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Giuliani's Princess Bride
Judith Giuliani always dreamed big, which got her out of small-town Pennsylvania, through two marriages, and into the arms of Rudy Giuliani. But, as her husband runs for president, people are asking, "Who does she think she is?" It was the first anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero, an occasion when the names of the dead were read aloud. The first reader was to be Rudy Giuliani, New York's mayor at the time of the disaster, whose actions during those terrible days would prove a political boon. An army of policemen flanked him—an excessive number, spectators thought, since, due to the hundreds of dignitaries gathered, security outside was extremely tight.
Inside the tent were Secretary of State Colin Powell, New York governor George Pataki, Richard Grasso, who was then head of the New York Stock Exchange, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Senator Hillary Clinton stood in the aisle—until she was unceremoniously pushed by a phalanx of four burly cops entering the tent, these guarding Judith Nathan, Giuliani's girlfriend. No apologies were offered, one observer noted.
"The nerve of that woman!" Hillary exploded, recalling that her own daughter's Secret Service detail evaporated soon after Bill Clinton left office. Why should an ex-mayor's girlfriend get such royal treatment? "Who does she think she is?" Hillary said to an observer, who later recounted the story.
An interesting question. Who does Judith Stish Ross Nathan Giuliani think she is? These days, even with her husband, a freshly minted multi-millionaire, far ahead of the competition in the Republican presidential polls, no one, least of all Judith, 52, seems to have a clue. In a way, this is understandable. There have been so many different Judiths. As her second husband, Bruce Nathan, has told friends, "She is in an ever changing mode upward."
Three decades ago, Judi Ann Stish, as she was known in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, left her parents' home, a gray two-story house fronted by potted geraniums and a ribbon of flagstone. Fifteen years ago, while working for $1,200 a month as a part-time receptionist, she was living on borrowed money and the hospitality of friends—and threatening her estranged second husband with prosecution over a $3,500 rug. "Judi started from scratch, so of course she grabs every opportunity that comes into her life," Manos Zacharioudakis, her onetime live-in companion, tells me. "Of course she was attracted to Giuliani."
Today she and Giuliani, when they are not boarding private Gulfstream IV jets to Europe or trying to woo voters, shuttle between a $4 million Hamptons house and a $5 million nine-room Upper East Side apartment near Madison Avenue, its dining room walnut-paneled and crammed with crystal, china, and linen from Scully & Scully. Her annual salary has also improved: $125,000, evidently for helping to write some of the speeches Giuliani likes to give (for which he received $11.7 million between January 2006 and March 2007). This comes as a surprise to at least one of Judith's acquaintances. Asked if he knew Judith was writing speeches, one former Giuliani aide replied, "Holy cow! God forbid!"
The details of Judith's life have also undergone some refurbishing. Her monogrammed hand-stitched napkins embraced by thick silver napkin rings are on display, along with the new cigar room designed for her husband, and a mantelpiece adorned with white porcelain figurines of Winston Churchill, the statesman with whom Giuliani likes to invite comparison. She struck an odalisque pose in Hamptonstyle magazine, and appeared robed in a floor-length burgundy gown by Carolina Herrera on the cover of Avenue magazine, whose editorial director, Pamela Gross, accompanies her frequently, especially when TV cameras are present. ("Never get between Pamela, Judith, and a camera," advises one observer.) Judith sits in the front rows of fashion shows, her hair freshly styled by a full-time assistant lured from Frédéric Fekkai, and, when asked to pose, thrusts out an obliging hip for the cameras. Although she informed WWD, "I have no room for shopping in my life," she buys Dolce & Gabbana.
A dramatic transformation has occurred, one she does not care to discuss, despite repeated requests by Vanity Fair. She had always been known as "Judi." "Judi is what she was born. I don't think we called her Judith ever," says her father, Donald Stish, 78, seated on his porch one sultry June day in the shade of a gray metal awning. He is a calm, thick-set man who marvels at his daughter's makeover. After her second divorce, she upgraded herself to "Judith" with such vehemence that, one former Giuliani aide confides, "at City Hall we were prohibited from calling her Judi. She would bawl us out if we did."
For years she appeared, in the public record, to have had only one failed marriage, but as it turned out she'd had two. It seemed that she had gone to Pennsylvania State nursing school, as The New York Times once reported, but she had not. She completed two years of nursing school, but left hospital work before a year was up. Nonetheless, Giuliani has publicly referred to her "expertise" in "biological and chemical" disasters, and believes she would be a help in the event of an anthrax attack.
Her second husband, Bruce Nathan, was, Barbara Walters mentioned in a March interview with Judith, a man of "means"—a notion Judith promoted. A former boyfriend tells me that after the divorce Judith often referred to her ex-husband as a "millionaire." But in 1991, the year before their separation, Nathan earned exactly $72,775. Judith would later insist that Nathan had a trust fund worth perhaps $1 million and a yacht. However, as Bruce has informed friends, there was only a boat—and no trust fund at all. "Do you honestly think I'd be selling wallpaper if I had all that money?" he would ask.
Inside the marriage, according to friends, Bruce considered himself a "golden retriever, who put a lot of faith and trust in things," only to find that trust misplaced. "Some people can fool you," he would declare sorrowfully. There were expenses incurred by Judi—large sums, considering his modest salary, he complained, mostly for her clothes or tuition for their adopted daughter, Whitney, at elite schools. Toward the end of their marriage, when Bruce's credit cards were no longer at her disposal, Judi was incensed.
The family was then living in a small rented house in the pricey neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, California. Although Judith also claimed on ABC that she had to "re-enter the workforce, after, oh gosh, more than a decade of being a wife and mother" following her divorce, she had actually resumed working in surgical sales months before leaving Nathan.
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And finally, Judith told Walters, she would not reveal the circumstances of how she first met Giuliani, in 1999, except to say that the encounter, fraught with mutual attraction, was "by accident." In reality, it was she who approached Giuliani, who was then married and a father, with words of admiration and a proffered business card.
Within Giuliani's camp the picture of who Judith is is not much clearer. "When I see her, she's only interested in my jewelry, where I buy my dresses," says a friend of the former mayor's. "Does anyone really know Judith Giuliani? Let's be honest: no one does."
The Giuliani people certainly wish to keep it that way. "I'm hearing bad reports about you. Bad reports. You interviewed Mrs. Giuliani's father, in Hazleton!" Mike McKeon, the campaign spokesman, barks at me within four hours of the encounter.
"We're not allowed to talk to the press," Judith's mother, Joan, says nervously when she discovers me interviewing her husband. She is a short, brisk woman in black trousers—she shares with Judith a small, purposeful mouth—who expresses despair over her husband's candor and wants me to shred my notes on the carpeted porch.
Bits of the real Judith are scattered all over the country: in the South, East, and West. They must be carefully pieced together.
When Judi met Rudy, he was mayor of New York and married to the actress Donna Hanover, who is the mother of his children, Andrew, now 21, and Caroline, 18. At the time, the family was living in Gracie Mansion. In retrospect, it is odd it took Hanover so long to catch on. By then she had endured at least one very public embarrassment as a result of her husband's roving eye. In the late 90s, Cristyne Lategano, the mayor's press secretary, had been widely assumed, despite Lategano's heated denials, to hold a special place in his heart. By March 1999, however, Hanover was breathing easier, even as Lategano grew anxious. According to knowledgeable sources, Lategano was well aware there was a change in her friend the mayor, a sudden mysterious chill.
It was around this time that Judi Nathan met Giuliani at Club Macanudo, an East Side cigar bar he was known to frequent. The details of that fateful night have since been industriously hidden and altered. They met at a private-school function, went one version of the story; at Coopers Classic Cars and Cigars, the former bar of Elliot Cuker, Rudy's onetime confidant, went another.
Around a year ago, Cuker has told friends, he was pressed to back up a version worthy of a potential president and First Lady. Specifically, Cuker has confided, he was told to say it was he who formally introduced the couple at his restaurant. He pointedly refused. "It ****** Elliot off that he was asked to lie for them," says a friend, who adds that Giuliani and Cuker are no longer close.
At the time of that first meeting, Judi and her daughter were living in a one-bedroom apartment off Third Avenue with Zacharioudakis, a handsome Greek psychologist nine years her junior. "Whitney slept in the bedroom, Judi and I in the pullout bed in the living room," Zacharioudakis tells me, adding that he didn't mind the cramped quarters. He found Judi to be "a beautiful, sensual, erotic creature." She was no pushover, he adds. "She will fight teeth and claws in order for her dignity not to be abused."
Still, after four years, he says, "you get bored, the passion is not the same." Moreover, "she wanted to get married." He did not.
With that revelation, their relationship fell apart, inducing in Judi some bitterness, he recalls, "because she had invested some years in this." When he came home at night, she would leave. It was on one of these forays that she met Giuliani—not that Zacharioudakis knew this at the time. In retrospect, however, he understands her fascination. "Giuliani was the No. 1 man in New York!" he says.
And Judi was thrilled with her new boyfriend. "This is the guy," she informed her mother after their third meeting. Rudy and she, she later told the press, were simply "two people in love—never mind the extracurricular stuff that went on around us." That "extracurricular stuff," however, included not just Rudy's wife and kids but the entire city of New York.
Giuliani invited Judith everywhere: to Yankees games in the summer of '99, to Cuker's restaurant, to the millennium celebration in Times Square, and to Town Hall meetings. This lack of restraint was not unusual for him: "Rudy has no willpower when it comes to relationships. This is why it's such an issue," says a Giuliani friend.
By 1999 he had acquired only the thinnest veneer of discretion—even though at the time he was seriously planning a Senate run against Hillary Clinton. "I was told Judith was Kate Anson's best friend and that's why she was going to all these big events.… Everyone was told that," reports one top aide from that era. Anson was and still is Giuliani's loyal scheduler.
The mayor began to spend his weekends—accompanied, as the New York Post reported, by a detail of detectives, which may have cost taxpayers $3,000 a tryst—in Southampton, where Judith owned a condominium. Since he had until then always accounted for his weekends, says the incisive Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett, "his press office started telling reporters, 'He's teaching Andrew how to play golf.' Now, Andrew's old enough to understand—he has to be aware that his father used him as a beard!"
At the annual Saint Patrick's Day Parade, in 2000, Judith marched right behind the mayor. She was by his side when he went to the hospital for prostate tests a month later and then learned he had cancer. When he decided to leave Hanover, in May, he made a public announcement—"Judith Nathan is a very, very fine person" were his words, "and I'm going to need her more now than maybe I did before." That was how his wife of 16 years discovered her marriage was over.
Donna consulted a divorce lawyer, the Daily News revealed later that month, and learned she could potentially bar Judith from Gracie Mansion as "poisonous to the home environment." Giuliani canceled his Senate run.
From then on, the couple seemed to grow even closer. "The cancer really got to Rudy because of his own feelings about mortality. He is very, very afraid of death," says a friend. "As his career went downhill, he was being publicly flogged about Donna. Judi was totally loyal. She reflected the essence of what he considered important. Loyalty." Giuliani's divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, tells me that Judi and Rudy "used to go early in the morning for treatment" to Mount Sinai Hospital. One evening there was a public stroll with Judith for the benefit of the media.
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The 2008 Election
An aide from that time recalls that Judith wasn't disliked—at first—nor did she come as a surprise. "We had been through this all before. When they first come around, they're nice. Until they realize the power they have over him."
Who was this new girlfriend, worried staffers wondered. Their suspicions aroused, they began checking into her background.
Hazleton, Pennsylvania, population 25,000, is a friendly but desolate town ringed by a scarred landscape that in Judi's high-school years was best known for its coal mines. When Judi Stish was born, in 1954, the second of three children, her father was a circulation manager for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "Quite honestly the Stishes were just very nice, simple people," says an old friend. "They ate dinner every night at five p.m. Salad was not something they knew much about. Hoagies and potatoes and corn they knew about."
Their only son, Donald, born with his umbilical cord around his neck, was always frail, according to two family friends. Three years ago, the father says with simple gravity, "while Donnie was praying, he just fell over slowly and passed away. It was like someone was holding him up until he dropped." Judith, the second child, was the family star, as far as her parents were concerned. "They were just enamored with this daughter of theirs who left," says an old friend.
"If you had told me back when we were in high school that one day Judi would move to New York and marry a presidential candidate, I wouldn't have been in the least surprised," says Gemma Matteo, a former classmate of Judi's, now a special-education teacher in Hazleton. In an era of blue jeans and rebellion, Judi was a fresh-faced, meticulously groomed enigma—quiet, self-possessed, biding her time. "Very prim and proper, not a hair out of place," according to Holly Ciotola, another former classmate. "She was always in a dark blazer, white collared shirt, and dark skirt."
In 1974 she graduated from St. Luke's School of Nursing, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As a registered nurse, young Judi spent only a few months at Sacred Heart Hospital, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She would never care for patients after that. She had other plans. At 19 she married Jeffrey Ross, a U.S. Surgical salesman six years her senior.
In short order both Rosses were working in Charlotte, North Carolina, for U.S. Surgical (now part of Tyco Healthcare), which eventually grew into a billion-dollar enterprise marketing surgical staplers. Judi was excellent at her work, and earned $40,000 a year by the late 70s. But problems arose when animal-rights groups began investigating the way the company sold its products—problems recently pointed out by the New York press. U.S. Surgical used dogs in demonstrations to doctors and hospitals as part of its marketing plan.
"Every salesperson at U.S. Surgical was trained for six weeks with dogs at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, and that was really brutal," explains a former employee. "They spent days and days with dogs, taking out the spleen or stomach or the lobe of a lung. Then if the dog started moaning or fidgeted, whoever was closest would push more sedative into him from the syringe. It was horrible. Then the dog would be killed with potassium chloride."
After training, the salespeople marketed the staplers to doctors, and, once again, in many cases large dogs were used, as they had organs comparable in size to those possessed by humans. "After the stapling, sometimes they'd put a big clamp above and below the staple lines of the dog, and fill [the area] with lots of fluid," the ex-employee says. "It would fill up like a balloon, and the salesperson would say to the doctor, 'See—it doesn't leak!' That's how they marketed and sold the product." (Some years ago, former C.E.O. Leon Hirsch defended the company's practice of using dogs, claiming that there was no proper substitute.)
WABC radio host Ron Kuby, a lawyer and severe Giuliani critic, marvels at the campaign's sublime lack of preparation for the storm of fury that greeted the dog issue, in April. "Think of all the hacks and politicos who sit down and they say to Judi, 'O.K., we've gone through your background, husbands, etc.,'" he muses. "'Is there any other thing in your background, some crazy little thing, that might catch someone's attention?' It's at that point you should raise your hand and say, 'Oh, you mean when I was killing puppies?'"
But for some reason the campaign entered the ring gloveless. "I wouldn't dignify it with a comment" was Giuliani's reply when asked about the use of dogs.
Bruce Nathan, dark, handsome, and 28, was earning a modest salary in 1979 selling wallpaper in the South when he met Judi Ross, by then separated from her first husband. Five days after the Rosses were divorced, Bruce and Judi wed, and she moved into his small house, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Two years later the couple left for Atlanta, where, in 1985, they adopted Whitney. They settled into a more spacious house with a portico of black-and-white marble. Judi joined the Junior League. But it was clear to her intimates that none of this was enough.
"Judi's goal was always to go to New York. Why do you think? Because it's the capital of the world!" says a friend from that era. The Nathans moved to New York in 1987, the year the stock market plunged, and along with it, Bruce's prospects of selling a lot of wallpaper on the East Coast.
It was growing obvious to Judi that, to quote one of Bruce's friends, "his was not a bottomless pit of money." The couple had rented what is described by an old friend as "a teeny-weeny apartment on the Upper East Side."
"They never could afford a big co-op on Park Avenue and she wanted it," says another friend. "I think Bruce wasn't doing well enough for her, and she was ambitious."
Pretty soon these friends heard the same stories that would eventually find their way into court papers: Bruce would claim that his wife called him "'a kike,' when I couldn't afford something; 'a rich little kike,' … 'Jew boy.'" Certainly he felt they had entirely different ambitions. "Unlike my wife, I was not a social climber," he would later observe. "My wife's 'main goal' in life was being involved with whatever was 'the in-thing' at the moment … the 'right church' … the 'right people'; adopting a child for status purposes."
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For her part, Judi claimed Bruce had a "violent temper" and was physically abusive: there was, for example, she said, a blow to her uterus and later another to the ear, which required a hospital visit. "Not true," Bruce tells me flatly.
Despite severe misgivings, in the summer of 1991 Judi Nathan, accompanied by seven-year-old Whitney and their cocker spaniel, followed Bruce to California, in the hope that somehow or other the marriage would thereby be improved. The couple furnished their small rented house, in Pacific Palisades, with articles of whimsy—a framed picture of cats in human garb—and antique reproductions. In the cupboards were a few trinkets from Lalique and six Baccarat glasses. About the only item of value was the $3,500 Aubusson rug Judi would later fight for.
Outwardly, Judi appeared happy enough, says Marilyn Stein, a friend who still lives in the neighborhood. On the other hand, Stein notes, "I always got the feeling that for her the move was temporary."
Certainly Judi was eager to increase the couple's income. Her husband had had to take a 10 percent cut in his $80,000-a-year salary. In the last months of her brief California sojourn, Judi signed on as a saleswoman for DynaMed Surgical, which makes ophthalmologic products. "Very, very savvy, very professional" is Bradley Bakke's estimation of his former employee's work in California. The head of the Minnesota-based firm adds that "when she left I had no idea why. She gave no explanation."
But to her friend Stein, Judi was more voluble. Late one night in mid-March 1992, she and Whitney arrived at her neighbor's door. Bruce had told her he had stopped loving her, Judi said. He had punched her "on the side of my head," she claimed. He had screamed "vile epithets" at her. He had spit. The police were summoned.
The next day she and the child left. Bruce Nathan called and called his wife and daughter, hoping Whitney would be brought back home, in vain. He phoned the police, accusing his wife of child abduction, also in vain. "My kid was just gone," he tells friends these days.
There is no doubt that Judi Nathan faced tough times when she moved back to New York more than a decade ago. She and Whitney initially had to live with friends. Her first job there, as a dental receptionist, was not substantial enough to defray her legal fees, which came to just under $28,000; it was her parents, by then retired in Hazleton, who lent her much of the money, after taking out a second mortgage on their house. Whitney went to the exclusive Spence School, in Manhattan, on a partial scholarship.
Even the $1,600 a month in alimony payments and the resumption of her work as a hospital sales rep, this time for Bristol-Myers Squibb, didn't wholly lighten Judi's load. "She didn't have an easy life bringing up a child in New York as a single mother," says Felder, Giuliani's divorce lawyer, whom she hired when Bruce sued for custody of their daughter, six years ago.
Whitney, whom Judith described to the judge as "this precious little paper doll," was, her mother announced, fighting anorexia, in bad trouble, and associating with the wrong kids. "Failing school, missing classes," Felder added.
Inside the courtroom, Bruce couldn't believe his ears as his former wife offered up every one of Whitney's adolescent issues for inspection. "Her mother publicly came out with this stuff about her own child! You want to screw up a kid? There's a good way!" a family confidant recalls. The teenage Whitney, adds this friend, was "confused, furious, and upset" by her mother's decision to air her problems. There was also fear that the court's judges would be swayed by Giuliani's clout. "We're talking about an extremely powerful man here," Bruce worried aloud.
"My wife drinks often," Bruce had maintained for years. "She is a manipulator and a pathological liar and exaggerator." It was all fuel for the tabloids. Everything in Judi's life was.
"The newspapers talked about her $3,000 pocketbooks and all this stuff. None of this was true," says Felder. "No, she was a very prudent shopper who would go to the store and buy hundred-dollar copies of whatever." The lawyer recalls his client "switching outfits very carefully. She'd wear the dark pearls, not real ones, with the white blouse. She didn't have money."
And when she met Giuliani, Felder adds, he didn't have much money, either, "because Rudy was living on a mayor's salary"—$195,000 a year—"and had no inherited wealth, and was supporting his family very, very well." Giuliani's final settlement with Hanover obliged him to pay her $6.8 million. Prior to that arrangement, her lawyer told the press, she had seriously considered a trial, along with subpoenas to both Judith and Lategano.
The entire divorce battle was played out badly in the press. When Hanover sued to prevent Judith from entering Gracie Mansion, and also refused to move out with her children, Felder announced one bright Mother's Day that New York's resolute First Lady "will have to be dragged from the chain of the chandeliers in Gracie Mansion by the next mayor.… She doesn't care what happens to the children. She cares about getting her name in the paper and embarrassing the mayor and getting more movie roles."
"Yes, the children were upset," recalls a close confidant of the Giuliani kids, who is not referring simply to the unraveling of their parents' marriage. Far worse "was an application for Dad to allow Mrs. Nathan into Gracie Mansion. That kind of thing was very disconcerting to everyone."
In the midst of all this family strife came 9/11: the deaths, the turmoil, the necessary absences and preoccupations of the Giuliani children's father.
Judith tried valiantly to fill this vacuum: "When Andrew had a football game in New Jersey, say, and Rudy would have to appear on ABC, it would be Judith who'd be the one pushing to make sure the schedule was set up so he could go to Andrew's game, and I know this for a fact," says one former aide who in other respects can be critical of Judith. "Caroline—she wouldn't want her to miss dinner with her father, so Judith made sure his schedule would accommodate that dinner." A pause. "She could be a ***** to everybody else but not to his kids."
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There were other efforts at reaching out. Soon after the Twin Towers fell, Judith volunteered at the Family Assistance Center, on Pier 94. When Paul O'Neill of the Yankees came by, Judith got the star right fielder to sign a ball, which she then gave to the teenage Andrew, "as a way of making peace," says Manny Papir, a former Giuliani deputy chief of staff.
None of Judith's efforts, however, proved to be of much consequence—and some, like her recent Christmas gifts of Bibles to the Giuliani kids, have backfired, I am told. According to a number of Giuliani's good friends, the former mayor insists on Judith's presence at events for his offspring—and when this demand is thwarted, he doesn't attend. He was not present, they say, at Andrew's graduation from St. Joseph Regional High School in New Jersey. Now 21 and a Duke University junior, the son tells friends he doesn't speak to Rudy, according to one of his classmates—this at a time when his father is desperate to attract conservative, family-values backing.
Just recently, after explaining to The New York Times that he would not help his father campaign for the presidential nomination, Andrew cited, among other issues, his stepmother, with whom, he said, "there's obviously a little problem."
"Andrew was really siding with his sister, Caroline, here," says a source friendly to Giuliani. "Caroline is silent, but she was very traumatized by the divorce." Two sources who know the family well tell me that Rudy is more attentive to Whitney than he is to his own children. At Caroline's recent graduation, from New York's Trinity School, Rudy and Judith sat in the last row of the balcony and left 10 minutes before the two-hour ceremony ended.
Despite the messy divorces, Judith worked very effectively in the aftermath of 9/11. "For four months she was right in there with [police commissioner] Bernie Kerik, [fire commissioner] Tommy Von Essen, and Richie Sheirer, who headed emergency management," reports one observer, who recalls she sat in on about half the meetings. "We went through the phase where we had to change the operation from rescue to recovery.… You know—you have to come to a decision that, frankly, everyone is dead. There's no one to save."
Judith, this former city employee says, quickly pitched in with "You may want to talk to someone in psychological services about that—how to get the message across to the families." Three mental-health specialists came to the operation command center, at Pier 92, to discuss the best ways of communicating terrible news. Those assembled found Judith's ideas valuable. During those difficult days, she was also extremely solicitous of Giuliani. "It started during his cancer, actually. But after 9/11, even more, she was watching his food, his care, his sleep. She was smack-dab in the middle of it," says a top aide from that era. "You couldn't have asked for anything more. If she was a nuisance at the time, I'd be the first to say it, but it was sincere caring."
No one was surprised when Giuliani presented her, one year later, with a $20,000 Ceylon sapphire-and-diamond ring, selected by the bride-to-be at a store in Atlanta, to which she had flown with one New York City police officer. What did astonish friends was the venue where the couple exchanged vows before 400 guests: the lawn of Gracie Mansion, with Mayor Bloomberg officiating. On May 24, 2003, Andrew Giuliani (as best man), Whitney Nathan (as maid of honor), Vera Wang, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, and Donald Trump all witnessed Judith triumph at Donna's old home. "It was definitely Judith's idea to have it at Gracie," a close confidant tells me. "Rudy—he doesn't give a **** about clothes, bags, suits, or where he gets married."
Judith, on the other hand, clearly put special thought into the occasion. The train of her pale Vera Wang dress was studded with Swarovski crystals; on her dark-red hair perched a Fred Leighton diamond-and-pearl-encrusted tiara.
"There is a reason why she wore that tiara at her wedding: she really does see herself as a princess," says another former Giuliani aide. "Not as a queen. Queen is her goal. Queen is who she wants to be."
Queenly is certainly what Judith became, her demands and expectations heightened in large part by her husband's new affluence. Giuliani Partners (where she maintains an office) was established five years ago with the help of Giuliani's onetime chief of staff Anthony Carbonetti. It is a firm with management-consulting and security divisions; its clients, as The Washington Post reported, include Purdue Pharma, which hired the firm while being investigated by the D.E.A. and the F.D.A. over deaths stemming from the misuse of its painkiller OxyContin, and the Florida-based Seisint, Inc., which produces a data-mining product. Since Giuliani Partners' inception, the newspaper also reported, it has earned more than $100 million.
This is not the couple's only means of support. At least until recently, Giuliani has been raking in the speaking-engagement fees. Those willing to pay the former mayor $100,000 a speech (and to foot the $36,000 bill for a Gulfstream IV charter) also were contractually obligated to accommodate his wife: "Please note that when arranging your seating, Judith Giuliani must be seated directly next to him." This demand was not confined to paid events. Some years ago at a Hamptons July Fourth party thrown by the journalist Lally Weymouth, two guests were astonished to learn that Judith was in a snit after discovering she and Rudy were at separate tables.
She has become used to getting her way. An organizer of a recent fashion shoot received a call from one of Rudy's business associates warning her to address his wife as Judith. According to this source, Judith became so smitten with the dress she was modeling "that she simply didn't want to take it off. She didn't offer to pay. She made it very clear she wanted it for free. You know how it is when someone stalls." Instead, says this source, Judith kept repeating a kind of mantra: "I'm a sample size, I'm a sample size."
The fashion insider sighs. "But the problem was the dress was a sample, and the designer's only sample. But she was very persistent. We had almost a metaphorical tugging of the dress away!" And not just that dress. "There were a number of items she tried on she wanted. There was greed in the air. We finally brokered a deal with the designer to give her some sort of discount for the dress."
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Around the office of Giuliani Partners, it is said, Sunny Mindel, Giuliani's communications director, spoke of the need for providing an entire plane seat for Judith's "Baby Louis"—a reference to her Louis Vuitton handbag, which sits in solitary splendor on her travels.
If Giuliani's third wife became less popular as time went on, it was in part due to the feeling that she had a private list of Rudy loyalists she wanted fired. "The atmosphere is slippery, but not always venomous," says one. "You just realize there's an agenda there: she's worming her way in so she can push you out." Papir, for instance, was fired five years ago after word got around that he had called Judith a "princess" behind her back. But there are others, two sources say, of whom she patently disapproves. "Kate Anson, his scheduler, and this was the person who was so nice to her—everyone likes her!" says one Giuliani friend, holding up fingers to enumerate those of whom Judith disapproves. "Matt Mahoney [now deputy senior political adviser]—he loves Rudy. And Tony Carbonetti too, that's the other person Judith hates.… He would never be confrontational. His job is Rudy." A shrug. "Anyone supportive of him, close to him—Judith wants them fired. A lot of the senior staff … She just gets furiously jealous and treats them like **** !"
And her ire is apparently not confined to staff. "Listen. She can be very, very abrasive. At him!" says a close friend. There have been blowups, say those who have witnessed them, and obtuse demands. Some years ago on a plane to Japan, Judith became so angry at her husband, says a close Giuliani friend, that Rudy, who "couldn't take it anymore," moved to the back of the aircraft, switching places with an advance man.
In a massive Baden-Baden hotel suite five years ago, an observer tells me, a loud quarrel erupted when Judith pointedly denied one of her husband's requests. She refused to remove her toiletries case from a bedroom reserved for a policeman, claiming it would be bothersome, since the case was already unpacked. In Mexico, I am told, at a time when security was very tight and armored S.U.V.'s were deemed necessary, she asked her husband to leave the car to retrieve a bag of health bars she had mislaid.
There are also, of late, large expenses: a Palm Beach house Rudy bought for the elder Stishes, and other lavish purchases by Judith. Around New York, reporters are hearing that she recently spent $40,000 in a week. "Driving him crazy" is the phrase used.
There have been public missteps as well. In April, for example, she spoke before fellow Republicans of her unrivaled ability "to pick up the phone as Judith Giuliani" to get charitable contributions, at which point the tabloids made a meal of what they perceived to be her vainglory. However, it was clearly a phrase that came from Judith's heart: a tribute less to herself than to the clout of her husband, to whom she is indebted for whatever power she holds, for however long she holds it.
The position of "Mrs. Giuliani" has not historically been a secure post. Although the candidate has lately been warned by advisers to avoid any hint of scandal, there is a sense that perhaps he is not listening. "Does a leopard change its spots?" says one close friend. Recently, Starr Shephard, a Texan who informs me she used to be on the "U.S. world team of rhythmic twirling gymnastics," emerged in The National Enquirer, which ran a story suggesting she might be a Giuliani love interest. "I am not having an affair with Rudy Giuliani. I do not need a political power stick," the 36-year-old redhead says when I call her. "I believe in his vision and his voice even if I do not believe in his family."
"What do you mean by that?" I wonder.
"Oh, you know, you hear things about his family," she replies.
"God Bless America for his power," Shephard writes on MySpace. Beneath a photo of herself and Rudy there is a promise that he will "advance our one nation under God."
Naturally, Judith is on her guard. "And who are you?" she inquired of an attractive and prominent Republican woman who embraced her husband during a chance encounter in a New York restaurant. The woman marvels at such behavior. ("I felt like saying, 'Really, it's O.K.! I love my husband!'" she recalls.) But who can blame Judith?
"They're all there to stay," says Papir. "Until they're gone. And the staff usually knows before they do. And we hear the footsteps."
There have been other moments of vulnerability. At the close of the May Republican debate, Judith leapt onstage eagerly, her face beaming with delight. Giuliani, it was noted, appeared strangely disconcerted. "It did not look like he was happy to see her. It looked to me like he was estranged," says Barrett. "He was cold."
It was in the ladies' room before the event that observers got a telling glimpse of the real Judith. She had gone there to touch up her makeup when some of her husband's staff informed her Giuliani was in the vicinity, walking by.
"He's out there! Coming by!" repeated Judith, her voice tense with excitement. And then a plea: "Tell him to wait for me!"
"Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased." - C.S. Lewis
"The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul."
~George Sand
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