by Mike Stanton
The previous winter, she had gone to Florida to stay with her mother and thaw out after coming down with pneumonia. Cianci had promised to come down and meet her, but he never did. In January she met a man named Christian Johannsen at a valet-parking stand outside a restaurant where she had gone to eat with her parents. He gave her his business card. In Providence, Materna said, she never looked at another man; out in nightclubs like Sh-Booms, she and her girlfriends would joke about how one of “Buddy’s baby-sitters” always seemed to be around.
Materna called Johannsen, who worked in Miami as an investment banker, and they went out. “It was the first time that somebody had taken me to dinner in nine years,” she said. Before things could go any further, she received a frantic call from Cianci. A Providence patrolman, Steven Shaw, had been shot and killed apprehending a robbery suspect, and he wanted her to return for the funeral. “Please come back,” she recalled Cianci’s telling her. “I need you.” Still nursing her pneumonia, Materna flew back to Rhode Island in early February and marched in the funeral procession behind the casket with Cianci and Governor Sundlun. It was a gray day, wet and snowy.
Later that month, they had what she called their “first big serious talk” about their relationship. Once again, he said that he would marry her. In March Materna went back to Florida for six weeks and kindled a romance with Johannsen. Cianci, she said, apparently became suspicious and found out—how, she didn’t know, because she didn’t tell him.
In the coming months, Materna shuttled between Florida and Rhode Island, Christian and Buddy, never staying in one place too long. Cianci began pushing her to get married, only now she had another suitor. She felt conflicted between her need to move on and the strong pull of her relationship with Buddy—and with Providence. Growing up as a navy brat, she had always felt Providence was her home base, her touchstone. She had good friends and “a great little life” there. And Cianci, for all the pain of their relationship, had transformed her into a much more confident person—“He gave me the world.” She had become a polished public speaker and a doer, serving on a multitude of charitable boards and learning how to get things accomplished. She had gotten involved with the Providence Preservation Society, the Providence Performing Arts Center, the library, the schools, the dog pound. The political whirl with Cianci was “exciting, thrilling, exhausting.” It was, she said, “like being the bride at every party, every night.” But there was also the heartache, and the realization that Buddy was never going to change and make her a true bride.
“There’s nobody better for you than me,” he’d tell her. But she was hesitant. She envisioned herself staying with him, sitting at home alone on Power Street and growing old while he was out at political events or with other women. Cianci signed them up for couples therapy, and they started going to see a man in Cranston; the mayor’s police chauffeur would drive them, discreetly parking the limousine in a garage near the office. To Materna, the sessions were comical. The therapist parroted Cianci so much that they should have been sitting on the couch together, she joked; it was as if the mayor had told him what to say. The therapist would compare Johannsen to a doctor who had come on the scene to highlight the problems in her relationship with Cianci. But you don’t marry the doctor, the therapist said—you use him to fix the relationship, and then you send the doctor away. Within the mayor’s office, one aide said, there was talk that Cianci had “gotten to” the therapist.
One night, over dinner at the Old Canteen, Wendy asked, “Why do you act the way you do?” She couldn’t understand how he could have such a big heart, be so kind and wonderful and loving, and yet behave so horribly. Then it hit her. “What happened with your father?” she asked. Cianci burst into tears. He didn’t go into detail about his father, or talk about the things that Wendy had heard on other occasions about Dr. Cianci’s girlfriends, or how he could be aloof and demanding. Instead, Buddy spoke tearfully about the last time he had seen his father alive, when Buddy boarded the train in Providence to join the army in 1967. His father had died a short time later, on the Fourth of July. The Fourth had always been an awkward day for Wendy when she was with Buddy, because it was her favorite holiday.
It was an election year, and Materna came back from Florida for a fund-raiser in May and again for the mayor’s official announcement in June. Then, as the summer wore on, she said, “I sat up there [in Providence] and went crazy.” Cianci’s proposal became a public issue; she told the Journal that she was thinking about it. “It literally became a show,” she recalled. “We’d go to a fund-raiser, and it would be like George Burns and Gracie Allen. Buddy would say, ‘She wants me to marry her.’ I’d laugh.”
Behind the scenes, Cianci was turning up the pressure. He started calling Materna’s mother in Chicago and charming her, talking for hours. Materna, who had struggled in the past to get Cianci to spend any time with her parents when they were in town, was annoyed. “He’s really fabulous, Wendy,” her mother would say. An exasperated Materna replied, “He’s been making me cry for nine years, and you call him fabulous?”
Cianci was “very, very angry” with her, Materna recalled. One day her Florida boyfriend, Johannsen, chased away a private detective who showed up snooping at his office in Miami. In a conversation with Materna, she said, Cianci took credit for sending the detective, and also relayed information from credit reports that he had somehow obtained on Johannsen. Cianci even described how her new beau walked and how he dressed. Materna suspected that the phone at her apartment in Providence was tapped, because Cianci would repeat back to her verbatim conversations that she had had with Johannsen, who would be asking when she was coming back to Florida. The mayor also threatened to plant drugs on her boyfriend and tip off the police, though she considered that an idle threat—she had heard Cianci say the same thing many times before about political rivals or anyone else who angered him.
Art Coloian began talking to her, telling her that she had “better behave.” One day, she said, he took her to lunch and told her to “keep my head on straight.” Materna laughed. A Providence police officer said he received a phone message from Coloian one day, asking him to go to Florida on a matter involving Materna. But the police officer, who had just worked an overnight shift, said that he ducked the call.
In the summer of 1994, during the month following her dinghy ride with Cianci to dedicate WaterPlace Park, Materna vacillated between her two suitors. She was, she recalled, “all over the place emotionally.” She wasn’t happy in Rhode Island. She wasn’t happy in Florida. She didn’t want to leave Providence, but she didn’t feel that she could stay with Cianci, even though she loved him. Finally, she and Johannsen agreed to get married in Barbados on Saturday, September 10.
As the wedding approached, Materna’s emotional turmoil grew. Just before Labor Day weekend, miserable in Florida, she put her marriage plans on hold and called Cianci and said that she wanted to come home. Cianci arranged a flight. When she stepped off the plane in Rhode Island, Cianci was standing on the gangway of the airport with their two dogs, Tucker and Belle. But rather than being touched by the scene, she grew angry when she saw that the dogs had bows on their heads—something she had always hated, one more sign of how little attention Cianci paid her. She pulled the bows off the dogs’ heads and told Cianci that she wanted him to take her home. Surprised, Cianci said, “I thought you came home to get married.” She said no, that she wanted to be left alone to think. After he dropped her at her apartment, she retreated to her cousin’s house on Prudence Island for the weekend, where she realized that she had made a mistake. She called Johannsen and they agreed to go forward with the wedding.
That Tuesday, Materna went to Power Street to break the news to Cianci. He was devastated, she said. Late in the afternoon, they took a walk along the waterfront at India Point. Cianci sobbed, she said, as they grieved over the end of their relationship. A few days later, she flew back to Florida. Before Materna left for Barbados on Friday, Cianci sent a courier to hand-
deliver a letter, asking her not to go through with it. But it was too late.
Cianci was wild with grief. Devastated, he poured his heart out to close friends, including his longtime secretary, Carol Agugiaro, who was surprised to see such a vulnerable side to the hard-charging mayor. Bruce Sundlun said that it was “the only time I’ve ever seen him knocked off his feet.” According to Sundlun, Cianci said that it was “the worst blow and the worst mistake he had ever made.”
Even after she married, Materna said, Cianci continued to call, asking, “When are you coming back?” In what she described as one of the low points of their relationship, Cianci sent Tucker and Belle to live at the Providence dog pound for ten months, at the instigation of an old girlfriend whom Cianci had left for Materna years before and who had moved back in and wanted no reminders of Wendy. When Materna found out, she was furious. Around the same time, Cianci received an insurance settlement for some damage to his boat; because Materna had lent him money on the boat to help him out of his early-nineties financial troubles, she had to sign off on the check. She agreed to do so, she said, in return for Cianci’s releasing the dogs to her custody. She hired a lawyer and wound up spending five thousand dollars to get Tucker and Belle out of the Providence pound and bring them to live with her at her new home in Key Biscayne.
The day that Wendy walked down the aisle in Barbados, Buddy campaigned for reelection at the Providence Waterfront Festival, where he kissed a pig named Petunia.
Petunia was at a booth to raise money for charity; people could pay a dollar for a ballot and vote for the politician they wanted to see kiss the swine. Cianci won in a landslide. Puckering up for the cameras, he joked, “I’ve kissed a lotta pigs in my life.”
Cianci had an easy race that year. His would-be challenger, councilman Josh Fenton, had decided to retire from politics; his wife was pregnant, and he wanted a normal family life. Still, the mayor campaigned on, trailed by a PBS camera crew filming a segment on him for a documentary on American politics, Vote for Me.
“I’m running for my fifth term,” Cianci told his PBS interviewer. “That’s a long time. You’ve really and truly gotta want it and love it. You’ve gotta be dedicated to it. And you’ve gotta like to do what I’m about to do in that crowd right now.”
Later, after he’d kissed the pig, Cianci was back in his limo, riding to another campaign stop. “All fame and power, I guess, is fleeting,” he said. “It goes and it comes. . . . I’ve been in and out, back in again, and I can tell you—when you’re out, you’re out.”
At another stop, a woman asked innocently, “How’s Wendy?”
“She’s, uh, getting married today, in Barbados or someplace,” he replied.
Embarrassed, the woman said, “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, she met a guy—good luck to ’em.”
Later, at another stop, a man dressed like Uncle Sam asked about Wendy. Cianci said she was getting married, then told Uncle Sam, “Yeah, bad move—for me. . . . It isn’t a very good day for me, you know.”
Back in his limousine, Cianci looked sad. “Kinda lonely today, just alone, place to place, from one advance man to the next one. But if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be in it. My whole life has been the city, so it’s tough for me to say that I don’t want to do things in it.”
The limousine drove past the State House, where a bride and groom stood outside, posing for wedding pictures. “Oh, look at this, a bride,” he said softly. “Stop, we’ll go say hello to the bride. Isn’t that nice.”
Chuckling, Cianci got out.
“That’s the prettiest sight I’ve seen,” he called out. “I only see demonstrations here, you know, and riots and things.”
Cianci shook the groom’s hand and pecked the bride on the cheek. He stood with the newlyweds for a picture, his smile frozen in place.
WENDY WAS GONE, but Buddy still had Providence.
He was reelected easily in 1994, and his love affair with his city flourished. As the Renaissance took shape, his approval rating soared past 80 percent.
There was a new convention center and new hotels. The upscale Providence Place Mall opened, a handsome brick structure that stretched from downtown to the State House. Fleet Bank financed an outdoor public ice-skating rink outside City Hall; the mayor, not wanting to embarrass himself at the dedication ceremonies, hired a personal skating instructor.
“We have moved more than railroad tracks and rivers,” he proclaimed. “We have moved the hearts and souls of an entire city.”
The old downtown core remained a problem, though there were signs of life. He declared downtown an arts-and-entertainment district, modeled after a program in Dublin, Ireland, and pushed for tax credits for artists and developers to rehab old buildings into lofts. He wanted to bring residents back downtown. But financing remained difficult, and progress slow. For all the attention focused on Cianci’s program of tax breaks for artists, only a handful actually moved downtown to take advantage. More artists were moving into cheaper old mill space in neighboring Pawtucket. When the mayor boasted that Providence had more artists per capita than any city in America, he was counting the art students at the Rhode Island School of Design, according to Patricia McLaughlin, his downtown economic czar. Still, as the river-relocation project had shown, change sometimes came slowly. Nobody could fault Cianci for his grand ideas.
Zorba the Greek was impressed by the mayor’s vision.
In 1995, actor Anthony Quinn moved to Rhode Island and settled on a waterfront estate in Bristol to paint and sculpt. Quinn had met Cianci in 1986, while performing Zorba the Greek in Providence. Cianci had shown him around the drab city, which singer Bette Midler once called “the pits,” and enthusiastically pointed out how they were going to move these rivers and restore those historic buildings.
Quinn thought that Cianci was nuts, but he listened with good humor. He had been a mayor, at least in the movies, and he knew that it was a tough role. In The Secret of Santa Vittoria Quinn had played an amiable drunk who unexpectedly becomes mayor of his Italian wine-making village during World War II and must contend with Nazis intent on looting the village’s vintage wines.
When Quinn moved to Rhode Island, he renewed his acquaintance with Cianci. The two grew as close as father and son, Zorba the Elder and Zorba the Younger, dining and drinking and laughing late into the night up on Federal Hill.
“I don’t know of any artist or man in the world who has the dreams for a place that Buddy has for Providence,” said Quinn. “He made all his dreams come true. He’s a miracle man.”
In the 1970s, Cianci said, mayors were social workers; in the 1990s they were entrepreneurs. A Wellesley College urban-studies professor, Wilbur C. Rich, concluded that mayors in postindustrial cities had to be salesmen who could create excitement to promote their city as a good place to live, work, and play.
“Buddy Cianci has mastered the technique of creating the show particularly well,” Rich wrote in a book on mayoral leadership in middle-sized American cities. “To say he is the life of the party in Providence is an understatement. . . . Cianci has come close to melding his personality with the so-called New Providence.” As a result, the public was willing to put up with Cianci’s “idiosyncracies and self-serving behavior. He is the merchant of the New Providence. Shameless boosterism is now the norm in Providence.”
Cianci could be over the top, telling The New York Times that Providence was “the Florence of America,” or returning from a mayors’ conference in San Francisco and ordering his economic-development director, John Palmieri, to get cracking on a Chinatown for Providence. Undeterred by Providence’s negligible Chinese population, Cianci shouted, “I want pagodas!”
But the mayor’s enthusiasm was infectious. Providence became trendy. Publications as diverse as Money magazine and Swing, a magazine for the twenty-something set, rated Providence as one of the best cities in America in which to live. Utne Reader ranked Providence as one of the country’s ten most enlightened cit
ies. Esquire and the Journal of Food & Wine raved about Providence’s restaurants, many of which had been nurtured by an aggressive city loan program. Food & Wine rated the city’s restaurants ahead of Boston’s.
As the longest-serving active mayor in the country of a city with more than one hundred thousand people, Cianci presented himself as a statesman. “You know, Winston Churchill once said that a politician gives people what they want and a statesman gives them what they need,” Cianci told The New York Times in 1997. “This is the only time in my career I’ll be able to make them converge.”
Cianci became something of a national cult figure as the roguish savior of Providence. A frequent guest on the ribald Imus in the Morning radio program, he went toe-to-toe with the acerbic Don Imus, who was not known for suffering fools gladly.
Imus teased Cianci about wearing an ankle bracelet and finding thumbs in the mayor’s marinara sauce. Cianci pledged to rename Clown Alley, the street beside the Civic Center where the circus unloaded, Imus Way—for a price. Cianci would have his public-relations people work for days writing material before an Imus appearance, but he was also quick at ad-libbing.
“Did you set someone on fire?” asked Imus, who liked bringing up Cianci’s assault conviction.
“I set people on fire every night,” shot back Cianci.
Afterward, puffing so hard on a Barclay cigarette that he left teeth marks on the filter, a charged-up Cianci crowed about the line all day. “You just have to stay with him,” he boasted to a friend. “He’s not hard to outflank.”
