The Giulianis' Bleak House Rudy and Donna should both move out of Gracie "Put two dollars on the wife, two on the oldest boy and two on the little girl. I guarantee you'll win." Fiorello LaGuardia, farewell address, Jan. 30, 1945 On this hot, still May afternoon, the yellow white-trimmed facade of Gracie Mansion seemed chilly and remote. There were nine cars parked in the cobblestoned driveway and a policeman working a telephone inside the guardhouse, but the grounds gave off a rancid sense that something here had died. Out beyond the double barrier of ivy-draped wood and painted iron pickets, out past the border of the mayor's home, which is also the home of his wife and children, life went on. . In the dark green shadows of Carl Schurz Park, a father tossed a ball with his 10-year-old son. In brilliant patches of sun, a dozen solitary sunbathers basted on towels, oiling their bodies, chatting away on cell phones. On a bench, a young couple played with an infant. An old hippie came by on Rollerblades, gray ponytail bobbing. A cool breeze blew from Hell Gate, combing tall, plump trees. But Gracie Mansion seemed disconnected from all this quiet simplicity. A citizen looking through windows could see only dark, silent rooms. The humps of empty chairs. No laughter. No childish shouts. No woman's pleased giggle. Everyone Knows Everyone who passed the mansion had surely seen the newspapers and read the vile accusations of the mayor's divorce lawyer and the anonymous assurances of a Giuliani "friend" that the poor man is impotent from chemo. Most probably laughed, since nothing sets off laughter faster than news of intelligent people acting like idiots. Most also probably uttered a sentence like the one I heard from a dozen friends and a few strangers: "Those poor kids." A good case could be made that Raoul Felder, in his role as the mayor's snarling divorce lawyer, was practicing child abuse when he said of Donna Hanover Giuliani, "She will stay in Gracie Mansion until they take her screaming, scratching and kicking out of that place." Or when he said: "She doesn't care what happens to the children because it doesn't suit her agenda here." Or when he said: "I suppose we're going to have to pry her off the chandelier to get her out of there." He said a lot of other things, all of them rotten (she was an "uncaring mother" with "twisted motives") and then he went off into the New York day. It was not Felder's job to worry about what were called in "The Godfather" the Pain-in-the-Ass Innocent Bystanders. He was just the hit man. But Felder wasn't freelancing last Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court. He was sent there by Mayor Giuliani. And so the mayor is the "intellectual author" of this crime against decency and good taste. He must share full responsibility for what Felder's words did to other human beings, most specifically his children by Donna Hanover. Their son Andrew is now 15. Their daughter Caroline is 11. They are old enough to read newspapers and to absorb the vicious words about their mother. And thanks to another Giuliani "friend," they now know more about the impoverished state of their father's testosterone than most children ever get to know. So do their friends at school. So do their schoolyard enemies. They are certain now to endure the worst of all cruelties: the slings and arrows of their contemporaries. Kids, as we all remember, can be even more vicious with words than divorce lawyers. Taunting. Nagging. Shouting from a crowd or whispering in a hallway. The Giuliani kids will carry those taunts, and Felder's words, with them into the distant future. Each Giuliani child will bear in mind separate pictures of the rubble of their parents' marriage, but the captions will be provided in 120-point type. So this dreadful mess at Gracie Mansion is not simply a public entertainment, providing diversion from the collapse of the Mets or the machinations of the Bush administration. There are too many second-rate emotions flowing in its dirty tide: monumental ego, false pride, the need to hurt and then to hurt back. This scenario makes all its witnesses feel dirty. None of it rises to the level of tragedy. None of it has the elegant domestic wit of Moliere or Edward Albee. It's a sad, dismal script, and Gracie Mansion is merely its theater. Time for a Change Walking around the perimeter of the mansion the other day, I felt that the only long-term solution would be to evacuate the place. It's a fine building in the Federal style, erected in 1799-1805, and for most of its existence, no mayor lived within its walls. New York mayors lived in their own homes until 1942. That year, Fiorello LaGuardia — the greatest of all mayors — was persuaded to move from his small apartment at 1274 Fifth Ave., where he had lived since becoming mayor in 1933. LaGuardia resisted the move to Gracie Mansion. He was a republican with a small "r" and thought New Yorkers would accuse him of going "high hat." But he had two adopted children, a wife and a cook, and, reluctantly, he made the move. Every mayor has lived there since LaGuardia. But maybe it's time to go back to the older tradition. If Giuliani and Hanover had lived in an apartment, or a loft, or a private house, there would be no discussion now about whether Judith Nathan could come calling. That would be preposterous. Since Giuliani is clearly the party who roamed from the marriage vows, he would have long since moved out. He would by now be ensconced in a place like the old Hotel Earle off Washington Square, where all the booted-out husbands of my generation found refuge, or some similar halfway house. Donna and the children would be at home, like so many others abandoned by their men, getting on with their lives. Question of Decency I'd like to see both Giulianis depart when the school term ends: Hanover to an apartment, the mayor to a hotel, or a couch at City Hall, or to Nathan's place. That way, neither would be perceived as the winner of the battle for Gracie Mansion. And no future New York mayor should have to enter a house filled with wretched echoes: unfinished sentences, sudden outbursts, rumors of conspiracy, whispered plots, slammed doors. Let all future mayors live like New Yorkers, not aristocrats: at home. The empty mansion could be converted into the Fiorello H. LaGuardia Museum of the Mayoralty. In my view, Rudy Giuliani, with all of his flaws, is the greatest New York mayor since LaGuardia, but he seems ferociously determined now to tarnish everything he has done. Poor Giuliani is now the man who unleashed Felder, a member of the mayor's decency committee and thus charged with sniffing out affronts to the public sensibility. But as I gazed at the bleak house in which this drama is now being played out, the face of another lawyer rose among the trees. It was the sorrowing face of Joseph Welch, uttering again the words spoken to a bully in 1954: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Original Publication Date: 5/14/01 New York Daily News