Until the Twelfth of Never - Should Betty Broderick ever be free?

by Bella Stumbo

  Meanwhile, Linda had gotten into the act, too, calling her old boyfriend, Steve Kelley, the Union's editorial cartoonist, to ask if he could help stop publication of Betty's letter. But Dan's protest was enough. The letter never got published.

  * * *

  At the end of September, Dan and Linda went off on a two-week Caribbean cruise. It boiled in Betty's mind, one more stab to the heart. The Caribbean. Scene of their honeymoon. Why couldn't he take the cunt to Tahiti or Hawaii?

  She also had a final court date that month—this one to answer four more counts of contempt. She didn't appear, but, since Dan was gone, the hearing was only postponed. It still galled her years later. "If I didn't show up, they would've had a warrant out for my arrest"

  Attorney Hargreaves won that month, too—an arbitration panel (consisting of lawyers) ruled that Betty owed him several thousand dollars in unpaid fees.

  By then, Dan's complaints against Betty were so backed up on Anthony Joseph's calendar that the judge was now looking at answering machine messages dating back to May, plus Betty's July letter to Dan. Thanks to Dan's refusal to back off, and Betty's refusal to shape up, Joseph had become an almost monthly monitor of one ex-wife's nasty blasts into her ex-husband's telephone. By now Joseph also well understood from experience that, as soon as he dealt with Dan's latest batch, more would be awaiting him tomorrow.

  Finally Joseph reached his limit. Both Betty and Dan Broderick were insulting him. He was angry. He exploded. He was not going to hear any more of it. He erased his entire Broderick calendar, dismissing every one of Dan's backed-up contempts—but, again, with prejudice against Betty. Which meant that, if she misbehaved again, she might still be jailed: a total of twenty-four days in suspended sentences from contempt convictions six months old still hung over her head.

  Even so, for the first time in two years, she was able to go home to look at a clean court calendar.

  Now she could concentrate on the divorce settlement. Or, at least, she might have.

  Instead, she ignored Joseph so completely that within weeks Dan was threatening a court order denying her even the right to talk to her children on the telephone, due to the increasingly outrageous things she was saying to them.

  Chapter 20

  The Big Four-O

  She moved through that autumn in her own desperate, quixotic fashion. The children were at her house most weekends, but she was too distracted to care. Fall was always the worst time of her year. Football games, trips to Notre Dame, Larry's Oktoberfest party. Family traditions. All gone. Her diary entries were often listless.

  October 12: Attended the chamber orchestra with Judy Bartolotta—who told her about upcoming plans for the Oktoberfest.

  Same weekend: took Rhett and the Forbes children to the San Diego Zoo. It was "a fun day."

  But two days after Dan and Linda returned from the USC-Notre Dame game, she again took her bitter anger out on her children in a phone call—and, again, Dan taped it for his contempt files. Betty asked Danny what plans he had made for the upcoming weekend at her house. He told her he just wanted to "stay there and take care of the dogs." This exchange followed:

  Betty: "Well, I'm really not even interested in seeing you guys and having anything to do with that fucked-up family until you get your act together over there. Try to be normal … I'm too embarrassed to tell anybody I know you guys.

  Danny: Why? It's not our fault.

  Betty: Because Daddy's fucking his office cunt is very embarrassing.

  Danny: I know, but why are you embarrassed to tell them you even know us?

  Betty: Well, because you're living over there, you obviously approve.

  Danny: We don't, Mom. That doesn't mean anything.

  Betty: Well, then, why don't you come over here and live over here and get out of there?

  Danny: Well, it's not that easy.

  Betty: Yeah, it is that easy. It's exactly that easy, you know. You can just move here, and it's that easy. There's nothing going on in that neighborhood anyway, right?"

  Days later, Dan enclosed a transcript of the above conversation in a letter to Tricia Smith, along with a plea for her to help him control his ex-wife.

  "… This kind of abuse is directed at all four of my children on a regular basis by their mother," he wrote ... I am [asking] for your help in putting a stop to it. As you know, I have done everything I can to minimize the contact between your client and the children, but there is only so much I can do without making the situation even worse. If I try to prevent them from calling her or interfere with her calls to them, I'm afraid it may cause even more stress in their lives than the calls themselves do." And, in a bitter footnote:

  "It's interesting that the afternoon of this call, [Betty] brought her four puppies to Rhett's class for everyone to see and play with. That night she went to Danny's school for an open house. How anyone could say the things she said to Danny in the morning and then try to project herself as a loving, concerned mother that same afternoon and evening, I'll never understand." Nor would he ever even try.

  Betty, meantime, was preparing for her first public appearance to tell the world what a louse Dan Broderick was. The event was a large seminar sponsored by HALT to discuss women's problems in divorce court. It featured dozens of women speakers ranging from the prominent to the obscure, and it was well attended by the press. Hundreds attended.

  "I am the former wife of the President of the San Diego County Bar," Betty began, in a soft, nervous voice. Her comments were brief, no more than three or four minutes, and centered mainly on her problems in obtaining an attorney because of her ex-husband's status in the legal community. She also spoke about her contempts and fines. She finished by saying she felt hopeless and overwhelmed.

  Her remarks, she says, went unreported, despite the heavy press coverage and her own prominence. Her paranoia increased. Dan, she was positive, had somehow used his influence to suppress her, just as he had killed her letter to the Union.

  Still, Betty had gotten her first taste of public attention and TV lights, and she liked it. By the time she went to trial for murder three years later, she had become a master in seducing journalists with her angry, clever wit and defiance. But, back then, in the fall of 1987, she was still quiveringly timid. "I wanted to call the press a lot of times," she said later. "I was thinking by then that just the threat of going public might make him settle with me—but I was afraid of making him madder."

  Then it was November, the month of the Blackstone Ball—just one more event that she would probably never again attend. It had always been nearly as important to her social life as the USC-Notre Dame game. It was to a Blackstone Ball that she had worn her first Bob Mackie evening gown, years ago, when Mr. and Mrs. Daniel J. Broderick III were still planning a future together.

  But now, the Blackstone Ball was only another source of pain. She would never again remember it as more than the anniversary of her first arrest the year before.

  But, this year, she kept her peace—until the morning after, when she awoke, furious, and made another foulmouthed call to Dan's machine, accusing him of neglecting the children by staying out all night drunk. She also called the Child Abuse Hotline again, without result.

  By degrees, the angry wall around her vulnerabilities grew thicker as ugly new events steadily nosed out the sentimental memories of bygone times. Betty Broderick, whoever she once was, receded faster by the day.

  November 7 was her fortieth birthday. She crossed the Great Divide with minimal numbed fuss. A friend, Judy Backhaus, staged a birthday luncheon for her at George's at the Cove, a fashionable La Jolla Village restaurant.

  But it was an even worse experience than her birthday party with the girls the year before. "I didn't know where I was or how old I was or what the hell I was doing," she later said. "I needed the Betty Ford clinic by then—but they don't take codependents. I needed people to bolster me. Even jail was better—the women there understood a lot better about shithead husbands than my La
Jolla friends did."

  She went home to her diaries: "Solitary confinement is the cruelest punishment known, short of the electric chair," she wrote. And: "Dan is punishing me for knowing the truth about what a weakling he is."

  At about the same time, she went to school one rainy afternoon and attempted to pick up her sons, instead of having them ride home on the bus. But since school officials had no prior approval from Dan, they refused to let the boys leave with her until they got his permission by phone. He refused.

  "I was embarrassed to tears," she recalls. "There I was, standing face-to-face with people I had known for years, and they wouldn't even let me take my own sons home."

  * * *

  Her financial fears, meantime, had become all-consuming. Mimi was now making regular visits to help with bills and taxes. At the end of 1987, Betty hired a second accountant to deal strictly with her taxes, thus freeing Mimi to deal only with her ever-accumulating bills. At one point, her credit card charges alone exceeded $200,000. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it—only more evidence of a woman out of control.

  Adding to her anxieties, Betty had finally begun to pay attention to her lawyer's lectures about Epstein credits. She understood at last that her community property was eroding—that every day the divorce trial was delayed, she was losing money. And the more she understood about Epsteins, the more convinced she became that Dan had planned it this way all along. In time, she even decided that the crack in the Coral Reef house—which clearly existed—was only Dan's first step in a long-standing plot to abandon his family and, in the process, cheat her of equity in her own home.

  "He didn't want to give me anything! He wanted to drag the settlement out. Every day he stalled, he was stealing from me, and shifting money to Larry."

  Her desire to fire Tricia Smith was also growing more apparent with each passing page in her diaries. "T. Smith is NO HELP. Case doing NOTHING," she wrote. Money, money. So much money with so few results. All she was doing was enriching attorneys to defend her against Dan's incessant contempts.

  Yet she kept making her inflammatory calls.

  In a different, less antagonized household, some of those calls might have been almost comic—like this one left on November 15 for Lee, who had apparently taken Betty's car without permission: "Lee Lee, bring that car back!" Betty ordered. "Oh well, nobody'll even get this message anyway 'cause the cunt's around. She'll probably erase it. I need to talk to Rhett about getting beat up this morning. I need to talk to Danny about his wonderful report card. I need to talk to Kim about finishing our conversation of yesterday. And I need to talk to Lee about getting my car back. In that order. Good-bye."

  But, in Dan Broderick's eyes, nothing about Betty's mouth was humorous. Lately, her tirades were almost always over some matter concerning the children, some failing on his part. Either he hadn't delivered them when he promised, or, conversely, he brought them when she wasn't expecting them. And she continued to be furious that he would not reimburse her for the money she spent on the children for clothes, toys, and trips. In Betty's view, she deserved some form of child support, even if it wasn't court ordered. "What a cheap fucker you are," she hissed in another message, a week later.

  Obviously sensing trouble down the road, Tricia Smith began protecting her own professional reputation by meticulously documenting Betty's instructions to her in writing.

  In one letter, Smith wanted the record to specifically reflect that, in the custody matter: "You have instructed me not to try to negotiate any time for you with your children over Thanksgiving or Christmas. You have also continued to instruct me not to file any custody or visitation proceedings on your behalf for a more equitable and equal sharing of the children." If any of the above was incorrect, Smith asked Betty to notify her immediately.

  But Smith's understanding was correct. Betty would punish herself, and her children, to the bloody end, rather than let Dan win.

  Just before Thanksgiving, the children told Betty that Dan was about to have the annual family portrait made for his Christmas cards. Anyone who has ever been the unhappy half of a divorce knows how that small detail, carelessly tossed out in passing by children, pierced her heart. Another family tradition gone. Another year without her. She was so alone. She was going mad. She thought about it all day. She thought about what clothes she would dress the children in if she were still part of the Broderick family portrait. She remembered how wonderful the boys had looked three years ago when she bought them identical blazers and slacks for Dan's fortieth birthday party. She thought of the matching red velvet dresses she had bought Kim and Lee when they were little girls. She had always loved to dress them in twin frocks … But then her nostalgia vanished in a blur of hate. She remembered how she picked Rhett up at school one rainy, cold afternoon and he wasn't even wearing a sweater. She had taken him to Nordstrom's and bought him one. She remembered so much. Dan, with his perfect clothes, his rose boutonnieres … Linda with her new condo, her upscale new wardrobe …

  Adding irony to injury, she also discovered, that very day, that Scott's, a local children's store where she had shopped for years, was suing her for $879.11 in clothes she had bought for the boys because Dan refused to pay the bill. Humiliated again.

  She picked up the telephone and demanded that Dan return the clothes he refused to pay for. "I don't want fuckface using the clothes for his goddamn family portrait, and to purport to the community that he's dressing his children well, when he won't even pay for half the clothes," she said. "So I'm coming over to get the clothes that I own. So if you would please put in trash bags the several thousand dollars' worth of clothes I've bought in the last two months ... I will give them to poor children whose fathers don't have enough money to clothe them."

  By now, Dan could no longer control his temper any better than Betty could. He promptly filed another contempt. At the same time, he sent another letter to Drs. Roth and Sparta, saying that "I have reached the point where I feel I have no choice but to ask the court to enjoin the respondent from any further contact with our children."

  Betty spent Thanksgiving doing exactly what she had done the year before—darting around La Jolla, dropping in on old neighbors from Coral Reef, people who remembered her fondly from the days when she played with their babies and let the popcorn fly over their tiny, delighted heads.

  As Christmas approached, Dan wrote another conciliatory letter to Tricia Smith. He hoped, he said, to work out some arrangement allowing Betty to spend part of the holiday season with the children: "I know the kids would like this, and I assume the respondent would as well."

  Smith, who sounded exhausted herself by then, even in formal letters, replied, upon orders of her client, that, no, thank you—without sufficient funds to entertain the children, Mrs. Broderick would not be able to accept them.

  Tricia Smith then practically begged Dan to back down and fork over the extra money, anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000—not his standard $2,000 offering. Sounding as much like a marriage counselor as an attorney, she pointed out to Dan that he was a wealthy man, so dollars weren't the real issue. If he would only make the gesture, Smith wrote, everybody would be better off, himself included: "The benefits to you are great and those to your children are even greater." And, "The small amount of money it would cost you in relative terms cannot be significant to you."

  Dan's response was stunning in its iciness. Gone was the friendly fellow who had said only weeks before that it would be good for the children to spend Christmastime with their mom. When it came to dollars and cents, Dan Broderick lost all delicacy.

  "By my calculation, after your client has paid monthly real estate taxes, income taxes, car payment, house payment, and utilities, she is left with over $5,000. No one in their right mind could contend that that is not enough for one month's food, clothing, entertainment, and gifts, even the month of December. Basically what the respondent is asking me to do is pay her to spend time with the children over the holidays. This is preposterous, whet
her or not I can afford it."

  Even the boys' dogs became weapons in the adult war. A pair of tiny Shi-Tzus, Betty had bought them for her sons at $500 apiece years earlier, before she and Dan separated. When they bred, she either gave the puppies away or let the boys sell them at $100 apiece for their piggy banks. Danny and Rhett loved them. But, after the separation, they did not stay long at Dan's house. He hated the two yapping little dogs underfoot with their claws wrecking his magnificent hardwood floors. Topsy and Muffin were not permitted inside his house. Instead, they stayed in a makeshift dog run in the gulch below his backyard lawn. Finally, Danny and Rhett took their pets back to Betty's, where they were allowed free run of the house. Betty liked dogs.

  But, on Friday afternoon, December 18, she resented those little dogs, too. She was planning a weekend trip to Pasadena. Why was she responsible for hiring someone to care for these dogs while she was gone? Why shouldn't he share responsibility for his children's pets?

  And so, in a typically acerbic streak of Betty humor, she tied red Christmas ribbons around their necks, loaded Topsy and Muffin into her Suburban, and drove over to Dan's house one morning where, in purposeful defiance of the restraining order to stay off his property, she marched up the sidewalk, opened his front door, and deposited the two little pooches in his foyer. She watched with satisfaction as they went scurrying across his costly Persian rugs, their toenails clicking on his glossy floors, sniffing at everything. Fuck him and his restraining orders and his hatred of dogs. She hoped they pissed on every chair leg in the house.