The Odd Couple

The story of Charlotte and John Fedders rocked Washington. It had all the ingredients: success, money, ambition, image-obsession and violence. It has become a modern fable, a cautionary tale that flashes a warning beacon of tough young men pushing their way to the top, at the expense of their families.

Charlotte and John were the archetypal successful Washington couple. He was a young lawyer zooming up the status ladder in the fast lane. They were a crisp, clean-living Catholic couple with five young sons, living in a gleaming colonial-style mansion. From the outside they seemed to have it all: the best country clubs, the best Catholic private schools for their children, the best privately catered parties. He was selected for a top job which brought him into the public eye.

Then John Fedders' life fell apart. Or, at least, his image of it, which for him was the same thing. His private life had always been a catastrophe but one well hidden. The last straw for his wife came the day he started to turn his violent rage against his eldest son.

Charlotte Fedders filed for divorce. She hoped for a quiet divorce without dispute. But her husband wanted to battle it out. Perhaps he thought no one would notice an obscure hearing in a small courtroom in Maryland. But the Wall Street Journal sent a reporter to write the story, and what a story it was. Fedders had beaten his wife often and savagely. He thumped her repeatedly when she was pregnant. He ran the house­hold with a set of iron rules: no one was permitted to enter the house in shoes; his sons had to do thirty press-ups whenever they came into the room. He was obsessively mean about money.

Charlotte got virtually none for herself and the children. And yet she worried frantically about their rising debts. They lived way beyond their means.

The day after the Wall Street Journal ran the story, John Fedders was forced to resign. The story ran extensively on nationwide televi­sion. It rang new alarm bells. It showed that battered wives were not necessarily poor or confined to ghettos. Charlotte learned for the first time the FBI statistics: four women are beaten to death every day in America by husbands or lovers.

Charlotte got her divorce. John Fedders took a lower paid job and paid $12,000 a year to Charlotte and the children. The older children all worked and contributed their money to the household. Charlotte earned a little in a flower shop, but they were hard pressed. Then a publisher asked her to write the awful story of her life. But just before the book was to appear John Fedders took her back to the divorce court to try to get his puny payments to the family reduced. On top of that, he wanted 25% of the proceeds of the book on the grounds that he was the star of it. Everyone expected him to be laughed out of court. Imagine the shock when the court accepted his plea and did award that 25%.

Charlotte Fedders now seems like a self-confident and articulate woman. She makes speeches on battered wives up and down the coun­try. Her book is a fascinating but dispiriting read. She was a poor, cling­ing pathetic creature who invested everything in her husband and her children. She thought as a young nurse that she would never find a hus­band with the sort of earning power that her family expected. When tall, handsome, athletic, clever Fedders looked on her with favour she thought she didn't deserve to land such a big fish. But he spied in her what he wanted: obedience, adoration, inferiority yet a sufficiently culti­vated veneer for social acceptability. No danger of equality here.

It is a terrible pattern: this story caused such a stir in America as it forces attention on the family life of the high achievers. When gilded young husbands work all the hours under the sun, who takes the strain? Who bears the brunt of all that bottled frenetic activity? j What do wives and children have to tolerate in order to keep a man | on the upward path?

(Polly Toynbee, The Guardian)

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