‘How Many Politicians Curl Up With Their Wife on the Floor?’

The making of the infamous Gavin Newsom rug photo.

Nancy Collins was all but finished with her 2004 Harper’s Bazaar feature on the First Couple of San Francisco when the photos to accompany it reached the fashion magazine’s New York office.

There was Kimberly Guilfoyle sprawled out on an intricately patterned rug in socialite Ann Getty’s Pacific Heights home. Ornate furniture surrounded the Ralph Lauren–clad, Cartier-bejeweled, bare-shouldered 30-something. The San Francisco Bay — framed by tall gold candelabras, olive-green drapes, and plush velvet armchairs — sparkled in the background.

To the writer’s utter surprise, Guilfoyle — a cable-news legal analyst — wasn’t alone. Mayor Gavin Newsom, a rising star in Democratic politics whom the reporter planned to brand as a successor to John F. Kennedy in the forthcoming profile, was also splayed out in the photo. There he lay spooning his wife in a Hugo Boss tuxedo, hair slicked back, hands wrapped around Guilfoyle and eyes fixed in a piercing, model-like stare.

“My God,” Collins remembers thinking, “how lucky am I?”

Most elected officials with their eyes on the future wouldn’t be caught dead basking in that level of luxury, let alone allow a photographer to capture the image for a national magazine. “I was totally surprised when I saw him on the floor,” Collins says. “How many politicians curl up with their wife on the floor for Harper’s Bazaar? It was kind of a sexy picture in terms of politics. There they were, kind of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.”

Collins was not alone in her surprise. When the September 2004 issue hit newsstands, Newsom’s aides were equally flabbergasted. According to a top aide at the time, no one from the mayor’s office was present at the photo shoot, and Newsom hadn’t shared with his team that he had posed for a portrait like that.

“Everybody was taken by surprise,” the aide says. When they dug into how the shoot happened, they recall, they found out that the picture “wasn’t really contemplated as being part of the story,” that they had understood it was an “outtake or something” — a claim that doesn’t hold up given that Newsom appears in it in eveningwear, not exactly something an aspiring politician would just bring with him to a photo shoot.

It was evident from the moment they saw the portrait, this aide recalls, that it would “be around for a long time.”

Two decades later, the image is firmly a part of Newsom’s political story. When some Democrats openly speculated that he should replace President Biden on the 2024 ballot, “the rug photo” popped up in political-gossip circles. Some Democratic operatives believe it is still a looming issue for Newsom’s future as the scion of a wealthy family tries to tilt populist.

The pair seen lounging in the Getty mansion would jointly file for divorce in January 2005, mere months after the story was published, and diverge politically, too. Newsom worked his way up the state’s political ladder, tacking left. Guilfoyle, meanwhile, turned hard right, becoming a mainstay host on Fox News and a top adviser to former president Donald Trump, eventually getting engaged to his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. (Newsom and Guilfoyle declined to comment.)

“I was thrilled,” Collins says with a laugh. “I knew they would have legs. I knew it was a great picture.” But, she adds, she could never have guessed it would have such a long shelf life, even though it “wasn’t very smart politically.”

The profile was just the latest for Collins, who, in her decadeslong career, had written for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s Bazaar and interviewed then-Senator Joe Biden in 1985 for the Today show and then-businessman Donald Trump and his second wife, Marla Maples, in 1994 for ABC’s Primetime Live.

Collins set her sights on Guilfoyle and Newsom because they were “smart and gorgeous and high profile.” The magazine had conceived the story as a look at Guilfoyle with the hope that Newsom would also talk to Collins; when she set off for the interview, her editors asked whether she could make that happen. “Well, he decided to take a picture instead,” she says. “I was shocked that he showed up.”

The story made sense at that political moment as well. Newsom, 36, and Guilfoyle, 37, were receiving considerable attention nationally, and not only for their movie-star good looks. Just weeks into his mayoralty, Newsom had directed city officials to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The decision spurred the so-called “Winter of Love,” during which hundreds of same-sex couples were married long before it was legal nationwide. The move put Newsom in a public fight with then-President George W. Bush, who, amid his own reelection campaign, was calling for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in response to what was happening in San Francisco. Despite his rising profile, Newsom would have no role at the Democratic National Convention in Boston later that year, primarily because officials wanted to distance themselves from the gay-marriage debate, something Bush had successfully been using to rally his Evangelical base.

The fight over gay marriage helped turn Newsom into a national figure. A GQ profile branded him “the next Bill Clinton,” and the First Couple of San Francisco appeared together on Charlie Rose’s show to talk about their marriage, among other things. Newsom said Guilfoyle “is probably a little more conservative than I am,” a comment that is not only true given her commitment to Trump two decades later but that bears itself out in the interview when Guilfoyle, a former assistant district attorney, disagrees with her husband (and California district attorney Kamala Harris) for not calling for the death penalty in the instance of a police officer being shot and killed. “It’s tough to deny people their justice,” Guilfoyle said, referring to the family of the slain officer.

To Collins, the Newsom comparison was more like Camelot: President and First Lady John F. and Jackie Kennedy. And she didn’t hide that in the piece. It was headlined “The New Kennedys,” and Collins wrote that the couple “promises to be one of the most glamorous political unions since Jack and Jackie,” describing Newsom’s hair as a “Kennedy-esque mop.”

“I went in with the whole Kennedy idea in mind, that they were kind of the new Kennedys,” Collins recalls.

The request Harper’s Bazaar sent for access to Newsom and Guilfoyle, according to a former top Newsom aide, came through friends and associates, not official City Hall channels. This was early in Newsom’s time as mayor — he had taken office only months before — and the Democrat’s operation was not yet in tip-top shape, they say. But Newsom’s office agreed to help with the piece, eventually even allowing Guilfoyle to pose for photos at City Hall.

Most of Newsom’s quotes in the profile are about his wife: He told Collins that Guilfoyle “can do whatever she puts her mind to” and described their marriage as a “wonderful combination of being in love and extraordinarily proud.” The story detailed how they met — locking eyes at a political fundraiser in 1994 — and how Guilfoyle, before they were dating, had donated $500 to his campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Newsom told Collins that Guilfoyle was “in high demand” at his events and joked that people told him, “Forget you. Where’s Kimberly?”

Guilfoyle described her husband as being “on a mission” and warned that “nobody better mess with him because I’m very protective.” She told Collins the couple wanted kids: “Children are definitely on the agenda. Maybe six, maybe one; who knows? I’m a very fertile Puerto Rican.” And she openly speculated about Newsom running for higher office one day. “Do I think he could be president of the United States?” Guilfoyle said. “Absolutely. I’d gladly vote for him.”

But what stands out most in the piece is the now-iconic Getty-mansion photo.

Guilfoyle told a reporter shortly after the issue was published that the pose had been photographer Dewey Nicks’s idea. “He liked the room, suggested that we do that,” she said. “He wanted something kind of warm and intimate … It’s a fashion magazine.” (Nicks declined to comment for this article.)

In the same interview, Guilfoyle bristled at the Kennedy comparison. “Oh my God,” she said. “We made no suggestion of any similarity. Public service, that’s it. It’s not a comparison we make.”

Newsom also seemed peeved about the story a few months later. During a December 2004 interview on CNN, anchor Soledad O’Brien asked him about it. “Why do you bring that up?” Newsom asked O’Brien before calling the comparison to the Kennedys “ridiculous” and saying it gets made “any time there are new politicians.” (Newsom also denied wanting to be governor — a position he would hold 15 years later — and said it was “not my aspiration to be a politician.”)

The rug photo wasn’t the only snap in the profile; the couple was also shown in an office setting and shooting pool in the back room at Tosca Cafe, where they’d had their first date. Newsom’s aides, however, knew that particular image could become an issue. “It’s a thing that … those of us who were involved at the time will regret,” the former aide says. “But I don’t in any way think it’s decisive about how people make choices about who to vote for.”

Except that the photo gets new life on social media every time Newsom or Guilfoyle is in the news. Should Newsom run for president someday, opposing campaigns’ operatives would quickly use photos like this to cast him as out of touch.

“Nothing says I care about the cost of your groceries like sprawling out on an expensive rug for a fashion-magazine photo shoot,” says a Democratic operative with years of experience on political campaigns. “Never in a million years would staff sign off on that now. Pictures go viral. Things cannot be unseen.”

They add, “Whether or not this has a tangible impact on his trajectory, it’s a reminder that the internet is forever and that images from the early aughts can haunt you for decades … But that rug really did tie the room together.”

People close to Newsom dispute the idea that this one photo will impact his future, particularly since he has risen from mayor to lieutenant governor to governor to possible presidential contender in the years since it was taken.

Peter Ragone, a longtime political operative who was Newsom’s communications director at the time of the photo shoot and counsels him to this day, maintains that “voters don’t give a shit about random titillating photos. They give a shit about what you did and what you’re going to do for them.”

Collins isn’t convinced.

If Newsom one day runs for president, “it will be splashed everywhere,” she says. “Look, Jack and Jackie didn’t lay on the floor.”