by Bella Stumbo
Among her diary entries that month, Betty wrote: "Rhett always reports Dan and Linda with no clothes on laying on each other in bed. Linda in see-through nightgowns in kitchen in front of girls and friends."
It is both fascinating and painful to read her diaries from the divorce on. They are the work of a woman who has realized, too late, that she miscalculated everything. She was cornered, on the edge of the abyss, with no safety net below. Night after night, she sat at her table, scribbling into her notebooks about the injustice of what was happening to her. But no answers ever came to her at the end of her long, rambling essays. Only rising, repetitive rage. And it was only 1986—three long years before she finally killed.
For a few days, she took to her bed. She was too upset to work, and so she never went back to the Simic Art Gallery.
"Shaking in my bed, feels like an earthquake," she wrote. "Have no one to help me. Kids gone, Gail [Forbes, her neighbor] gone."
But panic sporadically forced her to her feet. In August, she returned briefly to the telephone, searching again for a lawyer. Same old story. She didn't want anybody who wanted her, and vice versa.
Meantime, as is usually the case in bifurcated divorces, court-ordered mediation sessions were now underway to resolve the Broderick property settlement. Attorney J. William Hargreaves was designated to lead the negotiations. But mediation is only as useful as the warring parties want it to be—and, in the Broderick matter, sessions soon failed for the same old reason: Dan wouldn't pay the full $5,000 fees, and Betty refused to split costs since the divorce wasn't half her idea. But, beforehand, in a tactic reminiscent of their old Marriage Encounter days, the Brodericks were asked to write notes to each other describing their feelings. Dan didn't comply, but Betty did:
"First off, let me say how nervous and overwhelmed I am," she wrote. "My entire life, past present and future is on the table now. None of this affects you. Your past present and future are right on track. Bastard. I'm mad as hell … [the children and I] have been betrayed, abused, humiliated, robbed … We have been victimized by the one person on earth who was supposed to protect us from harm, not cause it! … Literally all the money in the world would not keep me in the life-style to which I had been accustomed …"
As for the children: "When I am assured of financial security—my house, car, social standing, I will begin to discuss custody. For now, I am too enraged by your actions to be around the children or accept any responsibility for them ... I don't know how to raise secure happy healthy children with a firm sense of right and wrong when you are living proof that none of my values are WORTH A DAMN."
Hargreaves, meanwhile, was beginning to sound more like Dan Broderick's personal adviser than a detached mediator. In a handwritten "Dear Dan" note in August—with no copy to Betty—Hargreaves urged Dan to fork over the money for mediation in his own best interests:
"As it is now, having Betty pay would really just be a reduction of her advance, which is your money anyway," Hargreaves told Dan. In a particularly confidential note, he also told Dan that, if he didn't pay for a settlement now, "I happen to know that the alternative to mediation is Bea Snyder [a prominent feminist attorney] representing Betty. Talk to Tom [Ashworth]. But if I were you, I'd concede this point ... I think the court would probably order a significant payment of her fees by you personally in any event, if that makes you feel any better about the situation …"
But Dan was less interested in Hargreave's advice than in teaching his former wife the value of a dollar: "I will not agree to pay the $5,000 in mediation fees," he wrote Hargreaves, "because I firmly believe that this process will fail unless Bets has a financial stake in its successful outcome."
So much for mediation. Nor did Betty hire Bea Snyder. Betty never wanted a female attorney, although she eventually hired one, because, she said, she was "afraid they would use it against me, call me a crazy feminist or something like that." Closer to the truth, Betty was never comfortable around professional women, because they represented a challenge to her own career choice as homemaker, one she never fully accepted herself.
Shortly after mediation efforts collapsed, Hargreaves volunteered to represent Betty in the divorce. She never wanted him. He did not have a top-flight reputation in town. But, by now, she was too humbled and exhausted by her attorney search to delay much longer. She was also desperate for court-ordered support to end Dan's arbitrary fines. And so, although she was still demanding that Dan pay all her attorney fees, she capitulated in September and sent Hargreaves a retainer of around $800, along with this wistful, wary note:
"Dear Bill," she wrote, "By presenting this check, I feel I have entrusted you the monumental task of validating the twenty years of my life WITH Dan Broderick and securing a base for my future WITHOUT him. I sure hope you're up to the job! Thanks for taking it on! Betty Broderick."
Thus, did Betty acquire her second attorney.
It would, to say the least, be a brief, unhappy liaison. Within months, she fired Hargreaves, who was, she always insisted, never more than Dan Broderick's stooge. Why else, she demanded, had Dan been so quick to pay Hargreaves the same $10,000 he had refused to pay Dan Jaffe? (Which he did, in fact, do, without a murmur of protest.)
Among Hargreaves's failings, as Betty perceived them: he had sat idly by, while Dan got the entire Broderick divorce proceeding sealed from the public; in addition, she said, Hargreaves also so goofed up in a spousal support argument that he forgot to include her taxes in his figures, thus costing her around $4,000 extra a month, which another attorney had to later correct.
For his part, Hargreaves later countered that Betty was impossible to represent. In his view, "she was really impaired. She couldn't understand that life was possible without Dan." He also likened her money lust to that of Joanna Carson—no amount, he thought, would have satisfied her, such was her urge for revenge. On the other hand, Hargreaves also once remarked that he found Dan "obsessive" in his controlling tendencies—it was almost like Dan was "inviting [Betty] in to shoot her." Eventually, concluding the Hargreaves-Betty battle, he sued her for several thousand dollars in unpaid legal fees, and ultimately won.
Dan Jaffe, meantime, was observing all this with rising disgust from his Beverly Hills office. He had kept track of Betty's case, and probably understood better than anybody that Betty Broderick was so opposed to a divorce that, left to her own devices, she would self-destruct. And so, when he discovered that Tom Ashworth and Dan had won a divorce by default in July, he wrote a letter to Ashworth in September threatening, in effect, to file a formal complaint in Betty's behalf.
He was "distressed" to see that Ashworth had accepted Betty's default in the divorce action, he wrote. Although he was no longer representing her, he thought that such a savvy pair of attorneys as Tom Ashworth and Dan Broderick must surely know that they were taking advantage of a woman emotionally incapable of looking after her own interests.
"I am now convinced that the only way this case can ethically and morally move forward, and, of course, legally move forward," he told Ashworth, "is for your office and client to file a motion to have a guardian ad litem appointed for Mrs. Broderick so that there will be someone to protect the substantial interests that Mrs. Broderick has in the matter. She clearly does not understand how her attitudes and actions in this matter severely prejudice her legal position, and it is clear that some individual must be available to make binding and rational decisions …
"Unless I hear from you concerning the setting aside of Mrs. Broderick's default," Jaffe concluded, "I plan to contact the legal powers that be and the Bench in San Diego so that someone is made available to protect Mrs. Broderick's legal rights." Jaffe also complained about his many unanswered phone calls to Ashworth over the last few weeks.
This time, he got an immediate reply. "I am afraid that [Betty] is being less than candid with you," Ashworth wrote. In reality, at least three "competent San Diego attorneys" had agreed to represent Betty, said Ashworth—the most recent being
J. William Hargreaves, Esq..
Ashworth slid past Jaffe's suggestion that a guardian be appointed to serve Betty's interests, remarking only that, while her actions at times seemed "self-destructive," at other times she only seemed "calculating." He concluded by saying that, while neither he nor his client had any desire whatever to take unfair advantage of Mrs. Broderick, neither could he, Ashworth, "stand by and permit her to destroy an entire family through her actions." And, finally, he reassured Jaffe, "it is my understanding that she is presently represented by Mr. Hargreaves." In short, according to Ashworth, Betty was now in solid San Diego legal hands.
It was soon after that exchange that Dan promptly anted up $10,000 for the remainder of Hargreaves's retainer.
In October, Dan fined her $200 for two incidents of offensive language and $250 more for a trespass in September. Less the house payment, that left her with a check of around $3,700 for the month.
"Asshole and his sleazy cunt in Europe," Betty wrote on the bottom of his statement, "Don't we love it? [He] didn't have enough money for kids and maid and they called me for help …" And she wasn't exaggerating—Dan had in fact left his housekeeper with a $50 weekly grocery budget for a family of four while he was gone on his three-week trip, and the woman had indeed finally called Betty, asking for more grocery money. Naturally, Betty would make the most of that detail for years to come— that and dozens of other tales of horrific deprivation and starvation she heard from her emotional kids. They no doubt exaggerated, playing one parent against the other as children caught in divorces normally do. But it never failed. Betty would then fly out to Saks or Magnin's or the local gourmet supermarket to buy them whatever it was they claimed they lacked, from new shoes to pistachio nuts. It was one reason that she was always broke.
Then came her November "allowance," along with yet another letter.
She had been especially bad in October, it appeared.
This time her check showed deductions that not only wiped out her entire monthly $9,000 allowance, but actually left her in the hole—she owed Dan $1,315.32.
Typically, he included an itemized statement, explaining his "sanctions":
—"Offensive language (ten times)" for a total fine of $1,000.
—"Trespass on 1041 Cypress (six times)" for $1,500.
—"Trespass in house (five times)" for $2,500.
The rest was miscellaneous bills—coupled with a gratuitous lecture about her frivolities and his generosity: "By my count, in the twenty months we have been separated, over $450,000 has been spent on you or made available for your use and enjoyment," he wrote. So "if you don't have enough money to pay your bills, you have only yourself to blame." He finished with another financial threat:
"I know your first impulse upon reading this letter will be a violent one … You better think twice about that. If you make any attack on me or my property, you will never again get a red cent out of me without a court order …"
In the margins of the letter Betty wrote, "Wouldn't anyone become violent after all his INCESSANT BULLSHIT [underlined 5 times]. How can anyone survive under this kind of assault?"
But she was enraged even before she got the letter, because Dan had told her it was coming. Violence begets violence, particularly after the first few adventures, once the barriers are broken, once it becomes a norm—and especially when both parties are constantly fomenting it. So, that Saturday, "I hopped into the Suburban in my little yellow Ralph Lauren shorts and I banged on his door ... All I wanted to know from the fucker was exactly how he expected me to get through November on minus $1,300," she says today. In reality, she was so furious it's surprising that she didn't run her car through the door again.
Not incidentally, that was also the day of the annual Blackstone Ball, one of her favorite events in years past. It didn't help to know that "while the president-elect of the bar was screwing his wife, he was about to don his fucking top hat and cape and take the cunt to the party that I should have been going to." Betty never did let false pride get in the way of blunt outrage over her lost social status. She was never the type to say it didn't matter. It mattered a lot.
Dan did the usual: he ordered her off his property. She stared at his smooth, clean-shaven face, sniffed his after-shave in the evening air, and grew even angrier. How long had it taken him tonight to get his toilette together? Was the cunt inside, dressing for the gala, too?
She refused to go. He promised that if she would leave, he would talk to her about the money matter at ten the next morning. He was making an appointment with his ex-wife.
She wasn't buying it. She still refused to leave. He threatened to call the police. She dared him. He would do it, he warned her. She double dared him.
One more time, Betty Broderick underestimated her ex—or, at least, overestimated his image-consciousness. By now, his loathing of this infernal woman who refused to play by the rules had become utterly, maddeningly intolerable to him. He called the cops.
They came. They asked her to leave. She again refused. Dan watched as they handcuffed her and took her away.
And that was the first time Elisabeth Anne Broderick went to jail—booked, fingerprinted, and mugged for violating Dan's restraining order. It was six days before her thirty-ninth birthday.
According to her former friend and neighbor, Gail Forbes, Betty called from jail that night, just as Forbes was about to depart for the Blackstone Ball herself, wanting Forbes to call San Diego Union society writer Burl Stiff to "tell everyone that while Dan was enjoying himself at the ball, he had his former wife jailed." Her tone, Forbes later volunteered at trial, was "exultant."
"What bullshit," says Betty, who at first denied even calling Forbes. On the other hand, she qualified, "I was in such shock I can't really remember who I called, but I sure as hell wasn't exultant. I was scared to fucking death in there with those women."
She was in jail for only a few hours. But, she always said, "November 1, 1986, was really the beginning of the end for me, I can see it now ... I could never believe he would treat me that way. What did I ever do to him? What was so wrong with asking how I was supposed to live for a month on no money?"
Even so, amazingly, what she remembered the next morning was Dan's promise to meet with her at ten A.M. to discuss her complaints about the money, the children, the broken marriage.
He didn't show up.
So she called his answering machine:
"Fuckhead, you're right back where you started with not talking to me," she said. "Now you've got to settle with me so I can leave you and the little cunt in your idyllic mansion in the slums there. I'd be more than delighted to do that, but I want my money! So you promised you'd talk about it at ten today. Obviously, you don't know how to tell time. Bye."
Meantime, Dan did not relent about the minus $1,300. That November, Brian and Gail Forbes lent Betty $6,500 to help her pay her bills.
A week after her release from jail, several of her friends gathered at the home of Kathy Saris, a former Miss Massachusetts and wife of a La Jolla dentist, to celebrate Betty's thirty-ninth birthday. It was an awkward, kindly little affair, aimed strictly at bolstering her spirits, alleviating the shame. Photos of the event show a group of attractive women in tasteful, conservative, casual clothes and expensive haircuts. Betty stood out amid them like a marshmallow in spinach salad. Her weight gain had already begun; her round face, framed by its blond bob, wore the expression of a woman who might have been on drugs. She looked dazed, vacant; her forced smile looked both sad and stupid.
"I was a basket case," she says now, bitterly. "I was just a shaking wreck, my whole body was trembling. I can't remember a thing about it, except trying so hard to act like I was fine, faking my smile and being scared to death that if I didn't get out of there, they were all going to see that I was a basket case." Presumably, the brighter ones among them did see.
Chapter 14
Happy Holidays to the Broderick Children
Then it was the holiday season again. Sh
e spent Thanksgiving, as divorced people usually do, dropping in on friends kind enough to invite her. Her children spent the day with Dan and Linda. Increasingly, she was taking her pain out on them. She began to blame them for the collapse of the marriage. She raged at them for spending time with Dan and Linda instead of her; she taunted them because they lived docilely in the same house with their father instead of running away to live with her. She had lost all memory of how they had gotten into his household in the first place.
In a conversation with her son Danny, for example, she remarked that Dan had "robbed me of everything I have on earth, including you kids."
No, the boy protested. "He didn't rob you—you gave us to him!" The child, then ten, went on, crying, to beg her to stop using "bad words," so that Dan would let them spend more time with her.
"For two years while I was married to him, I put up with shit in my face and you kids never even knew it," his mother replied. "You never knew he was fucking Linda while he was married to me, did you? ... I put up with shit for two years hoping he'd get over this, and he'd grow up ... he is obviously too weak a little faggot … You tell your father to grow up and act like a gentleman and this could all be over in an hour."
Betty had forgotten that her children were powerless, that they were only kids trying to get by, that the youngest was only seven, the oldest a confused sixteen. She continued to lure the two youngest, Danny and Rhett, into sneaking out of his house without telling Dan. And it wasn't hard for her to do, because, although they would both get into trouble with Dan for it later, these two little boys always loved their mother enough to try to please her. They later begged the judges to let them to live with her because, as Rhett once put it, "You don't need television to have fun at Mom's house." And, they both complained, Dad wasn't home enough.
"He is always at work," said Danny in divorce court two years later. "I think [Betty] could take better care of us than my Dad … she is always there, and she knows how to take care of us, and everything we like and dislike, and I just think she is all in all a better parent."