The Family: A Question of Custody

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THE FAMILY

At trial's end, there was a brief vignette that presaged what was to come. Dr. James Slater Murphy threw his arms around his lawyer and kissed him on the cheek. Mrs. Nelson ("Happy") Rockefeller, handsome second wife of the Governor of New York, stood in the corridor smoking cigarette after cigarette. "You are nervous!" said a deputy sheriff sympathetically. She was.

Last week Happy learned that her premonitions were all too justified. New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph F. Gagliardi denied Happy's suit to regain custody of her children, ruled that all four should stay with their father.

Health & Personality. The drama began with the terms Happy accepted 18 months ago as a price for her divorce from her virologist husband. Then, in proceedings behind closed doors in an Idaho court and with a sealed agreement, she relinquished custody of the children. She was obviously aware that as long as she was happily remarried, while Dr. Murphy remained unmarried, neither public opinion nor the law would view sympathetically any effort to take the children away from him.

Last June, when Dr. Murphy married Victoria Thompson, one of the children's teachers at the Chapin School, Happy plucked up hope. Whether or not her husband's dashed hopes of being a presidential candidate had anything to do with it is an interesting speculation. In any case, two days after the nomination of Barry Goldwater in San Francisco, Happy brought suit to change the custody arrangement, alleging that the health and personality of at least one of the children were being affected. (The Rockefellers—who now have an infant son of their own—had not returned four-year-old Malinda to the Murphys after all four children stayed with them during the Murphys' honeymoon.) As chance would have it, the man Happy's suit came before was an old Rockefeller appointee. Justice Gagliardi, 52, had been named to his first judgeship in Westchester County by Governor Rockefeller, and later, as supreme court justice, had waived the obligatory three-day waiting period between blood test and wedding to expedite the Governor's marriage to Happy.

Witnesses & Principals. The judge imposed total secrecy and the kind of decorum that the Rockefellers can still command in an egalitarian society. Friends and relatives trooped into the courthouse in White Plains. The Murphys' housekeeper and the Rockefellers' children's nurse made their appearance in turn, but reporters were reduced to watching them emerge from closed limousines. Occasionally, an enterprising reporter caught glimpses of the witnesses and principals through the windows, performing as in a dumb show. Twice the Murphy children—James, 13, Margaretta, 11, Carol, 8, and Malinda, 4—were shepherded into the judge's closed chambers.