Madness Under the Royal Palms (19 page)

Abe’s secretary showed me into his office, where the seventy-nine-year-old businessman sat behind a great desk far too big for the room. He was a tiny man and he looked even smaller. He spent much time on the phone each day trying to make new deals. “After three decades here it’s God’s waiting room,” he said. “We were all younger. I’ve lost a lot of friends in the last ten years. People just die. The Rudins. Friedman. Whatcha-ma-call-it. Julie Cohen. Davidson. And on and on and on.”

People say they like Abe, and why not. He gave great parties. He invited people on his yacht. He was charitable.

We started talking about some of the people he knew, and focused on Bob Gordon, who was an old friend. “His father was not well liked,” Abe said. “Bob thought he would come here and became part of the country club and never was.”

Abe was silent for a moment. “Tell me how you want to frame this whole thing,” he said finally.

I had told him this at least twenty times, but I did it again.

“I’m not going to talk now,” Abe said. “Let me jot some things down. I wanted to get a feeling with where you were going.”

“And what about the sale for ninety-five million?”

“I don’t want to talk about that. It’s aggravating.”

When I left that day, Abe went back on the phone trying to make a deal. I knew he would never jot anything down. I knew he would never talk about what had happened. I knew that when I called him in a few days, he would not answer the phone, and I would never see or talk to him again.

As I drove away, I started thinking about
Death of a Salesman
again. I remembered the funeral scene after Willy has committed suicide. He thought that salesmen would come from all over to his funeral, drummers from Maine and Boston, Hartford and Providence. But standing at his graveside were only his wife, his two sons, and his only friend, Charley, a friend Willy did not even like because he was successful.

“Nobody dast blame this man,” Charley says. “You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

F
redchen Keller was far too young to think about the wages of wealth. He was a thin, bespectacled five-year-old child who looked like a miniature blond version of Daniel Radcliffe in
Harry Potter
. He was a highly intelligent boy, preternaturally sensitive to all that was going on around him, especially concerning his estranged parents, Fred and Rose.

Early on in the divorce proceedings, Rose’s advocate Martin Haines presented evidence that four decades before, Fred had kidnapped his three sons from his former wife Blanch and hid them from her for years. Haines argued successfully that because of this, Fred should be allowed only supervised visits with Fredchen.

Rose used her son as a vehicle of her wrath. She had so poisoned young Fred’s attitude toward his father that his love was tainted with fear. Fredchen had heard the stories about what his father had done, and was so afraid that Fred would spirit him away from his mother that he was most comfortable when the supervisor was within view. “Papa will steal me,” he told one supervisor who wanted to go into the other room to make a phone call. When Fredchen went on Fred’s boat with his father and his half brother Eric, he refused to eat the sandwiches Eric had prepared because he feared they were poisoned.

Fred did not demean Rose in front of Fredchen, in part because the supervisor would have duly noted his remarks. He realized that Rose was a good mother, and an essential part of his son’s life.

Fredchen had learned to be two different people. In front of his father he played the little scholar, answering the vocabulary cards that Fred flashed by him as they sat with the supervisor eating dinner at Toojay’s, a local delicatessen; listening as his father attempted to explain the Keller Trust financial statements; or snuggling up next to Fred as they watched yet another program on the Discovery Channel. And then it came time to go to Mama, and in the first minutes with Rose he was manic, a crazed little boy, running and yelling until finally he calmed down and became the little Fredchen his mother knew.

One day in July 2001, Rose brought little Fred to the courthouse and sat him outside the courtroom to be watched over by her brother Wolfgang, who was scheduled to testify that day. Rose’s excuse was that she had no babysitter, but she wanted her son to witness what Fred was doing to her. It was potentially so hurtful to the little boy that later in the day the judge admonished Rose.

When Fred arrived outside the courtroom, Fredchen looked first at his father, then at his mother. Then he began spinning around and around in endless circles. Fred walked up to his son and asked, “How you doing?” And Fredchen just kept spinning. “Fredchen, how you doing?” Fred asked again. “Speak to me.” Fredchen kept spinning. And then Rose stood up and tried to get him to stop, but Fredchen kept spinning and spinning and spinning. The situation was only resolved when Fred and Rose entered the courtroom, but in another sense it was not resolved at all.

Rose had two truths that wrestled with each other in her brain. There was a hopeful, nurturing earth mother and a manipulative overlord. In 2001 when Fred grew grievously ill, falling into a coma and almost dying of leukemia, Rose was there at his bedside at Good Samaritan Hospital nursing him with loving concern. For Fred it was a horrendously difficult time; despite Rose’s presence, no longer was he supported by the constant succoring love of family, and he knew that once he recovered, the other Rose would again emerge.

As Fred slowly recuperated and walked the ward, he saw that in an adjoining room lay his son Paul dying of cancer. They had not talked for more than ten years and Paul had been the architect of the most savage testimony against Fred, but that was another day, and in what proved to be the last months of Paul’s life, the father and son came together in sickness as they had never come together in health.

T
HERE WERE TO BE
three phases to the divorce: a trial to determine the validity of the prenuptial, a second trial to decide the custody and visitation rights for Fredchen, and a third trial to determine the financial settlement. Much to the distress of Rose, at the end of the first trial, the judge ruled that the prenuptial was largely valid, a devastating beginning for her case.

In the second phase, Rose’s attorney sought to severely limit Fred’s contact with his son. As part of his strategy, Haines decided that he would put Fred on trial, exposing what he considered his deceits and duplicities, leaving him denuded and despised. This went far beyond mere legal strategy. He was attempting to turn the modest family court into a high tribunal that rendered spiritual and moral justice.

The attorneys flew up to Washington, D.C., to take the deposition of Fred’s adopted son, Brian Bohlander. Brian was a purported witness to a dark past, his psychic scars from the kidnapping painfully visible. Fred despised Brian and considered him a pathetic character bemired in the muck of the past. He was a recovering alcoholic who had not had a drink for eight years. He had never married or even had a long-term relationship. He made a meager living working on home improvement projects. Brian blamed Fred for his troubles, not only for tearing him away from his mother, but for abusing him so horrendously that he had never fully risen from those assaults. It was this conduct, Brian said, that had brought social services into the house and Brian into the loving arms of a foster mother, Mrs. Lois Yost. Brian told his foster mother stories about his past that led Mrs. Yost and a social worker to write letters that located his mother.

“Brian was more than a little disturbed,” Mrs. Yost recalls. “He didn’t like to talk about it, but I remember him telling me the stories, some of it was like torture, holding his head down in some kind of container of water. And he had been burned between the toes, and that was one of the stories too.”

Back in Florida, Fred’s son Paul also testified. He had his own stories of abuse, including an especially vivid recollection of fifth grade when, for stealing some colored markers, he suffered “a bare butt whipping by Fred, using Grandpa’s three-inch leather razor strap, one lashing for each of the stolen pens.” Fred dismissed these tales as lies told by a son who would do anything to hurt him.

Paul had also written a manuscript that was made part of the court record. He called the unpublished book
Isthmus
, in the sense of “the sole remaining connection between legend and truth.” Out of the pain of his estrangement from Fred, he had sought to write the truthful story of his father, and in doing so, to free himself.

Paul discovered that the stories Fred had told him about his grandfather serving as an officer in the Waffen-SS in World War II were not true. Ludwig Bohlander had arrived on Long Island as an immigrant in the early thirties, where he had lived and worked as a carpenter, never returning to live in Germany. Also untrue were Fred’s stories about his heroic war service in Korea. Fred had entered the army after the war was over, his most notable duty peeling potatoes. Fred said that he had invented these stories to please his Neo-Nazi wife; he had been telling these tales long before he met Rose, who had no deep political beliefs.

The most important testimony in the second part of the trial came from Dr. Stephen R. Alexander. His wife was a judge in the same courthouse, and the soft-spoken psychologist was something of a fixture in the legal scene of South Florida. He had been hired by the court to evaluate both Rose and Fred. Alexander was practically the only person to give important testimony who was not financially or emotionally tied to one side or the other. His evaluations were unsettling portraits of two disturbed individuals with deathlike grips on each other’s emotional innards.

The psychologist portrayed Fred as a man of profound isolation. The underlying dynamic of his life was “an inability to develop or maintain a truly empathetic relationship with another person. His orientation toward the world is essentially narcissistic, so he views people, places, and things in terms of how that person, place, or thing benefits or diminishes him. Mr. Keller is capable of controlling himself whenever he thinks it is in his best interests to do so. However, Mr. Keller is prone toward hostile reactions whenever a threat to his narcissistic self-image is seen, such as a perceived challenge to his authority, control, dominance, or sense of superiority.”

Alexander’s portrait of Rose was even more disturbing, a psychological horror film in which Fred had created a clone in his image. “Ms. Keller probably was a naive and optimistic young woman when she met her husband, and more likely than not she was the doting, attentive, and admiring wife in the early stages of the marriage,” Alexander concluded. “She apparently proved to be a quick study, for she has obviously learned to be self-servingly manipulative to get her way. She developed her narcissism by emulation as part of her histrionic attachment to her husband. In short, she learned from observing him and by his direct instruction in business matters to always place your own interests first, and to do whatever is necessary to protect those interests. She believes she is better off without him. She believes she has set in place everything necessary to ensure she gets what she wants.”

The divorce was so drawn out and so emotionally brutal that Judge Kroll commented, “You know and I know that nothing will end this case except for death.”

In their epic battle, Fred and Rose traded the most savage charges and tried to force-feed Fredchen their love and affection. Fredchen was seen by various therapists, whose opinions generally favored the side that paid for their expertise. No one asked was it even healthy for the boy to be shuttled between so many therapists. Through all this, Fredchen developed a caginess that became one of his tools of survival. No one could authoritatively say just what the divorce was costing the sensitive little boy.

Alexander concluded that Fred should see his son, but that for the immediate future, the visits should continue to be supervised. Yet contrary to the psychologist’s tempered judgment and her lawyer’s strong admonitions, Rose decided that Fred should be allowed unsupervised visits with their son. If Rose’s stories about Fred were true, it was wrong to allow this. But to
this
Rose, it was all a glorious charade in which the endless divorce was little more than a device to teach her husband a lesson. And so before the second trial took place, the parties agreed that Fred should have almost equal access to Fredchen as his mother. The little boy continued shuttling back and forth.

As Fred saw it, he had triumphed in the first two acts of this divorce, and was convinced he would triumph in the third and most important act as well. The problem of having lied to Rose that he had signed 50 percent of his properties over to her was little more than a meaningless aside. “My intention was to placate her,” Fred says. “I wouldn’t have put her out on the street. I would not have had my son live with her in a dump. I would have provided.”

On October 30, 2003 Judge Kroll ruled on the third part of the divorce. She released a decision that gave Rose half of everything, and made her an immensely wealthy woman. When the verdict was released, Rose happened to be at Haines’s offices, where she visited so frequently that the lawyer had given her a separate office. She was doing his paralegal’s hair, and when she heard the decision, she started crying and kept doing the hair. She was now Fred’s equal in the only arena that truly mattered, and she fancied that once they divided the properties, they might well get back together now and live peaceably with Fredchen.

Fred did not cry. He showed no emotion. He had learned that Judge Kroll had made a mistake: She had forgotten to issue the divorce. If Rose drove off the bridge on the way back to her home and drowned, none of this would be valid; the couple would still be married, and Fred would own everything. Haines realized this as well, and immediately filed a brief to have the judge fix her mistake.

A
T EIGHT A.M. ON
the morning of November 10, 2003, Rose and her thirty-one-year-old brother, Wolfgang, left the mansion on the far north end of the island in a red minivan. The siblings were accompanied by Michael Easton, a massage therapist who had once worked for both Kellers.

It had been only ten days since Judge Kroll’s decision, and today the thirty-four-year-old Rose and sixty-nine-year-old Fred would begin the process of dividing up the properties of Keller Trust. Rose wanted her brother with her, and not simply because he had worked for Fred for nine months before Fred fired him when Rose set out to seek a divorce. Wolfgang had become his sister’s primary emotional support. He was stolid and provincial, but he was unflinchingly loyal to his sister.

As the same time that Rose left her home, Fred walked out of his condominium at Winthrop House, on the corner of Worth Avenue and the ocean that he had purchased after Rose left him, and got into the backseat of his 1999 Cadillac. As he set down his Gatorade and briefcase, the businessman murmured a greeting to Roy Bourgault, his driver. Fred was dressed in what for him bordered on formal wear, a pair of long pants and a shirt with a collar.

As Fred saw it, he had done everything for Rose and her family, and they had turned on him. He alleged that she and her brother Wolfgang had broken into his offices and stolen documents. She said that she had a perfect right to examine what was half hers.

When his estranged wife had come into the building to look at files, she had driven some of the employees to tears. He told his business subordinates that Rose had threatened to kill not only him, but all of them. Just three days ago, he had sent a fax to the Riviera Beach police near Keller Trust, alerting them to this supposed danger. An officer had given him a call and promised to look into the matter. And now this morning he was being asked to rip asunder his life’s work, to tear it in two and give half to a woman who demeaned and defamed him, a woman who deserved nothing but his eternal enmity.