A Spork in the Drawer: Dicky!

I finally got around to reading Vanity Fair's piece on our favorite batshit crazy billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. The bits I like most:

THE HOOKER

In December of 2005, the private detective proved Ritchie’s (the soon to be ex-Mrs. Scaife - ed.) fears to have been well founded: he took pictures showing the reclusive 75-year-old billionaire with a woman named Tammy Vasco, a tall, blonde 43-year-old whose criminal history includes two arrests for prostitution. The pair was photographed at Doug’s Motel, a roadside establishment near Pittsburgh, where rooms rent for $49 a night, or $31 for three hours.

He spends all of that money in an attempt to destroy a president yet meets an (ex?) hooker in a motel that charges by the hour. Gotta keep those priorities straight, I guess.

THE ANGORA SWEATER

Ritchie says Dick started pursuing her immediately. Dick himself says that he didn’t see Ritchie again for another six months. Then one day she came to his office, soliciting for a charity; he couldn’t take his eyes off her white angora sweater. That afternoon, he adds with a wink, “we did what comes naturally.”
“Never owned an angora sweater,” Ritchie protests, aghast and lilting. “I’m allergic to things like that!”

Was it Ritchie or Ed Wood?

CORRUPTION OF A MINOR

David (Dicky's son from his first marriage - ed.) says that Ritchie soon won him over: “My grades were so bad at school at that point, I just thought, Well, instead of getting yelled at,” siding with Dick against Franny could be “a new chapter to our friendship. All of a sudden, he and I were drinking buddies.” When Dick and Ritchie visited him at Deerfield Academy, David claims, Ritchie brought pot for them to smoke together, and his father bought him alcohol.
“To take marijuana to a child? To a prep school?,” Ritchie marvels, when asked about the story. “Never,” she declares, her petite hands holding one another in her lap. “And how dare anyone even make a comment like that?”

Dick, who regretfully confirms the details of his son’s story, says that he did not inhale.

"I didn't inhale."

HIS NAME IS "DICK"

For the exchange of vows, on the old Penguin Court property (Dick had had the gloomy mansion torn down after his mother died, in 1965), Ritchie wore a short white dress. For the reception, at Ligonier’s Rolling Rock Club, the new wife surprised her husband, a fireworks aficionado, by hiring Zambelli, which is responsible for the July Fourth shows on the Mall in Washington, to create a blazing sign on the lawn that proclaimed, in sparkling letters, ritchie loves dick. Even today, a certain set of Pittsburgh women, including wives of some of the country’s most brass-knuckled industrialists, speak of Ritchie’s flaming double entendre as among the most shocking moments of their lives.
It was not a double entendre, Ritchie says, with tears in her eyes: “My mind doesn’t work that way. Please. His name is Dick. His name is Dick, and I thought of the human being. And how evil of them, because I was saying I loved my husband.”

Sometimes you just gotta have Dick.

BEAUREGARD

After Dick had Ritchie arrested and thrown in jail (and stories about it appeared in his newspaper), Ritchie and the Scaife’s three dogs—including Dick’s favorite, a yellow Lab named Beauregard (Dick says Beauregard was a gift from Ritchie; Ritchie says the couple owned the dog together)—moved in with Pietragallo and his wife, Helena, who is one of her oldest friends. Then, in March 2006, Dick arranged for a sign to be made and placed on his front lawn: wife and dog missing—reward for dog.

Woof.

DICKY = BILL CLINTON

For his part, Dick does not believe that any of his efforts to humiliate Ritchie were excessive. Erecting those signs in his front yard, he says, was just plain “fun.” Do the end of the marriage, its escalating vindictiveness, and the ongoing consequences of such anger make him in any way sad? His eyes go blank, and he says, “No, I don’t think about that. I just don’t want her near me. That’s all I think about.”
Asked whether his infidelity is hypocritical, in light of his political commitments, he refers not to a moral principle but to his own personal history. “My first marriage ended with an affair,” he says, amused. And monogamy is not, he continues, an essential part of a good marriage. “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.” Philandering, Scaife says with a laugh, “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.”

That's our Dicky!