Certainly, eyebrows would be raised at NBC if his bosses knew, as Rivera confesses, that he also offers political advice to the Clinton team privately while reporting the story. "They try out ideas on me and see what my reaction to it is," he says. "There was a time when I thought they had lost their courage, they were droopy and scared. I stiffened them up." Far from being repentant about his bias, Rivera charges that his view of the scandal as a sexual witch hunt is impeding his career at NBC News. NBC executives, he says, have "shot down" his proposal to do a Clinton-scandal special on the network. "My colleagues look askance because I'm out of the mainstream," he bristles. "I'll never be on Dateline. I'm a voice in the wilderness. But twenty years from now, I'll be seen as one of the few who were right." In the midst of his tirade, Rivera makes a point to note, "I don't even have an NBC I.D. The guards let me in the building because they all speak Spanish."

Marty Berman, Rivera's longtime producer on the daytime show, says he has tried to persuade Rivera to hold his tongue with the press, but "he's a girl who can't say no." "Geraldo's honest, and sometimes it gets him in trouble," adds his former 20/20 colleague Barbara Walters, recently described by Rivera in Playboy as having "nice tits." "After the Playboy interview, I called him and said you've given me a whole new image. We used to kid a lot back then, and I used to tell him if he was ever ready for older women to give me a call."

The Playboy interview points up another undeniable aspect of Rivera's persona that makes him an unlikely network standard bearer: He's cheesy. While fans see it as part of his charm, one frequent guest on Rivera Live confesses to wincing occasionally: "He's got this Long Island, pinkie-ring, Al D'Amato thing going that can be pretty awful." Greeting former Newt Gingrich press secretary Tony Blankley on Rivera Live after the November election, Geraldo smirked, "Tony, I love ya, but you got your butt kicked the other night, man." He signs off every night by kissing two fingers and making a peace sign. His not-ready-for-prime-time Perry Ellis wardrobe of big-shouldered, double-breasted suit coats is widely derided by his NBC colleagues.

Not surprisingly, Rivera's close friends all seem to come not from the ranks of the media elite to which he has ascended but from earlier parts of his life, a motley, protective posse that includes Cheech Marin of Cheech & Chong; Brooklyn Law School chum Jerry Shargel, now John Gotti's lawyer; and a few yes-man producers who've been with him since the tabloid days. Most nights after the show, they head to Elaine's or Miss Elle's, an Upper West Side dive Rivera proudly informs me is "owned by three dykes" (a statement that later mystifies the bar's sole, heterosexual owner). He then drives back to Rumson in a black Bentley, fit for, well, John Gotti.

Although Rivera has seemed to re-invent himself almost as often as Madonna, he really hasn't changed a whit. Born Gerald Rivera to a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father, he grew up the oldest of four siblings in West Babylon, Long Island. According to Los Angeles lawyer Victor Furio, who met Rivera when they worked together one summer on a city maintenance crew, Rivera's father, Allen, who had emigrated from Puerto Rico as a young man and worked in the cafeteria of a local defense contractor, instilled in Geraldo his brimming self-confidence. "His dad didn't have a very sophisticated job, but he was a proud guy who had been class valedictorian back in Puerto Rico," Furio says. "Geraldo was the Robin Hood, Sir Lancelot and Don Juan of his day. He had aspirations to be a superhero." At the same time, says longtime friend Marty Berman, "With his mixed heritage, he had a sense of never fitting in in either place."

Rivera attended the New York Maritime Academy -- to this day, he often commutes the 25 miles to work in Fort Lee, New Jersey, from Rumson on his speedboat -- and then went on to the University of Arizona and Brooklyn Law School, where for three years he sat next to Jerry Shargel. "I told my fiancée in 1966 that this is the smartest guy I ever met," says Shargel. After a summer in the Manhattan D.A.'s office, Rivera embarked on a career as a long-haired, left-leaning legal-aid lawyer, working with a Puerto Rican activist group, the Young Lords, whom he often represented in television interviews. Even then he demonstrated the strange mix of intellectual ability and louche theatrics that has dominated his career. "He wanted to have an impact," says Craig Rivera, describing his brother's "romanticized notion" of himself. "He wanted to be a great man." Rivera admits that his heroes tend to be "overdrawn and overly romantic. I think of the great historical swashbucklers, the Lawrence of Arabia types."