His daughter is voting for Obama, his son won't campaign, and his third wife was a 'professional puppy killer'. Marion McKeone, in New York, reports on Rudy Giuliani's domestic troubles.
Last Sunday, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton's former press secretary turned ABC political pundit, posed the following question to each of the Republican presidential candidates: "What is the defining mistake in your life, and why?"
"It took me 30 years to realise Jesus Christ is my personal saviour," Tom Tancredo simpered, while Sam Brownback went one better, blubbering: "Not telling my wife and kids and parents I love 'em enough." Rudy Giuliani, who is currently leading the field of Republican candidates, drew in a deep breath. "To have a description of my mistakes in 30 seconds . . . " He paused, then grinned ruefully and shook his head.
It was a moment of levity during an orgy of predictable political pandering. But Giuliani wasn't kidding.
Wags have joked that his political mistakes started with his first marriage to his second cousin and culminated with his daughter from his second marriage publicly declaring her support for Democratic candidate Barack Obama because she hates his third wife so much.
His teenage daughter's declaration of support for Obama on her profile on the Facebook networking website followed his son's declaration to the New York Times that, even if he had the time, he wouldn't be campaigning for his father. It's an open secret in New York circles that the Giuliani children loathe their stepmother, who has been painted as Cruella de Vil meets Lady Macbeth.
Campaign strategists have been preparing to handle this political hot potato since Giuliani entered the presidential fray. Traditionally, White House candidates present pristine, "happy family" portraits to the public for the duration of the race. Since John F Kennedy, would-be White House occupants have unashamedly used their wives and children as campaign props. Usually, family fissures can be politically airbrushed for the duration of the campaign, but not in the case of New York's famously combustible former mayor. And it's not just his estranged children who dislike his new wife. His advisers fret that, as the campaign intensifies, she will become an increasing liability.
Ambitious, grasping, extravagant with her demands, but singularly economical with the truth, Judith Nathan Giuliani carries a lot of baggage for a potential first lady.
There is no question that she possesses considerable powers of persuasion. But so far they have failed to win over potential voters or Giuliani family members.
When she was a saleswoman for medical supply company US Surgical, she left her competitors at the starting blocks. She could sell lipstick to lab rats. Her sales figures were off the charts. This, apparently, is part of the problem. According to one longtime Giuliani adviser, "she acts like she's always trying to close a deal. What made her a good saleswoman makes her a bad campaigner. You can't browbeat undecided voters."
Her biography, as supplied by Giuliani's press office, details her qualifications as a nurse, philanthropist and fundraiser for various children's charities and Aids and cancer research foundations. But it omits her decade-long stint as what animal welfare groups describe as a "professional puppy killer". While she worked for US Surgical during the 1980s, she demonstrated products, including scalpels and staplers, on laboratory dogs, which were killed afterwards.
Defending the controversial practice, Nathan's former boss, US Surgical chief executive Leon Hirsch told Time Magazine: "A dead dog doesn't bleed. You need to have real blood-flow conditions or you get a false sense of security."
Giuliani spokesman Michael McKeon said that Judith Giuliani was in the operating room "probably hundreds of times, using her nursing skills and training doctors in stapling techniques". He conceded the techniques where honed on live dogs.
With the September edition of Vanity Fair running an extensive - and apparently deeply unflattering - profile of Judith Nathan, the damage-limitation wing of the Giuliani camp has gone into overdrive. One editorial source at Vanity Fair says the feature doesn't drop any new bombshells; rather, it puts together information that is already in the public domain; the damaging career details, the demands, the tantrums, past infidelities, and relentless ambition. "It's like a join-the-dots profile, and the picture is not pretty," he says.
RUDY AND JUDITH Giuliani are not your conventional Republican couple.
Between them they have notched up six marriages, a little higher than the prescribed number for the God-fearing, family-values-obsessed voters that will select the Republican candidate for the 2008 presidential race. In the case of their respective first marriages, Rudy Giuliani married his second cousin and subsequently had the marriage annulled on the grounds that he hadn't realised it was a little too close for comfort.
For her part, Judith Giuliani forgot she had ever married her first husband, medical salesman Jeffrey Ross. It took a lot of not-so-gentle prodding from reporters before she said it had somehow slipped her mind that as a 19-year-old they had eloped to Las Vegas. The marriage ended in divorce after five years.
Each of them has been involved in spectacular divorce proceedings.
The orgy of mud-slinging that dogged Giuliani's divorce from his second wife Donna Hanover, could perhaps have been minimised had he informed her of his intention to divorce before he announced it at a press conference. The all-out war that followed fuelled front-page tabloid headlines for months. No accusation was too shocking; no bedroom secret too lurid; no demand too preposterous.
When Judith divorced her second husband, Bruce Nathan, her divorce was almost as ugly, as both parties battled for custody of their adopted daughter.
DESPITE, OR PERHAPS because of their turbulent personal lives, Rudy and Judy miss few opportunities to publicly declare their adoration of each other. Nathan has repeatedly told reporters the third time is the charm. "My husband is so brilliant he can read two books at once," she announced during a Hello-style photo shoot at their $4 million (€2.9 million) Hamptons summer home.
Their public displays of affection would better suit a couple of teenagers on a sofa. A recent Harper's Bazaar photo shoot showed them locked in a cringe-inducing series of passionate embraces.
They constantly refer to each other as "baby" during press briefings; a few months back he raised eyebrows when he said he would allow his wife to sit in on Cabinet meetings if he became president.
Despite the best efforts of the campaign team, Judith Giuliani's public image has been damaged largely by her own hand. She has been evasive and untruthful about her past life, and can be difficult and demanding on the campaign trail, behaving more like a Hollywood diva than a first-lady-in-waiting. When she flies with her husband, she requests a separate seat for her Louis Vuitton handbag.
One widely-circulated tale concerns her behaviour at the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when Hillary Clinton was shoved out of the way by four NYPD officers, who were hurriedly escorting Judith Giuliani into the VIP area in time to hear her then fiance speak. "The nerve of that woman," a furious Clinton allegedly spluttered. "Who does she think she is?"