THE LOVER

At this point, Giovanni looked terribly vulnerable. It was this very look of pain, I realized, that probably made so many women want to marry him and mother him.

"You know what I've been doing since they arrested me?" Giovanni asked. He answered his own question before I could reply. "I've been researching the history of bigamy," he said. "I've researched all the way back in time to the point where the penalty was death." Then his face brightened.

"Don't you think it's hypocritical in an era when people are practically being shown all there is about sex on daytime-television soap operas for the state to spend a small fortune to convict me?" Giovanni took his right hand off his precious box of records to rub his chin. Obviously, he realized he'd become a celebrity.

At the time, stories about him were running in newspapers all over the country. Television comedians were telling jokes about him.

"The police have this thing all wrong," Giovanni said. "I don't recall half a dozen times when I had to ask anyone to marry me. It was always the women who popped the question.

"I find it incredible that some of these women are now saying such terrible things about me. If they really feel that way, why did they marry me?" I found myself listening to Giovanni with rapt attention. After all, what is there really to ask such a person? There is nothing in any journalism books that covers this particular set of circumstances. Who else has ever married 105 different women?

Giovanni put his box of records down next to him. He seemed outraged.
"They say I mesmerize people," he said. "That's just not true. They charge me with adopting a courtly manner to manipulate these women." As he spoke these words, Giovanni started to smile. Perhaps he was now remembering several of the best of his multitude of courtships.

"I never realized there was any other way to treat a woman than the way I do. Is it wrong for a man to hold the door for a woman to pass through? Is it wrong to buy them flowers?

"If the rest of the men in the United States don't treat women that way, then I'm sorry for the women in this country. No wonder so many of them were anxious to marry me." At this point, Giovanni puffed up his chest. He made fists of both his hands and pounded them against his chest.

"I love women!" he said, his voice rising. "And I think I love them because they bring me out of myself.

"For a brief time, they have the power to make me forget that I am actually short and dumpy and that my face is actually ugly.

"They give me a chance to escape into a beautiful dream . . . into a world of fantasy. They take me on a wonderful trip to a wonderful place where everyone is in love." Giovanni put his head in his hands momentarily. He had spoken so passionately that he had brought tears to his own eyes.

"Does that make me the world's worst human being?" he asked in a cracking voice.

"Am I being dragged through the mud because my name isn't Walter Mitty?" he asked.

Giovanni was speaking of the main character in the James Thurber short story, who daydreamed about being a different hero every day.

"In the red lights and traffic patterns of my life, I, too, have emerged like Walter Mitty and assumed other identities. Must I be persecuted for having fantasies? Am I the only person who has ever had dreams and sought to live them out?" he asked.

What Giovanni never figured out was that society frowns on a man who adopts an assumed name and attracts women by spinning wild tales in which he is either a wealthy businessman or a Mafia don with millions socked away.

He admitted that in totaling up his record score, he had assumed almost as many false names and occupations as there were marriages.

"I always looked for a name that fit the role I was playing at the time," Giovanni said. "There were so many aliases. I just don't remember them all." In the courtroom of Judge Rufus Coulter one day, Giovanni did something I'll never forget. He was on trial for marrying and then deserting a Mesa woman who turned out to be his last victim.

Giovanni had been captured in Florida when another of his wives spotted him in a shopping center and called the police. The authorities in Florida returned him to Arizona for trial.

The trial was a wonderful piece of theatre. Giovanni, ever the eccentric, performed in a unique manner each day, much to the annoyance of Judge Coulter and Dave Stoller, the prosecuting attorney. What made it even more unusual was that Giovanni also alienated his defense attorney, Richard Steiner, as well.

Asked if he could remember the names of all 105 of his wives, Giovanni said that if he were allowed to remain in court during the lunch hour he'd try to write down the names of every wife he ever had.