Three Real Florida Society Scandals in Honor of Palm Royale

Apple TV+’s Palm Royale, now streaming, stars Kristen Wiig as a cartoonish social climber navigating a fictional 1969 Palm Beach society awash in Lilly Pulitzer pastels and soap-opera-ready plot twists. (Her husband was married to whom?! The resort bartender, played by Ricky Martin, is actually living where?!) 

The sudsy series, which also features Allison Janney, Leslie Bibb, Laura Dern, and Carol Burnett, is based on Juliet McDaniel’s 2018 novel, Mr. and Mrs. American Pie, which is set in Palm Springs, California, and Scottsdale, Arizona. When it came to Apple TV+’s series, though, Palm Royale creator Abe Sylvia swapped out those locations for the most exclusive enclave in Florida—a more unique visual experience for viewers, with its own steep history of society scandal. In anticipation of Wiig’s desperate hijinks as Maxine, let’s look back at a few of the more outlandish and forgotten scandals from South Florida’s most colorful real-life socialites.

In 1964, a wealthy blonde socialite named Candace Mossler was accused of plotting and carrying out—with Melvin Powers, her 22-year-old nephew and lover(!)—the murder of Candace’s husband, Jacques Mossler, with whom she shared six children. Jacques was a banker 25 years older than Candace. Candace was a vivacious party host with movie-star looks and a romantic history with Chuck Berry. 

In 1962, she agreed to let her nephew Melvin move into the family home in Houston so that he could rebuild his life after a 90-day jail stint. While in town, Melvin “underwent four operations, presumably at the behest of Candace,” reported Texas Monthly. “He was circumcised, his tonsils were removed, his ears were cosmetically adjusted to lie flatter against his head, and his face was sanded.” (The excellent investigative feature also notes that an autopsy of Melvin later revealed he had “‘a prosthetic device’ implanted in his ‘penile shaft,’” but there is no information to conclude when that procedure may have taken place.)

In 1964, Jacques was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in his oceanfront apartment in Key Biscayne after discovering that Candace and her nephew were having an affair. Candace suggested to reporters that Jacques was killed by a jealous male lover. But after police found love letters between Candace and Melvin, aunt and nephew stood trial in Miami for murdering Jacques in what prosecutors described as a conspiracy to get Jacques’s $33 million fortune. 

Shortly after Candace was acquitted of her husband’s murder, she kissed Melvin on the lips in a gold Cadillac outside the courthouse.

Candace and Melvin eventually parted ways—with Melvin becoming a flamboyant real estate developer in Houston who owned a huge yacht and was at one point worth $200 million. Candace married again—wedding an electrical contractor named Barnett Garrison in 1971. “A year later he fell from the roof of their 62‐room house early one morning under circumstances that were never fully explained,” reported The New York Times. 

Publishing heir Herbert ‘Peter’ Pulitzer avoids eye contact with his wife Roxanne Pulitzer as they wait for their bitter divorce trial to resume in 1982.

It was a Palm Beach scandal so sex-, drug-, and spectacle-fueled that even Hunter S. Thompson covered it for Rolling Stone. In the early 1980s, Herbert “Peter” Pulitzer—the 50-something millionaire grandson of the storied newspaper publisher—filed for divorce from his second wife, Roxanne, who was 21 years his junior. (Pulitzer’s first wife was Lilly Pulitzer, the socialite who founded a self-titled clothing and print business.) At stake were Peter’s reportedly $25 million fortune and custody of his and Roxanne’s five-year-old twins. The sensational allegations lobbed between parties involved cocaine abuse, extramarital affairs, incest, and late-night séances.

In 1982, Time laid out some of the wildest accusations: Peter said that Roxanne had slept with a number of people including “a local real estate salesman, a French baker, a Belgian race-car driver, the beautiful young wife of a handsome old Kleenex heir,” and “a drug dealer who threatened to kill him.” 

Roxanne, meanwhile, said that Peter “once flew a load of marijuana from the Bahamas to Florida on board his plane,” and in her most lurid contention, that he had a “sexual encounter” with then 26-year-old Liza Pulitzer Leidy, one of Peter and Lilly’s three daughters (and now a high-powered Palm Beach realtor), when she was 16. Both Peter and Leidy denied the charge, though Leidy went even further by saying it was Roxanne who had made an advance toward her stepdaughter “after the two had sniffed cocaine in the bathroom of a West Palm Beach disco,” according to Time.

The strangest allegations may have come from Janice Nelson, Roxanne’s onetime psychic adviser, who had lived in the Pulitzer home. As Time wrote:

Nelson assisted Roxanne [in] running periodic bedroom séances involving a dozen or more Pulitzer friends. On the foot of the bed were a black cape and a trumpet. Roxanne explained in court that she was hoping “the dead would speak to the living through the trumpet.” Said Peter of the occult sessions: “I don’t believe in spirit voices. I was kicked out for falling asleep.” Judge Harper reluctantly allowed the trumpet to be admitted as [evidence]. “I don’t know for the life of me how this is relevant,” he said, and added: “I’ve made so many rulings in this case, if I haven’t made an error by now I ought to get the Pulitzer [Prize].”

In the end, Herbert won custody of the twins, and Roxanne was awarded less than $50,000 in alimony.

Hunter S. Thompson pointed out in his Rolling Stone coverage, “Nowhere in the record of the Pulitzer trial is there any mention of anybody who had to go to work in the morning. There were nannies and gardeners, hired boat captains and part-time stockbrokers and a Grand Prix driver and a French baker and at least one full-time dope dealer. But there was nobody who ever had to get time off from work to come in and testify.”

Roxanne found herself back in the world of those working folks after the trial. As the Chicago Tribune reported, “In debt from huge legal bills, she scraped by on her salary as an aerobics instructor. The divorce settlement allowed her to see her sons only every other weekend and every other Christmas.” Three years after the divorce, she posed nude in Playboy for $70,000.

Nearly 30 years after the Pulitzer v. Pulitzer ruling, Forbes reported a surprising turn of events: that Roxanne’s fifth husband, Tim Boberg, lent Peter and their twin sons $220,000 to keep their citrus-growing business out of bankruptcy. “We would have lost everything without him,” Mac Pulitzer told the Palm Beach Daily News, per Forbes. “The bank would have foreclosed on it all. He was our white knight.”

Roxanne also got the chance to comment: “I never thought Peter would run out of money,” she said. “The pendulum swings. It’s a different ending.”

William Kennedy Smith (R) and Kennedy family members arrive at Palm Beach County Courthouse in 1991 as Smith’s rape trial began its second week.

One of Palm Beach’s most famous families and properties featured in a 1991 scandal that drew international attention. William Kennedy Smith—nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy—was accused of raping 29-year-old Patricia Bowman at the family’s former “Winter White House” property.

Smith met Bowman at a local bar during a visit he made Easter weekend with his senator uncle Ted and cousin Patrick Kennedy. Smith invited Bowman back to the estate, with its 11-bedroom house, swimming pool, tennis court, and 200 feet of beachfront property. While there, Bowman claimed that Smith chased her across the grounds, tackled her, pinned her, pulled up her dress, and raped her. Bowman passed two polygraph tests on her statements to police and had bruises on her legs, shoulders, and arms. 

Dominick Dunne covered the trial for this magazine, reporting how the Kennedy family came out en masse to support Smith: “They gave an unprecedented display of solidarity combined with stardom, waving at the press, smiling at the photographers, any one of them capable at any moment of stepping in front of the bank of microphones and addressing the multitudes,” wrote Dunne. 

Smith was ultimately acquitted—not a surprise given his expensive defense lawyer Roy Black, his family clout, and this detail from Dunne: “From the moment on the first day of the trial when Judge Mary Lupo disallowed, without comment, the testimony of three other women—a doctor, a medical student, and a law student who at the time was the girlfriend of Smith’s cousin Matthew Maxwell Kennedy—who claimed they were sexually assaulted by Smith between 1983 and 1988, the die was cast. Only the speed with which the jury of six people selected to decide Smith’s fate arrived at their decision was a surprise: a mere seventy-seven minutes, including the time it took to pick a foreman.” (At the time, Smith, through Black, denied the three women’s allegations.)

(In a bizarre postscript, Black married one of the jurors who found Smith not guilty, Lea Black, in 1994. Black later became a member of The Real Housewives of Miami.)

Bowman later told Dunne, “It’s the acquittal that money can buy. [Smith’s team] had nine months to come up with their story…. He had five of my statements and everybody else’s statements. He had the forensic evidence. He had all kinds of resources, which they’ve already testified that they used. He had all this material with which to concoct a story. And that’s what he did…. Everything I couldn’t remember, because of rape-trauma syndrome, he could come up with something for. Everything that fit in with the forensic evidence, he found an answer for it.”

In 2015, Jerry Oppenheimer wrote in his book RFK Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream that JFK Jr. had been blackmailed into attending the trial to support his cousin. James Ridgway de Szigethy, an acquaintance of JFK Jr., told Congress that he recalled his friend saying that the family “‘should have done something about Willie years ago when he first started doing this,’ meaning…raping women.” De Szigethy said that JFK Jr. “told me he did not want to [support his cousin at trial] and his mother did not want him to, either. I suggested that he not do it since Willie was guilty, but he told me who was pressuring and why.” Oppenheimer continued with De Szigethy’s statement to Congress: