Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

Scaife’s rambling remarks were made in the same year that he returned to drinking after a life in and out of rehab programs. In 1987, his second wife, Margaret “Ritchie” Battle, took him with her to the Betty Ford Center. He stayed sober, associates said, for several years. His life, however, remained flamboyantly turbulent. After he met Ritchie—who was married, as was he—in 1979, the couple carried on a soap-opera-worthy affair. Scaife claimed he consummated it after Ritchie, a glamorous and memorably feisty southerner, appeared in his office in an irresistible white angora sweater. “We did what comes naturally,” he told Vanity Fair. She retorted, “Never owned an angora sweater. I’m allergic to things like that!” While they were courting, Ritchie reportedly kicked Scaife in the testicles so hard he had to be taken to a hospital emergency room. Meanwhile, he and his first wife wrangled for almost ten years over the divorce settlement as he fought to keep her from taking a share of some Gulf Oil stock he’d belatedly come into. At one point, in order to evade a subpoena, Ritchie was carried out of Scaife’s house rolled in a carpet, like Cleopatra, by his servants.