Of course this piece is still pretty slanted, so it isn’t necessarily true. And if he gets the nomination, it had better not be true. Its just the sort of thing that could break at the wrong time and screw everything up horribly for the entire nation.

My favorite excerpts from the story are these (taken sequentially, but out of context):

Within Giuliani’s camp the picture of who Judith is is not much clearer. “When I see her, she’s only interested in my jewelry, where I buy my dresses,” says a friend of the former mayor’s. “Does anyone really know Judith Giuliani? Let’s be honest: no one does.”

The Giuliani people certainly wish to keep it that way. “I’m hearing bad reports about you. Bad reports. You interviewed Mrs. Giuliani’s father, in Hazleton!” Mike McKeon, the campaign spokesman, barks at me within four hours of the encounter.

“We’re not allowed to talk to the press,” Judith’s mother, Joan, says nervously when she discovers me interviewing her husband. She is a short, brisk woman in black trousers—she shares with Judith a small, purposeful mouth—who expresses despair over her husband’s candor and wants me to shred my notes on the carpeted porch.

Bits of the real Judith are scattered all over the country: in the South, East, and West. They must be carefully pieced together.

Giuliani invited Judith everywhere: to Yankees games in the summer of ‘99, to Cuker’s restaurant, to the millennium celebration in Times Square, and to Town Hall meetings. This lack of restraint was not unusual for him: “Rudy has no willpower when it comes to relationships. This is why it’s such an issue,” says a Giuliani friend.

The mayor began to spend his weekends—accompanied, as the New York Post reported, by a detail of detectives, which may have cost taxpayers $3,000 a tryst—in Southampton, where Judith owned a condominium. Since he had until then always accounted for his weekends, says the incisive Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett, “his press office started telling reporters, ‘He’s teaching Andrew how to play golf.’ Now, Andrew’s old enough to understand—he has to be aware that his father used him as a beard!”

“Yes, the children were upset,” recalls a close confidant of the Giuliani kids, who is not referring simply to the unraveling of their parents’ marriage. Far worse “was an application for Dad to allow Mrs. Nathan into Gracie Mansion. That kind of thing was very disconcerting to everyone.”

None of Judith’s efforts, however, proved to be of much consequence—and some, like her recent Christmas gifts of Bibles to the Giuliani kids, have backfired, I am told. According to a number of Giuliani’s good friends, the former mayor insists on Judith’s presence at events for his offspring—and when this demand is thwarted, he doesn’t attend. He was not present, they say, at Andrew’s graduation from St. Joseph Regional High School in New Jersey. Now 21 and a Duke University junior, the son tells friends he doesn’t speak to Rudy, according to one of his classmates—this at a time when his father is desperate to attract conservative, family-values backing.

“There is a reason why she wore that tiara at her wedding: she really does see herself as a princess,” says another former Giuliani aide. “Not as a queen. Queen is her goal. Queen is who she wants to be.”

She has become used to getting her way. An organizer of a recent fashion shoot received a call from one of Rudy’s business associates warning her to address his wife as Judith. According to this source, Judith became so smitten with the dress she was modeling “that she simply didn’t want to take it off. She didn’t offer to pay. She made it very clear she wanted it for free. You know how it is when someone stalls.” Instead, says this source, Judith kept repeating a kind of mantra: “I’m a sample size, I’m a sample size.”

Around the office of Giuliani Partners, it is said, Sunny Mindel, Giuliani’s communications director, spoke of the need for providing an entire plane seat for Judith’s “Baby Louis”—a reference to her Louis Vuitton handbag, which sits in solitary splendor on her travels.

There have been other moments of vulnerability. At the close of the May Republican debate, Judith leapt onstage eagerly, her face beaming with delight. Giuliani, it was noted, appeared strangely disconcerted. “It did not look like he was happy to see her. It looked to me like he was estranged,” says Barrett. “He was cold.”

It was in the ladies’ room before the event that observers got a telling glimpse of the real Judith. She had gone there to touch up her makeup when some of her husband’s staff informed her Giuliani was in the vicinity, walking by.

“He’s out there! Coming by!” repeated Judith, her voice tense with excitement. And then a plea: “Tell him to wait for me!”