Mario Cuomo in his midtown office
By Jerry Tallmer
It was around 7 p.m. and the call went right through to Mario Cuomo himself, there at his desk in the big midtown law office. The three-term (1982-1994) governor of the State of New York listened politely to the pitch: “NYC Plus, a new magazine … Plus means 50-plus … A profile of you, sir … We’d be honored … ”
“What’d you do,” said Mario Cuomo, “run out of living politicians?”
On a morning two weeks later, the man behind that desk was very much alive. “You have exactly 30 minutes with him,” a young woman at the law firm had said as she led the press – this press – down the corridor. “I’m sorry, but not a minute more.”
Lawyer Cuomo, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, sans jacket, stood up to shake hands. Geniality and sensitivity were grooved deep into his bespectacled face. “Fifty-plus,” he said. “Well, there are plenty of us out there. The alte kokker set.”
Immediately he had a corrective thought:
“One shouldn’t say ‘alte kokker,’ I discovered. I looked in my Yiddish dictionary, which says ‘alte kokker’ has the implication of ‘filthy mouth.’ What made me look it up, one of my kids said ‘schmuck.’ I said you should never say ‘schmuck,’ you should say ‘schlemiel.’ Even better, you should say ‘schlemozzle.’ So what can I do for you?” said Mario Cuomo to the press.
You can tell me what you think your life would have been like if you’d made it as a ballplayer.
“Hmmmm,” said the man who 55 or 56 years ago had had a brief tryout with the Pittsburgh Pirates. “The truth is, that has never occurred to me. I loved baseball almost as much as I loved basketball, but basketball’s better because you’re always in a crowd in the center of the court. In baseball I was a center fielder, and it gets very lonely out in center field.
“I was a good ballplayer. The scout who scouted me saw me play against Whitey Ford [future great New York Yankees left-handed pitcher] as a member of the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Bees. I was playing under the name of Connie Cutts, because I was still at the time in high school. The scout said: ‘Gee, you looked comfortable out there.’ I said: ‘Yeah, but I played against him three years ago.’ I also played against Billy Loes [future Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who liked to look up from the pitcher’s mound at birds]. Billy Loes was with the Astoria Cubs and Whitey Ford was with the 34th Avenue Boys.
“Anyway, I had some very good weeks, and the scout said: ‘Would you like to play major-league ball?’ He offered me $2,000 for signing a contract. I got $2,000 for signing, and around then, Mickey Mantle got $1,100 from another scout.
“I went home and told my father in the grocery store. My father said: ‘Why is this good?’ I said: ‘Two thousand dollars is why.’ My father said: ‘I’ll ask some of the customers.’ The people he asked said: ‘Better he should go to college.’ I told the scout that, and he had Branch Rickey [the Pirates executive who a couple of years earlier, at Brooklyn, with Jackie Robinson, had shattered baseball’s color line] write a letter to my father, who of course couldn’t read it. The letter congratulated my father for realizing that my going to college was the right thing to do.
“The contract said I wouldn’t have to show up until after graduation from college, but I went down for two weeks [tryout] in Georgia until the end of August. I got injured, hurt my wrist running up against a wall, and after that I got hit in the head. There were no MRI’s or CAT scans in those days, but the X-ray showed I had a hematoma, a blood clot on the brain. The Pittsburgh doctors said: ‘We want to open you up, take a look.’ I said: ‘I feel fine.’ Just the idea of it,” said Mario Cuomo with a verbal shiver. “Well, that was the end of my baseball career.”
The 12-year career as governor came to its end in 1994, when Cuomo, who had repeatedly vetoed capital-punishment bills coming out of Albany, was defeated by a George Pataki who would in fact reinstate the death penalty in 1995.
“So on January 1, 1995,” said the Cuomo who was now once again standing up behind his desk, hands in trouser pockets, as the interview ap-proached the half-hour – “on January 1, 1995, I had to find a way of making a living. I’d gone broke as governor. My daughter’s wedding, my son’s wedding, all that and other things …”
Mario Cuomo, son of Andrea and Immaculata (Giordano) Cuomo, was born June 15, 1932. On January 1, 1995, he was unemployed and 621/2 years old. “Long past my center-field days,” he said with a rueful smile.
I know something about that kind of thing, said the press. Rupert Murdoch fired all of us, 287 of us, including some who’d been there for a lot of years, when he broke the union – the Newspaper Guild local – at the New York Post.
Cuomo put both hands over his eyes in a gesture of irony.
“Rupert Murdoch,” he said. “A piece of work. I saved that paper three times. [In 1994] Murdoch called me. He said: ‘I owe you, I like you, you’re a good person, a thoughtful person, an intelligent person, a wonderful person. I wish I could endorse you, but I can’t. I can’t go for any of your ideas. I have to go with the Republicans. If I can do you a favor anytime … ’
“I said: ‘Thank you. You don’t owe me a thing …’ ”
Ex-Governor Cuomo drew a breath or two, and sat back down.
“So Matilda came to me after the election. We’re married 52 years this year. First we used to live with my mother. Then we had a third-floor walk-up apartment in Queens. Carrying the baby-carriage up three floors,” he said with a grimace. “Then for eight years we had a house of our own in Hollis, a little Cape Cod house. Took me seven years to finish.
“So now, after I’d lost the election, Matilda came and said: ‘What does this mean?’ I said: ‘It means we don’t have a home. I don’t have a job. I’m not a kid. We owe money. If I die right away, you’re going to have to live with one of our kids [three daughters, two sons]. So I have to get money right away. So now I have to do something I have never wanted to do: I have to go with a big law firm.’
“Matilda said: ‘Why?’ I said: ‘Because they’ll give me a big
insurance policy, so if I drop dead, you’ll be taken care of. But I’m
starting all over again while the other guys are retiring.’
“You know,” Cuomo said – not to his wife now, but to the press: “I never thought of it as 20 years of public service [New York secretary of state, lieutenant governor, governor]. I thought of it as 20 years the state gave me something worthwhile to do. So at this juncture I would say I feel rejuvenated. And I’ve started to write.”
The phone rang once or twice. He ignored it. The press guessed that it was probably that young woman trying to let him know the interview had gone well past the half-hour.
“Oh, one other thing,” Cuomo said with delight, having just remembered it. “A gift from heaven. There came a phone call before I left Albany. When I’m still governor. Would the governor like to do a commercial? No, the governor doesn’t do commercials. Then I got a call from Ann Richards [the spunky likewise then just-defeated governor of Texas, who in her keynote address to the 1988 Democratic Convention had set half the nation chuckling over “George H. W. Bush, born with a silver foot in his mouth”].
“Ann Richards said to me over the phone: ‘Are you crazy? They want to do you and me together in a commercial. We’ll each make a pot of money. Two leading Democratic governors.’
“So Ann Richards and I did the commercial, for Frito-Lay burritos, a scene in her office where she’s packing to leave, I’m helping her pack, and I talk about how change is good, starting all over and so forth, ‘just like good old burritos,’ something foolish like that, and we did make a pot of money. And [with his half] I bought a small apartment for Matilda and me on the Upper East Side – far over by the river – and they wanted us to eat a Frito-Lay burrito or two on camera, but that we refused to do.”
The grocery store where Mario Cuomo’s father worked and behind which the family lived was at 95-36 150th Street, South Jamaica, Queens – “literally the wrong side, the south side, of the railroad tracks; an area so poor it couldn’t afford low-income housing projects. Mostly tenements, like the Lower East
Side of Manhattan. Auto body shops, junkyards.
“Believe it or not,” said the Mario Cuomo who some 30 years ago had first come to citywide attention by cooling a tense housing and racial standoff in Queens, “directly across the street from us there were three bar and grills, one all Portuguese, one all black, one Italian and Irish.”
As a high-school student at St. John’s Prep, he hadn’t actually thought of himself as a big-league ballplayer.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I loved books. I loved education. Early in life I was unhappy about how people like my mother and father were treated, people with no education, here or in Italy. They came to this country before [Franklin D.] Roosevelt. I wanted to be a teacher, and also thought of being a priest. But with all the propensities of a young man, I couldn’t see going through life as a priest. I’m not that good,” said Mario Cuomo.
“In this country, Italians are seen as either Sicilians or Neapolitans, which offends the whole lower half of Italy, including Salerno Province, where my parents were from. My father grew up in Nocera Inferiore, my mother – one of eight girls -- in Tramonti, which literally means ‘among the mountains.’ My father lived at the base of the mountain and worked on the land of my mother’s family. Worked with the wood of the trees, making barrels, baskets, carts, furniture, everything.
“I was born in ’32, after the [Wall Street] crash. Between ’29 and ’32 my father was a ditch-digger in New Jersey. My mother had had a child, a son, born in Italy; then here in New Jersey she had a daughter, my sister Marie; and then a baby, Mario, who died of pneumonia; and then me.
“When the crash hit, there was no more construction work and my father was out of a job. But my parents had a friend, a paisano, who knew about this grocery store in Queens owned by a Harry and Ruby Kessler. Mr. Kessler had had a heart attack. This friend told the Kesslers about my father and mother. ‘You can put them in the back room,’ he said, ‘give them a little money, and they’ll work like horses.’ Which is what happened. I could give you 50 people with the same story – the immigrant story. After seven years, Kessler turned the store over to them. My mother and father really revered the Kesslers. And I,” said Mario Cuomo, there in his suspenders at his desk at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, “I was a shabbas boy.”
Whatever Mario Cuomo’s “propensities” of the flesh as a young man, he has been married going on these 55 years to his one and only wife. Her name was Matilda Raffa when he first laid eyes on her in the cafeteria at St. John’s College.
“In those days St. John’s was in Bed-Stuy, and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. it was a men’s college. From 4 p.m. on, it was a men’s and women’s college for working people. In the no man’s period in between, you went to this small cafeteria right next to the court of the famous St. John’s basketball team.
“I saw Matilda there, chatting with some girlfriends, and I was dazzled by her. This, I thought, is the person for me. We were engaged shortly thereafter – over the opposition of both sides,” he dryly throws in. “And Matilda said: ‘One of us is going to have to make money, you should apply to St. John’s Law School,’ which I did, and I got in, and that’s it.”
The phone on his desk gave several insistent rings. He picked it up, listened, said: “No, no, tell him I’ll call him back,” and put it back on its cradle. The half-hour interview had passed the one-hour mark.
“I am by training a lawyer and by practice a politician.” This is what Governor Cuomo of New York State declared, on September 12 1984, to a rapt audience at Notre Dame University (and a listening nation) in a brilliant speech about abortion and – “as a son who stood next to his own father’s deathbed trying to decide if the tube and needles no longer served a purpose” – about artificially sustained life. What the man believes in is human diversity, the right of everyone to his or her own position.
“I speak here as a politician,” he’d said. “And also as a Catholic, a layperson baptized and raised in the pre-Vatican II church, educated in Catholic schools, attached to the church first by birth, then by choice, now by love. An old-fashioned Catholic, who sins, regrets, struggles, worries, gets confused, and most of the time feels better after confession…
“I accept the church’s teaching on abortion,” he had declared. “Must I insist you do? By law? By denying you Medicaid funding? By a constitutional amendment? If so, which one? Would that be the best way to avoid abortions or to prevent them?”
Which, in this year of grace 2005, brings the subject right around to a president who has endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. What think, Mr. Cuomo?
“I’ve been doing some writing of what I call Updates,” he replied, picking up the phone and asking a secretary to bring in the latest batch of them. “What I say about gay marriage in one of those pieces is that you shouldn’t be making public policy based on religious considerations.”
Standing there behind his desk, hands in pockets, he rather resembled, one thought, Clarence Darrow, arguing the case for evolution, enlightenment, an age of reason. “If you say same-sex marriage is bad,” said lawyer Cuomo, “you have to give me a rationale other than ‘the Bible says so.’ The only rationale I can think of is that marriage has to be between heterosexuals because that’s the way you make babies. But if that’s true, why then should a heterosexual couple that chooses not to have children get any benefits? You can say, okay, let’s call it [same-sex marriage] civil union – but the offensive part of that is it gives a certain stigma. Just to not let them use the word ‘marriage’ is mean-spirited.”
The secretary brought in a handful of those Updates. Cuomo riffled through until he found one of his favorites. “Listen!” he said. “Let me read some of this to you.” And read he did, with considerable relish, gaining amusement (along with that of his listener) as he went along:
The idea of a sharing community has withered in the first Bush Administration. We have been fragmented economically, and driven by a clash of religious values caused – in part – by a conservative political constituency’s attempt to convert God into a Celestial Party Chairman.
That movement is led by the insistent advocacy of President Bush, whose zealous conviction on the rightness of his office is occasionally more chilling than inspiring. This subject came up during a debate I had with Newt Gingrich just before the recent election. He observed that George Bush and Abraham Lincoln were alike in that they were both daily Bible readers and believers who also prayed to God every day of their life. I said there were a number of differences. Lincoln was not a member of any particular religion. He did read and quote from the Bible freely, and he probably prayed from time to time. But when he prayed, Lincoln talked to God.
When Bush prays, on the other hand, God talks to Bush!
“Wait! Wait!” said the Update author. Picking up steam, squelching his own laughter, he plunged toward the payoff:
Now I wouldn’t deny that God talks to Bush – how could I? But it is clear that President Bush admits to having some difficulty with the English language: Imagine what happens when God speaks in Hebrew or Aramaic. I conclude, therefore, that perhaps God does speak to President Bush, but if so, the President probably misunderstands what She’s saying to him.
Mario Cuomo had just about talked himself out, but was thrown one further question: Why, as one had read, had he declined President Clinton’s invitation of a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States?
“He did invite me. That is, to be nominated by him. I did say no. I told my son [Andrew Cuomo] to tell him. I didn’t want to say no to the president. It’s true that being on the Supreme Court would have suited a lot of my preferences. I don’t like cocktail parties, for instance, don’t like socializing. I like reading, I like studying, I like talking with my friends. The Supreme Court job would give complete independence.
“On the other hand, I had learned an awful lot about this nation’s problems and needs,” said the keynote speaker who had awakened the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco with a slashing attack on the meanness of Reaganism and a cordial preference for laws written by St. Francis of Assisi – “the world’s most sincere Democrat” – rather than Charles Darwin.
“By becoming a member of the Supreme Court,” he said now, “I’d never be able to talk about those things, or do anything about them. Never be able to talk about Israel, or stem cells, or the death penalty, or class warfare, or anything of the like. I simply don’t know how much difference I could make being one of nine judges hearing maybe 75 cases a term. Now I can go around debating, go on news shows, write a book, express my opinion.”
Little did he know, little did either of us know, that within two weeks of that instant Justice Sandra Day O’Connor would announce her retirement. Not, I imagine, that the gentleman currently in the White House would have thought for a billionth of a second of reprising President Clinton’s offer of a Supreme Court seat to the onetime center fielder from South Jamaica, New York.
That center fielder picked his necktie up off the desk, put it back in place, knotted it, and then pulled the interviewer over to a framed photograph on the wall by the door. It showed old ballplayers, Mickey Mantle and Mario Cuomo, having a gab in a Buffalo, N.Y., ballpark – “a ballpark that I built,” said ex-Governor Cuomo. “Mickey was saying: ‘This bum and I were signed by the two dumbest scouts in baseball. I got $1,100 and this bum got $2,000.’”
The bum in question raised a hand to fiddle with the thermostat that was a little to the left of the photo. “It’s as cold as a Republican’s heart in here,” said Mario Cuomo as the strictly limited half-hour interview was breasting the tape at an hour and a half. Slipping into the jacket of his midnight-black business suit, the attorney from Assisi was ready to go back to work.
Photo by Brett C Vermilyea