ShareThisOne has four wives and likes to dance during his campaign speeches. Another, who is 72, likes to cavort with 17-year-old girls. Still another has a passion for color -- as in Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.
As the members of the G-20 prepare to head to Pittsburgh three weeks hence for an economic summit, inquiring minds want to know: Which of these global leaders are the biggest paparazzi magnets, thanks to their glamorous and/or chaotic lifestyles?
Don't look to Russia or China for the answer. Dmitri "We-will-preserve-the-course-of President-(Vladimir)-Putin" Medvedev, president of Russia, is married to his childhood sweetheart. While he is a devotee of hard rock -- he has collected all the vinyl recordings of Deep Purple -- he's widely viewed as Putin's puppet and somewhat lacking in personality. The same is true for Hu Jintao, bespectacled president of the People's Republic of China, who is said to be a fan of ballroom dancing.
While our own president is certainly dogged by the press everywhere he and his family go, those ranking highest on the charisma meter have to be "Silvio" and "Sarko" -- Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy.
These two leaders hail from countries whose voters don't seem to mind flamboyant, macho behavior and a tendency to hang out with beauty contestants -- underage or not -- or marry supermodels whose naked photos are on the Internet.
"Silvio does get carried away, while Sarko is much more serious," said Giuseppina Mecchia, associate professor of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. "I think, though, people have to realize that both live in countries where the elites are mostly male -- the people who get elected to parliament, the top executive jobs at the major firms, are mostly filled by men. And there's this macho culture in France and Italy, where there's a condescending admiration for these kinds of figures."
When Sarkozy was dumped by his first wife during his campaign for president, his wooing of supermodel Carla Bruni -- a socially ambitious Italian heiress who once dated Mick Jagger and whose nude photos were auctioned off at Christie's on the eve of a state visit to Britain -- was actually seen as a smart move politically.
"He needed to counteract the idea he was a cuckold and a loser," Mecchia added. "Having a wife who has posed naked is actually not something to be ashamed of in France, but a point of pride. It says, 'I'm really macho -- this is a woman who all the world desires but she is mine.' "
Berlusconi, a billionaire media mogul, has been a constant paparazzi magnet since being elected prime minister 15 years ago, notes Christopher Rossi, a former Squirrel Hill resident who works for an international banking and finance firm in Rome.
"He's the butt of every joke, but he always gets re-elected, because he's viewed as a successful businessman who managed to make all this money in every industry he's ever entered into," Rossi said -- in part because of suspected corruption.
Perhaps Berlusconi's biggest paparazzi moment came earlier this year when he was caught dallying with Noemi Letizia, age 17, giving her a $5,000 necklace and hosting her at his villa in Sardinia along with a bevy of other young women.
"The paparazzo snapped photos of these girls running naked up and down a hill from his swimming pool," said Rossi. "And he was criticized, and he said, 'Well, these girls can't take showers with their clothes on.' "
In contrast, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown -- a dour Scot who is variously described as "nerdy" and a control freak -- attracts a different kind of media attention, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, a Paris-based journalist for London's Daily Telegraph,
"He's a dead man walking," said Moutet, noting that the Labor Party leader is widely expected to lose when a general election is called in Britain next year. Gordon and his wife Anne -- a former public relations official who is much more popular in the British press -- have suddenly shown up at more glamorous events, such as a recent summit of African first ladies, in part, it's suspected, to scout for future clients for their consulting firm.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, too, rarely lands in the scandal sheets, although, Moutet noted, when she wore revealing decolletage recently to the opera, German tabloids had a field day.
There are other leaders with intriguing back stories: Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a fiery orator, once served a term in jail for reading a poem. And Jacob Zuma, South Africa's newly elected president, has four wives and leads campaign rallies with the song, "Give me back my machine gun."
But most of the leaders coming here do not qualify as genuine press fodder. Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, for example, lives "in a charisma-free zone," the Times of London warned its readers before last spring's G-20, even though he does speak Chinese and did liven up his image once when he appeared on a TV news show and used a four-letter word to describe a political situation.
Just imagine if Obama tried that on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."
E-mail reporter Mackenzie Carpenter at mcarpenter(at)post-gazette.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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