Feature

Rudy's Choice

Lategano's press office was a disaster. It was so bad that many Giuliani loyalists believed it was threatening the success of his mayoralty. They were convinced that the torrent of negative press and the fact that Giuliani's message and his accomplishments were being lost in a series of meaningless skirmishes were Lategano's fault. She was responsible for crafting his image, and rather than being viewed as an achiever and a star, he quickly came to be seen as cranky and prickly and difficult to deal with (a perception that stuck and in fact has only gotten worse over time).

"I've covered eight mayors," Channel 4's éminence grise Gabe Pressman told me at the time, "and the relationship between this mayor and the reporters in Room 9 the City Hall press room is the worst I've seen in 30 years."

The always irascible Jerry Nachman, then Channel 2's vice-president of news and now the co-executive producer of Politically Incorrect, was even more scalding. "This is a jihad; it's a holy war against the press. It's beyond my experience," he'd said. "Cristyne Lategano is an amateur."

As the summer progressed the Lategano story took on another dimension. Not only was she the object of hostility both inside and outside the administration, but she was now also the subject of a whispering campaign. Rumors about the precise nature of her relationship with the mayor were being discussed at cocktail parties, over lunches, and in offices all around the city.

Ironically, Lategano's closeness to the mayor was born out of her instinct for survival. "You have to understand," one high-level member of the administration told me then, "she's getting terrible press; she's got this cabal of Rudy's closest people trying to get her a boss or kill her. Her staff hates her because she treats them like shit. City Hall people hate her because she's young and arrogant and she treats them like shit. The pressure to handle the William Bratton problem -- his great P.R. -- is growing, and everybody has identified her as the press problem."

Instead of crumbling under the pressure, Lategano reacted brilliantly. She abandoned the press office -- the mayor always believed the media were out to get him anyway -- and began to ride with the mayor day in and day out. She was at Gracie Mansion in the morning so she could ride with him to City Hall. She traveled with him to every event, no matter how unimportant. She attended every meeting, and she was the last person to see him at night.

"She did not leave his side or that fucking ice-cream truck the mayor's white Suburban for months," one former aide said. "By the time she'd finished a couple of months of this, Peter Powers's influence was diminished, Denny Young's was diminished greatly, and Randy Mastro's was diminished even more. Ray Harding was put in his place, and David Garth, who was the strongest proponent of getting somebody in there to fix the press office, was out. They had all tried to kill her, and she'd gotten them all taken care of."

It was also during this period that the mayor's daily routine began to change. Instead of going home at the end of the day, he was out every night of the week into the wee hours of the morning. Though much of this was the result of his tireless working style, his ability to function on little sleep, and his absolute joy at being the master of all he surveyed in the city, there was another element as well.

He was enjoying himself. Nearly every night, he could be found eating dinner at ten or eleven o'clock at McMullen's or Limoncello or in more recent times at Coopers Classic Cars & Cigars (owned by Elliot Cuker). Sometimes he was with several staff members and Lategano, sometimes just with Lategano. While he hammered Commissioner Bratton and his clique for hanging out at Elaine's, Giuliani had carved out his own thriving nightlife.

It was at this point that the rumors about his relationship with Lategano really heated up. Coy items ran in the gossip columns about shopping expeditions he'd gone on with her, and Newsday even printed mentions of the late-night dinners.

Proving an affair, of course, is almost impossible unless one of the participants talks. Otherwise, the best a reporter is likely to come up with is circumstantial evidence. (Semen-stained dresses are few and far between.) And there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence surrounding Giuliani and Lategano.

But I believed when I wrote my story in 1995 and I continue to believe now that whether the relationship was sexual is really irrelevant. What is relevant is that it became the most important relationship in his life: both in terms of its impact on his mayoralty and for him personally. Lategano was the person he spent all his time with, day and night, seven days a week.

By the beginning of last year, she was even being referred to as co-mayor. It was an all-consuming relationship that created a wall between the mayor and everyone else -- including his wife. When Hanover said last week that her husband's relationship with one staff member prevented her from participating in his public life, this is what she was talking about.

"What we at City Hall really resented was their complete disregard for the perception created by their behavior," a former staff member and an ardent supporter of both Giuliani and Lategano told me last year. "Despite the widespread rumors, however unfounded we chose to believe they were, the mayor and Cristyne altered none of the actions that led to those rumors. There was a complete disregard for appearances."

Given recent events, it's possible to say that this is how a man in love behaves. If a man is seeing someone his friends believe is bad for him, and they say so, who ends up gone? It's always the friends.

The most trenchant quote about the nature of their relationship in 1995 is just as penetrating today. "It may not be an affair of the heart, but it is an affair of the spirit," said Hank Sheinkopf. "That's where the intimacy cuts."

After all the intensity between them and all the slings and arrows Giuliani and Lategano withstood, the relationship ended last May with barely a whimper. Lategano's departure from City Hall couldn't have been more unceremonious. Quietly, she took a leave of absence and never returned. By the fall, she'd been installed at the Convention & Visitors Bureau at a salary of $150,000 a year.

It was during this time, Hanover said, that she and Giuliani "reestablished some of our personal intimacy." And for the first time in years, they were seen in public together: dancing cheek to cheek at the wedding of Howard Safir's son last May.

"Who knows exactly what happened?" says a former staff member. "Did Cristyne tell the mayor she was in love with Nick Nicholas her husband now first, and he went berserk? Or does he tell Cristyne, 'Listen, Donna and I are gonna try and make a go of it, so you have to leave 'cause we can't do it with you around'?"

In any event, the reconciliation with Hanover did not, apparently, go on for long. By last summer, Giuliani had already taken steps to set the current situation in motion: He'd begun to see Judi Nathan.

One Republican insider told me he believes the mayor is going to pay a price for his decision. "Scores of Republican leaders and tens of thousands of Republican voters across the state and around the country are going to look at his dropping-out as an abandonment of the cause. The cause is to stop Hillary Clinton, and if she wins, he will pay for the damage."

But in the end, Hillary wasn't the opponent he needed to focus on. "There were just too many uncertainties," says a confidant. "The mayor is not a man who's comfortable with the unknown or with taking risks." Of course, the unknown will loom larger than ever in the months ahead. And as he said in that remarkable press conference a couple of weeks ago, now he's going to need someone more than ever.