Spitzer's Tale of Redemption

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Spitzer's Tale of Redemption
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-25/spitzers-tale-of-redemption/
by Lloyd Grove
April 25, 2010 | 11:31am

BS Top - Grove Eliot Spitzer Doc Christopher Peterson / Getty Images;
Amy Sussman / Getty Images for IMG The new film about Eliot Spitzer
reveals the disgraced New York governor’s emotional turmoil, Ashley
Dupre’s one-night stand, and how he talked politics with his favorite
call girl.

New York’s disgraced former governor—the subject of documentary director
Alex Gibney’s work in progress, Untitled Eliot Spitzer Film—didn’t show
up, as was rumored he might, for Saturday night’s Tribeca Film Festival
screening.

But he should have.

He probably would have received a standing ovation from the A-list
audience of New Yorkers, which included Police Commissioner Ray Kelly,
real-estate billionaire and Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, CBS News
exec Susan Zirinsky and her husband Joe Peyronnin, and writer-director
Nora Ephron and her husband Nick Pileggi.

He comes off as remarkably self-reflective and unsparing of his
flaws—not just for a public figure, but for anybody.

As it was, the cheering was for the movie, not the man. “I just emailed
him,” Spitzer’s friend and campaign admaker, Jimmy Siegel, told me after
the applause died down. “I told him I felt that the film was extremely
positive for him, on balance. And I thought it was a very good film as
well.”

The two-hour film, which still might get some tweaking, is the product
of two years of research and on-camera interviews with key players in
the scandal, notably Spitzer himself, by Gibney and author Peter
Elkind—who also collaborated on the 2005 hit Enron: The Smartest Guys in
the Room. Elkind’s companion book on the controversy, Rough Justice, has
just been published.

The filmmakers suggest that Spitzer’s March 2008 downfall was engineered
by powerful enemies on Wall Street and inside the Bush Justice
Department, who targeted and surveilled the Democratic governor—known as
“The Sheriff of Wall Street” when he was New York’s take-no-prisoners
attorney general—and exposed him as “Client 9” of a busted prostitution
ring, Emperor’s Club VIP.

Gibney, who serves as the film’s narrator, argues that federal
prosecutors departed from Justice Department guidelines against focusing
on johns in prostitution cases, in order to throw a harsh spotlight on
Client 9 in an unusually lurid, clue-heavy affidavit detailing Spitzer’s
assignations with high-priced call girls. There were more than enough
hints and obvious press leaks for the news media to identify the hapless
customer, resulting in his governorship being snuffed out a mere 16
months after he was elected in a landside.

But Spitzer—who sat for four lengthy, often uncomfortable interviews—is
not so easy on himself. “Not to mince words,” he tells Gibney in the
movie, “my view is I brought myself down… I did what I did, and shame on
me.”

Siegel—who is among the many Spitzer friends and foes who cooperated
with Gibney (including such mortal Spitzer enemies as former Republican
Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, who is facing federal corruption
charges, and billionaire businessman Ken Langone)—said the film revived
raw feelings.

“It’s still emotional to think about what could have been, and I was sad
to see it all happen,” Siegel said. “It reminded me of the feelings we
all had when everything came crashing down. I felt that someone had
died, and you couldn’t have a funeral for them.”

Spitzer campaign fundraiser Kristian Stiles, who also appears on screen,
had a similar reaction. “When I was watching, I’m still angry and hurt,
and you feel he betrayed the many staff people who believed in him and
worked hard for him,” she said. “The other level is it shows the person
who believes in forgiveness and the good fight, and you didn’t know if
you want him to make a comeback. It goes back and forth with me.”

Spitzer, who has indeed been angling in recent months for a political
comeback, seems to have decided that gritting his teeth, and subjecting
himself to Gibney’s grilling about an episode in his life he’d sooner
forget, was a door he had to walk through to put the scandal behind him.

He comes off as remarkably self-reflective and unsparing of his
flaws—not just for a public figure, but for anybody—and he also conveys
a sense that he’s still grappling with the psychological and emotional
fallout of his carnal sins. (His aggrieved wife, Silda Wall Spitzer,
declined Gibney’s interview request.)

Eliot’s authoritarian father, self-made real-estate tycoon Bernard
Spitzer, comes in for special scrutiny as a role model for the
ex-governor’s hard-charging ways, in which politics was a form of
extreme combat. At one point the son recounts: “I don’t want the
impression to be that he was devoid of compassion, but it is true that
he foreclosed on me in a Monopoly game…. I think what he was trying to
do was teach me how the market worked. Monopoly was a fun game, but I
had been overbuilt and overextended and he said, ‘I’m sorry, that’s it,
there are consequences.’ I cried. I think I was about 10 years old. I
was a kid. It was no fun. I wanted to be bailed out.”

Other revelations in the movie:

•Spitzer nemesis Roger Stone, the Republican operative who worked to
blow up the scandal on behalf of Joe Bruno and unnamed businessmen, is a
sexual swinger who has Richard Nixon’s smiling face tattooed on his back.

•Contrary to one of Stone’s more widely circulated claims, Spitzer did
not wear long black socks during sex with call girls—he took them off,
and they were short.

•Ken Langone decided Spitzer was “evil” after the then-attorney general
sued Langone, who headed the New York Stock Exchange’s compensation
committee, and NYSE chief Dick Grasso over the latter’s $140 million
retirement package. “I’d like to think I’m not a vindictive person,”
Langone tells the filmmakers. “The basic tenet of my faith is
forgiveness. The worst harm that Eliot Spitzer has done to me is that I
am defying my faith. I can’t forgive him. I should, but I can’t.”

•Ashley Alexandra Dupre, who parlayed sex with Spitzer into a career as
a minor celebrity and the New York Post’s advice columnist, actually had
only a single encounter with him—the fateful one-night stand at
Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. Spitzer’s favorite call girl was a
whip-smart New York artist nicknamed “Angelina”—whom Gibney interviewed
off camera, then hired an actress to perform her lines for the movie.
Initially, Angelina recalls, Spitzer was a
“trying-to-get-his-money’s-worth type client,” and “I told the agency, I
don’t want to see that person again.” But after a second encounter, in
which she insisted that they sit and talk first, she began to see him
regularly, and would frequently give him the benefit of her insights on
various aspects of New York governance.

Speaking of Ashley Dupre, Gibney said he would have liked to have
interviewed the  “luv guv’s ho,” but she wasn’t available. “I asked her
and her representatives. It was a lengthy negotiation, but it ultimately
fell apart when Ashley Dupre asked if she could have editorial control.
There were times when the editing process was difficult and I considered
giving her editorial control,” the director joked.

As the audience filed out of the theater, I managed to get a couple of
spot reviews. Nick Pileggi, who wrote the book on which Martin
Scorsese’s classic Mafia movie Goodfellas was based, pronounced the
Spitzer film “absolutely fascinating.”

Susan Zirinsky, the executive producer of 48 Hours: Mystery, told me:
“It’s a terrific film. To balance it out with the good, the bad, and the
ugly is really the ultimate achievement in film. You feel everything for
this one guy. You feel his pain, you feel his frustrations, but you also
see the brilliance—and that’s success. But the truth is, even before
this film, you felt for the schmuck, no matter what.”

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