SEXUAL WARFARE AS FAMILY STYLE
Hendin, Josephine
Few things hold us like home. The current celebration of traditional family values expresses a need for refuge, pleasure, and acceptance that is as impossible to forgo as it is difficult to...
...To kill her father 232 was to kill part of herself...
...Such use of form and format permits an escape from the whole picture of family violence by focusing on selected parts...
...Frances scapegoated her oldest son, Larry, virtually from birth...
...She had not taken kindly to the birth of three children in rapid succession and a late-coming fourth (the lethal Frances), economic hardship early in marriage, and to her husband's refusal to spend or acknowledge his wealth...
...If the fascination with the life-styles of the rich and famous serves to inflame envy, the family antiromance creates complacency...
...She rented huge mansions in the Hamptons in which she lived in isolation...
...The Bradshaw's story offers a chance to see in enlarged and dramatic form the mechanisms that connect extreme pathology with the behavioral quirks and styles of families whose problems are less severe...
...How it was found, how alert detectives developed evidence, and how the family's snarled emotions emerged in their legal wrangles is Coleman's primary focus...
...In its disclosure of how sexual warfare evolves into a family style, a patterning of discord and destructiveness, the story offers glimmers of self-recognition...
...Yet the awareness gained from the antiromance does not necessarily incite reform...
...Why did she resort to murder...
...In winter, when the zipper on his jacket gave out, he tied it around himself with rope...
...She killed her father because he was writing a new will that would disinherit her and prevent her from securing her position on the board...
...By what process did Frances take up her mother's fight...
...17.95...
...Refusing Marc's plea to get rid of the murder weapon, she entrusted it to a friend to whom she owed $3,000...
...The ease with which incidents of family violence make their way from the police blotter to nonfiction books and TV miniseries discloses how many facets of our culture are touched and how many eyes are widened by families that cannot be said to work at all...
...In doing so, the antiromance implies that the answer to a seemingly insoluble problem is to get used to it...
...Shallowness is not a surprising response to the suspicion that the current crises in family life are insoluble...
...He clipped the blank portions of letters for his own stationery, inserting them into an old typewriter that had lost bits of its letters...
...Refusing Marc's plea to get rid of the murder weapon, she entrusted it to a friend to whom she owed $3,000...
...Yet the awareness gained from the antiromance does not necessarily incite reform...
...19.95...
...She shared her father's need to withhold from Berenice what she needed most: gratitude and admiration...
...Her delight in withholding this amount even after she had access to an immense fortune rendered her friend vulnerable to her sister Marilyn, who had offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the solution of the crime...
...While Berenice lamented what Franklin didn't do for Robert and her daughters pleaded for medical help, Robert descended into madness and spent most of his adult life in mental hospitals where, several years after a lobotomy, he died...
...Exploiting her younger son, Marc, as her housekeeper, cook, and confidant, Frances alternately seduced him to obedience by her total reliance on him, by threats of suicide if he failed, and of expulsion from the house if he refused to do her bidding...
...and finally by siphoning money from her mother to create a setting of success by her choice of address, religion, private schools for her children, and by using the Bradshaw money to propel herself onto the board of trustees of the New York City Ballet...
...Even after the conviction of Franklin's killers, Berenice continued to wage it...
...The greatest of these was motherhood...
...Evil" Frances had tried and failed to escape the work-and-family ethic, first through education (she was expelled from Bryn Mawr for drinking and stealing...
...A burgeoning genre—the family antiromance—is appealing to that fascination with things gone wrong: the horror show of failed intimacy...
...Alexander's fast-paced narrative records the voice of New York malice, wealth, and power, providing enough of a view of the workings of a prestigious ballet company to appeal to the taste for celebrity gossip...
...q 233 Josephine Hendin Sexual Warfare as a Family Style Few things hold us like home...
...Frances scapegoated her oldest son, Larry, virtually from birth...
...In doing so, the antiromance implies that the answer to a seemingly insoluble problem is to get used to it...
...Given her history of suicide attempts and destructive behavior, her guilt probably predated the crime...
...She reminded me of Tara"—decayed and neglected...
...Shana Alexander's Nutcracker and Jonathan Coleman's At Mother's Request take on the difficult task of unraveling such a crime.* Each is slated to be a separate miniseries, providing next season's television with a heavy dose of family anguish...
...She was able to make her mother and her children feel like everything, the most important people to her—and like nothing, refuse she could dispose of...
...In response, Frances frequently refuses to accept her mother's visits...
...She had not taken kindly to the birth of three children in rapid succession and a late-coming fourth (the lethal Frances), economic hardship early in marriage, and to her husband's refusal to spend or acknowledge his wealth...
...How can sexual warfare be transmitted from one generation to another...
...Faith McNulty's The Burning Bed (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) depicted an abused wife who set fire to her sleeping husband...
...Her image of her daughter as ballerina was not only an idealized self-image but also the flip side of her disgust with what she was...
...Jonathan Coleman is a less polished but more thoughtful writer who approaches the family as the sufferers they clearly were...
...Alexander has a savage eye for the disparities between the world Frances wanted, epitomized by the Nutcracker ballet, and the one she choreo *Shana Alexander, Nutcracker...
...Yet her guilt was even greater and more complex...
...As her mother had pinned her fantasies of a socially exciting life of irresponsibility and good times on Frances, so Frances pinned her dreams of glory on her own youngest child, Lavinia...
...Yet he presided over an auto-parts empire and had parlayed an undergraduate education in geology into cornering 40 percent of all oil and gas leases in America...
...His files were crates from the refuse of fruit markets...
...When he began to have seizures at about age 10, he was sent to his basement room in the care of his sisters and was never medically treated...
...Why did she resort to murder...
...If this story can tell us anything about how a family can go haywire, it clearly illustrates how a mixture of scapegoating, exploitation, and idealization, fueled by sibling rivalries, can alter the attachment between parents and children and among children...
...The sexual warfare that dominated the pattern of relationships in the Bradshaw family was one that programmed all for self-destructiveness...
...Frances received a love that reflected the flowering of Berenice's disgust with Franklin...
...Parricide and the corruption of one's own son to a trigger man express a derangement of attachments spilling over three generations...
...Both Alexander and Coleman make clear that Franklin was determined to stop her, yet both writers also believe that he would have backed down if she had attempted a rapprochement...
...Shallowness is not a surprising response to the suspicion that the current crises in family life are insoluble...
...it acknowledges the depths but flattens the emotional force of failed intimacy...
...Disinheriting her, she made Frances, now in prison awaiting appeal, her sole heir...
...In an odd parody of her father's ecstasies of acquisition and selfdeprivation, she bought expensive jewelry and clothes yet wore the same filthy things day after day...
...A burgeoning genre—the family antiromance—is appealing to that fascination with things gone wrong: the horror show of failed intimacy...
...She was virtually raised as his opposite: where he and her older sisters were hardworking, honest, and reliable, she was incapable of sustained effort, dishonest, and vacillating...
...If this story can tell us anything about how a family can go haywire, it clearly illustrates how a mixture of scapegoating, exploitation, and idealization, fueled by sibling rivalries, can alter the attachment between parents and children and among children...
...In winter, when the zipper on his jacket gave out, he tied it around himself with rope...
...The war between the Bradshaws will become part of the war of the networks as CBS brings us Coleman's view and NBC offers us Alexander's...
...Both books were later made into TV shows...
...When he began to have seizures at about age 10, he was sent to his basement room in the care of his sisters and was never medically treated...
...Shana Alexander tells the story as a fable of social climbing in which each principal player is a familiar social type...
...She succeeded in planning the perfect crime, which would never have been solved had she disposed of the murder weapon as her son, Marc, had wished...
...Unable to pry from her husband either money or an accounting of his worth, she resorted to begging his foreman to buy her a new car from company funds, to stealing, and to returning to work in the warehouse at 74 to facilitate her thefts while also earning an hourly wage...
...Her delight in withholding this amount even after she had access to an immense fortune rendered her friend vulnerable to her sister Marilyn, who had offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the solution of the crime...
...Languishing in their house in a working-class neighborhood, and irritable in her 10-year-old Oldsmobile, Berenice only suspected they were fabulously rich...
...While Berenice lamented what Franklin didn't do for Robert and her daughters pleaded for medical help, Robert descended into madness and spent most of his adult life in mental hospitals where, several years after a lobotomy, he died...
...For a briefcase he used a ragged Coors carton salvaged from someone else's garbage pile...
...The fact that the genre focuses on extremes of violence also serves to reassure the reader that others are even worse off...
...How CAN ONE EXPLAIN the fascination with families whose disorder is so extreme...
...If nostalgia for the past is largely a sign of present frustration, it has only served to heighten interest in what makes families fail...
...Hiring a nanny to raise her properly, teach her to bathe and keep her room immaculate, Frances pushed her to become a ballerina who might one day command center stage...
...What provoked her to murder may have been a desire to die and bind others to her in death...
...The fact that the genre focuses on extremes of violence also serves to reassure the reader that others are even worse off...
...to have him killed by her son was to bind together the demise of her father, her son, and herself in the act of murder...
...Berenice's desire for a successful husband had been ironically fulfilled by a man who had amassed a fortune, but who had no desire for anything money could buy...
...It can enable the reader or viewer to divorce self-recognition from self-implication...
...graphed for herself...
...Yet her guilt was even greater and more complex...
...A new page was added to the album of family murder when Franklin Bradshaw, a Utah Mormon millionaire, was shot one Sunday morning in August 1978 by his grandson, a prep-school junior, at the insistence of his own daughter, Frances Bradshaw Schreuder, a convert to the Episcopal church and a resident of Manhattan's Upper East Side, and a member of the board of trustees of the New York City Ballet...
...No matter...
...Frances's need to exploit Marc without limit led her to adopt a trial defense that named him as a vicious killer who planned and executed the crime alone...
...The antiromance appeals to the sense of impasse: it discloses the worst and reassures...
...Faith McNulty's The Burning Bed (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) depicted an abused wife who set fire to her sleeping husband...
...his clothes were thrift-shop workpants and T-shirts...
...No matter...
...The antiromance appeals to the sense of impasse: it discloses the worst and reassures...
...It is clear that the family antiromance speaks to a time when too few families work...
...She killed her father because he was writing a new will that would disinherit her and prevent her from securing her position on the board...
...At the time of his death his assets were in the tens of millions, some scattered among the orange crates or tucked into outdated auto-parts catalogues in a filing system not even he had mastered...
...What distinguishes these adversaries from the familiar figure of the husband turned workaholic to escape his wife and the wife willing to do anything to get a response from him is the extent to which their war became institutionalized in virtually all the family's patterns...
...Parricide and the corruption of her son expressed an attack on both her own origins and on her offspring...
...The nostalgic dream of a return to an idealized traditional family and preoccupation with family violence are flip sides of the same fear that the family has fallen into a chaos from which it will not easily emerge...
...He clipped the blank portions of letters for his own stationery, inserting them into an old typewriter that had lost bits of its letters...
...Frances's daughter was clearly raised to redeem Frances from her social disabilities: her bizarre isolation, her bad smell and poor grooming, her "uncultured" Utah parents...
...For a briefcase he used a ragged Coors carton salvaged from someone else's garbage pile...
...Where Berenice had sent the older girls to local schools and taught them to make their own clothes, Frances was sent to Bryn Mawr with an expensive wardrobe...
...Spending her days in bed wearing filthy nightgowns and stinking from a lifelong habit of not bathing, Frances lived in almost total social isolation, buying $10,000 earrings and $1,000 nightgowns she seemed never to wear...
...608 pp...
...It is clear that the family antiromance speaks to a time when too few families work...
...When the family romance hits the rocks in this new genre, it explodes...
...In Frances, her youngest child, Berenice found her most ardent ally, one who did not have to be punished for having Franklin's sobriety and who fully accepted Berenice's view that Franklin was responsible for all the troubles in the family...
...Coleman speculates that her failure to destroy the weapon expresses a wish to be caught and punished...
...She exploited her two older daughters as helpers, referring to Marilyn, the oldest, as "the other mother," and refusing to acknowledge the physical weakness of her younger daughter...
...Where Berenice had sent the older girls to local schools and taught them to make their own clothes, Frances was sent to Bryn Mawr with an expensive wardrobe...
...By underwriting fundraising dinners, and much of the cost of Balanchine's last ballet, "Frances was moving into a new world of culture and beauty," although she could not pronounce Balanchine's name correctly...
...Although her behavior seemed totally geared to self-interest, she was herself ultimately caught on the treadmill of feeling like everything and nothing...
...She was able to make her mother and her children feel like everything, the most important people to her—and like nothing, refuse she could dispose of...
...Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision (Putnam, 1983) introduced us to a young physician whose wife and family were deadweights to his ambitions and who murdered to escape...
...Ironically, the family style that generated the murder also generated Frances's punishment...
...Ironically, Frances's bond with Berenice was expressed in a recapitulation of her way of dealing with children...
...Frances Schreuder is the renegade child of an abstemious, workaholic father and a mother who embodied purity: No one would seem to have had deeper family feelings, longings, yearnings, attachments, not the most devout Mormon—than Berenice Jewett Bradshaw...
...next by marrying European charmers who seemed to offer a life of sophistication (she was twice divorced and without support...
...431 pp...
...To kill her father was to kill part of herself...
...By underwriting fundraising dinners, and much of the cost of Balanchine's last ballet, "Frances was moving into a new world of culture and beauty," although she could not pronounce Balanchine's name correctly...
...it acknowledges the depths but flattens the emotional force of failed intimacy...
...She turned from Marilyn for being his champion and accused her of destroying the family...
...Parricide and the corruption of one's own son to a trigger man express a derangement of attachments spilling over three generations...
...Her image of her daughter as ballerina was not only an idealized self-image but also the flip side of her disgust with what she was...
...A woman who was really brought up with money wouldn't wear a long white dress with black shoes and an old bag...
...The ease with which incidents of family violence make their way from the police blotter to nonfiction books and TV miniseries discloses how many facets of our culture are touched and how many eyes are widened by families that cannot be said to work at all...
...608 pp...
...What provoked her to murder may have been a desire to die and bind others to her in death...
...ALTHOUGH COLEMAN AND ALEXANDER EACH imply or state that the Bradshaw marriage was related to the murder, neither explores or analyzes how the patterns established in the family led to the crime...
...Such tendencies are intensified by television, which blurs the distinction between surface and substance...
...Berenice drove a wedge between her husband and children by presenting him as the source of her troubles and raising them to feel like misfits in his Mormon world...
...It assimilates family violence into a familiar pop culture of combativeness and aggression...
...Coleman and Alexander hammer the Bradshaw story into the well-known television shapes of the cop show or the fable of the female social climber...
...Tolerated more than accepted by the wealthy people she met, Frances earned the following ratings: "Her white mink looked secondhand...
...The war between Berenice and Franklin transcended death...
...The nostalgic dream of a return to an idealized traditional family and preoccupation with family violence are flip sides of the same fear that the family has fallen into a chaos from which it will not easily emerge...
...Jonathan Coleman is a less polished but more thoughtful writer who approaches the family as the sufferers they clearly were...
...The sexual warfare that dominated the pattern of relationships in the Bradshaw family was one that programmed all for self-destructiveness...
...Frances as parricide had become Lady Bountiful...
...She had a capacity for fun and an independence of spirit soon perverted to vindictiveness...
...Marilyn, who was sure that Frances had done it, made it her business to "sympathize" with this man's rage at Frances until he delivered the gun...
...Languishing in their house in a working-class neighborhood, and irritable in her 10-year-old Oldsmobile, Berenice only suspected they were fabulously rich...
...The current celebration of traditional family values expresses a need for refuge, pleasure, and acceptance that is as impossible to forgo as it is difficult to satisfy...
...She is a woman who will organize her entire life around her family...
...Shana Alexander tells the story as a fable of social climbing in which each principal player is a familiar social type...
...ALTHOUGH COLEMAN AND ALEXANDER EACH imply or state that the Bradshaw marriage was related to the murder, neither explores or analyzes how the patterns established in the family led to the crime...
...How it was found, how alert detectives developed evidence, and how the family's snarled emotions emerged in their legal wrangles is Coleman's primary focus...
...She locked him out for weeks at a time, refusing him access to home and clothing...
...How CAN ONE EXPLAIN the fascination with families whose disorder is so extreme...
...Scapegoating, exploiting, and withholding from each other, the clan remains bound together by a battle whose strategies have survived all...
...Berenice was a vivacious woman who prized her good looks...
...Alexander has a savage eye for the disparities between the world Frances wanted, epitomized by the Nutcracker ballet, and the one she choreo*Shana Alexander, Nutcracker...
...Yet the marriage was clearly a battle of the sexes whose bunkers were the yin and yang of the autoparts warehouse and the home, and whose weapons were money and love...
...Disinheriting her, she made Frances, now in prison awaiting appeal, her sole heir...
...431 pp...
...Working seven days a week, rising early for a regimen of a hundred push-ups and 15 minutes of rope jumping before his 10- to 12-hour workdays at his auto-parts warehouse on the seamy side of Salt Lake City, Bradshaw was a harsh parody of the American ideal of plain living and hard work...
...When the family romance hits the rocks in this new genre, it explodes...
...She had seen the demolition of her brother, and the unrewarded virtue of her older sisters...
...Each has a claim to truth...
...The problem is that the emotions of the characters strain against the social stereotypes of the blindly doting mother, the dour father, the ambitious daughter, which shape her book...
...Unable to pry from her husband either money or an accounting of his worth, she resorted to begging his foreman to buy her a new car from company funds, to stealing, and to returning to work in the warehouse at 74 to facilitate her thefts while also earning an hourly wage...
...The self-hatred expressed in her personal habits was apparently not relieved by the opulent settings with which she tried to relieve it...
...What distinguishes these adversaries from the familiar figure of the husband turned workaholic to escape his wife and the wife willing to do anything to get a response from him is the extent to which their war became institutionalized in virtually all the family's patterns...
...Exploiting her younger son, Marc, as her housekeeper, cook, and confidant, Frances alternately seduced him to obedience by her total reliance on him, by threats of suicide if he failed, and of expulsion from the house if he refused to do her bidding...
...next by marrying European charmers who seemed to offer a life of sophistication (she was twice divorced and without support...
...Frances was calculating, conscious of the extent to which frustration could itself be a means of binding, controlling, and subjugating other people...
...Spending her days in bed wearing filthy nightgowns and stinking from a lifelong habit of not bathing, Frances lived in almost total social isolation, buying $10,000 earrings and $1,000 nightgowns she seemed never to wear...
...Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision (Putnam, 1983) introduced us to a young physician whose wife and family were deadweights to his ambitions and who murdered to escape...
...There the renegade behavior that had been rewarded in the past grew into criminality: she forged checks stolen from classmates, took what she wanted, and ignored all the rules...
...Both books were later made into TV shows...
...The current celebration of traditional family values expresses a need for refuge, pleasure, and acceptance that is as impossible to forgo as it is difficult to satisfy...
...Each has a claim to truth...
...q...
...GIVEN FRANCES'S SUCCESS in draining money from the Bradshaws, her motive for parricide seems problematic...
...The self-hatred expressed in her personal habits was apparently not relieved by the opulent settings with which she tried to relieve it...
...Coleman and Alexander hammer the Bradshaw story into the well-known television shapes of the cop show or the fable of the female social climber...
...That the family antiromance has become popular precisely at the time when the hearth has become the sacred flame of the religious and social right suggests how widespread alarm is...
...After building a "nest" of cardboard boxes in the stairwell of their luxury apartment building and living there he sank into unreality, as his uncle Robert had done before him, and was hospitalized for violent acts...
...Shana Alexander's Nutcracker and Jonathan Coleman's At Mother's Request take on the difficult task of unraveling such a crime.* Each is slated to be a separate miniseries, providing next season's television with a heavy dose of family anguish...
...230 graphed for herself...
...Jonathan Coleman, At Mother's Request...
...New York: Doubleday and Co...
...The Bradshaw's story offers a chance to see in enlarged and dramatic form the mechanisms that connect extreme pathology with the behavioral quirks and styles of families whose problems are less severe...
...and ultimately will sacrifice all on the high altar of motherly and grandmotherly devotion...
...It can enable the reader or viewer to divorce self-recognition from self-implication...
...Frances's daughter was clearly raised to redeem Frances from her social disabilities: her bizarre isolation, her bad smell and poor grooming, her "uncultured" Utah parents...
...Parricide and the corruption of her son expressed an attack on both her own origins and on her offspring...
...Frances wanted to escape from both her parents...
...In an odd parody of her father's ecstasies of acquisition and selfdeprivation, she bought expensive jewelry and clothes yet wore the same filthy things day after day...
...19.95...
...Frances as parricide had become Lady Bountiful...
...17.95...
...Frances was calculating, conscious of the extent to which frustration could itself be a means of binding, controlling, and subjugating other people...
...That the family antiromance has become popular precisely at the time when the hearth has become the sacred flame of the religious and social right suggests how widespread alarm is...
...Yet the marriage was clearly a battle of the sexes whose bunkers were the yin and yang of the autoparts warehouse and the home, and whose weapons were money and love...
...At the time of his death his assets were in the tens of millions, some scattered among the orange crates or tucked into outdated auto-parts catalogues in a filing system not even he had mastered...
...Pushed by detectives, the prosecution, and by a life sentence into facing his mother's willingness to sacrifice his life, Marc testified against her for an early parole...
...Yet he presided over an auto-parts empire and had parlayed an undergraduate education in geology into cornering 40 percent of all oil and gas leases in America...
...The greatest of these was motherhood...
...Alexander's fast-paced narrative records the voice of New York malice, wealth, and power, providing enough of a view of the workings of a prestigious ballet company to appeal to the taste for celebrity gossip...
...Such use of form and format permits an escape from the whole picture of family violence by focusing on selected parts...
...She had a capacity for fun and an independence of spirit soon perverted to vindictiveness...
...She had seen the demolition of her brother, and the unrewarded virtue of her older sisters...
...She reminded me of Tara"—decayed and neglected...
...A woman who was really brought up with money wouldn't wear a long white dress with black shoes and an old bag...
...Evil" Frances had tried and failed to escape the work-and-family ethic, first through education (she was expelled from Bryn Mawr for drinking and stealing...
...A new page was added to the album of family murder when Franklin Bradshaw, a Utah Mormon millionaire, was shot one Sunday morning in August 1978 by his grandson, a prep-school junior, at the insistence of his own daughter, Frances Bradshaw Schreuder, a convert to the Episcopal church and a resident of Manhattan's Upper East Side, and a member of the board of trustees of the New York City Ballet...
...to have him killed by her son was to bind together the demise of her father, her son, and herself in the act of murder...
...There the renegade behavior that had been rewarded in the past grew into criminality: she forged checks stolen from classmates, took what she wanted, and ignored all the rules...
...At 75, Bradshaw had a stoic dignity...
...Although Frances lacked her father's strengths, she proved all too much like him...
...Then, having murdered well enough to avoid discovery for two years, why did she fail to dispose of the murder weapon, the only evidence against her...
...Although Frances lacked her father's strengths, she proved all too much like him...
...She rented huge mansions in the Hamptons in which she lived in isolation...
...Frances received a love that reflected the flowering of Berenice's disgust with Franklin...
...As her mother had pinned her fantasies of a socially exciting life of irresponsibility and good times on Frances, so Frances pinned her dreams of glory on her own youngest child, Lavinia...
...By what process did Frances take up her mother's fight...
...Pushed by detectives, the prosecution, and by a life sentence into facing his mother's willingness to sacrifice his life, Marc testified against her for an early parole...
...Even after the conviction of Franklin's killers, Berenice continued to wage it...
...Coleman speculates that her failure to destroy the weapon expresses a wish to be caught and punished...
...Ironically, Frances's bond with Berenice was expressed in a recapitulation of her way of dealing with children...
...If nostalgia for the past is largely a sign of present frustration, it has only served to heighten interest in what makes families fail...
...In its disclosure of how sexual warfare evolves into a family style, a patterning of discord and destructiveness, the story offers glimmers of self-recognition...
...Bradshaw shared few meals with his wife, Berenice...
...Berenice seems to have wanted to foist upon them the burdens he placed on her...
...and finally by siphoning money from her mother to create a setting of success by her choice of address, religion, private schools for her children, and by using the Bradshaw money to propel herself onto the board of trustees of the New York City Ballet...
...Berenice seems to have wanted to foist upon them the burdens he placed on her...
...Far from being only the eccentricity that Coleman and Alexander describe, Bradshaw's tight fist was self-serving: it won him credit for purity and simple living while frustrating Berenice's love of comfort and good times, keeping her at a high pitch of anger...
...Hiring a nanny to raise her properly, teach her to bathe and keep her room immaculate, Frances pushed her to become a ballerina who might one day command center stage...
...In Frances, her youngest child, Berenice found her most ardent ally, one who did not have to be punished for having Franklin's sobriety and who fully accepted Berenice's view that Franklin was responsible for all the troubles in the family...
...GIVEN FRANCES'S SUCCESS in draining money from the Bradshaws, her motive for parricide seems problematic...
...New York: Atheneum...
...Berenice was a vivacious woman who prized her good looks...
...In response, Frances frequently refuses to accept her mother's visits...
...She turned from Marilyn for being his champion and accused her of destroying the family...
...she had married Bradshaw when he was a collegefootball player, and she was a social success...
...Ironically, the family style that generated the murder also generated Frances's punishment...
...She exploited her two older daughters as helpers, referring to Marilyn, the oldest, as "the other mother," and refusing to acknowledge the physical weakness of her younger daughter...
...She is a woman who will organize her entire life around her family...
...If the fascination with the life-styles of the rich and famous serves to inflame envy, the family antiromance creates complacency...
...New York: Doubleday and Co...
...Her only son, Robert, who wanted to be like his father, was cruelly treated and scapegoated as the family irritant...
...Far from being only the eccentricity that Coleman and Alexander describe, Bradshaw's tight fist was self-serving: it won him credit for purity and simple living while frustrating Berenice's love of comfort and good times, keeping her at a high pitch of anger...
...She succeeded in planning the perfect crime, which would never have been solved had she disposed of the murder weapon as her son, Marc, had wished...
...She locked him out for weeks at a time, refusing him access to home and clothing...
...The war between Berenice and Franklin transcended death...
...Working seven days a week, rising early for a regimen of a hundred push-ups and 15 minutes of rope jumping before his 10- to 12-hour workdays at his auto-parts warehouse on the seamy side of Salt Lake City, Bradshaw was a harsh parody of the American ideal of plain living and hard work...
...New York: Atheneum...
...His files were crates from the refuse of fruit markets...
...Berenice drove a 231 wedge between her husband and children by presenting him as the source of her troubles and raising them to feel like misfits in his Mormon world...
...She shared her father's need to withhold from Berenice what she needed most: gratitude and admiration...
...Both Alexander and Coleman make clear that Franklin was determined to stop her, yet both writers also believe that he would have backed down if she had attempted a rapprochement...
...The problem is that the emotions of the characters strain against the social stereotypes of the blindly doting mother, the dour father, the ambitious daughter, which shape her book...
...Scapegoating, exploiting, and withholding from each other, the clan remains bound together by a battle whose strategies have survived all...
...Marilyn, who was sure that Frances had done it, made it her business to "sympathize" with this man's rage at Frances until he delivered the gun...
...She was virtually raised as his opposite: where he and her older sisters were hardworking, honest, and reliable, she was incapable of sustained effort, dishonest, and vacillating...
...Although her behavior seemed totally geared to self-interest, she was herself ultimately caught on the treadmill of feeling like everything and nothing...
...Jonathan Coleman, At Mother's Request...
...his clothes were thrift-shop workpants and T-shirts...
...Given her history of suicide attempts and destructive behavior, her guilt probably predated the crime...
...Tolerated more than accepted by the wealthy people she met, Frances earned the following ratings: "Her white mink looked secondhand...
...Frances's need to exploit Marc without limit led her to adopt a trial defense that named him as a vicious killer who planned and executed the crime alone...
...Her only son, Robert, who wanted to be like his father, was cruelly treated and scapegoated as the family irritant...
...After building a "nest" of cardboard boxes in the stairwell of their luxury apartment building and living there he sank into unreality, as his uncle Robert had done before him, and was hospitalized for violent acts...
...It assimilates family violence into a familiar pop culture of combativeness and aggression...
...Such tendencies are intensified by television, which blurs the distinction between surface and substance...
...Then, having murdered well enough to avoid discovery for two years, why did she fail to dispose of the murder weapon, the only evidence against her...
...How can sexual warfare be transmitted from one generation to another...
...The war between the Bradshaws will become part of the war of the networks as CBS brings us Coleman's view and NBC offers us Alexander's...
...Berenice's desire for a successful husband had been ironically fulfilled by a man who had amassed a fortune, but who had no desire for anything money could buy...
...Frances wanted to escape from both her parents...
...and ultimately will sacrifice all on the high altar of motherly and grandmotherly devotion...
...she had married Bradshaw when he was a collegefootball player, and she was a social success...
...At 75, Bradshaw had a stoic dignity...
...Frances Schreuder is the renegade child of an abstemious, workaholic father and a mother who embodied purity: No one would seem to have had deeper family feelings, longings, yearnings, attachments, not the most devout Mormon—than Berenice Jewett Bradshaw...
...Bradshaw shared few meals with his wife, Berenice...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
