Esquire Magazine, October 1997

See also: What I've Learned: Rudy Giuliani

A sign out front says, MEET THE MAYOR, and there's a picture of Rudy Giuliani smiling his ghoulish public smile, with his cavernous dimples and aspirin-white teeth. The grin is utterly horizontal, a perfect straight line, as though a ruler and a razor together had cut it into his face. Five hundred people have gathered inside the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx, and Giuliani is standing before them, above them, on a stage. He is wearing a black suit. Everything about him is peremptory, except that his shoulders are sort of sad and hunched and his hair, which is gelled or glued down, is cupping his head like a small helmet. The air is warm and damp, and way back on the stage, arranged in a semicircle, a row of wilting city commissioners is fanned out behind the mayor like his own traveling glee club. Giuliani has them appear at all his town-hall meetings -- though "town hall" seems the wrong term for it, suggesting a sunshiny Bill Clinton feel-in. This is the Rudy Show -- exhilarating, primal, bloody.

Giuliani admits later that when he's doing these public Q&A things, town halls or radio shows, he's thinking: The people griping to me are right about half the time -- and I'm right the other half. Tonight, though, right seems more on Rudy's side. The first question is about the Yankees. An older man, possibly retired, suggests it's costing too much to keep the baseball team from moving out of the borough. This hits a nerve. Giuliani has been a die-hard Yankees fan since childhood. "Sports teams are tremendously important to the city's economy," Giuliani responds with a hint of disbelief in his voice. It is clear right off: The guy is wrong. The dodgers were lost to L.A. in 1957 because the city refused to build a new stadium for them, Giuliani says. The Giants defected to San Francisco. The Jets left because the city wouldn't fix up the bathrooms at Shea Stadium. "No city in America," he says, "has the terrible record we do of driving out sports teams."

Complaints, questions, all manner of lament follow -- the Bronx has 1.2 million people, and every one, it seems, is fixated on some bolt of the vast, wheezing machine. An incinerator plant, a filtration plant, garbage, bus schedules, two questions about the possible expansion of the Russian mission's housing, and rent control. Giuliani is quick to answer. Sometimes, he's quick to help with names and numbers, and the glee club comes in for backup. Other times, he's quick to assess that the questioner isn't right. The mayor is.

A woman complains about hospital cuts.

"What cuts specifically?" Rudy asks.

"Aren't there million-dollar cuts proposed?"

"For you to say we've cut their budget is unfair," Rudy says. "And I take some offense at your suggestion that cuts have affected the quality of care at these hospitals."

"But -- "

"Please! I didn't interrupt you. Don't interrupt me!"

Toward the end of the ninety-minute meeting, another woman steps up to the microphone. She is stoop-shouldered and unhappy-looking. She begins a long, seemingly endless story -- a tale of wrongdoing, a tale of woe, about how she and her two children were "illegally" evicted from their apartment in the Bronx. She's lost in the details, and her complaint doesn't seem to end or contain a narrative thread.

Rudy looks dumbfounded, possibly comatose, from listening carefully and trying to follow her. "I don't think I can figure out whether we can help you," he finally blurts. "Based on this discussion."

"Well, sir, you can help me get help," she says, kind of foggily. "What I understand when we talk about rent decontrol is we're talking about greed. Because we're not hearing about all the money that the governor has gotten or perhaps that you've gotten."

The room goes quiet.

"Thank you," the mayor says, with icy insincerity. "I'm glad to hear from you. And that was an enormously insulting thing to say. I listened to you very carefully, and for you to suggest that I would make a decision because I got money was enormously insulting. My integrity is important to me, as yours should be to you. Our conversation has ended."

Undaunted, perhaps disoriented, the woman continues talking.

"This conversation has ended!" Giuliani says to her.

A new questioner is handed a microphone. He begins, but the woman -- who is still standing -- yells out, "Good evening, lades and gentlemen! Goodnight!"

All is quiet. The mayor stares incredulously, his dark eyes boring into the woman's head. She bends down for her pocketbook and starts moving toward the door.

"I pride myself in displaying good judgment about people," Giuliani says to her back as she trudges down the aisle. His face has turned white. He's half smiling, too, that vaguely deranged smile. Two of his staff members, sitting below, shoot knowing looks to each other.

"Thank you for proving I was right!" Giuliani says. "And I'm glad we didn't help you."

The People v. Rudy

Behind his back, they compare him to Mussolini. He removed the homeless from the subways and hid them. Where are the homeless? you hear them saying. Those cope he's got control of, it's like a paramilitary force of thirty-eight thousand…. Poor Rudy Giuliani. Love is the unspoken part of the benefit package for mayors, right? Senators can be cerebral. Congressman are allowed to be nasty. Presidents should be dignified -- and inspiring. Mayors are supposed to love and be loved. You walk around your city. You do good. Tell me I'm good. Give me your hugs, your cheers, heap gratitude and devotion upon me. But it's not like that for the 107th mayor of New York City.

He's a uniquely dark figure on the national stage, so comfortable with his authority it scares people. He relishes power and stern discipline, and he doesn't seem ashamed to admit it. The tourists may be thankful, arriving in record numbers and dropping cash on Gotham. Washington may be eyeing him hopefully -- Giuliani's beginning to appear on lists of possible GOP candidates for president in 2000. And he will win again in November, be reelected mayor. But not without a certain amount of shame for the city's liberal populace. They are voting with bags over their heads, admitting it only to close friends. It would be so much easier if Rudy were not a Republican and were a different kind of guy -- somebody less fixated, less intense, somebody nicer -- a happy Macy's float to bob around like the beloved New York mayors of the past. But he wasn't raised for that.

His father bought him boxing gloves when he was two. When he was three and still living in Brooklyn, his father made him wear a Yankees uniform around the neighborhood, a taunt to Dodgers fans, who'd periodically beat him up.

"Deep down in my personality, I don't have any trouble with disagreement," Giuliani, now fifty-three, explains one morning, sitting in his city-hall office. "I love having people to disagree with." Safe inside his lair, no rivals in sight, the mayor is relaxed, easy to talk to. And seems hardly tortured at all. Except that he's come from the dentist, where he's just had and inlay done, and he keeps holding the side of his face.

"I've studied the careers of other politicians," he continues, "and they start off wanting to achieve things but lose courage. They become placaters of the popular mood instead of having confidence that your ultimate goal s correct and simply moving toward it."

He has been roundly booed on Martin Luther King Day for a couple of years running. During his second year as mayor, while he walked in a parade, the NYPD had to hold the giant piece of orange Day-Glo netting all the way around him -- shoulder high -- to keep tomatoes and eggs from landing on his cream colored suit. He's a racist, people said. Cutting government. Cutting welfare… Lately, things have been better. He gets hugged awkwardly by strangers sometimes -- after all, the subways are clean, welfare mothers are raking leaves in Central Park, Times Square has gone Disney, the mob has been rousted from the Fulton Fish Market. And murder is down 60 percent in New York City since he took office, which mean, exactly, that thousands of people are walking the streets alive who, given the statistics four years ago, would have been dead by now. But for many New Yorkers, it seems easier to believe that things are hopeless and their mayor is a creep. Otherwise, it messes with their bleak worldview. Crime isn't something you can do anything about -- it's caused by poverty and social injustice. He hasn't fixed a thing. He's made it worse. Am I right?

And if Bill Clinton is the model of a modern politician, then it's hard to wrap your arms around Rudy. He is the Anti-Clinton. No lip biting, no gushing, no God talk. He roams the Apple like an obsessed, hungry worm -- angry, secretive, misunderstood -- looking for graffiti to clean up, wounded cops to comfort, welfare frauds to lecture, filth and panhandlers to eradicate. Wrongs to right. Mobsters to squash. Enemies to destroy. Ever since he became a prosecutor years ago, he has toiled long hours, been job obsessed. As he puts it, "Work defines me." And now that he's got this mayor job, he's not about to start coasting. At night sometimes, instead of going home to Gracie Mansion or even sleeping, he makes the rounds of the city in an unmarked car, a dark and tortured crusader without a cape, forcing himself on the city whether the city wants it or not.

"He rules with an iron fist," says former mayor Ed Koch.

"He abuses power," he says.

"He's not a nice man," he says.

And, "I'll vote for him," Koch says finally, "with despair."

Even His Wife Hates Him

Meanwhile, in his office this morning, Rudy is upbeat, keeps talking "the spirit of New York." He's almost giddy when he carries on about how well his radical ideas have worked.

His mouth is still numb from novocaine, which accentuates his slight lisp. He's saying "spirit like "thpirit," over and over again, something like Daffy Duck or one of the dreaded Disney characters now haunting Times Square and ruining the ambience that so many New Yorkers claim they already miss. What happened to the hookers, the dealers, the used syringes? Poor Rudy with his big, corny preoccupation, his retro vision, his thpirit of the city. He's pathetically out of sync with the real New York, the dangerous, gritty metropolis now vanishing because of him.

His social grace is minimal. He can't schmooze, hold his cool, make a stranger feel comfortable, or get his wife to campaign for him. He won't kiss a voter's baby, either. He's more at ease throwing Yasir Arafat out of Lincoln Center (which he did). "I keep thinking this might be my last campaign," says his political consultant, Adam Goodman -- who at age forty-two is too young to give up the game. "Rudy is antithetical to the persona of a modern-day politician. And the thought of going back to representing some baby kisser is depressing to me."

Even his wife hates him. This is the other thing people talk about. While Rudy obsesses over the city, the people obsess over his marriage. Speculation was stirred up recently by a Vanity Fair article that claimed the marriage was all but over -- something the mayor and his wife aggressively denied. Still, a few years ago, she was calling herself Donna Hanover Giuliani, but not lately, not since she stopped appearing by Rudy's side, doing his TV ads -- stopped publicly being his wife. She's Donna Hanover now, her own person, and is a program host on the television Food Network in New York. "More seriously, she does studio segments several times a week for the local Fox TV station and makes movies now, too -- real acting -- and she's pretty good at it. she played Ruth Carter Stapleton in The People vs. Larry Flynt, and before it came out, she went on Conan O'Brien's show and never mentioned she was the mayor's wife. Neither did Conan. Hope you're writing about the marriage, people keep saying. What about the marriage?

On the Delta shuttle one morning from Washington, D.C., a GOP fundraiser sits next to me. I ask him what he things about Giuliani, and he lowers his head and begins whispering into his Hermes pocket square. "The word is she's threatening to leave him any second, he says. "Like, she might go before the election just to fuck him over." Welcome to politics. Welcome to New York City. Rudy can't get a little love even from a fellow Republican, from a man who has given him money.

The Major Hispanic

Rudy is on the steps of city hall, hugging Fernando Mateo. Today, he is holding his daily "press availability" outside. The weather is glorious -- billowing flags and blu skies and sunshine. A crowd of reporters has gathered.

Earlier this morning, Cristyne Lategano called me. She's the mayor's director of communications and perhaps his closest adviser, spending most of her waking hours by his side. "Martha, there's a press conference this morning at 10:30," she said in her abrupt style. "Another major Hispanic endorsement."

Major Hispanic. That was Mateo, the man Rudy has his arms around. He is a Dominican American businessman and community leader, smooth and handsome. He has talked about running for mayor himself one day -- and is now endorsing Giuliani because his first choice, Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president and a Democrat, has just dropped out of the mayoral race.

A breeze picks up around city hall. Mateo speaks. Giuliani speaks. Mateo could have endorsed the Democratic frontrunner, Ruth Messinger, but she is a weak candidate with little change of mounting a serious challenge to Rudy. "I'm supporting the mayor," Mateo says, "because I want to make sure that his message and all of the good he wishes for our community is achieved."

In the past, Mateo has been critical of the mayor. And in the past, Giuliani has refused to meet with Mateo. But now they are allies. It is a relationship not unlike the on Giuliani has with many men in his political and personal life. He is too adversarial and independent to be in anybody's political camp for good -- a point he stuck to Senator Alfonse D'Amato and the state Republican party when he supported Mario Cuomo over George Pataki in the last New York gubernatorial race. Rudy seems uncomfortable with the compromises party politics require. He's a pro-choice, pro-immigration, antigun liberal Republican. Giuliani likes being his own boss, and he is most relaxed around a group of compliant male cronies.

Rudy is looking right into Mateo's face and smiling his big jack-o-lantern grin. His brow is beading up with sweat. The sun feels strong. Tanning weather, and Rudy could use it. Mateo looks like a movie star: His suit is stylish; his hair is think and cut just right. Your heart goes out to Rudy. His appearance is a political handicap he's always trying to overcome, like a stutter, but never quite does. The moment of fluidity and elegance are but… moments. His shoulders slump. Though his dark pinstripe suits are expensive, they look like good suits wasted on the wrong guy. Something is weird about his hair, too. It's the most un-Kennedy hair you could have in politics. Newsweek called it "a bad comb-over," but more to the point, is it real?

I could hear the words of the GOP fundraiser on the shuttle still echoing inside my head. "So what about that rug?" he said.

"What rug?" I asked.

"Rudy's."

"That's not a rug. His wife was quoted somewhere saying his hair was real."

"His hair may be real," the guy said, "but it's not his."

I look up to the billowing flags, to the heavy white clouds drifting across the sky. Suddenly, I notice that everyone's hair is moving. Fernando Mateo's hair is moving. The Channel 9 reporter's hair is moving. Cristyne Lategano's wine-red hair is tied back, but rogue strands are circling her head like a halo. Everybody's hair but Rudy's hair, which is remaining strangely still. It defies nature. And whatever is going on, rug or weave or comb-over, it is courageously vain and emphatic. Like a challenge to the world.

Mateo's grammar is iffy in places, and he can't wax on smoothly about nothings the way Rudy can. This must relax Rudy some. Relationships with equals tend to be passionately competitive for him. He can share the stage but won't be upstaged. He's turned down several chances, for instance to focus on the revival of the Bronx because, Why help that fucking Freddy Ferrer? He's going to be running against me next time. His feuds are famous in the city -- with D'Amato, Koch, political consultant David Garth. (He's not on speaking terms with the last two.) He's shown that he has particular difficulty dealing with strong men who work for him. None more so than his former commissioner of police, William Bratton.

The mayor throws his arms around Mateo again, a big, outer-borough kind of embrace. "Thank you, Fernando," Rudy whispers loudly into his ear during the hug. "You did a great job, great job."

Bratton, Nemesis of Rudy

Rudy and Bill Bratton stood next to each other once, too -- with goodwill, declarations of devotion. "There was never a curse word between them," says Peter La Porte, one of Bratton's former deputies. But Bratton kept rubbing Giuliani the wrong way. He was a charismatic police commissioner and a handsome and flamboyant man. He went out at night -- had fun and made a big show of his fun. He also made friends with reporters, who started writing about him almost immediately. BRATTON BRINGS COMMUNITY POLICING TO THE APPLE. BRATTON TO END CRIME, BLOCK BY BLOCK. And BRATTON: "I'LL END THE FEAR." Wait. Who'll end it? Within a few weeks of Bratton's taking the job, the headlines were driving the mayor insane.

Peter Powers, the mayor's right-hand man, sat Bratton down: "Look, you don't know this guy, the mayor. I've known him all my life -- and you can't get away with this kind of thing. And if you can't rein it in, we'll find another police commissioner."

City hall also told John Miller, who was Bratton's deputy commissioner for public information, to keep his boss out of the papers and his face off TV. "It was quite clearly a directive from the mayor," says Miller. "I was told to 'shut Bratton down.' That was the phrase used." Miller was asked to fax city hall a list each morning of every media appointment the commissioner had scheduled that day. Occasionally, Miller was allowed to let his boss talk.

"And I'd always remind Bratton beforehand," Miller says, "remember the spiel: The mayor and I, the mayor and I, the mayor and I."

So Bratton and his deputy, Jack Maple, a colorful former transit cop, went about their business, trying to keep a low profile but not that low. They were starting to worry that their mayor was a "micromanaging control freak," as somebody put it, but at least they shared a vision with him -- of community policing, of getting cops closer to the neighborhoods they were protecting. Bratton and Maple worked on a gun strategy first, then a drug strategy, then a "quality of life" strategy -- figuring out ways to enforce previously unenforced laws against vagrancy and panhandling and how to stop the "squeegee men," who wiped car windshields at stoplights and then demanded money. Bratton and Maple were developing Compstat, too -- a computer system that tracks crime weekly by precinct and borough. Late at night, after a long day, they'd still wind up at a nightspot like Elaine's.

So, Bratton, when are you going to run for mayor? the reporters started asking.

Then came a flattering New Yorker profile of Bratton. It just slipped between the cracks. A fluke. And it spelled problems. It looked as if Bratton was setting himself up to get credit for the crime strategies, credit for the vision.

And then came the 150th anniversary of the NYPD. Bratton planned an elaborate celebration, a march up Broadway -- "the canyon of heroes" -- most of the force of thirty-eight thousand in uniform, with bagpipers and police bands. The mayor was briefed. "He was going to lead the parade," says one former police-department staffer. "Everything has had to be devised that way: How do we fit the mayor in? How do we get him some credits? Is he going to be happy with his role? City Hall was reviewing the plan when a New York paper wrote a story about the celebration, calling it "Bratton's Bash."

The parade was scheduled to take place on October 6, which happened to be the police commissioner's birthday. Another fluke, says the Bratton guys. A coincidence.

The parade plans were immediately cancelled -- "We don't coronate anybody in this city," says Peter Powers -- and within days Giuliani abruptly ordered the dismantling of Bratton's public-information office. Miller resigned, and thirty-five staffers under him were transferred. "Banished," says one former employee.

"The point I was making," Giuliani explains during a long conversation about Bratton, "is that the police department should not have a bigger publicity arm than the mayor's office or the White House. The point I was making was: If you have a question about who runs the police department , that's just been answered for you."

Bratton hung on for another year, long enough to see the crime figures come out. Murder was down 39 percent, auto theft down 35 percent. But then something happened that made it impossible for him to remain: He made the cover of Time, all alone, just him, no Rudy Giuliani, January of 1996: FINALLY, WE'RE WINNING THE WAR AGAINST CRIME. HERE'S WHY.

Within weeks, he resigned, and detectives at the police department were ordered to work overtime -- to locate all mentions of William Bratton on the NYPD website and obliterate them.

Is Ruthlessness a Bad Thing?

The Daily News described him as "an enigma." New York magazine called him "unlovable." The Bratton guys use the word "Nixonian." In a recent column in the New York Post, Ed Koch described Giuliani as "a ruthless control freak who governs by imposing a state of terror on members of his administration." Even mild-mannered former mayor David Dinkins denounced Rudy as a classic "type A personality." From the stories you hear, it would seem that in Rudy's perfect world he would be totally alone and in charge -- no rivals, no threats, no sharing of credit. All opposition reduced to dust.

"He's got to dominate. He's got to take you on, cut your throat. And vilify people," says Koch, sitting in his law office with his jacket off, surrounded by memorabilia and photos from his many years as mayor. Unlike Rudy, he has a lazy elegance to him, the schmoozy charm of a doting uncle. He and Giuliani became allies after 1989, when both lost to Dinkins -- and they had the mutual joy of watching the man who beat them make one blunder after another during his four years as mayor. He pandered. He was indecisive. No leadership. "A terrible mayor," says Koch.

Rudy has the opposite problem. "I am Caesar" is how Koch puts it. "He isn't loved. It seems he can't be loved." They're on the outs, following an ugly phone fight they had they had early last year. ("Don't interrupt me!" he said to Koch.)

He is an authoritarian -- and utterly convinced of his rightness. But is Rudy truly unlovable? Even when he dressed in drag with that blond wig with the cast of Victor/Victoria last March?

Over breakfast at Waldorf-Astoria, I sift through Rudy's psychological soil with Peter Powers. They've been best friends since high school, through years of Christian Brothers boys' school, through college and law school together. I want to know: How did a man like Rudy -- so apparently a tyrant, so widely disliked -- wind up mayor? How does he get endorsements from people who detest him? And how does he win a 60 percent approval rating in a city where Democrats rule five to one?

"To understand Rudy Giuliani," Powers says, "you just gotta see a guy focused on results. You either like the way he gets there or you don't."

The next morning, at the University Club, I ask Giuliani about his ambition, the charges of ruthlessness, that he plays politics like a blood sport. "Robert Kennedy was constantly attacked for being ruthless," he says calmly. "When I was a young person, I could never understand that. He had an objective to achieve, and as far as I could tell, he did it honestly but in a very strong way. And isn't that what you want from a leader?"

The Passions of Rudy

It's hard to know what's been most important to Rudy -- his work, his women, the Yankees, or opera. Opera drew him in magically. He was twelve or thirteen, all by himself, he remembers. "I was in Klein's department store on a Saturday afternoon, looking for a popular record -- I had a certain number of rock 'n' roll records," he says, as if to counter the mounting evidence that he was a nerd growing up, "and I wandered off to the classical section and bought three records at once: Handel's Julius Caesar, Verdi's La Traviata, and the 1812 Overture. And I went home and played them and fell in love."

He is still sitting in the University Club, talking about his life. His other life, the one that happens inside him, as opposed to the one that happens on the steps of city hall. His private thoughts, though, turn out also to be mostly about work. The love of his job. The joy of accomplishment. Winning. It is not surprising to learn that he is an only child or that his mother doted on him. She was a "frustrated teacher," Rudy says, "and I became her single student." But if his mother was doting, his father, who ran a bar in Brooklyn, saw to it that Rudy didn't turn out weak.

"He was a tough guy," Rudy says. "He never hit me. Now, there was a fear of that, because he was a strong man and a boxer who had terrific punch."

Rudy married his second cousin, Regina Peruggi, in 1968 but was too young and work obsessed, he says now. Precisely -- he wanted to be U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York. "It was," he says, "the culminations of all my ambition and desires." As an assistant U.S. attorney, he ran a special investigative "corruption" unit that uncovered polices officers who were selling heroin. The investigation resulted in nearly fifty convictions and a Hollywood movie, Prince of the City. Although he grew up as a Kennedy Democrat, he took Republican jobs in Washington -- first with the Ford administration, and later, in 1981, the year before his first marriage ended, he became the third-ranking official at the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan.

He met Donna Hanover in the early eighties in Miami. She was a television reporter, and he proposed to her at Disney World. They have been married since 1984, throughout Giuliani's six-year tenure as the most aggressive and successful U.S. attorney in the history of New York.

Critics said he was brash and overzealous, image obsessed, and neglectful of cases that weren't high profile. Donna was raising a family while Rudy was busy busting New York City officials for bribery, Fat Tony Salerno for racketeering, and Wall Street brokers for insider training.

"My own father worked long hours," Rudy says when asked if he got home much between the years 1983 and 1989. "He worked nights, too, and I didn't see him as much as I'd have liked, but the time I did see him, he had a big impact on me…"

Donna Hanover is not talking much these days. She is said to be focusing on her own career. But it seems impossible not to be curious about the marriage, give Donna's refusal to participate in even the most modest displays of spousal support. Rudy seems careful, and a bit rehearsed, when he is asked about his wife. "Yes, we're staying together," he answers quickly. "We do personal things together. We went and watched our son play baseball yesterday. But we try to do that as privately as possible. … I think when people see two separate careers, they assume the marriage must be in trouble. People will gossip about almost anything."

What he doesn't say, of course, is We're happy. I love her. When asked what brings him the most joy in life, he says the renovation of Forty-second Street and being with his kids.

Sitting behind him as he says this is Cristyne Lategano. She is nodding along in agreement with the discussion of Giuliani's marriage and how it's not over. Sepparate careers. Yes. Nod, nod. Smile. Lategano. thirty-two, is a solid, no-nonsense sort of beauty. She is tough but personable and seems to own a number of double-breasted pinstripe suits just like Rudy's.

In the first year, Lategano was thought to be in over her head. She was known for browbeating reporters, trying to get stories killed, keeping an enemies list. Also, on the more ridiculous side, she allowed the mayor to be videotaped, for a 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters, Rollerblading clumsily around Central Park, wearing hiked-up Levi's and a rather oversize crash helmet. But Lategano proved herself to be smart and politically adept. She endured a New York magazine cover story ("Why Does Everybody Hate This Woman?") and this summer's Vanity Fair piece that dwelled breathlessly on speculation that she was having an affair with the mayor. Neither article produced evidence of such a relationship, but the persistence of the gossip reflects how central a figure she has become in the administration. One former official has called the relationship simply "an affair of the spirit."

While platonic affairs of the spirit between a politician and a key aide are common in Washington, it seems New Yorkers don't know what to make of Rudy and Cristyne. The speculation about an affair is awfully sexist, but the rumor seems to escalate in proportion to Hanover's distance. People seem to forget that Dennison Young, the man who handled Giuliani's press when he was U.S. attorney, also never left his side.

Could We Ever Love This Man?

The mayor has, uncharacteristically, decided to cancel his appointments for the afternoon. It is Tiger Woods Day. Or, at least, the mayor proclaimed it Tiger Woods Day just minutes ago, after Woods arrived at Randall's Island -- tucked away between Queens and East Harlem -- to give a golf clinic to city kids. There's a sports center and trees and grass. It's such a nice day. Maybe we could all just stop here, in the shade, and talk, Cristyne suggests. Take some downtime. Take a break. And the mayor might hit a few balls in the batting cage.

Earlier, I noticed that Tiger Woods has a perfectly round head, like a soccer ball. Impossibly, perfectly round. Head shape is an interesting thing, and it seems important on TV, important on a movie screen. You have to have a certain head shape, or you look like a freak or a weakling. It is particularly important in politics, I have observed over the years -- there are only certain head shapes that allow you to rule effectively. Most senators have really big heads, Ted Koppel-size heads. The bigger the head, the better, and Rudy's -- I couldn't help but notice -- is large and quite senatorial also. Blockish. Square. He has a very strong jaw, too. Almost sweet eyes. His forehead is big and high.

We find an empty spot and settle under a white tent, leaning back in two plastic chars on the grass. There's a breeze, and Rudy looks very cool and relaxed. He takes his jacket off. His eyes become large and relaxed and open. He drinks a cold Diet Coke. I raise the subject of Bill Bratton. Rudy's face says, Oh, him. He went to Elaine's too much, Rudy says, and it looked bad -- "I thought the emphasis on the heavy nightlife, the drinking, did not give the kind of image the police department that it needed." Bratton was restless to leave government and "make a million dollars," he says. He took trips to exotic places, and his millionaire friends paid for them, Rudy says. "Trips here, trips there. Those things were troubling," he says. "You lead by example, or you really don't lead."

Bratton later declines to respond on the record and makes it clear he doesn't want to get into a pissing match with the mayor. Besides, he's got a book coming out next winter.

Rudy is smiling. "There's never been a mayor who understands the psyche of the police department the way I do," he says. "I think Bill did some good things, but some of those strategies were things I came up with. The squeegee operation -- totally my idea. The emphasis on quality of life -- my idea …"

A list was starting, a case was being mounted. Credit. He wants more credit. And I was finally getting with the program. Fine. Okay. Take some credit, Rudy. No, take it all. Take it all, and run with it. Rudy, you did everything. You arrested every criminal, cleaned up every street. Thought every thought. It was you, all you!

I could see it very clearly now, too: He is a megalomaniac, a despot, a monster. But his certainty is exhilarating; his control, a relief. So what if the schools are a disaster and the city economy still rises and falls with Wall Street? "Even after I'd figured out he was a lunatic," says one former staffer, "I'd meet with him in person and think, God, what a brilliant, rational man. I'd be agreeing with everything he said and then I'd leave the room, hitting my head."

His awful spell is inescapable. And if I were living in New York… Yes, okay, it's true -- I'd vote for him. I could even love him.

Rudy heads to the batting cages. He's got his suit jacket thrown over his shoulder and swinging from his index finger. The cages are marked SLOW, MEDIUM, and FAST. He opens the door to the first cage. He picks up a metal bat, bends his knees, and the balls starts coming. One, two … He doesn't miss. "This is slow?" he asks incredulously. "There isn't a single kid in my son's Little League who can hit a pitch like this." Nine, ten, eleven. He hasn't missed one. The balls are coming at fifty-five miles per hour.

Rudy moves to the medium cage. This time, he puts on a red helmet. One, two, three. No misses. The balls are coming at seventy miles per hour, and they hit the metal bat with a horrible throng-ing sound, a sharp zing-ing-ing that stays in your ears. A crowd of park security guards and boys is gathering. When the mayor makes contact, the boys whoop, and a spontaneous smile, a real smile, appears on Rudy's face.

"Even people who disagree with him appreciate that he's in charge," says Larry Mone, president of the Manhattan Institute -- the think tank where Rudy got so many of his ideas. "His executive leadership is a big part of his popularity. … Why couldn't he run directly for president?"

Next, the eighty-mile-per-hour cage. The balls come so fast you can see them for only a fraction of a second before they are upon the mayor, right at his bat. He misses only two out of fifteen or twenty balls. When it looks as if he's finished for the day, he starts to remove the red helmet. He takes one hand and begins pulling, then realizes he needs two hands to take it off.

I am standing directly behind him, just a few feet away, as he pulls it off. The sunlight is harsh, unforgiving. And suddenly, all the answers come to me, fly my way. I am able to comprehend the entire design of Rudy's hair, the scheme, the architecture, the beginning to the end -- from the roots coming directly out of his scalp at the back of his head to the long, soft hair as it swoops over the left side of his head, bends, then come around the crown to its ultimate conclusion just above the right ear.

Rudy's hair is totally real, refreshingly real. Fabulously and relievingly and reassuringly real.

Sweaty and smiling, he eyes the last batting cage. "Ninety miles per hour," one of the par officials tells him.

The last cage. The fastest cage.

"I've got to try this," Rudy says.

"The crowd is shaking their heads. No, no, Mr. Mayor. You'll kill yourself.

He heads behind the Cyclone fencing, closes the cage door behind him.

"You're brave, Mr. Mayor!" somebody shouts.

And he hits one over the roof.

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