Nootie Gingrich's 2nd Wife Rips Him On :Debts, Sex, Meltdowns & Lots More
Harry Hope
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/gingrich_profile_featuring_ex-wife_begets_question.php?ref=fpb
August 11, 2010
Newt Gingrich's Second Wife Dishes Hard To Esquire: His Money Woes,
His Philandering, His Meltdown
By Megan Carpentier
In 1999, after refusing to take the seat he won in the 1998 elections,
Newt Gingrich left his second wife, Marianne, for a much-younger
staffer with whom he'd been having an almost-ignored affair.
As in his first marriage, he did so shortly after Marianne was
diagnosed with a serious illness;
as in his first divorce, he fought Marianne tooth and nail over any
financial settlement.
And then he had the Atlanta archdiocese inform Marianne that their
marriage was invalid in the eyes of his fiancée's faith;
9 years later, he completed his conversion to Catholicism.
Given his popularity among Republicans, one would think there is
little left to say about Gingrich's personal foibles that could hurt
his political career.
But sandwiched in between snippets from his campaign to return to
popularity in yesterday's Esquire profile
http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910 are tidbits from
the still-supportive Marianne that portray Gingrich in a
far-from-pleasant light -- and hints that his personal foibles took
quite a toll on his political fortunes behind the scenes.
Before marrying Marianne, Gingrich presented his first wife, Jackie
Battley, with the terms of their divorce as she lay in a hospital bed
recovering from surgery for uterine cancer.
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In April 1980, only one day after Jackie's surgery, Newt went to her
room to present her with the terms of the divorce.
That summer, he introduced Marianne to his parents, according to
Esquire.
By October, he was already refusing to pay alimony or child support.
Marianne admits she knew little of that at first.
At first, she had no idea that the wife he was divorcing was actually
his high school geometry teacher, or that he went to the hospital to
present her with divorce terms while she was recovering from uterine
cancer and then fought the case so hard, Jackie had to get a court
order just to pay her utility bills.
.....................................................................................................
The divorce was finalized in February 1981;
Marianne and Gingrich wed six months later in August.
She says now that she probably should have known better.
...............................................................................................................
Gingrich declared keeping a budget "too stressful," so Marianne took
that over, looking to maintain homes in Georgia and D.C., pay
Gingrich's alimony and child support and reduce his massive personal
debt.
A Vanity Fair article from 1995 indicates that Jackie, too, was in
charge of the household finances because of Gingrich's spendthrift
ways:
in fact, the debt the couple faced when they married in 1981 wasn't
paid off until 1994.
In 1997, Gingrich was fined $300,000 by the House for ethics
violations related to college courses and a non-profit.
He and Marianne didn't have the money, so he began to write a book.
But the book didn't turn out as anyone expected:
it was a dramatic apology that Marianne described as "weird."
With his inner circle, she attempted to edit it into something
publishable -- but they ended up scrapping the manuscript entirely.
After the book petered out in 1997, Marianne said that his behavior
began to deteriorate.
After that, Gingrich started to deteriorate.
There were times, Marianne says, when he wasn't functioning.
He started yelling at people, which he'd never done before, and he'd
get weirdly "overfocused" on getting things done -- manic, as if he
was running out of time.
He took to taking meetings while eating, slurping his food, as if he
wasn't aware or didn't care how strange it looked.
The staff responded with gallows humor:
"He's a sociopath, but he's our sociopath."
...................................................................................................................
Gingrich, like several of his colleagues, were not immune from charges
of infidelity.
In 1998, Salon reported that, much like his first marriage, Newt was
dogged with rumors about alleged infidelities.
In addition to rumors swirling around the Hill in 1997 and 1998,
Gingrich faced accusations that he conducted an affair in 1977 based
on his ability to deny that he'd "had sex" with a woman.
From the 1995 Vanity Fair profile:
In the spring of 1977, [Anne Manning, who admitted to a relationship
with Gingrich that started during his 1976 campaign] was in Washington
to attend a census-bureaus workshop when Gingrich took her to dinner
at a Vietnamese restaurant.
He met her back at her modest hotel room.
"We had oral sex," she says.
"He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, "I never
slept with her."
Indeed, before Gingrich left that evening, she says, he threatened
her:
"If you ever tell anybody about this, I'll say you're lying."
A neighbor of his first wife, Jackie's, said he, too, saw Gingrich
engaging in extramarital oral sex.
Kip Carter, who lived a few doors down from the couple, saw more than
he wanted to.
"We had been out working a football game --I think it was the Bowdon
game-- and we would split up.
It was a Friday night. I had Newt's daughters, Jackie Sue and Kathy,
with me.
We were all supposed to meet back at this professor's house.
It was a milk-and-cookies kind of shakedown thing, buck up the troops.
I was cutting across the yard to go up the driveway.
There was a car there.
As I got to the car, I saw Newt in the passenger seat and one of the
guys' wives with her head in his lap going up and down.
Newt kind of turned and gave me his little-boy smile.
Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then.
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After the Republican losses in 1998, then-Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA)
pressured Gingrich to resign as Speaker, threatening to run against
him if he did not.
(Students of political history will recall that, 6 short weeks later,
Livingston himself withdrew as speaker and left Congress 6 months
after that in the wake of revelations of his own marital
infidelities.)
Gingrich left Congress in early 1999.
It was then that Marianne went to the doctor and was diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis.
In early May -- just before Mother's Day -- she went to Ohio to visit
her mother.
She told Esquire that Gingrich didn't return her calls for two days --
which, for a man that usually checked in several times a day, was
quite unusual.
And when he finally returned her calls, that's when she knew.
He wanted to talk in person, he said.
"I said, 'No, we need to talk now.' "
He went quiet.
"There's somebody else, isn't there?"
She kind of guessed it, of course.
Women usually do.
But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her
plates, sleeping in her bed?
Probably not.
Marianne didn't give up on her marriage so easily -- but Gingrich
asked something of her she could not give.
She called a minister they both trusted.
He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole
weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he
wanted was a Chevrolet.
" 'I can't handle a Jaguar right now.' He said that many times. 'All I
want is a Chevrolet.' "
He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.
Undoubtedly, his mistress -- a Callista Bisek, a former Hill staffer
who was then 32 -- would not have appreciated the comparison.
Bisek and Gingrich had reportedly been having an affairs for 6 years
before Gingrich told Marianne.
After Gingrich's phoned-in confession, they talked at their home --
just after he'd given a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania about the
importance of family values.
She told Esquire she asked him how he could give such a speech days
after he's admitted his affair to her and asked her to tolerate it
"It doesn't matter what I do," he answered.
"People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can
say what I can say. It doesn't matter what I live."
If Marianne was not keen on her husband's moral hypocrisy, she became
less enamored with his efforts to deny her as much alimony as possible
-- or his efforts to tell the world that they'd had an open
relationship.
It wasn't until Gingrich deposed his own mistress in their divorce
proceedings that he admitted the affair had been going on for six
years.
Marianne denies that she knew of the affair or allowed it to continue.
In a telling anecdote, Gingrich attempted to explain to Esquire
reporter John Richardson his relationship with Bisek as one in which
she, of course, is more mature than he.
"Callista and I kid that I'm four and she's five and therefore she
gets to be in charge, because the difference between four and five is
a lot."
Richardson repeats the anecdote to Marianne, who finds it jarring.
Her eyes go wide when she hears his line about being four to
Callista's five.
"You know where that line came from? Me. That's my line. That's what I
told him."
She pauses for a moment, turning it over in her mind.
Then she shakes her head in wonder.
"I'm sorry, that's so freaky."
There's a lot of that going around.
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RePIG Nootie Gingrich, ladies and gentlemen
Harry