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

by Bella Stumbo

  Betty only shrugs Aunt Kay's analysis away. No, she insists—it was never her parents whose demands shaped her personality, nor did she feel inferior to her siblings. Instead, it was the nuns who scared the hell out of her, she says, starting on her very first day in school.

  She can't recall exactly what it was that she did, that day in first grade, to bring the wrath of authority down upon her head—but she remembers vividly that it was Sister Claire Veronica who punished her. She was forced to sit under the piano for several hours. "And maybe I learned right then that I wasn't going to spend my life being humiliated and standing in corners and sitting under pianos—instead, I'm going to kiss this woman's ass."

  And that's what she did. Throughout her school years, "I was the goody-two-shoes, and everybody loved me," she says, her voice laced with self-contempt. "I figured out how to get more rows of gold stars than anyone else. I was the one that the teacher called on to mind the class when she went out of the room. I liked that. I even used to dust the Principal's office. That was like the biggest thing you could do in the whole school, was be the Principal’s goody-two-shoes. All these nuns wanted me to be a nun. I learned very early in life that if you look real cute and you're a goody-two-shoes, everybody likes you. And I've been doing it ever since."

  Her flashy good looks attracted attention early on. Boys began to buzz around the Bisceglia household as never before. And, after a church fashion show during high school, Betty began modeling professionally, a part-time job she kept up throughout her college years, eventually doing occasional shows at some of the large New York department stores. But modeling was never a serious career consideration, "because my mother thought it was too tacky. I was supposed to be a schoolteacher until I got married, because that was proper."

  She was programmed from birth to be a wife, not only by her parents and the girls' schools she attended, but by her peers, too. "You were what I've often wanted to be," a college classmate once wrote her, in 1966. "You present … the image of the model woman and—more so—the perfect wife." The girlfriend added that she "almost envies the man who marries you." For Betty, it was a world without options.

  She lived at home throughout college, right up until the day she was married, commuting to school in a sporty little green MG. Partly, it was cheaper—the Bisceglias were comfortable, but never, as some later accounts had it, rich. In addition, says Betty, putting the best face on every situation as usual, she didn't want to live on campus. "What for? The nuns wouldn't even let you wear lipstick. I had more freedom at home."

  But, in the next breath, she also remembers her parents' strictness. Her older sister hadn't dated much, she says, so now, for the first time, Frank and Marita Bisceglia faced swarms of boys banging on their front door, ringing their phone, wanting to court their pretty daughter. "And I would go out and have ice cream with them or something, and my mother thought I was a slut. I mean, if you talk to a boy, you're a slut, and she was always accusing me of stuff." She remembers taking a nap one day after staying up studying all night for an exam. Since she never napped in the daytime, her mother was suspicious. "She comes in my room, pulls me off the bed, screaming and yelling that I'm on drugs."

  Another time, in college, she had planned a weekend skiing trip with Dan and several friends. "I had my car and luggage packed up—but my father cut the wires on my car so I couldn't go anywhere, and my mother broke the locks off my luggage looking for contraceptives and drugs," she says, laughing in exasperation. "And, mind you, I had never even seen a contraceptive yet, and I'd sure as hell never seen a drug. They were just trying to be good parents, to keep their daughter from becoming a loose woman—but they drove me crazy." She didn't go on the trip.

  "The theme of the whole thing," she said later, in a rare moment of self-analysis, "is that I tried to be perfect. The rule book that I was given since the day I was born was the Catholic rule book. This is how to live your life: You don't lie, you don't cheat, you don't steal, you're kind to your neighbors, you show love to everyone, even if you hate them … You get married, you have children, you put the kids through the best school possible, and then you're a grandma."

  But it only works if the husband follows the rule book, too. That's why she said, "I would never in my life have dreamed of marrying a man who wasn't Catholic, who didn't share my views on divorce. That was the number one requirement."

  She met Dan at Notre Dame, during a USC-Notre Dame football weekend. He was a senior premed student, bound for Cornell Medical School in New York. The year was 1965. She was seventeen, a college freshman. It was the most exciting weekend of Betty Broderick's young life, the first time she had been allowed to travel out of town overnight—chaperoned, of course, but that didn't dilute the thrill. She went with a girlfriend, both of them invited by dates at Notre Dame.

  The Vietnam War was building to a thunder, Betty Friedan was just beginning to stir the consciousness of a whole new generation of American women, drugs were about to explode on college campuses, and Bob Dylan was turning a song called ‘Blowin' in the Wind’ into the anthem of an entire era.

  But not for Betty and Dan. It might not have been the sixties at all, looking at these two. Theirs was a sweetheart romance right out of a Pat Boone-Terry Moore movie. ‘April Love,’ in fact, was one of their favorite songs.

  Betty's most enduring image of feminists from the sixties was a negative one: they were, in her mind, radical, bra-burning lesbians from People's Park in Berkeley, circa 1968. They were a threat, and a challenge to all that she stood for, all that she finally killed for. They were not mothers and wives. Had Betty been politically oriented at all, she would probably have become a disciple of Phyllis Schlafly.

  "I thought Berkeley was Moscow," she said later. "I thought feminists were crazy people, I thought draft-card burners were Communists, and I didn't know what that meant, except that it was bad. I never had the slightest interest in magazines like Ms, I never read Betty Friedan's book, I thought Gloria Steinem was pretty, but weird. I just didn't want to be any part of all that. We just didn't get into the real world. Besides, the nuns wouldn't let us. In my world, all that mattered was that you had the pleated skirt, the right Peter Pan collar, the Papagallo ballerinas, and a circle pin. If you didn't have the right uniform, you were dead!"

  She remembers her first impressions of Dan Broderick vividly. She and her date were at a college club where Jerry Lee Lewis was performing, when Dan sat down at the same table and, a few drinks later, asked her for a pen. "And I, of course, being the proper little Catholic schoolgirl, always had in my purse a handkerchief, a dime to get home, and my little gold Parker pen." He wrote his name on a napkin. Daniel T. Broderick, MDA. Medical Doctor Almost, he explained to her with his wonderful grin.

  "He was skinny, with these big glasses, he looked like a nerd," she says. "But I liked his wit. I liked him."

  For his part, Dan seemed instantly smitten with the tall, striking, vibrant New Yorker. "I later heard that he told a friend that very night that he was going to marry me," she says now, with some faint hint of pride still flickering dimly amid the rubble of her ruined emotions. Somewhere, stored among her possessions, she still has an Indiana Club beer mug she saved as a souvenir from the night they met. She also remembers exactly what Jerry Lee was singing that night: “ ‘Great Balls of Fire!' What else?" "Oh, baby, you're drivin’ me crazy. Goodness gracious—Great Balls of Fire!"

  In later years, they attended the annual Notre Dame-USC game without fail. She would never get over the sentimental pain of those memories. It apparently took Dan a while, too. After he left her, over twenty years after they had met, he once called, tipsy, from a Notre Dame weekend, his first without her, to tell her, she says, how much he had once loved her. "And he was there with Linda," she says. "I don't think I ever hated him more than I did at that one single moment."

  It was an old-fashioned courtship that lasted for the next three years. He came to see her in New York, they made dates to meet under the
Biltmore clock, they listened to the Lettermen, and were soon enough two college kids in love. She still remembers the walks in Central Park, the movies, the fun they had exploring Manhattan's cheapest restaurants and bars.

  Dan took his new love home to meet his family, and they were dazzled "She was so worldly, so sophisticated, at least in our minds—a glamorous New York model," Dan's sister Kathleen remembers. "She told me she made $17,000 in one year! And we hadn't been anywhere. She had three swimming suits—I only had one. She was so witty and gracious. And she always brought us little gifts—things from Tiffany, Doss apples …" The Broderick family would continue to be charmed by Betty Broderick for many years to come.

  During those years, while Dan was attending medical school, Betty and Dan also discovered an Upper East Side pub called Henny's and, within few months, turned it into a fashionable watering hole for Cornell medical students, thanks to Dan's endorsement. "Pretty soon the owner, a guy named Jim, was so grateful at all the new business, he didn't even want to charge Dan," says Betty. Never much of a drinker, she now refers hatefully to Henny's as "one of those wino places, a cheap Irish piece of junk." But back then she loved the Saturday afternoons she spent sipping Irish coffee at Henny's, holding hands with Dan across the table.

  It was during these youthful, halcyon days, too, that Dan created "the Turtle" and "the Alligator," silly little drinking skits that he would still be performing virtually until the day he died. "The Turtle," says Dan' youngest brother, Terry, amounted to Dan lying on the floor, on his stomach, and kicking his legs. "The Alligator" was the reverse—he lay on his back and kicked his legs. Betty remembers that "I thought it was sort of cute at the time. And everybody drank …" She shrugs it away. Even today, mention of the Alligator and the Turtle embarrasses her. As she denounces Dan Broderick in one breath as a power-maddened drunk Betty still tries, in the next moment, to protect his memory from the smaller humiliations. She wants the world to hate him—but not to mock him. Only she is permitted to do that. Even during her first murder trial when her defense attorney once launched into a sarcastic review of the Turtle for the jury, she could not bear it. "Tell Jack to drop it!" she scribbled an angry note to his assistant. "This isn't relevant!"

  She was equally embarrassed when she once let slip that, during her many pregnancies, Dan also liked sometimes to impose the Turtle on her. "He thought it was funny to push me down on the floor or a couch when I was so heavy I couldn't get up unless somebody helped me," she remarked. "I'd just be laying there, floundering, trying to get my balance, with everybody laughing."

  But, pressed for details, she hid them away. "It was no big deal," she snapped irritably. "I didn't mind it at the time. I guess I thought it was funny, too! I don't know what I thought!"

  She loved him. He loved her. They became engaged.

  "He was smart, ambitious, and fun, and so was I … But what's love when you're only seventeen? I have no idea what either of us really thought about each other," she once said from jail, in a fleeting moment of fairness not only to herself but Dan, too. "All either one of us knew was that we were exactly what the other was supposed to be looking for in a mate."

  It was a pretty time in their lives. On Friday afternoons she often waited for Dan in his dormitory room, where she listened to their special love songs on his record player. Besides the Lettermen, Johnny Mathis was a favorite—especially "The Twelfth of Never."

  "It was great make-out music," she later remarked from jail, typically flip, in her outdated hip speak. But, then, in the next breath, in one of her whipsaw moments, Betty Broderick was suddenly, softly singing the lyrics into the telephone, every one perfectly intact in her memory, even after all those years.

  "You ask how long I’ll love you, I’ll tell you true …"

  Her little-girl voice trembled slightly as she searched for the bygone words. In the background, in the small courtyard where she stood at the pay phone, the usual yelling, howling prison yard racket continued. Her voice rose as she continued singing her lost song.

  Anyone from that generation would remember that Johnny Mathis classic with all its beautiful images of undying love. Hold me close. Hearts melting like snow. Forever and ever. Until flowers stop blooming, until poets no longer rhyme. Love forever.

  She sang on, through the very last line.

  "Until the Twelfth of Never, I’ll still be loving you …"

  She finished with an embarrassed little giggle; then, typical of Betty when her emotions threaten to overflow, she hung up. Another prisoner needed the phone.

  Chapter 4

  Until the Twelfth of Never

  They were married on April 12, 1969.

  It was only months after the My Lai massacre; Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia would soon surface. But the Brodericks were a world away from Vietnam: He would not be called to serve—he was a student and claimed a minor stomach disorder, according to Betty. Soon he would also be a father. It was the year of Woodstock, only miles away, but these two were lost to the Grateful Dead, Judy Collins, Baez. It was also just a few months before California and other states would institute no-fault divorce laws, in what at the time was considered a feminist victory. But Betty Broderick didn't know or care. Her life was on schedule, her script intact. Because of her wedding plans, she entered an accelerated child psychology program at college, and graduated in December with a B.A. She then won a coveted teaching job at the respected Anne Hutchinson School in Eastchester, just across the street from her parents' house, and she loved it. Her small, sheltered world never expanded. Dan, meantime, was finishing his last year of medical school. They had life by the tail.

  Their wedding was preceded by a proper announcement in the regional newspapers, complete with pictures of Elisabeth Anne Bisceglia, her hair in a lacquered bouffant, looking a lot like a pouty-lipped Sandra Dee.

  It was also occasion for Betty Broderick's first gynecological exam because "It's what you were supposed to do when you were getting married." What she discovered, she says, was that she had a remarkably confused body: two cervixes, two vaginas, two uteruses. The doctor performed a simple office operation to correct the dual vaginas, but, to this day, she says, she has two sets of all the rest. If her freakish condition bothered her then, it doesn't show today. All she remembers clearly, she says, is that the doctors told her she was at high risk of becoming pregnant even if she used female contraceptives, but that "I would probably never be able to carry a child through to full term."

  * * *

  The wedding was strictly her mother's production, a lavish, traditional affair that, judging from photographs, more closely reflected Marita Bisceglia's era than Betty's. The bridesmaids wore pink satin with gauzy headdresses and sprayed, teased hair. Betty wore spit curls. Her prim, high-necked white wedding dress came from one of New York's most exclusive bridal shops; the china pattern, Pickard, was listed at all the major department stores. The wedding cake was a spectacular, flower-encrusted work of art. Marita Bisceglia herself wore a hat wreathed in silk blossoms, and half the women in attendance were wrapped in fur stoles. The dress code for men in the wedding party, as dictated by Mrs. Bisceglia, was morning coats.

  But Dan refused to abide. Instead, he showed up in a pin-striped suit, a paisley tie, and loud brown shoes with big shiny buckles. "He said he didn't want to wear rented clothes," says Betty.

  It was the beginning of a lifelong loathing between Dan and Betty's mother. "I should have known then, I should have warned Betty Anne, when he came in those awful shoes—Dan Broderick never had any respect for anyone or anything but himself," Marita Bisceglia lamented years later at her daughter's second trial.

  But, on April 12, 1969, it was only a minor squall. Nothing could ruin the glory of the day. Dan and Betty even wrote part of their rites. "Our agreement was 'for better, for worse, for richer or poorer, for fifty years.' That was a condition Dan and I put in—an agreement to be married for at least fifty years," Betty remembered years later.

  An o
rchestra played Johnny Mathis's ‘The Twelfth of Never,’ their wedding theme song, and Pat Boone's ‘April Love.’

  Their honeymoon was a Caribbean cruise, ending at a friend's house in St. Thomas.

  She was a virgin and, Betty insists, so was he. "And he raped me!" she says now. "He could never show his feelings without drinking, so he got drunk that night. It was awful!"

  What really happened is anybody's best guess because, in subsequent years, after their marriage fell apart, both Dan and Betty Broderick viewed their history together through eyes so blinded by angry events that they probably effectively erased some of the softest, most magical moments in both their lives.

  Today, Betty can only resentfully recall that, as soon as they arrived on the lush, romantic isle of St. Thomas, "Dan dismissed the servants … He said it was so we could be alone—but the point was, I was now the Wife. I was supposed to serve him, make his meals. From day one, the minute I married him, everything changed. He wasn't courting me anymore. I was no longer his princess—I was his housekeeper. He was just like his dad—he had no respect for women." What's more, she says, he showed no interest in either her or the exotic new world around them. Instead, "He brought all these books along—he read the whole time!"

  For his own part, after he met Linda, Dan told friends that he knew from the first hours of his marriage that he had made a horrible mistake because Betty was too much like her mother for it ever to work. He once told attorney friend Brian Monaghan that, on their honeymoon, he was sitting on a bus one day looking out a window "and wanting to cry because he knew he had done the wrong thing—but he was Catholic, and he was stuck."