A Prayer for the City (51 page)

“I am satisfied,” said Rendell. “I think they worked incredibly hard to drive a story line and exaggerate and embellish.”

Two days before the train ride, a profile of Rendell had appeared on the front page of the Sunday
Washington Post.
Long and mostly laudatory, it had certified Rendell as the great dragon slayer on behalf of the cities. He tried to be humble about it, moaning that he could never again show his face at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting without risking “assassination.” But despite his efforts to minimize the story, the glow of it had clearly carried beyond that of the usual publicity fix. Four years earlier Rendell had been seen as a has-been politician trying to make a desperate comeback. Now he was a star, not just a star of the city but a national star, Vice President Gore’s words about him forever committed to print in one of the nation’s most prestigious papers: “America’s mayor.”

It was a crowning moment, and as the train sped past Wilmington and the two men laughed and joked and dipped their hoagies into their little vats of Russian dressing in perfect sync, it seemed hard to believe that any other single moment of the administration could be better than this one. In that rumpled suit, with that bemused look on his face, inviting everyone around him to try one of those fat-free chocolate muffins and see,
see
, how it tasted like the real thing, Ed Rendell
was
America’s mayor.

But in between the moments of relaxed banter, Cohen continued to go through the contents of his briefcase, and he pulled out the results of a private citywide poll of voters. The poll documented Rendell’s stunning popularity in the city, with a 76 percent approval rating. It also showed that a majority of those polled, 52 percent, thought conditions in the city were better than they had been a few years ago.

But the poll pointed out other trends as well, trends that were foreboding not only in terms of what Rendell had achieved but also in terms of
what lay ahead for a city that was as divided as ever along class and economic lines, a city where the gap between the haves and the have-nots wasn’t simply a gap but was perhaps an unbridgeable gulf. The poll also suggested that in running his administration like a Broadway musical, with a great series of showstoppers to make up for a bleak and depressing story, the mayor may have reached his peak.

A criticism of Rendell had always been that he was a downtown mayor driven by downtown interests to the virtual dismissal of the neighborhoods. He bristled at that, sending his critics vitriolic letters noting the millions upon millions that had been spent in the neighborhoods. He also argued that economic development, regardless of where it was located, meant jobs for people in the neighborhoods. He was right about that, but he also knew that it was perception that counted, and the poll showed that the vast majority of the electorate remained unconvinced about his commitment to the neighborhoods. “Voters overwhelmingly think you care ‘mostly about the problems of downtown businessmen and Center City’ (64 percent) instead of ‘mostly about the problems facing average people in the neighborhoods’ (28 percent),” the pollsters concluded. The number-one problem in the city, the poll showed, was fighting crime and drugs, and nearly 70 percent thought the mayor could be working “a lot harder” to try to solve it. The poll also showed that 50 percent believed that the mayor, after starting fast, was now slowing down.

From a political standpoint, the poll concluded that “there exist several weaknesses that a potential opponent could try to exploit next year.” Dwight Evans, whose name had been whispered and repeated the most, was currently running for governor in the Democratic primary. Because he was black, no one gave him a ghost of a chance in a statewide election (it had once reportedly been uttered by political huckster James Carville that between the poles of Philadelphia to the east and Pittsburgh to the west lay Alabama). But Evans’s showing in the primary would be an interesting barometer of his potential strength in a mayoral election, where the dynamics of race were very different and where blacks in past elections had constituted a majority of registered Democrats in the city.

From a practical standpoint, the poll was depressing proof of what demographers and other social scientists feared most about the city: its unabated evolution into a two-tiered place with a narrow crust of wealthy residents feeding off the downtown renaissance and an enormous swath of blacks and working-class whites struggling vainly to survive, a schism so strong that the pollsters had highlighted the following passage in italics:

But in the euphoria of the moment for Ed Rendell, stemming from
The Washington Post
piece and the approval ratings and the creamy Russian dressing in ample supply in its plastic cups and the safe company of a brilliant man who had put loyalty to him above loyalty to a wife and children, that schism didn’t even seem to register, except perhaps as a potential political problem.

As the Metroliner pulled into Washington’s Union Station right around 2:00
P.M.
, America’s mayor was still soaring and would continue to soar. At least for another hour.

Rendell and Cohen crammed themselves into the backseat of a taxi and were on their way to HUD headquarters to see Cisneros when they pulled out their cellular phones simultaneously to check in for messages. Cohen’s phone was sleek and black and was easily removed from his breast pocket. The mayor’s was gray and clunky and held together by a rubber band, and it wobbled as it was brought forth from his brown valise.

“Hi, Annie,” said the mayor.

“Hi, Yvonne,” said Cohen.

The mayor was given a brief rundown of who had called. So was Cohen. In the cab, neither man had any idea of the code-red crisis that was exploding 140 miles away in their own city. The
Daily News
had gotten hold of a profile of the mayor that would shortly appear in
Philadelphia Magazine
, and by all accounts it was a heart stopper, not because the reporter had taken potshots but because of what the mayor had said to the reporter—stuff about spiky metal bras and what the reporter might be like in bed and how the mayor and Clinton were alike in just a whole lot of ways beyond being Democrats and married to lawyers.

The writer of the
Philadelphia Magazine
article, Lisa DePaulo, had previously produced stories with sexual twists to them. In 1991, she had done a story for the magazine about the Republican mayoral candidate Sam Katz, much of which dealt with accusations of sexual harassment. It was merciless, and Cohen not only remembered it vividly but also had kept it in his office as if never to forget it. He had warned the mayor of the repercussions
of letting DePaulo spend the day with him on a trip to New York, describing her as “treacherous,” and a “bitch.” But the mayor hadn’t listened. So Cohen had gotten Tom Leonard to go with the mayor and DePaulo as a chaperone. But that clearly hadn’t done much good.

The meeting with Cisneros went flawlessly. “Congratulations on the Sunday piece” were Cisneros’s first words to the mayor. The Cabinet secretary praised the mayor and the other officials there, in particular Council President Street, for taking on the responsibility of the housing authority. City officials had come armed with a list of needs that they wanted HUD to honor, and Cisneros, because of the mayor’s involvement, indicated that he would do his best to honor them, even if that meant granting the city special exemptions.

“Are you getting positive strokes with the press?” asked Cisneros.

“The principal reporter covering PHA [for
The Philadelphia Inquirer
] went to
The New York Times
two and a half months ago and hasn’t been replaced,” said Rendell. “The other principal reporter got transferred.” “There wasn’t enough bad news,” said Cisneros. “That’s good.”

Actually there was.

At several points during the meeting, Cohen abruptly left to answer phone messages to his beeper. It seemed rude, even for the always-fixated Cohen, to just get up and walk out while a member of the president’s cabinet was literally in mid-sentence. But one of the messages had come from press secretary Feeley, and the news he had could not wait for later.

The second the meeting was over, Cohen was on the phone in the outer office trying to do damage control, trying to figure out what to do about a story in which the writer, while in many ways complimentary to the mayor, had also come up with passages such as the following:

Of course that was no longer DePaulo’s problem.

The Metroliner ride back to Philadelphia wasn’t nearly as jaunty and
cheerful as the ride from there, which now seemed as if it had taken place months ago. Rendell, with Cohen at his side, called DePaulo. He told her he had meant no offense by his comments and asked her whether in fact she had been offended. She said she was not, which in the minds of Rendell and Cohen became an important point. Back in Philadelphia, while Rendell muttered to members of his office staff, “I can’t fucking believe I agreed to do this,” Cohen took over completely, standing behind his desk with the reserve of a fighter pilot. He was as intense as he had ever been, but he didn’t seem particularly surprised to be handling a crisis such as this one. Rumors of intemperate sexual behavior by the mayor had been so frequent over the years that the entire populace of the city seemed to consider his womanizing a foregone conclusion even though not a single word had ever been written about it before. To a certain degree, what seemed most amazing about the episode was that it was the first of its kind to surface publicly in nearly two and a half years.

When Nicole Weisensee of the
Daily News
called to ask about the magazine piece, Cohen said he hadn’t seen it yet, using the ignorance-is-bliss tactic, when of course he had just read it. He also said he was doing the speaking because the mayor was still in Washington, which wasn’t true either. His instincts told him that anything the mayor might say without him there as censor and radar detector, would only lead to greater disaster. “No good can come of it, only a lot of harm,” he said to the mayor, who had come into his office ashen faced, with that furtive look of a child who knows that yes, it was he who lit the match that burned the house down.

Most of the mayor’s intemperate comments had been made on the limousine ride home from New York. Rendell’s idea was to get in touch with the driver, who he thought would certify that DePaulo “gave as good as she got” and that the whole atmosphere was one of levity and laughter. “He would have buried her,” said Rendell with an upbeat tick in his voice, but Cohen knew it was a terrible idea. There are times when the best antidote to a story is to discredit the reporter, but this wasn’t one of them.

“Is there no sign that the
Inquirer
is doing anything?” the mayor asked. So far at least, the answer was no, and that was good news because the basic rule of thumb of the administration was that if a story appeared in the tabloid
Daily News
and did not appear in the
Inquirer
, then it really hadn’t appeared at all.

The
Daily News
put the story on the front page the next day, and everyone in City Hall knew this was just the beginning. Columnists and radio reporters
who had not been seen in months were beginning to swarm like smiling killer bees. Privately DePaulo became a clear target of the administration’s wrath, and the venom was repellent and disgusting, not to mention totally unwarranted. At least one administration official referred to her as Miss Slut Ball, and another speculated as to how many cocks she had sucked to advance her career. But in public, at Cohen’s paramilitary directives, contriteness was the rule of the day. Rendell was about to give a press conference on an unrelated subject, but undoubtedly the matter of the profile would come up. Cohen told him, “You’re going to have to handle questions on this.”

“Yeah, absolutely,” said Rendell.

“They’re going to do it a hundred times, and you’re going to have to do it lightly. And at some point, walk away with a smile on your face. I suspect they’re hoping to see you explode.”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

The press conference was a masterpiece. Not only did Rendell follow Cohen’s directions precisely, but he expressed them in a remarkable way, with just the right blend of humility and strength. “I am what I am,” he told the throng of reporters. “Again, I’m not perfect. I do like to joke around and kid around. This job is a crusher. It’s a high-pressure job. I do certain things to have fun and release the tension.

“If I felt this would have been offensive to the reporter, I never would have done it.… Let me repeat, I’ve never intentionally, or with great negligence, done something to offend someone.”

He walked back to his office with that slow shuffle he used when he was either tired or wondering what on earth it was that had possessed him to go into politics, besides the romance of listening to the 1952 Democratic National Convention over the radio with his father. What was astounding about the magazine episode wasn’t necessarily what he had said but the poor judgment that had gotten him into the predicament in the first place. Why had he not heeded the warnings of those who had told him that this would be the inevitable result of letting DePaulo spend the day with him? Why would he make such comments to a reporter? Why would he display such a dangerous level of trust?