would be dirty," and he would often wear the same clothes for several days in a row, she said. In addition, the boys sometimes came to school so visibly ill that they would be put to bed on couches in the nurse's room until one of the parents came to fetch them. Rhett, especially, always seemed to have a bad cold, Dewart testified. On those occasions, the school called Dan first, since he was the custodial parent, but he was often unavailable. They would then call Betty, who, Dewart said, always arrived promptly to fetch the ailing child.
Then it was Christmas season, Betty's favorite time of year, the month when, in times past, she traditionally held her grand children's party, when she was busy twelve hours a day, racing around La Jolla, buying the best of everything, from sequined bulbs for the tree to scarlet felt place mats and candied apples. December was Betty's month.
But now she sat in her house wondering what to do. There would be no Christmas party this year. Those were family events, and she had no family anymore.
But, she thought, she would still take the children skiing that year, if Dan would agree. That was another family tradition—in years past, after her Christmas party, the family had usually taken a ski week vacation either to Keystone, Colorado, or Park City, Utah.
Dan agreed immediately. In fact, in a December 2 letter, dictated to his secretary, he urged her to take the children that Christmas "at my expense." But, as always, his correspondence had a command tone to it. He had plans to go to Park City himself on December 21, he wrote, and had intended to take the children with him. However, "If you would prefer to take them somewhere (at my expense) or want them to stay with you for Christmas, that will be all right with me." But, he added, since the time for making travel arrangements was short, "please let me know what your plans are by five P.M. on December 6. Sincerely yours, Dan."
It was the opening for another ugly scene. Betty says she didn't even receive his letter until the afternoon of his December 6 deadline. Why couldn't the sonofabitch have just picked up the telephone?
Not that it mattered. What mattered more was money. Dan offered her an extra $2,000 for the trip. The rest she would have to pay herself.
Don't be ridiculous, she said. The airline tickets, condo rental, and meals for herself and four children would cost three times that much, and he knew it. Why was he nickel-and-diming her to death?
But he refused to offer more.
And Betty refused to bend. She was too enraged. It was their money. These were their children. What gave him the right to dictate the terms? Furthermore, if she couldn't take the children skiing, she wasn't about to entertain them at home that season either. "Why should they have to suffer, because he's being a cheap bastard?" she asked later. "If he was going to deprive them of their traditional ski holiday, I wanted them to know it!"
But Dan didn't deprive them of their Christmas ski trip. Instead, he took all four of them along on his own ski trip to Park City. With Linda. All six spent the week together in a cozy little three-bedroom condominium he had rented. It was the first time D
an had gone public with Linda, with the Broderick children in attendance.
Probably no other single incident in the entire Broderick divorce war devastated Betty more. Although it eventually became far more complex, the Broderick case was always a crime grounded, not in sexual jealousy, but in Betty Broderick's sexual inhibitions. She was staggered, and still is to this day, that Dan would sleep with Linda in front of their children. Fathers were at least supposed to be divorced from the mother before they exposed their youngsters to naked adult lust. Dan Broderick had finally crossed the line in her mind from philandering college boy to vile cuntsucker. She would never recover.
"He kidnapped my children," she says from jail, still practically screaming in pain. "He took them to a condo where he fucked the cunt in front of them, and we weren't even divorced! What do you think my baby [Rhett] thought of that?"
The shock of it so seared her that, even today, she doesn't accept February 28, 1985, the night he walked out, as the true date of their separation. Instead, in her mind, the real date was December 21, the first day of Dan's ski trip—"the first time he had tried openly to replace me with Linda the Cunt Kolkena with my kids as witnesses."
Betty's hysteria aside, it was in fact fairly remarkable that Dan Broderick had so quickly overcome the moral code of his upbringing to cohabit with another woman with his children long before he was even divorced. Likewise, Linda Kolkena, for all her prior crying about the agonies of adultery, had also apparently overcome all guilt about consorting with a married man in the presence of his children, then aged six to fifteen.
Compounding Betty's sense of sick disbelief, Dan even sent her a bouquet of Christmas flowers from his trip, along with a perfunctory little card that read: "Bets, I hope you have a Merry Christmas. Love, Dan."