You knew that the Giuliani marriage, when it blew, was going to make a mighty big bang. As soon as the subdued New York mayor announced, on Wednesday, that he and wife Donna Hanover were working out a separation agreement, a tearful Hanover summoned reporters to Gracie Mansion to help her pour gasoline on the fire.
Her statement managed to put the blame squarely on Hizzoner's shoulders ("I had hoped to keep this marriage together"); to suggest that the long, publicly apparent cooling of their marriage was entirely a function of his earlier rumored affair with a close aide ("For several years it was difficult to participate in Rudy's public life because of his relationship with one of his staff members"); and firmly to close the door on any whispering campaign, from the mayor's side, to the effect that his wife had shut him out ("Beginning last May, I made a major effort to bring us back together. Rudy and I reestablished some of our personal intimacy through the fall. At that point he chose another path.")
To which we can only say: Yuck and double-yuck! Tell us no more!
The smart money says that Giuliani will have to drop out of the Senate race. His campaign might well have survived a simple separation or divorce; a recent poll found that New York voters, by a margin of 77 to 12 percent, said that last week's stories about Giuliani's new lady friend, one Judith Nathan, has no impact on how they view his candidacy. And for Giuliani and Hanover to call it quits might even have struck some voters as a refreshing change from the Clintons' unfathomable partnership. But as soon as Hanover made clear that she was going to the mattresses, he faced the prospect of defending himself from constant fire.
But he will still be mayor of New York, and he and Hanover still stand poised to write a rich new chapter in our evolving struggle over politicians and their private lives. So far, by falling prey to the universal human impulse to spin the split, they're writing an ugly one.
Don't you just hate it when, one day, politicians are admonishing us that their personal lives fall within the precious "zone of privacy," and then the next day they're telling us all about their sex lives? The mayor used to respond to inquiries about his strange marriage with huffy indignation: "I think when people see two separate careers, they assume the marriage must be in trouble. People will gossip about almost anything," said the mayor who, according to his wife, has had two affairs--including one with a city employee--while running New York. Now he wants us to sympathize with his new love. "I rely on [Nathan], and she helps me a great deal," he said Wednesday. "And I'm going to need her more now than maybe I did before."
As for Hanover, she has always maintained that her marriage was no one's business but her own. Now she's telling us more than we want to know about recent connubial relations in Gracie Mansion. If they keep this up, New Yorkers will come to feel like the children of spatting parents, who each insist on helping them to form a bad opinion of the other.
Perhaps we should be inured to this kind of thing after years of watching the Clintons alternately cry foul at any attention to their private life and then unsheath the details of their marital woes when it is convenient, a ploy that reached its crowning cycnicism when they sent forth friends and aides to describe Hillary's supposed shock and pain when the president finally confessed the details of his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. But I don't have an opinion about whether Rudy or "Donner," as he always called her, is the party most at fault here. I don't even want to have an opinion, or feel entitled to one.
For all the talk about the New York media's ferocity, there is another choice here. If the Giulianis were to proceed straight to a dignified separation, refraining from further comment, there's every chance they'd get a measure of privacy. Up until now, even as the Giulianis' marriage crumbled in plain sight--she called reporters to insist they drop the "Giuliani" from her name; he stopped wearing his wedding ring; she disappeared, like a banished apparatchik, from his Christmas card--City Hall reporters treated the mystery largely with respectful (read: frightened) silence. If you go back and read the clips, coverage of the marriage mostly strikes you as deferential.
But if they continue to air their anger in public, the press will gleefully oblige. Here's hoping that Giuliani and Hanover look into the abyss before talking further. Every divorce is a sadness, especially when it comes to a family, like the Giulianis', that includes two children. The most that any of us outside a marriage is entitled to say is: Rest in peace.
