When I first Googled “Garfield DeMarco,” the first thing I read was that he is a gay Republican being sued by his brother for misappropriation of funds and I thought, Uh-oh. But then I saw he was being sued because he had donated 10,000 acres of land and thought, OK, for a good cause. So far, so good. Then I met DeMarco for dinner, with his husband Billy Wilson, and I found him to be a charming fellow with a warm smile and sharp sense of humor. He’s a no-holds-(or questions)-barred kind of guy with quite a résumé.
DeMarco graduated Dartmouth College in 1959, Yale Law School in 1964 and received the Fulbright Grant for European study. He was admitted to the New Jersey Bar in 1966. A family tragedy caused him to take over the family cranberry business, which is now the second-largest cranberry-growing entity in New Jersey.
With the holidays rapidly approaching, who better to talk to than Mr. Cranberry himself?
PGN: How did you and Billy meet?
BW: I’ll take this. I was working as a butler/house manager at a house on Delancey Street. They were having a private reception for Greg Louganis. As I was setting up, I felt a pinch on my behind and it was from Garfield. We talked and later started having lunch together and then dinners and, 15 years later, we’re married!
GDM: Yes, I’m usually late for everything but that time I arrived early and had Greg Louganis pretty much all to myself. What a charming man! We had a great conversation and as we were talking I noticed this one young man with a beautiful smile and a dazzling derriere and I struck up a conversation and that’s how we met. We just got married on my 77th birthday.
PGN: Nice birthday present!
GDM: Yes, yes, yes. We were waiting for two judges, Nelson Johnson — who also wrote “Boardwalk Empire” — and Anne Paterson, who used to be my attorney and is now on the state Supreme Court. She’s a tremendous person. She represented me in the horrible legal battle I had with my brother, which frankly I think was engendered by homophobia. We vacation with Anne and her husband and they both were very helpful during the case, as was Billy. The whole ugly process just brought us closer.
PGN: Tell me a little about the house that you grew up in.
GDM: I grew up here in Hammonton, N.J. My father was the youngest of nine. My grandparents were Italian and my father was first-generation, so he didn’t speak English until he went to school. My grandfather was a very energetic sort. He was a produce broker, a recruiter for farm labor and he also made wine barrels. My grandmother had the terrible life that so many women had back then, working and raising the kids because my grandfather wasn’t around much. My father always wanted to be a physician but his dad died when he was 18 so he had to go into the family businesses, the cranberry business being one of them. Becoming a pharmacist didn’t take as much time so he did that and had a pharmacy in Philadelphia but ended up hating it and city life. He moved back to Jersey and went back into farming and recruiting labor and then went into politics. In a surprise election, he was elected county freeholder at the age of 24. My mother was from the Pinelands and was a school teacher. She always supported education for the best reasons: not because it was a way to make more money but because it would enrich you as a person. I also have an older brother. When he was born, something happened and my mother was told she could not have more children. Well, seven and a half years later, she had me and then my younger sister. I think my brother always resented not being an only child. My sister, on the other hand, was a delight. I really miss her. My mother was very religious, baptized Catholic but raised Methodist because there weren’t any Catholic churches around. But she was also raised around Quakers and that very much informed her attitude and beliefs.
PGN: What was something fun that you remember about the family?
GDM: My mother was a great cook and we had these great family outings with all the family, cousins, uncles, aunts, etc. We’d have two complete dinners, one Italian and one American. [Laughs] Which might explain why so many of us have weight problems! They were so much fun. I got along with every single blood relation I had from the older generation.
PGN: I would imagine cranberries would be prominently featured in your Thanksgiving meals. When did the family get involved in the business?
GDM: That goes back quite a way. My maternal grandfather and my great-great grandfather were cranberry bog managers for the Evans and Wills Company, and on my father’s side they recruited labor for those farms. As a kid, he worked on the farms and that’s how my parents met. Love at first sight; she was beautiful and he was dashing.
PGN: Did you ever work in the bog?
GDM: Oh sure, I was a big, brawny kid and in the summertime during college and law-school years I’d work there. It was good that I did because when my father died — killed in a car accident — I had to jump in, and I had a good rapport with all the workers, which helped with continuity. My brother hated it but I loved it, working in the heat with all these macho muscular guys with their shirts off! It was great and I was a hard worker, which they appreciated.
PGN: What was your first inkling that you were gay?
GDM: I hated sports. Instead of playing football, I’d play dodgeball with the girls. I loved playing with my paper dolls and I loved Halloween because I could parade around in my grandmother’s dress. I was my grandmother’s favorite but I do remember her making a funny face when I asked her to teach me how to crochet. But I didn’t know that there was anything peculiar about it, I was just being me. I’d have little sexual escapades with other boys, and not think anything of it; it was natural. But around 13, the boys who used to fool around together started getting interested in girls. I used to think, What is wrong with them? I used to watch the “Tarzan” movies and would fantasize about being off in a tree somewhere with him. That was back in the ’50s. I was an avid reader and soon came to realize that back then what I was feeling was considered queer and perverted. It was a very lonely time. But I had one cousin who was my same age and he was gay so he and I carried on, but the rest went in another direction.
PGN: Did your parents ever know?
GDM: Yes, they were both very supportive. During the court case, my brother and his wife did everything they could to try to turn my mother and sister against me but they didn’t budge in their support. My brother and his wife were very religious — “good Catholics” — and they were very bitter that no one took their side.
PGN: Who was your first boyfriend?
GDM: That would have been my cousin. Then you decide to get rid of the desires so you try praying, date girls thinking that would help — that was painful, trying to feign interest in the opposite sex and be someone you weren’t. I feel bad for the girls, too. It was a tough time. A fun side note, Billy and I went to my 60th reunion and one fellow came up to me and gave me a big kiss and said, “I’ve been waiting 50 years to do that!”
PGN: Nice. So how did you get into politics?
GDM: As I mentioned, my father was a county freeholder. At the time, the political boss of Atlantic County was Nucky Johnson, who unofficially ran the Republican political machine that controlled Atlantic City and Atlantic County from the 1910s-1930s. He’s played by Steve Buscemi in “Boardwalk Empire,” but they call him Nucky Thompson on the show. My father ran in the Republican primaries and beat the incumbent. When he came up for re-election, Nucky ran someone against him, so the head of the Democrats said, “If you run for us, we’ll pull our candidate and put you in, but you have to pledge to support Roosevelt and the Democratic ticket.” He was the Republican incumbent but he said yes and won in a big Democratic sweep. He remained in politics for many years. With me, I took a different slant. When I took over the farm, I must have impressed someone because I moved and went from being an Atlantic County Democrat to the Republican chair of Burlington within a few years. I remained chairman for 17 years and we really gave the county good government, very enlightened. The Republican Party was very different in those days. The Eisenhower Republicans were much more progressive. They certainly weren’t tied in to the religious right and weren’t the antigay bigots we have now. It’s interesting, when the sodomy laws collapsed, it was every bit as much a Republican effort as a Democratic one. The main opponent was the Democratic Sen. Joe Maressa, who had some ties to the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, many of the party leaders got defeated not in the general election, but in the primaries.
PGN: That’s where you seem to lose a lot of the moderates.
GDM: Yeah, it was shocking and that’s how all this extremism began. Since I left, they’ve been getting stronger and stronger, though I did manage to suppress some things before I left. They were trying to get a bunch of books banned from the schools and I intervened and they finally backed off. It was frightening.
BW: They were trying to burn books by gay authors.
GDM: I went to several school-board meetings ready to challenge them but they heard about it and didn’t show up. I was in the battle for civil-partnership rights as well. It’s a shame, the Republican Party today is not the party that I knew. Even Nixon’s daughter said that neither her father or her grandfather-in-law, Dwight Eisenhower, would approve of the party as it is today. You look at these clowns during the debate and …
PGN: Hey, I’ve worked with clowns, don’t insult them.
GDM: [Laughs] That’s right, I’m sorry!
PGN: Were you openly gay as a politician?
GDM: I was very careful and the issue never came up, ever. But I’d decided long ago, if it ever became an issue that I would face it head on and not back down. Even as a Republican, if they asked me to step aside because of that, they would have quite a battle. And they knew that so they just left it alone. It didn’t really come out until the trials with my brother.
BW: What about the spies setting you up?
GDM: Well, that was long ago, back in the ’60s and ’70s when I was first chairman. The Democrats used to send these cute guys to my office to try to entrap me. You did a profile of Mark Beyerle a while back; well, his mother used to work for me and whenever one of these guys came in, I’d make sure she stayed in the room the entire time. Over the years, I did get approached by some pretty prominent figures but I dodged the bullet with most of them!
PGN: Speaking of Democrats, I hear you and Hillary Clinton went to the same school.
GDM: Yes, two schools: Dartmouth and Yale. Bill Clinton too, though I went before them, but we had small classes so I had some pretty sharp kids as classmates: Jerry Brown, Gary Hart, Eleanor Holmes-Norton and Bob Rubin, secretary of the Treasury.
PGN: Let’s talk about the land you helped preserve, nearly 10,000 acres of pristine woodlands. Why was that important to you?
GDM: I wanted to help keep the flora and fauna of the Pine Barrens in their natural state as they should be seen. The Pinelands are a natural treasure, and it’s important to protect them not only for the beauty but for the important underground watersheds.
PGN: So are you a Republican who believes in climate change?
GDM: Well, in truth, it shouldn’t make a difference, whether the problems are man-made or not: It’s a pretty good idea to eliminate as much of the pollutants in the air and water as possible.
PGN: What celebrity chef would you like to have fix you a meal?
GDM: Georges Perrier from Le Bec-Fin. He’s been a friend for a long, long time and he’s a true artist. He’s created so many wonderful things for me and my guests over the years … one of the great chefs of the world. Funny story: Mike McDonough was the manager at Le Bec and he was gay. Someone once suggested that Georges and Mike were an item and he replied, “Puh-lease! The biggest thing on Georges is his nose!”
PGN: An item you still have from childhood?
GDM: [Smiles] My grandmother gave me this little safe, a little bank. I still have it. I wish I had some of my old paper dolls too. I loved them!
PGN: You mentioned his derriere. What’s another favorite part about Billy?
GDM: His big heart. He’s kind and considerate, very generous.
BW: Enough about me. Tell her how you’ve advised presidents!
GDM: During Reagan’s day, they seemed to think highly of me and I was able to attend some very high-level meetings. I’d never lost an election and they would call on me for advice. In 1976, I had a great conversation with Reagan himself when he was trying to unseat Ford for the nomination. Jersey was a pivotal state and I was a delegate. One day, my mother told me I had a call and I said, “Ah, whoever it is, tell them I’ll call back.” She answered, “You might want to take this one.” It was then-Gov. Reagan. He wanted my support for his presidential run but I told him that I thought Ford had done a good job after the Nixon scandal of holding the country together and deserved our support. But I did thank him for the way he handled the Phil Battaglia scandal. Reagan didn’t go after Battaglia for being gay; he blasted the reporters for going after him. I told him that I admired him for it and after that we spoke often.
PGN: There was something also with teachers, wasn’t there?
GDM: Yes, at one point a Congressman named Jim Courter tried to pass an amendment in New Jersey banning gay people from teaching. I refused to support him and in fact started withdrawing from the party all together. At one point, he sent an emissary to me wanting a large contribution, and I told him, “Go back and tell Jim that if he wants that kind of contribution, he’s going to have to assume a position familiar to a group he recently bashed!”
PGN: Wow, and I thought I was just going to learn about cranberries tonight! You need a whole biography.
GDM: Ha. I have to tell you, over the years I’ve been lucky enough to have some glorious meals, a lot of wonderful friends, kind relatives and beautiful, beautiful men. Sad times too, but overall some really good times. n
To suggest a community member for Family Portrait, email [email protected].