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

by Bella Stumbo

  Theirs was always a specifically Catholic story—at least when it came to marriage, divorce, and sex. Although, as adults, both Brodericks stopped observing church rituals and sent their children to secular schools, neither of them ever fully shed the Roman Catholic values instilled in them from childhood. The nuns and the fathers were never far from their bed. Contraception was not a consideration—at least not for Dan. "He simply would not even consider it," says Betty. "Once, years later, I got a diaphragm, but any kind of contraceptive was disgusting to him, so I threw it away." For both, sex seems to have been: a shadowy affair, done but not discussed. "I never once even saw Dan Broderick naked," she later said. "He would put his underwear back on before he got out of bed, and he always came out of the shower with a towel." And she was the same way. Sex was a thing done in the dark.

  At the time of her honeymoon, Betty was also naive as a child about sex. She was never given any formal sex education at home or in school, she says. In her household, sex talk was strictly taboo, a dirty subject. She still recalls her shock when she had her first menstrual period. She was twelve, and her mother had never even mentioned such a thing to her, she says. She had been at the school rifle range that day, she remembers, wearing a pair of shorts. "But when I lay down on the ground, suddenly the Father wouldn't let me shoot, he made me get up and leave and I didn't understand why, until I got home. My shorts were all bloody … and either my mother or my sister—I can't remember which one it was—just threw a Kotex and belt into the bathroom. And that was it."

  She came back from the honeymoon pregnant.

  She was stunned. She loved her new job at the Hutchinson School and didn't want to quit. But, given the doctor's warnings, it never occurred to her that she would carry her baby through to full term, she says. But, to her amazement, the baby only grew and grew, and she got sicker and sicker. "So much for doctors," she says sourly. "They said I would miscarry. Instead, every time Dan Broderick walked through the room, I was pregnant."

  She continued teaching right up until the day before she gave birth, on January 24, 1970, to her daughter Kim. And, from that day forward, Betty Broderick was no longer a career woman, she was a full-time wife and mother. Dan was in charge, Betty was along for the ride. The trade was complete.

  Ten months later she was pregnant again, with Lee, born July 27, 1971.

  It was only the beginning. Altogether, she was pregnant nine times in ten years. All her deliveries would be by Cesarean section, preceded by terrible nausea and discomfort. She would not end it until 1979, when she finally had a tubal ligation. Before then, she bore four healthy babies, had two miscarriages and two abortions. Her third child, a boy, died four days after he was born in 1972.

  Nothing better reflects the extraordinary ambitions of both Brodericks than the misery they endured by mutual consent during the early years of their marriage.

  He drove a cab part-time during medical school in Manhattan and worked after classes in a blood laboratory. She sold nurses' uniforms part-time while still teaching and pregnant with Kim. Afterward, she worked between pregnancies as a hostess at a Bloomingdale's cafeteria and took in baby-sitting jobs. In her spare time, while she was pregnant with Kim in New York, she rode her bicycle across Central Park to attend gourmet French cooking classes at the Dakota, where she learned, among other recipes, Dan's favorite, Poulet Normandie, a chicken dish with apples and mushrooms.

  Dan began his medical residency in Pittsburgh. The young couple, then parents of one child with a second on the way, lived for a few months with his parents. Betty spent her savings, her parents kicked in for baby clothes and other necessities. Thieves stole their car—her MG—and his grandparents gave them a new one, a Volkswagen bug.

  But she regarded all of it as a minor, temporary hardship. Soon, Dr. and Mrs. Broderick would commence their ascent to prosperity.

  Then Dan turned their lives upside down by deciding that he didn't want to be a practicing doctor after all. He wanted to be a medical malpractice attorney instead. He was accepted at Harvard and enrolled without completing his medical internship.

  "He wanted to get rich. So did I, of course," says Betty, "but I figured it was good enough to be a doctor's wife. But Dan told me we could richer faster if he was a malpractice attorney. I thought it was a great idea. I didn't object at all. I'd vote for being richer any day, wouldn't you?"

  So the Brodericks embarked on an even harsher course. His parents, frugal people in the first place, believed it was their responsibility to educate their offspring through one college degree, but they refused to subsidize a second education. Hers agreed. Dan, Betty, and babies were on their own.

  Those next years were the hardest ones. They moved from one cheap, cramped apartment to the next even cheaper one, some in bad neighborhoods, one a place without reliable hot water or heat during a long, harsh Boston winter. But what she best remembers today "is hauling dirty diapers to the laundromat in the freezing snow on a bus while he was out at some student activities event, or home studying. At the time, though, I didn't complain. We were a partnership, and that was my part of the job."

  During those years, she also continued to work at assorted odd jobs to help keep them afloat. She sold Avon and Tupperware door to door, taking Kim and Lee with her, and, again, she took in home baby-sitting. At one time, they even supplemented their income with food stamps. They also took out $20,000 in loans for Harvard, for which, in divorce court almost twenty years later, she would be charged half.

  But the picture that emerges of these two during Dan's Harvard years, as they sat around their bare little apartments amid the diapers and law books, is hardly that of a struggling young couple sacrificing for the greater good. Dan and Betty Broderick were sacrificing for their own good, period. They were completely removed from their own turbulent generation. Instead, they both methodically plotted their course for years to come right down to declaring her small, cash baby-sitting fees on their student tax returns. "Dan said we should establish a record with the IRS of being meticulous about small amounts so that someday, when he was really making big money, they wouldn't ever audit us," she says.

  Money was always the goal, as she tells it, without shame. "I always thought Dan would make a great U.S. Senator, or a President someday … and I thought it would be great to be First Lady. But he always told me that no way would he ever get into politics, because they didn't make any real money. It was one thing if you were the Kennedys—they already had money. But we had to make ours."

  In those years, too, both agreed that his image on campus should be a priority item. "Dan always told me, image was everything, and I agreed. Harvard is the kind of place where you make contacts for a lifetime." And so, she says, much of their money went into ensuring Dan enough free time to participate in student government. He even took pilot lessons. Nor did he ever outgrow his childhood fixation with clothes. Later on, he would be noted around San Diego for his expensive suits and flashy sports jackets, his flamboyant cape and top hat at formal events. But even during the sixties, when everybody else was wearing jeans and turtlenecks, he was always beautifully turned out in tailored clothes, says Betty, despite the fact that they really couldn't afford it. In medical school, he even had custom-made lab jackets. "We called him Dapper Dan," she says, laughing almost fondly.

  He was equally meticulous about his surroundings. Sometimes, even now, Betty recalls Dan's old habits with amusement. Once, for instance, she remembers buying him a case of Windex for Christmas. "It was back in Boston, when we had no money at all, and two babies, and I was expecting the third … We had a glass-topped cheap coffee table, and we had sliding glass windows; and two toddlers, who of course, hold onto things to walk. Dan would walk in the door, and before he'd say anything, he'd get the Windex and clean the table and clean the window. I'm not kidding," she says, laughing. "The man was such a fanatic. So I went to the supermarket and literally bought him a cardboard case of Windex that Christmas, and I wrapped it and put it u
nder the tree. He loved it."

  They had few friends in those days, she says, because neither of them wanted anybody to see the poor conditions in which they lived. "Besides, Dan was always gone, out doing things. I was home all day with two little kids. It was lonely." But one couple who did visit them during that period remembers that "It was a very, very traditional relationship, in terms of roles, and both of them seemed happy with it."

  Then it was 1973, Dan's last year at Harvard. Betty was twenty-five. Kim was three, Lee was two, and Betty was pregnant again. But now women all over the United States suddenly had an alternative. This was the year of Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion. And Betty Broderick decided she wanted one. The sirens of the sixties had finally filtered through her Catholic training. Other voices were at last louder in her ears than those of the nuns, the pope, her parents, her girlfriends—and Dan.

  "I was just so tired, it was so much work, we couldn't afford the children we had. And Dan was always gone. He was working hard himself, always studying, or doing something on campus. And I just thought, 'Oh, no, not this again. I can't do this again!' I was a cow! I was a baby machine. I didn't want a third baby in three years with no money. I didn't think that was the proper way to raise children. And I was deathly ill the whole nine months, throwing up … and the two babies. It was the worst, because not only am I crawling around and throwing up every two minutes for nine months, Lee Lee was a colicky, crying baby, and I bled through every pregnancy. I'd be walking down the street and I would just hemmorhage, in the supermarket, in restaurants. It was down your legs and on the floor. And Dan never helped … Minding a third baby was entirely on me."

  And so, the Church be damned, she decided to have an abortion.

  Dan drove her to the clinic in New York. And sat in the car and cried. "He begged me not to do it, he promised to stay home more, to help me out more." So she didn't do it.

  But when she went into premature labor at seven months, he was gone on a ski trip. She was alone in Boston, miles from any relatives, with no one to call. She called the police. They drove her to a hospital in a snow storm. It was false labor. Dan returned that night, in time to drive her to the hospital a few days later, when the child was finally born. Ironically or perhaps providentially, the baby Betty had wanted to abort died anyway, four days later. And, for reasons clear only to her, she still has not forgiven Dan for not being there when the fear struck, the night the police came. "The sonofabitch lied to me! He wasn't there when I needed him most!"

  And so when she became pregnant again, only a few months later, she didn't even ask him. "I just drove to a clinic and got an abortion. It was the first time in my life I ever stood up for myself."

  When he found out about it, Dan cried again.

  Betty would always be in conflict with herself over her immediate, inescapable motherhood. Sometimes, she would insist that mothering has always been her first and only goal: "I loved children, I always thought I wanted to have at least ten, even if I had to adopt. When I was in high school, I would always rather baby-sit for the neighbors than go on a date."

  But that was never more than the mixed view of a woman who, in those days, had no choices—because, at other times, she would speak with wistful pride of how she had been such a good teacher and had always missed "the stimulation of the real world, the sense of independence that a job can bring." In fact, from jail during the summer of 1991, the only social issue in the outside world with enough power to penetrate Betty Broderick's own tangle of self-absorption was the antiabortion drive. “I can't believe this country is going to go full circle, to put my daughters back to exactly where I was twenty years ago!"

  In later years, in between pregnancies, she would try at least twice to return to teaching. Then, after her last child was born, she got a real estate license. And, after the divorce, she considered going to either photography or law school. But by then, she had neither the self-confidence nor the will to seriously pursue anything beyond winning her "fair share" in divorce court for all the years she had put into her failed marriage.

  Chapter 5

  “Dearest Bets, Darling Dan”

  The Brodericks moved to San Diego after Dan completed a summer clerkship in Los Angeles, where he met David Monahan, an attorney at Gray, Cary in San Diego. Monahan and his then-wife, Patti, persuaded the Brodericks to consider San Diego. And so Betty and Dan loaded their babies into their Volkswagen and drove down to visit. They were both instantly charmed by the quiet, civilized beauty of the city. "And Dan figured we could be bigger fish faster in a smaller pond, too," says Betty, "which was fine with me."

  Dan had no trouble getting a job offer. His double degrees dazzled senior partners at Gray, Cary. "They wooed us like royalty," Betty remembers. Even so, Dan didn't begin his San Diego legal career with a royal salary, at least not for a young man with a growing family. His starting pay was about $17,000, says Betty, so, for some time, life was only a few steps better than their struggling student years.

  Their first home, near the inner city, was a cheap, vintage Southern California apartment complex called the Plum Tree, a typical transients' refuge with a narrow courtyard swimming pool and neon palms emblazoned across the building front. They had no furniture, beyond beds and cinderblock bookcases. She remembers that Dan's brother Larry once bought them some patio furniture that doubled as a kitchen set for more than a year.

  In a few months they moved to a small rental house in Clairemont, a working-class neighborhood across the freeway from La Jolla, where they stayed for another year until an electrical fire burned them out. Most of their personal possessions were destroyed, including a stuffed-animal collection Betty had hauled across country with her. But the fire turned out to be a boon to their ambitions. The insurance company promptly paid their expenses to move. They used the money to make the down payment on the Coral Reef house in La Jolla. It had taken Dan and Betty Broderick only two years to arrive at the most celebrated address in town.

  The next years were ordinary, at least for the Brodericks. The nation was in historic crisis. In 1974, an American President had been driven from office, and, in 1975, while they were moving into their new La Jolla home, thousands of Vietnamese refugees were camped only thirty miles north of their doorstep, in a sea of tents at Camp Pendleton Marine Base. But while the country stared at pictures of their tearful, frightened faces and wondered what it had wrought, in San Diego, Dan Broderick mowed his: lawn and networked, while his wife was getting her first thrills from seeing her name in Burl Stiff's society column for her charity work. "We didn’t talk about politics—or anything else, really. We didn't have time," she says today. "We were both so ambitious, we each took our jobs very seriously. We were just spinning in circles, during those years—but we never bumped into each other. And I thought we were both doing it all for the common good."

  Just as they missed the sixties, so, too, did Dan and Betty Broderick miss the seventies. Their decade was still ahead.

  Both Brodericks hit the ground in San Diego running.

  Dan was an immediate star at work. Whatever he did, he did it well, and he drove himself remorselessly. "He was a superstar," recalls fellow Gray, Cary attorney Lance Schaffer. "Dan was the kind of guy who made all the rest of us look like loafers … In his last year [at the firm] he billed something like 2,500 hours when 1,800 is considered tops."

  From his earliest days in San Diego, too, Dan took an active part in extracurricular legal activities. "He was always off teaching, or doing this and that," Betty says. "He told me he had to do it, because when the: judges ask you, if you say yes, they never forget, but if you say no, the they don't want to hear about you when you appear in front of them later in court." That made sense to Betty. Nor did she complain when Dan began to socialize seriously after hours with the boys for the same reason. Just as they had during his Harvard years, both Brodericks agreed that contacts and high visibility were politically critical to their future, mutual advancement.

  Da
n's favorite Friday-night haunt, his new Henny's, was Dobson's, a fashionable downtown San Diego bar where bright young attorneys, future judges, politicians, and San Diego millionaires congregated, mainly to discuss their own futures. Here, Dan formed lasting friendships with many of the city's next generation of leaders. Today, any popular national registry of San Diego's top attorneys includes many of Dan Broderick's best friends, most of them immortalized in life, as Dan was, by small metal name-plates attached to Dobson's long, mahogany bar.

  For her part, Betty was ready to live up to her half of the bargain, too—to become the perfect complement to her accomplished husband.

  She plunged into community affairs. She became president of a San Diego art museum support group, took a leading role in an annual charity auction sponsored by a local radio station, and promptly signed on with the bar auxiliary for attorney's wives, which organizes the Blackstone Ball, the legal community's annual gala, and conducts courthouse tours for school children. She also taught Bible Study and fifth-grade Sunday School class at the church. Already she had begun to worry, too, about which schools her children should attend, what school activities she should lead. At the same time, she was going to be a career woman. That thought had not yet left her head. Initially, in an attempt to pick up her teaching career, she took a job as a fifth-grade teacher at a suburban private school. She was going to be Supermom.

  Besides that, they still needed the money. The payoff was not yet at hand. So she also took a part-time job at night in a jewelry store.

  Dan's inner circle, in those early days, consisted primarily of other aggressive young attorneys like himself—many of them Irish Americans. They became like a post-college fraternity. They joined the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, marched every year in the St. Patrick's Day parade, and loved singing mournful Irish ballads into the wee weekend hours. They also belonged to the Tuesday Morning Marching and Chowder Society, a group Brian Monaghan formed to discuss matters of law, although members invariably met more often on Friday nights over ale than on Tuesday mornings over coffee.