The Revolutionary

Sharon Baum met Bloomberg at a Harvard Business School alumni function (Baum had graduated from Harvard a year before, one of seven women in her class) shortly after he moved to New York. They dated casually. Even in his youth, Bloomberg had a tendency toward grand gestures. On the day Baum married another man in 1969, Bloomberg sent her a dozen long-stem roses with a card: "I wish you all the happiness in the world."

Baum remembers the young investment-banker Bloomberg as a man with limitless energy. At night, they had a socially energetic group of friends that was up for anything—gourmet-dinner clubs, trips to the circus and the Ice Capades, "things nobody would say today that they'd done because they're so unsophisticated." The city dazzled him. "He loved New York when he got here," Baum says. "He's from Medford, I'm from Jefferson City, Mo. I couldn't wait to be here. He was the same way."

Baum, who is now an executive at Corcoran, frequently sees Bloomberg at parties, on Madison Avenue in the mornings and at Temple Emanu-El. At temple, "he doesn't try to come in, not have anybody see him, and then get out. He's not looking for the side door. He's there talking … He really, really loves what he's doing, or if he doesn't he puts on a really good act." She says the thing that hasn't changed in Bloomberg is his self-possession, his comfort in his own skin. "When you look at him, even in tough times, his body language suggests he always has a pretty positive and pleasant outlook ... Think about how close he is to his daughters. Or that he also has remained close friends with Sue [his first wife]. Look at the way those kind of things are handled today with so many people. But there was no big stuff in the press about the girls or her."

Baum is convinced that Bloomberg's mother is the key to understanding his values. She recalls running into Bloomberg on his way into a benefit uptown in the middle of a transit strike in December 2005. She complimented him on the pictures she'd seen of him walking with commuters across the Brooklyn Bridge. "You looked really great coming across the bridge," she said. "But where was your hat?" Bloomberg grimaced. "Ugh, you and my mother." Then she changed the subject. "Why aren't you running for president?" she pestered. The mayor's response was the same: "Ugh, you and my mother."

He has been a good father to his two daughters. Married for 19 years to Susan Brown, an Englishwoman, Bloomberg played a big role in raising Emma (born in 1979) and Georgina (born in 1983). Asked about her first memory of her father, Emma hesitates. "It's hard to say, because there are very few memories he is not a part of. He was always around, especially when I was a kid and the company was smaller. I was 3? when my sister was born, and I gather I wasn't thrilled, so we went off to Utah. He would do things like that." He taught his daughters to ski, went to their equestrian shows and watched World War II documentaries with them to explain the evolution of bomber technology. "I once asked him how an elevator worked, and to teach me he helped me build a model of one," says Emma. "I still have it." When she was small, she was dispatched, she recalls, to a weeklong Revolutionary War camp, where she wore tricorn hats and carried toy muskets.

The Bloombergs decided to divorce in 1993, but remain very friendly. After the split they lived together in the city for more than a year and shared a country house. "We still spend holidays together. Just because they're divorced doesn't mean we aren't family," says Emma. The former Mrs. Bloomberg even campaigned for her ex-husband. Bloomberg has been dating Diana Taylor, a former New York state superintendent of banks, for seven years.