Old money does not simply purchase exclusion. It builds invisible walls so high that a woman can marry into one of America’s most storied dynasties. Bear the family heir twin sons and still find herself standing outside the gates with the servants and the help. In 1982, Roxan Pulitzer, a former insurance saleswoman who had been living in a Lakeworth trailer park when she met publishing heir Herbert Peter Pulitzer Jr.
at a party 8 years earlier, refused her husband’s pre-trial settlement offer and demanded custody of their twin sons along with a substantially larger share of what she believed to be his $25 million fortune. What followed was an 18-day trial that produced 4,900 pages of transcripts containing testimony about cocaine use, threesomes with the wife of the Kleenex heir, seances involving a trumpet through which the dead would supposedly speak, and an incest accusation against Peter involving his own daughter from his first marriage to fashion designer Lily
Pulitzer. The New York Post ran the headline, “I slept with a trumpet.” And newspapers across America dubbed Roxanne the [music] trumpet with the trumpet, a nickname that would follow her for the rest of her life, reducing a complex custody battle to a crude joke about a woman’s alleged sexual depravity. Judge Carl Harper, a law enforcement family man whose grandfather had been a police officer and whose father had risen to assistant chief of police, awarded full custody of the twin boys to Peter despite both parents having
admitted to participating in the same cocainefueled sexual encounters, a ruling that legal scholars would later site as evidence of the double standards governing female sexuality in American courts. In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we trace how one woman born in Casadaga, New York, a spiritualist community founded in 1875 as a winter retreat for mediums, transformed herself into Mrs.
Herbert Pulitzer was systematically excluded by Palm Beach society despite her marriage. Lost everything in a courtroom spectacle that captivated the nation. Then rebuilt her life through a playboy spread and a best-selling memoir, only to watch the ultimate irony unfold three decades later when her fifth husband rescued her ex-husband from bankruptcy.
Roxan Wrinkles was born on February 10th, 1951 in Casadaga, New York, a small spiritualist community whose significance to her story would emerge decades later in a Palm Beach courtroom. Far from the world of inherited wealth and country clubs, she grew up with modest means in rural upstate New York. After high school, she attended Palm Beach Junior College in Florida, where she worked as an insurance saleswoman, earning modest commissions while living in a Lakeworth trailer park, one of South Florida’s less glamorous
addresses. In 1974, when Roxanne was just 22 years old, she attended a party thrown by her boss that would transform her life entirely. There she met Herbert Peter Pulitzer Jr., a 44year-old publishing heir, dashingly handsome, sophisticated, and precisely the kind of man she had only read about in magazines.
Peter was the grandson of the legendary Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the Pulitzer Prize, which gave his name weight and prestige throughout American culture. The age difference, 21 years, might have seemed scandalous to some, but to Roxanne, Peter represented something far more tantalizing, a complete escape from her constrained circumstances.
Peter had used $500,000 of his substantial family inheritance to launch business ventures, including a bowling alley and a liquor store, before settling into more lucrative enterprises. By the time he met Roxanne, he owned extensive citrus groves in central Florida and had begun venturing into the hotel business.
His first wife had been Lilian Lily McKim, who would become the world famous fashion designer Lily Pulitzer. They had eloped in 1952, thrown casual house parties where guests danced on kitchen floors flooded with water and champagne, and kept a private managerie that included pet [music] monkeys and exotic animals. Peter had served as vice president of Lily Pulitzer Inc.
But after their 1969 divorce, he found himself a drift. A man accustomed to partnership with a woman of genuine sophistication. When Peter met Roxanne, something drew him to her youth, her vivacity, and perhaps her malleability. Unlike Lily, who had inherited her own fortune and social standing, Roxanne was hungry, ambitious, and eager to please.
On January 12th, 1976, Peter and Roxan married, and within 2 years, their twin sons, Mlan Simpson Pulitzer and Zachary Simpson Pulitzer, were born in 1978. For Roxanne, marriage meant instantaneous transformation. Her name changed, her social position changed, and invitations that had mysteriously failed to arrive when she was merely Peter’s girlfriend suddenly began appearing on her dresser.
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But Palm Beach operated according to an almost medieval hierarchy that had nothing to do with current net worth and everything to do with lineage. And the old guard wives regarded Roxanne with barely concealed disdain. Palm Beach in the early 1980s was one of the most exclusive and insular communities in America.
A barrier island of just 10,000 residents where old money and established family names meant everything and outsiders meant nothing. As one longtime resident explained to a reporter, “There’s the old guard, the new guard, the outguard, and the lifeguards. The lifeguards being people who had married into money and immediately acquired the cache of wealth through matrimonial alliance.
Roxanne technically belonged to the lifeguard category. But Palm Beach’s old guard had other ideas. Despite being Mrs. Herbert Pulitzer, despite living in a mansion, despite having access to wealth and privilege, Roxanne struggled to penetrate the inner circles of society. The Everglades Club, the island’s most exclusive institution, founded by Paris Singer in 1919, kept its doors firmly closed to her.
She had not been presented at a debutant ball. Her family had not summoned in Newport. Her parents were not names in the social register. Worse, she came from a trailer park and had been workingass when she met Peter. No amount of Cartier jewels or couture dresses could change that fundamental fact.
Years later, reflecting on this period, Roxanne would say bitterly, “My gut feeling is that it was more a power situation. The name, the money behind it, Palm Beach being very close-knit. I really felt the power more than anything else.” Peter’s marriage to Lily had been different, the meeting of two equal forces, both already embedded in the social structure.
But as the decade progressed, the Pulitzer marriage deteriorated into a tableau of infidelity, substance abuse, and sexual experimentation. According to later trial testimony, Peter and Roxanne participated in a lifestyle that, while perhaps not uncommon in certain cocainefueled circles of the 1980s, was utterly scandalous when exposed in open court.
They admitted to using cocaine. They admitted to engaging in threesomes with Jqueline Kimberly, the wife of Kleenex heir James Kimberly and Roxanne’s former best friend. By 1982, just 6 years after their wedding, the marriage was finished. Peter’s legal team offered Roxanne what appeared to be a generous settlement.
a Porsche valued at $20,000, $45,000 per year in combined child support and alimony, four years of continued residence in their family home, and a $200,000 home of her own afterward. Roxanne refused. She wanted custody of her twin sons and a substantially larger share of what she believed to be Peter’s vast fortune. The trial began on September 20th, 1982 in the Palm Beach courtroom of Circuit Judge Carl Harper and would continue for 18 days, producing 4920 pages of transcripts that captivated the nation.
The accusations flew from both sides with stunning ferocity. Peter’s attorneys painted Roxanne as a drug-addicted adulteress who had engaged in affairs with multiple men and women, including Belgian race car driver Jackie Icks, a French bakery owner and a local real estate salesman. The nanny, Estelle Godbout, testified about witnessing surfside lovemaking between Roxanne and Jackie Icks.
While the couple’s young children were present, a mental health counselor testified that hospital documents showed Roxan’s cocaine habit had escalated from 1 g per month to 1 g once or twice per week. Peter admitted to sometimes joining his wife in using cocaine, though he denied her allegation that he had once flown marijuana from the Bahamas aboard his private sea plane.
The most sensational allegations centered on Jacqueline Kimberly. Peter’s attorneys constructed a narrative that Roxanne and Jackie had carried on a lesbian affair with Peter claiming Roxanne had even given Jackie a Christmas present of 1 ounce of cocaine valued at approximately $2,000. When Jacqueline Kimbley took the stand, she vehemently denied all allegations, telling reporters that Pulitzer is definitely deranged and desperate for the almighty buck.
Roxanne counteratt attacked with her own shocking allegation. She accused Peter of having engaged in an incestuous relationship with his daughter from his first marriage, Liza Pulitzer Lady. When Liza testified, she denied the incest accusation, but claimed that after she and Roxanne had sniffed cocaine together in the bathroom of a West Palm Beach disco, Roxanne had made a sexual advance toward her, saying she said that if I ever felt I wanted a lesbian relationship, she wanted to be the one I got involved with. But the most bizarre
element involved a black draped trumpet. Psychic Janice Nelson testified that during seances attended by approximately 10 to 15 friends, Roxanne would lay on the bed with a trumpet at the foot draped in a black cape, an instrument through which the spirits of the dead could supposedly communicate with the living.
Judge Harper expressed bewilderment. I don’t know for the life of me how this is relevant. I’ve made so many rulings in this case, if I haven’t made an error by now, I ought to get the pullet surprise. The New York Post ran the headline, I slept with a trumpet, and newspapers dubbed Roxan the trumpet with the trumpet, a nickname that would completely overshadow the actual substance of the custody dispute for decades to come.
On December 28th, 1982, Judge Harper issued his devastating ruling. He attacked Roxanne’s demeanor in the courtroom, contrasting Peter’s doeful eyes and aging face with Roxanne’s apparent detachment as she sat at the defense table and doodled on a notepad. Harper proclaimed that Peter was a hard worker and loving parent who deserved custody, never mind that Peter had admitted to cocaine use, to participation in threesomes, and to the same behavior for which Roxanne was being condemned. The judge invoked
Florida’s tender years doctrine, which presumed that children formed strong bonds with their mothers during the first 3 years of life. Mack and Zach Pulitzer were only 5 years old under the doctrine they should have automatically been placed with their mother. However, Harper declared that Roxan’s flagrant adultery and other gross marital misconduct required abandoning the doctrine entirely.
He awarded full custody of both twin boys to Peter. Roxan’s visitation was strictly limited, two weekends per month, alternating holidays, and a 4-week annual vacation. The financial settlement was equally punitive. Harper referenced country singer Jerry Reed’s 1980 song, She Got the Gold Mine, I Got the Shaft, writing that Roxan’s exorbitant demands shock the conscience of the court.
She received her $20,000 Porsche, approximately $60,000 in jewelry, $2,000 per month in rehabilitative alimony for only 2 years, a total of $48,000 and $7,000 equity in Peter’s 73 ft boat. She was ordered to vacate the Palm Beach house within 2 weeks. Judge Harper had valued Peter’s net worth at approximately $12.5 million.
Yet Roxan received less than 500,000 in total assets despite having borne him two children and forgone her own career development. To make ends meet, Roxanne sold her jewelry for only $20,000, onethird of its stated value, borrowed money from her mother for an apartment in West Palm Beach, and took a job teaching aerobics for $40 per week.
She filed three separate appeals, all of which failed. What happened next was extraordinary. Peter and Roxanne began dating again almost immediately after the trial ended. She later admitted she had been sleeping with him right up to the trial and after the trial, confessing with bitter self-awareness. I had no game plan. I was an idiot.
In June 1985, Roxanne made a startling decision. She posed nude for Playboy magazine, appearing on the cover wearing a sequined blue bathing suit and holding a trumpet, literally reclaiming the symbol that had been used to humiliate her. She explained she did it to laugh at all this and frankly for the money.
The $70,000 she received covered her legal bills exactly. More importantly, in 1987, she published The Prize Pulitzer: The Scandal That Rocked Palm Beach, a tell- all memoir presenting herself as the victim of perjurers and methodical character assassination. The book became an immediate bestseller, remaining on the New York Times list for approximately 36 weeks and earning her an estimated $2 million in royalties, more than Peter’s settlement had given her.
In 1989, NBC broadcast a television movie adaptation starring China Phillips as Roxanne and featuring a prefriend Cox as Jacqueline Kimberly. Roxanne made a cameo appearance as a party guest in her own story. She published three novels in the 1990s, married twice more, including a 57-day marriage to speedboat racer John Hagen Jr.
in 1992 and eventually found stability with her fifth husband Timothy S. Boowberg, a Colorado-based wealth management consultant. Then came the ultimate irony. [music] By 2011, Peter Pulitzer had moved to rural Okchobee, Florida, partnering with his twin sons, Mack and Zach, to run Pulitzer Groves, a citrus farming operation.
Beginning in the mid 1990s, Florida’s citrus industry had been devastated by citrus canker [music] and hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 destroyed approximately 80% of the grapefruit crop. Pulitzer Groves lost 88,000 grapefruit trees. The man Judge Harper had valued at $12.5 million in 1982 now faced bankruptcy, unable to make payments on his $1.3 million mortgage.
It was Mack and Zach, the very sons whose custody had been so bitterly contested, who approached their stepfather, Timothy Boowberg, for help. Boowberg agreed, guaranteeing the mortgage, paying $6,000 monthly in interest, extending a $400,000 credit line, and assuming an additional $220,000 mortgage, total assistance exceeding $2 million.
When informed of the situation, Roxanne expressed her shock. I never thought Peter would run out of money. The pendulum swings. It’s a different ending. Jacqueline Kimberly, whose reputation never recovered from the trial, died by suicide on January 1st, 2006, [music] exactly 24 years after Judge Harper’s ruling, shooting herself outside her Fort Lauderdale apartment at age 55.
Peter Pulitzer died on April 18th, 2018 at age 88, surrounded by the children his ex-wife’s husband had helped him keep. And now, we’d love to hear from you in the comments. Judge Harper condemned Roxan for behavior Peter had admitted to sharing. Three decades later, her fifth husband rescued Peter from bankruptcy.
Does knowing who ultimately needed saving change how you see the gold digger narrative? We look forward to the discussion below. And thanks for joining us for another episode of Old Money Allure. Cheers.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
