\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Her son Nicolaus Getz said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was bile duct cancer.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Getzes lived in a 27-room mansion called Shadowbrook<\/a>, overlooking the Hudson River in Tarrytown, N.Y. They bought it in the mid-1960s when Mr. Getz\u2019s fame was at an apex as a result of his bossa nova recordings: the album \u201cJazz Samba,\u201d with the guitarist Charlie Byrd, and the hit single \u201cThe Girl From Ipanema,\u201d on which his mellifluous tenor sax backed the breathy singing of Astrud Gilberto<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Drugs and alcohol, however, created havoc in the Getzes\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At the couple\u2019s divorce trial in 1987, Mr. Getz said he often drank to the point of blacking out. \u201cI have a discography of 2,010 records,\u201d he said, but \u201csome of them I can\u2019t even remember making.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s violence toward his family.<\/p>\n While drinking, he hit his wife repeatedly, according to testimony from Ms. Getz and the couple\u2019s two adult children. Their daughter, Pamela Raynor, said he \u201cwould slap, kick and punch\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The case reached the courtroom six years after Mr. Getz had moved out of Shadowbrook, decamping for San Francisco, and sued for divorce.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n She made excuses for his violence to the jury, just as she had to her children, blaming his alcoholism. She forgave him, she testified, \u201cbecause I know it\u2019s a disease, and I\u2019m a forgiving person.\u201d<\/p>\n In an interview, Nicolaus Getz said that Ms. Getz \u201cloved my father so badly that she thought if she could just keep him sober, he wouldn\u2019t want to\u201d end the marriage.<\/p>\n For years, Ms. Getz had been secretly dosing her husband\u2019s 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: \u201cHe began to tell his friends on the phone, \u2018I can\u2019t drink anymore, I\u2019m allergic to it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In court, Mr. Getz accused his wife of trying to poison him with the surreptitious Antabuse. \u201cI couldn\u2019t live with her in a million years,\u201d he told the jurors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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).<\/p>\n In dividing the couple\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She denied that she wanted to extract more money. As appeals ate up ever-higher lawyers\u2019 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\u2019s life by standing beside him during the worst of his drinking and drug addiction.<\/p>\n \u201cShe would like to picture herself as Florence Nightingale and me as a combination of Attila the Hun and Jack the Ripper,\u201d Mr. Getz told<\/a> The New York Times in 1990, adding: \u201cShe couldn\u2019t get it past a jury.\u201d<\/p>\n