Train Wrecks: McGreevey v. McGreevey
Their wedding, in October 2000, had all the trappings of an ambitious politician and his equally ambitious wife. Though neither was from the Washington, D.C., area, they got married at the Hay-Adams Hotel, and their wedding photo shows them standing in front of the backdrop of the White House. (“In my mind, it was kind of a campaign stop,” Jim wrote later.) In the picture, Jim is in a tux, Dina in Vera Wang — “the dress of my dreams,” she said. Dina later hung a poster-size portrait of herself in the dress in her bedroom.
With his new blond wife in tow, McGreevey set out to win the governor’s mansion, and this time he did. And one can track back to the exact moment the course of Jim and Dina McGreevey was set — the one that has led them to one of the most hideous divorces ever recorded. It was November 7, 2001, when Jim stood at the podium of the Hilton hotel in East Brunswick and declared victory.
Because it was on this night that Jim McGreevey would discover, all too quickly, that his ambition, stoked for years as he poked about in the muck of New Jersey politics, carried a price. He had spent a lot of political capital getting elected governor, and a lot of people were expecting payback. He had also begun an affair with an aide named Golan Cipel, whom he’d met in Israel, and for the first time the revulsion he felt about his latent homosexuality, carried around like a sack of coal inside his heart for years, gave way to a naive teenager’s fantasy of forbidden romance.
The idea of being first lady held enormous appeal for Dina: In her memoir, she refers to herself as the “first lady-elect.” (The term “first lady” appears 10 times on page 132 alone.) Seeing herself as a modern-day Jackie Kennedy (a comparison also made in her book), she eventually redecorated Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion, and tried to be the kind of elegant hostess required of the wife of a head of state — even if the state was New Jersey. On the night of Jim’s inaugural, a state trooper was “assigned the role of Protector of the Gown,” Dina writes. He followed her around with his arms outstretched, to make sure no one stepped on her train.
And so the makings of that perfect storm had gathered: a politician who checked his ethics at the door, whose administration would quickly be riddled by scandal, and who had begun living a high-risk, full-fledged double life that could destroy him at any moment; his wife, who so desperately yearned for the trappings that come from being the governor’s spouse that she had an official portrait taken and business cards that read DINA MATOS McGREEVEY, FIRST LADY printed, complete with the official state seal, while by her own admission she ignored the clouds brewing over her marriage; and their daughter, without whom the whole sordid, sad saga of Jim and Dina McGreevey might have quietly died, as it so obviously should have, in a file cabinet drawer in Room 105 of the Union County Courthouse.
