It’s the fall of 1982, and, in a gossip-hungry West Palm Beach courtroom, reporters and spectators lean forward for the next secret.
At the table, Roxanne Pulitzer, 31, doodles on a notepad.
Her face stays smooth and still, her eyes lowered. To the judge, it looks like indifference. Later, she’ll say she was only trying to keep her composure.
Over 18 days of testimony, witnesses describe séances in her bedroom, drug use and alleged lovers of both sexes.
When her husband takes the stand, she looks up and fixes her eyes on him: Peter, the silver-haired grandson of newspaper titan Joseph Pulitzer.
The confrontation is silent, but unmistakable. By the judge’s account, she has stared him down.
Her lawyers call her an innocent “farm girl” who was led astray. Peter’s side tells the story with a much longer cast of characters: a psychic, a French baker, a yacht club bartender and... a trumpet.
Up on the bench, Circuit Judge Carl Harper runs his courtroom with a dry wit and a sharp eye. He watches a marriage come apart in front of strangers, and what he sees at that table will end up in his ruling.
Roxanne’s side of the case values the Pulitzer fortune at about $25 million.
She wants alimony, the lakefront mansion on North Lake Way and a share of the 73-foot yacht he now calls home.
It’s a staggering wish list for someone who started out with almost nothing. Before she met him, she was a divorced insurance saleswoman thinking about going home to upstate New York.
Palm Beach likes to keep its scandals behind the hedges. The Pulitzers are airing theirs in front of television cameras.
What will come of it will turn a mother into a visitor in her own sons’ lives.
Five-year-old Mac and Zac will go home with their father, and she’ll need Peter’s written consent just to take them out of Palm Beach County.
A Small-Town Beginning
Her lawyers called her a “farm girl” led astray, and the first half of that label held up.
Thirty-one years before the trial, her story began in upstate New York, about as far from Palm Beach society as a girl could get.
Roxanne was born in 1951 in Cassadaga, New York, a small farming community. She’d later describe it as quaint and monotonous.
When Roxanne was young, her mother asked her father to leave, according to a Chicago Tribune profile, and in time another man took his place at the head of the house.
The new man was Tyrone Ulrich, a police officer, and he taught his stepdaughter how to shoot. The skill would come in handy years later, when she married a man who loved to hunt.
At school she was a cheerleader and an athlete, and in her yearbook she listed “people who lie” as her pet peeve.
Years later, her husband would accuse her of dozens of lies in open court.
But, for now, her way out of that quiet farm town ran through a wedding.
At 19, Roxanne married a young man who took her south to Florida, where she enrolled at Palm Beach Junior College. The marriage lasted barely a year.
But while the husband was soon out of the picture, Florida was not.
Rather than return home, Roxanne stayed, living on her own in a mobile home. She was 23 years old, divorced, with a two-year degree and little to her name.
When she married Peter, a judge later noted, her assets amounted to a used car and a $7,000 interest in a mobile home.
Before the mansion and the yacht, Roxanne sold insurance, and she found it humiliating.
She later wrote she hated the experience so much she vowed never to sell anyone anything again. For all her determination to leave Cassadaga behind, she was now seriously considering going home.
Then her boss threw a party.
Among the guests was a silver-haired hotelier in his mid-40s, with a panther tattoo, a famous last name, and a fortune that would one day be fought over in a televised courtroom.
The Panther Tattoo
Most Americans knew his last name from journalism’s most famous prize, and the guest at her boss’s party belonged to the family that created it.
His grandfather Joseph owned The New York World and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and officially he was Herbert Pulitzer Jr., though everyone called him Peter.
His father, Herbert “Tony” Pulitzer, married Gladys Munn, a divorced Palm Beach socialite, in a private Paris ceremony in 1926 that took even high society by surprise.
They had two children, Peter and a sister, Patsy, but their later years together were overshadowed by Gladys’s battle with tuberculosis.
Their daughter later recalled that Tony traveled the world with his wife searching for a cure, while the children were kept away for fear of infection.
Gladys died in La Jolla, California, in 1938, at just 45 years old. Peter was eight.
From then on, the daily work of raising him fell to nannies, and the people who tucked him in at night were on the family payroll.
He attended St. Mark’s, a prestigious Massachusetts boarding school where old money families sent their sons to acquire the proper polish. Peter absorbed the lessons well enough, though his enthusiasm for formal education had its limits. After two years of college, he grew bored and dropped out.
Then there was the panther tattoo. It fit the pattern, an unlikely mark for an heir to a publishing dynasty and fair warning that Peter would write his own rules.
And he ran his love life the same way. In 1952 he eloped with Lillian McKim, a girl from a prominent Northeastern family. As Lilly Pulitzer, she later became a fashion name in her own right, famous for bright resort dresses.
Palm Beach became their home, and they raised three children there, among them a daughter named Liza who’d one day take the witness stand in her father’s next divorce.
The couple divorced at the end of the 1960s, and, in its wake, Peter built a business empire of his own. He planted orange groves in Florida, with Pulitzer Groves selling its fruit to Tropicana.
In Amsterdam, he and a partner turned six canal houses into the Hotel Pulitzer.
“The six houses we started with eventually turned into 25 houses, a five-star hotel, and the largest national historic monument of the Netherlands,” he said. “This was the beginning of the Pulitzer empire.”
When Roxanne met him, Peter was in his mid-40s and she was 24. They lived together for six months, and much of that time went into working on his 73-foot yacht, The Sea Hunter.
In January 1976, the insurance saleswoman from Cassadaga became Mrs. Pulitzer.
The wedding was in Palm Beach, and twins arrived in August 1977, two boys named MacLean and Zachary, known as Mac and Zac.
Roxanne arrived with a used car, and now she drove a black Porsche.
Palm Beach, however, had its own opinion of the new Mrs. Pulitzer.
