“We Know the Neighborhood,” the acid orange sign stated flatly. A big black dude in blue-tinted square-frame sunglasses cannonballed out of the supermarket’s automatic doors.

“Gifford Miller ain’t got a pray-uh!” he boomed.

“Well—you can pray!” said Mr. Miller, 35, the Speaker of the City Council now running for Mayor. Though New York born and bred, Mr. Miller is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and, hence, a minority contestant in a city whose leaders are decided by the city’s unforgiving tribal politics. And in this summer of extenuating atmospheric conditions, Mr. Miller was working particularly hard to adopt himself out to any ethnic neighborhood that might appreciate his progressive-Democrat intentions.

This very Sunday, he was back to hanging around the most affluent black community in the city. The notion was to exploit the disconnect between black leadership in southeast Queens, where make-believe-Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg is hardly disliked, and in Harlem, where C. Virginia Fields is expected to show strong in the Sept. 13th Democratic primary. Earlier that morning, Mr. Miller could be seen stepping out on faith in the area’s holy-rolling Bible churches, with their tambourines and drum sets and Yamaha keyboards, Kleenex boxes in every emotion-filled pew, and friendly neighborhood church ladies—a known Panzer-like voting bloc.

“Bloomberg is going to run over you like a, crush you like … like … the Russians crushed the Central German Unit!” the man at Western Beef went on.

“So it’s going to take him four years and cost him 20 million people?” asked Mr. Miller, a history buff.

Mr. Miller waited for his next potential convert and took a Johnny Carson–style golf swing as several locals stopped to shake hands with Leroy Comrie, their Yogi Bear of a councilman, who was introducing Mr. Miller around. They looked over at the guy that Mr. Comrie was endorsing for Mayor with a narrow squint, as if he were a snakehead just fished out of their water supply.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, man, but the majority of the people in this city are non-white,” said a fellow with fuzzy gray whiskers. “I want a non-white Mayor. White man’s got all the power.”

But here was a white man who didn’t, who had just been moseying around the Amity Baptist Church, the Reverend Dwight E. Shanklin presiding. Matt Epperly, Mr. Miller’s Nantuckety blond personal assistant—his “body person,” as they say in the business—purposely stayed behind in the Speaker’s Chevy Suburban with its black-tinted windows. (Campaign workers for one of Mr. Miller’s rivals refer to Matt, a Georgetown and Kerry-bid graduate, as “the whitest white guy in Christendom.”)

The goateed Reverend Shanklin looked like Henry VIII in his stately black robe aflame with crimson crosses as he sang and swung his fist over his head, as if to lasso his congregation. These were mainly elegant women in pastel suits and hats spuming bits of veil and rosettes, fanning themselves and balancing Bibles sewn into cloth purses atop their hosiery.

“Let the Lord use you or use us as he wishes,” he said to Brother Gifford, who was fresh from the 8 a.m. deaconesses over at Merrick Park, where he clapped and swayed to “I’ve got the victory! Ha-lle-lujah!” A woman had screamed during the traditional laying on of the hands, but Brother Gifford, in his cool cream linen blazer, didn’t flinch.

Brother Gifford preached about the kids who were failing in our schools and the schools that were failing our kids. He said that he’d just put Sunday parking meters out of business (a suggestion successfully heisted from candidate Freddy Ferrer), how even meters deserve a day of rest and how “the Mayor just doesn’t get it.” He told them a once-upon-a-time about “a man who was wolkin’ in the woods—an atheist!” and the grizzly bear who “raised his great big right paw to strike him.” (Like both Bushes, John Kerry and Uncle Remus before him, Mr. Miller twangs and drops his G’s before select audiences.)

Who knew that Mr. Miller had decided to sponsor a Reverend James Cleveland memorial postage stamp? Now he would charm the seniors with a solo, that old Reverend Cleveland crowd-pleaser, “Ple-ee-ease be patient with me.”

Three electric organs got busy. “Phenomenal!” is how Reverend Shanklin reviewed Mr. Miller’s set. (Mr. Miller has to be careful; eyes glazed over when he performed Ireland’s marathon national anthem at his annual St. Patrick’s parade party at the Princeton Club.) Asked to comment on Mr. Miller’s minstrelsy, most political consultants emit a noise that sounds like Ack!—even if there’s precedent: Jimmie Davis, the strumming and singing governor of Louisiana, who wrote “You Are My Sunshine” for his horse. And, of course, Mayor Jimmy Walker was a songwriter.

On his way home, Mr. Comrie slipped Mr. Miller a soul-brother handshake.

Family Affair

Mr. Miller prefers to downplay his minority status. His campaign Web site used to note that he lived on the East Side of Manhattan, without specifying the uptown latitude.

One late afternoon in August, Mr. Miller was wolkin’ down the street in East Harlem, past the Johnson and Jefferson housing projects, past the pawnshops, sneaker stores, Pentecostal churches, and those fast-food restaurants where they slide you your hamburgers through a sheet of bulletproof glass. Mr. Miller reached for the hand of an advocate for senior citizens who was winging by a cuchifritos lunch counter. In those Princetonian rags (from the racks of Seize Sur Vingt, a Nolita store wallpapered with edgy photographs of scanty-panty Lolitas), Mr. Miller looked like he was “from another planet,” said the guy. But an athletic young black man who had just finished building a charter school—aided by kids remanded by the court system—was in awe: “For him to just call up and say he would stop by was something.”

Gifford Miller’s dynamic 78-year-old father, Leigh, was along, looking similarly Preppy Handbook down to his cordovan loafers. “Have you ever been to the Conservatory Garden at 105th and Fifth?” Gifford asked one fellow who appeared to be missing a few teeth in the balcony. “My mom designed that.”

Dad moved in to close the sale. “I’m on the community board, and I know you need affordable housing,” said Leigh. “The other one there, he’s trying to buy your vote.” Leigh patted the braided head of a toddler.

“I vote for you, you buy me a house,” the man said.

Leigh Miller is the self-made son of two teachers in Olympia, Wash. He rode scholarships and the G.I. Bill to both a Yale college and law degree before joining the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He helped found the Agency for International Development, which did things like funnel surplus grain to Pakistan and India. Leigh did know John F. Kennedy: One of Gifford’s two half-brothers from Leigh’s first marriage was in the Kennedy White House kindergarten.

In 1966, Leigh married Lynden Breed, a debutante and a Smithie who had worked for two Congressmen and was an assistant to Chalmers Roberts at The Washington Post. As is the case with most WASP’s flapping around New York, everybody at some point cross-pollinated with everybody else, and Gifford’s very distant cousins include John Kerry, Howard Dean, J.P. Morgan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George W. Bush.

Lynden is one of the Breed, Abbott & Morgan Breeds, and the “A.” in A. Gifford Miller actually stands for Alan, the name of her father. Alan Breed’s was a life of unfulfilled promise: A few years out of Princeton, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and died at the age of 44. His wife, Rosilla Hornblower, had roomed with Mary McCarthy at Vassar. The Breeds would play bridge with Ms. McCarthy, who repaid their friendship by making fun of Rosilla’s New Deal liberalism in her best-seller The Group. In the 30’s, Rosilla was active in the National Consumers League, where she fought for minimum-wage laws; in The Group, Priscilla Hartshorn is employed by the League of Women Shoppers.

Gifford’s father eventually landed at American Express, as an international banker. “My parents lived in London for two years,” Gifford says, haltingly admitting that he had actually been there with them in the late 70’s, in a striped Norland Place school tie, with his younger brother Marshall. Back in New York, the lifestyle was shabby-genteel in the slightly elevated Whit Stillman construct: His parents bought a nine-room co-op in a handsome building at 98th and Fifth at a time when there was lots of space to be had for little money. “Doctors from Mount Sinai lived there,” says realtor Patricia Burnham of P.S. Burnham Inc. “It didn’t yet count as Carnegie Hill.”

“The Millers are the kind of old-time, low-profile WASP’s who never touch their principal,” said David Patrick Columbia, editor of the Web site New York Social Diary. Upper-upper Fifth was a tad iffy—several paces north of where Cy Vance, Tish Baldrige, Paul Newman and Ralph Lauren came to nest—but the Millers were urban pioneers. “The Millers do good things, and they help their community,” says Toni Goodale, a Democratic fund-raiser. Leigh Miller is on the board of Planned Parenthood and, among so many other activities, has worked on behalf of the Osborne Association, which provides job training to former prisoners. Even the Millers’ clubs—the Cosmopolitan, the Century—are the clubs of achievers.

Uptown Bildungsroman

When Gifford’s mother, one of the city’s foremost public-garden designers, sought to revamp the Conservatory Garden several blocks uptown, friends feared for her safety. “This was before the notion that you could do really great public spaces in New York City and people would respect them, which is now an article of faith,” says Gifford, who remembers wanting to play video games but being dragged off to water and weed among East Harlem’s community school groups.

Grammar school was literally across the street at single-sex St. Bernard’s; when Gifford was 11 or 12, he was mugged on his block for a Casio watch.

“I told him it was broken, but he told me that he would blow my head off if I didn’t hand it over,” says Mr. Miller, who testified before a grand jury when the guy was actually caught. Truth is, the Millers’ world was to some degree insulated from the barrio by Mount Sinai’s sprawl. “One of the things I regret about St. Bernard’s is, it’s a bit more cut off from East Harlem than it should be,” says Mr. Miller. “French was taught instead of Spanish. I’m still enraged by that.”

A trumpeted event at St. Bernard’s is the annual eighth-grade Shakespeare play. In Mr. Miller’s year, it was The Tempest. After a little prodding, Mr. Miller confesses that he actually asked to play Miranda—“a fairly sizable part,” he explains, “not the most sought-after role, but one of the keys to success in life is having weak competition.”

Home from Middlesex boarding school, Mr. Miller would only occasionally drift through Dorrian’s Red Hand or the Surf Club. Choirboy looks made it hard to get a hold of a really good fake ID, he said, smiling adorably. At Princeton, he played club lacrosse for a couple of years and, in a student body boiling over with professional class presidents and fogies before their time, he didn’t strike others as A Serious Person. He liked dorky music. He majored in politics and moved in with a girl everyone assumed he would marry. The summer before senior year, they were bicycling on Martha’s Vineyard when she was hit by a truck. “It changed him,” says Robert Hammond, a close friend and painter active in Chelsea’s High Line Park project. That’s when Mr. Miller’s latent ambition emerged.

His friends never expected him to be, well, good at this. “He was sort of abrasive—he loved irritating you,” said Mr. Hammond. “He would call me ‘Hambone’ or, if there were a whole bunch of people around, he’d shout ‘Boner!’”

Mr. Miller also likes to argue; he will take the other side of an argument if he thinks he can have some fun. Someone he’s argued with lots is Mayor Bloomberg, who is annoyed by Miller’s mini-Mayoralty, those needling press conferences. As the Mayor complimented Mr. Miller at their annual budget presentation, Mr. Miller restlessly cracked his knuckles under the podium. “The Mayor would act grumpy at their Tuesday-afternoon meetings—that is, if he didn’t cancel on Gifford, which was often,” said one Council member. “But Gifford thought it was funny the Mayor didn’t like him.”

“There was an intense mutual dislike,” said another source close to the situation. “The Mayor sees Miller as a junior employee, a spoiled rich kid who barely worked a day in his life.”

After college, Mr. Miller was hired by Upper East Side Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, a friend of his parents. After winning a seat on the City Council in a special 1996 election, Mr. Miller appeared to have intentionally evacuated from The Social Register.

Observers thought of Mr. Miller as an accidental Speaker, backed by the Queens machine and playing a very smart game campaigning for and funding his allies after term limits virtually swept the Council clean. “He willed himself to be Speaker,” said Manhattan Councilwoman Christine Quinn, Because of term limits, Council members old and new are obliged to bang a lot of cans as they essentially run for their next office. It sometimes feels like the Senate of the Galactic Republic from Star Wars with all the diverging interests, the grandstanding on silly issues that have no business in this venue.

“Gifford is very bright and was one of the stars when I was there,” said ex-Speaker Peter Vallone, who has endorsed Mr. Miller for Mayor. Even Charles Barron, the former Black Panther who represents East New York, pronounces Mr. Miller “a nice guy.”

Lots More Mr. Nice Guy

Too nice, some say.

Everyone palms money from lobbyists—except for a billionaire Mayor who placates the special-interest groups with personal checks. But Mr. Miller’s problem with the special interests is that he’s for all of them, said one Council member: “He’s like a candy store—everybody may not get the jumbo bar, but everyone walks out with at least the nickel bar, and you’re a real loser if you only got penny candy. Because he doesn’t say no to anybody. He’s too busy running for Mayor.”

People think they see some affectation, comparing Mr. Miller with Shrek’s shrimpy Lord Farquaad, tootling around in his chauffeured S.U.V. with a brace of bodyguards like some prig Mack Daddy (but then, two years ago, a Councilman was shot in cold blood on the floor of the Council chamber). Standing next to someone who’s got the microphone, Mr. Miller has a tendency to go “Mmmmm, mmmm” in agreement, much like a Campbell’s Soup kid.

“He’s been forced into a race he’s not ready for. It’s the Peter Principle,” the Council member continued.

“Gifford is used to being underestimated,” countered Queens Councilman Eric Gioia. “He’s compensated for that with a lot of hard work.”

There are those who believe that Mr. Miller should have run for Manhattan borough president, that by going for broke at a very early age and losing, he’ll be out in the cold until 2009, with no media or fund-raising base. People like to say that Mr. Miller pines for Carolyn Maloney’s Congressional seat, though he has denied this. Still, the lusty fight he lost against the garbage-transfer station on East 91st Street certainly put him in good odor with both their districts.

How might it all play out? TV commercials have already upped those low polling scores. “People may think I look young, but as head of the City Council, I got results,” one script announces. He’s all smiles, the guy you’d want passing the cranberry sauce at your Thanksgiving table (to paraphrase a Quinnipiac poll question that Mr. Bloomberg routinely bombs). The commercial invites you to think of him as the Second Coming of Jack Kennedy, strolling the city park with his wife, Pamela, and button-cute children, Addison, 4, and Marshall, 3.

Right now, Mr. Miller hopes to score second in the primary and find himself in a run-off with Freddy Ferrer. C. Virginia Fields, Anthony Weiner and Mr. Miller are now pretty much tied for second, but one problem the Speaker faces “is that a lot of non-Hispanic white voters, particularly Jewish voters, already know that they’re voting for the Mayor and will skip the primary,” said consultant Joseph Mercurio, late of the Fields campaign.

In a run-off, Mr. Miller probably presents the most viable threat to Mr. Ferrer. “Gifford’s got money, he’s got troops, he’s got a record on every single issue, because he’s been voting and sponsoring bills and duking it out with the Mayor on stuff,” said political consultant Norman Adler. “What’s Ferrer going to say? ‘I was over at the Drum Major Institute taking two-hour lunches?’” But a run-off could very well damage Mr. Miller with Hispanic voters on the way to a Bloomberg-Miller match-up. “The run-off is going to be a bloodbath,” said political consultant Hank Sheinkopf.

“For something to happen here, it would require a deus ex machina,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and author of the Rudy Giuliani biography Prince of the City. “A terror attack in which we discover that Bloomberg’s disassembly of the Office of Emergency Management has left the cops and Fire Department in a state of confusion.”

Mr. Miller postponed a second sit-down interview—something about his cat. Achilles has been with him since he graduated from college, and now the poor thing has cancer. Mr. Miller decided it was wrong to have Achilles put down just yet, as he is still up and walking. One tries not to see a metaphor.

Like Newt Gingrich, Mr. Miller has cracked the sacred scrolls of Colleen McCullough’s hyper-researched Roman toga-rippers; he’s friends with doorstop biographer Robert Caro.

Mrs. Miller is a brisk, down-to earth former Princeton swimmer who, as a little girl growing up outside San Francisco, was an Olympic prospect. Today, she’s a litigation lawyer on leave from Arnold & Porter. In the swelter of the Gay Pride parade, she kept an eye on the children as a guy with a Prince Valiant haircut struggled like Diddy’s umbrella man to stay up and over Mr. Miller with a “Miller for Mayor” poster in case a photographer wandered by. Mr. Miller’s son Marshall was riding a scooter. “Whatever happened to Connecticut?” one of the children recently queried Mrs. Miller, suddenly remembering the swimming pool at the in-laws’ Litchfield County country house. Asked if he will consider public schools for his kids, Mr. Miller tends to get twitchy; come fall, both will be enrolled at Park Avenue Christian, where Addison’s tuition alone costs more than $13,000.

With the face of a fourth-year hospital resident, Mr. Miller has an air of quiet competence. He’s got some silver at the temples. He’s a Thomas Keller of the barbecue, a whiz with the Bisquick who often cooks breakfast for his little boys. In January, Anthony Weiner accused Mr. Miller of being an “out-of-touch Upper East Side rich guy.” Naturally, Mr. Miller disputes this. “I’m worried about where to send my kids to school,” he said. “I’m worried about the subways getting me and my wife to work every day…..”

But doesn’t he have a car and driver?

Mr. Miller smoothly emended his statement: “I take the subway sometimes—at least once or twice a week,” he said, adding: “I worry about how to afford housing.”

The Millers live in a 21¼2-bedroom duplex in a turn-of-the-century tenement turned gussied-up co-op. “When you say ‘duplex,’ I think of Mr. Drummond,” said Councilman Gioia. It’s a nice place, very lived in, very Pottery Barn, “but it’s not like you walk in and say, ‘This guy’s loaded!’ There’s a postage-stamp-size backyard,” he added. Mr. Miller admits he’s a millionaire, but only if you count his real estate (and public filings seem to bear this out).

Mr. Miller doesn’t think he’ll ever return to Fordham Law, calling the third year “literally just a way for schools to extort $40,000 out of impoverished law students, through large law firms that pay those bills, by further enslaving law associates for an extra several years of indentured servitude.”

Like his rivals, Mr. Miller has a lot of plans that would be paid for by taxes that are purely speculative. He proposes to drum our fair share of money out of Albany and Washington by agitating alongside a coalition of city power Menschen—“not like our Mayor, who approaches everything like a one-man band,” he said. His main quibble with the Mayor’s school plan is that it leans on “bureaucratic reshuffling and test preparation.” He sees a day when our schools will be more like those in the suburbs. In his travels, when he comes across a schoolteacher, he always says, “Bless your heart!” Corny, but he means it. His people are confident that those wooden-sword fights over the $1.8 million of taxpayer money spent on all those fliers with his beamish-boy picture, or the cash his campaign accepted from slumlords, will be forgotten inside the voting booth.

“You know the old baseball saying,” he told someone in front of Zabar’s: “They don’t throw it at your head until you’ve whacked a few out of the park.”

“We Know the Neighborhood,” the acid orange sign stated flatly. A big black dude in blue-tinted square-frame sunglasses cannonballed out of the supermarket’s automatic doors.

“Gifford Miller ain’t got a pray-uh!” he boomed.

“Well—you can pray!” said Mr. Miller, 35, the Speaker of the City Council now running for Mayor. Though New York born and bred, Mr. Miller is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and, hence, a minority contestant in a city whose leaders are decided by the city’s unforgiving tribal politics. And in this summer of extenuating atmospheric conditions, Mr. Miller was working particularly hard to adopt himself out to any ethnic neighborhood that might appreciate his progressive-Democrat intentions.

This very Sunday, he was back to hanging around the most affluent black community in the city. The notion was to exploit the disconnect between black leadership in southeast Queens, where make-believe-Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg is hardly disliked, and in Harlem, where C. Virginia Fields is expected to show strong in the Sept. 13th Democratic primary. Earlier that morning, Mr. Miller could be seen stepping out on faith in the area’s holy-rolling Bible churches, with their tambourines and drum sets and Yamaha keyboards, Kleenex boxes in every emotion-filled pew, and friendly neighborhood church ladies—a known Panzer-like voting bloc.

“Bloomberg is going to run over you like a, crush you like … like … the Russians crushed the Central German Unit!” the man at Western Beef went on.

“So it’s going to take him four years and cost him 20 million people?” asked Mr. Miller, a history buff.

Mr. Miller waited for his next potential convert and took a Johnny Carson–style golf swing as several locals stopped to shake hands with Leroy Comrie, their Yogi Bear of a councilman, who was introducing Mr. Miller around. They looked over at the guy that Mr. Comrie was endorsing for Mayor with a narrow squint, as if he were a snakehead just fished out of their water supply.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, man, but the majority of the people in this city are non-white,” said a fellow with fuzzy gray whiskers. “I want a non-white Mayor. White man’s got all the power.”

But here was a white man who didn’t, who had just been moseying around the Amity Baptist Church, the Reverend Dwight E. Shanklin presiding. Matt Epperly, Mr. Miller’s Nantuckety blond personal assistant—his “body person,” as they say in the business—purposely stayed behind in the Speaker’s Chevy Suburban with its black-tinted windows. (Campaign workers for one of Mr. Miller’s rivals refer to Matt, a Georgetown and Kerry-bid graduate, as “the whitest white guy in Christendom.”)

The goateed Reverend Shanklin looked like Henry VIII in his stately black robe aflame with crimson crosses as he sang and swung his fist over his head, as if to lasso his congregation. These were mainly elegant women in pastel suits and hats spuming bits of veil and rosettes, fanning themselves and balancing Bibles sewn into cloth purses atop their hosiery.

“Let the Lord use you or use us as he wishes,” he said to Brother Gifford, who was fresh from the 8 a.m. deaconesses over at Merrick Park, where he clapped and swayed to “I’ve got the victory! Ha-lle-lujah!” A woman had screamed during the traditional laying on of the hands, but Brother Gifford, in his cool cream linen blazer, didn’t flinch.

Brother Gifford preached about the kids who were failing in our schools and the schools that were failing our kids. He said that he’d just put Sunday parking meters out of business (a suggestion successfully heisted from candidate Freddy Ferrer), how even meters deserve a day of rest and how “the Mayor just doesn’t get it.” He told them a once-upon-a-time about “a man who was wolkin’ in the woods—an atheist!” and the grizzly bear who “raised his great big right paw to strike him.” (Like both Bushes, John Kerry and Uncle Remus before him, Mr. Miller twangs and drops his G’s before select audiences.)

Who knew that Mr. Miller had decided to sponsor a Reverend James Cleveland memorial postage stamp? Now he would charm the seniors with a solo, that old Reverend Cleveland crowd-pleaser, “ Ple-ee-ease be patient with me.”

Three electric organs got busy. “ Phenomenal!” is how Reverend Shanklin reviewed Mr. Miller’s set. (Mr. Miller has to be careful; eyes glazed over when he performed Ireland’s marathon national anthem at his annual St. Patrick’s parade party at the Princeton Club.) Asked to comment on Mr. Miller’s minstrelsy, most political consultants emit a noise that sounds like Ack!— even if there’s precedent: Jimmie Davis, the strumming and singing governor of Louisiana, who wrote “You Are My Sunshine” for his horse. And, of course, Mayor Jimmy Walker was a songwriter.

On his way home, Mr. Comrie slipped Mr. Miller a soul-brother handshake.

Family Affair

Mr. Miller prefers to downplay his minority status. His campaign Web site used to note that he lived on the East Side of Manhattan, without specifying the uptown latitude.

One late afternoon in August, Mr. Miller was wolkin’ down the street in East Harlem, past the Johnson and Jefferson housing projects, past the pawnshops, sneaker stores, Pentecostal churches, and those fast-food restaurants where they slide you your hamburgers through a sheet of bulletproof glass. Mr. Miller reached for the hand of an advocate for senior citizens who was winging by a cuchifritos lunch counter. In those Princetonian rags (from the racks of Seize Sur Vingt, a Nolita store wallpapered with edgy photographs of scanty-panty Lolitas), Mr. Miller looked like he was “from another planet,” said the guy. But an athletic young black man who had just finished building a charter school—aided by kids remanded by the court system—was in awe: “For him to just call up and say he would stop by was something.”

Gifford Miller’s dynamic 78-year-old father, Leigh, was along, looking similarly Preppy Handbook down to his cordovan loafers. “Have you ever been to the Conservatory Garden at 105th and Fifth?” Gifford asked one fellow who appeared to be missing a few teeth in the balcony. “My mom designed that.”

Dad moved in to close the sale. “I’m on the community board, and I know you need affordable housing,” said Leigh. “The other one there, he’s trying to buy your vote.” Leigh patted the braided head of a toddler.

“I vote for you, you buy me a house,” the man said.

Leigh Miller is the self-made son of two teachers in Olympia, Wash. He rode scholarships and the G.I. Bill to both a Yale college and law degree before joining the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He helped found the Agency for International Development, which did things like funnel surplus grain to Pakistan and India. Leigh did know John F. Kennedy: One of Gifford’s two half-brothers from Leigh’s first marriage was in the Kennedy White House kindergarten.

In 1966, Leigh married Lynden Breed, a debutante and a Smithie who had worked for two Congressmen and was an assistant to Chalmers Roberts at The Washington Post. As is the case with most WASP’s flapping around New York, everybody at some point cross-pollinated with everybody else, and Gifford’s very distant cousins include John Kerry, Howard Dean, J.P. Morgan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George W. Bush.

Lynden is one of the Breed, Abbott & Morgan Breeds, and the “A.” in A. Gifford Miller actually stands for Alan, the name of her father. Alan Breed’s was a life of unfulfilled promise: A few years out of Princeton, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and died at the age of 44. His wife, Rosilla Hornblower, had roomed with Mary McCarthy at Vassar. The Breeds would play bridge with Ms. McCarthy, who repaid their friendship by making fun of Rosilla’s New Deal liberalism in her best-seller The Group. In the 30’s, Rosilla was active in the National Consumers League, where she fought for minimum-wage laws; in The Group, Priscilla Hartshorn is employed by the League of Women Shoppers.

Gifford’s father eventually landed at American Express, as an international banker. “My parents lived in London for two years,” Gifford says, haltingly admitting that he had actually been there with them in the late 70’s, in a striped Norland Place school tie, with his younger brother Marshall. Back in New York, the lifestyle was shabby-genteel in the slightly elevated Whit Stillman construct: His parents bought a nine-room co-op in a handsome building at 98th and Fifth at a time when there was lots of space to be had for little money. “Doctors from Mount Sinai lived there,” says realtor Patricia Burnham of P.S. Burnham Inc. “It didn’t yet count as Carnegie Hill.”

“The Millers are the kind of old-time, low-profile WASP’s who never touch their principal,” said David Patrick Columbia, editor of the Web site New York Social Diary. Upper- upper Fifth was a tad iffy—several paces north of where Cy Vance, Tish Baldrige, Paul Newman and Ralph Lauren came to nest—but the Millers were urban pioneers. “The Millers do good things, and they help their community,” says Toni Goodale, a Democratic fund-raiser. Leigh Miller is on the board of Planned Parenthood and, among so many other activities, has worked on behalf of the Osborne Association, which provides job training to former prisoners. Even the Millers’ clubs—the Cosmopolitan, the Century—are the clubs of achievers.

Uptown Bildungsroman

When Gifford’s mother, one of the city’s foremost public-garden designers, sought to revamp the Conservatory Garden several blocks uptown, friends feared for her safety. “This was before the notion that you could do really great public spaces in New York City and people would respect them, which is now an article of faith,” says Gifford, who remembers wanting to play video games but being dragged off to water and weed among East Harlem’s community school groups.

Grammar school was literally across the street at single-sex St. Bernard’s; when Gifford was 11 or 12, he was mugged on his block for a Casio watch.

“I told him it was broken, but he told me that he would blow my head off if I didn’t hand it over,” says Mr. Miller, who testified before a grand jury when the guy was actually caught. Truth is, the Millers’ world was to some degree insulated from the barrio by Mount Sinai’s sprawl. “One of the things I regret about St. Bernard’s is, it’s a bit more cut off from East Harlem than it should be,” says Mr. Miller. “French was taught instead of Spanish. I’m still enraged by that.”

A trumpeted event at St. Bernard’s is the annual eighth-grade Shakespeare play. In Mr. Miller’s year, it was The Tempest. After a little prodding, Mr. Miller confesses that he actually asked to play Miranda—“a fairly sizable part,” he explains, “not the most sought-after role, but one of the keys to success in life is having weak competition.”

Home from Middlesex boarding school, Mr. Miller would only occasionally drift through Dorrian’s Red Hand or the Surf Club. Choirboy looks made it hard to get a hold of a really good fake ID, he said, smiling adorably. At Princeton, he played club lacrosse for a couple of years and, in a student body boiling over with professional class presidents and fogies before their time, he didn’t strike others as A Serious Person. He liked dorky music. He majored in politics and moved in with a girl everyone assumed he would marry. The summer before senior year, they were bicycling on Martha’s Vineyard when she was hit by a truck. “It changed him,” says Robert Hammond, a close friend and painter active in Chelsea’s High Line Park project. That’s when Mr. Miller’s latent ambition emerged.

His friends never expected him to be, well, good at this. “He was sort of abrasive—he loved irritating you,” said Mr. Hammond. “He would call me ‘Hambone’ or, if there were a whole bunch of people around, he’d shout ‘Boner!’”

Mr. Miller also likes to argue; he will take the other side of an argument if he thinks he can have some fun. Someone he’s argued with lots is Mayor Bloomberg, who is annoyed by Miller’s mini-Mayoralty, those needling press conferences. As the Mayor complimented Mr. Miller at their annual budget presentation, Mr. Miller restlessly cracked his knuckles under the podium. “The Mayor would act grumpy at their Tuesday-afternoon meetings—that is, if he didn’t cancel on Gifford, which was often,” said one Council member. “But Gifford thought it was funny the Mayor didn’t like him.”

“There was an intense mutual dislike,” said another source close to the situation. “The Mayor sees Miller as a junior employee, a spoiled rich kid who barely worked a day in his life.”

After college, Mr. Miller was hired by Upper East Side Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, a friend of his parents. After winning a seat on the City Council in a special 1996 election, Mr. Miller appeared to have intentionally evacuated from The Social Register.

Observers thought of Mr. Miller as an accidental Speaker, backed by the Queens machine and playing a very smart game campaigning for and funding his allies after term limits virtually swept the Council clean. “He willed himself to be Speaker,” said Manhattan Councilwoman Christine Quinn, Because of term limits, Council members old and new are obliged to bang a lot of cans as they essentially run for their next office. It sometimes feels like the Senate of the Galactic Republic from Star Wars with all the diverging interests, the grandstanding on silly issues that have no business in this venue.

“Gifford is very bright and was one of the stars when I was there,” said ex-Speaker Peter Vallone, who has endorsed Mr. Miller for Mayor. Even Charles Barron, the former Black Panther who represents East New York, pronounces Mr. Miller “a nice guy.”

Lots More Mr. Nice Guy

Too nice, some say.

Everyone palms money from lobbyists—except for a billionaire Mayor who placates the special-interest groups with personal checks. But Mr. Miller’s problem with the special interests is that he’s for all of them, said one Council member: “He’s like a candy store—everybody may not get the jumbo bar, but everyone walks out with at least the nickel bar, and you’re a real loser if you only got penny candy. Because he doesn’t say no to anybody. He’s too busy running for Mayor.”

People think they see some affectation, comparing Mr. Miller with Shrek’s shrimpy Lord Farquaad, tootling around in his chauffeured S.U.V. with a brace of bodyguards like some prig Mack Daddy (but then, two years ago, a Councilman was shot in cold blood on the floor of the Council chamber). Standing next to someone who’s got the microphone, Mr. Miller has a tendency to go “Mmmmm, mmmm” in agreement, much like a Campbell’s Soup kid.

“He’s been forced into a race he’s not ready for. It’s the Peter Principle,” the Council member continued.

“Gifford is used to being underestimated,” countered Queens Councilman Eric Gioia. “He’s compensated for that with a lot of hard work.”

There are those who believe that Mr. Miller should have run for Manhattan borough president, that by going for broke at a very early age and losing, he’ll be out in the cold until 2009, with no media or fund-raising base. People like to say that Mr. Miller pines for Carolyn Maloney’s Congressional seat, though he has denied this. Still, the lusty fight he lost against the garbage-transfer station on East 91st Street certainly put him in good odor with both their districts.

How might it all play out? TV commercials have already upped those low polling scores. “People may think I look young, but as head of the City Council, I got results,” one script announces. He’s all smiles, the guy you’d want passing the cranberry sauce at your Thanksgiving table (to paraphrase a Quinnipiac poll question that Mr. Bloomberg routinely bombs). The commercial invites you to think of him as the Second Coming of Jack Kennedy, strolling the city park with his wife, Pamela, and button-cute children, Addison, 4, and Marshall, 3.

Right now, Mr. Miller hopes to score second in the primary and find himself in a run-off with Freddy Ferrer. C. Virginia Fields, Anthony Weiner and Mr. Miller are now pretty much tied for second, but one problem the Speaker faces “is that a lot of non-Hispanic white voters, particularly Jewish voters, already know that they’re voting for the Mayor and will skip the primary,” said consultant Joseph Mercurio, late of the Fields campaign.

In a run-off, Mr. Miller probably presents the most viable threat to Mr. Ferrer. “Gifford’s got money, he’s got troops, he’s got a record on every single issue, because he’s been voting and sponsoring bills and duking it out with the Mayor on stuff,” said political consultant Norman Adler. “What’s Ferrer going to say? ‘I was over at the Drum Major Institute taking two-hour lunches?’” But a run-off could very well damage Mr. Miller with Hispanic voters on the way to a Bloomberg-Miller match-up. “The run-off is going to be a bloodbath,” said political consultant Hank Sheinkopf.

“For something to happen here, it would require a deus ex machina,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and author of the Rudy Giuliani biography Prince of the City. “A terror attack in which we discover that Bloomberg’s disassembly of the Office of Emergency Management has left the cops and Fire Department in a state of confusion.”

Mr. Miller postponed a second sit-down interview—something about his cat. Achilles has been with him since he graduated from college, and now the poor thing has cancer. Mr. Miller decided it was wrong to have Achilles put down just yet, as he is still up and walking. One tries not to see a metaphor.

Like Newt Gingrich, Mr. Miller has cracked the sacred scrolls of Colleen McCullough’s hyper-researched Roman toga-rippers; he’s friends with doorstop biographer Robert Caro.

Mrs. Miller is a brisk, down-to earth former Princeton swimmer who, as a little girl growing up outside San Francisco, was an Olympic prospect. Today, she’s a litigation lawyer on leave from Arnold & Porter. In the swelter of the Gay Pride parade, she kept an eye on the children as a guy with a Prince Valiant haircut struggled like Diddy’s umbrella man to stay up and over Mr. Miller with a “Miller for Mayor” poster in case a photographer wandered by. Mr. Miller’s son Marshall was riding a scooter. “Whatever happened to Connecticut?” one of the children recently queried Mrs. Miller, suddenly remembering the swimming pool at the in-laws’ Litchfield County country house. Asked if he will consider public schools for his kids, Mr. Miller tends to get twitchy; come fall, both will be enrolled at Park Avenue Christian, where Addison’s tuition alone costs more than $13,000.

With the face of a fourth-year hospital resident, Mr. Miller has an air of quiet competence. He’s got some silver at the temples. He’s a Thomas Keller of the barbecue, a whiz with the Bisquick who often cooks breakfast for his little boys. In January, Anthony Weiner accused Mr. Miller of being an “out-of-touch Upper East Side rich guy.” Naturally, Mr. Miller disputes this. “I’m worried about where to send my kids to school,” he said. “I’m worried about the subways getting me and my wife to work every day…..”

But doesn’t he have a car and driver?

Mr. Miller smoothly emended his statement: “I take the subway sometimes—at least once or twice a week,” he said, adding: “I worry about how to afford housing.”

The Millers live in a 21¼2-bedroom duplex in a turn-of-the-century tenement turned gussied-up co-op. “When you say ‘duplex,’ I think of Mr. Drummond,” said Councilman Gioia. It’s a nice place, very lived in, very Pottery Barn, “but it’s not like you walk in and say, ‘This guy’s loaded!’ There’s a postage-stamp-size backyard,” he added. Mr. Miller admits he’s a millionaire, but only if you count his real estate (and public filings seem to bear this out).

Mr. Miller doesn’t think he’ll ever return to Fordham Law, calling the third year “literally just a way for schools to extort $40,000 out of impoverished law students, through large law firms that pay those bills, by further enslaving law associates for an extra several years of indentured servitude.”

Like his rivals, Mr. Miller has a lot of plans that would be paid for by taxes that are purely speculative. He proposes to drum our fair share of money out of Albany and Washington by agitating alongside a coalition of city power Menschen—“not like our Mayor, who approaches everything like a one-man band,” he said. His main quibble with the Mayor’s school plan is that it leans on “bureaucratic reshuffling and test preparation.” He sees a day when our schools will be more like those in the suburbs. In his travels, when he comes across a schoolteacher, he always says, “Bless your heart!” Corny, but he means it. His people are confident that those wooden-sword fights over the $1.8 million of taxpayer money spent on all those fliers with his beamish-boy picture, or the cash his campaign accepted from slumlords, will be forgotten inside the voting booth.

“You know the old baseball saying,” he told someone in front of Zabar’s: “They don’t throw it at your head until you’ve whacked a few out of the park.”

Woody Johnson was kidding around at the annual winter cocktail party for the Queens County Democrats that was underway at Antun's, a lively wedding-reception rathskeller in Queens Village. The owner of the Jets had been making the rounds, cranking up support for a stadium on the site of the M.T.A.'s West Side railyards that would double as a stage for the 2012 Olympics. Only suddenly, he had a gate-crasher: Days earlier, Madison Square Garden's territorial operator Cablevision offered $600 million to the M.T.A. to plunk some apartments and offices on the site-six times more than what Mr. Johnson was bidding. This was just the beginning: TransGas would soon be flashing $700 million at the M.T.A., and the state of New Jersey was jumping up and down to sell the Jets on a less magnificent setup entirely. It was turning into a messy food fight, and everyone knew it.

Congressman Anthony Weiner was cheering all of this mayhem from the sidelines. Though he hadn't yet declared his candidacy, Mr. Weiner was very publicly running for Mayor, largely on the issue of where Mr. Johnson could stick his stadium.

Mr. Weiner had been waylaid by the white baby grand in the lobby, where he was having a few exasperated words with Stephen McInnis of the city's District Council of Carpenters over the tinny gurgle of a fountain landscaped with phony zinnias. Mr. McInnis represents the guys who make a living erecting and crunching convention booths, guys who would give Mr. Weiner's eye teeth to see 30,000 dentists choogling around a sparkly new Jets–Javits Center complex. Mr. Weiner had been calling for the Jets to build instead in Willets Point, Queens, currently the swampland address of some car dealerships and scrapyards. The Congressman's "Johnny-come-lately ideas" confounded Mr. McInnis: Nobody was going to expand the claustrophobic Javits Center southward if the Jets weren't there to grease the rails. And nobody-but nobody-was going to board a shuttle bus to go visit any Javits-convention spillover at Willets Point.

Somebody finally dragged Mr. Weiner over to shake hands with Mr. Johnson. There was some strained chitchat about Chad Pennington's injured throwing arm before the elephant in the room laid a great big fart: "It's gonna be terrific to just get on the No. 7 and go right to the stadium," another guest said to Mr. Johnson.

"Yeah," Mr. Weiner chimed in, "even if you're going in the other direction!" Mr. Weiner plucked two cubes of cheddar off a tray and headed for the door.

Mr. Weiner's S.U.V. was now whistling through southeast Queens. Here were the tidy row homes of middle-class African-Americans (as Mr. Weiner was careful to call them). "This is far from the vision that Manhattan's decision-making elite has of the city," Mr. Weiner was saying. "But people like this are important to the city's survival."

Mr. Weiner isn't black and he isn't Hispanic, but the thinking is that he might luck out representing a particular social class: middle-income outer-borough folks looking for a vehicle for their displaced anger. Between them, Brooklyn and Queens are an imposing bloc of votes. And the only other white Democratic candidate in the race, City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, wanted some-a-that. Mr. Miller may have announced his run on the steps of Brooklyn's Borough Hall, but Mr. Weiner was going to do his damnedest to confine Mr. Miller to Manhattan-particularly the swanky Upper East Side-and to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's interests. Mr. Weiner had already won some attention for chaining President George W. Bush to Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Bloomberg to Gifford Miller, like sled dogs to his greater purpose.

"I think it's very dangerous to underestimate Anthony Weiner," said Norman Adler, a veteran consultant who has worked with both Democrats and Republicans.

After six years as a Congressional aide to Chuck Schumer, Mr. Weiner was elected the youngest-ever City Councilman at age 27. Positioning himself as the seed of Chucky when he ran for Mr. Schumer's seat in 1998 worked rather well for him (though a swift endorsement may not be forthcoming; Mr. Schumer is said to work well with Mayor Bloomberg, and Mr. Schumer's wife is Mr. Bloomberg's transportation commissioner). Mr. Schumer immediately partnered with Mr. Weiner once he arrived at the House, and the two are known to speak almost on a daily basis.

"Having Chuck Schumer as a rabbi is a key element of whatever success I've been able to attain," said Mr. Weiner, who added parenthetically that while he and Senator Hillary Clinton weren't beer buddies, they were friendly.

Mr. Weiner now has his own respectable record-for someone in the House minority-and the press releases to prove it. Mr. Weiner was doing colorful, noisy things like asking the President to cancel his inaugural festivities. Occasionally, he even brought home treats like more Homeland Security moolah and funds to eradicate the Asian longhorned beetle. He also introduced some fairly cinematic legislation deploying several million dollars to help intercept asteroids heading for the planet; the tongue-in-cheek press release that so engaged his critics doesn't appear on Mr. Weiner's Web site.

Like some of New York's best Mayors (Koch, Giuliani), Mr. Weiner is a bit of a wise-ass-and with that kind of currency, he could actually break from the pack. Whether he or Mr. Bloomberg is likable is beside the point: "New Yorkers will rationalize any behavior if they think it's appropriate for the moment," said strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who worked on Mark Green's bid for Mayor. "Rudy Giuliani was kind of like castor oil."

But lately, some of Mr. Weiner's paid advisors have been advising him to drop the stand-up shtick and start sounding more like someone with concrete running through his veins.

"I am a serious person," Mr. Weiner was saying, a tad stiffly. "I take my job very seriously. I have serious plans for the future of this city. And I have to make sure that having a sense of humor doesn't get in the way of that." He was still living down a comedy-night fund-raiser from a couple of years ago where he appeared in a muscle shirt and joked that he wouldn't mind having sex with a colleague in Congress. "But I'm afraid it would be like a praying-mantis deal and she'd bite my head off," Mr. Weiner ba-boom-boomed.

Now, at age 40, Mr. Weiner's hair is a little thinner, but he is still, physically speaking, a string bean in a Banana Republic suit who is eager to shed his reputation as a young man in a hurry.

Farrell Sklerov, one of the Mr. Weiner's community-outreach college boys, was behind the wheel of the Congressman's Ford Hybrid. (There were only so many speeches that Mr. Weiner could give criticizing Washington's cozy relationship with the Saudis and then jump into his gas-glutton Explorer.) Mr. Weiner grabbed for a pair of spectacles that looked a little like Chuck Schumer's. These were his driving glasses-even when he wasn't driving. His press secretary seemed nervous about what Mr. Weiner might say in the car: Mr. Weiner is the Dale Earnhardt of back-seat drivers. "My problem is, I generally know how to get there," Mr. Weiner explained. "It's part of the ethos of living in New York-figuring out how to do things in a better way."

Back-seat driving is now Mr. Weiner's game plan in a much broader sense. The latest Quinnipiac poll indicated that only 10 percent of New Yorkers would elect Anthony Weiner as Mayor. But nine out of 10 political consultants seemed to agree: The problem wasn't that people wouldn't choose Anthony Weiner; the problem was that people didn't know who Anthony Weiner was. Bashing Mayor Bloomberg daily at his gangly Congressional microphone-diagnosing the Mayor as a malignancy on New York City-might remedy the situation. And if he didn't win this time, he'd have the edge next go-round.

Pointed toward Manhattan on the Long Island Expressway, we passed some of the Congressman's recent battlefields. The proposed site for a Wal-Mart in Rego Park. Willets Point, where he hoped the Jets might come in for a landing.

"There's a reason the Jets are called the Jets-their stadium used to be out here by LaGuardia," said Mr. Weiner as we drove by the exit for the airport and the World's Fair grounds, where Mr. Weiner likes to be photographed as a Big Idea Fella. He noted that one section of the highway was the only point where one could see all of Manhattan, from its southern to northern tip.

"When Mayor Bloomberg closes his eyes and envisions the city of New York," Mr. Weiner likes to say, "what he sees is the skyline of Manhattan." When Mr. Weiner looks at New York, he sees its "Manhattan-centricity," a level of condescension emanating from the Bloomberg administration.

The car pulled over at the Lenox Hill Democratic Club on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where Gifford Miller is prep-schoolishly known as "Giff." This little gathering of 20 or so concerned citizens stuffed into an afterthought room piled high with cardboard boxes wasn't going to be Anthony Weiner's crowd.

"But I'm going to try to go everywhere," Mr. Weiner explained. "I can't have people say, 'He blew us off because we're Manhattan.'"

Then it was onward, to the F.D.R. Drive, where Mr. Weiner kept glancing at his Bulova. He was making his driver nervous: On Second Avenue, Mr. Sklerov came cheerfully close to ramming two other cars. On Houston Street, what looked like a black Chevy Tahoe with tinted windows tore by in the opposite lane, lights flashing. "Look! That's Gifford!" Mr. Weiner joked, and perhaps it was: Both candidates had been scheduled to do about 15 minutes around the corner with the Village Independent Democrats. Under the V.I.D. bucking-mule banner, Mr. Weiner successfully unfurled his one-liner comparing Mayor Bloomberg welcoming the Republican conventioneers to Fantasy Island's Ricardo Montalban.

Mr. Weiner was now chasing Mayor Bloomberg with a baseball bat: Bloomberg, the Congressional delegation's own private underminer; Bloomberg and his "big edifice" complex; Bloomberg and those corrupt (with a small "c") 2012 Olympic-stadium donations; Bloomberg, who invited Wal-Mart-with its slave labor in China!-to set up shop in Mr. Weiner's front yard.

"I might not look like much, but I'm going to throw myself in the gears of that thing!" said Mr. Weiner to hoots and hollers. (Last week, having already found itself in the chomping gears of New York's fabled neighborhood and labor activism, Wal-Mart canceled its travel plans.) As Mr. Weiner made his way past Virginia Fields, who was waiting to take the stage in a photo-friendly magenta suit, he was hoping he'd said something tabloid-worthy. He also wondered whether it was true, that thing he'd just mentioned about being the first candidate in the race who came out for gay marriage. That was back in 1998, when he was running for Congress.

Might Gifford Miller have said it first? "That would have been high school for him," Mr. Weiner said in the car. "Just kidding. Just kidding!" (Mr. Weiner still suspects that last month Mr. Miller's camp might have intentionally leaked to The New York Times an internal Miller campaign memo suggesting that Mr. Weiner be tagged "an ineffectual leader.")

That night, the Village Independent Democrats' endorsement went to front-runner Freddy Ferrer, but Mr. Weiner seemed happy-surprised, really-that he'd pulled a few votes: "The message resonated," he said.

Now it was over the Williamsburg Bridge to a club in Mr. Weiner's own Ninth District. "I've been finding my way back to you-ou-ou," he crooned quietly as he checked his BlackBerry. He hoped the meeting was still going on. His driver just loved the excitement of working on a campaign, Mr. Weiner said, giggling Beavis-ly. "It's a point of pride that he doesn't need the fancy lights and sirens."

At the Jackson Heights Jewish Center, Mr. Weiner smacked the Mayor with a two-by-four for saying that the city's public hospitals were now better than its fabled private teaching hospitals. Plans to extend the No. 7 train to the wasteful $1.4 billion West Side stadium meant the City Council (Giff!) would now be scooping some money out of the education budget.

"You know the infrastructure we really need?" Mr. Weiner asked his audience. "Ferries!"

Though Brooklyn and Queens were creating 70 percent of the jobs, "Manhattan is always going to be the dog here in New York, and we're always going to be the tail," he said.

Mr. Sklerov was now so wound up he forgot to turn on the lights as he gunned the Hybrid to one of the district's finest "on the bay" establishments, Russo's in Howard Beach, another banquet multiplex with a white baby grand in the foy-yay, where dinner was about to be served to the West Hamilton Beach Volunteer Ambulance and Fire Department. A fund-raiser for a Lindenwood elementary school was still rollicking around the Tivoli Room across the hall, and Mr. Weiner would stop by there, too.

But hark! Who was on the radio but the villainous Mayor himself, twirling his mustache as he lashed out about the West Side stadium. "We'll survive if we don't get it," he was saying. He vowed a fight to the finish.

"That's what I'm hoping for!" said Mr. Weiner.

It was Day 2, and Eric, an employee of three days, had several Mapquest pages pressed up against the steering wheel. Already that morning, Mr. Weiner had taped Fox's Good Day New York and Gabe Pressman's NBC show, where he tore Mr. Bloomberg's calling-card issues like education and the stadium into little tiny pieces.

He reached for his glasses. Here in Park Slope, Anthony Weiner grew up right across the street from St. Xavier's. Back then, the neighborhood was heavy on the Irish, heavy on the Italian. They were still running numbers out of a storefront on the corner. Mr. Weiner pointed out P.S. 107 and mentioned that he'd secured funds for its brickwork. In minutes, Mr. Weiner would be standing on a wind-stunned corner in front of St. Thomas Aquinas protesting the closing of 26 Catholic schools, calling for a summit with the diocese.

"They say it can't just be a bake sale, but we have a lot of people willing to bake," Mr. Weiner said, none too convincingly. "I think the Mayor's taking exactly the wrong approach, talking about how they're going to come in and scavenge the space."

Back in the car, he took a baby wipe to NBC's makeup and rang his mother, Fran, who came to meet us at just the sort of neighborhood bistro that pulls up at the curb during gentrification.

A.W.: "So you've gotta watch Gabe Pressman this weekend. He asked all about you."

Mom: "Oh, yeah? O.K."

A.W.: "Not in a good way." [Mom laughs, weakly.] "He said, 'Why was your mother breaking your chops at a recent speech?'"

Mom: "Well, I already apologized about that."

A.W.: "To whom?"

Mom: "To you!"

A.W.: "You and I have never talked about this!"

Mom: "No, but I sent you an e-mail. You don't read my e-mails."

A.W.: "No, it didn't reach me. There's something wrong with the e-mail address you got for me …. Why didn't you just call me?"

Mom: "Because I can have a thing for you, and you didn't call back."

A.W.: "I don't think that's right. I'm quite certain that's not right. Are you gonna hang out a while? Mom, the reporter's on the record right now. The reporter's on the record right now. Everything that's being said is on the record. So ixnay on the alec-smart-ay stuffay, O.K.?" [She laughs.] "All right, this was a bad idea. All right, Mom, nice to see you."

She did correct him on a minor point at a recent education speech, but Mr. Weiner's mom, a retired schoolteacher, is a pleasant enough 67-year-old with a snappy little kerchief around her neck. She likes to ski and said she's learning to read Herodotus in the original Greek. She certainly didn't give the impression that she had taken leave of Midwood High School (as her son likes to say) because "the fun, the joy and the creativity was taken out of the teaching profession." Mom taught A.P. statistics, so her own curriculum was untouched. Still, she confirmed that Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to standardize and script the schools was stifling her colleagues.

Mr. Weiner took a long phone call outside. Upon his return, he was intensely irritated to hear that Mom had revealed his personal e-mail address. He jokingly compared his press secretary, who was ostensibly keeping an eye on Mom, to a potted plant. Mom was dismissed.

Mr. Weiner's parents divorced when their three boys were grown. His dad, Mort, is a neighborhood lawyer who headed up his block association. A classic New York pisser, said Mr. Weiner: "You couldn't say 'Pass the potatoes' without having to have a discussion about where potatoes are grown, whether our agriculture policy is correct, and without referencing at least one Shecky Greene routine that included potatoes." Debate was an Olympic sport at this table. "My brother of blessed memory would usually get the last line, but Dad would get the last laugh," said Mr. Weiner fondly.

Mr. Weiner always thought his elder brother Seth was the smartest Weiner. (The youngest, Jason, is the co-owner and chef of Almond in Southampton.) But Seth had a drinking problem. Arrested twice for driving under the influence, he was jailed for a few days for driving without a license. In May of 2000, a credit-card company filed suit against Seth, then a real-estate agent, for $10,000. It was around noon eight days later that Seth, intoxicated, walked into traffic in Alexandria, Va., and was killed in a hit-and-run.

This is an uncomfortable subject for Mr. Weiner, who had worked very hard to help his brother and was devastated when he couldn't. "All families have things they have to deal with with those they love, and the Weiner family was no different," he said. "My brother was brilliant and charming, and he was taken too young. That is how he should be remembered." Credit-card usury is now one of Mr. Weiner's issues.

Another is hunger, the first he'd address as Mayor, he said, "because it's easy to fix, it affects so many people, and it's something that I just think we've gotten used to-the idea that it's not our job to solve it." As with all his other issues, he had a plan.

Why would the Congressman want to be Mayor? Because he could do stuff "with a phone call or the stroke of a pen rather than deal with the cloud-of-dust slog of legislating," he said.

Mr. Weiner had already raised $1.7 million. He was doing meet-ups organized by vestigial Deaniacs at Democracy for America. And while he'd never met Chuck Dolan, he mentioned that he'd just returned a check from Mr. Dolan's company, Cablevision, because he didn't want people to think his position on the Jets was for sale.

"My pitch is somewhat different than that of my opponents," said Mr. Weiner. "I'm not asking them to give me money because I control government contracts at the City Council. I'm not asking them to give me money because I'm the front-runner at the polls."

("Perhaps the Congressman should spend less time attacking other Democrats and wringing his hands over the fact that our campaign has raised four times as much as his, and spend more time making sure his own campaign learns how to comply with campaign-finance laws," countered Brian Hardwick, Gifford Miller's campaign strategist.)

Mr. Weiner had received some problematic campaign checks courtesy of an Indian pharmacist fan. (He ended up returning them-along with money from the relatives of a rabbi who'd once had a spot of trouble.) "I have a huuuuge following-you may mock me-in the South Asian community," he said. And Mr. Weiner had always been an advocate for the neighborhood pharmacies being elbowed out by the pricier Duane Reades of the world. It wasn't fair that his finances should come into question "when the Mayor is arguably the single most destructive force to ever hit campaign finance by spending 70, 80, 100 million of his own money," he said. "And with a great deal of secrecy."

Mr. Weiner likes to describe the Mayor as a weak sister, rolling over for the Republicans when he's not kissing up with donations. Whenever he sees the Mayor, Mr. Weiner said, it's all reasonably cordial. After all, nothing's personal in politics. "I think he likes me," Mr. Weiner ventured. (The Mayor does not, say his aides.)

Mr. Weiner often compares his campaign to Koch '77. But that was almost 30 years ago, and the demographics have shuffled and reshuffled. The percentage of minority voters may now be over 50 percent, said strategist Jerry Skurnik, Koch '77's first paid employee. Mr. Weiner's situation is perhaps only comparable in that an unknown Congressman like him with a strong outer-borough showing could possibly triumph in a primary runoff-that is, if Freddy Ferrer slides in at under 40 percent.

"I'm not, you know, brilliant," said Mr. Weiner, who attended SUNY Plattsburgh to play hockey. "I just really believe in what I'm doing, and I think this comes across. I think I work harder."

"He is very hard-working," said Congressman Charlie Rangel, and so many others. Sometimes Mr. Weiner is on four New York–Washington shuttles a day, making sure he's back in time for a fifth-grade graduation in Kew Gardens. He still plays hockey most Monday nights at Chelsea Piers, lugging his equipment around in the trunk because he's too cheap to pay for a locker, he said. There isn't much time for TV, but he TiVos Jon Stewart, a friend from years back that he sees occasionally. "We disagree a little on Israel," Mr. Weiner noted.

"Politics is Weiner's life," said consultant Hank Sheinkopf. (Mr. Weiner is as yet unmarried, sharing his Forest Hill co-op with two cats.) "That's very much like Koch," Mr. Sheinkopf added, though Mr. Weiner has had for-real girlfriends: New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead; a woman known as Allison (Adrenaline Alli) Joseph, who would post naughty pictures of herself on her AOL/Newline sports Web site; and Kirsten Powers, a pretty blond strategist who has worked for Bill Clinton and Andrew Cuomo. The other day, Page Six reported that he was out late, "swapping spit" with a young lady at the D.C. bar Stetson's.

"I don't know that Mayors are expected to be swapping spit," said Mr. Sheinkopf. "I don't know that this was extraordinarily helpful to him."

"Well, who was he swapping spit with, is the question," said consultant Norman Adler.

Mr. Weiner declined to confirm that he was dating anyone. "I don't think this kind of stuff matters much to people," he said. "I think most people scratch their heads and ask themselves, why are my comings and goings so fascinating?"

But they sort of are. And Mr. Weiner, it might be said, was grooving on the attention. The message was resonating.

Mr. Richardson knew how to dance the line when he was shooting for Gucci, Levi's, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike. Carolina Herrera had again hired him to juice her upcoming ad campaign with the notion that something fantastically illicit was in store for anyone who bought her clothes. And who in fashion hadn't heard about the spontaneous sexcapades that occasionally rattled Mr. Richardson's sets? Terry World would be Mr. Richardson's own reality show, but with the basic plot line varying little from episode to episode. Big on blowjobs, Mr. Richardson seemed to want everyone to know that he had more spume in him than a creature out of Melville.

A professionally grim Red Cross representative was on hand to relocate families from a cast-iron building next-door. Terry's team asked if they could rescue the 800 trapped teddy bears wearing Mr. Richardson's grinning mug that had been made up special.

"That's an Office of Emergency Management question," she said with a calculated perversity.

"If they could just get that hole filled," Mr. Richardson was saying. A plaid flannel shirt flung over his shoulder, Mr. Richardson, 39, loped back to his loft- cum -studio on the Bowery to finish a meeting with Vice magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes.

"Terry was in deep shit with all of those first-year feminist types about eight months ago over at Deitch," Mr. McInnes said gleefully. A freedom fighter for fringe culture, gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch represents the likes of Vanessa Beecroft, Mariko Mori and Barry McGee. But after some of his artists heard that he'd huddled with Mr. Richardson, they threatened to huff off to other galleries, calling Mr. Richardson's work "misogynistic" and "exploitative," said Mr. McInnes. Mr. Deitch didn't need any Kleenex to wipe off his conscience: He stood his ground, and the handful of objectors in his employ were bought off with a month's paid holiday.

"Terry is one of the most charismatic figures in downtown culture"-a mood-swinging planet where, Mr. Deitch noted, thanks to the political climate and the fallout from AIDS, "things got very repressed in the 90's."

Given the flood, it was decided that Terry World would relocate around the corner, on Wooster Street, in a space with the ambiance of a high-school gym. Mr. Richardson was relieved.

"How old is she?" said Gavin McInnes, reviewing a number of photos strewn across Mr. Richardson's floor. "You think she'd mind if her tits are on display?"

The subject in question, Boonk, was a meth-head who finally flipped out and didn't come around the studio anymore. "There's something about her face," said Mr. McInnes admiringly. This fragile blonde faun made her money in a practice known in her neck of Jersey City as boonking : She would negotiate an incredible sum of money for some preposterous sexual act inside a john's Range Rover, then hurtle out the door before the performance could begin. Sometimes she didn't make it. Mr. Richardson had captured her blackened panda eyes with one of the archaic point-and-shoot Yashicas he buys on eBay.

"Whatever happened to Boonk?" Mr. Richardson wondered aloud.

"She's a born-again Christian and going to college," said Mr. McInnes.

Autre temps, autre muses . Mr. Richardson was an early graduate of the happy-snappy school of shooters who often turned the camera on their posse. Mr. Richardson's assistants Seth and Keiji may often be glimpsed in the margins of his work. They, too, affect that droopy convict mustache. Mr. Richardson calls them superstars.

His newest superstar was an intern with rock-chick hair now drying his dishes, a communications major at New York University named Alex, "a rich girl who wanted some culture," said Mr. McInnes.

Alex assisted Mr. Richardson on the Miu Miu campaign, but soon she was involved in what is known around the studio as "documentary work." When Mr. Richardson thought it might be cool to pose as the back end of a horse costume, it was Alex who went down below and urged him to the finish line. (The riding costume and crop she'd brought with her to work weren't required after all.) Striving for something a little more ironic-Clintonian-Alex saw to Mr. Richardson under his desk. It was a cool summer job, and it looked like she might even earn some academic credit in the service of Art. The payoff came when Mr. Richardson would point to the pictures of her and call it some of his "most important work."

"My therapist is going to see the show and tell me about it next week," Mr. Richardson remarked. Like an athlete preparing for the big game, he hadn't had sex or even masturbated for a solid three days before the opening.

And what an opening it was: Thousands had tumbleweeded through the under-air-conditioned exhibition. The Japanese snapped pictures of each other in front of Alex fellating the Terry Horse and Alex fellating Terry from the kitchen trash can. ("It's Sesame Street !" Mr. Richardson explained with a chuckle.) A morose young hipster confessed he'd once been cast in a Richardson shoot: He was in his underpants and she was wrapped in plastic, but it felt way too porno, so he took off. At the time, he hadn't really known who Mr. Richardson was. Clearly, there was the prodrome of regret.

Because of the unstable buildings nearby, the cobbled street was now cordoned off and had turned into an impromptu block party. Vincent Gallo was looking very Wild Bunch in a leather cap. Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, director Wes Anderson and designer Cynthia Rowley all paid their respects to Mr. Richardson, shyly observing things from the very edge of the crowd. Matt Gubler, the bright-eyed ephebe in Wes Anderson's upcoming film, was performing magic tricks. People were buying "Model for Terry" T-shirts and Terry condoms, four for $5.

In his hand-stitched yellow Caraceni suit, Jeffrey Deitch was looking extravagantly pleased. In the show, Mr. Richardson's glasses often come in for a XXX drenching, and Mr. Deitch had changed into his own prescription Terry glasses. "You think these would look good with cum on them?" Mr. Deitch joked with Mr. Richardson's assistant, Melissa, who always wears a Virgin Mary medal around her neck. ("So gross !" she later complained.)

" Telly !" It was Charlie Brown, the Japanese karaoke maestro and publisher of the edgy magazine Dune . Mr. Brown had a cameo in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation , and he was here with a copy of Taschen's new Terry World coffee-table tome under his arm. Mr. Richardson signed it " Shaku-hachi!" ("Blowjob!")

"I want Terry to sign my chest," said Alex the intern, whose scrap of a dress was affixed to her bitty body with gobs of double-sided tape. A pair of policemen who wanted to see what the fuss was about inside were expelled back into the street. They were smiling.

"It's comedy," said Mr. Richardson merrily. It certainly wasn't pornography, everyone kept insisting.

"A lot of it starts with me saying to a girl, 'Do you want to do nudes?' And they're like, 'I don't want to be naked,'" said Mr. Richardson. "So I say, ' I'll be naked and you take the pictures. You can have the camera. You can have the phallus.'" Everyone, including the assistants, was always armed with a camera. Mr. Richardson liked to say he wouldn't ask someone to do anything he wouldn't first do himself: "And since I'm in so many of the pictures, aren't I objectifying myself a bit?"

But he wasn't the one poking his head out of a garbage can or wearing that diamond "Slut" tiara.

"Some people think those images are funny and love them, and some people think they're degrading to women. And those are great reactions to get, because the same people who are saying that are secretly taking dumps on people or like to drink piss or whatever," said Mr. Richardson. "Everybody has their trips." And no one in his pictures seemed to be suffering though the experience, certainly.

Mr. Richardson was by no means a porn junkie. He was more likely to be caught with Cocaine Cowboys , Christiane F . or Pink Flamingos in his VCR than Yank My Doodle, It's a Dandy . The pile of Hustlers in the bathroom were there because a friend sent him a subscription. If he wanted to jerk off, he could always use the mirror, he said. He had never bought a porn movie-and anyway, too much of that stuff could scramble your circuitry.

"Once, a year ago, I'd been watching porn, and there was one where some guy was smacking this girl," he remembered. "So I'm with someone for the first time and I just slap her. She slapped me back so hard she knocked my glasses off! I was like, 'Whadja do that for?' 'Don't fuckin' slap me!' she said. 'I thought you'd like it,' I said. She's like, 'No, I like to get choked .'"

Mr. Richardson was sure that other photographers had collections of Polaroids and pictures that were something like his. It's just that no one had the guts to put them out there. Mr. Richardson's own dimensions were the subject of much fascination among both sexes. A solicitation for women willing to take it all off on his Web site had yielded much mail from gay European men. Mr. Richardson would sometimes spot a candidate at the Starbucks on Spring Street, but his stylist friend Leslie Lessin would be the one to approach.

"I've had girls come up to me and say, 'I want to shoot with Terry-he's a bad boy,'" said Ms. Lessin, who has worked with porn's big bang star, Houston. In his photographs, Mr. Richardson's penis has been caressed by the mouths of she-males in a Brazilian whorehouse, and he allowed that he'd also "been inside of" hard-core's empress dowager, Vanessa del Rio. But there were the Pollyannas, too, who would arrive for a simple portrait and be reaching down Mr. Richardson's pants by the end of the shoot, unintimidated by the Bruce Lee nunchakus hanging over his bed.

Recently Mr. Richardson split with his on-and-off girlfriend of two years, Elite model Susan Eldridge. He'd been faithful, in his fashion: The pretty young flings offering blowjobs at the office were something Ms. Eldridge understood to be part of his job description.

The day after the show, Mr. Richardson was sitting around his apartment, having a smoke and mulling the why of it. Perhaps the show was about his finally getting clean.

His favorite drug had been heroin-snorting it, smoking it. He also drank. "Christmas Day three years ago," he said, "I was here doing ten bags of heroin, washing down a bunch of Valiums with a bottle of vodka and going to bed with a suit on by myself, just being like, 'Please don't wake up,' and then waking up and going: ' Fuck- I'm still here!'"

Friends staged an intervention.

"I don't think I'd had sex without being drunk or stoned in almost my whole life," he said. "All of a sudden, it was like, 'Wow-sex! This is incredible!'"

Mr. Richardson's father Bob was a well-regarded photographer-dude of the 60's. When Terry was 4, his father left his mother for Anjelica Huston, then 17. Terry's mother moved on to Jimi Hendrix, Kris Kristofferson and Keith Richards. When Mr. Richardson was 9, she was coming to pick him up from his child psychiatrist ("I was just really angry and hyper") and a telephone truck rear-ended her Volkswagen.

"When she came home, she was in diapers," he said. "It was very heavy. By the time I was 11, I was getting high every day on weed-just checking out, basically."

A redhead rang up from downstairs. She was dropping off Gummi Bears for Mr. Richardson. He plopped one in his mouth. "I feel like a lot of the women I've dated have been the same kind of person," he said. "I've been through a lot of relationships that were really just girls cheating on me or being quite sadistic. Because of this accident, my mother couldn't walk, and she was just very ill-tempered all the time-always screaming and yelling and throwing things at me and, like, totally unavailable as a mother." Young Terry stopped seeing his shrink, and the man jumped out his office window six months later. Two years ago, Mr. Richardson had a pensive image of himself as a child tattooed on his chest.

Terry was 10 when his father Bob started to bottom out; since then, Bob Richardson's life has been punctuated by repeated comebacks and homelessness. (Today, Terry's father lives in Venice Beach off Social Security and has been working on his memoirs.) Terry did it up on the SoCal punk scene and played bass guitar in several garage bands. He started taking his own pictures and assisting other photographers. He lived on Ramen noodles. In 1991, his father suggested they work together in New York as a team.

"It was comedy," said Mr. Richardson. "We'd be in Miami shooting beauty pictures for some magazine, and my dad would be yelling at the editor: 'Terry's going to do what he wants-and if you're going to get in the way, we're going to get on a plane and go home!' And we were just so broke, I was like, ' Noooo , we're in a hotel ! It's free food and free drinks and I want to stay!' Dad was really into tantrums and trying to emotionally devastate people. The 60's was a different time. You could get away with these incredible scenes."

For a spell, his dad was living in Terry's studio apartment. "And I would just go to sleep on people's couches every night, because I just couldn't handle sleeping in a bed with my dad every night," Mr. Richardson said. "I'd come home and he'd be wearing my clothes and hanging out with my friends."

The Richardsons had scored a job for Vibe magazine, but Terry told his dad that he wanted to go it alone. His father hung up on him. But the story won an award, and Terry's career took flight.

Mr. Richardson married model Nikki Uberti, and he compares their relationship to Sid and Nancy, Kurt and Courtney. "We were together three months and we went to City Hall, and I was high as a kite and everyone was saying 'Don't get married,' and then we fought the whole time and after six months we almost got it annulled, and you know there were great moments," he said in a torrent. When Ms. Uberti was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 29, Mr. Richardson asked for a divorce-or so the oft-repeated story goes.

"I know people say, 'He's a heartless cad; his wife got cancer and he took off with Shalom or some model'-which is completely not the truth," Mr. Richardson said. "We'd basically separated and she was diagnosed, and I stayed with her and went back and forth, but I was trying to get clean, and I couldn't get clean and stay in that house. I would just wake up and start drinking and taking pills. And she had been throwing me out forever anyway."

Faux Pas is a short film Ms. Uberti made about their relationship, starring cats and stuffed animals. Mr. Richardson said he'd love to see it, only they no longer speak.

Many a hotel room has suffered at Mr. Richardson's hands. "To go from, like, not having anything to flying on the Concorde and just being a lunatic …. " he said. "I was working on a job with Polly Mellen, and she was just looking at me with tears in her eyes, saying: 'You don't have to do the same thing as your father. You're going to destroy everything.'"

Now people were calling him the heir to Helmut Newton. Famous people were always a kick, and he considered himself one, too ("Terry Richardson is an international celebrity," reads the first line of his biography on the "only official Terry Richardson website"-as if there were other aspirants to that role). "It's nice to get attention," Mr. Richardson said. He enjoyed being recognized on the street. Warhol had his wig, said Mr. Richardson, and he had his Confederate facial hair, Charles Manson T-shirts and 70's sit-com glasses. "Sometimes I think I'm turning into a caricature of myself," said Mr. Richardson, who was selling T-shirts he had printed with a caricature of himself.

Someone offered him a million dollars to make an arty sex film. While he says he loved his buddy Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny ("Some great heart-breaking moments, and the blowjob is awesome"), this is not what he wanted to do. "I wanted to make something really dark and heartbreaking and beautiful and funny that was more than penetration," he said. He's co-written a screenplay called Son of a Bitch , about a kid whose shyster father resurfaces in his life at 18, only to wreak havoc on his life.

"The whole sex thing-I'm kind of bottomed out on it," said Mr. Richardson. "Eventually I would just like to have kids and go into a different kind of place."

Mr. Richardson had a little side project that had been going on for years called "Breaking in the Carpet." As he explained: "I have hundreds of images of me just coming on different rugs in different hotel rooms." He suspected he'd jacked off at every room in the Marmont, he said. But he hadn't taken one of these pictures in almost two years. Or perhaps he just didn't want his Marmont guest privileges revoked.

He was now thinking he might want to get into what he called "real photography," as opposed to lo-fi snapshots. "A whole other part of me is that beautiful, romantic kind of picture I do, too," he said.

Mr. Richardson's post-show ramble seemed to sound an epitaph for yet another phase he'd survived. "The people who don't like me will hate me more, and the people who do like me will be like, 'There's Terry-he went all the way. Cool.'"

The Passion of the Christ , the film that cost Mel Gibson $30 million of his own money, already had civic and religious leaders lunging for the microphone. The film was set for a nationwide opening on February 25-23 theaters in New York City. Mr. Foxman felt compelled to pass out some polemically correct thoughts with the popcorn: "The movie is not anti-

Semitic. But it has the potential to fuel anti-Semitism" was his own professional opinion. The phone rang. Again. Us Magazine was calling Mr. Foxman for some measured outrage.

Mr. Gibson's film wasn't the only brouhaha Mr. Foxman faced down in recent months. There was the American Airlines pilot who instructed Christians on an L.A.-to-New York flight to have their neighbors converted by the time the plane landed. The Urban Outfitters T-shirt screeching "Everyone Loves a Jewish Girl" in a rain of exclamatory dollar signs. The offending corporation could count on receiving one of Mr. Foxman's fabled epistles. There would be some back and forth. And then: the concession. A.D.L. would always run the celebratory press release up its flagpole.

But Mr. Gibson wasn't looking for a pen pal.

It is the subject of much debate whether the A.D.L.'s cure is worse than the disease. Are Mr. Foxman's rat-a-tat-tat reactions to the world's casual anti-Semitism making the Jewish community look like an irritable mob? Or is the 90-year-old organization correctly protesting a steady trickle of anti-Semitism that, unchecked, might one day sweep through the sandbags?

In his restrained suit, starchy chevron-patterned white shirt with French cuffs and in-red-you're-ahead necktie, Mr. Foxman was clearly a man who paid attention to presentation. Over the years, his wedding ring had migrated to his pinkie.

It was a look.

"Gibson wrote me a very nice letter," he said. "It was respectful-I've always written him in a respectful tone-and then he says, 'Let's love each other.'"

But in Mr. Foxman's still boyish 63-year-old face, there was the gnash of terrier teeth.

"Where is the blame in this film? The blame is on the Jews," he said. "From the first scene, they're moving this process forward. They're angry. They're vengeful. They're stereotypic. They're hard . The Jews are portrayed as controlling the Romans. And Pontius Pilate-who history records as one of the most vicious proconsuls in the Empire-he's a loving, sweet, confused guy forced by the Jews to do this."

Mr. Foxman pointed out that Mr. Gibson, a Traditionalist Catholic who believes the pre–Vatican II teachings about Jewish culpability in the death of Christ, could have blamed the Romans. (After all, who would complain?) But it was too late to upend the entire film. Now Mr. Foxman was begging Mr. Gibson for a postscript, distributing said blame more equitably.

"I don't think he gets it. I really don't think he gets it," said Mr. Foxman, his arms clasped protectively around his body. "But maybe I still want to believe he doesn't get it. Because Gibson is playing with something very dangerous. He's playing with faith; he's playing with history. A true believer can be very naïve in his beliefs."

To hear Mr. Foxman tell it, the true believer had delivered nothing less than a high-toned snuff film! A screenplay co-written by the screenwriter of Wise Blood. And a scourging with barbed whips that left the movie's star, James Caviezel, with a 14-inch scar on his back.

Martin Scorsese spent exactly 20 seconds of screen time on Jesus's flogging, and two and a half minutes on the trudge up Golgotha, in The Last Temptation of Christ . But these same moments are the meat of Mr. Gibson's film. The most gruesome filler for the movie was supplied in diaries-which have been called anti-Semitic-by the 19th-century stigmatic nun Anne Catherine Emmerich, a name that Mr. Foxman likes to pronounce with a long i : Reich .

"It's this nun's teaching that the only way you can become close to Christ is to participate in his suffering," said Mr. Foxman. "Well, this is over the top. I saw a lot of people look away. I looked away."

Mr. Gibson has said he wanted to create "a moving Caravaggio." He was photographed tramping around the set in Italy in a beret. "I'm an artist, I must create! " he told students at Azusa Pacific University last month before insinuating several times that God was, in fact, the artist directing the film. "You're watching a man being tortured and forgiving in the midst of it," said Mr. Gibson. "It has to find its own kind of beauty and its own lyricism."

"That's acrobatics with words," snickered Mr. Foxman. "Only for sadists , only for masochists could this be beautiful. And for him to say, 'I'm doing this because God commanded me'-there's a certain arrogance. He's on another trip. But that's fine, you know? It's his money. As long as we don't pay the price!"

Abraham Foxman was baptized a Catholic. Born in Poland in 1940, his parents left him in the care of his nanny, Bronislawa Kurpi, when they were forced to live in Vilna's ghetto. Frau Kurpi raised him as her own. When he misbehaved, she called him Judas. When his parents came for him at the end of the war-his father had survived work camps, his mother had secured Aryan papers-Frau Kurpi was reluctant to let the boy who called her "Mamoushka" go. So they all lived together.

"My parents realized they'd lost everybody, and she was family," Mr. Foxman said. But Frau Kurpi denounced his father as a Nazi collaborator. She had Abe kidnapped, and his parents kidnapped him back.

Eventually his parents left Frau Kurpi behind as they fled over the border to displaced-person camps overseen by American soldiers. That's where Abe Foxman learned his first English words: "Pleased to make your acquaintance." Those of Mr. Foxman's acquaintance now include Senators, Presidents, Kofi Annan, Henry Kissinger, Jacques Chirac, Ariel Sharon, George Tenet. Quite an achievement for someone who arrived here in 1950 and made it through City College, New York University Law School and lessons at Arthur Murray that his father, a Yiddish publisher, thought he should have.

Abe has met the Pope five times, said his publicist Myrna Shinbaum. " Eight times," Mr. Foxman corrected her sternly. He said he speaks Polish with the Pope: "It gets his attention."

John Paul II, who several weeks ago may or may not have given the film a rave, was not expected to offer any further comment. "The Pope has earned enough credit with me and the Jewish community for being sensitive to anti-Semitism, so I can't believe it that he saw it and loved it. I just can't believe it," said Mr. Foxman. He noted that there was "jockeying in the Vatican today for position for a future date." The ailing Pope is said to be surrounded by some conservative cardinals who might like to see parts of Vatican II rescinded.

"The Vatican will be very careful to stay on the sidelines," said one ex-Vatican employee who worked in media under the current regime.

But that didn't stop Mr. Foxman from trying to score once he steamed into Rome.

"I would hope that the Vatican and the Catholic church would stand up to defend its teachings," he told Reuters Television. Then he announced that in June he would convene an international conference on global anti-Semitism. In Rome.

Mr. Foxman's trip raised the expected hackles.

"These people are cracking up!" said William Donahue, the president of the neoconservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, speaking to The Observer . The league-which claims Mel Gibson as a member-is a sort of Catholic version of the A.D.L.; in the past, it has complained about things like nun jokes on Ally McBeal . "They tried to say Mel's anti-

Semitic-that didn't work," said Mr. Donahue. "They said the movie was too violent-that's not working. Now they're trying to say that he's a fanatic. Foxman actually went over to the Vatican. I mean, you talk about who's the nut!"

Mr. Foxman has been desperate to herd more big-time Christians into his tent. He admitted that he isn't as close to New York City's Cardinal Edward Egan as he was to his predecessor. "That was a relationship that took a while," said Mr. Foxman. "When Cardinal O'Connor first came, he compared abortion to the Holocaust. But, you know, he learned."

Cardinal Egan hasn't seen the film. "Cardinal hasn't been to the theaters to see a movie since he's been archbishop of New York," said archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling.

"The Cardinal was very concerned about the movie when he spoke with me about it a while ago," said real-estate developer Jack Rudin, who counts himself a friend of both Abe Foxman and the Cardinal, and added that he thinks the A.D.L.'s actions are entirely appropriate.

The Cardinal is coming through for Abe Foxman: In an upcoming issue of Catholic New York the Cardinal writes that he's seen the movie's trailers like everyone else, and that "the images are bloody and stark; and for some, they may on this score alone be quite unacceptable apart from any purely religious considerations …. One may legitimately question whether such a representation exceeds the limits of propriety, good taste, or artistic authenticity." The Cardinal expresses concern that the film might occasion anti-Semitism: From the pulpits, "we need to repeat with clarity and vigor Catholic teaching about the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ." He quotes from the Second Vatican Council: "'What was perpetrated against the Lord in His Passion cannot be imputed either to all the Jewish people of that time or the Jewish people of our time' …. The matter is crystalline clear."

Mr. Foxman was so intent on seeing Mr. Gibson's film that he started his own church. Thwarted in his effort to see The Passion by Mr. Gibson's Praetorian guard of publicists, Mr. Foxman decided to register online for an Orlando pastors' conference in January where a screening had been scheduled-in his own name, he was careful to point out. First, he plugged in "Congregation of Truth." Then "Institute of Truth." Only the "Church of Truth in Brooklyn, New York," jimmied open the gate. A woman next to him at the screening commented on his name tag.

"Church of Truth?" she said. "What's that?"

"A Jewish church," he replied.

"Well, welcome! " she said mischievously.

WNBC finally came and went, and Mr. Foxman headed back into his office. Off came the jacket with the flag pin in the lapel. His office has its own tension-filled bass line: the baying of whichever crowd happens to be megaphoning a protest in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. Today it was Haitians.

Mr. Foxman wouldn't join Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in calling for a boycott of The Passion , even though a boycott in 1970 forced changes in Germany's Oberammergau passion play.

The A.D.L. doesn't boycott. The A.D.L. doesn't picket in the streets.

Passion plays like Oberammergau were originally for the illiterate, a way to dispense religion. "This film will be seen by more people in three months than the 'Passions' have been seen in 2,000 years," said Mr. Foxman.

Mr. Gibson's project has taken heat for being intellectually slack. For starters, there's the awkward title ("Theologically, ' the Christ' is a kind of liberal Protestant usage I don't think Gibson would be terribly enamored with," said Father John Pawlikowski, professor of social ethics at Chicago's Catholic Theological Union) and the languages of its script, "street Latin" and Aramaic. The movie's Web site stubbornly insists that Aramaic, not Greek, was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean in this period. "It's from Mars," Paula Fredriksen, a Boston University biblical expert, told The Observer. "Gibson's covering his ass because he made a mistake. God, what a chutzpah !"

And while the Gospels may have included some eyewitness material, as Mr. Gibson has said, they were compiled in a period well after Jesus' death. "They're more religious literature than history," said Father Pawlikowski, written at a time when early Christians were desperate for Roman converts.

The Wall Street Journal has applauded the film's "astute marketing," which mainly consisted of showing the film to evangelical audiences, conservative Catholics and a handful of contrarian Jews. Mr. Gibson twitched his way through these audiences with pastors.

"We've been beating Mel to death, practically, doing these screenings," Paul Lauer, the marketing head of Gibson's Icon Productions, told one such gathering.

Icon actually focus-grouped the movie's inflammatory blood-libel scene from the Gospel of Matthew, where the Jewish high priest declares of Christ that "his blood will be on us and upon our children." But finally on Feb. 3 came word: The scene was out.

This reminded Mr. Foxman of a story: "There's a Jew in Eastern Europe who lives in a hut with nine children, and he says to the Rebbe, 'Rebbe, I can't study, I can't pray, the children make so much noise, my wife yells and screams. What can I do?'

"And the Rebbe says, 'You have a goat? Bring the goat into the house.' A week goes by and the guy comes back. 'Rebbe, it's worse. Now the goat's bleeping it all over the place.' The Rebbe then has him bring in a cow. The man comes back and he says, 'It's horrendous. '

"'You know what?' says the Rebbe. 'Take the goat and the cow out.' The man comes back to the Rebbe and says, 'Thank you, Rebbe. It's so quiet and peaceful. Thank you very much.'

"It's the story of this scene! " Mr. Foxman said. "First Gibson announces he's going to take it out. Now he puts it in. Now that he puts it in, he's announcing he's going to take it out. So what are we supposed to say? 'Wonderful!!? Boy, he's listening, he's really a nice guy, he's sensitive'? He's playing a game."

Mr. Foxman also has little patience for Alan Nierob, the film's publicist, who refers to himself as a "second-generation Holocaust survivor," and Paul Lauer, Icon's marketing director, who has said on TV that he has a Jewish father.

"Nierob, when I first spoke to him, told me, 'You know, my parents are Holocaust survivors,'" said Mr. Foxman. "I said, 'I don't care! I really don't care! I find it offensive. You know, you do your job, I respect you for doing that. Don't give me a pedigree. It doesn't mean anything. I find it cheap! I find it sadly cheap! … Mel Gibson is right because you're Jewish and you work for him?' What does that mean?"

What does he make of self-described "raised-Catholic convert to Orthodox Judaism" historian Paula Fredriksen, who referred ominously to an approaching time "when violence breaks out" in her New Republic article on the film? "I don't police her," said Mr. Foxman. "Do I think pogroms will happen? No. But I worry a lot more about Latin America, in Europe, in the Middle East. Because it's going to be shown there without a debate. This is going to be a bonanza for TV in Lebanon."

The A.D.L. doesn't only spar with allegedly anti-Semitic movie directors. Debate is a part of the Jewish tradition, and there's a lot of it among the Jewish community organizations. "They argue with each other over who's going to get more space in the media-especially in the hometown daily, The New York Times, " said Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, former head of the American Jewish Congress.

There are some who feel that the A.D.L. doesn't take a strong enough line on issues like fighting anti-Zionism. There are others who insist the A.D.L. is playing kissy-face with the Israeli right wing: "Jewish lobbying for Israel is as much in order as Halliburton or Mr. Cheney lobbying for the Saudi Arabians," said Rabbi Hertzberg.

The gala dinners, the parade-float series of awards, raise lots of money-and many eyebrows.

"I wonder if anyone in the future can ever again take seriously the Anti-Defamation League," wrote William F. Buckley in 1980, revolted by a $250-a-plate black-tie dinner dance the A.D.L. was throwing Hugh M. Hefner, the recipient of a First Amendment Freedoms Award. In October, the A.D.L. gave a dinner in honor of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"To honor Berlusconi after he has been rebuilding the reputation of Mussolini was a swinish thing to do!" Rabbi Hertzberg bellowed. "A cheap stunt for some publicity and to raise some money! I am absolutely prepared to go straight down their tonsils on this!"

"I personally have no problem about them honoring Berlusconi," said Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America. "He apologized for his remarks. Berlusconi's been a great friend to Israel and the Jewish people."

Hedge-fund honcho Michael Steinhardt, listed in annual reports as an "honorary life member of the ADL National Commission," co-chaired a Waldorf-Astoria birthday dinner for Mr. Foxman in March 2000. But called for comment, his spokesman demanded to know why a reporter would even imagine that Mr. Steinhardt and the A.D.L. were connected, conceding only that the A.D.L. "must have given Michael an award or something."

Mr. Steinhardt doesn't believe anti-Semitism is a major issue right now, his spokesman said. "Michael's just not into that stuff. What he's into right now is Jewish education and assimilation issues." The spokesman confirmed that Mr. Steinhardt feels there is too much dust being kicked up about anti-Semitism in this country, that the A.D.L. is doing Jews a disservice. "Michael does believe that," he said. Twice.

Behind the scenes, those who have worked with Mr. Foxman say he behaves like a noisy one-man band. He can be abrasive. "He's hung up the phone on me," said an executive at one Jewish community organization. Mr. Foxman's interfaith-affairs chief, Rabbi Eugene Korn, resigned after just a year on the job. People said they fought over the handling of Mr. Gibson's film.

" Baloney, " said Mr. Foxman. "Rabbi Korn was even tougher than I was."

"You want it straight?" said Rabbi Hertzberg. "The A.D.L. is the bully in town. Within the Jewish community, they bully you. Since they're engaged in the holy cause of anti-Semitism, you can't disagree with their tactics. They have enough money-a lot of it-to make their views the reigning orthodoxy. If you disagree, you are not-so-subtly painted into the corner of being treasonable."

These organizations compete for money, and the A.D.L. is feeling the heat from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which is headed by Rabbi Marvin Hier, who complained that Jewish characters were portrayed in Mr. Gibson's film as "Rasputin-like characters." Some covet Mr. Foxman's $60 million annual operating budget-not only funding diversity teaching programs and a stream of reports tracking terrorism, hate groups and all gradations of kook, but also deployed on tickets to international conferences, the executive committee meeting at Palm Beach's Breakers Hotel, and the dispatching of "delegations" around the world to "monitor the situation." Mr. Foxman, who lives in Bergen County with his wife Golda and has two children-Michelle, an intellectual-property lawyer, and Ariel, editor of Cargo magazine-makes $422,075 a year. "Not enough," he snapped. "I hope that the business of fighting hate will attract the best people. And the only way to attract them is to say, 'Not only is it rewarding, but you can live like a human being.'"

After Mr. Foxman kicked and made up with Barnes and Noble chief executive Leonard Riggio over a book of European stories that Barnes and Noble had published-the A.D.L. felt that one of the fairy tales was anti-Semitic-the A.D.L. had a dinner for Mr. Riggio which hauled in a record $2 million. "Sometimes you've got to raise your voice, but you also have to remember to say 'thank you,'" said Mr. Foxman.

And "sorry": Three year ago, the A.D.L. was fined more than $9 million in damages after wrongly accusing a Colorado couple of anti-Semitism. The A.D.L. is still fighting the decision.

Just what has Mr. Foxman accomplished with Mr. Gibson's movie? Last week, the President and First Lady announced their intention to see the film. But who were most of the people who were going to buy a ticket? The answer could be found in Ozone Park: Just down the street from John Gotti's Bergen Hunt and Fish Club is Grace Evangelistic Ministries.

Evangelical Christians comprise 30 to 40 percent of the American population. Inside this storefront church, the Reverend Dave Rajoon, a spirited young man with a space between his teeth, was looking to spread the word of the Lord. He was also, not incidentally, looking to expand his 70-person congregation, mainly Trinidadians of Indian descent.

Pastor Dave said he knew Mr. Gibson's film would convey a powerful message. "You know Bambi ? Everybody cries when the mother gets killed. Movies have the power to move you. And here we have the story of God's act of redemption for all mankind, the story of his son."

Was he concerned with charges that the film is anti-Semitic? "When you relate history, it's not being anti-Semitic," he said. "It's like when people talk about Hitler and the Jews. It's history. It's a recounting. "

Recently, Mel Gibson hinted that he'd added a scene to the end of the film, a little something from Luke that talked about "loving everybody, not just people like you." But in the final cut, there was no postscript, no concession for Abe Foxman.

Instead, the clouds rolled in and the winds picked up and the Jewish priests in their gold-trimmed raiments, whose very souls were now drenched in Christ's blood, rode off on their donkeys, not caring enough to see this execution through.

His frost-n-tipped Allman Brothers mane had matured into a short and bristly Kenny Rogers; the bouncer beard was tamed to a pale goatee. Those hairy-chest Hawaiian shirts had been discarded three years ago with his worn-out existence in Malibu; today he was wearing a sensible thermal pullover more befitting a burgher of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

Barely visible above his collar was a five-inch scar, a fault line in that ruddy football-coach neck. In March 2001, Joe Eszterhas was diagnosed with throat cancer. It was now or perhaps never to release Hollywood Animal (Alfred A. Knopf), a 736-page monster truck of a memoir that lumbers into bookstores this week.

His four-pack-a day devotion to Salem Ultra Lights had cost Mr. Eszterhas, 59, most of his larynx. He was lucky he wasn't drinking his carrot juice through a tube in his stomach. The demon cells were in remission-for the time being: "My doctor, a very honest man, told me everything is absolutely fine, but with this particular kind of cancer, you could have a lump on your neck and be dead in six months."

In the 80's and much of the 90's, Mr. Eszterhas was Hollywood's best-paid screenwriter, sometimes receiving more cash for a script than the film's director, who would usually find himself in a back-alley brawl with Mr. Eszterhas over their unshared vision. Some of these movies were hits. Some weren't. One could count on seeing cartons of militantly smoked cigarettes, plenty of on-the-job hanky-panky and, in his late-period panty movies, ruttish lesbians and multiple grand-mal orgasms. "You like to play games, don't you?" was a line that Mr. Eszterhas wrang out of his Olivetti manual more than once. Plots usually twisted around people who were not what they appeared to be.

By the time he packed up and left Hollywood, he'd seen an astonishing 15 films reach the screen. He'd sold several other scripts for crazy money. One went for $3 million, another for $3.7 million and yet another for $4.7 million, he tells us in the first 11 pages, before his story has even left the runway. He doodled the plot for a $4 million movie, One Night Stand , on the back of a cocktail napkin. (And then Mike Figgis came along. Mike Figgis! A man who wore a beret to the Golden Globes! Mr. Figgis spat his own words into the $4 million cocktail-napkin movie, writes Mr. Eszterhas, and ruined it for everybody.)

But it was Showgirls, 1995's stripper satyricon, with its oceans of sticky lip gloss, Scissorhands nail extensions and bottles of Cristal bursting in air, that Mr. Eszterhas would never live down. The movie's rapist rock star, Andrew Carver, even looked something like the film's author. The reviews were vicious; people wondered what Joe Eszterhas was smoking.

"From the time director Paul Verhoeven and I read the script," he patiently explained at the Four Seasons, "we were laughing our heads off at certain things. Somehow, people thought it was a very serious drama that had turned into inadvertent comedy. But there was always a lot of humor in the piece. I don't understand how it's not obvious that a line, like, you know, 'How does it feel not to have anyone coming on you anymore?' is funny. It was meant to be a funny line. It was a funny line." He laughed easily-a roll-bellied heh-heh-heh .

In one of many paragraphs in the book spent wresting his reputation from this tar baby, he suggests that too many tokes of Maui wowie had informed the creative process. As for his alleged misogyny, he claims Gloria Steinem approached him after Showgirls to write a film on the young Marilyn Monroe.

How insufferable was I? he asks several times in the course of the book's introduction. The answer is all too apparent, but he clearly prides himself on the carbo-loaded particulars: the Concorde tickets, the "A-list pussy" that rubbed up against his leg, the 2,000 fan letters a week, the T-shirt he wore to meetings that read, "My inner child is a mean little fuck." Mr. Eszterhas' movies grossed more than $1 billion, so he comes by his bragging rights honestly. Still, one can't help but wonder if it was merely an accident of geography that neighbor Bob Dylan's mastiffs often chose to relieve themselves in front of his Point Dume house.

The scorekeeping continues. "For two and a half years, I've had gallons of carrot juice, and my doctor says he's never seen the kind of tissue regeneration that he sees in my case," he croaked. The waiter went to fetch a pot of hot water, antifreeze for Mr. Eszterhas' still-stunned pipes. This morning, there were things on his mind that would no longer go without saying. The operation had left him sounding more don't-screw-with-me than ever.

The way Mr. Eszterhas writes about Hollywood's own tricky peristalsis, it makes you wonder how anything halfway decent ever falls out the back end. Mr. Eszterhas' stories may date from a pre-Ashton-and-Demi era, but like classic-DVD rentals, they still hold up.

There are the actors insisting their characters have a redemptive arc. The female leads forced to pass every studio's "But would you want to fuck her?" test. The grip who dared to suggest to Mr. Eszterhas a fix for the last scene of Betrayed and got socked in the stomach. A quick cameo features a dentist who is a studio head's only trusted pair of eyes-that is, until the dentist drops dead of a heart attack and the studio head's lucky green light goes on the blink forever. Mr. Eszterhas said it's a true story and reached for some Hollywood lore: "People were always saying Michael Eisner's wife had a gynecologist who would read the comedies, and his own doctor would read the dramas."

"I'm a writer. I use people for what I write," Catherine Tramell snarls in the nympho-brainiac thriller Basic Instinct . "Let the world beware." In Mr. Eszterhas' book, Norman Jewison leaves an unsealed envelope in the young Eszterhas' bedroom so he can get a load of all the zeroes on the director's bank statement. Sylvester Stallone tries to heist the credit for writing F.I.S.T. , then objects to being killed off in the script. Glenn Close bans the wild-boar producer of Jagged Edge from witnessing her carefully lighted sex scene. Michael Douglas bloodies Paul Verhoeven's nose on the set of Basic Instinct (or so Mr. Eszterhas' spies report). The late director Richard Marquand has a one-night stand at the Westwood Marquis and wakes up alone, in handcuffs.

Robert Evans is the book's dotty old uncle in a bolo tie, shoving a huge dildo out the car window on his way to rehab. He weeps when a check he's written to Mike Ovitz is returned to sender, ripped into tiny pieces. He uses a naked actress-slash-model-slash-courier to deliver his thank-you notes. Mr. Evans complains about Charles Michener, the Princeton-grad ghostwriter of his autobiography: "He uses the word 'vagina' all the time," moans the priapic producer. "I've never used that word in my life. Now I've got to go back and change all of Michener's vaginas to my cunts ."

Somewhat perversely, there's no index in the back to track the numerous dramatis personae, but if there were, Sharon Stone's entry would read something like this:

Stone, Sharon, 9

Frankenstein-monster creation of, 23, 303, 337, 401

one-night stand with, 27-28, 337-339, 364, 447

in Basic Instinct 's pubic-hair scene, 35-36, 553-554

scratching and clawing for parts and, 302

Michael Douglas and one-upmanship of, 299

Bob Evans' hatred of, 340-341

Ayn Rand and organic healing and, 402

past-life regression views on, 399, 402

married-men seduction of, 9, 27-28, 337-339, 397-403,

407-409, 411-414, 417-499, 422-423, 444, 447, 478-479,

510, 514- 515, 519-520, 528

Mr. Eszterhas cheated on his first wife with Ms. Stone, among others, including the daughter of Ohio governor (now Senator) George Voinovich. But his attentions are mostly glue-gunned to Ms. Stone, portrayed as the most manipulative Cleopatra since Liz Taylor, a queen of the vile. It was on the set of Sliver that Ms. Stone took up with Bill Macdonald, one of Mr. Eszterhas' married producer friends who worked with Bob Evans. Then Mr. Eszterhas left his wife of 24 years for Mr. Macdonald's pretty young wife, Naomi. The tabloids damn near combusted.

He and Naomi now have four little boys. But Mr. Eszterhas likes her to come along on his business trips; she stopped by the table on her way out of the hotel, good cheer illuminating her wide-open face, her hay-colored hair flipped up at the ends. "Naomi and I had an operating principal when we began the book," Mr. Eszterhas said, "which was: If it's true and it happened, let's not hide it. Let's be very up-front about it, even if it doesn't make us look very good." Lengthy outtakes from her own well-tended diary chronicle the collapse of her marriage and the domino crumble of his (that is, when she's not practically videotaping the outrageous antics over at Bob Evans' pad).

"It's a very interesting point of view-a woman's voice right in the middle of my book," said Mr. Eszterhas, very genuinely. "I love the fact that this love story will live forever and our grandchildren will read it, you know?"

Perhaps it's for the benefit of Naomi-the woman he calls his "one true love"-that he decides to reheat a Sharon Stone tale from American Rhapsody , his part-memoir, part-fictionalized 2000 book about Hollywood and Bill Clinton. As viewed again in the mirrored ceiling of his memory, the single night he spent romancing Ms. Stone was now traumatic. There was Thai grass, there was way too much Cristal, and there was much roistering around an ornate dollhouse she kept on the floor of her living room. "It's a Southern Gothic image," Mr. Eszterhas told me, not wanting to say any more-as if there was much more to say. In Hollywood Animal , he suddenly drops that Ms. Stone's body was doughy, like she'd eaten one too many peanut-butter sandwiches.

At the end of the evening, when he shambled back to his hotel suite- where George Voinovich's daughter awaited him! -he now says he felt "underpaid" (though he charitably allows that most screenwriters would have felt overwhelmed). Also new to this book is the bonus detail that Ms. Stone then telephoned, sweaty and scared: She thought she'd heard the burglar alarm and went sprinting down the street with a butcher's knife.

"One of the things that I love about writing books is that I really did get tired of fighting. It's not a healthy way to live," said Mr. Eszterhas. But Hollywood Animal shows that he still has some of the Hun in him.

Mr. Eszterhas liked to approach the studios with an original, already finished screenplay, called a spec. "I love writing specs because there's less of a chance, frankly, that everybody will piss in it," he said. "A spec is almost as close as you can get to a fait accompli. If they like it, they will be in a hurry to make it, and if they are in a hurry to make it, there's less of a chance that 10 development people and the director and the stars are all going to have ideas on how to redo it."

Other screenwriters were far more accommodating, he felt. Namely Bill Goldman and Ron Bass, who "rewrote Barry Morrow's Rain Man and earned a secondhand ricocheting Oscar," Mr. Eszterhas says in his book. These other screenwriters are like hookers, Mr. Eszterhas writes over and over again. Except Charlie Kaufman. Still: "I wouldn't go out of my way to look at his stuff," Mr. Eszterhas muttered at the Four Seasons. He also drew a distinction between those who butter-churned original scripts and those who merely banged out adaptations: "It's very much 'Dennis Lehane's Mystic River ' to me, you know?" he said. "I resent those critics who make it a film by Clint Eastwood and never mention Lehane and talk about how good Clint's writing was. It's not true. It's wrong."

Mr. Eszterhas spends a lot of time in the book unloading a tractor trailer of sometimes-interesting excuses and mea culpas : He even apologizes for using so many limos (the cabbies, he said, were always troubling him to read their scripts).

He fidgeted with his blunt silver knife, pitching and rolling it in those roast-beef fists like a size-XXL joint. The days were gone when he carried a big buck blade like the one he jabbed into the table at meetings when he was a reporter at Rolling Stone . "Smokers need to do something with their hands," he explained.

Today, he said, producers were now merely servants for the studio, and in many cases for the stars, too.

"There are fewer real original characters. People like [ Jagged Edge 's producer] Marty Ransohoff would go storming into a studio head's office and say, 'You stupid motherfucker, you are not doing this!'" he said. "They've all been replaced by these mealy-mouthed, namby-pamby, scared-shitless executives."

Oh, for the days of Mike Ovitz! Read all about Mr. Eszterhas' 1989 exit from CAA, when he decided to dump Mr. Ovitz-who, it must be noted, didn't take it very well. "My foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out," he told Mr. Eszterhas, who managed to sneak these battle plans to the press and eat lunch in that town again. In 2002, Mike Ovitz told Vanity Fair that he blamed the "gay mafia" for kneecapping his own career. Mr. Eszterhas said he wasn't surprised by the choice of words.

"If you leave, you're going to make my agents look like faggots," Mr. Eszterhas claimed Mr. Ovitz told him in their infamous 1989 exchange.

When the droid of a super-agent came meeching around afterward, Mr. Eszterhas instructed his then-wife to hang up on him. He'd already written Mr. Ovitz an "I am not an asset; I am a human being" letter. Mr. Ovitz wrote back, identifying himself as a "sensitive" soft-candy-center guy who only wished Joe the best.

Of course, he didn't really .

Late one night, Mr. Eszterhas writes, the phone rang. It was a mutual friend. "Michael is crazy with this stuff," said the voice. "Watch your driving, check the brakes of your car, see if you're being followed." Producer Don Simpson advised him to check into different hotels under an assumed name when the writer was business-tripping through Los Angeles. Make sure your booze is opened where you can see it, Don said. Mr. Eszterhas writes of death threats and, in the driveway, a San Francisco–appropriate horse's head: A bandanna printed with skulls and bones came wrapped around his Chronicle . The moment he mentioned to someone in CAA's orbit that he was on the verge of talking to 60 Minutes , he claims in the book, those death threats dried up.

"In terms of karma, Mike Ovitz treated a lot of people very badly," Mr. Eszterhas observed darkly.

Mr. Eszterhas seemed untroubled by the state of his own karma. American Rhapsody , a ranty groin-kick directed at Bill Clinton, was a best-seller for seven weeks in 2000. Rush Limbaugh read several pages on the air. Mr. Eszterhas mentioned that Vernon Jordan, impudently labeled the "Ace of Spades," left a message on his machine just to say "thank you." Mr. Eszterhas was at the Democratic Convention when Bill Richardson, the onetime ambassador to the U.N. and President Clinton's Secretary of Energy, strolled up to him outside the green room.

"You're a good man," Mr. Richardson said.

"I was like, 'Jesus, what's he thinking?'" Mr. Eszterhas remembered, shaking his head in disbelief. "And then he said, 'No, I really mean it.' So clearly there were some people around Clinton who liked the book."

Mr. Eszterhas was sure the Clintons would divorce when Bill left office.

"I hope that, on a human level, they're not living a hypocrisy," he said. "They are, however, both political animals. But I hope there's a real partnership there, and that it's not all an act." He's convinced Hillary Clinton will run in 2008. "It'll be a sensational race- great theater! " he growled.

But would he- could he -vote for her? His last book pegged her as an earnest crypto-lesbian (and not even a horny one) who liked to scream and throw things. "It would depend on who she's running against," he said. The cup of hot water scraped its saucer uncomfortably. "No. Eh. But. There are a great many things I like about Hillary and a great many things that frighten me. She was an absolute orthodox, dogmatic true believer in her younger years, in her doctrinaire liberal politics. True believers of the left or the right put me off."

Relocated to Ohio, Mr. Eszterhas has quite the unique perspective on things. "I would love to do something that really captures Midwesterners. They are the flyover people. They are the real Americans. They are the reason George W. Bush is President. And they are the reason he will be overwhelmingly re-elected," he said.

Mr. Eszterhas' last production was 1997's Burn Hollywood Burn , a home-movie-ish satire that incinerated at the box office. And surely these books of his weren't pumping his West Coast Q-rating. Mr. Eszterhas had considered this. "My old agent Guy McElwaine was right when he said the town runs on greed," he said. "Everyone knows that one day I might sit down and write another spec script that's gonna be a $200 million hit movie. This is Hollywood; people know they may need each other again." People like Paramount head Sherry Lansing, who cherrypicked 1995's Jade for her out-of-work director husband, William Friedkin, and then drove the project into a ditch-or so Mr. Eszterhas writes.

"Besides, I worked for nearly 30 years in Hollywood," said Mr. Eszterhas. "I know an awful lot about an awful lot of people. Those people won't consider this book a tell-all." He's still having dinner with Ms. Lansing and Mr. Friedkin.

But amid Hollywood Animal 's stomping and snorting, it's easy to be distracted from the other half of the book, housing a deeply felt immigrant tale.

"It's a kind of love story about my father," said Mr. Eszterhas, who had just been born in Hungary when his parents found themselves trying to survive on pine-needle soup in Europe's refugee camps. His parents were Catholic; his father had been a writer and Hungarian nationalist, and had changed his name from Kreisz to the more Hungarian-sounding Eszterhas. His mother, the daughter of a tavernkeeper, was painfully shy. "The notion that she would have to hear people arguing or making love in the camps must have been the most brutal kind of violation," said Mr. Eszterhas.

After the family docked in Cleveland, his mother had a breakdown when he was 13, apparently suffering from schizophrenia. "One of the most painful things for me was that she would be yelling and very aggressive and hostile. And then she would be very cold and not aggressive and hostile. And then, suddenly, she'd be a friendly and warm and loving mother," he said. His parents kept to themselves even as he rejected violin lessons, eagerly embracing America and Chuck Berry and "bazball." But he was never not an outsider, this kid who was bullied at his parochial schools. A nun threatened him with a Coca-Cola bottle and he knocked her to the ground.

Later in life came the unexpected plot twist. In 1990, a year after the release of Music Box , a moving film about a Hungarian immigrant accused of war crimes, his own 83-year-old father, who edited a tiny Hungarian newspaper in the States, was suddenly under investigation by the Department of Justice for wartime activity in Hungary's Ministry of Propaganda. Mr. Eszterhas discovered that his father had actually fled the old country for fear that he would be prosecuted as a war criminal. A book his father had written long ago, the one his father had always said he wished he had a copy of- that was the one in which he'd called Jews "parasites" on the body politic. His rosary-twisting mother had literally been a card-carrying member of the country's foremost anti-Semitic political party, the Arrow Cross.

This kind of great theater Mr. Eszterhas could have done without.

For the rest of his father's life, Mr. Eszterhas could hardly bear to be around him. His dad hung on for a time, his only companions the nurses his son paid for.

"I've never really been to Hungary," Mr. Eszterhas said. "I was so charged up to be an American. But I think I want to go now." Maybe the thing he's proudest of in the book, he said, is that here, his father will always be alive. "I had to come to the point where I was at the most vulnerable that I'd ever been in my own life to forgive him."

On his doctor's advice, Mr. Eszterhas said he'd also quit drinking. "I was a really terrible, bad, totally functioning alcoholic," he said. He is quick to point out that he never staggered. Still, he said he was "one of those people who were maybe born in need of two drinks, and that became worse with the pressures of a divorce and with movies and with living there ."

After the operation, Mr. Eszterhas found himself unable to write for a year and a half. Writing was just too yoked to "sipping" and smoking. "Both of these things were so central to my conception of myself, I thought I might be powerless without them," he said. "I was terrified. I'm still terrified." He now walks several miles a day to tire himself out, ease the cravings. "Naomi and I used to have these wonderful lengthy dinners. We'd watch the news, and we'd have two or three bottles of wine. All that changed. Dinner became 20 minutes. We changed our lives inside out, you know?"

Mr. Eszterhas now feels clear-eyed. Lucid. "There's a kind of peace I never had before," he said. His editor at Knopf, Peter Gethers, confirmed this newfound calm. "For one thing, he can't yell any more. Even when he gets angry and threatens to kill me when I try to cut several hundred pages, it's not the same."

Mr. Eszterhas has also rediscovered God. That heavy silver ring on his knuckle has the flash of a rhinestone cross. The credits were now rolling, but not before Joe Eszterhas had found his own redemptive arc.