Surely Andrew gets some of his liveliness from his mom, 44, a warm yet sharply focused woman who spent 16 bustling years as a TV reporter and anchorwoman in Miami, New York and other cities. Like most first ladies, she lends her time and name to numerous charities. Unlike almost any other, she is on TV more often than the officeholder himself. As co-anchor of Food News & Views on cable's seven-month-old TV Food Network, Giuliani addresses a national audience for an hour every weeknight—a claim the mayor can't make.
Hizzoner, she says, "likes being married to a career woman. He didn't many someone who wanted to prepare dinner. I can cook if I have to—I mean, I got my merit badge in Girl Scouts." On Food News her role isn't resident gourmet (that's cohost David Rosengarten) but rather culinary Larry King. "I can do an interview on pretty much any topic," she says.
That's why Reese Schonfeld, creator of the TV Food Network and an old friend, hired her. Those skills also come in handy at home, where Giuliani often preps her husband for press conferences by peppering him with questions. "She's my closest adviser," says the Brooklyn-born mayor, 50. "She has a lot of understanding of how the city works. She's good at assessing who's strong, who's weak."
Giuliani's easygoing inquisitiveness comes perhaps from growing up a Navy brat, the oldest of four daughters born to Robert Kofnovec, now 68, who eventually rose to lieutenant commander, and his wife, Dolores, 67. (The name "Hanover" comes from a first marriage that Giuliani refuses to discuss, out of respect, she says, for ex-husband Stanley Hanover's privacy.) The experience of spending her formative years on the move—from Oakland to Millington, Tenn., to Guam—"gave me a little bit of a spirit of adventure," she says. The family eventually settled in Sunnyvale, Calif., where she attended Fremont High and decided, while working in the school's closed-circuit TV studio, that journalism would be her career. She studied political science at Stanford, then journalism at Columbia University. After gelling her master's degree in 1973, she whizzed through a series of reporting jobs before landing a Miami anchoring job in 1980. Along the way, she says, ticking off assignments, "I learned to drive a racing car, I flew a blimp, I drove a dog sled—right into a tree."
Being romanced by Rudolph Giuliani was another high-speed event—without trees. They met in 1982, when a friend set them up for a date while the future mayor—at the time an associate attorney general—was visiting Miami. "You know how there are certain bells people can ring of yours?" asks the mayor. "Donna rang every single one of mine." They had been dating long-distance a mere six weeks when he proposed marriage in a Disney World hotel. She accepted without hesitation.
By 1984 the couple had settled in New York City, where he made national headlines as the tough-talking U.S. Attorney who brought down financier Ivan Boesky for insider trading and mob boss Anthony Salerno for racketeering. She became a local fixture herself, working as a TV reporter and anchor from 1983 to 1990, when she retired to give birth to Caroline. Amid the current whirl of activity, she says, raising her kids is the greatest challenge. "The main thing," says Giuliani, "is to make sure they feel they're the center of my world." And if Andrew chooses to turn into Silly Putty whenever the press comes near, she accentuates the positive. "People tell me they saw [at the inauguration] how proud Andrew is to be with his dad and what a loving person Rudy is," she says.
Bui now it's lime to be driven to her TV job in midtown. "Thai's what I am," she says simply. "A person who works."
TOM GLIATTO
ALLISON LYNN in New York City
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- Allison Lynn.
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