Poisoned Love

by Caitlin Rother

  Gregory Bernard Paul Yvon Tremolet de Villers was the first of three American sons born to Yves and Marie-France Tremolet de Villers. Greg and his brothers grew up in Southern California, across the globe from France, their parents’ native country. But because their mother always felt more comfortable speaking in her native tongue, all three were fluent in it.

  Marie-France was born in 1943 in Gaillac, a small town near the Pyrenees. When she was a child, her mother would spread hot vapor rub on her chest to help her asthmatic breathing. Her father’s military career exposed her and her younger sister, Marie-Paul, at an early age to African cultures in Algeria, Morocco, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo. Marie-France was in her twenties, working as a physical therapist, when she met Yves in Mende, a town in the south of France, where her parents had settled. Yves, who was eight years her senior, worked in a hospital there.

  Yves lost his father when he was eleven, so his mother raised him and his sisters with the help of two uncles, both members of the French Parliament. When their town of Montpellier was bombed during World War II, Yves’ family hid in a vaulted basement across the street from their home, biting on pieces of wood to keep their mouths open and prevent their eardrums from rupturing. The next morning they learned that thousands had died in the night. Yves saw people gunned down in the street and was awakened one night at 2 A.M. by the Gestapo, who were looking for one of his uncles.

  Ambitious and intelligent, Yves started medical school in Montpellier in 1953. He also studied medicine at a university in Marseilles. He trained in surgery and anesthesiology and also interned at a hospital in Nice.

  Yves and Marie moved to the Chicago area in 1970 so he could continue his medical studies, and they were married there in 1972. Greg was born the following year, on November 12. Yves did a residency in hand surgery at Northwestern University, one in general surgery at Michael Reese Hospital, and one in plastic surgery at the University of Illinois, where he also taught classes. In 1974 he opened a surgical practice in Monte Carlo, which is in the tiny country of Monaco, on the Mediterranean Sea near the French and Italian borders. A resort area, Monte Carlo has a population of about thirty-two thousand, is a vacation spot for the rich, and is known for its casinos and for being home to the late Grace Kelly after she married its chief of state, Prince Rainier III.

  In 1975, two years and three days after Greg was born, Marie gave birth to Jerome Henri Vincent Louis Tremolet de Villers, continuing the tradition of naming their sons after three relatives. The family soon moved to Westlake Village in California, a community that straddles Ventura and Los Angeles Counties. They bought a modest condominium there that December, and Yves opened a second plastic surgery practice, this time with a partner in the neighboring city of Thousand Oaks, a mostly white, family-oriented city of about 117,000 people in Ventura County.

  The third de Villers son, Charles Bertrand Jean Francois, who went by Bertrand, or Bert to his friends, was born on March 10, 1979, in a hospital across the street from the family’s condo.

  Over the years, Yves would travel back and forth between his dual practices in Thousand Oaks and Monte Carlo. Yves worked as a surgeon at L’Hospital Complex Princess Grace. Back in California, Bertrand remembered that Yves did some work on Walt Disney to fix a broken nose, and that he brought home a Mickey Mouse watch as a token of appreciation.

  But pure medicine was never enough for Yves, who had a very active mind. He went on to coauthor a textbook titled Body Sculpturing by Lipoplasty in 1989. A student for life, he also received a master’s degree in business administration, finance, and marketing from the University of Southern Europe in Monaco in 1998.

  Two months after Bertrand was born, the family moved to a more upscale neighborhood a couple of miles away, where Yves and Marie bought a two-story house on Silver Springs Drive. Lined with tall, thin conifers, an olive tree, jasmine, and rose bushes, the house looked onto a soccer field that was part of a K-8 school that Greg and Jerome attended across the street. With a pool and a hot tub in the backyard, this was suburbia at its best.

  But before long, Yves and Marie’s marriage went sour. Greg and Jerome were rousted out of bed by doors slamming or Yves yelling at their mother. They would climb to the top of the stairs outside the master bedroom, trying to figure out what the ruckus was about. It scared them and made them cry to hear their parents fight.

  Yves filed papers to dissolve the union on September 2, 1981, when Bertrand was two and Greg almost eight.

  A month later Yves filed papers asking the court to stop Marie from selling their community property and to award him custody of the boys. Upon returning from Europe, he claimed, he discovered that Marie had sold their 1973 Volkswagen and a “very expensive gun” without his consent. Given his wife’s “emotional state,” he was worried that she’d run off with the boys to their house in Monte Carlo.

  “I feel I am qualified to make the statement, as I am a medical doctor,” he wrote. He also asked the court to restrain Marie’s “personal conduct,” so she would not be allowed to “contact, molest, attack, strike, threaten, sexually assault, batter, telephone or otherwise disturb” his peace.

  Marie filed her own set of divorce papers on October 1, asking for the same restraint on Yves’s conduct.

  Each parent gave a dramatically different version of the events that contributed to the split. But one thing was obvious to any neutral party: Even though Yves moved back into the house for a time, the high drama reflected in four years of divorce filings must have created an emotionally volatile environment for Greg and his brothers, one in which money was always an issue. Each parent went through several attorneys.

  In Marie’s initial filing, she asked the court to award her custody of the boys, along with $1,500 in child support and $4,000 in alimony, monthly. She asked that Yves, who wasn’t living at home at the time, be forced to stay at least one hundred yards away from her.

  “In the past, respondent has on many occasions beat me with a closed fist, and police reports have been made,” Marie’s signed petition stated. “After he beat me up, respondent sent me to a doctor for treatment, and I had black-and-blue marks all over. I am afraid of him, and he has stated he will break my teeth and mouth and will make me an ugly person.”

  Years later Marie would testify that Yves never hit her. Yves also denied hitting her, saying those allegations were “a fabricated maneuver” by her attorney and that Marie may have signed the divorce papers without reading them carefully. California bar association records show that Marie’s attorney, Saul Nadel, had one disciplinary action against him—his law license was temporarily suspended in 1990—but the charges remain confidential. He died in 1998.

  Although the boys don’t remember ever seeing Yves hit their mother, they said Marie told them she’d been scared of his behavior and recounted stories of him throwing over chairs and breaking down a locked door she was hiding behind.

  The judge granted a mutual restraining order to Marie and Yves, but less than a month later, Marie complained that her husband had already violated it.

  “[Yves] is annoying me, and he has removed various wires from my car so that I could not use the car,” her filing read. “I called on my neighbors for help, and they replaced the removed wires so that I could take my son to the doctor.” She said Yves had not paid “sufficient monies” for the family’s living expenses, such as the boys’ tuition and other necessary household bills.

  Yves and his attorney responded by asking the court to order Marie to undergo a mental examination. The judge approved the request.

  Marie “has been treated for a substantial period of time by certain psychiatrists for mental conditions,” Yves’s attorney wrote, saying Yves told him Marie “suffers from substantial delusions and other mental diseases.” Her emotional state, he wrote, was relevant because it related to her ability to hold a job and care for the boys properly. He said Marie, who had been employed at a local hospital, “terminated said employment due to an alleged ment
al condition.”

  Marie’s attorney responded by filing a petition to subpoena two years of Yves’s personal and business tax records. Yves’s attorney followed up with a proposal for a family living arrangement, complete with photos and a floor plan, giving Yves the master suite upstairs and Marie the smaller downstairs bedroom. The couple wouldn’t eat meals at the same time, and Yves would buy his own food, do his own laundry and cooking, and take out the trash. Marie would pay for a new phone for herself and the boys.

  On February 12, 1982, the American Savings and Loan Association filed a legal notice that Yves and Marie had defaulted on their mortgage and that their house could be sold if they didn’t pay up within three months. A few weeks later, Marie’s attorney wrote the judge to complain that Yves had evicted her from the master bedroom and relegated her to the “maid’s room” downstairs. She, too, submitted photos and a floor plan, asking for exclusive use of the house.

  The judge ruled that Yves should move into the downstairs bedroom. If Yves violated any part of the order, the judge warned, he’d have to leave the house. Yves was ordered to pay $500 in alimony and $900 for child support each month, and the children would no longer attend private school. Yves was also ordered to pay Marie’s $2,750 in attorneys’ fees. When Yves failed to pay those fees, her attorney had to get a court order to garnishee Yves’s bank account.

  On August 29, Yves asked the court to free him from having to pay the mortgage on the family home and to force Marie to consult with him on the boys’ education. He said he couldn’t pay child support or alimony as ordered because his practice was $206,900 in debt and the family home was in foreclosure. He said he’d fallen, breaking one arm and the other wrist, which had prevented him from working for several months.

  Meanwhile, Marie and the boys had to move in with a woman she worked with at a nearby hospital. For a time, the four of them had to share one bunk bed.

  Marie’s attorney renewed the judgment against Yves on September 28 to try to collect the rest of his fees. The next day Yves tried to modify his alimony and support order and asked for joint custody of the boys, with the right to be consulted on their education and religious training. He also complained that since his bank account was garnisheed, he could no longer access his own safety deposit box, which contained documents he needed to drive and operate his medical practice in Monaco.

  In November the judge ruled that a sheriff’s deputy could watch Yves remove his citizenship papers from the box, but no stock certificates, automobile pink slips, insurance policies, or personal property with “tangible value.”

  On March 15, 1983, Yves filed papers contending that his income had fallen to zero. Two weeks later, he sought sole custody of the boys, saying Marie was trying to take them back to France to live with her mother without telling him. He claimed Marie either prevented him from visiting the boys or harassed him so much she made visits virtually impossible. She had even yelled threats at him at his office in front of patients and staff, saying she would “do anything she can to ‘hurt’ me.”

  A few weeks later, the judge ordered a new child visitation schedule for Yves, telling Marie she needed to give Yves any new phone numbers or addresses. He prohibited both parents from making derogatory remarks about the other in front of the children. Marie couldn’t take them to France until the summer break, he said, and she had to bring them back in time for the fall term.

  After that order, the divorce dispute shifted to how community property and assets from Yves’s medical practices should be divided.

  In October Yves complained to the judge that he’d tried several times to visit his children since April but was still being refused access. Marie had also taken the children out of school in Ventura County, he said, and enrolled them at a school in Riverside County. Marie had, in fact, moved with the boys to an apartment complex in Palm Springs that year. By this time, Greg was about ten.

  On November 8, Marie’s divorce attorney filed papers to remove himself from the case against Yves, saying he feared it was endangering his life and his children’s. He’d received an anonymous threatening call four days earlier. Then, a package from an unknown company was delivered to his home, and he had to call in the bomb squad to investigate. After getting numerous disturbing phone calls at his house, he had to change the number.

  The divorce case finally got to a nonjury trial on January 10, 1984. The judge awarded joint legal custody of the boys to Yves and Marie, and full physical custody to Marie. Yves could visit the children during July and August and on alternating weekends and holidays. He would pay $500 a month in alimony and $900 in child support, as well as $900 in outstanding bills for the boys’ private schools. He was to pay about $11,500 in debts and attorneys fees for Marie and was awarded all assets and debts from his medical practices and all personal debts he shared with Marie. He also got to keep his “over and under Franchi hunting gun.”

  The divorce became final on August 6, 1985.

  Bertrand and Jerome didn’t recall their childhoods being all that clouded by the divorce battle, at least not so much that they would discuss it with someone outside the family.

  Bertrand remembered that they never had enough money after the split, but he chose to focus more on the positive outcome: The brothers learned early how to amuse themselves. They always played outside, doing something athletic, like riding dirt bikes, hiking, or thrashing around in the swimming pool at their apartment complex. They also learned how to be creative. They built forts out of palm fronds, waged dirt-clod wars, made up their own games, and built a BMX bike-racing course with jumps and ramps.

  The brothers often played together, at least until Greg started working odd jobs and then was employed at a drugstore to help their mother support the family. Greg was sixteen or seventeen when he got a job at Longs Drugs, where Jerome joined him a year later, after working at another pharmacy. In the coming years, the two brothers would stay in close touch with their coworkers, Aaron Wallo and Bill Leger. Leger, whose father was the store manager, was over at the de Villerses’ apartment most weekends, playing tennis or hiking.

  The de Villers boys never had allowances, so they’d have to ask their mother to give them money when they wanted something, and she would decide if they could afford it on a case-by-case basis. Greg and Jerome had to pay for their own orthodontia.

  The brothers never understood why Marie had to struggle so much. They saw how much easier life was for other kids whose fathers were plastic surgeons, and they wondered why their father couldn’t help out more, especially when he had a practice in Monte Carlo, a playground for those with a glitzy lifestyle.

  Yves and Marie always watched the evening news, and as the boys got older, their parents encouraged them to participate in dinner discussions about current events or whatever they were learning in school.

  Marie taught the boys table manners: Don’t come to the table without a shirt, fork on the left, knife on the right, and sit up straight. Marie made her own salad dressing, shepherd’s pie, and ham and cheese sandwiches, which sound so much more sophisticated when called by their French names—Purée Parmanchiez and Croque Monsieur. She also taught Bertrand to cook, and he often started dinner when she had to work two jobs to make ends meet.

  With the boys at soccer or tennis practice and with Marie and Greg working late, the family might not have sat down to dinner until 9:30 P.M. But they always ate together. It was just something they did, and it helped keep the family together.

  “We are a team,” Marie would tell her sons. “Everybody has a role to play. If you want to win the game, everybody has to keep his position and to play the game. But don’t forget, I am the captain.”

  Marie was a strong woman with a deep sense of pride, and once she’d made up her mind, it was difficult to change. But she could also be gentle. Her children were the primary focus of her life.

  Jerome and Bertrand recalled their parents staying in regular contact but admitted those days seemed a bit blurry in their
minds. They remembered spending summers alone with their father soon after the split, saying that in later years, Marie would come along, too. When Yves still had his practice in Thousand Oaks, they would summer there and hang out at the YMCA or go to the beach while Yves was at work.

  Sometimes Yves would rent a cabin for two or three weeks at Mammoth Lakes or take them camping there, a summer trip that gradually became a family tradition.

  One summer Yves took the boys to a dude ranch in Wyoming for two weeks. There they learned how to lasso a goat and do other rodeo tricks. Greg made a leather belt with his name on it. And he and Jerome got to go horseback riding, but Bertrand had to stay behind because he was too little.

  During the rest of the year, Yves visited the boys in Palm Springs some weekends and over the holidays. They would go hiking together, and he’d take them to church on Sunday.

  Marie worked in various clothing boutiques and then high-end department stores in Palm Springs, selling clothes and helping to put on fashion shows. Later she studied massage therapy, and after Bertrand went off to university, she moved into a town house Yves was renting in Thousand Oaks. Eventually, she opened her own massage business, called Somacare, at the Hyatt Westlake Plaza hotel.

  The boys grew up knowing that Yves was supposed to pay child support and alimony. They also remembered that the checks often didn’t come on time, which made it difficult for Marie to make rent. Sometimes, they said, Yves would buy things for the family instead.