Hugh Carey: He always made it interesting
New York Gov. Hugh L. Carey, center, flanked by Felix Rohatyn, left, chairman of the New York State Municipal Assistance Corp., and State Comptroller Arthur Levitt, meet with White House officials in Washington, as they seek financial help for New York City. (Nov. 14, 1975) Credit: AP
One night in Albany more than 30 years ago, Gov. Hugh Carey strode onto an elevator and found himself face-to-face with the correspondent from Staten Island's daily paper.
Promptly, Carey began to sing, to the tune of "How are Things in Glocca Morra":
"How are things in Staten Island . . . Are the Huguenots still living there?"
This second line, as consistently recited by the reporter, referred to French Protestants who settled in the area in the 17th and 18th centuries to escape religious persecution.
This was Carey -- literate, odd, amusing.
He once was asked at a news conference about environmental concerns at the Binghamton state office building over the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, a toxic compound that had been widely used in transformers and electric motors.
The reply became a classic tale of Carey:
"I offer here and now to walk into Binghamton, into any part of that building, and swallow an entire glass of PCBs, then run a mile afterwards," the governor said.
Sadness also was part of the Carey story.
When elected governor in 1974, he was a widower, his wife, Helen, having died of cancer earlier that year. They had 14 children, two of whom died in a 1969 car crash on Shelter Island.
People magazine wrote: "As a television plot, it would have been rejected as unconvincing: A little-known politician, fulfilling a promise to his dying wife, runs for high office with the help of his 12 kids. He wins, and the family goes off to live in the big, old gingerbready Governor's Mansion."
Four years later, in 1978, Carey became the first Democrat in nearly 40 years to win consecutive terms as governor.
By then, he'd faced criticism about an isolated personal style and society page accounts of his public courtship of socialite Anne Ford Uzielli.
On election night, Carey surprised campaign workers when he addressed the romance: "I announce that in order that I will not be aloof, alone, remote, inaccessible and grouchy -- or any of those things -- tonight I embark on a new campaign."
That relationship fizzled and he later married Chicago real estate businesswoman Evangeline Gouletas. The marriage ended eight years later.
Carey's name during his governorship became associated with nights out at bars such as PJ Clarke's in Manhattan and 21 in Albany. There were even some Jimmy Walker comparisons. But as Michael Kramer wrote in New York magazine in 1981, the year before Carey left office: "He is neither a jet setter nor a playboy. He is a romantic, a one-woman man. . . . He wants a wife for himself and a mother for them."
None of this, of course, speaks of Carey's official performance as the state's chief executive, for which he's drawn heaps of praise in recent years from influential quarters.
But in his related role as a performer on the public stage, Carey always made it interesting.
