The Picnic Trial

"Courtroom drama," that trite darling of novelists and dramatists, has authentic origins: civilized mankind's transforming willingness to submit its disputes to third parties for impartial judgment. The ritual can impart strength to the weak, modesty to the immodest, and equality to the powerful and wealthy.

So last week the courtroom drama of Rockefeller v. Murphy unfolded be hind closed doors in White Plains, N.Y. Only the disputants knew just why Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller yielded custody of her four children -- James, 13; Margaretta, 11; Carol, 8; and Melinda, 4--to Virologist James S. Murphy when she divorced him in Idaho last year. The public knew only that "Happy" was now demanding custody and that Dr. Murphy, himself recently remarried to a pretty former teacher of his children, was unwilling to give it up.

Blue for Battle. To apply the law and the facts to whatever emotions were involved was the prickly task of New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph F. Gagliardi, 52, a former genial amateur golfer who once reached the final round of the U.S. Amateur championship, a onetime Westchester County judge appointed by his fellow Republican, Governor Rockefeller. As in all custody cases, he was solely concerned with the children's welfare. Firmly shutting his courtroom door to all but the witnesses, the parties and their lawyers, Gagliardi summoned Plaintiff Rockefeller to prove what he cryptically called her "allegations to the effect that the personalities and even the health of one or more of the infants are being adversely affected."

As newsmen hovered, the opponents moved in and out of the closed courtroom like Henry James characters, their real motives invisible for hundreds of pages. Mrs. Rockefeller arrived on the first day with her husband's state police bodyguard and Chrysler Imperial. She graciously smiled her way into battle in a blue sheath dress, bare legs and black flat-heeled shoes, accompanied by four lawyers, a nursemaid and Mrs. Peter Iselin, one of her Philadelphia cousins. Dr. Murphy, his new blonde wife in demure beige, said, "I can't smile." In they walked, past a wall plaque reading:

Not flesh of my flesh

Not bone of my bone

But still miraculously my own.

Never forget

For a single minute

You didn't grow under my heart

But in it.

Humble Thanks. Through a window, newsmen watched Murphy scribbling on a yellow pad as his ex-wife took the stand. Still smiling, she emerged at noon for a storybook picnic lunch (ham, roast beef and chicken-salad sandwiches on white bread with trimmed crusts) in the sheriff's office. Still unsmiling, Murphy and his wife ate in a bar and grill down the street.

By the time Happy had been in court three days, Dr. Murphy's cold silence had gradually melted, to the point where he smilingly walked across the courtroom and greeted her, and thereafter kept glancing in her direction. "This was the first sign of friendliness," said a deputy. "Until now, they've been cutting each other dead."

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