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

by Bella Stumbo

  And, in part of another letter, in answer to the question: How are we going to share our couple love?

  "... You and I (especially I) are private persons ... As far as I am concerned, this has been a personal encounter between you and me Although I have enjoyed it very much, I won't be advertising it or even discussing it with anyone else. As for changing our social habits, we pretty much do everything together already, now that I have stopped playing football and going out with the boys on Fridays … As for things like PTA meetings, school open houses, etc., I hope to start attending them with you …"

  Betty's letters, by contrast, reflect the frustrations of a thwarted romantic, a twenty-nine-year-old housewife whose priorities were dramatically different from those of her husband.

  "Darling Dan," she wrote. "The opposite of love is indifference. We've never hated each other, but we have, or I feel you have, been guilty of the opposite of love, and it really hurts … I love you and hope we can accommodate each other better. One of the big hurdles I'm up against is your refusal to need to share. I really think ALL people do, but you're saying you don't. This has got to be a mutual thing of fulfilling each other's needs, but you keep saying you don't have these needs—which I believe—but in a way feel sorry for you that you don't open yourself up to some wonderful happiness. I think your self-image is so guarded that you're not living life and enjoying it to the fullest. Love, Bets."

  And, in another letter, addressing a topic sentence concerning the differences between wants and needs:

  “… I've been pestering [you] for a long time that I NEED [underlined eight times] a vacation. What I meant was to get you away from TV and work and Bartolotta and boys, to get you back to ME. This [weekend] has sort of fulfilled that, but I still need to have a family time. It could happen in our own home, if we would turn off everything else and just be a loving family for two days or a week or two weeks, without any worldly obligations or duties for any of us. It would be so relaxing and worthwhile and we all NEED [underlined seven times] it.

  "Maybe something you can relate to better is we NEED a sofa—nothing else for our house … There's lots we want … but for now we NEED a sofa so you and I can be physically close in the evenings and share the day's events and feelings so we go to bed in love. Not what we have now. By the time we go to bed, I'm full of RESENTMENT for the lack of closeness and communication during the evening—how can I make love to that?"

  In another essay, critiquing herself, she wrote, "I'm pretty, people like me, I'm a good mother, I'm a good teacher, I'm funny, I'm active." On the negative side, "Too demanding of myself and everybody else, too high-pressure." And, she added, in an essay called "Who Am I?" that "Betty Broderick is … always busy doing something but never really does anything perfectly. She loves kids but feels trapped by them all the time … She was never taught or shown how to keep house and do the wash and feels incompetent at it …" She also wrote that "I am an awful listener—you've told me a hundred times. I really want to work at being a better listener for you … [but] I don't feel you want to tell me anything … I try to be open with you in all areas. But you don't seem to be willing to open yourself up. I always feel like you're weighing your words for one reason or another." She complained, too, that Dan didn't include her in his decisions: "Example: the way you pick out a new car first, then tell me you've gotten it. I like to share in the excitement of the decision to get it. You never discuss YOUR plans for OUR house ahead of time …"

  Then, back to Betty the sentimentalist: "Do you remember how touched and thrilled I was with the gold charm [which he gave her] that says, 'I love you more than yesterday, less than tomorrow'? I believe you were sincere with those sentiments then. That charm is probably my most treasured possession. I cling to it hoping that it's still true or will come again."

  In answer to a question on "how will you share your couple love?" she wrote: "I hope we will share our couple love with our wonderful children first. They need to feel close to us and we will enjoy being closer to them …" She also hoped that their own loving joy would serve as an example to others—particularly the crowd at Gray, Cary. "Patti Monahan speaks of the Gray, Cary 'sickness,' how contagious it is. Warmth, happiness, contentment, and love are just as contagious. I hope we become the carriers of this new strain of disease."

  But, at the same time, it was clear she wasn't optimistic, that she was still at least toying with the idea of leaving him.

  "… You ARE the most important person I have in the whole universe, bar absolutely none, and I’d be lost without you. Even if we do separate, you will never be replaced. We have shared too much … [but] I feel like I'm … speeding along, wasting time, not seeing what is ahead—anticipating a terrible thing to happen to us at any second. Losing touch with the world. Unable to cling to anything secure."

  It was the way they were drifting apart emotionally that frightened her most, she wrote: "I feel concerned that you are falling prey to such trivial 'strokes,’ as you call them, from people who mean nothing to you. You react to the smallest thing. [But] when people that mean everything to you try to give you 'strokes,' you slough them off and don't react … Trivial strokes are fun, but I can't do without the REAL ones. You seem to think they're interchangeable … We used to marvel that we thought the same thought at the same second … [T]he first moment I saw you, I liked you. Spoke to you, it stayed. Wrote to you and it grew. Dated you, it only got better and better. No one else I’d ever met before or since was as right as you …"

  But she was too unhappy to continue this way:

  "I love you and want to share all that I am with you, but I also need to be loved by you and feel that I know everything there is to know about you like no one else on earth ever had or ever will. Every day I live with you I want to get a little bit closer to that goal … striving toward the Impossible Dream to give my life meaning and worth. I don't feel anything like that now … The number one thing I loved about you [in the beginning] was how much you LOVED ME and showed it. You know [all the other reasons]. In fact, I love everything about you now as I did then, EXCEPT that you don't show your love for me anymore."

  She ended on a note of optimism, laced with the same pervasive futility. "Wouldn't it be fun to redo our marriage, just the way WE WANT it, like it should have been the first time? Let's really think about it. The ceremony, the guest list, the celebration … holding hands, looking into each other—appropriate verses that really say what we mean. Such sincerity that we shut out everything else in the world and really listen and honor …" She also wanted them both to start devoting ten minutes a day to writing each other love letters again, just as they had done in their courtship. "Writing and receiving love letters was a tremendously important factor in the development of our love. I think we both enjoyed it. . . [and] I want to know that I'm at least worth ten minutes. Now I don't feel that you even think I'm worth that."

  But, she added dismally, "I honestly can't believe you'll do it. You're too tough, too cool, too hard to write a love letter every day and let me know you care."

  With that, Dan and Betty Broderick, both briefly buoyed by their weekend encounter with emotions, both filled with good intentions and new vows, returned to La Jolla for several more years of the same old pain.

  Chapter 6

  As Good as It Gets

  By 1978, Dan was earning about $32,500 per year at Gray, Cary. "But he was doing the work of three lawyers," Betty says. "Finally, I said to him, 'Hey, fool, they are not paying you enough!’." He agreed, but was nervous about going into practice on his own. Even now, Betty is proud of her role in persuading her husband that he could succeed. "Dan was a real doofus when it came to personal relationships—he didn't know people at all, but, as an attorney, nobody was better. He never went near an opponent until he was holding all the cards. He always told me that the first rule of the game was 'Never negotiate until you're sitting on their chest.'"

  But it wasn't only financial ambition that motivated her. She
was also trying to save her marriage. 'I'm a smart woman, and I knew trouble when I saw it. I wanted to get him away from those drunken oafs at Gray, Cary. He would work fifteen hours a day and drink away the rest. He was drinking, drinking all weekend, all in the name of getting ahead. He didn’t eat, he didn't sleep, and he was always hung over. And he wouldn't call home because of peer pressures. He once said [Dave] Monahan told younger attorneys that 'Anybody who calls home is a wimp'."

  The next few months provided a glimpse into what the Broderick marriage might have been, had these two been consistently interested in building a partnership based on mutual involvement in each other’s careers. For the first time, Betty was a welcome participant in Dan's world. She took charge of decorating his new office. At night, they sat in the living room together, studying fabric swatches and paint shades, calculating costs and enjoying the thrill of what was the most exciting adventure of their married lives. In the end, she created a showcase of expensive taste far beyond their means. Dan worried about it, "But I told him exactly what he had always told me, back at Harvard—'You have to look successful to be successful'.” And he respected her judgment. In the end, she says wistfully, "He had the prettiest office in town." They charged it all on credit cards.

  But that was the end of their togetherness. Afterward, they returned to their separate worlds—and hers held little interest for Dan since it meant only one thing: babies. By then, she was pregnant again, for the tenth time, sick as ever, varicose veins throbbing. She was too ill even to supervise the finishing touches on his office, much less attend the champagne opening.

  She also decided that Rhett was enough, and her doctor agreed. After his delivery, she had her tubes tied and her varicose veins repaired. She was thirty-two.

  She was exhilarated by her new freedom. For the first time in Betty Broderick's life, sex would no longer carry with it the automatic penalty of pregnancy and pain.

  And, this time, Dan didn't cry. He didn't even object.

  His new practice was soon thriving. Because of his medical background he was able quickly to determine which were the most promising malpractice cases, and, as his reputation grew, he increasingly accepted none other. Eventually, even settlements in the low six figures seldom interested him.

  Those were heady days. At first, "We used to go to the La Valencia dinner to celebrate when he won a $1 million settlement," says Betty, laughing. "But finally we were there three times in one week, so we decided that it wasn't worth making a big deal over, that maybe we should move it up to $10 million."

  The payoff was at last at hand. Their struggling days were done. During the next four years, "We had a million good times," she says. "I liked to go to all the parties and legal functions—it was absolutely fun for a long time."

  They were the perfect couple. Although in later years their friends would wonder who Betty and Dan Broderick had really been, to end in such bloody fashion, the Brodericks were the envy of everyone who knew them at the time. She shone with energy and high voltage wit, he dazzled with his quiet, wry charm. Betty wanted to be liked, and she was, by sheer force of her will. Dan was liked, whether he wanted to be or not, attracting by the pure sheen of success. "They were everything we all wanted to be," said one attorney's wife from those days. "They looked about as good as it gets."

  Sometimes they even wore matching clothes. At the 1984 Blackstone Ball, for instance, long after their lives had turned into a private battlefield, Betty wore a strapless dress (her first ever) of red satin and black velvet, to match Dan's long black cape with its scarlet lining. In her private photo collection is one particularly stunning picture of them together, she so tall and striking in her slinky, form-fitting gown, he so debonair with his cape casually flung back to display its lining. Behind them, on an ebony piano, sat a vase of red roses, which Betty had arranged just so, providing the final, perfect accent. No detail ever eluded her. Only the strain in both their faces could not be hidden.

  Like most people unaccustomed to big money, the Brodericks spent tentatively at first. He bought her a lynx jacket and a diamond necklace—but only as holiday gifts. His first big treat for himself was a flashy kit sports car laden with chrome fenders and old-fashioned tailpipes, which he spotted in an airport lobby and bought on a credit card.

  They advanced their part-time Mexican housekeeper, Maria, to five days a week. By 1980, Betty even acquired a summertime "au pair"—a young student from England who performed menial chores and baby-sat the children in exchange for room and board.

  The Brodericks also began traveling. In 1981, they took their first trip to Europe with Kim, although, says Betty, "We still lived like students doing Europe on $5 a day, staying in hostels and cheap hotels—but we had a ball." They also fell into a routine of holiday ski trips, first to Park City, Utah, then later to Keystone, Colorado, where Dan bought a condominium in partnership with his brother Larry. One summer they also took a cruise to Cancun, Mexico.

  And they began searching for a home more appropriate to their grand new station in life. No more tracts. Mr. and Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III were at last about to move across the hills, to the sea.

  But, behind closed doors, they still quarreled, and for all the same old reasons. Nothing had changed since their Marriage Encounter weekend except that, now, Dan and Betty Broderick were no longer typical of most other young couples under ordinary pressures. Instead, they were now even further distanced from each other by the impending scent of extraordinary success, of even more fabulous riches just around the corner—which made it all the easier for both of them to shelve the personal problems for just a little while longer. Only a few years more. Then they would deal with their private discontents. Tomorrow. It was just as Dan had written in his Marriage Encounter letters—except now, Bet was buying into the waiting game, too. She became more interested in the price of a Mercedes than in Dan's staggering annual income tax, more focused on the menu for her next dinner party than in trying to woo Dan into spending a Saturday at the beach with her and the kids.

  But she still felt overworked and unappreciated, and so did he. She nagged, he withdrew; she sulked, he stayed out later. The only real difference was that their quarrels were now less constructive than ever.

  Once when they took a weekend vacation to a nearby mountain resort for example, she flew into a rage because, as soon as they arrived, she says, "He headed straight for the bar for a drink, and then got his bathing suit on and went to sit by the pool. He was acting just like a bachelor, leaving it to me to unpack the boogie boards, the skis, the clothes. He was still treating me like the maid." She was so angry she drove back to San Diego by herself. Let him get himself and the kids home as best he could.

  At the same time, Dan was hardening, too. According to the later trial testimony of his daughters, his temper was always as explosive as Betty's—he was just slower to erupt, while she was more spontaneous. In the midst of an argument, Betty might throw something at him—for instance, a ketchup bottle once. Another time, she locked him out of the house when he came home late after a night of drinking by barricading the garage door with one of his skis; he spent the night in the car. Dan, by contrast, was more inclined to take his temper out on inanimate objects, according to his daughters. Once he smashed a defective lawnmower to smithereens with a hammer; another time he flung his sons' empty aquarium off the balcony; on another occasion he ripped a sliding closet door off its track and pitched it over the balcony. But the only living creatures he apparently ever attacked were the family dogs. He kicked them when they got underfoot.

  Neither of the Brodericks apparently ever deliberately hit each other. Although Betty's defense attorney would later insist that Dan had given her at least one black eye, Betty herself insisted that it was only an accident. Nor did the children ever witness physical violence between their parents. Physical battery was never a viable aspect of the Broderick case.

  As the years wore on, their quarrels increasingly centered around Dan's drinking
. Betty's plan to get him away from the Gray, Cary crowd when he went independent had proven a resounding failure. Finally, like most people who don't understand the allure of alcohol themselves, she lost all tolerance and came to see her husband as a clinically sick alcoholic who needed to be committed to some fashionable drying-out tank. Long after she was in jail for killing him, Betty would continue to speak of her failed marriage as a disaster that might have been avoided, had Daniel Broderick only discovered the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book.

  She also began to aggressively detest many of his best friends, blaming them for Dan's drinking. In her eyes, Brian Monaghan was the chief ringleader, and he was banned from her dinner parties, no matter how much Dan liked him. Nearly as revolting to her was Mike Neil, whose battlefield heroics didn't impress Betty in the least. Instead, all she remembers today is how repulsive he was when several couples once went to Tijuana in a van, in the late seventies, to celebrate Neil's birthday. "Everybody was disgustingly drunk, and he [Neil] stuck his skinny, spitty tongue in my ear. Yuk!!"

  Neil remembers that trip differently. "She was such a bad sport. She just sat there, disapproving of everybody else having fun," he says. "I felt so sorry for Dan—he was trying to have a good time, but she was such a wet blanket. She wouldn't even pretend for the sake of the rest of us. The poor guy should've left the bitch years before he did."

  Ironically, of all Dan's closest men friends, it was only Brian Monaghan who showed any real compassion for Betty after the killings. Although he believed, like the others, that Betty was driven by jealousy and that "She thought she was the center of the universe," Monaghan had sympathy for her, too. "I think she just never felt loved, either by her parents or by Dan." She was like a child, he thought. "And kids need a dependable link of love. But Betty didn't have that … not with her family, or with Dan, either. She just had her social structure to support her … and when that eroded, she just fell apart."