Rudy's 'princess bride' wants to be a queen, former aide says
According to an expansive profile of Rudy Giuliani's wife in September's Vanity Fair, the former pharmaceutical sales representative's lifelong dream seemed to be to move to New York City and become famous.
After a lengthy affair with the former mayor while he was still married to his second wife, Judith Stish Ross Nathan Giuliani recited her third set of matrimonial vows at Gracie Mansion in 2003, and Vanity Fair profiler Judy Bachrach notes a suspected motive behind her fashion choices at the wedding.
"There is a reason why she wore that tiara at her wedding: she really does see herself as a princess," a former Giuliani aide told the magazine. "Not as a queen. Queen is her goal. Queen is who she wants to be."
The 19th century pearl-and-diamond encrusted tiara, lent to her by Fred Leighton's jewelry store, was worth somewhere in between $60,000 and $90,000, and Judith's decision to wear it raised some eyebrows at the time.
"Wearing that sparkling tiara was a former-mistress-now-wife's equivalent of doing an elaborate touchdown jig," observed the Washington Post's fashion critic Robin Givhan, who recently critiqued Senator Hillary Clinton's cleavage in a controversial column.
The Vanity Fair piece also explores a run-in between Mrs. Giuliani and Sen. Clinton which transpired during a commemoration of the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11.
"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," Bachrach reports.
Clinton was apoplectic at the perceived slight.
"'The nerve of that woman!' Hillary exploded, recalling that her own daughter's Secret Service detail evaporated soon after Bill Clinton left office," Bachrach reports. "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."
In her article, Bachrach employs some unflattering quotes from a longtime critic of the GOP presidential candidate, but identifies him as simply a "Giuliani biographer." Since the nineties, journalist Wayne Barrett has criticized the former mayor in a number of Village Voice articles and columns, plus two books he authored.
Barrett is used to back up the Vanity Fair profiler's observation that there may be cracks in Rudy and Judith Giuliani's marriage because the Republican presidential candidate appeared "strangely disconcerted" when his wife embraced him after a recent debate.
"It did not look like he was happy to see her. It looked to me like he was estranged," says Barrett. "He was cold."
NY Post gossip column Page Six characterized the Vanity Fair article as a "hatchet job" for painting Judith Giuliani as some sort of "an opportunistic, puppy-killing homewrecker."
|