Everything About Newly Minted "Democrat" Charlie Crist... Even His Life In The Closet

The Florida Democratic Party has been a mess for a long time-- a losing mess. It's one of the country's most pathetic and least successful statewide Democratic parties, has been for a very long time, and looks like it will get considerably worse as Debbie Wasserman Schultz tries throwing her weight around. She's decided lifelong Republican and opportunist Charlie Crist should be the party's next gubernatorial nominee and she's threatening anyone who tries to oppose him. This week Miami's New Times did an in-depth look at Wasserman Schultz's candidate for governor. Wasserman Schultz is a raving, self-deluded imbecile but, the New Times asks if Crist can get the voters to forget his murky, unsavory past.

More than any other person, Dr. Charles Crist shaped the man who would become Florida's governor 35 years later. His own pugnacious run at St. Pete politics likely heightened his son's ambition and tempered the younger Crist's disposition. During Charlie's time in the governor's mansion on North Adams Street, he listened to his father before other advisers. Nearly every morning-- then, as well as now-- Charlie Crist called his dad for private conversations to which even senior aides weren't privy. Their closeness conjures a comparison to another successful politician, three separate people close to Charlie Crist say. "There's an analogy I like to make to Charlie's father," Crist's ex-wife, Mandy Morrow, says. "Joe Kennedy."

And just as the Kennedys were born of Irish angst and ambition, the Crists sprang from immigrant origins. Their story is rooted in Cyprus, a small Mediterranean nation split between Greeks and Turks. In 1912, while the nation was falling under British control over the fading Ottomans, Crist's grandfather Adam Christodoulou left for America. At age 14, he arrived in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Destitute, Adam shined shoes for $5 per month and in 1932 fathered Charles Joseph Christodoulou. Young Charles abandoned his native heritage, shortened his name to Crist, and never learned Greek. In his 20s, after attending Penn State University, he was accepted to Emory University's prestigious medical school and graduated in 1960. He married a demure Irish woman, Nancy Lee, and fathered three daughters and Charlie.

When Charlie was 4 years old, Charles Crist took a medical position in St. Petersburg and moved his family into a columned two-story home along the bay. Nancy Lee-- by all accounts a good, decent woman-- was intensely shy, and her husband dominated. He inculcated the children with the same restive spirit that, in part, drove him from the factories of Altoona. Two daughters became educators and the third a radiation oncologist.

"One time I got a D, and all my dad said was, 'Fix it,' " recalls Charlie's younger sister, Cathy Kennedy, who lives in St. Petersburg. "You're a Crist, and you do the best." She remembers coming home late at night during high school to find her father awake in the living room, surrounded by literature, reading an encyclopedia.

And then, of course, there was Charlie. Charles brought his son everywhere: to local high school football games and along the campaign trail while running for school board in the late 1960s. Crist Sr. recalls teaching his son about fiscal responsibility and fairness. "We were always social moderates," Charles says. "We were never racists or anything."

But stories printed in the St. Petersburg Times in the early '70s cast doubt on that claim. Crist Sr. served on the school board during desegregation and was perhaps its most controversial and vociferous opponent. In 1970 he appealed a Fifth Circuit Court ruling that had found Pinellas County in violation of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling-- all the way to President Richard Nixon and the U.S. Supreme Court. The plea was ignored.

In an editorial that year, the St. Petersburg Times condemned Crist and two other board members for playing "racial table tennis." He "has gone out of [his] way to see that this city becomes a permanent bastion of apartheid," the editorial said, adding that he "deserved" an "expression of disgust."

While the drama saturated the city, Charlie entered St. Petersburg High as seemingly the perfect student. He was handsome, popular, school president, zealous about extracurricular activities-- though unfortunately not much good at football. He had an arm but lacked agility and fumbled too much, recalls teammate Steve LeCroy. The football coach, Forrest Page, thought he was a "sissy" and vowed Charlie wouldn't start.

"We didn't get along," Crist recalls, but when pressed about what happened between Page and him, he simply responds, "I don't know."

His son's failure at sports made Charles Sr. extremely unhappy, says Bob Chick, who wrote for the now-defunct Evening Independent. In the spring of 1972, Chick remembers, Crist Sr. invited Page to lunch at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club and attempted to bribe him with a high-paying school district administrative position. The condition: Page would have to start Charlie. The coach later described the meeting to Chick, who scribbled it down for a story in the Independent. The reporter even kept his notes, which he recently unearthed. "I knew Page for many years," Chick says. "And I never caught him saying one thing when it was really another. He wouldn't lie about this."

Over the next year, tension mounted between Crist Sr., who was also the team's physician, and the coaches regarding his son's playing time. "His son was getting closer to the point of becoming a senior and graduating," says David Grassman, the defensive backs coach, during a trial deposition. "And Dr. Crist seemed to be becoming more and more involved, interfering with coaches [regarding the] way his son was being handled."

On one occasion, Crist Sr. called Grassman while he was teaching and expressed frustration. Charlie wasn't getting the time he needed to throw, his father said. The coaches were coddling the team's starter, Jerry Lewis. His son had to play, he informed the coaches over and over again.

After Grassman was fired, the team limped to a 3-7 record while playing both Charlie and Jerry. Soon, Page resigned. But in truth, the coach told buddies at a local jock hangout called the Edgewater, the Crists had forced him out. Charles Graham, a close friend of the coach, says Page blamed the Crists. "Charlie is a sissy," Graham recalls the coach, who died in 1983, saying that night. "And I wasn't going to play him. He wasn't good enough for playing time."

Crist went on to compete at Wake Forest University but foundered there as well and never made varsity, his family says. But in later years, Crist would often talk of his quarterback days, sometimes glossing over that fact. He boasted to New Times that Virginia Tech and Rice University recruited him in high school. His official state Senate bio in the mid-'90s was terse: "Wake Forest University, 1974-76: quarterback, football team"-- without mentioning the practice squad. And Crist Sr. says his son "could pass a mile" and "throw the ball 65 yards." Even during his 2012 Democratic National Convention speech, Crist said, "I used to play quarterback right down the road here at Wake Forest."

But Crist's ex-wife, Mandy Morrow, who met him around that time, says, "He was never good at football, not good in high school, and not so good in college." During college, Morrow and Crist were an inseparable and striking pair-- she blond and fair, he tall and dark-- attending dances and concerts.

But after the two wed in 1979, following Crist's transfer to Florida State University and graduation, their marriage quickly dissolved. Everything was an argument, Crist says. That fall, he drove home from Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama, filled with anxiety. He kept thinking, No one in my family has ever divorced. He was terrified what his father would think. When he arrived, his sister Cathy didn't recognize him. "He didn't have that smile or confidence," she says. "It really upset me."

That night, after consulting his father, Crist decided to divorce Morrow, Cathy says. He told his wife the next day; both recall they spoke once more and never again. Morrow says she didn't have any warning and soon after moved to Dallas. "It came out of nowhere," she recalls. "And then we just lived our lives."

Crist graduated from Cumberland in 1981 and later took a job as the general counsel for Minor League Baseball in St. Pete. A decade later, he was elected to the state Senate and began a remarkably seamless ascent through state politics.

Until he failed at that too.

...[B]ullshit, Crist found, worked well in the state Senate. Once, in the mid-'90s, he hoisted chains above his head in the chamber to demonstrate his commitment to tying prisoners together as they trolled highway ravines for trash. The St. Petersburg Times called chain gangs the "worst idea of 1995," and even the state Department of Corrections held that chains impeded prisoner work, but Crist netted loads of positive publicity.

And in 1997, after Florida Power & Light abruptly raised rates, then-Senator Crist garnered major props for suing the company. "These issues gave him great credibility with people who never knew who he was," says Ron Sachs, former Gov. Lawton Chiles's communications director. "Few politicians in Florida's modern history have been so successful in reading the public mood."

However, he misread the mood that year when he abandoned the state Senate for a run at U.S. Congress. The immensely popular Bob Graham crushed him by 26 points. Two years later, Crist rebounded and was elected education commissioner. But Gov. Jeb Bush ignored Crist and appointed his own secretary of education, leaving Crist without power or influence. The decision didn't appear to bother Crist, who posted more than 100 pictures of himself on his education website and raised cash for a run at attorney general-- though he'd failed the state bar twice.

In 2002, he became Florida's attorney general and was soon sucked into the drama of Terri Schiavo, who had been left in a vegetative state after a heart attack. While conservatives bellowed for her right to life, Crist declined to intervene, leaving it to the courts to decide whether her feeding tube should be removed. Crist's inaction was one of the greatest controversies of his tenure.

At the time, he was overly concerned with the next office, remembers Jackie Dowd, a tall, gray-haired lawyer who worked under Crist. "I never saw an attorney," she says. "I saw a guy running for governor." (Crist announced his run May 8, 2005.)

Dowd recalls the exact moment she came to that realization. It was a Monday morning in early 2003 after she'd trudged into a teleconference with Crist. She updated him on a lengthy investigation involving Lou Pearlman, the mastermind behind the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync. Pearlman, she said, had scammed aspiring models by charging them thousands of dollars to upload their pictures to an unknown website. Dowd had more leads, she told Crist, but he expressed no interest. "I don't know why I knew it, but I just did," she says. "The case was dead."

Later, dozens of Pearlman's victims involved in a separate Ponzi scheme sued Crist and the state for negligence in investigating the con man, whose political and business ties spanned Florida. The lawsuit alleged Pearlman had pumped more than $11,000 into Crist's gubernatorial campaign, and the then-attorney general had flown in Pearlman's private jets and sat in his sporting skyboxes. The U.S. District Court in Tampa dismissed the complaint, citing the state's sovereign immunity.

Not even those allegations could slow Crist's ascent. Then came the rumors he was a closeted homosexual, a potentially serious issue for a Republican in Florida. It threatened to destroy him in the weeks before the 2006 gubernatorial election.

Jason Wetherington, a 21-year-old Republican staffer, had told several friends at separate social functions that August that he'd had sex with Crist. Wetherington had also told friends that another man, Bruce Carlton Jordan, had slept with Crist.

These stories-- never corroborated but widely discussed on blogs, as well as in the St. Petersburg Times, in the New York Times, and on NBC-- deeply wounded Crist's family. "I always thought it was his womanizing that would get him in trouble," Crist Sr. muses, saying he was impressed how well his son stamped out the ballooning intrigue. Charlie called the stories "ridiculous" and "completely false" and just kept on smiling. It worked. In 2006, voters deposited him in the governor's mansion.

Immediately, his approval ratings soared. Unlike his successor, Rick Scott, Crist caused little controversy. He backed teachers and cops and was the first Republican governor to accept an invitation to the state's NAACP conference.

In 2008, he married divorcée Carole Rome. He was pro-choice, then pro-life, and then pro-choice again. "I'm deeply committed to the Everglades ecosystem," he said. "I am deeply committed to persons with disabilities," he said a few months later. "I am deeply concerned... about our citizens and businesses."

He anointed himself the "happy warrior" and the "people's governor." But even then, there were traces of his political demise.

Extreme conservatives hated Crist for his moderation. First, he appointed centrists Jorge Labarga and James Perry to the state Supreme Court. Next, he accepted $13.3 billion in federal stimulus. And then there was The Hug. More a quickie man-bump than a full embrace, Crist clasped Barack Obama in February 2009 after he accepted the federal bailout, and Republicans, quite simply, lost their minds.

The governor eventually recognized the true might of the Tea Party, but it was much too late. When he announced his candidacy for U.S. Senate in May 2009, he never saw Marco Rubio coming.

...In mid-December he officially registered as a Democrat, and five days later he materialized at a U.S. Senate hearing in Washington. Wearing a pregnant expression and a navy pinstriped suit with a gold-and-blue tie, he lampooned the current governor. "The outcome of [Scott's] decisions was quite obvious," Crist said. "Florida, which four years earlier was a model for efficiency, became once again a late-night TV joke."

Though such signs point to another run at governor, what remains unclear, however, is whether Crist will win. How long will the early-voting calamity resonate? What will the money-laundering case against Jim Greer, the Crist-appointed and allegedly corrupt Republican chairman, shake loose about Crist?

Besides, if Crist's loss to Marco Rubio proves anything, it's the capricious nature of primaries. They're not won with fame but by an active party nucleus. "There's a difference of opinion between longtime party activists and the casual voters," says Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida political scientist. "And someone who is a longtime activist in the Democratic Party will be resentful of him stepping in."

Contemporary polls, however, offer a different narrative. After Crist switched to the Democrats and changed positions on Obama?Care, taxation, and gay marriage, his lead over prospective opponent Alex Sink, the former state CFO, ballooned from 17 points to 25. And if he glides through the primaries, besting possible opponents such as Orlando's mayor, Buddy Dyer, he'll likely pummel the most unpopular governor in modern Florida history.

On a recent Wednesday, following another castigation of Rick Scott at a news conference in downtown Tampa, Crist eases into his black SUV. The leather interior, except for the sanitized aroma of Brut, is sterile. There isn't a crumb on the dashboard, not a document in the back seat. The only vestige of personality is in a side compartment-- the album Time and Tide, by Polish jazz singer Basia.

Crist is talking about his political evolution. "You know, people say all the time that you plan this or you plan that to get somewhere," he says, steering the vehicle onto I-275. "But for me, none of it was planned. It just happened. And some days, I have to pinch myself. It's like a dream."