stomach. America’s most popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, married the dying man to the divorced woman, outraging both press and public. Then 2,000 women crowded Apollo Hall in New York to petition the governor to commit the acquitted murderer to an asylum. McFarland, they argued, should be either hospitalized if insane as judged or hanged if not.

1911: SINCLAIR V. SINCLAIR

Upton Sinclair always maintained that he sought no publicity for himself. His wife, Meta, made no such disclaimer. After he had sued her for divorce and named the latest in her long line of lovers as corespondent, she told reporters she was eager to have others learn from her experience. Soon the tabloids were trumpeting the case and Meta’s father was telling the World that his son-in-law was “an unripe persimmon.” Though the scandal made good newspaper copy, Sinclair’s graphic account of watching his wife and her lover couple and then finding solace in another woman’s bed never found a publisher, which clearly contradicts the plus ça change theory of history.

1922: STILLMAN V. STILLMAN

In a suit that packed all the raw kick and unpredictable aftereffects of bootleg booze, James Stillman, president of National City Bank, charged his wife, Anne, and an Indian guide at their Quebec lodge with adultery. She counterattacked by accusing James of being the father of a former Ziegfeld Follies girl’s illegitimate son. Before long, people began noticing that Anne’s blue-eyed, blond-haired child bore less likeness to the Québecois guide or her husband than to Fowler McCormick, a teenage grandson of puritanical old John D. Rockefeller. After five years and almost a million dollars, the attorneys negotiated a reconciliation, and the Stillmans lived happily ever after—until, a decade and a half later, in a surprise love-conquers-all ending, the 50-year-old Anne divorced James and married 29-year-old Fowler McCormick.

1925: RHINELANDER V. RHINELANDER

Though Leonard Rhinelander grew up in a tony Madison Avenue mansion, he suffered cruelly from his mother’s violent death when he was 14, his father’s icy arrogance, and his own stutter. No wonder Kip, as he was called, fell immediately in love with the darkly lovely and entirely adoring Alice Jones. But Kip’s father was less susceptible to the charms of his new daughter-in-law, who’d once worked in the laundry room of the New York Athletic Club. When the tabloids screamed SOCIALITE MARRIES NEGRESS , the senior Rhinelander sued for an annulment on the grounds that Alice had misled his son. While Rhinelander’s attorneys portrayed Kip as “backward” and “brain-tied,” the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses, politicians squared off in the Senate restaurant, and Calvin Coolidge refused to comment. The jury denied the annulment, but the trial, which featured Alice’s forced disrobing in a New York Supreme Court jury room, was a perfect marriage of national prurience and racial prejudice. (For more, see “The Time Machine,” page 85.)

1949: BERGMAN V. LINDSTROM

Ingrid Bergman didn’t

just deceive a husband and abandon a child; she betrayed an entire nation, and post-World War II America was not about to let her get away with it. Before she fell in love with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, the Saturday Review wrote: “The cleanliness of her spirit is truly next to godliness.” When she left her physician husband and small daughter to live with Rossellini in Rome and bear his son out of wedlock, five and a half million American clubwomen voted to boycott her films. Federico Fellini called her “an American saint,” but the nation made her a martyr, and Bergman rose to the role: “I am glad that all those other women, in small and big towns all over the world, who suffer because of their ‘sins,’ will take on a little more courage because of me.” Ilsa Laszlo could not have said it better.

1982: PULITZER V. PULITZER

Headlines told of sexual high jinks with a trumpet, and the wife’s “first step toward … autonomy” was to pose for Playboy . More than a mere divorce, the split between the Palm Beach heir Herbert Pulitzer, Jr., and his wife, Roxanne, was an expression of the Zeitgeist . He accused her of a lesbian affair; she insisted she’d merely agreed to a ménage àtrois he’d been demanding, and said they had celebrated with 50 lines of cocaine laid out to spell “Happy Birthday, Rox.” The judge cited her “gross, moral misconduct” and his “painful hurt” while giving him custody of their twin boys. More than three centuries after colonial courts had decreed a wife’s adultery grounds for divorce, but not a husband’s, the action was still not equal opportunity.