Kid Carolina

by Heidi Schnakenberg

  It wasn’t until she flew to New York and Dick’s lawyers converged on her again that she realized the preposterous divorce papers were real.

  Muriel was devastated.

  CHAPTER 17

  Darien

  1959–1963

  Muriel’s initial reaction was to fly back to Sapelo immediately and get Frank Wells, Dick’s sister Nancy, and her own brother, Tony, who was still a very good friend of Dick’s, to help her persuade Dick to rethink his move. She wrote a desperate letter to Nancy, begging her to intervene and telling her not to believe the things Dick said. But she received an “icy reply” in return.

  Then Muriel appealed to Dick directly. She begged him to reconsider and accused the doctors and the nurse of conspiring to turn him against her. Her letters were mixed with anger, sadness, and demands. When she tried to call Dick and he hung up on her, she fought back. She wrote him a letter warning that she would fight him to the bitter end and if he wanted to get rid of her, they could get a quick divorce in Reno and settle right then for $2 million.

  Dick refused. He wasn’t about to give Muriel a dime. There was already a lot of talk around town of Muriel’s diaries and her supposed infidelity, and Dick was furious about it. Muriel wrote to Nancy saying she kept those diaries unlocked for a reason—there was nothing to hide.

  Then Muriel wondered if Dick had found another woman. She had certainly witnessed his shenanigans when he was trying to divorce Marianne. Maybe he was up to his old tricks again.

  Muriel appealed to Dick directly yet again. She wrote him saying, “The medicine is affecting your judgment. The accusations are absurd. You have always let me cut the bonds… they are part of the trust… you told me to keep them in the box. I didn’t steal them. As for the bracelet, you never used to have problems with things like this. Cartier gave me a great price… that was two months ago and you never said anything… love does not turn off and on like an electric light bulb…. Your broken hearted wife.”

  Muriel also defended her changing her will, saying she never disinherited Dick and even used his lawyer to make the changes. What was so wrong with that? Strat Coyner had reported the change of will to Dick, she pointed out. She wasn’t trying to hide it. It also occurred to Muriel that Karl, who knew where her diaries were kept, must have directed Dick to the chest in her room. She wondered who else had betrayed her at Sapelo.

  Dick’s complaints about the bonds continued to perplex her.They were right there in her closet, in the safe, she reasoned. She had always been in charge of them. Muriel even sent Dick the coupons and receipts from New York after she cashed them. Did he not receive the box? And what of all the letters he sent her all summer, signed “with a heart full of love from ole Buck Rabbit”? Muriel continued to suspect that Dick was out of his mind when he filed for this divorce. Maybe he would come around.

  While she shopped for lawyers, Muriel consoled herself at El Morocco, the Key Club, the Stork Club, and “21” with her friends. But she felt she was living her worst nightmare. After all she had done for Dick, this was the thanks she got. Of course, Eleanor made things worse—she demanded that Muriel find a way to hang on to Dick, or at the very least, take him for all he was worth. Muriel sadly told reporters, “If this man doesn’t like me anymore, all he has to do is meet me with my brother or my family like a gentleman, tell me the truth, instead of which the divorce was thrown in my face.”

  Muriel’s society friends in Winston-Salem also expressed shock at Dick’s actions. No one saw it coming. They told Muriel how excited they had been when Dick found her—“someone he could converse intelligently with after his two other great mistakes. Who would either gamble with him at Monte Carlo or run the vacuum cleaner at Fancy Gap! Could have twenty for a formal dinner or steak sandwiches in the trailer,” wrote Dr. Valk’s wife, Bungy.

  Meanwhile, Dick moved to dump as many assets as he could. He was tired of living with Muriel’s constant complaining, he was sick, and he wanted to live in peace for once in his life. In fact, he wanted to be rid of everyone, including his sons, who he now felt were nothing more than leeches, too. Dick got into an argument with his son Zach when he asked to buy a Sapelo jeep. Dick inexplicably grew furious, accused him of trying to take his money like Muriel, and kicked him out of the house. Dick wanted to be alone for good.

  He gave $442,000 to his agricultural foundation, $10,000 to the local Presbyterian Hospital, nearly $2 million to the University of Georgia, and he donated the Aries, which had too many memories with Muriel, to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He also revoked the $6 million trust he had set up for Muriel.

  Fearing Muriel would try to get to Sapelo, Dick stationed guards all over the island—the Meridian Dock, the Salt Marsh Dock, and at the house. He advised his servants to “shoot first and ask questions later.” Then Dick had his lawyers serve Muriel with a restraining order at her apartment at the Ritz Tower. The order said that Muriel had threatened him, his nurse, and his doctor, citing her letters to them all, and said they all feared for their lives.

  Her little Ritz flat, room 503, would soon be the site of many more servings of motions. Private investigators from the Schindler Bureau of Investigation, including Walter Russell and Shelby Williams, followed Muriel all over town. They served her in front of Fortieth Street, Madison Avenue, Seventy-ninth Street (Richard Greenough’s place), the Hotel Astor at Broadway, the Park Sheraton, and more.

  Muriel hired one of the best lawyers she could find, Smythe Gambrell of Atlanta, on recommendation from Louis Nizer, renowned attorney to the stars. Nizer had been Marianne’s lawyer when she divorced Dick in 1952. Gambrell was one of the best lawyers in the South and he was also counsel for Eastern Airlines, Dick’s former investment and rival to Delta.

  Throughout the fall, depositions and subpoenas were taken from and issued to Dick and Muriel, and Dick subpoenaed his witnesses—Irma and Arved Rosing, Captain Evans in Gosport, Dr. Harry Rollings, Dr. Henry Valk, jeweler Louis Cartier, Charles Torem, the representatives of the Montreal Trust Company and the Royal Bank of Canada, and Strat Coyner—and that was only the beginning. Muriel concluded that Dick meant to highlight every negative incident in their marriage—the spats with the servants and the workers at Gosport, the disagreements with his doctors, the time she wired the half million to herself after Copenhagen, and the disputed bracelet from Cartier—all to prove his claim of mental cruelty.

  Once Muriel realized the case was definitely going forward, she turned up the attacks as well. No more tears, no more grief. She was going to take Dick for all he was worth. Once again, Dick had underestimated his opponent.

  Muriel knew Dick’s strategy, and she would use it to her advantage. She realized that Dick had been tricking her all along—the letters, the flowers, encouraging her to take a holiday. He always tricked his soon-to-be ex-wives in order to catch them off guard right before he filed for divorce. Muriel had seen it firsthand during his divorce from Marianne.

  They went back and forth for months, filing hundreds of motions to produce. Muriel’s lawyers were going to tell the jury all about Dick’s drinking. They wanted all of Dick’s booze bills for the last seven years. For every incident of Muriel’s alleged cruelty, she was going to match it with an incident of Dick’s drinking.

  The exchange of motions, written interrogatories, and subpoenas that were exchanged throughout late 1959 and early 1960 seemed to last forever. In the spring of 1960, it was finally time to go to trial.

  The divorce proceedings were held at the Darien, Georgia, courthouse, which served as the seat of McIntosh County, and were launched on May 2, 1960. Sixty local jurors, including members of the politically connected Poppell family and Frank Durant, were selected for the trial. Witnesses from Europe and all over the United States would provide testimony in support of Dick’s charges that Muriel’s cruelty exacerbated his pulmonary emphysema and threatened his health.

  Muriel was still in shock over Dick’s actions and stupefied by her own inability to s
ee it coming. Muriel was only in her mid-forties and thought she would spend the rest of her life with Dick. She should have known this would happen. Sooner or later, Dick always left his wives.

  Muriel’s lawyers opened with the position that “mental cruelty” was not grounds for divorce in Georgia. Muriel angrily denied the accusations anyway—what Dick perceived as nagging, Muriel said, was simply her insistence that he take his medicine and continue treatment for alcoholism. Muriel’s attorney, Smythe Gambrell, opened by stating that he was trying to find the reason for the “baffling mystery” of Mr. Reynolds’s suit against Muriel, as well as the paranoid restraining order he issued. Gambrell also pointed out that Dick had been writing and phoning Muriel almost daily throughout her summer vacation, leading them to believe he deliberately tricked her. If he had, this would also be grounds to refuse a divorce to Dick.

  Dick’s Savannah lawyer, Paul Varner, whom Muriel knew well, said in his opening statement, “We’re going to lay it on her and we’re going to tear her to pieces, piece by piece and thread by thread. We’re going to tear her to pieces in this courtroom and throw her out the window.” With that, Varner set the tone.

  Both Dick and Muriel had an army of lawyers, and both sides engaged in vicious attacks. Dick’s lawyers paraded the prenuptial agreement that Muriel had signed in 1952, warning the jury that if they found favor with Dick in this case, they should consider giving Muriel no alimony because of it. Muriel’s lawyers accused Dick of being a sadist.

  Witness depositions were soon recited. Irma and Arved Rosing testified to Muriel’s meanness toward them and the chef, Karl Weiss, on the Aries. Drs. Harry Rollings and Henry Valk testified that Muriel made Dick’s health worse. Admiral Durgin and Price Gilbert, from Dick’s wartime days, testified to Dick’s character, and Nancy testified that she received desperate letters from Muriel.

  Dick’s financial life became an important issue. As Strat Coyner, Dick’s ever-present cleanup guy, served as a witness for Dick, he had a hard time looking Muriel in the eye. Under examination by one of Muriel’s lawyers, Robert Richardson, Strat disclosed that Dick owned a company called Netherlands Meade that was a foreign corporation. Dick had created it for the express purpose of making foreign investments, including fine gold, which he kept in Switzerland. This piece of information was to become important in just a few years. Richardson went on to question Coyner about Dick’s income and expenses in an attempt to show what Dick was worth, how extravagantly he lived, and his standard of living while he was married to Muriel.

  Coyner also testified that he knew Dick was talking about divorce after Muriel left the summer before, but he didn’t tell her—even as he was working on her will. Coyner was forced to admit that Muriel was very good to his own wife, having bought her clothing and gifts, and that she was popular among Winston-Salem society.

  John Gates, current master of the Aries, testified as to Dick’s and Muriel’s conduct on their yachts over the years. Gates also told the court that Muriel cursed too much and encouraged Dick’s drinking, even when he was trying to quit.

  Muriel Takes the Stand

  On direct examination, Muriel talked about her marriage with Dick and recalled their wedding. “Karl Weiss baked a cake, the housekeeper made a lovely hat of gardenias to wear, Karl put lanterns in the garden,” she said. Muriel pointed out that all of Dick’s attorneys, now there fighting her, had witnessed Dick’s signing of the drinking agreement, which trumped the prenuptial agreement of 1952.

  On cross-examination, Muriel was criticized for going to El Morocco and spending hundreds of dollars while trying to portray herself as the poor victimized wife. She countered that it cost four times as much to have a meal shipped in to Sapelo.

  To obtain some sort of settlement, Muriel had a fight on her hands. Even a fraction of Blitz’s and Marianne’s settlements would be difficult because of the prenuptial agreement and the fact that she and Dick had no children. Dick had settled with his previous two wives for around $11 million. Even though Dick had almost instantly broken his alcohol contract, no one took that document seriously. Muriel was asking for $2 million, and in spite of Dick’s large settlements in the past, the press was heavily publicizing the sum.

  Muriel had lost the battle before she’d even begun when Gambrell failed to get a relocation of the trial. Muriel’s legal team argued it was impossible for Muriel to get a fair trial in McIntosh County, where Dick was one of the county’s most prominent citizens as well as one of its largest employers and benefactors. Dick owned one quarter of the land in the county, and his many lavish gifts would undoubtedly sway public opinion in his favor.

  Dick had conveniently and cleverly established legal residency on Sapelo—the residency trick—which he had owned for almost twenty-five years, just six months before he filed for divorce. The entire town of Darien was either directly employed by, or benefited from, Dick Reynolds. Even the city’s energy was supplied by Dick. The sheriff had just received a handsome donation from Dick, and the judges and lawyers were all Dick’s friends or business partners. Muriel’s legal team requested a change in location. But the judge denied the motion. Now Muriel would be at the mercy of those “backwoods” Southerners she used to mock.

  Throughout the interrogation, Muriel managed to stay calm and even maintain her sense of humor, even though she was dying inside. She swore to the jury that she would have loved Dick if he had no money at all.

  The half-million-dollar money transfer after the Copenhagen incident came up in court. Muriel testified that Dick pulled anchor and left her stranded without funds or even clothes, which was why she had withdrawn the money. It came out that in order to make the transfer, Muriel had to forge Dick’s hand. Muriel said this was normal. She had done it “thousands of times during Dick’s seven years’ intoxication” and claimed she had done nothing wrong because she didn’t even spend the money. It was fully intact two weeks later, “as safe in a joint account with me as it would be in Fort Knox.”

  As the court heard hundreds of pages of depositions and testimony and the tedious trial continued, one thing was missing: Dick. The presiding judge, Henry Durrence, ruled that Dick was too ill to appear in court. Instead, an oral deposition was taken from Dick on Sapelo by a court-appointed reporter, Mrs. Minnie Lee Johnson, and all of his accusations were read in court by his attorneys. Dick was supposedly living alone in paranoia with his servants and Nancy, who was on Sapelo during Dick’s depositions. When Dick claimed to be too sick to come to court, Muriel’s lawyers said that being impaired by excessive use of whiskey and tobacco did not constitute an inability to answer questions. Gambrell said Dick was being allowed to hide out from Muriel and demanded the right to question Dick personally.

  When Gambrell finally had the chance to interview Dick on Sapelo Island, he was flippant and sarcastic, sometimes refusing to answer questions altogether. Dick dismissed questions about his foundations and their worth, saying, “It has nothing to do with the case.” He refused to answer questions or submit evidence of how much he drank. When Gambrell pressed him about his net worth, Dick finally admitted he was worth about $25 million—far less than he really was. Gambrell asked him questions about his divorces from Blitz and Marianne, trying to get him to admit that he used trickery and a change in residency in all his divorces. Finally caught using his old tricks, Dick refused to answer.

  Gambrell turned to the possibility of other women. When asked if he had any intention of reconciling with Marianne, Dick said “NO, with a capital N and O.” When he was asked if he ever wished to marry again, he said, “NO with a capital N and O, underscored.”

  Dick reported that Muriel had a “fiendish temper,” and he lived in constant terror. She frequently mentioned that she wished he were dead and asked doctors how long he had to live. Dick brought up the voodoo and witchcraft, saying, “She had a way of shuffling cards.” He said Muriel had people to do her bidding, and that she was a Gypsy who could see the future. He claimed he kept his bedroom door l
ocked at night because Muriel boasted of her underworld connections.

  Underworld connections? Muriel felt she was in a dream—reliving what must have been Marianne’s ordeal with Dick. How could he be so predictable?

  When Gambrell asked about their sex life, Dick said he hadn’t slept in the same bed with Muriel since January 1, 1959. Dick repeated his claim that Muriel’s diaries revealed that she was with former lovers throughout their marriage. Muriel countered that both she and Dick were friends with many of her exes, including Richard Greenough, who was mentioned in the diaries, and whenever she was with him, she never did anything wrong. Muriel said many of the diary entries dated back to 1937, long before she met Dick.

  Muriel’s lawyers asked why the diaries weren’t entered into evidence if there was damning information in them. Dick’s camp claimed that they did not expose the diaries because international society was very worried about who and what was in them, and they didn’t want to offend anyone. In the end, most observers concluded the diaries likely never had anything of interest in them—Dick could have easily presented them and saved himself a lot of time and money.

  It turned out that Muriel was guilty of one thing—gambling away her money in Monte Carlo. Dick revealed that he had private detectives follow her during her entire vacation—one of the men who Muriel thought was her chauffeur was actually a private investigator, and Dick had spent $56,000 just to have her followed. None of the investigators caught Muriel doing anything wrong.

  Then Dick accused Muriel of sending her mother’s friend Cedric Taylor to spy on him at Sapelo. In fact, Dick had flown Cedric down to Sapelo, at his expense, to show him her diaries after he cracked them open. He wanted to turn Cedric against her. Dick even told Cedric that he would kill Muriel with a pistol if he saw her.