As Eliot Spitzer launched his daft and delusional drive to relieve his middle-aged boredom while reviving the city’s X-rated economy by running for comptroller, the little woman to whom he’s married did not stand by her man.
Finally.
With the last of the three Spitzer daughters now out of high school, and Spitzer, 54, revealed as New York’s biggest political and sexual fraud until Anthony Weiner, Silda Wall Spitzer, a k a New York’s First Doormat, stayed away.
Silda, 55, Eliot’s wife of nearly 26 years, seems to have found the guts to remove herself from the side of a man who turned her into an object of pity, ridicule and unfair physical comparisons to a hooker named Ashley Dupre. Take that, Eliot!
For the first time in her pathetic married life, she’s a doormat no more. But can Silda still stay away from this rich, narcissistic and insatiable stud?
Can she resist the charms of a man who cares more about satisfying his own appetites for lust, power and unfortunate wardrobe choices (black knee socks!) than he ever cared for the woman who promised to love him forever?
We shall see.
Yesterday, I faced Spitzer in the broiling midday sun in Union Square, where his people were collecting signatures to get the joker on the ballot. And I asked the ex-Love Gov, who was sweating profusely in a wool, pinstriped suit, where the devil his wife was.
This is the same wife who stood, like an ashen-faced potted plant, beside her hubby as he resigned in disgrace from the governorship five years ago, caught by the feds patronizing high-end prostitutes — after the cheapskate haggled over the price.
“She’s at the office,’’ he snapped before turning his scrawny back to me.
So, of course, I asked again.
“Someone’s got to earn a paycheck!’’ he said.
This would be funny for the wife of an unemployable gazillionaire like Spitzer. It was even more so because the two charities on whose boards Silda has long served paid her $0 a year in 2011, according to GuideStar, which tracks nonprofits.
With his back now firmly planted in my face, I asked Spitzer if he’s still separated from Silda. As The Post reported, Eliot has been bedding down lately in the building where his elderly mother and real-estate mogul father live, while Silda sleeps, presumably alone, a few blocks away.
That question seemed to rattle the grinning idiot.
“We are not separated,’’ he protested. “She’s at the office.’’
Adding a note of hilarity to this farce, hecklers penetrated the thick wall of reporters that clung to Spitzer like a $4,000-a-night call girl.
“Spitzer, you’re a joke!’’ a man shouted.
The Silda question wasn’t going away, and Eliot insisted that his wife would be going on the campaign trail with him. He did not say when.
He tried his best to maintain his grin. But out there in the sun, in a city where most voters don’t seem to want to know him, mobbed by press and handlers, Eliot Spitzer looked like the loneliest man in the world.
Get used to it.