Chapter 4
In the audience was my mother, Marilyn Frances Zenner Daniels, or Pat as everyone called her. I don’t know the origin of her nickname. But it’s why she named me Patricia. When Billy Graham’s crusade began in Miami my mother was thirty-six and closely resembled the actress Vivian Leigh.
“She dabbles in everything.” Including men, Herb Rau wrote, describing her as “attractive enough to find a niche in show business.”
With her “shorts-and-sweater figure” she easily “could win beauty contests” but thought they were “silly,” the Miami News columnist gushed.
The same month Billy Graham was preaching in South Florida for the first time, my father announced he was starting his own law firm. Recently, he’d stunned friends and colleagues by leaving the prestigious Nichols, Gaither, Green, Frates & Beckham, located in Miami’s Pan American Bank Building.
In the mid-’50s Dad had helped start the firm with Perry Nichols, a prominent trial lawyer and pioneer in personal injury cases.
One of the first to use court exhibits, Perry had begun winning record-breaking settlements, his firm nationally recognized.
Originally from Texas, he was flamboyant and persuasive in front of a jury, his oratorical style compared to Billy Graham.
Perry Nichols was a powerhouse. He received publicity and accolades, and earned a lot of money.
Meanwhile my father worked behind the scenes.
He didn’t make headlines and was rarely in the news.
The firm’s appellate wizard, he’s credited with creating appellate law as a specialty.
He was gifted at dissecting a legal case, perhaps explaining my eventual affinity for autopsies.
Dad was known for his logical mind, quirky humor, and impressive pedigree.
His father, Carroll Salem Daniels, met Augusta “Gussie” Warner in 1915 in Muskegon, Michigan.
She was a well-paid legal clerk, and a direct descendant of the Beecher family, best known for Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
After my grandparents married, he and a business partner decided to open an office supply company.
They needed just the right location. Grandma Gussie, or G.G.
, as we called her, discovered a hat store for sale.
She could have the building and everything in it for $1,500.
This included barrels of ostrich feathers that G.G.
had fashioned into hats, making more than what had been paid for the entire business.
Daniels Office Supplies in Muskegon still exists today.
My grandparents’ first child, Warner Brown Daniels, was followed by a sister, Priscilla, who died from laryngeal diphtheria at the age of six.
A year later, my dad, Samuel Carroll Daniels, arrived on February 22, 1927, the family bereft and in turmoil from losing their daughter.
G.G.’s husband claimed it was her fault for leaving their sick child with the nurse.
By all accounts, Priscilla was special, playing the piano by the age of five.
She had black curly hair and big eyes in the photograph on her father’s desk near his pens and ink bottle.
G.G. remembered that after Priscilla died, her husband would stare at the photograph, wiping the gilt frame with his handkerchief. Then he’d wipe his eyes.
My grandfather had doted on Priscilla, wanting another daughter to take her place.
He was disappointed by the arrival of Sam, born five months premature and not expected to live.
He was in an incubator for quite a while, and when he came home from the hospital, G.G.
had to hire a wet nurse. Mother and son never bonded.
Dad would later claim his compromised immune system was from being born prematurely.
While in his early forties he would develop rheumatoid arthritis.
He tried every remedy. Snake venom. Gold salts.
Copper bracelets. A lifetime of steroids, and his skin became as thin as cigarette paper. He was always covered with bruises.
When he developed asthma as a child, his parents decided it would be best for him if they moved to a warmer climate.
They relocated to Miami and started the family’s successful business, Daniels Incorporated Women’s Clothing Department Store.
Or simply Daniels Department Store, famous for its free circulating library that encouraged people, especially women, to read books.
The nearly twenty-thousand-square-foot store occupied acres of prime Coral Gables real estate on Ponce de Leon Avenue.
It was co-owned by G.G. and her husband, but she was the driving force.
By now, their marriage was a facade. My father grew up in an erudite but toxic environment, his parents growing to detest each other.
Eventually, they would take separate vacations, Sam his father’s confederate, and Warner his mother’s.
The brothers were vastly different and eventually had nothing to do with each other. Their father thought Warner was a lazy do-nothing. He was weak and worthless. Those were my dad’s sentiments as well. G.G. once commented that he wouldn’t speak to Warner if they were on the same elevator together.
Fair or not, my father blamed his brother for the eventual ruination of Daniels Department Store.
G.G. would have been comfortable financially the rest of her days were it not for her older son.
My father said that Warner borrowed money from the till and didn’t repay it, which is a nice way of saying he embezzled.
I don’t know if what I heard about my uncle Warner was true.
But my few exposures to him weren’t impressive.
Once while I was visiting G.G. in Coral Gables, he dropped by unannounced.
Hovering near the front door, he explained he needed money for milk and bread.
He struck me as homeless, and she left him in the living room, returning with her pocketbook.
As a young man Dad became a tournament tennis player, gifted at slices, spins, and chesslike strategies.
Graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UNC Chapel Hill, he went on to attend Columbia Law School in New York City.
Top in his class, he was selected in 1951 to clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.
That fall Dad moved into a Washington, D.C.
, apartment, and two months later, the justice’s fifty-one-year-old wife, Josephine, died suddenly in her sleep.
The cause of death was never determined, although she’d not been feeling well for several days.
Her husband was overcome by grief and found my father good company.
Hugo Black asked Dad to move in with him.
During the clerkship, my father stayed in the justice’s house in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, on South Lee Street.
I never knew the location until researching this memoir.
Ironically, it’s but a few blocks from where Kay Scarpetta lives in my more recent novels.
Dad would spend the year in Black’s two-story brick house, built in 1800, Federal style with dormer windows.
Best of all, it had a backyard clay tennis court.
Black was a passionate tennis enthusiast and fierce competitor.
He’d designated an area of the U.S. Supreme Court building to knock balls around with his clerks and others.
In the fall of 1952 the clerkship ended, and Dad left to begin working as an instructor at the University of Miami Law School. Over the next decade he and Hugo Black would write each other regularly and visit.
In March 1953 during a court recess, Black had stayed in Dad’s Miami apartment for a while.
They deeply respected each other until Dad cheated on Mom and left her at the end of 1961.
His mentor wouldn’t have approved of such behavior.
Kindness, unselfishness, humility, and decency were the justice’s top priorities.
Without good character, nothing else mattered, and Hugo Black must have been disappointed, not to mention shocked.
He was quite fond of my mother, appreciating her bright childlike spirit, her whimsy, and her obvious attractiveness.
He thought Dad had won the romantic lottery, and was their cheerleader, sending them sterling flatware for a wedding present.
“I should be surprised if that pretty wife of yours would ever see a man without ‘a gleam in his eye,’” he’d written to my father on October 24, 1957.
Four years later, it appears the correspondence stopped. The last letter I could locate was dated the end of August in 1961. I’ve wondered if Dad confided that he was involved with another woman and wanted a divorce. I can’t imagine Hugo Black would have been sympathetic, not even a little.
Likely, he reminded his former law clerk that such behavior limited future opportunities.
My father dreamed of becoming a judge, possibly a U.S.
Supreme Court justice. With his cold impartiality and steel-trap mind, he would have made a good one.
But that lofty ambition was unlikely after a scandal.
Certainly, in that era, and he was becoming noticeably off tilt, his behavior alarming.
By March 1961, Dad was on his own as an attorney.
He’d opened a small office in Miami’s DuPont Building, working there long hours alone except for the secretary he was sleeping with.
At Perry Nichols’s firm Dad had colleagues, a support staff, a salary.
He had structure. For him to resign and strike out on his own was a bold move. Possibly a reckless one.
Supporting a wife and three young children, he was coping with mounting financial pressures while his relationship with my mom continued deteriorating.
His underlying insecurity, grand ideas, and need to impress were causing him to overreach.
We lived in the wealthy subdivision of Coral Gables, our lovely home on Alfonso Avenue filled with fine furniture. We had nice cars, nothing inexpensive.
In 1961, Dad decided we should move to the relatively new and more private subdivision Snapper Creek Lakes.
He began building a big house there, white stucco with a columned portico, a wall in front.
The driveway was long, the backyard shaded by palms and ficus and fruit trees.
When we moved in that late summer, I remember plenty of vacant lots.
His decision to relocate to a more secluded and exclusive subdivision may have been prompted by hostility from neighbors.
Dad was making the news for accepting a case on behalf of the Cuban government.
This was during a volatile period when it was reported that the Soviet Union planned to establish missile bases in Cuba.
American citizens were prohibited from traveling there.
The U.S. had cut off all sugar purchases, and embargoed Cuban exports. At the beginning of 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ended all diplomatic relations. Three months later was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban fighters trained by the CIA, and equipped by our military.
Some countries, like Czechoslovakia, supported the Cuban revolutionaries and their leader, Fidel Castro.
Ambassador Miloslav Rusek hired my father on Cuba’s behalf.
Castro needed representation in lawsuits filed after he began seizing American properties.
Dad argued in court that Cuba grabbing a U.S.
tractor company or a construction company in Havana was the legal act of a sovereign government.
He took this position at a time when the U.S.
was trying to overthrow Castro. Ultimately, Florida Supreme Court Justice Hal P.
Dekle ruled against my father, the case all over the news that summer of 1961 and into the early winter.
I’m not sure how much my mom knew about what Dad was doing on behalf of Castro, but certainly she was aware of it.
At a party in Coral Gables, neighbors made comments just loud enough for her to hear.
They referred to our newly constructed home in Snapper Creek Lakes as the house that Castro built.
The new Impala that Mom drove was the Guevara-mobile.
People were outraged, calling my father a communist and a traitor.
He was receiving death threats, and somebody decided to make a point by spray-painting our white hound dog bright red.
It took Dad hours to scrub Snuffy clean with paint thinner, a pile of red-stained rags on the garage floor.
By now, Mom was chronically depressed and feeling worthless, retreating to her bed with another sick headache.
As Billy Graham’s Miami crusade began in March 1961, she was circling a black hole emotionally, the timing miraculous. Intrigued by the television evangelist drawing such enormous crowds, Mom accepted a friend’s invitation to a service one night. It would change our family’s destiny.
Had my mother not gone, I don’t know what would have become of us.
I call that synchronicity, the purpose and quantum of our mysterious existence.
To her it was God’s will or an answer to prayer, and maybe they’re the same thing.
She walked forward, responding to Billy Graham’s altar call as the choir sang “Just as I Am” and the organ played.
She began attending a Baptist church in Coral Gables and took me there several times for various activities.
She joined a women’s Bible study group, and I can well imagine my father’s reaction.
He wouldn’t have been happy about her going to a Billy Graham crusade and being born again.
It was bad enough that she’d started watching the evangelist on TV at every opportunity.
No doubt Dad would have made derisive comments that painted her as irrational and lowbrow.
He would have mocked her conversion experience and been threatened by it.
Anything that had power over her took it away from him.
He had no use for religion or those who practiced it, most of all Billy Graham.
Dad detested him long before there would be a personal reason.