Lifestyle

A legendary Manhattan DA’s wife recalls their long relationship

Billionaire cosmetics magnate and noted philanthropist Ronald Lauder wasn’t exactly the picture of charity during a run-in with then Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau in 1998.

Lauder, then chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, was furious that Morgenthau had sanctioned a team to recover a masterpiece from the museum’s collection, Egon Schiele’s famous painting “Portrait of Wally.”

The painting was looted by the Nazis during the war and Morgenthau planned to return it to its rightful owner.

But Lauder had other plans for that painting: He wanted to ship it off to a big exhibition overseas.

Lauder burst into the Morgenthau’s office in the Criminal Court Building “chin thrust forward, jutting brows casting a shadow over eyes luminous with indignation,” Lucinda Franks writes in “Timeless” a memoir of her 40-year marriage to the man friends and colleagues call “The Boss.”

But her husband, she writes, waved Lauder off with seven words: “It’s not my decision. It’s the law.”

Love him or hate him, Morgenthau, now 95, was a force to be reckoned with. Through six terms over 35 years, Morgenthau prosecuted high-profile cases from “the Preppy Murderer” to Anthony Marshall (convicted of stealing from heiress Brooke Astor) to the now-overturned 1989 Central Park Jogger case.

He even inspired the character DA Adam Schiff on the original “Law & Order.” (A show, according to Frank, that he loved to watch in reruns.)

On the love side, it was Mayor Ed Koch who used to call Morgenthau on his private line at home at all hours — even in the early morning after his 1977 wedding to Frank.

On the other side was Rudy Giuliani, then federal attorney for New York state.

There was a “bitter rivalry” between the two, Frank writes, because Morgenthau felt that Giuliani was a “publicity hound” who stole cases from him (Giuliani led the case against John Gotti — the one that finally sent “Teflon John” to prison).

But Morgenthau let bygones be bygones when Giuliani became mayor, according to Frank. When in office, he praised the mayor and said, “I’m human. I forgive my enemies.”

One of the book’s most startling chapters includes a diary entry Franks wrote after Morgenthau’s prosecution of El Sayyid Nosair for the murder of Orthodox rabbi Meir Kahane. “Bob is complaining bitterly about the FBI and the Police Department.”

Apparently, in Nosair’s apartment, they found dozens of boxes full of really damning documents and tapes indicating a big Islamic conspiracy, including…blueprints and plans of how to bomb US landmarks, including maybe the Twin Towers.”

“But the FBI seized the boxes and wouldn’t allow the DA’s office to put them in evidence at Nosair’s trial. The police and the FBI kept saying he was just a ‘lone gunman,’ and Bob says that’s absurd,” she writes.

Could closer scrutiny of these materials have prevented the 9/11 attacks? No one will ever know, but Franks says, “It was hard not to draw the conclusion that [Nosair], along with other al Qaeda terrorists, knew about plans for the Sept. 11, 2001, Twin Towers disaster.”

Franks met Morgenthau when she was in her mid-20s, and he was well into his 50s.

She was working as a news reporter. Despite (or because of) the age difference, he was smitten.

Morgenthau and wife Lucinda Franks.Robert Miller

She realized he loved her when, at a party, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. “I looked up at Bob. He was smiling too. But not at Jackie. A weight fell through me. I took a deep breath and then another. Then I smiled back at him,” Franks writes.

Their May-December marriage raised eyebrows among Morgenthau’s tony circle, and much of “Timeless” is naturally devoted to the couple’s love story.

Parts of it are almost too private to read (“Are you afraid of sex, you, a boy whose family seldom hugged or touched?” she writes).

When Franks was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998, the couple’s relationship was severely tested. Morgenthau’s first wife, Martha, died of the disease in 1972.

When he refused to come and pick Franks up after a radiation treatment, she realized that he suffered from PTSD.

He struggled not only with his first wife’s passing, but also from his time in the Navy during World War II when he battled in the Pacific aboard a destroyer.

Frank also says he struggled with demons about his father, who died in a psychiatric hospital.

The man who dedicated three decades to serving the city had a startling admission.

“I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else,” he told her. “I wanted someone to take care of me.”