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Politics

Silda Wall Spitzer is the latest to put on a brave face

It's hard to pinpoint what motivates wives of disgraced leaders to stand by their men.

By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer
Published March 12, 2008

Gov. Eliot Spitzer with his wife Silda Wall Spitzer.
	[AP photo]

Here stands another wife in the white lights, stoic, silent, so close to her sullied husband the fabric on her jacket rubs against his suit coat.

The cameras roll. He is sometimes stern, sometimes apologetic, never unaccompanied.

This plays out time and again in politics and pop culture, as predictable as a parade. Suzanne and Larry Craig. Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker. Vanessa and Kobe Bryant.

This time it's Silda Wall Spitzer, wife of New York's Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer, on Monday afternoon, wearing pearls and looking down.

And we wonder: What is she thinking?

Silda Spitzer has three daughters and a Harvard degree. How must it feel to stand (be dragged?) before America as your husband faces revelations that he paid $4,300 in cash for a hooker?

In the totally scripted post-scandal news conference, the role of the politician's wife is puzzling.

In real life, scandals play out in bedrooms. Pier 1 lamps fly. The shouting spills onto the lawn and maybe a few neighbors catch wind.

And there it stays.

This is public with a capital P. The wives are as much a part of the saga as the husbands who dragged them into it.

What a wife brings to the situation is context.

"What would the consequence be if his wife were not there?" asked Michael Levine, a public relations expert who has represented stars such as Barbra Streisand, Suzanne Somers and Demi Moore. "It would be pretty dire. Would it not create an impression that his wife has abandoned him at this time?"

What's in it for her? Does she stand there at the pleading of the political script-writers? In the interest of protecting her children? To guard her family's financial security?

Is she angry?

"I am angry, I am hurt and I am disappointed," said Carlita Kilpatrick, as she sat next to Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who had apologized amid a scandal over sexually explicit text messages to one of his aides. "But there is no question that I love my husband."

There always seems to be an astonishing level of control, even if the rage is just beneath the surface.

"I am afraid that if I start throwing things, I won't stop," Dina Matos McGreevey told Diane Sawyer, after her husband, New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, announced that he is gay.

"What I want you to know is that I love my husband," Gayle Haggard wrote to the women of the church her husband, Ted, led before his affair with a male prostitute was made public. "I am committed to him until 'death do us part.'"

It's easy to guess what we would do.

Ask Shannon Coats, 30, who took her daughter to dance Tuesday at Soulful Arts Dance Academy in St. Petersburg:

"I would not have supported him in any way. I would definitely not be standing there with him in front of America."

But what plays in private doesn't always play in public.

A Newhouse News Service reporter asked Wendy Vitter in 2000: If your husband were unfaithful, would you be as forgiving as Hillary Rodham Clinton?

"I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary," Wendy Vitter said. "If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me."

Last summer, her husband, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, acknowledged his number appears on the telephone records of D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Her husband is still intact. So is her marriage.

"David is my best friend," she said when the story broke. "Some people said to me they wouldn't want to be in my shoes. I stand before you to say I am proud to be Wendy Vitter."

Effi Barry sat through every day of the 1990 trial of her husband, former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry, who was caught on tape buying crack and seeking sex from an FBI informer. Effi Barry died of leukemia last September.

"I think (the political wife) knows going in that their lives are not private and if anything were to happen, she wouldn't be able to react in the way that a typical citizen might," said Christine Scodari, a professor in the school of communication and media studies at Florida Atlantic University. "There's a bargain that's made."

Watching Silda like everyone else, Dina McGreevey knew how she felt. "She's ridiculed and shamed in front of virtually the entire world," McGreevey told CNN. "She's not only dealing with her own personal pain, but trying to protect her daughters from this."

On Monday, Eliot Spitzer was trying to save himself.

His wife, whether by love, duty or bargain, stood beside him, so close their shoulders touched.

Times researcher Will Gorham contributed to this report. Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8650.

[Last modified March 12, 2008, 07:11:07]