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Donna's Riskiest Role

Another source of solace has been her friendships with women, which she has enhanced with a series of dinners for prominent women at Gracie Mansion. "The dinners began because I was interviewing a lot of really fascinating women. I've probably had about 25 of them. Which is astonishing, when you think that there are that many wonderful, brilliant, dynamic women. I could do 25 more.

"You know, there's a certain thing that happens with women that you see at the dinners, where women let their hair down a little bit, and they encourage each other, and they don't need to talk about sports first. And if you ask them questions, they respond often with the real truth!"

She has woman friends, she says, from her television posts in cities from Columbus, Ohio, to Miami, and as far back as high school in Sunnyvale, California.

Ellen Eisenstat, one of Hanover's closest friends dating back to 1976, when they both worked at WTVN-TV in Columbus, says Donna was always "very private. She really is a one-on-one or one-to-one kind of person, basically."

The pressures of Gracie Mansion increased that penchant: "It became all the more important to her to have an area of privacy about her family and about herself," Eisenstat says. She pauses a moment. "She likes it. She doesn't want her personal stuff out there.

"Her personality hasn't changed at all, adds Eisenstat, who wore a blue bridesmaid's dress she didn't like in the Hanover-Giuliani wedding. "She's gotten a lot more sophisticated externally, more elegant and more polished, but she's still a down-home person who interacts the same way she always did."

When they are together, says Eisenstat, "we do heavy girl stuff. We do heavy shopping. We try on jewelry and lipstick and sit on the floor with her endless supply of Diet Coke. She's very unaffected. She's just a girlfriend. She very much enjoys people's sense of humor."

"Humor is a big, big thing in my life," Donna acknowledged, "as are my friendships with women. If you said to me, 'What have been your strategies in the last two years?,' I would say those things have been my strategy."

Eisenstat tells this story: "When my father died, she called and said, 'Do you want me there?' Caroline was 2 at the time, so Andrew was 6. 'Don't even think about it. Don't come out.' And she was on the plane the next day, shows up at my mother's house with four bags of groceries including a pair of black stockings, in case I hadn't thought of it, a bottle of wine, and everything from soup to nuts. She's very dear that way. She inspires nothing but wanting to give it back to her."

Her friend and manager, Sue Leibman, echoes those sentiments. She talks of their playing tennis and attending Knicks games together, and of Donna rolling up her sleeves and helping pack boxes when it was time to move. And when Leibman started her own management firm last year, Donna not only sent her cookies and lasagna but signed on, too.

In the past couple of years, Hanover has done half a dozen interviews for Good Housekeeping, all of them profiles of survivors: Nell Carter's journey back to Broadway from drug and alcohol addiction, Pat Pepper's battle with ALS, Jackie Speier's path to recovery from the death of her husband. In a weird confluence of events, last year she interviewed Ali Torre about facing prostate cancer with her husband, Yankees manager Joe Torre. And she interviewed Kathie Lee Gifford about the brouhaha over her clothing line just days before the news broke about her husband's affair with a flight attendant. Perseverance, stoicism, being there for the children are common themes.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the intelligence -- or the determination -- of this graduate of Stanford and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. "A professional person -- that's definitely something I want to be and hope to be," she told me. "And to behave professionally, whatever I am doing -- whether I am working as a broadcast journalist or an actor or devoting my time to helping a group of people. That sort of integrity and that sort of keeping-your-word approach to life is something that is important to me."

"Considering what she's been through, she's doing great," claims her friend Gail Yancosek, the executive producer of Good Day New York. Ellen Eisenstat saw her last weekend in California and sounds concerned but not worried about the redoubtable Donna: "She's a resilient woman. She's going to be great."

In an odd way, none of the explosive announcements of the past weeks changes the big picture for Donna -- not even last Friday's double stunner of Rudy's dropping out of the Senate race hours after the Daily News reported that Donna had hired divorce lawyer Helene Brezinsky to work out the separation. Donna will continue to live her life, pursuing her career and nurturing her children.

Long before the events of the past month, she'd been thinking about her future. I asked her if she planned to stay in New York if her husband became a senator. "Oh, yes," she said. "I have an apartment that I rented out, and I would presumably go back to that apartment. Actually in the same neighborhood. You know, I raised my children in that park."

The children, as always, were at the forefront of her concerns. She provided what might be considered a skeleton key to her thinking in the past couple of years. "I think when children are young," she said, "a lot of the evidence shows that it's difficult when there's divorce. And you can imagine how difficult it would be to go from one house to another and not have either house be yours. I think a lot of people are trying to consider that when they think about their lives and the children -- what they're going to do."

These were some of the things that have been on Donna Hanover's mind over the past few months. It was mostly a matter of pride for her not to share them, except in the diplomatic code she had perfected. "In some areas," she said, "I believe you keep your own counsel, if you have the courage to do that. And it's best to have the courage to do that sometimes. And if people know that about me, then they know me."