by Bella Stumbo
What Dan Broderick's friends remember best about him today was his style. He had class, a certain reserve, combined with a dry humor that set him apart. "Dan was not an emotional guy. If you hugged him, he'd stiffen," recalls Brian Monaghan. And even in a circle of high-achievers, Dan's professional drive stood out. By day, he was all business, a no-nonsense, sometimes brusque personality who kept his eye relentlessly on the ball: for example, in the early days he invariably left his calling card under every lunch plate and cocktail glass in town in an effort to drum up new business. In later years, friends—and Betty—learned better than to make a personal call during work hours unless they expected an impatient, thirty-second yes-no conversation.
But, for all his cool daytime veneer, by night, Dan became one of the boys. He loved hanging out in the pubs, talking law, shooting the breeze. With a few drinks, he would loosen up and entertain them all with the Turtle and the Alligator. He also developed another favorite routine, based on Inspector Clouseau, the "Pink Panther" character, with his dog. "He would crawl under the table and bark and bite my pant legs," says Monaghan with a chuckle.
After his death, Dan Broderick's friends did their best to defend his reputation from Betty's accusations, to lend him the humanity she was stripping away daily in the press and in court. Only the setting changed—from Dobson's to a new Irish pub, Reidy O'Neil's, just across the downtown square. Dan had invested in Reidy's just before he died, and now it stands as something of a shrine to his memory. At the entrance is a large drawing of him and his three partners, drinking beer and singing. His boyish grin is captured perfectly. Elsewhere in the bar, on walls covered with photographs of famous Irishmen, are other pictures of Dan, one of him as a child talking to a nun, another of him laughing with Linda. On any given evening, half a dozen of Dan's friends can still be found at Reidy's, eager to remember the way he was:
He loved the Blues Brothers, John Wayne, and all old movies. "Dan just got a kick out of life," says developer Mike Reidy, one of the few non-lawyers in Dan's circle. "He could put on dark glasses and do a skit from the Blues Brothers that left us all in stitches. He could spout lines verbatim from The Quiet Man, Robin Hood …" And, of course, Gone with the Wind—Dan's favorite movie of all time. He was so enchanted with that film that he had a huge Clark Gable poster in his den. According to Betty, that's where Dan acquired his lifelong penchant for capes and top hats—and it was also the source of their son Rhett's name, after the movie's hero, Rhett Butler. He later had a cat named Scarlett, too. (Dan also had a classic poster in his den of Jimmy Cagney rubbing a grapefruit in the face of Mae Davis, from another old film, Betty growls.)
Nor was it true, Dan's friends say, that he only went to law school for the money. "Dan loved the law," says Monaghan. "He told me that he became a lawyer because he decided that being a doctor was too much like being a mechanic—no creativity."
As for his drinking, Dan Broderick was always a moderate social drinker, friends say. "I never saw him topped out more than five times in fifteen years, and when he was [drunk], he would go hide in a bathroom or a bedroom and sleep it off. Dan was always a gentleman," says Reidy. "Dan was the kind of guy who always ordered these sweet drinks that take you hours to get a buzz on, Spumanti and ice cream, Pink Monkeys, stuff like that," says Kathy Cuffaro. "And when he got loaded, he was so lovable that you wanted to take him and his Pink Monkeys home with you."
And they all got a kick out of Dan's foppish sartorial ways. He made them laugh with his brilliant pink jackets, his dandy rosebuds, his blinding plaids. "Dan was certainly different," says Reidy, a conservative, button-down type himself, "but it wasn't vanity, or ego. Dan just had fun with clothes."
Despite the fact that Monaghan, Reidy, and several others in Dan Broderick's San Diego crowd were Vietnam veterans, they also say that they never discussed Dan's draft status with him, not even during their most ribald, macho nights of drinking. "I don't remember that the subject ever even came up—it was a personal choice," says attorney Mike Neil, a Marine reserve general and much-decorated Vietnam War hero who became temporary commander of Camp Pendleton during the Iraqi war.
In death, Dan's friends would erect shrines to him. They renamed a conference room at the San Diego County Bar Association building for him, and today the local bar association issues an annual award in his name to an attorney selected for special "professional integrity." Just before Betty's first trial, the American Ireland Fund dedicated its annual fund-raising dinner to his memory; and, a year after that, several of the San Diego Irish American crowd went to the Broderick family's small ancestral village in Ireland to dedicate a new library in his name, and, of course, tip a few in his memory.
"It's a last way to say good-bye to our buddy," said Dan's friend Vince Bartolotta, an "honorary Irishman" whose firm inherited many of Dan's pending cases. Bartolotta also later became notable around town for copying Dan's habit of floral boutonnières, though he seems to prefer carnations to rosebuds.
But, if his friends deify Dan Broderick in death, some seemed equally in awe of him in life. As his professional reputation grew, and his personal poise blossomed, friends used to tell him that he was bound for bigger things than San Diego had to offer, that he should get into politics. And Dan had been interested, says Monaghan. "He thought about running for the Senate or President someday … until this trouble with Betty started. Then he would ask, 'How can I run for any office with her trying to ruin my reputation?'."
Betty, meanwhile, was not having nearly as much fun during those years.
After only one school season, she quit her teaching job because the baby-sitter was costing more than she was earning. So she became a nighttime hostess at a franchise steak house, when Dan would be home to watch the children. As a fringe benefit, she got free food, enough to bring a late dinner home to Dan every night. She kept that job for several months—"until I was so pregnant with Danny that I couldn't stand up." By then, too, she had developed such serious varicose veins that she later had surgery to remove them.
After Danny's birth in 1976, she worked for a few months at another chain restaurant in between pregnancies. Before the arrival of Rhett in 1979, she had another abortion and two miscarriages.
It was five years before Dan finally began to earn enough money that she could stay home and run her $l-per-hour La Jolla day-care service, more for pleasure than money. At her murder trials, the prosecutor would go to great lengths to establish Betty Broderick as a greedy shopaholic—and, she did, in fact, eventually attach a price tag to her prior labors. But what can never be taken away from her is the fact that, from the day they were married until the year Dan Broderick's income first hit $1 million, his wife was never too proud or too lazy to work twice as hard as most women could or would.
During those years, too, she got braces to fix her overbite. "I liked my overbite," Betty says. "If you look closely at the pictures, a lot of models have one." But Dan didn't like it. "I did it to please him. Besides, I decided I didn't want to be a fifty-year-old woman someday with lipstick on her teeth." The dentistry changed the entire shape of her face. "I never looked like me after that."
Meantime, Betty was always the same funny, lively, madcap, eager-to-please personality her Aunt Kay later described to the judge. She invariably made adults as well as children laugh with her zany antics: she carried fake bugs into fancy restaurants and planted them in her plate to watch the shock on the face of the maître d'. She would dress up elegantly and then stun strangers by suddenly grinning broadly, displaying a mouthful of gag fake teeth, stained with green gunk. Betty was, everybody agreed, always a hoot, so much fun.
And she was everybody's friend. If a birthday party was in order, she provided it. If a sympathetic ear was needed, she was there. Her energy and interests were seemingly boundless. In return, she asked for nothing. She never displayed a sad face, she seemed incapable of having a low mood, she never volunteered a personal problem. She was so consistently Happy Betty, old friends say,
that she was a constant joy to be around.
But Betty wasn't happy. Privately, she was lonelier and more disillusioned than she had ever been—not because of money problems, not because of her heavy work load. But because of Dan. He never came home. He was drinking too much. He was working too much. She was a single parent. He took her for granted. He didn't love her.
Years later, the prosecutor would attempt to depict the Broderick union as a Marriage from Hell from the beginning—all due, in the D.A.'s scenario, to Betty's personality flaws. In reality, Dan and Betty Broderick were probably no different, at least not in those early days, from most other young couples caught in the pressures of premature parenthood and blindly trying to live out pre-assigned sex roles passed on from an earlier generation. Certainly, they were no different from so many couples who, if they grow to wisdom, finally realize that the two sexes, by definition, are born to speak different emotional languages.
Theirs was in so many ways the oldest, weariest story ever told: Betty wanted intimacy, emotional bonding, sharing. Dan didn't know what the hell she was talking about, since he thought he was sharing just fine. At Christmas, he even dressed up like Santa Claus. Why was she nagging him after he worked his tail off all day? What did Bets want? He always called her by that pet name, even after he left her for Linda. Was he supposed to change diapers at night, too?
Why not? she thought. She was working harder than he was, without half the pleasure.
Her resentments festered, particularly when she brought his dinner home from the restaurant at night. "He never even said thanks … he'd just be sitting there when I got home, reading a magazine or a brief, twirling his hair. He always twirled his hair, always on the right temple …" Betty often mentioned that old habit of Dan's, pausing each time. Then she would rush on, angrier than ever. "And then he'd wait for me to heat it up and serve him. Never once did he offer to turn on the microwave himself. He just took it for granted that every woman should work all day and still have his meals ready, too."
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. His wardrobe was more elegant than ever—but she still didn't have a washer and dryer. "It was seven years after we were married before I ever got that goddamn washer and dryer! In his opinion, I was supposed to be happy to have a car to go to the laundromat, since I'd done it on a bus before."
She was tired. Now she had three children—Danny had been born only a few months earlier. But her pretty, happy-ever-after script was not in order. This was not the happy home, filled with two loving parents and happy, squealing babies that she had imagined.
"The guy was just a phantom. And I was a workhorse from five A.M., getting all the kids dressed and all the homework done and everybody off where they're supposed to go. Dan got up and tweezed his eyebrows and puffed his hair, and he never had anything to do with any of it. I was never allowed in the master bedroom while he was doing his toilette. He was like Louis XV, powdering his wigs. The guy primped himself like you wouldn’t believe. There was never a wrinkle, a flake, a piece of dust. He always looked perfect."
She remembered all the cold Boston winters, the Tupperware routes, the ugly apartments, the welfare groceries, the nights she waited up alone with the babies, starved for adult company. Nothing had changed. Her list of IOUs was growing. And Dan wasn't delivering. If he had an excuse during their student days, he had none now.
Worse, he wouldn't even acknowledge his debt. He never touched her hand, or her hair. He never kissed her or brought her flowers. "For twenty years," she once remarked, sounding tired, "I tried to get that guy to say, 'Yes, I love you, and you look pretty, and I'm happy with you, and l'm proud of you, and you did a good job with the kids, or dinner, or the house, or anything.' But no matter what the hell I did, he always had the air of, 'Well, it could be better.' All I ever wanted from that damned man was five minutes of eye contact a day!"
She couldn't stand it. If she had felt out of place in her own family, she didn't fit into this one either, except as a housekeeper, nanny, an sometime consort.
And so they quarreled. More and more.
By the autumn of 1976, Betty was threatening to divorce him and go back to New York. But she really didn't want a divorce—for all her talk that was unthinkable. She wanted a cure. And finally she thought she had found it. One weekend in November, 1976, she persuaded Dan to participate in a church retreat for married couples. It was called a Marriage Encounter, the object was to solidify relationships, and part of the drill was for spouses to write letters to each other on assigned topics.
Dan's letters from that weekend provide a glimpse into the mind of young man of thirty-one who, by then, must have been exhausted himself with his own grueling efforts to live up to the expectations of everybody he had ever known, from his parents to the priests, from a demanding God to a demanding wife, not to mention the escalating needs of three small children.
What is most striking about his letters, more than his raw materialism, is Dan Broderick's chilling, near-prescient preoccupation with his own mortality. In response to an assigned question on death, he wrote:
"Dearest Bets, I want to go on living because I enjoy life … I do not believe in any kind of extension of existence after death. Once I die the only thing that will be left of me anywhere will be the memories people still alive have of me. I want these memories to be warm, respectful, loving. I want people to miss me, to mourn my death, to wish I were still alive, to wonder what I would have said and done in a situation if I were still around …" He went on to say that he was sometimes "disappointed in myself for [my] shortcomings ..." But this "disappointment isn't too intense because I firmly believe that, given time, I will become a good husband, father, etc.. I tell myself that I've got to earn a decent living, establish myself as a lawyer, acquire certain necessary possessions, before I can indulge the luxury of being an attentive, thoughtful person."
At the same time, he worried that he might be "engaging in self-delusion … Experience suggests that unless I change my attitudes now, I never will have time to be and do the most important things. One worldly goal will unplan another until it's too late. You will either have left or have resigned yourself to living a separate life with me, and the kids will have gone on their own way, feeling bitter and frustrated at having never known their father (I went thru that myself several years ago and it's miserable)."
He then critiqued his own lifelong tendency to postpone personal relationships until another day. He remembered thinking, during his school years, that "my personal relationships would get the attention they deserved after graduation." And now that he was working, "I have always thought about next summer, next year, after I make partner, after I am earning enough money to be able to afford trips, boats, etc.."
But he couldn't fault himself, any more than he could help himself. "Even now I believe that our lives together will be much happiness when money ceases being a problem," he wrote. "It will enable us to do a lot of things like travel to Europe that will be shared experiences we will, I hope, enjoy and never forget. I want to be able to take you and the kids to South Bend every fall for a game without thinking twice about it … to buy a piano if Kim wants one, to buy you a ring, a motorbike, a microwave, a camera, whatever you want when you want it. I honestly believe that having this ability will make me happy and secure and will make me a more loving and more lovable person."
But the pressures of passing time were weighing increasingly on him. He worried that "I may not make it before it's too late. I feel lately that time is running out on me ..." He recalled how he used to joke around in school that "the worst thing that could happen to me would be for me to finish medical school, finish law school, pass the bar, and then be killed … If I were told that I had a short time left to live … I'd feel that I had wasted my whole life. Everything I've done so far has been in preparation for the good life I aspire to … to be successful at getting ahead in this world ... I want to make it—for myself, for you, and for the kids … I have made many sacr
ifices ... I have made you sacrifice as well, perhaps even more than me. I want time to pay you back, to make it up to you, to reward you for all the deprivations. I want you to be happy, content, secure. To feel like the sacrifices were worth it …"
It was for all these reasons, he said, that he had been thinking so much lately about going into practice for himself. "I want the financial security now so that I can get on with the important things in life ... I always tell myself that what I'm doing now, the way we're living now, is just a temporary situation … To die now would be a tragedy … especially if I haven't at least reached my goal of material success."
In sum, he had a lot of unfinished business. "I want to be a responsive sensitive husband and father. I want to be the type of person who will be genuinely missed when he dies … but," he wrote, "I need time."
From there, he turned his attention to the nature of the weekend Catholic retreat they were attending. He wanted his wife to understand "why I have to roll my eyes once in a while … The personalities of some of the leaders are distracting the hell out of me. How can I listen to and pay attention to a guy who gets choked up talking about his relationship with the Catholic Church? As far as I'm concerned, the Catholic Church is an utter irrelevancy, a meaningless show perpetuated by a lot of simple-minded, unenlightened weaklings who can't cope with life as it really is and who feel compelled to construct an elaborate network of fantasies to deal with realities that any strong, self-respecting person can handle rationally. I just have no respect for these people. Furthermore, they are basically uncool, unfashionable. I think we're above the level that they're operating on ..." Even so, he concluded, he was glad they had attended and wrote "I do believe you deserve every bit as much love, consideration and sensitivity as all of these women get from their husbands combined! I’ll try. Love, Dan."
