Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (22 page)

As to the newspapers? I don’t know what I would have thought if I’d been reading the news closely. But I wasn’t. And if my trusted ABC News or
Good Morning America
had reported those rumors about Jim, what would I have done? I don’t know. But they didn’t. Jim and I would talk—“Oh, the press is giving me a hard time about Golan,” he might say, but at the time I was also overwhelmed with everything else that was going on in my life. Did I think Golan was qualified to be an adviser on homeland security? No, I didn’t. He struck me as a lightweight, self-important and self-absorbed. And I can’t even count the number of times I heard members of Jim’s staff complain to each other, or to Jim himself, about how “demanding” or “arrogant” Golan was. But I certainly didn’t think that he was having an affair with my husband.

Here’s what I did think, though. One of Jim’s major supporters was real estate developer Charles Kushner, and I thought that Jim was beholden to him because he had underwritten so much of Jim’s campaign. I won’t haul out my soapbox, but I’ll pause to offer my conviction that any candidate who isn’t personally wealthy enough to underwrite his own campaign is every bit as likely to be as beholden as Jim was—whether to an individual or to an industry or to an interest group. I believe that this pattern of beholden politicians will continue, often preventing them from doing the right thing, until we have public financing of campaigns, thus eliminating the debt owed to special interests and big donors. Public officials should be beholden only to the citizens they represent. They should do what’s right for their constituents, without the fear of repercussions from special interests and powerful individuals.

Jim was a good fund-raiser, but he arrived at Drumthwacket heavily indebted to Charles Kushner, and that meant Jim owed Kushner. Furthermore, from everything I knew, saw, and heard, Kushner wanted Golan in Jim’s administration. Kushner had arranged for Golan’s visa and had given him a job when he first arrived. Knowing Kushner’s interest in the Jewish community of New Jersey, I assumed that Golan’s appointment as a liaison to that group was done with Kushner’s support and perhaps at his urging. I assumed then that Golan’s position as a consummate insider in Jim’s administration was at Kushner’s behest, that in fact he was there to represent Kushner’s point of view and his interests.

That’s what I thought. Besides, during that time, there were other things on my mind. Life was more exciting than it had ever been and yet more difficult as well. Shapes were shifting. Things were not as they had been, nor as they’d seemed.

15. SECRETS AND LIES

AS WE ROLLED OUT
of January and into February, I was far more concerned about my family having a roof over its head than I was about Golan Cipel or any of Jim’s troubled associates. One evening during that period, Jim said to me, “It looks like the Foundation has a hundred thousand dollars to spend on the residence. So you can start selecting carpeting, paint colors, and window treatments.”

I was combing through samples within days.

Then Jim came home with an update. “Well, the Foundation doesn’t have a hundred thousand dollars, after all. There’s only about thirty thousand set aside.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but that’s all you have to work with.”

“That will never be enough,” I said. “We’re lucky if we get the nursery done and maybe carpeting in our bedroom.”

“We’re just going to have to do a little bit at a time, there’s no money.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said. I hadn’t been a fund-raiser for nothing. “I’m going to find a way to do the whole thing.”

“What are you going to do?” Jim asked.

“I’m going to call some of my board members from the Columbus Foundation, to start with.”

This was a Thursday. I started making phone calls, and by Monday I had assembled a group of fifteen people who were interested in donating money, materials, or time to renovate Drumthwacket.

Then I got the answer to the question I had asked a month earlier about the presence of lead paint. As I’d suspected, there was lead paint throughout the house in the walls, but it didn’t pose a health threat because it had been covered by several coats of new paint or wallpaper; however, all forty-two windows in the private residence had tested positive for extremely high levels of lead and they would have to be stripped, treated, and painted. Thank heavens I asked.

In the end, it took three weeks to remove all the lead from the windows, all done by workers in getups that made them look more like astronauts than the craftsmen they were. As soon as they were finished, the work crew moved in to start renovating the entire second floor—fifteen rooms in all. They gutted the kitchen and two of the bathrooms, removed old furniture, replaced the floors, and painted. By the beginning of April, it was ready for us to occupy.

Immediately the media started nattering about the renovations. One reporter, for instance, quoted at great length Governor Whitman’s view that Drumthwacket Foundation funds should be used only for the public areas, not the governor’s private residence; a few others darkly noted that Charles Kushner had contributed funds to be used for the renovations to the residence; another noted—as if there were a whiff of scandal—that Jim had once worked for Merck and now some of the support for renovation had come from Merck. They thought that in light of the fiscal crisis facing the state, the resources should have been put to better use. But I had not spent a dime of the taxpayers’ money. I had secured donations to the Foundation worth $500,000 of labor, materials, and cash from private individuals. It was another taste of life in a fishbowl, without so much as a fake coral reef to hide under. Was the media going to watch and criticize everything I did from now on?

I thought Jim should have defended me in the face of such criticism. Instead, he invited the press on a tour of the private residential area of Drumthwacket. I was furious.

“How could you invite them?” I asked.

“We can make them feel part of the process and, hopefully, they’ll stop criticizing,” he said.

“They’re not going to stop just because you give them a tour!”

Jim wanted me to join the tour, but I refused. I was not going to welcome the very people who criticized us for transforming the governor’s mansion into a place that my daughter could be safe in and that all New Jerseyans could be proud of. So, Jim gave them the tour himself. He wasn’t happy that I went AWOL, and I wasn’t happy that he was playing tour guide. So we were even.

Jim and I had been married for barely a year and a half when the work on Drumthwacket was completed in April 2002. We were little more than newlyweds. And yet, perhaps because my expectations had changed, perhaps because his behavior had changed (or maybe it was both), I started to see him in a different light. It was during this time that I began to view Jim as secretive rather than private and to wonder if he lied rather than omitted. I guess you could say I started to see the shadows.

As I look back on it now, Jim spent a great deal of time accruing secrets and arranging his life to conceal them. The affair with Golan may have been Jim’s biggest secret, but it wasn’t his only one. Or even his only sexual secret, as I’ve already indicated.

Fundamentally, I don’t think being gay was the prompt for Jim to keep secrets. I think Jim’s inclination to keep secrets is at the core of who he is, and maybe part of the reason it took him almost half a century to come out of the closet. Secrets are Jim’s currency; they’re how he moves through the world. Keeping secrets was his default position. In fact, sometimes his secrets—or evasions, or ellipses—were so oddly pointless that they struck me as bizarre. Once, for example, during Jim’s time as governor, he told me that he wanted to go to dinner at Mediterra, one of our favorite restaurants in Princeton. That was all he said.
Oh, good,
I thought,
a quiet dinner.
A little time to catch up with each other. But when we walked into Mediterra, we were greeted by about a dozen other people. It turned out that Jim was throwing a party that night to celebrate the birthday of his staffer (and former driver) Teddy Pedersen. Why the omission?

Another time, he let me believe he was going to work, but later I found a single movie stub for that date in his jacket pocket; and still another time he told me he was going to meet with a particular politician, whom I later learned had been out of town on the day in question.

More serious was the time Jim told me he was going to visit Morag. I assumed—why wouldn’t I?—that he would be heading to British Columbia. But later I found an e-mail that his secretary had printed out and learned from it that he had instead gone to Las Vegas. Kari, Morag, and a few of their relatives were all spending the week there living under the same roof as Jim at the home of one of Jim’s friends. Later I asked Jim why he’d let me think he was going to Vancouver and left me in the dark about Las Vegas, never mind the living arrangements. “I went to see my daughter,” he said defensively, seeming to be annoyed that I had asked at all. “What difference does it make where I see her?”

To this day, I have no idea why he kept these pieces of information hidden. If I asked for an explanation or clarification, as I often did, either he ignored the question altogether, as if I hadn’t just asked it, or he gave me an answer that made no sense.

Though I continue to believe that acquiring money is not central to Jim, he was, and is, incredibly secretive about the subject. During our marriage, he kept his finances secret from me. Aside from Jim himself, only his secretary, Cathy McLaughlin, had access to his bank accounts. She even signed his checks for him. It was she who paid his bills and made purchases for him. He told me that she had always done it and that he preferred it that way, because he wasn’t good with finances.

It would have been no effort at all for me to manage our combined finances. Although I lived with my parents for years, I was financially independent, keeping my own bank accounts—checking, savings, a 401(k), a certificate of deposit now and then—and while I didn’t have a written budget, I always knew the balance in my checking account. To this day, I’ve never once bounced a check.

When we moved out of the town house in Woodbridge, Jim sublet it to someone we knew. Months later, quite by accident, I learned that not only had the tenant moved out but that Jim had put the town house on the market and sold it.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of these events as they were happening?” I asked.

“I just forgot,” he said.

“You forgot?” I asked, incredulous. “How is that even possible?”

He shrugged.

“Well, who did you sell it to?”

“I don’t know.”

“How much did you sell it for?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “Cathy handled all that. I’ll have to ask her.” Of course, he never asked. If he did, he never told me about it. Later, when a real estate agent reported that Jim had accompanied Golan on a walk-through of a town house Golan was buying, a number of friends and acquaintances even suggested that Jim had given him money toward the purchase of the home. I have no idea whether this is true, even now, but it sure would have explained it. Despite the fact that I have asked repeatedly and despite the fact that it is information necessary in the process of arriving at divorce terms, neither I nor my lawyers have seen any documentation at all regarding the sale of the house in Woodbridge.

But even these sorts of secrets, with the obvious exception of anything relating to Golan Cipel, would never have led us to divorce. I was committed to Jim. I loved him and had a child with him. Sure, I was apprehensive of the way he dismissed his omissions as miscommunications or forgetfulness or poor judgment, but I still wasn’t going to make his secrets a marital deal breaker. Did I like it? No. Did I understand it? No. I did know it was odd, but I also knew I didn’t want to get into a fight every time he hid something. I had made a decision early on in my relationship with Jim to pick my battles, and that’s what I did.

WHO KNOWS WHY JIM
was so secretive? Maybe it made him feel powerful to know something that others didn’t. Or maybe he kept secrets because it made him feel less fragile or vulnerable, more in control. If he felt he couldn’t hold his ground in the face of pressure or requests or demands from others, maybe his secrets acted as an anchor, something to give him weight and substance. Whatever his reasons, Jim’s tendency to secrecy was reinforced by his family. The McGreeveys played everything very close to vest. I remained an outsider, and I suspect that my brother-in-law did also. Significant family conversations never took place in my presence. I dated Jim for four years and was married to him for another four. We never lived more than five or six miles away from his parents during our time in Woodbridge. And yet while Jim would stop by at their place from time to time and they certainly came to our house, in all those years I was never in his parents’ home. Not once. Jimmy Kennedy once observed that Jim’s parents never seemed to have anyone over, but Jim explained it away by saying that they were “very private.”
Why all the privacy?
I wondered.

I noticed more secrets once we moved to Drumthwacket. When Jim was campaigning, his time was his own. But when he became governor, his life was central to a network of other lives and his schedule was a matter of importance to all of them in relation to their own jobs or how they might plan their own lives. In order to conceal his whereabouts, at least from me, Jim kept me in the dark about his schedule. Actually, he had three schedules—a long-term calendar that was prepared three to six months in advance, a monthly agenda, and a daily timetable. All of these, especially the daily schedule, were available to his inner circle and were supposed to be distributed to my assistant Nina, who was the director of the office of the First Lady, as a matter of routine. But they weren’t, no matter how many times I brought it to Jim’s attention. This was a constant source of anxiety for me, in part because I was not kept informed of events I was expected to attend. Often, the day before an event, sometimes even on the day itself, someone would allude to it, thinking I knew all about it, and then I would have to scramble, change plans already in place, get a baby-sitter, or simply not go. And often I did scramble, because I was embarrassed at not being in the loop and didn’t want anyone to know.