Al and Jeanine during her campaign last fall.   (Photo: Richard B. Levine)

Perhaps it is the better question. What’s the answer? “The answer to that question,” Al says slowly, “is she’s not. I mean, she’s certainly more accomplished in terms of a person who wants to be on a stage, okay. But that’s not what I want. My applause will come from having the independence to go and do whatever I want, you know, in terms of my economic freedom.”

I wonder what Jeanine thinks. The following day, I meet the Republican candidate for attorney general at her office, ten floors below Al’s. We talk in her glass-walled conference room with its one small bookshelf—Practical Homicide Investigations is a title carefully placed there.

I tell Jeanine, who is 55, that I’d asked Al if he was acting out in order to get her attention.

“What did he say?! I want to know!” she says. I tell her Al’s alternative question: whether he felt eclipsed.

She purses her lips, steers her head slowly from side to side, as if to say, Isn’t that just like Al? “He’s a sharp guy, he’s smart,” she says.

Jeanine is intrigued. “Mmmm,” she says. “And then when he posited that, did you say, ‘Okay, answer it’?”

“What do you think he answered?” I ask Jeanine.

She barely hesitates. “Yes,” she answers brightly.

“Actually,” I tell her, “Al said no.”

“Really?!”

This, of course, is the season of political marriages (coming soon, the Pirros’ heavyweight Westchester neighbors, Bill and Hillary; Al and Carol Hevesi on the undercard). For Jeanine Pirro, everything is at stake. She trails in the polls in what may well be her last run for public office. She’s desperate to talk about her experience, her issues. And yet, for the viewing public, no spectacle is quite as riveting as the reality TV of feuding political couples. For a time, Jeanine and Al Pirro seemed as if they might avoid this kind of finale. After all, for a long time they appeared to be just the right pairing, the sum greater than its parts. He was the powerful real-estate lawyer with political juice. She was the bright, telegenic D.A., urged by nearly every Republican (including, recently, those in the White House) to seek statewide office.

Jeanine Ferris was from the small upstate city of Elmira, the daughter of a mobile-home salesman and a homemaker who constantly reminded her daughter of the importance of looking good. Jeanine’s story is one of transparent ambition. From the time she was 6, she told people she wanted to be a lawyer. “I was always in a rush,” she says.

Al’s upbringing in Mt. Vernon was scrappier. His mother was a waitress and problem gambler who squandered the family savings—they moved often, fleeing landlords. Al’s father, a former boxer, was a truck driver who valued toughness in his kids. When Al was 9, four older boys chased him until Al’s father stepped in. “He ordered me to fight all of them,” Al recalls. “It was total panic and fear. It was like that all the time.” Al was bright, that was his saving grace, and it made him the family’s hope, the one who, as Jeanine says, “would make enough to take care of everyone.”

Jeanine met Al at Albany Law School. “He was the most brilliant, energetic, high-powered guy on campus,” she says. “He was just dashing. He was the hardest worker I ever met.” Al held three jobs, including mopping classroom floors (and was also president of his class). Then on Friday nights, ten friends would assemble at a restaurant for dinner and Al picked up the check. “He was the most generous guy,” says Jeanine, who was seeing someone else at the time. Al approached her anyway. She was smart, delightful, and spunky, Al recalls, with long jet-black hair and sexy legs. “If we’re going to get married,” he told her, “we better start dating.” Al was only Jeanine’s second boyfriend; Al hadn’t had many steady girlfriends either.

“If you love somebody which ... that was an earlier part of our life together ...” Al starts to tell me, and then slips into a memory. “We were so closely tied together emotionally,” he says. “We always knew how the other felt. It was extraterrestrial.”

They married in 1975, and moved to Al’s territory, Westchester, a county then controlled by the Republican Party. Al soon established himself as a bright, aggressive, up-and-coming attorney. He worked as counsel for the municipality of Harrison, learning zoning law from the inside. Al says that success came because he worked so hard—overprepared is his word.

In short order, Al became the person to make a developer’s dreams come true. “He’s the lawyer developers hired to save their projects from the mire of bureaucracy or local opposition” was how the local newspaper put it. For a period, his name seemed to be attached to many of the important countywide projects, from the Westchester Mall in White Plains to the office parks in Mt. Pleasant to Home Depot in New Rochelle.

Related:

• Archive: “Politics”
• Articles by Steve Fishman
• Table of Contents: Oct 23, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!