the monkey business yacht

30 Years Ago: Gary Hart's Monkey Business, and How a Candidate Got Caught

Thirty years ago this week, rumors began circulating about the supposed extramarital affairs of Sen. Gary Hart, the leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President.

In response, Hart challenged the media. He told The New York Times in an interview published on May 3, 1987, that they should follow me around. . . . They’ll be very bored. As the NBC anchor John Chancellor explained a few days later, "We did. We weren’t."

Seldom if ever has a major presidential candidacy crashed and burned so quickly. On May 8, 1987, a mere five days after issuing his challenge, the Colorado senator withdrew as a candidate. He would reenter the race the following December, but he would then withdraw a second time after winning just 4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary in February 1988. His political career was over.

Hart, the son of a farm-equipment salesman, was born in Ottawa, Kansas, in 1936, with the surname Hartpence (he legally changed it in 1965). He attended a local college and then went to both Yale Divinity School and Yale Law School. He practiced law for several years in Denver and then took on the task of running the very long-shot campaign of Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.

It made his political reputation, for it turned out that the McGovern campaign had a secret weapon. After the 1968 Democratic Convention was marred by riots in the streets of Chicago outside and near chaos inside, the Democratic Party established a commission to reform the nominating process.

Its recommendations, adopted by the party, sharply curtailed the power of elected officials and party insiders to choose delegates, increased the importance of caucuses and primary elections, and mandated quotas for blacks, women, and youth. The chairman of the commission, Sen. George McGovern, understood far better than the other candidates how much the rules had changed the political landscape. Hart exploited that understanding to the hilt.

While McGovern took only one state and the District of Columbia against Richard Nixon, no one blamed this on Hart. Two years later, Hart captured a Colorado Senate seat in the Democratic landslide of 1974, and he was reelected easily in 1980. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, and though he lost out to the more senior Walter Mondale, who had served as Jimmy Carter's Vice President, he established himself as a serious candidate who was young, attractive, articulate, and seemed to offer new ideas.

He declined to run for reelection to the Senate in 1986 in order to devote his full attention to winning the 1988 Democratic nomination for President. Against a lackluster field, polls soon showed him far ahead of his nearest rival, more than 20 points in some polls. But he had a major problem, a persistent buzz of rumor regarding his private life and being a womanizer. He and his wife, Lee, had been married for more than 25 years and had two children, but the marriage was apparently a troubled one. They had separated twice and reconciled twice.

A story in Newsweek around the time he formally announced his candidacy, on April 13, 1987, highlighted these rumors, and while it made no specific allegations, it quoted a former adviser as saying that Hart was going to be in trouble if he can't keep his pants on. This produced a barrage of stories in other newspapers and magazines but, again, nothing concrete.

Then, two weeks after Hart’s announcement, the executive editor of the Miami Herald , Tom Fiedler, got an anonymous phone call. The caller said she had proof that Hart was having an affair.

Fiedler was not, at first, impressed. Told that the caller had photographs of Hart and a friend of hers, an attractive blonde in the Miami area, Fiedler said that politicians had their photographs taken with strangers all the time; it proved nothing. But then the caller told him about phone calls her friend had received from Hart from various places over the past few months, and the dates when those phone calls had been received.

Fiedler was easily able to check them against Hart’s schedule, and they coincided. If it was a crank call, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the tip appear genuine. But he was wary of a professional dirty trick. She then told him that her friend was flying up to Washington that Friday, May 1, to spend the weekend with Hart at his Washington, D.C., townhouse. Fiedler knew that Hart was scheduled to be in Iowa Friday and then in Lexington, Kentucky, on Saturday, which was Derby day. He also thought that Hart lived in Bethesda, Maryland, not in the District. But checking the next day, he learned that Hart had sold the house in Bethesda and had indeed moved to Washington, to a townhouse on Capitol Hill. He also learned that the Kentucky stop had been cancelled; Hart was spending the weekend in the District of Columbia. Fiedler’s journalistic instincts told him he was on to something big.

He and a senior editor decided that Jim McGee, an investigative reporter, should catch a Friday afternoon plane to Washington—the flight most likely to have the mystery woman—and stake out Hart’s house. McGee barely made the 5:30 flight. On it he noticed one particularly striking blonde. Could this be her?

Staking out Hart’s house that evening, McGee saw Hart’s front door open at about 9:30 and a man and woman emerge. It was Hart and the blonde on the plane.

The next morning Fiedler and a photographer arrived on the scene. They thought it crucial to have the sighting confirmed, and that evening they saw Senator Hart and the woman emerge from the back entrance of the townhouse. The couple went to Hart’s car, which was parked a short distance away, but then returned to the house through the front entrance. Hart seemed agitated, as if he sensed he was being followed. When he came back out the back entrance, the reporters decided to confront him.

He denied that the woman had spent the night at his house and gave several lawyer-like denials of any impropriety. The reporters, facing a rapidly approaching deadline, decided to go with the story, which appeared in the Sunday, May 3, edition of the paper, with the headline Miami Woman Is Linked to Hart. It caused a sensation.

It soon emerged that the woman’s name was Donna Rice, and she had met Hart at a New Years Eve party in Colorado. She had later accompanied him on an overnight trip from Miami to Bimini on an 83-foot luxury yacht with the you-cant-make-this-stuff-up name of Monkey Business . A picture soon appeared in the National Enquirer , and then in hundreds of newspapers, showing Donna Rice sitting in Hart’s lap, with Hart in a Monkey Business T-shirt.

At a press conference on May 6, the senator furiously denied doing anything wrong. If I had intended a relationship with this woman, he said, believe me . . . I wouldn’t have done it this way.

But contributions to his campaign were rapidly drying up, and his lead in an overnight poll in New Hampshire fell by half. The Washington Post informed the campaign that it had good information on another liaison of his. On Thursday he flew home to Colorado, and on Friday, May 8, he announced his withdrawal from the race.

Gary Hart’s political career began with the crucial insight that the rules of the game with regard to getting delegates to the Democratic convention had fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of the 1968 Chicago convention. His political career ended because he failed to realize that the rules of the game with regard to the private lives of politicians had also fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of Watergate.

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How Scandal Derailed Gary Hart’s Presidential Bid

By: Becky Little

Published: November 7, 2018

Gary Hart was the presumed Democratic presidential candidate in the spring of 1987 when the Miami Herald reported that rumors of his “womanizing” were true. The ensuing scandal over his extramarital affair with a woman named Donna Rice ended his candidacy. Yet according to Gail Sheehy , a journalist who covered Hart for Vanity Fair in the 1980s , the real story was bigger than just one affair—it was about Hart’s fundamental character, and whether a man like him should be president.

Stories of Hart’s affairs had circulated long before his scandal broke in the spring of 1987 (those weeks are depicted in the new film The Front Runner , starring Hugh Jackman as Hart). The rumors had trailed him the first time he campaigned to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 1984, and even stretched back to his time as the national campaign director for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid.

“The wife of a very prominent Duke political scientist told me that he would just take every one of the college girls who volunteered [at the McGovern campaign] to bed,” Sheehy says. “And the next day, she would be hanging on her chance to talk to him, and he would walk right past her as if he’d never seen her before. He did that over and over and over again.”

Hart also sexually harassed at least one female reporter. When journalist Patricia O’Brien went to his hotel room to interview him during his 1984 campaign, he greeted her in a short bathrobe, then got “huffy” when she asked him to put some clothes on, Richard Ben Cramer reported in his book, What It Takes: The Way to the White House .

Hart wasn’t discreet about his affairs, either, according to Sheehy. At one point during his 1984 campaign when the media was focused on him as a major contender, a “veteran political mistress he’d been seeing since 1982 was startled to have him turn up on her Washington doorstep,” Sheehy wrote for Vanity Fair in September 1988. “She could see the Secret Service van parked right down the street. Hart stayed the night and blithely walked out her front door the next morning.”

Covering both of his presidential campaigns in the ‘80s, Sheehy caught him in several lies; not just about his affairs, but also seemingly unimportant details like whether he played varsity sports in high school. When reporters asked the Democratic candidate for president whether he had ever committed adultery in the spring of 1987, he not only denied it, but challenged them to prove it.

“Follow me around,” The New York Times Magazine reported him saying just a few weeks after he declared his candidacy. “I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored.”

Whether or not he was being sarcastic, as he later claimed, it was a bad move. “Why would a man who’s running for the presidency of the United States challenge a reporter to follow him to see if he was an adulterer, when he was an adulterer?” Sheehy asks. “He had to get caught.”

And indeed, he did. Shortly after making the remark, Hart “canceled his plans for the weekend and he invited Donna Rice to fly up and stay with him at his house, where obviously he would be seen in Washington,” Sheehy says. Journalists from the Miami Herald were already staked out near his D.C. house thanks to a tip they’d received that he was sleeping with Rice.

After the Miami Herald reported on his affair, a picture surfaced showing Rice sitting on Hart’s lap while he wore a T-shirt reading “Monkey Business Crew,” referring to the name of the yacht they’d partied on. The ensuing scandal prompted Hart to drop out of the race. The next year, Michael Dukakis became the Democratic nominee and lost the general election to George H.W. Bush .

This wasn’t the first sex scandal to feature prominently in an American presidential campaign. When Andrew Jackson ran for president in 1828, opponents dug up his marriage records to paint him as an adulterer in the press, as his wife’s first marriage had not been fully dissolved when they eloped.

In 1884, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph revealed that presidential candidate Grover Cleveland had fathered a son out of wedlock. The woman involved said Cleveland had raped her and tried to bury the story by placing her son in an orphanage and sending her to a mental institution. Despite this, Cleveland became the only U.S. president to hold two non-consecutive terms.

The Hart scandal wasn’t even the first time in modern politics that reporting on a politician’s personal life had thwarted a presidential campaign. A decade and a half before, journalists reported that Thomas Eagleton , George McGovern’s first vice presidential candidate in 1972, had previously been hospitalized for depression and received electroshock therapy. McGovern quickly dumped Eagleton, and his poor handling of the affair may have affected the landslide by which Richard Nixon won reelection.

With few exceptions, however, male reporters in the 20th century generally protected male politicians by not reporting on their affairs, or anything else that seemed “personal.” In this case, however, Hart "was the one who set up himself to get caught,” Sheehy says.

In the press, “[the affair] was only treated as a superficial issue: an extramarital affair with one woman that he had just been on a boat with,” she says. “As if that was the only time and the only way in which Gary Hart showed that he was unfit to be a president.”

Yet far from being irrelevant to the campaign, Hart’s affairs and his general character were something that voters really cared about, says Laura Stoker , a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied voters’ attitudes toward Hart before and after the scandal. 

“People who really preferred him over other Democratic candidates just turned against him,” she says.

In the decade after Hart’s scandal, Bill Clinton faced his own questions about extramarital affairs, as well as sexual harassment and assault . However, Sheehy doesn’t think Hart’s scandal made news organizations more willing to report on sex scandals. If anything, Hart’s attacks on the press—including direct attacks on Sheehy herself—made reporters more cautious.

“Many newspapers were weary of being called guilty of ‘gotcha journalism,’” she says.

During the Gary Hart scandal, the importance of evaluating the character of presidential candidates became clear. “We almost elected a compulsive sexual predator as president in 1988,” says Sheehy, “but we didn’t because he got himself caught.”

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• The True Story Behind <i>The Front Runner</i>: How Gary Hart’s Scandal Changed Politics

The True Story Behind The Front Runner : How Gary Hart’s Scandal Changed Politics

O nce the results of the U.S. midterm elections this Tuesday are official , politicos will turn to the 2020 presidential election.

And the new movie The Front Runner — which is getting a limited election-week release before it opens nationwide on Nov. 21 — offers a cautionary tale for future candidates.

It’s based on the true story of the fall from grace of former Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Played by Hugh Jackman, he was “the clear front runner for the Democratic nomination” in the 1988 presidential election, according to TIME, until he was forced to drop out of the race. The scandal hit just over 30 years ago, after the Miami Herald revealed that the married man had been spending nights with another woman — Donna Rice, a 29-year-old model.

Hart’s political career ended rather quickly. On Monday, April 27, 1987, Miami Herald politics editor Tom Fielder received an anonymous tip that in late March, Hart had attended an overnight trip on a yacht rented by lawyer-lobbyist William Broadhurst named Monkey Business . According to the tip, as they sailed from Miami to Bimini, he hit it off with a woman who was not his wife. The tipster — later revealed to be clothing designer Dana Weems — offered photos to prove it and said Rice was going to fly up to Washington, D.C., to see him.

By May 1, Herald investigative reporter Jim McGee was on a plane, and had staked out Hart’s D.C. townhouse. Hart was seen leaving the building with a woman who was not his wife shortly after 9 p.m., returning with her shortly after 11 p.m., and then leaving with her the next evening.

When the Herald confronted him, Hart denied that he was having an affair with the woman and said only that he was taking her back to where she was staying. On May 3, 1987, their story appeared in the Herald with photographic evidence of the two together from the stakeout. At a televised press conference in New Hampshire, a Washington Post reporter asked Hart point-blank whether he had ever committed adultery. “I don’t have to answer that,” Hart responded . Donna Rice, in another press conference with reporters, said she and Hart were “just pals” and added that she preferred “younger men.”

And yet two days later, Hart suspended his campaign. “I’ve made some mistakes,” he said. “Maybe big mistakes, but not bad mistakes.”

Just over two weeks later, the National Enquire r published a photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap.

In the case of Gary Hart, the problem wasn’t what he did, but how he did it. Americans didn’t like hypocrites. They couldn’t rally around a candidate whom they felt wasn’t being straight with them, pundits observed. A TIME poll conducted shortly after the news broke found that when Americans were asked what bothered them more, extramarital sex or “not telling the truth,” 69% said the latter and 7% said the former.

TIME’s May 18, 1987, cover story on the scandal described the perception of hypocrisy that did Hart in:

Yet the facts, as ambiguous as some of them are, make clear that Hart brought on his own downfall. Ever since he reconciled for the second time with his wife Lee in 1982, Hart has portrayed himself as a dutiful husband whose 28-year marriage was strengthened by the stress of separation. But in his private conduct, Hart challenged the moralistic conventions of political behavior and ultimately paid the price for his apostasy. Until the very end Hart seemed oblivious to the reality that his actions had consequences. He denied there was anything improper about his friendship with Donna Rice, even though it is far from customary for 50-year-old men to spend weekends away from their wives hanging out with comely actresses who have appeared on Miami Vice . Hart jeopardized his reputation for veracity by angrily denying the persistent rumors about his womanizing… Rather than wrestling with the complexities of arms control and a troubled economy, the public tends to look for personalities they can trust, whose judgment and integrity make them feel comfortable.

The scandal marked a turning point in how the media covered the private lives of public figures. “Political journalism may never be the same,” TIME said. Some media experts thought the Herald ‘s stakeout was too forward for a mainstream news outlet; TIME and other news outlets said Hart was asking for the comeuppance because of his earlier challenge to the New York Times magazine that reporters could feel free to “put a tail on me,” and his warning that they’d be “bored.”

TIME argued that journalism had simply evolved and adapted to societal changes, on top of a plummeting trust in government because of the Vietnam War. Historically, when journalists found out that public-office-holders like President John F. Kennedy were having affairs , they didn’t report on them because such trysts weren’t considered newsworthy. However, TIME observed, “with the breakdown of sexual taboos in the 1960s, public discussion of such topics became more acceptable. At the same time, with the changing status of women, society has grown less tolerant of the macho dalliances of married men.” The more candidates and politicians appeared on TV, the more that the line between movie stars and political figures became “blurred,” and the more there was a need for media consultants who could create this image of the politico for the general public. Now the job of journalists was to find out who these people really were.

As for what happened to the main characters, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis became the Democratic nominee and lost the 1988 presidential election to George H.W. Bush. Gary Hart went back to practicing law, serving on a variety of advisory councils, and was the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland in the Obama administration; he is still married to his wife Lee. Donna Rice Hughes married in 1994 and is an activist who works to rid the Internet of child pornography — and who has made it clear that she will have more to say in the future. In a recent statement about the 2018 film, she wrote that she is working on a memoir, that “all the truth is not out, as I have never told my own story.”

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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at [email protected]

Watch CBS News

​Almanac: The Gary Hart scandal

May 8, 2016 / 9:18 AM EDT / CBS News

"I'm not a beaten man. I'm an angry and defiant man. I've said that I bend but I don't break, and believe me, I'm not broken."

And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: May 8th, 1987, 29 years ago today ... the day former Colorado Senator Gary Hart quit the Democratic race for president in the face of a media frenzy.

A media frenzy many people remember today by the photograph that eventually emerged of Hart and a woman named Donna Rice on a dock next to a yacht called "Monkey Business."

When asked if he'd ever committed adultery, Hart responded, "I don't have to answer that question."

Just a few days before he dropped out, an anonymous tip about a possible affair had led Miami Herald reporters to confront Hart outside his Washington, D.C. townhouse.

Their story ran the next day ... the very same day The New York Times printed quotes from an earlier interview with Hart. Asked about earlier rumors of infidelity, Hart had answered: "Follow me around. I don't care, I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored."

Boring, it was not.

With Hart's statement giving them license, the media launched into full scandal mode. And within a week, candidate Hart announced the inevitable:

"Clearly under present circumstances this campaign can't go on. I refuse to submit my family and my friends and innocent people and myself to further rumors and gossip. It's simply an intolerable situation."

Not content with a simple statement of withdrawal, Hart went on to deliver a lecture:

"We're all going to have to seriously question a system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters, and presidential candidates to being hunted."

For all Hart's protestations, the release of that "Monkey Business" photo was all most people needed to see.

And with that incident, the precedent of non-stop, 24/7 coverage of the personal failings of politicians -- from both parties -- was firmly established.

Something all candidates, current and future, ignore at their peril.

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Politicians, Boats, Bad Behavior: Sailing Into Trouble With America's Scandal Navy

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Updated Tuesday, April 23

ep. Devin Nunes, who decided earlier this month to sue the parent company of the Fresno Bee over a story that did not allege he took part in a 2015 orgy aboard a yacht on San Francisco Bay, just helped us pinpoint the latest boat in America's Scandal Navy.

The nation's real Navy — the one with submarines and aircraft carriers and missiles and Tom Cruise pretending to be a pilot — has a heroic past conveyed by the names Bonhomme Richard, Constitution, Monitor and Missouri, and great engagements like the battles of Lake Erie, Mobile Bay and Midway.

The nation's Scandal Navy is short on armament but long on sordid episodes involving politicians whose careers have often intersected with yachts and various brands of impropriety. The roster of scandalcraft includes names like the Monkey Business, the Duke-Stir, the Sequoia and the Potomac. The engagements they were part of were more fit for the National Enquirer than the national Naval War College.

The latest addition to the flotilla — again, thanks to Congressman Nunes — is the Alpha Omega. That's a 59-foot yacht owned by the proprietor of St. Helena's Alpha Omega Winery, a close friend of Nunes who occasionally donates the craft for charity events.

Nunes announced earlier this month he had filed a $150 million defamation lawsuit against the McClatchy Co. over a story the Fresno Bee published last year. That piece recounted a suit filed by a former Alpha Omega Winery employee who said she witnessed an orgy during a charity cruise aboard the yacht in 2015.

Nunes' connection to the episode, which allegedly involved a group of male guests using cocaine and consorting with possibly under-age prostitutes aboard the Alpha Omega, is that he has a small investment in the winery. Beyond Nunes' investment, there's no suggestion in the original lawsuit, or in the Bee's story, that he participated in the bay bacchanal.

That's a little disappointing, because the most illustrious craft in America's Scandal Navy have hosted our elected representatives doing things on board they'd never want their constituents or their wives to know about. But who knows? The Alpha Omega is for sale , and maybe some other member of Congress or the Legislature will get a chance to breach ethics, morals and/or federal, state and local laws during a voyage.

While we wait for that to happen, here are some other illustrious members of the Scandal Navy:

The Monkey Business, 1987

The Scandal Navy's honorary flagship. If you've been following seaborne political misbehavior for a while, you'll remember Monkey Business as the yacht on which, in 1987, a promising Democratic presidential candidate, Gary Hart, saw his career sink out of sight (ironically, the boat stayed afloat).

The details have been rehashed for decades, but briefly: Hart, a senator from Colorado, was seen as the odds-on favorite to win his party's nomination for the presidency in 1988. Before a single vote had been cast in the primaries, however, Hart became the subject of an investigation by the Miami Herald, which had gotten a tip that the senator was having an extramarital affair. Among the evidence of impropriety provided to the paper were snapshots of Hart and his paramour, a woman named Donna Rice, on a pleasure cruise from Florida to the island of Bimini aboard the Monkey Business.

A team of Herald reporters, accompanied by a photographer, witnessed Hart and Rice entering and leaving the senator's Washington, D.C., residence. Hart denied a dalliance, but the resulting explosion of attention led him to quit the presidential race. Reports continue to circulate that the episode was a dirty trick orchestrated by operatives working for the campaign of Republican candidate George H.W. Bush.

Recommended reading: " How Gary Hart's Downfall Forever Changed American Politics ," by Matt Bai in The New York Times Magazine (2014).

" Was Gary Hart Set Up? ," by James Fallows in The Atlantic (2018).

The Duke-Stir, 2005

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a San Diego County Republican, was a star in the real U.S. Navy: an oft-decorated fighter-bomber pilot and instructor at the service's Top Gun flight combat school. He's also honorary commodore of America's Scandal Navy.

Cunningham was elected to Congress in 1990 and won re-election seven times. In 2005, the San Diego Union-Tribune began reporting Cunningham's ties to a defense contractor who secured a series of Pentagon deals with the congressman's help. The ties included shady-looking real estate transactions and a variety of gifts and favors — including the contractor buying a $140,000, 45-foot yacht upon which Cunningham lived rent-free. The former combat ace's floating residence, which had been named the Buoy Toy, was rechristened the Duke-Stir.

The Union-Tribune's reporting led to a Pulitzer Prize — and also to an FBI investigation, criminal charges and the congressman's eventual guilty plea to tax evasion, conspiracy to commit bribery, wire fraud and mail fraud. Cunningham resigned from Congress and spent nearly seven years in federal custody.

'USS Traficant,' 2001

In the early 1980s, James Traficant was a sheriff in northeastern Ohio who found himself facing federal charges he had taken bribes from mobsters. Traficant — not a lawyer — defended himself in court and beat the rap. Shortly afterward, he won election to Congress — but it wasn't the last time he faced corruption charges.

Sometime during his nine terms in the House of Representatives, the Democrat Traficant bought a boat from Sen. Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho who is best remembered outside the Gem State for allegedly trying to solicit sex in an airport bathroom. The boat may have been the least eye-catching thing about Traficant, who was known for his throwback '70s attire and a wild mane of hair — it was actually a toupee — that he once claimed he cut himself with a weed whacker.

Traficant's House tenure ended when he was convicted on 10 counts of racketeering, bribery and fraud. Among other things, he was accused of demanding salary kickbacks from his congressional staff and requiring them to do repair work on his boat, docked at a Washington, D.C. marina. I've tried without success to dig up the name of the craft, which Traficant described during his House expulsion hearing as "a 1970 wooden Egg Harbor motor yacht. It is old, but it was lovely inside." Not even the grand jury indictment mentions the boat's name. We'll just call it the USS Traficant in honor of the late congressman, who served seven years in prison for his crimes. He died in 2014 after a tractor toppled over on him at his Ohio horse farm.

Recommended reading: " Oh, Behave ," by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker (2002).

USS Sequoia, 1963

The Sequoia served as the yacht for most U.S. presidents between the mid-1920s and the late '70s, including John F. Kennedy. In May 1963, less than six months before Kennedy was assassinated, the boat was the scene of his 46th and final birthday party .

It was not a sedate affair. There was plenty of champagne to go around, and accounts of the party say that one of the president's brothers, Sen. Edward Kennedy, somehow had one leg of his trousers ripped off during the proceedings. But what elevates the Sequoia to inclusion in the Scandal Navy was the president's behavior.

Among the guests at the party were future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, who by this point had been friends with John and Jackie Kennedy for years. At one point in the party, Tony Bradlee said in a published account, JFK began chasing her.

"I was running and laughing as he chased me. He caught up with me in the ladies’ room and made a pass,” Bradlee said. “It was a pretty strenuous attack, not as if he pushed me down, but his hands wandered. I said, ‘That’s it, so long.’ I was running like mad."

Recommended reading: " JFK's last birthday: Gifts, champagne and wandering hands on the presidential yacht,"  by Ian Shapira in the Washington Post (2017).

USS Potomac, 1980

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't care for the Sequoia, and had a 165-foot Coast Guard cutter, the Electra, refitted and rechristened as the Potomac , which became a presidential superyacht. We don't have any tales to relate of presidential misbehavior aboard the boat, though FDR was known to have carried on at least one long-term affair during his three-plus terms in office.

No, the Potomac's scandal moment came after it was retired from government service — a period during which one of its owners, briefly, was Elvis Presley .

Eventually, the Potomac wound up in the hands of a Southern California bail bondsman named Aubrey Phillips. In September 1980, the Potomac was docked at San Francisco's Pier 26 next to another boat Phillips owned, the Valkyrie. Both craft displayed banners bearing the legend "Crippled Children's Society of America," a nonexistent organization that turned out to be a front for a marijuana smuggling operation. The boats were seized, along with 20 tons of pot, in a bust carried out by dozens of state and federal agents backed up by the Coast Guard.

The Potomac was towed to Treasure Island, where it sank six months later. Refloated, the former "Floating White House" was sold at auction to the executive director of the Port of Oakland, who spent $15,000 to acquire it. After a long process of fundraising and a $5 million restoration, the Potomac was opened as a museum at Oakland's Jack London Square and offers cruises throughout the year.

Updates April 22: This story has been updated to include a reference to one recent account that suggests that Gary Hart may have been set up in the Donna Rice incident by a Republican political operative. April 22: This story has been updated to clarify that the Alpha Omega Winery's yacht is occasionally donated for charity events, not hired out as the original copy reported.

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• What Is Cinema?

The Road To Bimini

Six weeks before Gary Hart killed off his presidential candidacy, I had a story in the works describing the war that raged within this double man. It was a war to the death. After studying Hart on and off for three years, I had become convinced that this time around it was not a question of if Gary Hart would destroy himself but a question of when.

He accomplished the stunning feat of political self-destruction in only twenty-six days. Why would any man in his right mind defy a New York Times reporter who asked about his alleged womanizing to “put a tail on me,” then cancel his weekend campaign appearances and arrange a tryst at his Washington town house with a Miami party girl? What demon was loose in the fifty-year-old front-runner of the Democratic Party, who lurched across the chartered yacht Monkey Business, drink in hand, and boasted to a model friend of Donna Rice’s that this was her big chance to party with the next president of the United States?

When he was caught and cut and ran, I thought that put an end to my story. Then debate broke out. Adamant that he had in no way transgressed, Hart lashed out at the wrongheadedness and prurience of the press and stalked off the public stage in anger and defiance. Hart’s own divided mind found its analogue in defenders within the press who still believe a Chinese wall can exist between public and private selves. Husbands and wives bickered over what adultery has to do with whether or not a person would make a good president.

Hart’s political demise remains an object of intense conversation because the central question remains unanswered: How could a man so dangerously flawed come so close to persuading us that he was fit to lead a superpower through the perils of the nuclear age? I have been dismayed that many people fail to grasp what is really at issue here. The key to the downfall of Gary Hart is not adultery. It is character. And that is an issue that will not go away.

A pathological deficit in Hart’s character riddled the public man as thoroughly as it ruled the private one. Through both his races for the presidency, to appease the inner dictator of his sore guilty soul, Hart sought out pretty spiritual playmates like Marilyn Youngbird, a Native American divorcée, who would worship his driven-to-do-good side and play back the message that he was worthy, even exalted, in his quest for power. Such worshipers were not, finally, a fair match against wilder demons that drew him to the satyrs, procurers, hustlers, and bimbos always first to spot a weakness in a powerful man and eager to exploit it.

The people close to Hart knew of his bizarre behavior patterns. Almost every one of the key players from his 1984 campaign had turned his back on Hart and walked away in puzzlement or silent disgust. The new players in his 1988 campaign rationalized to themselves and lied to us. His wife, Lee, a woman with a twenty-eight-year investment to protect, continued to be his accomplice in the sham that here was a healthy, happy man with a rehabilitated marriage who was our next great hope for leader of the free world.

Yet clues to Hart’s fatal character flaw were strewn all across his public life. If one missed the clues there, he had been flaunting the same weakness in his private escapades for at least fifteen years. If character is destiny, the character issue predicts not only the destiny of one candidate but the potential destiny of the United States he seeks to lead. That is why it is a serious exercise to try to solve the psychological mystery of Gary Hart’s demons. At a deeper level, the revelations raise the question of how much we really know about the character of any of the candidates running for president. How hard are we willing to work to save ourselves from waking up, once more, with the terrible aftertaste of a night on the town with yet another unrevealed and perfidious president?

Retracing his steps, I traveled through the various worlds of Gary Hart. The population of each world was alien to and unaware of the others. With the help of his sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins, the pastor and old Sunday-school chums from his Church of the Nazarene, and his closest classmates in Ottawa, Kansas, I re-examined the mental and moral distinguishing marks left on his character by an upbringing far from normal. Then I went on to the good soldiers who believed in his worthy side as he cut a bold and even sacrificial swath across American politics. Feeling betrayed, most wanted to share what had always puzzled them about Hart.

To both of these groups the world of Donna Rice was about as familiar as a black hole. It is a demimonde that thrives on the illusion that beautiful young women and drugs are effortlessly available, as party favors. Since Donna is determined to come out of the scandal squeaky clean, a celebrity who is “buddy-buddy” with Barbara Walters, she and the agent she hired as a “crisis manager” were not forthcoming, and clearly had a manufactured story to tell. So I sought out her father, who admitted his own doubts about his daughter’s dubious life-style. And with the help of Miami and Fort Lauderdale prosecutors and drug-enforcement agents I examined Donna’s live-in love affair with a big-time cocaine dealer, who is currently serving ten years in a federal penitentiary. Four of Donna’s friends illuminated the rest of the smoke and mirrors in this high-rolling netherworld. It might be seen as the forbidden picture show to which Hart’s hidden, sybaritic side had always longed for admission. Indeed, it might be one in a dizzying series of mirrors on which, according to a senior political consultant who has known and watched him for over a decade, “Gary Hart has been writing in lipstick for years, ‘Stop me before I fuck again.’ ”

Out of the lull of a thousand miles of plains the visitor is jolted into Ottawa by bumping over a railroad crossing. They crisscross the town, these old tracks that hum with the importance of far-away places—Chicago, St. Louis, New York, even California—but the trains do not stop here. Ottawa, Kansas, is one of those respectable blurs glimpsed by the people who pass through, no hope of greatness in it. The tracks serve only to fence in this dozy farm town, as if to keep it safe from worldly contamination, safe even from the future.

Scarcely a thing has changed in Ottawa in the twenty-five years since Gary Hart broke out. The houses are still bungalow-like clapboard boxes with gliders on their sagging porches, proud, tired, and perpetually in need of a fresh coat of paint. Apart from a few tire swings and mechanical rotating daisies, precious little is squandered on pleasure here. People still eat the same syrup-soaked foods and drive ’47 Chevys (now rebuilt) and set fans on their floors against the creep of heat. The girls still have doughy legs and the boys Fuller-brush cuts, and the fifty-year-old men who were boys with Gary Hartpence get together down at the Main Street bakery every morning and have the same conversation they’ve been having for the past quarter of a century. The fourth of May was different. The guys were all waiting on Walt Dengel with a wallbanger of news.

“I see your buddy Gary did it to himself,” one taunted.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said the respected town mortician. Dengel, who has known Gary since fourth grade, had been about to open a local Hart headquarters.

“No, man, he got caught with his pants down.”

“Dumb,” Dengel muttered.

Two weeks after the scandal broke, these men who are contemporaries of Hart’s, stumped by his mystifying behavior, were scouring their memories all over again to offer me clues. The first words that came to mind when his schoolmates described Gary Hartpence were invariably “always neat and clean.” Skinny and fine-boned, the boy always wore a long-sleeved dress shirt and perfectly pressed slacks, with his hair cropped short above jug ears—a creature resembling in no way the rangy, cowboy-booted desperado of his later years.

They discovered that not one of them was close to him. Not one had gone home with him. The more Gary’s schoolmates scratched their heads, the more they questioned if the boy they thought they had known, the boy they had given back to the press in tidy anecdotes, ever really existed.

His athletic record, for instance, is pure fiction. Hartpence played a fair game of touch football in eighth grade, but didn’t even come out in the ninth. The only league in which he played basketball was the church league, which admitted boys for superlative attendance at Sunday school. No, his schoolmates corrected the record, Gary wasn’t good enough to make any varsity team, except tennis, which was a sport for leftovers. Classmate Kent Granger reminisced over their last tennis game, in which he beat Hartpence 6—love. Granger remembers because he had polio at the time.

Granger believes he knew Gary as well as any of his classmates did. But they weren’t in the same “carload,” and the social-classification system in Ottawa came down to who was in which car draggin’ Main Street. Granger belonged to the jock crowd. “We smoked and had successful relationships with ladies.” Being that Ottawa had no bars, there were only a few outlets for boys to show their virility. One was to let a little air out of the car tires and hump them over the railroad tracks next to Skunk Run, then gun it eight miles to the next town, hoping a train didn’t catch you first. In a recent autobiographical sketch, Hart passed himself off as a participant in this daredevil pursuit. “Not Gary,” swears Walt Dengel, “he wasn’t nocturnal then.” He chuckles. “Not like he is now. He didn’t drag Main Street either. He’d only come out for special occasions.”

The Youth Center was the social cornice of Ottawa, equivalent to the dance assembly, the country club, meeting under the clock at the Biltmore, the essence of being “in.” Elbowed back by the tracks of the Santa Fe line, the Youth Center still functions today, with Ping-Pong tables and a record player and chaperons. When Gary’s classmates gathered there, everybody danced. Everybody? I ask.

“Maybe Gary didn’t,” amends Dengel. Gary and his sister, Nancy Lee, were never welcomed by the clique at the Youth Center: “They thought they were fancier people,” she recalls with a wilted bitterness.

Gary never talked about his feelings. Nice kid, but he never gave much. Granger pegs him as the slowest in maturing of anyone in their class, in every respect except intellectually. One thing they all agree upon for certain: the “mischievous” boy that Hart himself tried to manufacture for the press on his staged homecoming last spring was an outright lie.

“When the mischief started,” recalls Kent Granger, “Gary always faded away.”

Granted, he belonged to the strictest church in town, but the whole town was conservative, a dry town in a dry state, with standardized Christian manners that equated dullness with godliness. The other kids assumed Gary Hartpence’s church was pretty much like theirs, the First United Methodist or the First Baptist. But by their very stature and social prestige, the two redoubtable spinster churches that still dominate the town bear no resemblance to the grocery-box plainness of the Church of the Nazarene.

In fact, the Nazarene church at that time in Ottawa had no more than fifty members. Of the four young people, two were Gary and his sister. The whole sect had a national membership of around 233,000. Its rules of Christian conduct, meant to protect initiates from going to hell, forbade dancing, listening to the radio, seeing movies—one never knew when something satanic might come on—and, of course, drinking. Some of the Nazarenes in Ottawa today told me they had never seen a picture show. Well, maybe one Roy Rogers movie, but only because the children insisted on seeing Trigger. Nobody could remember Gary so much as taking a beer all during high school. He implored select schoolmates to give him blow-by-blow descriptions of the movies they saw. He never told anyone why. He made up excuses. Even then, he lived a lie.

I called on a spry lady who at one point lived two doors down from the Hartpences and had been close to Gary’s mother. Using the terminology of their church, I asked if she thought Gary had backslid seriously.

“Honey, well, yes, I do. Gary was a good boy. I hope there’s some good in him left. As long as he was a Christian, we’d have known he wouldn’t do this. But as you get into these worldly jobs, you backslide. Power gets to a man.” She stitched up her lips. “I could just pull his ears.”

I had asked Hart in an interview in 1984 about his own boyhood conception of God.

“Was He punitive?”

“Yeah, if you did bad.” He laughed.

“He was a God of mercy, but of wrath as well.”

I had also asked if his mother was at all demonstrative.

“Not really.”

And of Ottawa, Kansas, what was his first memory?

“Very cold,” he blurted.

His mother had drilled into the young Gary her own dark evangelical beliefs: that man is born with a sinful nature, that natural functions and appetites must “continue to be controlled” by “putting to death the deeds of the body.” The only refuge the boy found from the cold, from the frozen dogma of a bleak church, from the instability of frequent moving and the constant state of alert created by his ailing mother, was in books.

Friends cannot remember a girl ever making a play for the straitlaced Gary. “Lots of laughs but not a looker” is how the kinder kids described the girl he dated senior year, Kay Shaughnessy. Kay became a career navy officer and never did marry.

The name of Ann Warren is mentioned. She spent time around Hart when he came back to Ottawa for his class reunion in 1984, and noticed that he didn’t say much, just sat back, being detached and looking uncomfortable, as he always had been.

“I did date Gary in high school,” she acknowledges. “But he wasn’t romantic, no, definitely he wasn’t.” Still, when the extroverted Ann went on to date another boy, Hart had a fit.

“I wonder about all these affairs, if he really enjoyed them,” muses the widow Warren. “Maybe it was just revenge for all the things he never had. I think he’s still thumbing his nose at the world.”

Nina (pronounced Nye-nah) Hartpence, Gary’s mother, was someone Walt Dengel knew rather well. She made frequent use of the ambulance owned by his father’s funeral home. “It was more of a delivery-service type thing,” Dengel says, by way of explaining Nina Hartpence’s frequent calls demanding to be taken into Kansas City to the hospital. “She was frail, kinda chronic—I couldn’t even tell you what we took her to the hospital for.” This is not surprising, since Mrs. Hartpence, who had always complained of vague ailments, kept her family on call for such trips throughout the last fifteen years of her life.

The local newspaper found out the famous politician’s mother had moved the family at least sixteen times before Gary got out of high school. Nina Hartpence would take a place, clean it up, then move—once in the course of a single day—and start cleaning again. Nina had an extraordinary hold over her family. When she wasn’t turning the whole household upside down to meet her standards of perfection, she would take to her bed and control everyone around her by complaints of headaches, or asthma, or heart palpitations, and ultimately of thyroid problems. Relatives talk about how Carl Hartpence, Gary’s father, waited on her hand and foot. He couldn’t even get out of the house to go fishing for fear of leaving her alone.

“She was strictly religious,” her brother-in-law Ralph Hartpence told me. “She’d always quote out of the Bible. She’d hold services in the church and get Gary to preach with her.”

Did other members of the family think Nina’s strictness strange? I ask Uncle Ralph, who comes from the more passive father’s side of the family.

“It sure showed on Gary,” says his uncle. “He stayed with us at our trailer house in Colorado in ’48, when he was ten or ’leven. Never saw such a well-behaved boy in my life.” Gary dared not take more than one toy out of the box at a time.

“Why don’t you take the whole box outdoors,” his Uncle Ralph kept coaxing, “take out all the toys like my kids do and have a ball.”

“I’m afraid of getting dirty,” he remembers Gary saying.

“That boy needed to be turned loose.”

Not according to Aunt Erma Louise Pritchard, who of all the relatives remains closest in spirit to Nina Pritchard Hartpence. “Gary’s mother was compulsively clean,” she says approvingly, and Gary was always a good boy, she emphasizes. I ask what she thinks of his recent behavior.

“Somebody set him up.” (This is not a phrase that comes naturally from a lady with hair the yellowed white of never-used linen.) “I’ll never see and never believe, just like Nina wouldn’t have believed it.” Her demeanor perfectly expresses the contentment of the walking dead, a condition distinct from that of her sister-in-law, Gary’s deceased mother, only by the outstanding balance to be settled on her account with her Maker.

Outside the gaunt parsonage that was once a home of the Hartpences, I meet the current pastor. Gary Hartpence is a dead soul as far as the church is concerned. He died the day—the Reverend Earl Copsey remembers the date exactly, September 20, 1968—“he left the church to go back out to the world of sin.”

The truly singular feature of this sect is that its members believe one can, and should, achieve perfection in this life. No wonder Hart admitted to me in 1984, “The one Protestant quality I suppose I’ve got my share of is guilt.”

People raised in such strict Fundamentalist families never experience the turbulence common to normal adolescence. And since the stage of rebellion and identity formation is not allowed, breakaways like Hart often behave for years like belated teenagers. Rebellious, angry, and irresponsible as adults, they commonly harbor an extreme fear of commitment, and buck any sort of structure. Yet even as they are compelled to break rules and backslide toward Satan, the voice of a wrathful God is almost impossible to silence. The hold that this kind of authoritarian upbringing has on a person can last thirty or forty years after the formal church tie has been severed.

Charleen Peterson Roberts, a Nazarene teenager a little older than Gary, left the church even before he did. But the church never really leaves a person. The world is black and white, and there are only two ways to go. Charleen’s voice lowers superciliously. “Gary’s going to hell, that’s all, it’s pretty plain. If he doesn’t get right with God.”

Donna Rice, or “the woman in question,” as Hart dehumanized her by his only references, was cast as the villain of the piece. “Irate” is how Gary’s sister described herself when I phoned the day the infamous picture appeared in the National Enquirer. “Girls like her are a dime a dozen. I can tell you, when Gary and I sat and talked on April 12, he said what an asset Lee was.” She added that the children—Andrea, who still lives at home while attending the University of Colorado, and John, who stays away at the University of Massachusetts—were both “absolutely devastated.”

Then why, I asked, would Hart have taken such a cruel and reckless chance? Nancy Lee said she meant to ask him. A week later she was calm and implacable.

“Are you reading that crap in the newspapers?” Hart had demanded of her. “Well, don’t, just don’t,” he directed. He and Lee had gotten on the phone and given her the family line: Their marriage is stronger than ever; the real truth will eventually come out; the “setup” was planned by Hart’s enemies even before he announced.

“Why would Gary give up something like Lee for that lowlife,” Nancy Lee asked rhetorically, “a twenty-nine-year-old tramp?”

But the evidence is that when Gary Hart did break out into the worldly world, he gravitated toward its farthest extreme, using hedonists and fixers to find him girls. They led him into the kind of suspect scene where party drugs were ubiquitous. With a lust for danger, he plunged into the world of Donna Rice, a world even her father feared to look at too closely. Donna’s protestations that her privacy has been “beaten down by the press” ring rather hollow. It was Donna, not the press or her pals, who dropped the bombshell about her weekend cruise with Hart on the Monkey Business. That assured her of the national celebrity she had so long but lucklessly chased. Her distress was not over the publicity, but over the fact that, to her continuing astonishment, it was negative.

Spindle-legged and buck-toothed as a young girl in Irmo, South Carolina, Donna Rice made mostly A’s and did missionary work for the Southern Baptists one summer. She blossomed by the age of twenty-one into a willowy if flatchested blonde, not beautiful but pretty, not unintelligent but undirected. What use was a Phi Beta Kappa key (offered to about 140 students—or 6 percent of her senior class) if it couldn’t buy her fame? She figured the easiest way to come by celebrity, according to friends, was to use her looks to make the right connections to meet “people of significance.”

In a lengthy interview with her father, Bill Rice, a highway engineer for the federal government in South Carolina, the nebulous outlines of her reported life-style began to take on definition. “She won that beauty contest and they put her up in New York and that’s when her life started to change.”

A mature New York businessman, according to one newspaper report, met Donna at a party, and took pity on the struggling newcomer. He invited her to stay at his East Side apartment for a few days. She moved in and stayed for two years. The anonymous businessman has described Donna as “always up.” She would go to discos all night, sleep late, and use his telephone constantly. Her room was always a mess, and although she turned up at “go-sees,” he said she didn’t need to take more than one modeling job every three months.

“I’ve been a little disturbed by her life-style,” her father admits. In June 1981, Donna called him from New York and warbled, “Guess who I went out with last night? Prince Albert.”

“Who in hell is Prince Albert?” her father drawled. But that was typical of the calls Donna made to her friends and family, itemizing each “date” with a famous person: TV host Bill Boggs, Tony Curtis, rock musician Don Henley. “She was always out having a good time,” her father recalls. “Driven to dating celebrities,” says the businessman. “They went from club to club every night,” remembers Shirley Semones, mother of Donna’s friend Julie.

“She drifted into acting because it’s what everybody else was doing,” adds Julie Semones. “She hasn’t really been serious about it.” Donna didn’t trouble to take classes or do plays like her friends, but she was nothing if not persistent about using people to get to the right parties. Julie began to resent it. “She’d meet people through me and she’d say, ‘Why don’t you stay in touch with these people? They’re good connections.’ ”

Finally, through her Arab connections, Julie introduced Donna to Nabila Khashoggi, daughter of one of the richest men in the world. Bang, Donna was invited to Adnan Khashoggi’s forty-sixth-birthday party, aboard his opulent new yacht, her ticket and expenses to Cannes paid for.

“Khashoggi could buy the finest caviar and champagne . . . why not the best females?” writes Ronald Kessler in his biography of Khashoggi. The strutting Saudi middleman was tiring of the tawdry and obvious tarts being supplied to him for show on his yacht. He soon let it be known to his several procurers that he wanted a better brand of glamorous young woman to languish on the silk-covered couches and slither along the chamois walls of his custom-made $70 million yacht, the Nabila. According to one procurer, recruitment standards for party girls were strict. They had to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, classy and elegant, capable of making conversation, and very, very clean, with just the right combination of innocence and sexiness.

Donna would have fit the bill. Fine-boned, well spoken, and fair, she was quite good at passing herself off as a southern belle. Michael Griffith, an attorney who met Miss Rice at a Bridgehampton party in 1980, told a New York paper that he believed she came from a wealthy South Carolina family and therefore didn’t have to work while she waited for her break.

The party aboard the Nabila was a peak experience for Donna. Khashoggi’s birthdays were always celebrated with great extravagance. Guests were swooped up by his helicopter and deposited on the yacht’s own helipad. They moved about the decks sipping Dom Pérignon and dining on duck and venison and dancing in the disco bathed in clouds of artificially generated mist. The revelry lasted until dawn.

“Her trips to Europe and Vegas were at the request of Khashoggi’s daughter,” Donna’s father confirmed, “and Donna’s part of it was paid.”

When Khashoggi went to Las Vegas, Kessler reports, he gambled with thousand-dollar chips, which bored his companions, but the girls he took along were showered with bracelets and dresses and could always have a sniff of cocaine if they so desired.

I asked Mr. Rice if Donna had a trust fund.

“What’s that?” her father asked. “You were under the mistaken impression we were rich?”

How, then, did Donna support herself for two years in Manhattan? I inquired.

“I don’t want to get into that,” her father said.

Had he talked to his daughter about it?

“I didn’t ask her those questions. It was never discussed.” All at once, Donna’s father revealed his own worst fears. “What was she doing in New York to make a living? Have you got some information indicating she was a hooker?”

I said I didn’t know. I discussed with him what I’d learned about Donna’s move to Florida: that she soon began living with a drug dealer, remained with him for two years, and neither of them had any legitimate source of steady income. Mr. Rice had met the young man and already knew the story.

“She just doesn’t think!” her father exploded in frustration. “Her mother and I tell her about appearances, but she’s so naïve it makes you want to throw up.” His voice went limp with resignation. “Looking back, of course, I can see where I went wrong. I could have advised her. But, hell, she’s twenty-nine years old.”

In 1983, Donna moved to Plantation, Florida, outside Fort Lauderdale, and stayed briefly with a friend, Debi Dalton. Debi introduced her to her handsome, laid-back neighbor, James Bradley Parks. He had a two-bedroom condo on University Drive and a big flashy motorcycle. Donna moved right in. She had supposedly gone to Florida in hopes of getting a SAG card. But her modeling work was “real sporadic,” according to Debi. She got Brad a chance for a beer commercial, begged him to go, but Brad preferred other, more adventurous and lucrative activities.

Caught red-handed in 1979 picking up a thousand-pound load of marijuana smuggled in on a low-flying plane from Colombia, Parks impressed authorities as “a real cocky guy.”

When I reached Parks’s attorney, Bruce Wagner, he was at first baffled as to why I’d be calling him for a story on Gary Hart. Then a whistle came through the phone. “Oh, that Donna. I know she went out with Brad all during the time his appeal was being prepared. Sure, she was at the sentencing.”

The sentencing hearing, on March 30, 1984, did not go down well for Brad and Donna. Brad protested he was a scapegoat, but said he’d straightened out and was getting modeling jobs. Then the government prosecutor brought on her witness: Burton P. Dupuy III. It seems that, the year before, Dupuy had spent two days at Brad’s condo, where he was given samples of cocaine, heard casual conversation about past escapades of flying south to pick up pot, and was finally asked if he would like to front cocaine. A few weeks later he was busted selling Brad’s stuff to an undercover agent. All the evidence suggested that Brad’s drug-dealing activities had only increased since his 1979 arrest.

Judge Jose Gonzalez Jr. was not well pleased by this tale. He gave James Bradley Parks ten years in Eglin Federal Prison.

“Brad Parks was what we in the Drug Enforcement Administration consider a significant drug trafficker,” says Special Agent Billy Yout. “Which means, in Florida,” he is careful to qualify, “hundreds of kilos of coke a year and millions of dollars.”

After Brad, times were tough for Donna. She had to get her own digs for the first time. And, according to her talent agent, Peggi McKinley, “her career was pretty much flat. It didn’t develop.” Aggressive, a loner, she was still sent on casting calls to try for parts as the all-American girl or young mom, but she was number fifteen on McKinley’s list, “because Donna was never on a winning streak.” A serious professional model in Miami can make over $100,000 a year. In 1986 Donna Rice earned no more than a few thousand dollars with McKinley. During the first five months of 1987, she brought in only $800, says the agent. And in the commercials business, as on the party-girl scene, a girl over twenty-five is no longer young.

So, two years ago, Donna had to take her first steady job, as a sales rep for Wyeth Laboratories. Boring, but it gave her rent money, a company car, and a reimbursable phone bill. Also, she could work on her own schedule. “She was always flying off somewhere,” the maintenance man at her unprepossessing apartment in North Miami told a reporter. There was no man in her life after Brad. “She didn’t like to have relationships with men,” offers Debi Dalton.

At her twenty-ninth-birthday party, Donna was without a date. The Miami man she spent more time with than any other, Steve Klengson, did show up. He is a self-described naïve country boy with whom she’d had a platonic friendship since their South Carolina days. At that point in her life, Klengson says, Donna was focused not on finding a relationship but on advancing her career. But she told him she’d had news that Brad might get out by next fall.

Klengson was the easygoing, movie-date pal Donna had leaned on, the year before, when she decided to have breast implants. “She was self-conscious about it,” he says, “but she thought a smaller-chested woman just didn’t make it.” When he married one of Donna’s casual acquaintances, two weeks after the party, “that put a strain on our friendship,” Klengson acknowledges. He feels he is partially to blame for not warning Donna off the path to Gary Hart.

Last Super Bowl weekend, Donna and her model friends Dana Weems and Lynn Armandt flew out to Los Angeles looking for action. Julie Semones took them to the private club Helena’s, where Donna met a Hollywood screenwriter, Eric Hughes. “She is sweet, but vacant,” he observed. Donna told him it was time for her to move to L.A., to really get her career off the pad. “She’s probably still too naïve to understand she should be desperate,” said the Hollywood veteran. The four women ended up watching the Super Bowl on TV.

In Miami, Donna hung out at the Turn-berry Isle resort complex, a world of make-believe concocted on 234 acres of landfill on the intercoastal waterway beside Miami Beach, where rich men migrate for winter weekends. From the four gigantic condo towers rising out of the flatness to the celebrities’ lounge, with its promise of “animated conversation” with guests like tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis or actor James Caan (who parties with Turnberry developer and resident Donald Soffer aboard the Monkey Business ) or dethroned Miss America Vanessa Williams, to the spa, billed as “one of the most lavish dens of self-indulgence in the world,” to the ocean club, where, the brochure promises (in not very ambiguous phrases), one can “create, with the help of our staff, a very private affair,” to the highly publicized “model nights,” when pretty girls drift out of the disco to the boats, their backs soft as butter, the whole concept is to induce the most expensive fantasies, fulfill them, and then collect.

“It sure ain’t jet-setty there,” Congressman Bill Lehman told the Miami Herald. Although he has a complimentary membership, Lehman makes it a point to stay away from the yacht club, the spa, the Monkey Business, and the mirrored disco: “That’s too fast a track for me.” Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, told me, “To people who know Miami, the fact that Hart was hanging out at a sleazy place like Turnberry said more about his character than Donna Rice.” In fact, Hart had visited the resort as early as the 1984 campaign, on a rest stop with Warren Beatty.

Turnberry Isle’s guest list is not limited to shady celebrities and models, according to D.E.A. agent Billy Yout. “A lot of drug traffickers frequent and stay at Turnberry, and with dealers come drugs. The atmosphere caters to their fast-lane life. These are people who can buy virtually anything, including the companionship of supposedly legitimate women.”

A number of Miami models, who are given complimentary membership, play an important role in creating the glitzy atmosphere. As a respected Miami architect describes their function, “it is to decorate the place and to help busy men relax.” He added that Donna Rice was one of these decorative fixtures. The Miami Herald has reported that the women are known as “Donnie’s girls,” but Turn-berry developer Donald Soffer laughed off the term as “an expression used by jealous guys.”

To save them the time and anxiety of “dating,” busy men can charter an entire party along with the yacht Monkey Business , which is owned by Soffer. The models who hang out at the Turnberry show up and the party begins. Lynn Armandt, whom the press has described as a model, is the party-girl connection. Her Too Hot Bikini Shop is nothing more than a tent with a few racks of bikinis on which she pays Soffer a nominal commission, while he provides her with a base on some of the most expensive square-footage in Florida.

The fateful night in March when Donna went aboard the Monkey Business, she didn’t even know who had chartered it. The woman who later tipped off Tom Fiedler of the Miami Herald was aghast that Gary Hart could be at a party like that—“They weren’t the kind of people you’d think a presidential candidate would want to be around.” Many of the people onboard were drunk or using drugs, according to Fiedler’s source. She drew back in disgust from the arrogance of Hart’s come-on. But Donna, upon hearing his boast about being a presidential candidate, made a beeline for him.

“Hi, we met in Aspen,” she said for openers. The rest is history.

The next day, Hart invited her on the Bimini trip. Donna told anyone who would listen of her great coup. Now she had really hit it lucky. She even called her father when she got back: “Guess who I had a date with?” Upon hearing, Mr. Rice said, “Donna, you look out for those damned politicians. I’d better look up this boy’s history.” She told Debi Dalton that one of her friends was so excited she’d said, “Just think, you could be First Lady.” Debi dumped on Donna’s naïveté. “You won’t ever be anything but a sidekick.”

But let us not forget that the man who chartered the party boat for Hart was William Broadhurst, a friend and political intimate. Billed as “Mr. Fix It” for Edwin Edwards, the notorious Louisiana governor who beat a corruption charge, Broadhurst seems to specialize in getting close to politicians who are out of control. “Billy B.” arranged planes for the governor’s gambling trips and enjoyed his jokes about Edwards’s well-publicized womanizing. In the midst of the Hart— Monkey Business flap, a state senator asked the governor what he thought of his boy Broadhurst. A vintage Edwards comment came back: “Oh, Billy B., he was more careful when he was pimping for me.”

Broadhurst had also been throwing around a lot of money on Hart in the last year. His law firm challenged his use of its money for such political entertainment, and after the scandal his partners reorganized and dropped him from the partnership.

Given the company Gary Hart had chosen, he was heading for a crash. “The woman in question” does not even qualify as a villain, since she is a character with no center, no concrete goal, the kind known to “knockabout guys” as an “action girl,” just drifting from party to party in a perpetual state of expectation that the next introduction will lead to the next connection, which she can then parlay into a meeting with the next rich or famous man. On that game board, Donna started out at the top—with royalty, followed by one of the richest men in the world—and it was downhill from there. Nearly six years after her debut aboard the Nabila, she was a woman still waiting to hit a lucky streak. The Monkey Business , a mere $2,000-a-day charter, was a dinghy compared with Khashoggi’s $70 million yacht.

Donna Rice did not know how to protect herself, and, worse, she had nothing to protect. She collided with the world of a man who had everything to lose, and was ready to lose it.

Hart does not look like a happy man in that picture of the foursome on the bandstand in Bimini. His fevered red face resembles that of a terminally ill man suspended in those golden drugged seconds when, because his painkillers are working, he can pretend to revel in living.

The tempting, tortured journey by which Gary Hartpence crossed the tracks of Ottawa to the world of Donna Rice took him twenty-five years. He began on August 9, 1961, with an appearance at the courthouse in Ottawa to petition for a change of his name. Nina Hartpence, it was so noted, had an illness and was not present.

Years later, when the press discovered the name change, Hart was still covering up his very first act of independence, dared finally at the age of twenty-four.

His first attempt to leave had taken him to Yale Divinity School, but he went with the blessing of his mother by promising to live out her dream for him—to be a preacher. It was a common path for young men like Hart, wishing to go beyond the mind-set of their upbringing, but terrified to make a complete break. Now he headed back East to Yale Law School “with the idea of starting a new life,” says Nancy Lee.

What Gary had not shared with his mother were the Dostoyevskian visions already planted in his head by one J. Prescott Johnson, the philosophy professor who claims he “broke him” back at Bethany Nazarene College. Bethany was a bulwark of religious rectitude intended to protect its flock from the wickedness of universities; its dress code forbade girls to wear sleeveless blouses or blue jeans. Not only did Johnson introduce Hart to the seductive existentialists, he left the boy alone for the first time with a woman—Oletha (Lee) Ludwig. Lee came from a classy Kansas City family, and her father was general secretary of the whole sect. She wouldn’t give that “hick” the time of day.

“Gary saw Lee as a challenge,” says Nancy Lee. He took up that challenge, and they were married two months after their college graduation. Lee and Gary packed up and drove their jalopy east, to New Haven, where Lee began a six-year stint of supporting them while Gary attended the two graduate schools. Almost immediately Hart expressed frustration at being tied down. He told a friend, Tom Boyd, “You do everything right, you go with a girl, you get married. Then, six months later, you wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself, ‘My God, what have I done?’ ”

Hart’s overwhelming need at that stage was to find an identity to replace his necrotic Nazarene past. As a volunteer in Jack Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, he found his first model. With the utter surrender of a sword-swallower at the circus, Hart internalized J.F.K.’s values and attitudes, then tried to conjure up the same charisma by copying his gestures and even the Bostonian twang. Marking well that here was a presidential candidate who could play around with impunity, Hart took Jack and Jackie’s marriage as a model.

After two years in Washington at the Justice Department, where the fledgling attorney worked on cases left over from the McCarthy era, Hart struck out for Colorado. It was 1967. Colorado in the swinging sixties was the frontier for a covey of young, idealistic lawyers looking for a place to resettle, do good, and “be free.” Patricia Schroeder, now a congresswoman, and Richard Lamm, later governor, were a part of that movement. But, for all the group’s nonconformist élan, its members saw Gary Hart as the biggest risk taker.

No sooner had Hart served a year within the confines of a traditional law firm than he moved into a basement to start his own practice. Hart himself told me that was the greatest turning point in his life. He was thirty-one, and the father of two. But that bold move was only the beginning of an accelerated flight from his past. In the same year, 1968, he formally left his church.

His mother, already disappointed at his straying into the secular woods, set a cold sentence upon him. She told Aunt Erma Louise, “He’s changed.” From Nina, that was a condemnation.

In 1970, abandoning his new practice, he left his wife and family and moved out on the trail to work for an apparently hopeless cause called the McGovern campaign. “We thought he was nuts,” says Pat Schroeder. Not remotely interested in ideas in those days, Hart prided himself on being a cool technocrat. The intoxication of disencumbering himself of all obligations—human, financial, and spiritual—swept Hart into that high, sweet air the Scriptures call “lighter than vanity.” And in this weightless state, he met his mirror image.

Warren Beatty, star and sybarite, was a daredevil from Hollywood taking a year out of his life to work for McGovern and indulge his earliest childhood wish, to be president. He could introduce Hart to the glamour of Hollywood, and Hart could offer him political credibility—a magnificent symbiosis. It was the beginning of a long association. In age and temperament Beatty and Hart were a perfect match; Beatty, too, had always made use of secrecy in his life, and, when criticized for being inhuman, once remarked, “But I have no need to seem more human.” Gary copied Warren’s seductive body language and eventually metamorphosed into the kind of character Beatty played in Shampoo: a philanderer hiding from his own promiscuity.

“Hart had a real Don Juan complex,” observes Amanda Smith, now a feminist lecturer and wife of political scientist James David Barber, but back in 1971 the women’s issues person in McGovern’s Washington headquarters. “It’s something he couldn’t stop, but the women weren’t people to him at all.” Hart would speak for McGovern at a college political-science club, then spend the weekend with the club president. Monday morning, time and again, these breathless, brainy little buds would turn up in Washington to commit their lives to working for Gary Hart. Time and again, they would find themselves stuffing envelopes and weeping as they watched Gary pass their desk to the rest room—without so much as a hello.

“Over and over the women who stayed with the campaign found themselves consoling the women who had been bewitched by Gary,” says Smith. “Some were local campaign workers, some married, some pretty fancy. They were anybody.”

The ugly duckling, Gary Hartpence, had developed, as if overnight, into a dazzlingly handsome young man whose picture appeared even in Playboy. Gary had been a sensitive and intelligent boy; his need to break out was inevitable, yet he could not use the new freedom to experience sex and pleasure within the context of a full human relationship. His was a compulsion rooted not in seeking illicit sex but in proving he was so utterly worthy that he could break all the rules. For all his superficial arrogance, however, the evidence suggests that he could never believe he was worthy enough.

It was sudden and inexplicable, the way Nina Hartpence withdrew from her mortal coil. On the eve of the ’72 primaries, just as Gary was moving into high gear, he had to slam into reverse and rush home to Ottawa, toward a reckoning that never took place. Dashing up the steps of the local hospital, he was met by his mother’s nurse’s aide. Nina had already expired.

Gary hurried away without giving a eulogy at her funeral (although he later did so at his father’s). But his father seemed to make an effortless transformation. Carl went fishing, he went dancing, he romanced the nurse’s aide, and she made him laugh again. With his wife in the ground only six months, he and Faye Brown, aged seventy-two, had themselves a church wedding. Nancy Lee thought the ceremony “extravagant,” but Gary gave his unqualified approval. “She was pretty, fun-loving,” sniffs Aunt Erma Louise, “nothing like Nina.” The newlywed couple enjoyed exactly one day of bliss before the hitherto perfectly healthy Carl Hartpence suffered a heart attack. Five days later he was dead.

Clearly there would be no simple escape from the awesome power Nina Hartpence wielded over her son and husband. Both men had to go to dangerous extremes to free themselves. Indeed, Carl Hartpence may have died from it. And if Gary had hoped that his mother’s death would release him at last from the cold steel band of guilt around his heart, the fate of his father must have been a dart omen.

A strict Fundamentalist is taught that any window left open in one’s own faith can let in the evil that strikes down loved ones. Years after a person “comes out” from a Fundamentalist background, a traumatic event—or even a familiar verse from the Bible or evangelical exhortation—can trigger a panic over the remembered feeling of suffocation. Such a panic may have been what brought Gary back to Lee and the children after his parents’ unexpected deaths. But it didn’t keep him from showing up with a stewardess at a serious staff dinner after the ’72 convention. At least one close colleague remembers being stunned to learn that Hart was married. From then on, without regard to the status of his marriage, there were always other women.

Another pattern began to emerge, as fascinating as it would ultimately be fatal. When the McGovern campaign crashed, Hart handled the failure in a memorable way. “Everything was over for him,” recalls Harold Himmelman, a Washington lawyer. “Gary had nothing—no career, no money, no future. He was then the architect of the world’s worst political campaign.” Yet Hart seemed, somehow, stronger, lighter, even happier—like a man broken loose from all rules and obligations, and free to reinvent himself again. Even then, Hart was dropping tantalizing clues to his danger-seeking side. He told a Washington Post reporter, “Just as challenge and insecurity frighten most people, security and safety frighten me.”

During the cathartic winding-down period that followed, Hart called a law-school classmate, Oliver “Pudge” Henkel, and his wife, Sally, to invite them to join the Harts on vacation in Jamaica. The Henkels were surprised—they hadn’t seen the Harts since Yale and didn’t consider them good friends—but they accepted. During the trip, Hart withdrew from the group, spent time alone silently pondering his future, and came back to announce that he was thinking of a political career for himself. To the amazement of those around him, with a negative net worth and no political base, Hart set out to capture a seat in the U.S. Senate. When he was elected in 1974, Hart’s worthy side cast his victory as a purification: “Receiving the oath of office was, for me, the secular equivalent of acceptance into church membership.”

The purifying effects of election to what Hart considered the most select club in America did not inhibit the new senator’s adventures. He began to go farther afield, exploring American Indian religion, and getting glossy English hostess Diana Phipps to introduce him to European society. The more broadly he roamed, the more exaggerated was his denial that he had any problem. When he decided to gird up for the first presidential run, his friend Mike Medavoy, executive vice president of Orion Pictures, warned him to keep some distance from Beatty because of the actor’s atrocious reputation. Hart took offense, as he always would, and said, “I don’t have to worry about appearances if I’m not doing anything wrong.”

On the subject of guilt, “Gary seemed so young and immature,” says an old friend and former staff member. At one point, when he had been separated from Lee for six months, he closed the door of his Senate office and told this good soldier, “You’ve heard Lee and I are separating. You’ll no doubt want to make other arrangements.” The buried Fundamentalist within him must have assumed the staffer would want to move away from such a sinful person. Simultaneously, he was asking his secretary to find an excuse for him to fly to L.A. for the weekend. There he’d frequently hang out at Warren Beatty’s house, sitting by the pool, which was often populated with topless starlets. Hart and Beatty were overheard discussing other men’s scores, with Hart admiringly reporting on another senator, who would go to New York, line up five or six girls, “and just have himself a weekend.”

By the time Gary first decided to run for president, Lee had made a significant, twenty-four-year investment in his future. She had quit teaching in 1964 to have her first child and didn’t go back to work until 1979, when she and her husband separated officially.

They had reconciled in time for her to campaign for Hart’s re-election to the Senate, where he proudly wore the label of poorest member. Lee was shuffled off once more, less than a year later, when Hart’s office announced a divorce. She turned to real estate. But if there is anything tougher than campaigning ten hours a day with one’s husband, Lee Hart told me, it is competing eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, with the real-estate sharks along the Potomac. The Harts patched it up again shortly before Gary began his first presidential campaign.

My question to Lee Hart in 1984 about her husband’s much-vaunted indifference to material things struck a raw nerve. “Sure, I’d like to have the freedom that money can bring,” she said with some bitterness. “I can’t go to Colorado and ski like I’d like to, because I can’t afford to. I can’t go to New York and take in a play, as I would love to, because I can’t afford to. ”

Lee appeared to want the White House as much as Gary did. That would explain why she was willing to be humiliated in private and ignored in public. On the campaign plane, she would try to edge onto the armrest next to her husband; he was cold and distant. During joint campaign appearances, Lee would come forward, on cue, and be acknowledged by Gary only as “already deserving the job of First Lady” for her hard work. She would hold up her hands like the trapeze lady from the Flying Wallenda family, then drop back into the shadows. Not infrequently, her husband would forget to introduce her altogether.

“Lee Hart was always able to separate what she felt for Gary as a husband and what she felt for him as a politician,” according to Raymond Strother, a friend and campaign consultant. The relationship of Lee and Gary Hart seemed to have become mutually exploitive. Since neither one expected honesty or intimacy from the other, Lee Hart never saw herself as a victim. She had tried independence and found it a tough row to hoe. It would be easier to achieve her own ends by advancing her husband.

Almost two decades after Gary Hart severed formal ties with his Fundamentalism, he was still ambivalent about worldly success. The part of him that could not believe he deserved to be successful, because he was a sinner and a backslider, would now begin to sabotage his grander political ambitions. Even during the fastest-rising arc of his career—those few magical weeks in 1984 after his upset victory in the New Hampshire primary—while Gary Hart was the hottest political star in the country and a full-strength media spotlight was upon him, he was compelled to flout the rules of normal public behavior.

A veteran political mistress he’d been seeing since 1982 was startled to have him turn up on her Washington doorstep at such a vulnerable moment. She could see the Secret Service van parked right down the street. Hart stayed the night and blithely walked out her front door the next morning.

The same woman later spilled her hurt to one of Hart’s former advisers. She described her association with Hart as “sporadically affectionate.” But the more intimate their occasions together, the more brutally he would withdraw. As they parted he would say, “Call me and we’ll get together very soon.” She would demur, saying she knew how busy he was. No, he’d insist, just call and he’d find a way they could be together. So she would call. And then he’d duck her.

The pattern was always the same: the indiscriminate hunt, the rush to intimacy, the forced reassurances, then a sudden withdrawal, denial, and rapid retreat. A political friend of Hart’s for the last ten years says, “Gary was compulsive about seeking out women, sometimes for a sexual relationship, sometimes not. It was a compulsion, but it was not about sex, even if the relationship was sexual. The compulsion was to defy the rules and still have it all, on his terms.”

The capriciousness of it was what stung Hart’s women, many of them smart, substantial people. But they probably didn’t know his history. With the model of a mother as continuously demanding as she was undemonstrative, Hart could not be expected to have any notion of a warm, close, friendly relationship with a woman. Sex and power could be sought only outside such a relationship. Under the sway of his sensual passion, and when conquest and possession were the issue, he could be very intense, according to confidants of several of his partners. But once the passion was consumed, the fantasy fulfilled, and the specter of the start of a relationship reared its head, Hart would shrink back and, clang!, that inner steel door between his two selves would slam shut.

As Hart pursued national office, he naturally faced increasing constraints and the microscopic press scrutiny that goes with the territory. Alarm bells must have gone off. The constraints were not unlike the suffocating restrictiveness of his upbringing, and the scrutiny must have been felt as the very “prying” he’d been hiding from all his life. He grew sick of feeling guilty. His denials grew more extreme. Hart’s pathology was much like that of an alcoholic who, after his seventh drink, insists with thickened tongue, “Whaddya mean I can’t drive, shhur I can”—that level of denial.

In 1980, he told Hal Haddon, a longtime friend from Colorado, that he had stopped womanizing. Convinced that the only way Hart could become president was to clean up his act, Haddon suspended disbelief. But by 1982, Haddon, like Hart’s brain-truster, Larry Smith, had lost faith and walked away. Hart’s campaign became a vacuum, and into it were sucked naïfs like Pudge Henkel—who signed on as campaign director when Hart told him, “I have nothing to hide”—and an assortment of what Smith saw as “scumbags, jackals, and freebooters.” Henkel himself was amazed when Hart asked him to manage the campaign. He later saw that Gary had chosen him because he already knew his personality: “He wanted someone who was not going to ask him to tailor his personal life to what a political consultant would want.”

Patrick Caddell was brought on in desperation in January of 1984. The veteran pollster told me that he’d gradually recognized what Hart really wanted: “maximum chaos.” A campaign always takes on the character of a candidate, and in this case the campaign was designed to keep Hart free of structure, ensure that his advisers were kept off-balance by bickering, and guarantee that no one got close enough to see the demons Hart was hiding. The pattern was frightening in a campaign; in a presidency, such chaos could be annihilating for a whole country.

In March of ’84 I started out to cover Hart, as dazzled as much of the nation by this fresh face and attracted to his concepts. But since the national press had discovered him in New Hampshire and was now daily documenting his “new ideas,” I decided to examine his character.

One of Hart’s consultants put me onto Marilyn Youngbird, said to be among the rare people with whom he could “let down his hair.” Marilyn turned out to be an attractive divorcée and full-blooded Native American. She told me that she had awakened in Hart a reverence for the sun, the trees, all forms of life. They had met the day after he first entered the Senate (in his redemptive phase, I noted), and she was certain she had been Hart’s closest friend from ’78 to ’80, a soul mate. Marilyn went on to describe in breathless detail the peak moment, at a Comanche ceremony, which brought them close both spiritually and personally.

“They brushed the front and back of our bodies with eagle feathers. It was sensual, oh yes. He would look at me, smiling from ear to ear. Then all the smoke from the sage and cedar would engulf him. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, it was so beautiful.”

The woman must be wildly exaggerating was my first reaction. She’s probably fallen for Hart and romanticized some innocent occasion. So I brought up her name casually during an informal gathering in the back of Hart’s campaign plane.

“Oh, by the way, I have a message to pass on to you from Marilyn Youngbird. She says you should take time for a spiritual-healing ceremony.”

“Do you know Marilyn?” His voice was suddenly buoyant, spontaneous. “She’s been my spiritual adviser for the last few years.”

I tried to contain my astonishment as Hart gushed on, in a most uncharacteristic fashion, about her ineffable qualities. He even showed me a note from her he was carrying around. The memorable line was: “Hug a tree.” Several days later, in a one-on-one interview, I asked him about Marilyn again.

“She says she’s your conscience. And her people have all heard the prophecy. The Great Spirit has chosen Gary Hart to save nature from destruction. It’s your time.”

“I know,” he said. “She keeps telling me that. ”

“Do you believe it?”

Marilyn’s effect on him suggested a longing for some supernal being who would render him morally lovable as well as unimpeachable. What is more, her adoration seemed to feed Hart’s exaggerated view of himself as a man with a divine destiny.

When my article appeared in the July 1984 Vanity Fair, Hart played it exactly as he would three years later with the Miami Herald story. He lied and denied. “Terribly inaccurate,” complained Hart in print and on TV, while disclosing that he had not read the article and did not intend to. His protestations only dug him in deeper, prompting articles in Time and Newsweek, one of which noted that “Mondale’s advisors were amused by any hint of Hart as an oddball subscriber to Teepee Guide.” The Mondale camp used the article to dump a man they wanted to keep off the ticket at all costs.

Having looked closely at his life history, we can now propose some possible explanations for Hart’s behavior. Here is a man who grew up in a severely restricted manner, by virtue of his religion, his social milieu, and a mother whose treatment of her son was tantamount to child abuse. Emotionally deformed by that long boyhood, simply not equipped with any understanding of or feeling for the value built into human relationships, he was never able to learn in adult life how to connect with others. He can connect only with abstract ideas.

The Gary Hart who emerged from this tortured journey is a divided man. It was buried in his earliest consciousness that one was either worthy or sinful. One could not be both. Because he had to believe he was worthy of asking to be made president, he was compelled to separate the part of himself that he considered sinful from the part that was worthy.

One side of Hart, the rigid and controlling spirit of his Fundamentalist past, seeks perfection and inflicts harsh self-punishment for any natural pleasure. This is the boy who could not be coaxed to take more than one toy at a time out of the box, the boy who was always outside the picture show peering in. The other side of him, the passionate and profane side, never saw the light of day as an adolescent boy—indeed, was imprisoned for his first twenty-five years. That delinquent side began beating on the cell floor and going over the wall as far back as 1972, during the McGovern campaign. Finally, it went haywire.

The compartmentalization of Hart’s private life was echoed in his public life. When he stated in a keynote speech, “This is a campaign of new ideas—after all, that is what government is about, isn’t it?” his old chief of staff, Larry Smith, thought, No, government is about presenting and persuading the people of a vision of what is good for the country. Hart’s concept of politics focused only on the right instruments, i.e., how things should work. Indeed, he contended vehemently that one was not properly connected to the other. In the same way, Hart was unable to connect the emotional or moral expectations of those around him with their instrumental value to him. He had to be told to touch his wife, balked at having to phone potential supporters, and rarely thanked people who had given up months or years of their own careers to work for him.

Yet one part of him seemed to deeply believe he would make a magnificent leader. He was intellectually facile and worked hard at attracting experts to design sophisticated ideational grids. Above all, he subscribed to the Gatsby theory of self-reinvention. On his image-making trip to Ottawa last April, he became a hero to the graduating seniors by preaching to them what all small-town Americans want to believe:

“Do not accept the idea that you have to be born to wealth or grow up in a powerful family or a big city to achieve in life” was his message. “You can be anything you want to be.”

We’ve all seen and read a surfeit about the six days in which the world Hart built exploded. Tom Fiedler, a Miami Herald reporter who had covered the candidate for two years, at first didn’t recognize Hart when they came face-to-face on that fateful night outside his town house. Hart was disheveled; when confronted, he clutched himself with both arms, and his speech was halting and disjointed.

But by the time he phoned his wife that Saturday night he was able to tell her, coolly, to ignore the imminent scandal. This moment cannot have come as any great shock to Lee Hart. Five years before, when Hart first decided to run, according to friends, his wife had warned the candidate, “Your downfall will be sex.”

Another call Hart made that night was to his campaign director, Bill Dixon, assuring him there was nothing to the story. Dixon prepared the counterattack on the press, then resigned two days later. According to a former top aide, “We never really considered telling the whole truth.”

When Hart appeared before 1,600 publishers at the Waldorf two days later, he seemed, remarkably, more relaxed than he’d been in years. “Hi, babe” was the breezy greeting he gave his wife when she emerged from three days of seclusion to join him in New Hampshire the following day. Lee’s face, set like aspic, looked as if its last buoyancy was about to collapse.

Hart then faced reporters, who asked the candidate if he had ever committed adultery. At dinner that night on the Vermont border, he was full of brittle laughter and joked about his imbroglio with Donna Rice. In his utter disgrace, he was oddly devil-may-care. Then Lee told him, according to a participant, that his children were devastated. Hart was startled. It was the first indication he was registering even faintly the human impact of his actions.

Shortly after eleven that night Hart’s press secretary went to him in his motel and laid out a new set of facts. A private detective had made a detailed report of Hart’s activities over a twenty-four-hour period last December. The photographs of him entering and leaving the house of a Washington woman were now in the possession of the Washington Post.

“This thing is never going to end, is it?” Hart said to his press secretary. And then, with a remark so stunningly cavalier one can almost hear the thumbing of his nose, Gary Hart said, “Look, let’s just go home.”

Take me as I am or not at all, was the message he conveyed in his angry withdrawal speech. Holed up in the Rockies for the next month, Hart established a one-way communication with the world: he took a secret telephone number, turned away requests for interviews, called out to dozens of his financial contributors, and sent out to several thousand of his supporters a letter of apology as impersonal as “Dear Occupant,” signing off by quoting the Scriptures.

His status at his Denver law firm, where managing partner Donald O’Connor says Hart has brought in some oil business since the scandal, is still in flux. “We get needled, but we haven’t paid any economic penalty,” adds O’Connor. “That could change in the future.” Through his agent, Hart put out a book outline, which was promptly turned down by his publisher, William Morrow, and dismissed at Simon and Schuster the same day Donna Rice tried to peddle a book on herself as victim (to be written with the help of Liberace’s ex-chauffeur).

When the first visual evidence of his romantic relationship with Rice appeared in the Enquirer, Gary Hart simply withdrew into his ever smaller, isolated world and, miraculously, according to friends, managed to shield his family from the pictures. Lee Hart is very angry, but her anger is externalized, according to a former Senate staffer who stayed with Hart until the bitter end. Lee is convinced that the debacle was all the fault of the press—and of Washington, to which she vows never to return.

When reporters called his press secretary, Kevin Sweeney, and insisted that sooner or later Gary Hart is going to have to answer the questions about his personal life and whether or not he told the truth about not spending the night with Donna Rice, a most revelatory rallying cry came back: “He can say the hell with you guys, and just go out and start giving speeches.”

Now that he is not under any obligations as a presidential candidate, Sweeney said, Hart plans to emerge from seclusion and seek engagements with university audiences. No, he does not intend to address why he withdrew from his campaign. But is anyone going to sit still for Gary Hart’s lecture on why aircraft carriers should be smaller?

It is hard not to feel some compassion for a man so alienated from his past he has nowhere to go. If Gary were still a member of the Nazarene church in Ottawa, the Reverend Mr. Copsey would personally confront him. “I would ask, ‘Are you guilty of goin’ to bed with this woman? Havin’ these affairs?’ I would read Scripture to him and ask him to ask the Lord’s forgiveness.” Copsey frowns. “Course that would lead to a bigger problem, because he’d have to confess to his wife, and his wife and him would have to reconciliate.”

Just suppose for the sake of argument, I proposed to Hart’s Aunt Erma Louise, that all these things about Gary are true. What would he have to do to redeem himself? Aunt Erma Louise, in whom negation has been canonized as the one positive virtue, pronounced the judgment that Hart must be fleeing to this day.

“He’d have to go back to the way he lived before. When he was a boy.”

It would seem unthinkable for a man of Hart’s hard-won independence to go home again, to “put to death the deeds of the body.” Hart himself apparently believes that he can drop in and out of society as he pleases and be taken seriously as a political gadfly, that he can walk away from those hundreds who used up the credit on their charge cards to stake him to the caprice of a presidential campaign, dismiss a million-and-a-half-dollar campaign debt, and slam the door on those thousands of volunteers who squandered on him the idealism of their twenties. But Richard Nixon dropped out of sight at San Clemente for three years after his disgrace before daring the first test speech, at a political dinner in Corona del Mar.

Whether or not Gary Hart can carve out a place for himself as a Socratic contributor to the nation’s political dialogue, his most important task, in my opinion, is not the instrumental one. He needs to find a way to feel his common humanity, and to search out a middle path between Nazarene perfection and Beatty-esque amorality. But that journey requires humility. Only time will tell, and only one person will know in the end, if Gary Hart can beat the Devil in Gary Hartpence.

Gail Sheehy

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HART SPENT 2 NIGHTS WITH RICE, HER FRIEND SAYS

By The Associated Press

• June 9, 1987

Gary Hart spent nights with Donna Rice on a yacht in Bimini and at his Washington town house, then turned ashen-faced and coldly ended the affair when confronted about it by reporters, according to a friend of Ms. Rice.

In an interview for an article published Sunday, Ms. Rice's friend, Lynn Armandt, told People magazine that The Miami Herald's early accounts of a close relationship between Mr. Hart and Ms. Rice were true.

''The actual truth is that some of that back-door stuff they talked about never really happened,'' Ms. Armandt said of explanations that Mr. Hart had given, ''and Donna actually stayed in Gary's town house Friday night,'' May 1. Ms. Rice's Own Article

In another current article, Ms. Rice wrote in Life magazine that ''I'm not a party girl'' and said the Hart matter had had a bad effect on her life. On the advice of her lawyer, she did not write of the relationship in the article.

Mr. Hart, the former Senator from Colorado, quit the Presidential campaign May 8, five days after The Herald reported that Ms. Rice, a 29-year-old Miami model, had spent the previous Friday night with him at his Washington town house. Mr. Hart, at the time the Democratic front-runner, denied the report, saying Ms. Rice had left through a back door and stayed, along with Ms. Armandt, at the home of his friend William C. Broadhurst.

However, according to Ms. Armandt, 29, a Miami boutique owner, she spent that night at Mr. Broadhurst's house, but Ms. Rice did not.

The next night, she said, Mr. Hart called, saying reporters were outside his house and asking her and Mr. Broadhurst to come over. ''He looked pretty shaken - he was white,'' Ms. Armandt said. After That, 'Finito'

From then on, Mr. Hart and Ms. Rice were ''finito,'' Ms. Armandt said. ''The mission was just to get her out of there,'' she continued. ''It was very cold - not even a kiss on the cheek, which really upset Donna.''

Back at Mr. Broadhurst's house, he went over The Herald's account with both women. ''It wasn't like, 'We have to get the story straight,' but he said it like, 'This is what happened,' '' Ms. Armandt said.

The four first got together in March, Ms. Armandt said. Ms. Rice called to say that Mr. Hart, whom she had met at a New Year's party in Aspen, Colo., had invited her on a cruise. She invited Ms. Armandt along.

In Bimini, aboard the yacht Monkey Business, Ms. Armandt said, she slept in the cabin where she and Ms. Rice had stowed their bags. ''I awoke at 7 o'clock in the morning, and I was alone,'' she said. ''There were only three guest bedrooms, and I assume she didn't sleep with Broadhurst.''

Both Mr. Hart and Ms. Rice have said that the two women slept on the yacht and that the men slept on another boat.

But Ms. Armandt said that when she spoke to Ms. Rice later at lunch, ''it was absolutely clear that she had slept with Gary.'' 'She Said She Liked Him'

''She's not one to detail,'' Ms. Armandt said, ''but she said she had a wonderful time with him - that he was very gentle and romantic.'' After that, Ms. Armandt said, Ms. Rice told her that Mr. Hart telephoned every few days.

Ms. Rice, meanwhile, wrote in Life that she worked diligently as a saleswoman for Wyeth Laboratories, although she is currently on leave. Her $400-a-month Miami apartment is stocked with secondhand furniture, she wrote. ''Contrary to popular belief,'' her article said, ''I've always kept a full-time job. I'm not a party girl.''

''I feel like a hunted animal,'' Ms. Rice said, and accounts of her relationship with Mr. Hart have placed her ''under a great deal of stress.''

Mr. Hart did not return a telephone message that was left at his office seeking response to Ms. Armandt's account, and Mr. Broadhurst's housekeeper said he was not at home. Ms. Rice's telephone number is unlisted, but her lawyer, Thomas McAliley, said he did not believe that Ms. Armandt's comments were true.

A spokesman for Life, Edward Adler, said Ms. Rice had been paid the standard freelance rate for a six-page article, but he declined to say how much that was.''It's not an outrageous sum of money,'' he said.

Mr. McAliley, Ms. Rice's lawyer, said Ms. Armandt had received $200,000 for the interview, and accompanying photographs, that she gave to People. A People spokeswoman, Elizabeth Wagner, declined to say whether Ms. Armandt had been paid, and Ms. Armandt could not be reached for comment at her Miami apartment. Mrs. Jackson Cautions Press

Meanwhile, Jackie Jackson issued a warning to reporters covering her husband, Jesse: Don't get personal.

''I don't believe in examining sheets,'' Mrs. Jackson told Life. ''That's a violation of privacy.'' The magazine reported that Mr. Jackson spent just a few days each month at home with his wife in their four-bedroom house on Chicago's South Side. They have five children, aged 11 to 23.

''I've had to be the mother and the father,'' Mrs. Jackson said. ''But I don't condemn my husband. His life is out there, not in this house.''

Letter: Gary Hart Was Not Set Up

A journalist who reported on Gary Hart’s downfall in 1987 pushes back on the notion that the candidate’s Monkey Business incident may have been staged.

Was Gary Hart Set Up?

What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987? In The Atlantic ’s November issue, James Fallows asked what alternative courses history might have taken.

My name is James Savage, and I was the Miami Herald ’s investigations editor who helped report and edit the 1987 stories that uncovered Gary Hart’s relationship with Donna Rice and prompted him to quit his presidential campaign.

I believe from my personal knowledge of the facts that The Atlantic ’s article contains serious factual errors.

The article’s conspiracy theory suggests that William Broadhurst deliberately maneuvered Hart into potentially damaging press exposure by arranging for him to spend time on the yacht Monkey Business and have his picture taken with Donna Rice sitting on his lap.

The truth is the late Mr. Broadhurst did everything short of violence trying to prevent the Herald ’s investigations team from publishing the first story about the scandal.

Reporters Tom Fiedler, Jim McGee, and I were preparing that story on deadline after interviewing Hart about his relationship with the young woman from Miami when Broadhurst phoned our hotel room in Washington.

Broadhurst insisted that he had invited the Miami woman and a friend to Washington and any story we wrote would unfairly portray Hart’s relationship. He refused to name the woman who was later identified as Donna Rice.

We included Broadhurst’s defense of Hart in that first story. After filing our story, at Broadhurst’s suggestion, we met with him at an all-night restaurant, where he continued to argue on Hart’s behalf.

Broadhurst died recently and can’t defend himself.

I believe the Atlantic story also implies that Donna Rice was somehow involved in a conspiracy to embarrass Hart. I am convinced from my firsthand knowledge of how the Herald learned about Hart’s plan to meet with Ms. Rice that she did not have any involvement in any plan to embarrass Hart.

I believe The Atlantic should publish a correction and an apology to Ms. Rice. I would be happy to discuss further details.

James Savage Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

James Fallows replies:

The details of the Miami Herald ’s handling of the Gary Hart–Donna Rice case were explicitly not the topic of my article. The literature on the topic is too vast and contradictory to set out, even in a magazine article many times longer than the one I wrote.

In brief (as I said in giving a summary of the crucial episodes in my article): Over the decades, many of those involved in the Herald ’s decision to send reporters for a stakeout of Gary Hart’s house in Washington have stoutly defended the public and journalistic interests they believed they served in doing so, and the care they took in choosing this course. Mr. Savage, who was involved in those decisions, defends them in his note. A fuller account of the Herald’ s decisions, by James Savage and his Herald colleagues Jim McGee and Tom Fiedler, appeared in that paper just a week after the stakeout. You can read it here .

Over the decades, many people not involved in the choices have debated these same aspects: whether the Herald exercised sufficient care in pursuing the tip it received and what the consequences were of the way it (and, separately, The Washington Post ) then handled the “scandal” of Hart’s possible affairs. Back in 1987, the journalist John Judis offered a skeptical and negative assessment of the Herald ’s and The Post ’s approaches in the Columbia Journalism Review. Matt Bai’s 2014 book about the episode, All the Truth Is Out , is about the way that coverage of Hart became the moment when “politics went tabloid” and changed both politics and journalism for the worse.

Read them all. See the forthcoming movie based on Bai’s book, The Front Runner . Judge for yourself.

But wherever you come out, what the Herald did was not the topic I was discussing. The news my article conveyed is what might have happened before anyone at any newspaper got involved.

It was about the circumstances in which Hart, Donna Rice, another woman named Lynn Armandt, and Billy Broadhurst got together on a boat in the first place, which led to the tip the Herald later received. Broadhurst, a lobbyist and fixer, was by all accounts a man of many faces. I have no reason to doubt Mr. Savage’s report of the Herald ’s dealings with him. Other people who dealt with him firsthand, and have spoken with me about him, have offered much less positive perspectives.

As most readers noted from my story, and as Mr. Savage might see if he looks at it again, the story was careful to present new information as a possibility —as another way of thinking about a consequential moment in modern political history. The headline of the story was not “Gary Hart Was Set Up.” Instead it asked, “Was Gary Hart Set Up?” There is a proper journalistic bias against using questions in headlines. But doing so was appropriate in this case, for an article whose point was, in fact, a question: What if Lee Atwater’s deathbed admission to his colleague and competitor, Raymond Strother, was actually true? What if the Monkey Business disaster was not just a catastrophic error by Hart but a setup plan?

As the article points out, Strother himself realized that this claim would forever be unprovable, since Lee Atwater died soon after he revealed this information over the phone (according to Strother) back in 1991. Strother told me that this very unprovability was part of the reason he kept the information to himself for so many years—doing so, in fact, until he spoke with Hart early this year, in what he thought might be one of their final meetings.  

Can I prove that Lee Atwater actually made this confession to Raymond Strother 27 years ago, as Strother said to me in several conversations this year? Of course not. But Strother has a long record as a campaign strategist and press spokesman, which, to the best of my knowledge, offers no grounds to be skeptical of his honesty—especially on this topic and at this stage of his life. Could Strother himself, back at the time, prove that Atwater was telling him the truth? Also, of course not. And Atwater’s short record in public life contained ample grounds for doubts about his honesty. But in his final weeks, Atwater was offering a lot of public apologies for other campaign dirty tricks, which are known to have occurred. Would he have simply invented this additional trick (without actually having been responsible for it) so that he could privately apologize to his former rival Raymond Strother? Anything’s possible, but that seems far-fetched.

No one can know whether Gary Hart would have gone on to the nomination or the presidency if this scandal hadn’t erupted when it did; or whether some other scandal might have ensued if this one hadn’t; or whether Hart, like Bill Clinton after him, to say nothing of Donald Trump, might have ridden out the scandal coverage if he’d decided just to brazen his way through; or whether Michael Dukakis might have risen to the nomination even if Hart had stayed in the race; or whether George H. W. Bush was destined for election anyway; or a thousand other imponderables. The point of the story was: History is full of counterfactual what if s, which by definition are unknowable, and the Atwater-Strother-Hart series of conversations adds another unknowable but provocative what if to the list.

Mr. Savage concludes by saying that I owe Donna Rice Hughes an apology. I disagree. First, the article does not say what Mr. Savage thinks it does. Lee Atwater told Raymond Strother (according to Strother) that he, Atwater, was behind the whole episode. Necessarily, Billy Broadhurst would have to have been involved as well. Who else might have been, and what witting or unwitting roles the other main figures (including Donna Rice) might have played, Atwater did not tell Strother, and Strother did not claim to me.

Donna Rice Hughes presumably knows more than other still-living figures about this incident. I sent her many messages asking for a chance to talk and explaining what I wanted to ask. I know that she received at least some of them. She chose not to reply to repeated requests, which is her right and is entirely understandable. But it is not the occasion for an apology on my side.

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Yard : Gulf Craft Type : Motor yacht Guests : 8 Crew : 4 Cabins : 4 Length : 37.01 m / 121′6″ Beam : 7.54 m / 24′9″ Draft : 1.85 m / 6′1″ Year of build : 2008 Model : Majesty 121 Type of engine : Diesel Brand : MTU Model : 16V 2000 M93 Engine power : 2399 hp Total power : 4799 hp Maximum speed : 24 knots Cruising speed : 18 knots Gross tonage : 223 Interior designer : Cyrille Bieri Exterior designer : Gulf Craft Water capacity : 5716 Fuel Capacity : 28446 Similar yachts New listings Please use a modern browser to view this website. Some elements might not work as expected when using Internet Explorer. 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Yachts in your shortlist Bored Apes Yacht Club: The monkey business behind the world's most expensive NFTs Celebs and NFT platforms sing the project's praises—while secretly pursuing their own interests BAYC drop was a flop Whales gonna whale, ape flex with pfp, yuga labs earns with each resale, why give away 100 valuable nfts, nfts are a hell of a drug, nfts was the case they gave me, steph curry inflates google search, jimmy fallon uses moonpay, nft services crack the mainstream with celeb power, yuga labs is worth billions. The Bored Ape Yacht Club has become one of the most-prestigious NFT projects on the planet. But what kind of tactics did it employ to tower above the millions of other not-really-dissimilar NFT collections? OMR cut through the monkey business and found companies pushing the project on the downlow—all in the pursuit of their own interests. An exclusive club with a logo featuring a comic ape, membership perks like exclusive parties and members such as A-listers like Eminem, Snoop, Serena Williams, Gwyneth Paltrow and NBA star Steph Curry—if you’ve heard of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) that description would seem more than apt. It’s been long road for BAYC to reach its current in-demand status. In April 2021, Yuga Labs, the company founded by two thirtysomethings behind the BAYC , releases 10,000 NFTs (If you’ve been living under a digital rock for the past year+ here is our detailed breakdown of WTF NFTs are ) to attract NFT collectors. The pre-launch drop flops; only 650 BAYC NFTs are sold. It’s not until the "reveal" and the official launch that two influential individuals from the crypto scene snatch up several BAYC NFTs and start banging the drum: NFT entrepreneur Jimmy McNelis aka "j1mmyeth" finds out about the BAYC from a tweet from an "Honorary Ape" ( a  collection of 35 NFTs of special members , that Yuga Labs gifted to smaller-scale crypto influencers). McNelis buys 100, then 320 more, tweets repeatedly about it (at the time McNelis has followers in the low 5-figure range) and ends up elevating BAYC’s profile in the crypto scene. Recommended editorial content At this point you will find external content from Twitter that complements the article. You can display it with one click. I consent to external content being displayed to me. This allows personal data to be transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy. While this is going on, McNelis recommends BAYC to a group of business associates in a private chat (listen to the exchange in the Gary Vaynerchuk podcast ), including anonymous NFT collector "Pranksy." He gained notoriety in the scene as a collector of NBA Top Shot NFTs (Top Shots are video moments from the NBA packaged and dropped as digital trading cards). Pranksy is said to have turned a USD 600 investment into an NFT portfolio worth several million dollars . There are divergent opinions about whales in NFT circles like Pranksy. On the one hand, they are admired for the success they’ve had. Even more, as they often purchase numerous NFTs from new collections, they help generate awareness and subsequent demand. On the other hand, some of these NFT whales have a reputation of being able to inflate prices and a collection’s value just through their name and social media reach—only to sell high and make bank. Smaller investors are then left holding the losses of a given project. On May 1, 2021, Pranksy buys 250 BAYC NFTs and over the course of the coming hours expands his collection to a total of 1250. Just like McNelis, Pranksy tweets repeatedly about the purchases—at the time, Pranksy has nearly 50k followers on Twitter. These two "sweeps" unleash a snowball effect: interest in BAYC NFTs skyrockets, the message spreads rapidly on crypto Discord servers and the Bored Ape logo becomes a status symbol on crypto Twitter. It takes Yuga Labs fewer than 12 hours to sell out the entire collection—an estimated USD 2.8m in revenue for the company. In an interview  a week later, the BAYC founders confirm that McNelis and Pranksy were both instrumental in the success of the project. They underscored, however, that they had zero prior contact to the two NFT entrepreneurs—only after McNelis' initial purchase did the team send him a message thanking him. In the months post-launch, McNelis and Pranksy continued to raise awareness for the BAYC—in their unofficial role as BAYC marketing ambassador to celebs, as well. In August, Pranksy, for example, sells a BAYC NFT to superstar DJ Steve Aoki, who tweets it out to his 8.2 Twitter followers . Two months before, in June, Pranksy sold Bored Apes to NBA players Josh Hart of the Portland Trail Blazers and Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers. When the two teams meet in November 2021, Haliburton wears custom sneakers featuring his Ape, which leads to Hart taking to Twitter and pointing out that his Ape is better (because it has rarer attributes) than Haliburton’s. These episodes further push the standing of the BAYC. At the same time selling BAYC NFTs figures to have made Pranksy several million dollars in profit. Yuga Labs also earns on these transactions.  According to multiple reports and social posts, the BAYC NFT smart contract includes a 2.5% commission for Yuga Labs on each subsequent sale. McNelis also sells several of his Bored Apes – and at least one of them for an incredible sum of money. In October, one of his primates fetches USD 3.6m at a Sotheby's auction. But he also gives away 100 BAYC NFTs for free, as he disclosed in the Gary Vaynerchuk podcast . "Why? Because I can hack into people’s brains." He says that when he gives something to someone that he knows is going to increase in value, he basically plants an NFT virus in that person. He also gave Vaynerchuk five apes, as Gary V has confirmed. McNelis is a serial entrepreneur in the NFT space: In 2020, he launched an NFT project under the name " Avastars ," he runs the Tokensmart community and founded the company NFT42 . One of the products of the service provider: Nameless , a service that lets brands and companies launch and manage NFT collections. Some of the first onboarded clients include Pranksy (who runs NFT subscription service NFTBoxes) and Vaynerchuk, who has his NFT collection and community Vee Friends. McNelis has a vested interest in promoting NFTs as a medium. During a panel discussion in November 2021 with Vaynerchuk as a part of the NFT.NYC event, McNelis draws an even more interesting description than planting a virus. When asked how to evangelize others about NFTs to others, McNelis said , "Give them a rising NFT. Give them an Open Sea account (an NFT marketplace editor’s note) and notifications so they can see the offers. It's their first hit of crack and they're hooked." Gary Vaynerchuk then cracks, “so you’re a drug dealer. But I agree with you!" Just 10 minutes before, Gary Vaynerchuk stated that carnage was imminent as so many people had invested their personal assets in NFTs and many would end up being worthless. Nevertheless, he is a major player in the scene. In the past three years, Vaynerchuk has transitioned from an entrepreneur's guru and social media ambassador to a crypto bro. Not only does he have his own NFT community with "Vee Friends," but since July 2021 his company, Vaynermedia, also has a subsidiary, VaynerNFT , that helps brands enter the NFT space. Its first client: AB Inbev, owner of beer brand Budweiser. Vaynerchuk is not alone in his efforts to raise the mainstream profile of NFTs. Other celebs and well-known names from the US tech and entertainment scene are active participants as well. Jimmy McNelis is well connected to several of them. As he stated in the "Metaverse Podcast" (starting at 46:33), his NFT42 venture completed Seed funding in February 2021. Participants included Sound Ventures (the crypto fund of movie star and tech investor Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, manager of U2 and Madonna), tech billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Marc Cuban, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, Nick Adler (head of brand partnerships for Snoop) and Gary Vaynerchuk’s holding company Vaynerfund. Oseary even took on a management role for Yuga Labs in October 2021 . The NFT scene is closely knit—and the line between NFTs and the entertainment scene blurred. McNelis, for example, founded a virtual band, named Kingship, with four Apes from the Yuga Labs collection. The band is signed by 10:22, a new sublabel of Universal Music. Purchases of Bored Apes are also making more headlines. Some of the famous buyers, like NBA star LaMelo Ball from the Charlotte Hornets, use the purchases to plug their own NFT collections . It is what it is—never clear what’s done on conviction and what’s done in blatant self-interest. Another example: When Justin Bieber posted a picture of a Bored Ape to his 220 million followers on Instagram in late January 2022, the entire world just assumed that the music superstar bought it himself. But it seems that the owner of the BAYC NFT is actually Bieber’s business partner Gianpiero D'Alessandro , designer for Bieber’s fashion line Drew House who recently released the NFT collection Inbetweeners , which Bieber has promoted as well. According to Coindesk , shortly thereafter “the InBetweeners Twitter account began gloating about how the (maybe) Bieber-owned NFT was inflating the price of [D’Alessandros] InBetweeners NFTs. At this point you will find external content from Instagram that complements the article. You can display it with one click. But probably the biggest awareness push for BAYC came from NBA superstar Steph Curry, who, as far as we can tell, has no vested interest. In August 2021, Curry bought a Bored Ape for USD 180,000 and uses it occasionally as his Twitter avatar (Curry has 15.5 million followers) and joined the BAYC Discord server for a quick chat . Both his celebrity and the price make headlines; the impact is also recorded by Google Trends , which registered a spike in searches for BAYC in the next week. After all of these events helped advance the BAYC brand beyond crypto circles, the project then reached the next level: Infrastructure platforms from the crypto and NFT space begin piggybacking off the brand’s mainstream status to indirectly market themselves. Crypto payment service Moonpay especially has profited from the practice. In December 2021, it sponsored "Ape Fest," an exclusive party for the BAYC community in New York, where, among others, rapper Lil Baby performed. A month before, during an interview with NFT artists Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann, late-night host Jimmy Fallon announced that he had purchased his own "Bored Ape" —thanks to  Moonpay, "which is like Paypal, but for crypto." In November, clips of a “Mutant Ape” that Lil Baby acquired using Moonpay went viral on Tiktok. Then there is rapper Post Malone whose song "One Right Now," which has 44.6m views on Youtube, shows him using Moonpay to buy a Bored Ape right at the start of the video. He also posted screenshots of it on Instagram and Twitter and tagged the company. At this point you will find external content from YouTube that complements the article. You can display it with one click. "As we strive for mass adoption, we understand that big splashes can go a long way in providing visibility for those outside the crypto space," writes Corey Barchat on the Moonpay blog . " This level of exposure can only happen with Bored Apes." Moonpay has continued the practice. In late December, Snoop announces on Twitter that he bought a "Bored Ape," "Mutant Ape" and Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT. In a follow-up tweet,   he thanks both Moonpay and Jimmy McNelis, who sold him NFTs. The celebrity NFT Moonpay boom reached its climax, so far at least, in late January when Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon showed each other their apes during Fallon’s show —again thanking Moonpay. A video of the cringy scene went viral. US journalist Max Read made an attempt to map the "NFT Celebrity Complex." He speculates that Creative Artists Agency (CAA) might be instructing its clients to push NFTs, because CAA is an investor in NFT marketplace Open Sea—the most-important platform in the space at the present and who earns a commission on every transaction. CAA represents stars Ashton Kutcher and Jimmy Fallon, as well as "Jenkins the Valet," a fictitious BAYC NFT character, who is set to release an autobiography , and NFT collector 0x1b , who owns Bored and Mutant Ape NFTs as well. Yuga Labs, the company behind the BAYC figures to have generated a massive amount of revenue with the project. In addition to the USD 2.8m of Bored Apes and the USD 90m from Mutant Ape sales, there are commissions on resales. Estimates made by Cryptoslam on BAYC- and MAYC NFTs including the secondary markets put the total revenue at USD 2.17b. For Yuga Labs, that could mean an additional USD 54m in revenue from commission. According to the Financial Times , the company is in negotiations with the most well-known US VC venture Andreessen Horowitz about a possible investment, based on a valuation between 4 and 5 billion dollars. Related Articles Talk of the Town Scott Peterson 8/2/2024 Millions in revenue with chatbots—Has Character.ai stumbled on the first-functioning AI business model? 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Hood 2 Cabo Rico 5 Cabriolet Royale 1 Calafuria 2 Californian 11 Camper & Nicholsons 5 Canoe Cove 2 Cantiere Delle Marche 4 Cantiere Navale Arno 1 Cantiere Navale Di Pesaro 1 Cantiere Navale Rondolini G & Figli 1 CANTIERE NAVALI DI PESARO 1 Cantieri Di Pisa 9 Cantieri Di Sarnico 6 Cantieri Estensi 4 Cantieri Navali Del Mediterraneo 3 CANTIERI NAVALI DI TERMOLI 1 CANTIERI RIVA SPA 2 Canyon Bay 3 Cape Fear 1 Cape George 4 Cape Horn 8 Cape Island Cruisers 1 CAPE POWER CAT 1 Cape Powercat 2 Capoforte 2 Carnevali 2 Carolina Classic 10 Carroll Marine 1 Castagnola 3 CASTOLDI JET TENDER 1 Catalina 30 Catamaran 4 Catamaran Cruisers 1 CAVUSOGLU 1 CD HOLMES 1 Cdk Technologies 3 Center Console 2 Centurion 1 Cerri Cantieri Navali 9 CG Boat Works 1 Ch Marine 3 Chantier De L'esterel 1 CHANTIERS YACHTING 1 Chaparral 20 Cheoy Lee 26 Cherubini 5 Chesapeake 3 Chris-craft 118 Christensen 6 Cigarette 58 Cigarette Racing - Don Aronow 1 Cim Shipyard 1 Claasen Jachtbouw 1 Classic Coaster 1 Classic Craft 1 CLASSIC YACHT 1 Classic-Yachten 1 Cnm - Cantieri Navali Del Mediterraneo 2 Cnt Castagnola 2 Coastal Craft 7 Cobra Ribs 2 Colin Archer 4 COLVIC CRAFTS 1 Commercial 4 Composite Yacht 2 Concordia 3 Conrad N.v. Kalp Holland 1 Conrad Shipyard 1 Contender 59 Cooper Marine 7 Cooper Queenship 1 CORSAIR MARINE 1 Covey Island 2 Crownline 29 Cruise Ship 3 Cruisers 144 Cruisers Sport Series 2 Custom Built 25 Custom Carolina 36 CUSTOM CAROLINA BOBBY SULLIVAN 1 Custom Line 35 Custom Made 1 Custom Motor Yacht 2 CUSTOM STEEL MOTORYACHT 1 Custom Work Barge 1 Custom Yacht 1 Cutwater 27 D'este 1 Dalla Pieta 10 Damen Yachting 1 De Antonio 31 De Cesari 2 De Haas Shipyard 1 DE RUITER 1 De Vries Lentsch 4 DE VRIES LENTSCH (DUTCH BUILT) 1 Deep Impact 8 Dellapasqua 3 Delta Marine 6 Delta Powerboats 15 Destination 2 Devonport 1 Diesel Duck 1 Dix Harvey 1 Doggersbank 2 Dominator 14 Don Smith 2 DONZI MARINE 3 Dovercraft 1 Dreamline 3 DRETTMANN 1 Dubbel & Jesse 1 Duckworth 1 Dudley Dix 1 Dufour Catamarans 1 Dutch Barge 1 DutchCraft 1 Dynamique 1 EAST ASIA COMPOSITES 1 Edgewater 31 Egg Harbor 8 Elan Power 4 ELEGAN GROUP 1 Emirates Boats 1 Endeavour 2 Endeavour Catamaran 3 ENGELAER SHIPYARD 1 Enterprise Marine 2 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Yachtbuilders 1 Knight & Carver 5 Knight Brothers 1 Kong & Halvorsen 3 Kuipers Woudsend 1 KUIPERS WOUDSEND BV 1 Ladenstein 6 Laminated MY 100' 1 Latitude 46 2 Laurent Giles 1 Lazy Days 2 LAZY DAYS MANUFACTURING CO 1 Le Breton 1 Leopard 108 Lifestyle 1 Liquid Metal Marine 1 Little Harbor 14 Little Hoquiam 1 Long Island 8 Longline Fishing Vessel 1 Lord Nelson 1 LOUISBOURG 1 Luxe Clipper 1 LYMAN MORSE BOAT CO. 2 Lyman-morse 4 Magna Marine 2 Magnum Marine 3 Maine Cat 1 Mainship 23 Malcolm Tennant 1 Mangusta 50 Mano Marine 1 Marc Lombard 1 Marcelo Penna 1 MARINE MAGIC 1 Marine Trader 6 Maritimo 21 Marlineer 1 MARLOW HUNTER 1 Marlow-hunter 2 Marsaudon Composites 1 Mast & Mallet 1 Mastercraft 29 Mastro D'Ascia 1 MATHEW BROTHERS 1 Mathews Brothers 4 Maxi Dolphin 4 Mays Craft 2 MC CONAGHY 3 MC MILLAN 1 Mcconaghy 13 Mediterranean 1 Mengi Yay 8 Menorquin 10 Meridian 65 Metal Shark 1 Metalships 1 Midnight Express 38 MIDNIGHT EXPRESS POWERBOATS 4 Midnight Lace 1 Midship Marine 2 Miller Marine 1 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Steiger Craft 5 Streamline 14 STREAMLINE BOATS 6 Su Marine 2 Sun Hing Shing 1 Sunny Briggs 1 Sunseeker 415 Supercraft 1 Superyacht 3 Swiftships 5 SWISS SUSTAINABLE 1 Swordsman 2 TA YANG YACHT BLDG. 1 Tactical Custom 1 Tahoe Pontoon 2 Technohull 16 TECHNOHULL RIB 5 Technologie Marine 1 Technomar 1 Tecnomarine 1 Tecnorib 13 Terra Nauta 1 Terranova 5 THETIS WARE 1 Thoroughbred 1 Tiara Sport 17 Tidewater 13 TITAN MARINE 1 Tollycraft 17 TOMCAT BOATS 1 Traditional 1 TRANS WORLD 1 Transpacific Marine 1 TRANSPACIFIC MARINE CO LTD 1 Transworld 2 Trident Shipworks 1 Trintella 2 True North 17 Tullio Abbate 2 TURKISH GULET 1 Twin Vee 10 Two Oceans 3 VALENA YACHTING 2 Valentino 1 Valhalla Boatworks 34 VALLICELLI 1 Van De Stadt 8 Van Den Akker 2 Van Der Heijden 3 Van Der Valk 13 Vanderbilt 1 Vandutch 25 Vanquish 20 VAUDREY MILLER 1 VECTORWORKS 1 VENTURE BOAT 1 VENTURE MARINE 1 Versilcraft 6 Vic Franck 1 Viking Boats 1 Viking Princess 10 Viking Sport Cruisers 8 Vincenzo Catarsi 1 Vintage Classic 1 Virgo Custom Made 1 Vizianello 1 WAJER WATERSPORTS 1 Waterdream 1 Waterline 2 WEAVER BOATS 1 Webbers Cove 2 Weldcraft 1 Wellcraft 31 Wellington 1 West Bay 14 Westcoast 2 Westport 26 Whangarei Engineering 1 White Shark 1 Willard Marine 1 William Fife 1 William Garden 1 WILLIAMS BOAT WORKS 1 Williams Jet Tenders 1 WINDY BOATS 1 Winter Custom 4 WITSEN & VIS 1 WOODNUTT AND CO 1 World Cat 33 Wright Performance 1 X-yachts 13 Xcelerator Boatworks 1 XL Marine 1 Xo Boats 11 Yachting Developments 1 YACHTING DEVELOPMENTS, NZ 1 Yamaha Boats 2 Yellowfin 78 YOUNG BROTHERS 1 Yuka Yacht 1 Zar Formenti 2 Zeelander 6 ZIMMERMAN 1 NEW + USED YACHT SALES Denison Yachting is a yacht brokerage firm specializing in yacht sales (as well as super yacht + charter sales) that has helped boat buyers find superyachts , motor yachts , catamarans , sailboats , and trawlers . Prospective yacht owners interested in buying a new luxury yacht can search for yachts on the market worldwide by brand, make, type, length, price, location, year, and more. You can even search for yachts in Bitcoin, as we offer the option to purchase with Cryptocurrency. Our yacht selection includes megayachts of all sizes and from all over the world. YACHT BROKERS WITH EXPERIENCE Our team of licensed + bonded yacht brokers offer our clients three generations of yachting expertise. With over 100 brokers worldwide, their knowledge and experience in the yachting industry with both new and used yachts is one of the biggest factors in our success. With a large inventory of yachts for sale combined with our industry leading level of service & expertise, our brokers are guaranteed to find the perfect boat for your yachting needs, be it a luxury superyacht, a used catamaran, a large sailboat, or just about any yacht of your dreams. 353' Benetti 2022 Luminosity Tivat, montenegro, €135,000,000, 345' oceanco 2024 h3, monaco, monaco, €295,000,000, 315' davinci 2021 il dolce far niente, heeg, netherlands, 282' devonport 1998 chakra, portisco, italy, 262' benetti 2024 simon fraser, genova, italy, 262' isa 2025, ancona, it-an, italy, 262' oceanco 2019 y701, sanremo, it-im, italy, €79,750,000, 262' admiral 2024 galileo 80, carrara, italy, 257' abeking & rasmussen 2011 amaryllis, antibes, france, €89,000,000, 255' custom 1962 hansa, karlskrona, sweden, 253' admiral 2028, viareggio, italy, 251' custom 2015 yersin, marseille, 13, france, €59,000,000, 249' custom 1972 lady sarya, 243' lurssen 2007 global, la ciotat, france, €79,000,000, 243' lurssen 2017 aurora, dubai, united arab emirates, €130,000,000, 240' delta marine 2006 laurel, naples, it-na, italy, $69,500,000, 235' custom 1983 nansen explorer, kristiansund, norway, €15,900,000, 230' admiral 2024 galileo 70, 226' custom 2024, fort lauderdale, fl, us, €70,000,000, 224' armon 2021 wayfinder, portico, it-ce, italy, €55,000,000, 223' custom 2025, €95,000,000, 221' icon 2010 loon, monaco, france, $47,500,000, 220' heesen 2023 yn20067, oss, netherlands, €99,000,000, 213' admiral 2024 admiral 65m u force, 210' custom 2011 running on waves, athens, greece, €17,500,000, 209' royal denship 2006 cupani, genoa, italy, $29,950,000, 209' vsy 2020 atomic, san diego, ca, us, $58,000,000, 207' delta 2027 project metaverse, seattle, wa, us, $95,000,000, 203' sarp yachts 2025 project nacre, antalya, turkey, €45,000,000, compare yachts. 14196 Results YACHT CATEGORY Login or register, hi, welcome back. Login and pick up from where you left off. Creating an account allows you to save and compare your favorite yachts. By creating an account you agree to the terms of use and our privacy policy. 405 IMAGES MONKEY BUSINESS Yacht Infamous Yacht Monkey Business in The Front Runner Movie MONKEY BUSINESS Yacht MONKEY BUSINESS Yacht MONKEY BUSINESS Yacht Amer 92 Monkey Business COMMENTS Monkey Business (yacht) Monkey Business is an American yacht built for the use of the Turnberry Isle Resort Marina in southern Florida. It is best known for its role in scuttling the campaign of Gary Hart for President of the United States. History. An 83-foot (25 m) Broward Marine motor yacht, ... 30 Years Ago Gary Harts Monkey Business, How a Candidate Got Caught She had later accompanied him on an overnight trip from Miami to Bimini on an 83-foot luxury yacht with the you-cant-make-this-stuff-up name of Monkey Business. A picture soon appeared in the National Enquirer, and then in hundreds of newspapers, showing Donna Rice sitting in Hart's lap, with Hart in a Monkey Business T-shirt. Infamous Yacht Monkey Business in The Front Runner Movie Filming for The Front Runner took place in Savannah last autumn. We've been unable to determine which yacht plays the role of Monkey Business. Regardless, the real Monkey Business was an 83-footer (25-meter) from Broward Marine. She launched in 1978, for Donald Soffer, who also owned the Turnberry Isle Resort near Miami. Was Gary Hart Set Up? In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women ... MONKEY BUSINESS Yacht Cruising speed of 27 knots. Sleeps 8 overnight. The 28m/91'10" motor yacht 'Monkey Business' (ex. Vizantia) was built by Amer in Italy at their San Remo shipyard. Her interior is styled by design house Amer and she was completed in 2009. This luxury vessel's exterior design is the work of Permare s.r.l. - Amer Yachts. How Scandal Derailed Gary Hart's Presidential Bid After the Miami Herald reported on his affair, a picture surfaced showing Rice sitting on Hart's lap while he wore a T-shirt reading "Monkey Business Crew," referring to the name of the ... The Front Runner: The Real History of the Gary Hart Scandal Gary Hart's fall from grace, which inspired the new Hugh Jackman movie 'The Front Runner,' marked a turning point in political journalism. How Gary Hart's Downfall Forever Changed American Politics Weems recalled going aboard Monkey Business on the last weekend of March for the same impromptu party at which Hart and his pal Billy Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, met up with Rice ... Almanac: The Gary Hart scandal A media frenzy many people remember today by the photograph that eventually emerged of Hart and a woman named Donna Rice on a dock next to a yacht called "Monkey Business." Documentary revisits downfall of Gary Hart, and how Miami Herald broke In 1987, it was a Miami model and a luxury yacht named "Monkey Business.". Oh, and a resourceful pair of Miami Herald reporters who broke the story of former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart's ... Gary Hart Gary Warren Hart (né Hartpence; born November 28, 1936) is an American politician, diplomat, and lawyer.He was the front-runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination until he dropped out amid revelations of extramarital affairs. He represented Colorado in the United States Senate from 1975 to 1987.. Born in Ottawa, Kansas, Hart pursued a legal career in Denver, Colorado after ... The blonde on the boat and Gary Hart's downfall: fact-checking Hugh It didn't help that the name of the boat was Monkey Business. The story has now been retold in The Front Runner, a gripping feature film by the director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air , Juno ... 'Monkey Business' revisited: Gary Hart/Donna Rice movie debuts at After a photo of Rice sitting in Hart's lap aboard a yacht named Monkey Business emerged, Hart withdrew from the race. Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis went on to win the Democratic nomination ... Politicians, Boats, Bad Behavior: Sailing Into Trouble With ... The Monkey Business, 1987. The Scandal Navy's honorary flagship. If you've been following seaborne political misbehavior for a while, you'll remember Monkey Business as the yacht on which, in 1987, a promising Democratic presidential candidate, Gary Hart, saw his career sink out of sight (ironically, the boat stayed afloat). The Destruction of Politician Gary Hart To save them the time and anxiety of "dating," busy men can charter an entire party along with the yacht Monkey Business, which is owned by Soffer. The models who hang out at the Turnberry ... Donna Rice Hughes Monkey Business photo. On the cover of its June 2, 1987 edition, [16] the celebrity tabloid National Enquirer published a photograph of Rice sitting on Hart's lap. The pair were pictured on a dock during a yacht trip to Bimini that Hart, Rice, and others took before he announced his presidential campaign. [17] Hart Spent 2 Nights With Rice, Her Friend Says In Bimini, aboard the yacht Monkey Business, Ms. Armandt said, she slept in the cabin where she and Ms. Rice had stowed their bags. ''I awoke at 7 o'clock in the morning, and I was alone,'' she said. Monkey Business Yacht Monkey Business is a motor yacht with an overall length of m. The yacht's builder is Permare s.r.l. from Italy, who launched Monkey Business in 2008. The superyacht has a beam of m, a draught of m and a volume of . GT.. Monkey Business features exterior design by Permare s.r.l. and interior design by Permare s.r.l.. Up to 8 guests can be accommodated on board the superyacht, Monkey Business ... Letter: Gary Hart Was Not Set Up A journalist who reported on Gary Hart's downfall in 1987 pushes back on the notion that the candidate's Monkey Business incident may have been staged. ... spend time on the yacht Monkey ... Motor yacht Monkey Business About Monkey Business. Monkey Business is a 37.01 m / 121′6″ luxury motor yacht. She was built by Gulf Craft in 2008. With a beam of 7.54 m and a draft of 1.85 m This adds up to a gross tonnage of 223 tons. She is powered by MTU engines of 2399 hp each giving her a maximum speed of 24 knots and a cruising speed of 18 knots. MONKEY BUSINESS Yacht Photos The luxury motor yacht Monkey Business is displayed on this page merely for informational purposes and she is not necessarily available for yacht charter or for sale, nor is she represented or marketed in anyway by Trident Media Ltd. This document is not contractual. The yacht particulars displayed in the results above are displayed in good ... Bored Apes Yacht Club: The monkey business behind the world's most The Bored Ape Yacht Club has become one of the most-prestigious NFT projects on the planet. But what kind of tactics did it employ to tower above the millions of other not-really-dissimilar NFT collections? OMR cut through the monkey business and found companies pushing the project on the downlow—all in the pursuit of their own interests. 38 Regal Monkey Business 2004 New Buffalo Yachts for sale; Monkey Business | 38' Regal +1 954.763.3971 [email protected] Monkey Business 38' Regal 2004 New Buffalo, MI. $155,000. $155,000 Watch Price. Get More Info Share with a Friend Call 954.763.3971 ... catamaran gulet motorboat powerboat riverboat sailboat trimaran yacht