Monica Getz, Advocate for Divorce Court Reform, Dies at 90

New York Times

07-02-2025

Monica Getz, whose tempestuous 24-year marriage to the jazz star Stan Getz was whipsawed by his addictions and who, after losing a protracted legal fight to save the marriage, became an advocate for divorce court reform, died on Jan. 5 in Irvington, N.Y. She was 90.
Her son Nicolaus Getz said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was bile duct cancer.
The Swedish-born Ms. Getz was a student at George Washington University when Mr. Getz, one of the most revered jazz saxophonists of the 20th century, met her backstage at a campus concert and pursued her even though he was married. When they wed in 1956, the actress Donna Reed was the maid of honor at the nuptials in Las Vegas.
The Getzes lived in a 27-room mansion called Shadowbrook, overlooking the Hudson River in Tarrytown, N.Y. They bought it in the mid-1960s when Mr. Getz's fame was at an apex as a result of his bossa nova recordings: the album 'Jazz Samba,' with the guitarist Charlie Byrd, and the hit single 'The Girl From Ipanema,' on which his mellifluous tenor sax backed the breathy singing of Astrud Gilberto.
Drugs and alcohol, however, created havoc in the Getzes' marriage. Mr. Getz had begun using heroin at 16 and was arrested two years before the marriage for attempting to rob a pharmacy to get narcotics. At the insistence of his wife, a teetotaler, he would seek medical help and enter rehabilitation programs, but relapses invariably followed.
At the couple's divorce trial in 1987, Mr. Getz said he often drank to the point of blacking out. 'I have a discography of 2,010 records,' he said, but 'some of them I can't even remember making.'
The trial, in civil court in White Plains, N.Y., was a lurid, scorched-earth affair that made headlines, especially because of the accounts of Mr. Getz's violence toward his family.
While drinking, he hit his wife repeatedly, according to testimony from Ms. Getz and the couple's two adult children. Their daughter, Pamela Raynor, said he 'would slap, kick and punch' her mother while drunk. Monica Getz recalled her husband once beating her so badly with a telephone that she fell and hit her head, requiring hospitalization.
The case reached the courtroom six years after Mr. Getz had moved out of Shadowbrook, decamping for San Francisco, and sued for divorce.
Ms. Getz did not want a divorce. She explained both in and out of court that she still loved her husband, despite his battery and a string of mistresses, and despite having obtained an order of protection against him in Family Court in 1980.
She made excuses for his violence to the jury, just as she had to her children, blaming his alcoholism. She forgave him, she testified, 'because I know it's a disease, and I'm a forgiving person.'
In an interview, Nicolaus Getz said that Ms. Getz 'loved my father so badly that she thought if she could just keep him sober, he wouldn't want to' end the marriage.
For years, Ms. Getz had been secretly dosing her husband's food and drink with Antabuse, a medicine that causes nausea and dizziness when combined with alcohol, which kept him mostly sober throughout the 1970s, Nicolaus Getz said: 'He began to tell his friends on the phone, 'I can't drink anymore, I'm allergic to it.''
In court, Mr. Getz accused his wife of trying to poison him with the surreptitious Antabuse. 'I couldn't live with her in a million years,' he told the jurors.
Clearly baffled as to why such a marriage should continue, the jurors sided with Mr. Getz. They ruled in May 1987 that his wife had treated him cruelly and inhumanly in dosing his food, and that she had committed adultery (which she denied).
In dividing the couple's assets, a judge gave Ms. Getz a half interest in Shadowbrook and half of all future royalties on recordings her husband had made from 1956, the year they married, to 1981, the year he left her.
Ms. Getz continued to contest the divorce vigorously, in court and in the public sphere. In 1988, she founded the Coalition for Family Justice, a nonprofit group devoted to reforming divorce laws and supporting divorcing spouses, mainly women.
She appealed the divorce verdict and the financial settlement through higher courts for years, even after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear one appeal, in 1990, and Mr. Getz died of liver cancer in 1991.
She denied that she wanted to extract more money. As appeals ate up ever-higher lawyers' fees, it became clear that her quest was to erase the blot of being judged as the party at fault, and to secure a moral victory: to be recognized for having saved her husband's life by standing beside him during the worst of his drinking and drug addiction.
'She would like to picture herself as Florence Nightingale and me as a combination of Attila the Hun and Jack the Ripper,' Mr. Getz told The New York Times in 1990, adding: 'She couldn't get it past a jury.'
His lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, a veteran of many knockdown celebrity divorces, told The Times that year that Getz v. Getz was 'one of most terrible cases I've ever worked on.'
Monica Silfverskiold was born in Sweden on May 19, 1934, to Mary von Rosen, a Swedish countess, and Nils Silfverskiold, a surgeon who had been an Olympic medalist in gymnastics.
Seeking an escape from Sweden's cold winters and social formality, Monica came to the U.S. for college and enrolled at Georgetown to study foreign affairs. She was 20 when she met Mr. Getz after a concert he played there. He was seven years older, a former jazz prodigy who had played as a teenager with Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, and was already a major force in jazz.
He was also the married father of three young children, and he had recently completed a six-month jail sentence in California on narcotics charges.
Mr. Getz was smitten by Monica's beauty. (One of his young sons from his first marriage thought she looked like Grace Kelly.) He married her on Nov. 3, 1956, a few days after obtaining a no-contest Mexican divorce.
In addition to her son and daughter from her marriage to Mr. Getz, Ms. Getz is survived by two stepchildren, David Getz and Beverly McGovern, from her husband's first marriage; and six grandchildren.
Ms. Getz's Coalition for Family Justice held monthly meetings at Shadowbrook to support and advise women going through divorce. It also ran seminars for judges, aiming to sensitize them to divorce issues that disadvantaged women and children.
In the main appeal of her case, she argued that New York divorce law was biased against wives because cases are heard in the state's chief trial court, State Supreme Court, where husbands can fight a war of financial attrition against their spouses.
She argued, unsuccessfully, for divorces to be heard in Family Court, where expenses were lower and judges would better protect dependents.
She went on to take college courses on alcoholism and addiction, and to speak about recovery at the Betty Ford Center in California and the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. In recognition of her efforts to fight addiction, the board of legislators of Westchester County, N.Y., proclaimed June 27, 1991, Monica Getz Day.