By TODD S. PURDUM

In public, Donna Hanover Giuliani relishes her role as the First Lady of New York City, an ebullient partner who holds her solemn husband's hand at every opportunity and defrosts him every time she giggles. In private, Mrs. Giuliani, a 20-year veteran of the personable arts of television journalism, plays a subtler sort of "first."

"The first interview is sometimes me, in the sense that I'll ask him three or four questions, and he'll get a sense of what people will ask him when he's presenting a thought," Mrs. Giuliani, a former WPIX-TV news anchor, said of her conjugal conversations with the city's No. 1 newsmaker. "It's being a sounding board, and just being a person that's always there."

These days, it seems, Mrs. Giuliani pops up all over: in cameo appearances as her reporter self on the soap opera "All My Children" and in the new film "The Paper"; in her first official news conference last week, announcing her plans for the Donna Hanover Giuliani Cool School Awards, a $2,500 privately sponsored prize to be given each month to two city public schools "making great strides," and every night, as Donna Hanover, co-anchor of "Food News and Views," an hourlong stockpot of soupcons on the fledging cable Television Food Network.

At a taping last week, the self-confessed non-cook cheerily asked a chef specializing in Pacific Northwest cooking the difference between that region and the Pacific Rim and sought pronunciation tips from the author of a new French cookbook during a commercial break. ("Pro-VONCE, that's how you say it?")

For most of the Mayor's first 100 days, Mrs. Giuliani, 44, was quietly settling herself and their children, Andrew, 8, and Caroline, 4, into their new lives while her husband set about slaying the dragons of budgetary bloat and Democratic politics. Now the chatelaine of Gracie Mansion has re-emerged as what she has always been: one of Mr. Giuliani's best political assets, the girl next door who makes him seem more like a regular guy.

Skeptics could not help noticing that her fresh prominence -- in support of education, no less -- coincided with the Mayor's bitter blow-up recently with Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, but she insists that was purely coincidental, and that in fact she had been quietly visiting schools and education groups for weeks. "I was," she allowed, "very happy that everything was amicably settled."

Here is the paradox: while Mrs. Giuliani has almost always operated as a public fabric softener to her husband, the Mayor's top political advisers say that in private she has consistently put starch in his shirts.

It was she, the aides say, who insisted in 1989 that he hire the Republican attackmeister Roger Ailes to right his first, floundering mayoral effort. And it was she who insisted last fall that Mr. Giuliani make a final television commercial eviscerating Mayor David N. Dinkins when his new media guru, David Garth, was counseling restraint. (The advisers' compromise: the nasty ad was made but never shown.)

Playing Two Roles

For his part, the Mayor has long made it clear how much he counts on the partner he calls "Donner" and says he never makes big decisions without talking them over with her. He tells, and she confirms, how she used to counsel him to make shorter speeches, and to smile more. In last year's campaign, he often lamented that in 1989 too many voters, familiar with his tough prosecutor's image, had not even realized he was married or a father.

In fact, Mrs. Giuliani is an amalgam, unhesitatingly embracing the traditional title and trappings of the political spouse, adding her husband's name during the last campaign, while retaining her own public career. She has the un-self-conscious aplomb of the Navy brat she once was, and her face is crinkled with crow's feet and framed by a pixieish blond Peter Pan shock. Her foot swings back and forth against a sofa like a nervous cheerleader's, but it can swing hard.

"She's not going to tell him something to make him happy," said Deputy Mayor Peter J. Powers, Mr. Giuliani's campaign manager and closest friend. "If he asks her opinion, he gets it, whatever it is. She's not afraid to disagree with him. She's very perceptive."

Another campaign adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the staff often used Mrs. Giuliani to persuade her husband. "If she liked an idea, or she had a thought and you could talk to her about it, she was quite helpful in getting that across," he said. "I was never there when the persuading happened, but there were times when we discussed something and he was hesitant, and the next day it was done."

Just as often, it seems, husband and wife agree. The Mayor has not always had easy relations with his wife's professional colleagues, and that may be no accident.

Press Mrs. Giuliani about the news media and the bubbly personality that rode a dogsled, piloted a blimp and drove a race car as host of the "Evening Magazine" show in Pittsburgh 15 years ago, and that anchored newscasts in Utica, N.Y.; Columbus, Ohio, and Miami, turns dead-eyed cool.

"Both of us have learned, and it's funny, many journalists don't learn this until some times when they become prominent and have stories done about them and they suddenly get a taste of what they've been dishing out for a long time," she said over soda in the library of Gracie Mansion. "You know, one of the things you do learn over the course of time is that it's just a story."

"Not that you don't listen," she added. "You know, it is one source of information about what people might be thinking. But reporters sometimes have their own agendas, and I think there's sometimes a sense of reporters sometimes have their own political philosophies and what they see comes through their own lens.

"So you have to realize that, and I think the American public is beginning to realize that. So now there's more of a sense of 'Oh, that newspaper, well they have a certain kind of approach to things,' so when they report on things, it's not necessarily down the middle."

That's the tough side. In the next breath, Mrs. Giuliani fairly gushes at the contacts her new role has brought her. If it was said of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire that she gave him sex and he gave her class, Mrs. Giuliani gives the Mayor charm and he gives her that most prized journalistic commodity: access.

"I went to dinner at Henry Kissinger's house and Henry said to me, 'I thought you'd want to sit next to Vernon Jordan, but Nancy said you wouldn't,' " Mrs. Giuliani said, referring to the Democratic power lawyer and Clinton adviser. "And I said, 'Are you kidding, what journalist wouldn't want to sit next to him and get to know him?' So he said O.K. and quick changed the place cards. So you do get a chance to meet people you would have just loved to interview."

Mrs. Giuliani, a graduate of Stanford University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism who grew up in Navy postings in California and Hawaii, first met the Mayor on an interview. He was the No. 3 official in the Reagan Justice Department, and she was an anchor at the NBC affiliate in Miami.

A mutual friend suggested a date. Mr. Giuliani's secretary called to arrange an appointment -- he eventually made it clear he meant dinner, too -- and six weeks later he proposed in a hotel at Disney World. Both had been married before, Mr. Giuliani to a cousin, Donna to a sometime writer named Stanley Hanover, whom she will not discuss in any way, refusing even to say how long they were married.

"I don't talk about him," she said flatly. "He deserves his privacy."

In 1983, Mr. Giuliani took the United States Attorney's job in Manhattan and she went to WPIX in New York. They celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary on April 15 this year -- seeing the film "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and sharing a quiet dinner at home.

Mrs. Giuliani has not always had an easy time reconciling her professional and political obligations. During the failed 1989 mayoral campaign, she raised some journalistic eyebrows by making television advertisements for her husband while officially retaining her co-anchor slot at WPIX. She defended her dual role at the time by noting that she was on maternity leave.

The criticism, she said, was tinged with sexism and would not have been directed at the husband of a female candidate.

Eventually she left WPIX and did freelance work for Channel 5, WNYW-TV, but that dried up as last year's campaign approached.

The halftime job at the Television Food Network (she works from 4:30 P.M. to 7:30 P.M. five days a week) was a good compromise. ("It's very far from city politics," she said.) She joined the channel at its debut last fall, hired by its creator and an old friend, Reese Schonfeld, the former head of CNN.

"She's honest, warm and generous, and that's what I want the network to be," Mr. Schonfeld said. "This network is not aimed at Manhattan foodies. It's aimed at people who cook in their own kitchens all around the country. She knows what she knows and she knows what she doesn't know, and she doesn't pretend. The sense of kindliness just comes across."

On last Thursday's show, she segued seamlessly from a discussion of new foods to a new label for the Campbell's Soup can to a demonstration of a combination convection oven-rotisserie called the Convectisserie, trailing her microphone cord around the corners of the set, nodding earnestly to one guest, laughing with another as her city police bodyguards kept watch by the door.

Then she rushed home in her city car in time to put the kids to bed.

Donna Hanover Giuliani's four predecessors (Edward I. Koch, Mayor from 1978 to 1989, was unmarried):

JOYCE DINKINS, wife of David N. Dinkins, Mayor from 1990 to 1993

Mrs. Dinkins was low-key during her husband's administration. The daughter of Daniel Burrows, a Harlem assemblyman, she was raised in politics and was coordinator of metropolitan affairs for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance before moving into Gracie Manions. She is the mother of two.

MARY BEAME, wife of Abraham D. Beame, Mayor from 1974-1977

Mrs. Beame, the mother of two, actively followed the policy of her precedessor, Mary Lindsay, in maintaining Gracie Mansion as a private home. She kept out of the limelight.

MARY LINDSAY, wife of John V. Lindsay, Mayor from 1966 to 1973

Describewd by Deputy Mayor Robert Price as "a political force more powerful than patronage," Mrs. Lindsay, who has four children, was active in her husband's congressional and mayoral campaigns and was said to have a great influence on his decisions.

SUSAN WAGNER, wife of Robert F. Wagner, Mayor from 1954-1965, died of cancer in 1964. Mr. Wagner remarried twice.

Mrs. Wagner, a mother of two, was an advocate of opening Gracie Mansion to the people of New York and charitable, philanthropic and civic groups. She was on the board of the Boy Scouts of America, the Girl Scouts and the Greater New York Councils, among other organizations.

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company