Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 12, 1990 TAG: 9005120470
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In the family room 17-year-old Mark watched an advance tape of the CBS movie "Shattered Dreams" (Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channel 7 in the Roanoke viewing area) starring Lindsay Wagner as his mother and Michael Nouri as his father, John, formerly enforcement chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Afterward Mark emerged to talk a moment with his mother about the corsage he was buying for his prom date.
The boys, she said, have become rather blase about seeing their mother on television, in person or impersonated, particularly since her appearance on several talk shows (twice on "The Oprah Winfrey Show").
They thought Lindsay Wagner looked a lot like their mother in the days when they lived in the big house in Potomac, Md., but were amused that the actors who played the youngest boys wore glasses - which they do not.
And unlike the boys in the television movie, they did not sing at their parents' Christmas party - although they would have if their father had wanted them to, she said.
Charlotte Fedders had seen the tape the night before, after she returned from her job as a nurse at a nearby nursing home. She said she believes it tells her story effectively.
Charlotte and John Fedders' relationship came to national attention and underwent intense local scrutiny when their divorce proceedings resulted in a story in the Wall Street Journal and then a cover story in the April 1986 edition of Washingtonian magazine.
Charlotte Fedders and Laura Elliott, author of the Washingtonian article, joined to write "Shattered Dreams," published by Harper & Row (paperback, Dell).
At first, Charlotte Fedders agreed to talk with Elliott because Fedders needed the money, a $10,000 payment from Washingtonian. Now she also hopes to reach other people with her message:
"No one human being has the right to totally dominate another," said Charlotte Fedders, "even if it's just emotionally, and they certainly don't have the right in any instance at all to hit another person. There is no justification for it. If you worked for someone for 17 years and you only hit them seven times, you wouldn't have been there after the first time."
But this was an idea that Charlotte Fedders had to learn the hard way.
Charlotte Fedders, formerly Charlotte O'Donnell, was the eldest of five daughters of a Baltimore-area physician and his wife. A nursing graduate from St. Joseph's College in Emmittsburg, Md., she had met the very tall (6 feet 10), very ambitious John Fedders, president of the Catholic University Student Bar Association, and was surprised to find him attracted to her. In 1966 they were married. The obedient daughter became a dutiful wife, putting her career on hold and bearing five sons.
He became a successful lawyer at the Washington firm of Arnold & Porter, earning about $160,000 a year. Then he accepted a political appointment as SEC enforcement director, a job that offered excellent contacts at a lower salary of $72,300.
John Fedders, from a blue-collar family in Kentucky, was a man with a deep need to control, she learned. Today, Charlotte Fedders says, he is in psychoanalysis for depression that had its roots in his childhood.
But Charlotte had come to believe she was responsible for his silences and outbursts, and as the movie illustrates, John Fedders reinforced her lack of self-esteem.
Seven times, he was physically abusive, slapping her on the side of the head so that her eardrum broke, punching her in the abdomen when she was pregnant. In the television version of the trial, he admits that he hit her, saying, "Yes, I demeaned her. She didn't demand respect."
Her father, a medical examiner, insisted she file for divorce the first time she was hit. But the two reconciled, and, she now admits, "I stopped telling my parents, because it was too hard to win them back."
It was a pattern that continued for years: an increase in tension, an outburst, sometimes violent, and a reconciliation. It is called the battered-wife syndrome.
"I can't believe I really was that person," Charlotte Fedders said. "I can hardly believe I was as pathetic as I was."
The marriage could have been dissolved in an out-of-court settlement, but Fedders insisted that a judge hear the case. As it turns out, that was a tactical error. That day in February 1985 the courtroom was empty of all spectators except one - a reporter from the Wall Street Journal.
On her divorce, she said, she decided not to resume her maiden name. "I had the kids," she explained, "and I thought my father might think I belonged to him again. And anyway, I really grew up as Charlotte Fedders. That's where I came into awareness as an adult. As far as I'm concerned, John can change his name."
She does not like to be known as "Mrs. Fedders" and tells patients at the nursing home where she works to call her simply "Charlotte."
Charlotte Fedders is pleased with the television movie, for which star Lindsay Wagner served as executive producer.
"The story is very accurate," she said. "They made a lot of changes based on the changes I made in the script. To their credit, they listened to what I had to say. They called my psychologist and talked for over an hour, and the scenes that are in there, I feel, are right. They have taken great interest in this subject and great pains to educate in addition to telling the story.
"Lindsay Wagner is much prettier than I am, and Michael Nouri is much handsomer than John. But in general, I thought that my kids were better-looking than the actors." She laughed, knowing that Mark, in the family room, could hear.
While some scenes are entirely accurate, others are representational, she said, and the characters who play her neighbors and sister are composites.
Among the alterations: In one scene, Charlotte is bathing the smaller boys upstairs when John arrives home. She doesn't hear his knock on the front door. Angry, he slams his attache case through the door window.
In fact, she said, "he had his keys in his briefcase - he just didn't want to get them out. Normally, he would sit outside and honk, and I would open the door. But when he wasn't talking to me, he wouldn't honk. I don't know if the garage door was broken or the battery was out or what, but he didn't honk."
On the other hand, she said the courtroom scene is entirely accurate.
Judge James S. McAuliffe allowed John Fedders' request for a 60-day attempt at reconciliation, to which Charlotte Fedders reluctantly agreed. The period is telescoped into a scene in a restaurant that she said actually did not take place.
"Basically what they did was take this reconciliation and throw it into one scene. I was pleased with it. One minute he was begging her for a reconciliation, and the next minute he was screaming at her and the next minute he was crying. And that's the way it was."
At the end of the scene, arguing in the restaurant parking lot, Charlotte throws something at John Fedders: It is her wedding ring.
And then there's the house in Potomac, which the Fedderses sold in June 1988 for $490,000.
"We didn't live quite so elegantly" as depicted in the film, she said. "They put us up a peg financially. The house was really nice, but it wasn't as big as that one. Had we stayed together, and had he gone back to private practice, we probably would have left a big house in Potomac for another big house in Potomac, or in Avenel or some place, so potentially we would have lived in even a grander style."
She wishes the friends she had then, the ones who took her in and came to her defense, represented by the character Elaine in the movie, would have remained in her life.
"My life is so different now. Most of my friends' children are all grown, and they work because they want to get away from home, or they go to Congressional Country Club. In one way I'm a little hurt that they don't call me, but on the other hand I'm so busy now. But yet we still care about each other. I've become hopelessly middleclass now and they've gone higher."
There was one other change, involving a scene in which John Fedders insists that his wife and children shovel snow from the sidewalk and driveway. The encounter escalates into what Charlotte Fedders described as "the breaking point with me."
"The reason Charlotte left," she explained, using one of her occasional third-person references to herself, "was really not that she felt she deserved a lot better, it was that she got fed up with the way the kids were being treated."
In the divorce proceedings, John Fedders described their battling: "She enjoyed going after me and, unfortunately, I enjoyed going after her." In court documents, he said she was "neurotic," "taunted" him and had a temper.
Today Charlotte Fedders seems uncertain whether she has a temper. "When I was growing up, if I would deviate from the pattern of the day, that would be considered a temper. If I stood up for myself-I was clumsy about it, I guess, I don't argue well-that would be a temper.
"I feel with the temper I had, the learned behavior in the marriage - because I did learn to fight back - I have learned to control it. I probably don't have a real temper relative to other people's tempers."
Eventually, Charlotte Fedders began seeing a therapist who, she said, taught her "not to be quite so reactive to him."
After her allegations became public in 1985, John Fedders resigned his job at the SEC and went back to private law practice here. Judge McAuliffe ordered the Fedderses to split the proceeds from the sale of their Potomac house.
Charlotte Fedders received an extra $50,00O plus alimony and child support. But in June 1986, she filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, saying that although John Fedders had made his court-ordered payments on schedule, the money was not enough to live on.
She paid her lawyer and therapist, bought her current house and "begged for two car loans." Otherwise, she said, she pays cash for everything because she has no credit cards.
At the time of the Chapter 7 proceedings, the boys mowed lawns and shoveled snow and she sold Amway products, she said in bankruptcy hearings. Later, she said, she sold Avon and Mary Kay cosmetics, worked at a friend's flower shop and delivered newspapers.
Fedders, who lives in Falls Church, Va., sends her about $2,000 a month, she said, part of it voluntary. She said her father pays Mark's and Matthew's tuition at St. John's, a Catholic boys' school in Washington. Luke, a St. John's graduate, finished two years at Montgomery (Md.) College, holds a full-time job and hopes to become a paramedic.
by CNB