For a man with a reputation for uncareful public speech and private bouts of hotheadedness, Andrew Cuomo is surprisingly serene when he’s being grilled by the New York City Police Department—or at least, he is under the present circumstances, as he sits curbside in his SUV and half-wonders, I’m sure, exactly how compromising it will look in print to be busted for a traffic violation while campaigning for the state’s top job in law enforcement. Until this moment, our brief trip had been amusing and uneventful, with Cuomo contemplating his route to a union meeting in Queens (bridge or tunnel?) and talking about Robert Moses (a logical topic for a former Housing and Urban Development secretary stuck in midtown traffic). He chooses the tunnel. Then, the whoop of a siren. Cuomo looks in the rearview mirror.
“Is he pulling me over for some reason?” He looks around, then checks the mirror again. “I think he is.” He turns to his assistant, sitting in the back of the car. “Can I have my wallet, please?”
A cop wanders over, a big black fellow, stoic and handsome and as solid as the door to a vault. If he recognizes Cuomo, he’s not saying so. He asks if Cuomo was aware he was driving without his seat belt. Cuomo, looking puzzled, points to the belt in question, which is secured across his shoulder. “Now you’re wearing it,” says the policeman. “You weren’t before.”
Cuomo assures him he wouldn’t lie about a matter like this. The cop responds by asking to see his license and registration. Cuomo moves toward the glove compartment and discovers he can’t reach it. “Uh, is it okay if I remove my seat belt now?” The cop gives a barely discernible nod. The glove compartment contains the rambling campaign essentials—maps, a hairbrush, a bottle of mouthwash—but not the registration. Cuomo eventually finds it, hands it over with his license. The officer reads the name on the documents. He doesn’t blink. Cuomo repeats, without a trace of irritation, that he really wouldn’t lie about this. The cop nods and wanders back to his car. Cuomo looks at the two of us. “I was wearing my seat belt.”
I feel kind of bad for him. He was. I tell him he ought to go plead his case. He looks at me, looks back at the cop in the rearview mirror, and jumps out. I follow about 30 seconds later. Cuomo’s leaning into the police-car window, saying good-bye. Not only is he ticket-free, but he’s on such smiling terms with the police officer that I ask, point blank, if he told the officer who he is.
He shakes his head. “Apparently, he was just saying to his partner, ‘You know, I think this guy is telling the truth.’ ”
Wait. So the officer didn’t recognize him?
“No,” he says.
Is it a good or bad thing when you’ve run for governor of New York and a city employee still doesn’t know who you are? Back in 2002, Andrew Cuomo didn’t just lose his bid for governor, he cratered. No one, least of all he, could have predicted the stunning indignity of the outcome, especially considering his pedigree: the Kennedy wife, the Cuomo name. His ambitious plan was to enter the primary; defeat his rival, Carl McCall; and go on to defeat George Pataki, the man who defeated Andrew’s father, Mario, in 1994. Instead, he began his campaign with an unforgettable barb about Pataki—that he’d merely held Rudolph Giuliani’s coat in the aftermath of September 11—which, while admirably candid in retrospect, was remarkably unattuned to the sensitivities of the day. On the hustings, Cuomo could never make the basic themes of his campaign clear; in his ads, voters decided he looked angry. The party, meanwhile, lined up foursquare behind McCall, a well qualified if uninspired candidate, who as state comptroller had put in all the requisite hours at the state-party wingdings and as an African-American had a chance to make New York history.
By the time the Democratic state convention came around, Cuomo had alienated so many party leaders it was unclear whether he could muster enough delegates to earn himself a place on the ballot. He refused to attend. By August, he’d fallen roughly 24 points in the polls. One week before primary day, he pulled out of the race. What was supposed to be an opera of exquisite revenge had become one long, vaudevillian skid on a banana peel.
That turned out to be the easy part of his year. Ten months later, the news broke that Kerry Kennedy, his wife, was having an affair, and his marriage dissolved with almost the same painful, public garishness—in no small part because Cuomo’s own people clearly leaked the story to the tabloids. Dynasties, apparently, are more fragile than they seem.
Today, Cuomo is back. Chastened, single, and courting the support of the same party leaders he once spurned, he now hopes to succeed Eliot Spitzer as attorney general. So far, he is doing well: He has nearly seven times as much money on hand as any other candidate; he’s six points up on his closest rival, Mark Green, the former public advocate; and the party machine is supporting him with almost the same vigor with which it rejected him last time. “I think Andrew spends a lot more time listening now,” says Stuart Appelbaum, the chairman of his labor committee.
But the campaign season is young, and the field of Democratic-primary candidates is dense. There’s Green, a smart and highly ambitious man, though he’s also a perennial candidate (Congress in 1980, Senate in 1986, Senate primary in 1998, mayor in 2001). There’s Richard Brodsky, a shrewd state assemblyman; Charlie King, an African-American lawyer who was Cuomo’s pick for lieutenant governor last time; and Sean Patrick Maloney, a former Clinton aide who’s openly gay. And then there’s Denise O’Donnell, the former U.S. attorney from Buffalo who’s Catholic, decent, smart. She may be the most intriguing candidate of all—if only she had any money, and if only people had a clue who she is. Whoever wins must then face Jeanine Pirro, the former district attorney from Westchester County, a strong candidate in her own right.
Whenever anyone makes an argument against Cuomo, it’s generally based not on his qualifications for the job, but his character. It is staggering how ugly his reputation is—especially considering how playful, silly even, he can be. Cuomo, for example, kept a bright-green parrot as a young man, a squawking, shrieking thing his father loathed. I ask him about this early in our acquaintance.
“Who told you about that parrot?” he demands. “That parrot was an attack parrot. It was a trained attack parrot.”
Did he send it away for training?
“Oh, no. I trained it myself. It was the only trained attack parrot. It would go sa-woooping down at you—”
Did he train it to speak?
He shakes his head. “It didn’t say anything. It was just this loud, screechy WAAAAH, WAAAAH.” He spreads his arms, curls his fingers into claws.
Yet merely mention Cuomo’s name—it almost doesn’t matter to whom—and one hears the same set of complaints: He’s abrasive. Stubborn. Terribly conceited. He condescends, and Lord even knows why, because it’s not like he’d be anyone without the Cuomo name. And sure, he’s charming and charismatic, but a big bully, too, who has a way of alienating employees. “Andrew Cuomo did not endear himself to his staff,” says Sara Pratt, a career hud attorney who spent seven years as director of the office of enforcement for fair housing, two of them under Cuomo. “People were afraid to disagree with him, afraid to take bad news to him, because of the reaction they got.”
Cuomo’s friends say he’s a changed man. The loss of 2002, the dissolution of his marriage, the subsequent marital counseling—all of it had positive, salubrious effects. “Before, there was an ego,” says his friend Sam Hoyt, a Democratic assemblyman from Buffalo. “There was a big ego. But I don’t think ego is driving him this time. There’s a degree of entitlement that’s now gone.”
And publicly, anyway, Cuomo seems at least to have adjusted to the idea of taking responsibility for his 2002 campaign. “Whatever mistakes were made were mine,” he tells me one day. Less than a minute later, however, he adds, “But a lot of it was situational.” His usual list of explanations follows: He hadn’t been in New York during eight of the ten years preceding the governor’s race but in Washington; he was running against a highly qualified African-American whose time had come; September 11 had engendered a certain caution in the electorate.
Whatever the reasons for his failure in 2002, Cuomo will now have a second chance to carry on in the public-service tradition of his father, perhaps even to best him. The two have an immensely complicated relationship. Andrew was his father’s Bobby Kennedy, the loyal relation who ran a winning campaign but for years was regarded as the strategy man, the enforcer, the one who was too calculating and ruthless to be the candidate himself. And like Robert Kennedy, he seems to live in awkward, prideful, conflicted relation to his more famous relative’s stature and influence. Twice, Andrew has let me know that being hud secretary is a more powerful position than almost any governorship—“as a matter of protocol”—and that as HUD secretary, he was thirteenth in line to the presidency. “Cabinet secretaries also tend to be more powerful because they control more funds and have larger staffs,” he adds one evening, as we’re sitting in his SUV. “If you take out New York and California, most of the federal departments are bigger than every state. It’s just that New York doesn’t hold cabinet secretaries in as high an esteem.”
I ask Andrew how he reconciles the democratic ideal of a meritocracy with relying on his family name to advance his career.
“It doesn’t distort the meritocracy,” he says. “They’re electing someone. They pull a lever.”
But does he really think his name doesn’t give him an edge? Does he think it’s neutral?
“It depends with who and when,” he says.
Overall, I say.
“In a primary or a general?”
Both.
He’s silent. “I’ve never done the calculus.”
Before this story, I was told by everyone that I’d be charmed silly by Andrew Cuomo. They were right. He can be immensely charming when he wants to be. He’s got that Cary Grant thing going—gallantry, mischief wrinkles around the eyes—and a screwball wit one seldom sees in politics. (One day, he phoned from the road, recounting how strange it was to sit in the same room as the five other contenders for attorney general, as if he were a contestant in a beauty pageant. I asked how he distinguished himself. “I went with a dress of light chiffon,” he replied.) Tonight, he’s on the charm offensive again, this time with the pipe-fitters union in Sunnyside. We’re early, our impromptu curbside visit from the NYPD notwithstanding. Cuomo parks his car outside a squat building. His political director, Joe Percoco, comes out to brief him on the scene. He sticks his head in the car window.
“Okay. Jack Torpey is gonna introduce you. And Ed Malloy from the building trades is—”
“From the day Andrew came out of the womb, his job was to serve his father,” says Ed Hayes.
“Ed Malloy is here? Why?”
“This is part of his group. He came with Jimmy Cahill. He’s actually a steamfitter, but he’s the international representative for the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters, who have endorsed us—”
“Wait, give me that again?”
He repeats this information, along with a further elaboration on the union family tree.
“Can I have a pen, please?”
Percoco rummages around, finds him one.
“Okay. Ed Malloy, Jimmy Cahill, Jack Torpey.”
“Right,” says Percoco. They chat a few minutes more, then head inside. The joint’s jumping. Cuomo makes his way through the crowd with an easy vigor, hugging people, grabbing them by their arms, giving two-part handshakes. He climbs onto the stage. “I can’t tell you what an honor it is to be here,” he tells the crowd. “Jack Torpey, Jimmy Cahill, I see here Eddie Malloy. All the big shots came out tonight, boy … ”
For eight years, while Cuomo was in Washington, this is precisely the sort of hobnobbing and dutiful homage-paying that Cuomo did not do in his native state, even though he harbored ambitions of a triumphant return. One can see why. There’s something galactically debasing about begging for votes on the rubber-chicken-dinner circuit. Yet today, Cuomo’s living on a steady diet of rubber chickens, when he isn’t snacking on bowls of crow. He marches in parades, attends union meetings, lunches with county executives. A week later, we go to the Queens County Democratic Organization dinner, a bright red seascape of party balloons and Jell-O molds, and there he is again, cupping women’s faces, grabbing men by their ties. The county chairman announces his endorsement of Cuomo that night, telling the crowd, “He did a mea culpa.”
“I think this is all very particular to New York,” says Martin Connor, the former State Senate minority leader. “In most other states, a cabinet member comes back home, and it’s like, ‘Let’s make him governor!’ Not here. Andrew comes back, having been in D.C. for eight years, having had an incredibly responsible position. And people are like, ‘Where you been? You didn’t come to my club dinner when we invited you!’ ”
Not everyone is buying Cuomo’s newfound enthusiasm for the New York State party machine. And a wariness toward him still lingers, especially among the African-American political elite. Recently, he made the inexplicable mistake of giving a paid speech to developers in Las Vegas rather than attending a Martin Luther King Day event hosted by Al Sharpton. Back in 2000, Mark Green says, he asked Cuomo how he could challenge, with a clear conscience, the state’s most qualified black candidate for governor. Green says Cuomo replied, “Every black home has three pictures. One of Jesus Christ, one of Martin Luther King, and one of either Bobby Kennedy or JFK.” His connection to Kerry Kennedy, in other words, would more than inoculate him from black objections.
One day, I ask Cuomo about this story. “That is total … that just never happened. Never happened. They never heard that from me. No. They told you they heard that people heard it from me. This was one of the rumors at that time.”
Considering the story came from Green, Cuomo’s rival, I decided to take his answer seriously, at first. But a few days later, Connor told me he’d heard a version of it from Cuomo, too. The Daily News also reported in January 2001 that Cuomo had told the same thing to a Democratic county chairman upstate.
So the next time I see Cuomo, I ask him about the story again.
“I don’t remember,” he says. “Anyway, it’s not logical that I’d be suggesting the Kennedy connection. So what? You’re an in-law.”
Which is, as he knows perfectly well, exactly the point of those who took offense at the silly tale.
So is he saying Green and Connor are lying?
“I have a different recollection. That’s all I can say.”
I’m beginning to think that Cuomo lives in his car. What a comedown—not just to scale back your political ambitions but to live in your car on the campaign trail, and to actually be its driver. “Clean up Albany,” he says, giving me his campaign pitch for A.G. “Clean. Up. Albany. I believe in government. But government has to work. Look at what they’re doing now with Medicaid. The largest state program. Theft. Corruption. Everybody asleep at the switch. The attorney general didn’t do it. The attorney general is supposed to be doing Medicaid fraud. That’s why Tom Suozzi is attempting to beat up Spitzer on Medicaid fraud.”
Wait. So he thinks Suozzi has a point? Amazing how Cuomo can’t make this point without grazing Spitzer, whose help it’d be so useful to secure. I’ve developed an obscure affection for Cuomo, come to enjoy his vim and bluntness—it’d be nice to listen to a New York politician without fighting the urge to turn off the TV. But one pays a price for such a style. How this man is going to get through another primary without digesting his own foot is still beyond me. “Well, the Times says he has a point,” says Cuomo. “The attorney general had a Medicaid fraud unit. The Department of Health had a Medicaid fraud unit. And for some reason, the largest program in the state—once again, rampant corruption. You know what every Republican says? Another government program, another ripoff. So I say, make the program work. Protect the taxpayer dollar! That is exactly what I did at hud.”
Indeed, nothing gets Cuomo more fired up than the subject of housing. He lights up like a pinball machine when discussing it. At just 28, he started help, or Housing Enterprise for the Less Privileged, which still serves a population of 9,600; when he started as an assistant secretary at HUD, he was just 35 years old. “Think about it,” says John Marino, the former state Democratic Party chairman. “How many people really care about poor people?” Cuomo’s flair for oratory may not be as pronounced as his father’s, but when he gets fired up, he’s quite watchable, seductive in a Clintonian way. He explains things well. He likes thinking about government. How many people truly like thinking about government and its possibilities anymore?
Yet when I ask Cuomo for the names of housing advocates who can talk about the work he did at hud, he says he can’t give me any off the top of his head. When I phone them independently, I get mixed reports: dogged on the one hand, relentlessly self-promoting on the other. He famously went to war with hud’s inspector general, not exactly a mature response to criticism. And while Cuomo rightly touts the high volume of legal cases he oversaw at the agency, his critics complain that he chose lawsuits that had more news value than real-world reverberations. “Cuomo used the money to promote himself at news conferences,” says Shanna Smith, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance.
But when Cuomo got to HUD, the entire department—not just parts but the entire department—was on the Government Accountability Office’s list of most-wasteful government agencies. By the time Cuomo left, the GAO had dropped hud from its list entirely. Inspection protocols were redone; he started an enforcement center to make sure that bad buildings were withdrawn from HUD’s inventory. Most impressive, Cuomo nearly doubled his budget, from $15.2 billion to $28.4 billion—this from a Republican Congress—mostly in the form of vouchers, so that it became possible, over four years, for 189,000 very-low-income people to rent private housing through subsidies, at a time when everyone believed that government housing programs were all but dead.
“It’s Andrew, so you have to put up with Andrew,” says Denise Muha, executive director of the National Leased Housing Association. “He’s intense. But he knows what he wants, and he’s bullheaded about getting it. And from our perspective, it was a good thing. The guy took on not only the Republican Congress but his own administration.” Muha has been in this business for twenty years. “People who are smart get him. Clearly, you have to deal with his personality, his temper. But at the end of the day, he’s probably that way because he wants to do things right. If Andrew sticks to what he knows and controls his temper, he can do great things.”
Among the many photographs and doodads in Andrew Cuomo’s office at Island Capital is a picture of Andrew, his father, and Bill Clinton, all seated at a state conference. Cuomo is more expansive about this photo than any other article in the room. “My father’s going to get up to speak,” he explains. “So I take someone’s business card and write on the back DON’T SPEAK TOO LONG. TEN MINUTES. Then I cross out TEN MINUTES and I put FIVE MINUTES.” When Mario read the card, he handed it to Clinton, plainly amused. Clinton wrote back, CLINTON’S EIGHTH LAW: BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER, BUT THE PAYCHECK IS THICKER THAN BLOOD. Mario got up to speak. “And he is talking like a machine gun,” says Andrew. “Badabada, badabada, badabada … and then he stops, and he says, ‘Wait, why am I talking so fast? You know why I’m talking so fast? Because I have a twenty-minute speech, but Andrew just sent me a note saying no longer than five minutes. But what do I care what Andrew says? If I want to speak, I’m the governor, I’m going to speak!’ ”
“I don’t think ego is driving him this time,” says a friend. “There’s a degree of entitlement that’s now gone.”
Mario must have been one hell of a father to grow up with. Revered by the public, absent from home, he was, by pretty much all accounts, a man who listened to few and hectored many. Back when he was governor, it was said that Andrew was one of the few people he’d listen to.
Inevitably, anyone who knows both Andrew and Mario becomes an amateur Cuomoologist. Their relationship is a mysterious one, a neurotic combination of loving and slightly perverse. Right through Andrew’s failed 2002 gubernatorial campaign, Andrew publicly referred to his father not as “my dad” but “Mario.” (“Look, I couldn’t go into a meeting and say, ‘My dad said this, my dad said that,” says Andrew, explaining how the habit started.) Mario, meanwhile, spent his Albany days calling his son “the Big Mamoo,” which through some glitch of onomatopoeia comes off sounding both exalted and infantilizing all at once.
Andrew is acutely aware of this preoccupation. When I first ask whether there are any books or plays or operas that capture some essential complexity of their relationship, he deadpans, “Yes. The story where the father chains the little boy to a chair. In the basement. And leaves him without food. And then beats him.” A couple of weeks later, I shoot him an e-mail telling him I planned to phone his father for this story. His reply—a typical combination of charm and shrewd second-guessing—comes just seven minutes later:
And if i said no???
what psychological penchant would that suggest??
but then if I say yes, what political punditry must i endure?
you better just call me.
I phoned. We chatted; he was noncommittal. I phoned Mario. Mario never returned my calls.
“From the day Andrew came out of the womb, his job was to serve his father,” says Ed Hayes, the ubiquitous superlawyer. “He was his father’s campaign manager, his father’s axman. Whenever a dirty job had to get done, they sent Andrew—and I don’t think that’s right. Dad is not supposed to send his son to do his dirty work. Then Andrew got into a relationship with the Kennedys, and they did the same thing!”
“Personally, I don’t think Andrew is a prick,” says Hayes. “I think he’s a decent, very handsome guy, a very fine lawyer, a guy who genuinely wants to serve other people. I just think his father tortured him no end of it.”
When Andrew was growing up, he didn’t see much of his father. Mario was hardworking and ambitious, toiling late at his law firm in Brooklyn, then making his way up the ranks of the Democratic Party. “The governor will tell you, Andrew was the dad,” says Marino. As the five Cuomo children got older, the trend didn’t change much. Several people told me to ask Andrew how long his father spent at his wedding to Kerry Kennedy.
“Seventeen minutes,” he answers, when I finally get around to it. He starts to giggle. “No. He was actually good that day. He stayed … through the vows.” He starts to laugh again. “No, he came for the whole thing. He was on his best behavior.”
Has he missed other Cuomo wedding receptions? Is this why I was told to ask?
“He doesn’t … travel a lot, my father, it’s fair to say.”
In 1980, when Mario was still lieutenant governor, Andrew moved in with his father. It was a strange choice for a 22-year-old law student, attractive and awash in hormones, especially considering that his father didn’t like to tell him when he was coming home—“he was always thinking he was going to catch me.” But Andrew figured what the heck, his father was staying over only a couple of nights a week, and he was attending law school in Albany anyway. The two men shared an apartment in the Wellington Hotel. It was a two-bedroom dump with a pale-green rug and a yellow couch. “Think of Mickey Spillane’s first novels,” says Tonio Burgos, an old Cuomo adviser, who lived downstairs. “Shades half-torn, neon sign blinking in the background.” Mario hung two pictures on the wall. One was of Andrew’s mother. The other was of the Virgin Mary. And Andrew kept that green parrot, which dive-bombed visitors and freely relieved himself wherever he chose. “It was a nightmare, that bird,” says Burgos. “Very loud, very smelly. It flew out the window one day because Mario left the window open. We all cheered.”
So hold on, I ask Andrew. Your dad opened the window?
“He did not open the window,” Andrew insists. “He had a separate, ongoing conspiracy to … eliminate the parrot.”
In 1982, Andrew joined his father’s primary campaign against Ed Koch. It was brutal. Koch was the party favorite, and Mario, a potent combination of brilliant and distrustful, proved hard to advise. Eventually, Andrew became the campaign manager and earned himself—rightly, no doubt—a reputation for being a hothead, a more-than-willing henchman. But his job was also the one that invites the most awesome quantities of abuse. “Mario was extremely hard on Andrew,” says Norman Adler, who was deputy campaign manager but fell out with both Cuomos shortly thereafter. “I remember one time when he came down so hard on Andrew that Andrew was just wrecked by it. And I said to Mario that night, ‘I think you really beat up on Andrew unnecessarily today.’ He looked up and said, ‘You really think so?’ Like what I was saying to him was news.”
“It was a unique situation, granted,” says Burgos. “But Andrew also used his youth and naïveté to run the campaign the way he wanted, and he always outfoxed them.” He recalls the evening before the state Democratic Party convention in 1982. At 2 a.m., he and Andrew went into the suite of Dominic Baranello, Koch’s campaign manager, at the Syracuse Hilton, and found him lounging in his underwear. “Andrew walks in and says, ‘I know you’ve got us beat. We don’t have 25 percent of the delegates. So you have to be very careful here. My father’s crazy. If you don’t give him the 25 percent of the delegates, he’ll attack you for being big party bosses.’ ” He chuckles. “In the meantime, we knew we had 38 percent of the votes, but we didn’t want Koch to raid our delegates. We didn’t want them to work that final day. So Andrew ordered me to get a boat. And we put all our delegates on Lake Onondaga, and the engine died.”
Did it really die?
“No. I killed the engine. So for ten hours, we were on Lake Onondaga while the Koch people were trying to find and convert our delegates.”
Twenty years later, Andrew Cuomo ran in the Democratic gubernatorial primary himself, under circumstances that were remarkably similar—the party machine arrayed against him, the unions and bosses all in favor of his rival. Maybe he needed himself as a campaign manager; maybe he wasn’t as likable as his father. Whatever the case, we all know the outcome. By the time the state-party convention came around, it looked like he didn’t have enough delegates to earn himself a place on the primary ballot. So he refused to go. “It’s ironic,” says Burgos. “Years later, Andrew actually did what he said his father was threatening to do.”
It’s 8:23 in the morning, and the phone rings. It’s Cuomo. The day before, I’d spoken to him for two hours. Today, we follow up for nearly 30 minutes more. The majority of these calls are dominated by the same thing: a wish to revisit and debunk the criticisms I’ve repeated to him. He seems determined to win each point, though he never loses his cool. One gets the sense this is sport for Cuomo. He invites dissections, almost, of both his own personality and public policy alike. He is the first politician to whom I find myself uttering the words: You should know that I’m writing your personality can be a real problem. Your character can overwhelm your attributes.
He tells me that what I’m describing is not character but style.
The following day, I get an e-mail.
You asked me about my “management style.” Not to be difficult (ha ha), but I believe at one point the proof is in the dividends, and whether at HELP or HUD, we achieved great results.
But I do hear your point, and I think that I have always been extremely passionate about what I do, because for me it is about justice and reform and ending terrible conditions. I’m sure also that same passion has made me impatient [and] at times and has sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. In my “old age” I’ve realized that sometimes you can’t accomplish all you want to or even all you need to, despite the urgency or merits.
It occurs to me that Andrew really is the baby-boomer version of his dad. Divorced, a veteran of psychological counseling (in his marriage, anyway), struggling with how to keep the Democratic Party alive and fresh. Unlike most boomers, though, he refuses to blame his parents (or, let’s face it, his father) for the more challenging aspects of his temperament. Perhaps Mario doesn’t deserve the blame. Or perhaps he does, and it doesn’t matter. Perhaps Andrew’s really, finally, at long last, a grown-up.