Can Al and Jeanine Pirro's Marriage Be Saved? -- New York Magazine

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

To her detractors, Jeanine’s prosecutorial zeal seemed a media stunt. She flew around the country, seeming to stalk Robert Durst, the Westchester millionaire suspected of murdering his wife, though no body was found. Jeanine flew to Texas and Pennsylvania—where Durst faced other charges—appearing on TV until a judge admonished her to shut up. Even Al thought it “warmongering.” “A lot of decisions she makes are made out of pure this-is-what-we-should-do,” he says. “If she would wait a day before she made some of these decisions, she would be a lot better off.”

Jeanine wasn’t likely to change. Her passion, her intelligence, and her instinct for the dramatic gesture were perfect for TV in a tabloid age. Plus, she looked great. She’d traded black robes for short skirts. Marking her celebrity status, in 1997, People magazine named her one of its 50 Most Beautiful people. Al seemed delighted. “There’s not a place I go where people don’t speak about my wife,” he said.

At home, life seemed equally exciting, for the most part. Pirroland could be an awful lot of fun. “I love to entertain,” Jeanine says. And they had just the spot: a $5 million Harrison mansion, which they built and designed to resemble a Venetian palazzo. They’d toured marble factories in Italy, selecting their favorites for the floors, for the stairs. “It’s marble on marble,” says one friend. Two Vietnamese potbellied pigs, Homer and Wilbur, got their own small house out back, penned in by an elaborate wrought-iron grill. (One visitor figured it was the servants’ quarters. The help, though, slept downstairs, near the exercise studio where Jeanine could sometimes be found before dawn.)

The Pirros held lots of parties. “A lot of dancing. A lot of entertaining,” says Jeanine. They hosted theme nights. Cowboy night, Mexican night. One friend remembers spotting the district attorney at the top of a marble staircase in four-inch Manolos and a bustier. “If you’ve got ’em, flaunt ’em like diamonds,” Jeanine explained.

It was a striver’s Camelot, a sexy, ethnic shindig where people like Joey and Cindy Adams and designer Oleg Cassini mingled with Al’s law partners, Governor George and Libby Pataki, and State Senate leader Joe and Barbara Bruno. Pols got a hit of the larger culture while everyone else made frisson-inducing small talk to power.

To most outsiders, it seemed exciting to be Al and Jeanine Pirro. Few, though, knew much about the speed bump along the route. At 39, Al was admitted to Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. He was depressed, couldn’t sleep. He cried spontaneously and contemplated suicide, according to the hospital report. Partly, the crisis was brought on by the lieutenant-governor debacle. Al, as Jeanine knew, was obsessed with being a success. That Al, a rising business and political power, had proved a liability to his wife devastated him. Twenty years later he tells me, “There was a deep hollow feeling in me. Not just humiliation, a loss of my self-esteem.”

Other factors clouded Al’s mental health. Like his affairs. One in 1983 had produced a child. There’d been other one-night stands, and a liaison with a lawyer in his office. Jeanine, when she learned of his infidelities, slapped Al and threw him out. Still, when she considered Al’s misbehavior, she thought about his complicated drives, his frustrations. She found cause to blame herself, at least a little, even for the affairs. She knew that Al, whatever his public pronouncements, was deeply ambivalent about the career she so feverishly pursued. “Al took no pleasure in [my] fame,” she told one of Al’s psychiatrists.

Al sometimes said he didn’t really care about money. Jeanine, though, loved their lifestyle, which she certainly couldn’t afford on a public servant’s salary. Al picked up the tab. (Al, she noted, was the type to foot the restaurant bill even if now 30 people were at dinner.) Al’s mental-health problems had caused some financial losses; Jeanine couldn’t help but be angry about that, too. She put financial pressure on him, as she told the psychiatrist.

And, she acknowledged to the psychiatrist, she was “quite domineering,” which probably upset Al. As her friends knew, Jeanine didn’t mince words. “She could peel paper off the wall,” said one, referring to her foul language.

Jeanine seemed to feel for Al; maybe dealing with someone like her wasn’t easy. Perhaps that’s why she took him back. She was furious, but she made it clear to the therapists that she was committed to the marriage. Al let the doctor know he fervently wanted to undo the damage to the relationship with Jeanine. He longed “to be understood, to be taken care of,” the report said. “Al states that his greatest fear is that his wife will leave him,” says the psychiatric report.