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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/10/nyregion/10silda.html?ei=5090&en=77a8e10d43a6f5da&ex=1320814800&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1163166861-FDqdrf/r8tP+KhRBnGwhhw

The New York Times

November 10, 2006

Her Next Job: First Lady of New York

By ERIC KONIGSBERG

[Photos at end of article]

In January 2005, when she found herself pondering how best to come to terms with the job of political spouse, Silda Wall Spitzer sought the advice of a woman who was once best known for not fitting so comfortably into that role herself, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The two of them convened in Senator Clinton’s Manhattan office and spoke, according to Ms. Wall Spitzer, “about how to maintain a private sphere for our family and how to be helpful in my husband’s campaign.”

“I figured, here’s a woman who also met her husband at law school, who had been a lawyer with a firm, whose husband was a state attorney general before he ran for governor,” she said of Senator Clinton. “There really aren’t that many role models for this.”

Now Ms. Wall Spitzer, who has been married to Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer for 19 years, is poised to become New York’s first lady, and the balancing act may get even tougher.

By her own admission, she is an ambivalent political spouse, a high-powered woman in her own right who surrendered certain personal goals for the demands of public life. She was formerly a rising corporate lawyer, first at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and then as in-house counsel for Chase Manhattan Bank, and she makes no bones about the satisfaction she found in the work force.

But as her husband plunged headlong into the political life, she decided to devote herself to their three daughters (now ages 12, 14 and 16) and to starting a philanthropic foundation. In a recent interview, she declared, “It’s not necessarily the way I thought I would be spending my time.”

With the spotlight on the Spitzers intensifying during his march to the governor’s mansion, she has proved to be a game political sidekick who brings polish and grace to her husband’s occasionally headstrong and overeager image — such that one friend of the couple, Carl Mayer, described the dynamic between them as “sort of a reverse Bill-and-Hillary deal.”

“He’s kind of rough edges and ambition, and she’s tremendous charm,” added Mr. Mayer, who was a friend of Mr. Spitzer’s at Princeton.

Jim Cramer, a law school friend of the couple and who now has a television program offering stock-picking advice, put it somewhat more bluntly: “Silda is poised; Eliot is a maelstrom.”

Ms. Wall Spitzer, 48, is even-keeled, unassuming and a bit hard to read. Mr. Spitzer, on the other hand, is brash, and for good and for ill, very stubborn.

Mr. Spitzer’s friends laud his wife for her remarkable ability to rein in these tendencies. On the domestic front, Mr. Mayer said, her influence can be seen in Mr. Spitzer’s table manners, which can be less than graceful. “Watching Eliot eat a piece of chicken is like watching a public execution,” he said. “And the sound of him munching on a bowl of cereal — and then humming as he does it.”

Mr. Mayer recalled Ms. Wall Spitzer’s “soundly encouraging him not to do this.”

Moreover, Mr. Spitzer’s circle of close advisers is small, and his wife is among those he trusts most on political matters, friends and aides say. “I can’t imagine he would do anything significant — from appointments he would make to major decisions on policy issues — without full consultation with her,” said Lloyd Constantine, a former prosecutor who was the chairman of the transition committee in 1998 as Mr. Spitzer prepared to take office as New York attorney general.

Mr. Spitzer makes no bones about his wife’s influence. “At the end of every day, there’s the inevitable recounting of what I was doing and where we’re heading on different issues,” he said. “She pushes me to defend my views where we disagree. If I can’t convince her, I know my thinking needs work.”

He cited Ms. Wall Spitzer’s “deeply held sense of ethics” and her intellect as forming the bedrock of her judgment. “I rely on her very much as someone to talk to in order to resolve a tough issue,” he added. “What length of sentence to ask for, how severe a fine should be. They come down to questions of what is just and fair.”

Ms. Wall Spitzer grew up in Concord, N.C., which had a population of about 20,000 at the time. Her father was a hospital administrator and her mother was a homemaker.

Her parents came up with the name Silda by shortening the Old German name Serilda, which means something like “armed warrior woman,” or, as she likes to tell the story, “Teutonic war maiden.”

She never expected to leave North Carolina, but after graduating from Meredith College, a Baptist women’s school in her home state, she found herself unable to turn down Harvard Law. “I just felt that I wanted to experience a bigger and different world,” she said.

In 1982, after her second year at Harvard, Ms. Wall Spitzer was briefly married to Peter Stamos, a fellow student at the law school who was also a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. (He now runs a private equity firm in northern California worth $3 billion, and in 2004 was a major fund-raiser for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.)

She declined to discuss the marriage, but said through a spokeswoman that the two of them were separated after 29 days. Several friends of hers from that period of her life said that Ms. Wall Spitzer was hurt and embarrassed by the episode.

“This is a person who never made missteps,” said Janet Ward-Black, a close friend since high school, who now practices law in North Carolina. “Just like everything with Silda always was, she had a perfect wedding, with all her family and friends down here, to a perfect man, and then ... poof!” (Through a spokesman, Mr. Stamos declined to comment.)

When she met Mr. Spitzer in 1984, at a rented house in Vermont where they and several other friends were staying one weekend, they immediately hit it off. “Eliot of course is very quick with his thoughts, and Silda could go one-liner for one-liner with him,” said Clifford Sloan, Mr. Spitzer’s roommate at the time. “It was like a champion Ping-Pong player finding another one.” They married in 1987.

At Harvard, Ms. Wall Spitzer was a driven and disciplined student of whom great success — but not necessarily grandiose ambition — was expected. “She didn’t set out to change the world like Eliot did,” Mr. Cramer said. “She worked at Chase, for God’s sake. If she weren’t so pretty, you’d have called her a geek.”

Indeed, where Mr. Spitzer takes pride in his reputation as a crusader, Ms. Wall Spitzer thrives on negotiation, and misses the deal-making days of her legal career.

“It was a very exciting time to be doing mergers and acquisitions, the whole poison pill era,” she said, referring to the influential hostile-takeover innovation. As an associate at Skadden, Arps, she routinely billed about 3,200 hours a year, or more than 60 hours a week on average. She recalled her share of successive all-nighters, and trying to catch an hour’s sleep underneath a conference room table, “because you couldn’t turn out the lights in the office.”

“I’d felt kind of proud that I was making more money than Eliot,” she said. “He had a lot of time in public-sector jobs during that period.”

More recently, Ms. Wall Spitzer said, she has found sufficient challenges in running her foundation, Children for Children, which provides programs for young people to participate in community service.

According to her estimate, it has raised more than $1.5 million in resource grants for schools in low-income parts of New York, and more than 80,000 children have been involved, both as volunteers and recipients.

She has also learned a good deal about some of the more difficult aspects of campaign life. “As recently as last spring, she told me she didn’t like public speaking; she said it scared her,” said the clothing designer Dana Buchman, a friend who is in a book club with Ms. Wall Spitzer. “About a month ago, she said it’s gotten easier.”

And she has taken more to the political life. On a campaign swing upstate, Ms. Wall Spitzer made enthusiastic appearances at an elder care center and two gatherings of local Democrats. She became most animated, however, when the possibility of good, clean combat arose. In the audience for her husband’s debate against John Faso, she held her breath every time Mr. Spitzer spoke. When he finished his whirlwind opening statement, she signaled her approval with an intense, if barely perceptible, nod.

When Mr. Faso claimed that if elected, he would be the first governor of New York with a degree from the state’s public university system, she snapped forward and whispered to her husband’s running mate, David Paterson, that she didn’t think this was true. “Marty Mack just said something during dinner about a governor who went to SUNY-Cortland,” she said. Mr. Mack, one of Spitzer’s aides, was once the mayor of Cortland.

After the debate, the Spitzers headed to the airport for a return flight to New York. Ms. Wall Spitzer noticed a hole above the knee of her husband’s pants.

“That suit is falling apart,” she said.

“It’s my good luck suit,” Mr. Spitzer said, and began listing other occasions from its charmed history. “The first governor’s debate. Election night for attorney general — the second time I won. A bunch of big press conferences. It’s from Brooks Brothers.” He went on: “I like Brooks Brothers. I got a suit once at J. Press but it didn’t fit right.”

The woman who was soon to become the first lady of New York gave her husband an adoring glance. Still, there are times when the truce she made with his career choice is an uneasy one. When asked what it had been like to watch her husband argue a case in court, she said she had done so only once — in 1992, when he was an assistant district attorney.

A playful look of astonishment came over her face. “I was working. Remember?”

James Estrin/The New York Times

Eliot Spitzer and his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, had coffee and newspapers after voting on Election Day.