Is there anything left to say about the Spitzer scandal? It has to have set the land record for fastest revelation-to-elimination cycle of any modern political sex scandal (“In by Monday, out by Thursday”) and any TV talk show host who chose to take this week off could probably bring the house down just by opening with the line, “Did I miss anything?”
Our hyper-speed, internet-fueled, media-minded punditocracy sure didn’t. It reminds me of those Amazonian pirranha that strip a man down to his bones in a frenzied bloodlust… well, at least in a James Bond movie, which was where half of my childhood education came from. (The other half came from Mad magazine.) Watching the news cycle over the last three days, spending more time than usual at home with my ailing daughter, I have seen each possible angle picked up, run with and ultimately devoured. (The last line of interest is, of course, “Why are we all so interested?)
This time the fate of the political wives got more than usual traction, perhaps because Hillary is casting such a large shadow on our psychic landscape, or perhaps because Silda Wall Spitzer was so clearly devastated, standing beside Governor McLovin. “Why do the wives have to stand up there with them?” Franny asked when we were watching Keith Olbermann Monday night (that’s how sick she was!) and my line about the kabuki like dance to the death that is modern political marriage meant little to her. As I heard a comedienne ask at the end of that first evening (forgive me for not remembering who, there have been so many), “Why does the wife have to stand up there? Why doesn’t he stand up there with the hooker — that’s the one everyone wants to see!”
And now everyone has. Images of the real Kristen has been paraded all over the tabs and the talk shows and I bet visits to her My Space page came close to crashing the server. (I don’t know about you, but internet speed has been very slow here this week — don’t you think it’s Spitzer related?) She is, not surprisingly, an aspiring singer from a broken home. Who knows if those aspects of her personality were ever revealed to the governor (they did see each other more than once, you know). I like to envision a scene like those in Citizen Kane where the miserable millionaire and gubernatorial aspirant Charles Foster Kane starts visiting the chorine who would be the undoing of his marriage and political future. Nothing new here, keep moving.
A hundred years ago the Trial of the Century was that of Harry Shaw, a demented scion of a wealthy Pittsburgh family who murdered the lecherous NY architect Stanford White for White’s past dalliances with Shaw’s wife, a singer herself named Evelyn Nesbit. She came to be known, in tabloid legend and later movies, as the Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. White, who was presented as a serial defiler of young women in Shaw’s seven-month trial, had a special little love nest on in the Flatiron District where he entertained the teenaged Nesbit; she would swing in the red velvet swing, unencumbered by unessential clothing until White finally pounced.
It was a little game they played, just their little secret until the whole world came to know about it. (The phrase, “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” came out of that trial as well — it was one of White’s pickup lines — and entered the popular consciousness.) It’s doubtful anything quite as memorable will come out of the Spitzer imbroglio — Client Nine just doesn’t have much of a ring to it — but at least it will all be over sooner. The Nesbit story had legs. Why it was just a few months ago that the building that housed White’s literal swing house collapsed. That was just an old structure, his former trysting spot, meant to fall apart. White’s family was never the same, either.