By G. Wayne Miller, Journal staff writer
Journal photos by Gretchen Ertl

JAMESTOWN —The latest, and probably last, of Bruce Sundlun’s many homes occupies the crest of a hill overlooking Narragansett Bay. On this pleasant afternoon, the sun casts the property in shades of gold. Gulls dot the sky. A breeze brings the wind chimes on the porch to life.

Sundlun sits on his living room couch, awaiting the return of his wife, Soozie, who has spent the day at work.

The ex-governor, 86, is uncharacteristically anxious.

He has invited a writer and a photographer to visit, and he suspects Soozie will be less than ecstatic when she sees them. A man who has made headlines since flying B-17 bombing missions over Germany in Word War II, Sundlun remains one of Rhode Island’s most prominent figures — but his fifth wife has never welcomed media attention.

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She is an unusually attractive woman — tall, fit, stylishly dressed, her long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. She looks younger than her age, 52. Like most of the women with whom Sundlun has been intimately involved during his long life, Soozie is not easily forgotten.

The moment is awkward, but fleeting; Soozie is gracious, and these journalists are, however unwittingly, her guests. Soon, she and her husband are telling stories of themselves. Married in Sundlun’s Jamaican vacation home on New Year’s Day, 2000, they have known each other for 17 years. Soozie was a professional photographer when she met Bruce, and she still is, and also the president and majority stockholder of East Greenwich Photo & Studio.

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“She’s quite a woman,” Sundlun says.

“He’s a real romantic,” says Soozie. She tells the story of the night he proposed, on bended knee, in her kitchen. Sundlun questions a small detail of her account, but Soozie just rolls her eyes. Some things you are used to after 17 years.

“Have you seen the ring?” Soozie says.

She extends her hand, displaying a flawless diamond set in platinum. The stone is so large that it begs an impolite question: How many carats?

“A little over five,” Soozie replies.

“It’s over six,” Sundlun says. “You’re telling me? I bought the insurance!”

Soozie rolls her eyes. Some things she is used to.

Sundlun, whom many perceive as an arrogant man who thrived on confrontation — a man whom critics famously disparaged as “Captain Blowhard” — does not persist. As he sometimes observes, not facetiously, he has learned after much experience the two most important words in a relationship: “Yes, Dear.

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Soozie continues, relating her conviction that she and her husband were destined to meet. She first saw him while photographing an event at a Providence temple in 1989 (when Sundlun was still married to Marjorie), and she experienced the sensation of déjÀ vu. “If you believe in past lives,” she says, and she does, “I really believe I knew him.” She believes in future lives, as well, and Sundlun has opened his mind to the possibility. The two have vowed that whoever passes first will attempt to contact the survivor.

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The Sundluns moved into their home last year after an extensive remodeling that included an open space on the second floor that Soozie calls “our spiritual room,” which she offers to show her guests. A wall of photos lines the stairway. Many of Soozie’s relatives are displayed, along with many of Sundlun’s. There is his mother, whom Sundlun remembers as “a beautiful, lovely woman.” There is his father, whom he remembers less kindly. “A tough bastard,” Sundlun says. “He wasn’t an affectionate father. And as soon as I got old enough to stand on my own two feet, I went my own way.”

There is a sepia-toned portrait of the curly-haired, 8-year-old Bruce with his only sibling, brother Wally, who died of appendicitis shortly after the day in 1938 that Sundlun graduated from prep school. In this shot, Bruce looks dreamy and distant. Wally seems uncomplicated and sweet, a happy boy of 4.

“He was completely different than me,” Sundlun says. “He wasn’t as intense, he wasn’t as competitive, people liked him better than they liked me. He was just a nice human being.”

Sundlun laughs softly.

“No one ever called me a nice human being — although Soozie’s gone pretty far toward changing me into a nice human being. I think basically I am a nice human being.

“But I’m 86 when I say that.”

BORN ON Jan. 19, 1920, Bruce George Sundlun was the first child of Jan Zelda (Colitz) and Walter Irving Sundlun, whose parents came to America from Lithuania. Jan and Walter owned a jewelry store in Pawtucket, which they sold after Walter earned his law degree and entered private practice. The Sundluns lived on the East Side of Providence — a Jewish family in what was then a predominantly Christian neighborhood. Jews were not universally accepted, as young Bruce learned.

“I think I was the first Jewish kid to ever go to the Gordon School,” says Sundlun, who started in kindergarten.

Sundlun made lifelong friends at Gordon, including the late Sen. John Chafee, but he also experienced anti-Semitism. He remembers competing in a foot race during field day at the end of third grade. “I won hands down,” Sundlun says. “It was the first time I ever realized I had any athletic ability or could run fast. And the two guys who came in second threw me down on the ground and called me a dirty Jew.”

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For fourth grade, Walter and Jan sent Sundlun to public school, where more bigotry awaited. Girls confided that their parents forbid socializing with him because of his religion. “Kike!” taunted the bullies who lay in wait on a street Bruce had to cross walking home from school.

Fearful, the boy sought his father’s counsel. “Punch them in the face,” Walter advised, “then run like hell.” Bruce did.

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There was nothing endearing about the father Sundlun remembers. Walter had a bad temper, his son says. He was sparing with praise. He was demanding and judgmental. He was — as Sundlun laughingly describes in a rare instance of self-ridicule — “really arrogant.” Somehow, Jan kept her gentle spirit.

“My mother was as sweet as Soozie,” Sundlun says. “I never heard anybody say a bad word about her — ever — and they leaned over backwards to praise her. She was a lovely person. And she had to live with that son of a bitch, my father.”

Years after his childhood, Sundlun, by then a wealthy lawyer, traveled with his father to the Boston hospital where his mother lay terminally ill. On March 5, 1958, she died, her husband and son at her side. Walter and Bruce headed back to Providence.

“I was driving the car,” Sundlun remembers. “Somewhere there was a pay phone on the highway. My father said: ‘Stop the car, I want to make a call.’ He called his girlfriend and told her my mother had died. I didn’t like that.”

But Bruce said nothing to Walter.

“He’d have lost his temper if I had.”

VICTORY DAY 2006 dawns hot and humid, and by mid-afternoon, the tarmac at Quonset State Airport shimmers under the summer sun. A breeze provides small relief to the men who are tending an immaculately restored B-17 bomber that has stopped in Rhode Island on a national tour. Nearly 13,000 of these World War II-era planes were built, but fewer than 100 survive — and of those, just a handful are airworthy.

Sundlun is going for a ride. He arrives early and finds a shady spot to wait. He wears tassel loafers without socks, cotton slacks, a blue shirt, and a double-breasted jacket. Sundlun was in England during the war when he discovered double-breasted attire. He made it his signature style.

Inevitably, Sundlun has aged since he left office in 1995.

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Sundlun takes off his jacket, unbuttons his shirt, and bares his left shoulder.

“Did I ever show you this?”

It’s a blue-and-gold tattoo of the insignia of the Army Air Corps’ 8th Air Force, in which Sundlun piloted a B-17 on his bombing runs over Germany. Sundlun was governor when he received the tattoo, after swearing an artist on Atwells Avenue to secrecy.

“I never showed it when I was governor, but now I don’t care!”

Departure time approaches. Stuart and Peter, two of Sundlun’s three sons, are visiting this week, and they are accompanying him on the ride. Peter’s wife, Karen, and their 4-year-old son, Hunter, one of Sundlun’s two grandchildren, are also flying.

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After a safety briefing, Sundlun enters the B-17 on a ladder near the tail. He proceeds forward, through the waist gunners’ area, the radio room, and across the bomb-bay catwalk to the cockpit, where he straps himself into a jump seat behind the co-pilot. The others take their seats, in claustrophobic compartments defined by exposed ribs and control wires running along the ceiling, which the safety officer has cautioned the passengers not to touch. This is no jetliner. Someone who has never been inside a B-17 imagines a coffin.

The pilot throttles up and the plane moves to the runway, brakes squeaking. “That doesn’t sound good,” says Karen, whose husband is a pilot for Delta Airlines. As it gains speed, the plane vibrates and the sound deafens. “I can understand why his hearing is shot,” shouts Stuart, a businessman. “Imagine doing this for three, four years.”

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The pilot steers east of Jamestown on a course toward the south shore of Newport. The plane passes over Bailey’s Beach Club, where Sundlun is one of the few Jewish members, and then over Newport’s Cliff Walk and a waterfront mansion named Seaward, which Sundlun owned when he was governor and was married to his fourth wife, Marjorie. The plane passes Middletown’s Clambake Club, another exclusive, mostly Christian institution to which Sundlun belongs. After reaching Portsmouth, the plane circles back to Quonset, landing, after 20 minutes, with a violent shudder.

Sundlun alights and walks to the nose of the B-17. His thoughts are drawn to 1943, when he and a crew of nine left America in one of these bombers on assignment to England.

“It’s amazing,” Sundlun says. “This was the biggest airplane in the world then. It’s not very big.”

SUNDLUN LEFT Providence’s Classical High School, where he lettered in track and field, setting state records, after his junior year. His father had arranged for him to complete high school at Tabor Academy, in Marion, Mass. A prep school diploma, Walter believed, would improve his chances of admission to an elite university.

Sundlun entered Williams College in September 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland a year later, Sundlun, a sophomore, suspected that America eventually would be drawn into the conflict — and when it was, young men like him would be ordered to duty. Ground soldier seemed too perilous and he was no swimmer, which made him leery of the Navy. He decided flying was his best ambition.

In the summer of 1940, Sundlun earned his pilot’s license in the Civilian Pilot Training Program, which President Roosevelt, concerned with the deteriorating situation in Europe, had established. Sundlun’s first plane was a Piper Cub. He flew out of Theodore Francis Green State Airport , where, decades later, a new terminal would be named for him in recognition of his efforts as governor to modernize and expand the facility.

Sundlun was among Williams’s finest scholar-athletes, and in the first semester of his senior year, he was accepted into Harvard Law School. It was the fall of 1941.

On Dec. 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Days later, Sundlun enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

By the summer of 1943, the 23-year-old lieutenant was qualified to pilot a B-17. That August, he and the crew of Damn Yankee flew to the Grafton Underwood base, north of London. Bombers from the airfield were striking deep inside Germany.

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Sundlun’s 13th bombing run began the morning of Dec. 1, 1943, when Damn Yankee took off with several squadrons of B-17s. The plane had hit a factory in the city of Solingen when flak took out an engine. A second of the four engines went, leaving the aircraft difficult to control — and vulnerable to Luftwaffe fighters. One strafed Damn Yankee, killing the tail gunner and further crippling the aircraft. With the plane unable to climb, the only evasive action Sundlun could take now was dropping down. When the plane reached 3,000 feet, Sundlun gave the order to bail.

He was the last man out. He had parachuted just once before.

HE LANDED in a field in Nazi-occupied Belgium. Damn Yankee had crashed nearby, and a crowd was gathering around the wreckage. One man spoke English, and Sundlun, who knew no French, spoke with him long enough to learn which way German soldiers would probably come. He ran in the opposite direction, down a dirt road.

“I’m thinking, ‘How the hell am I going to hide?’ And I’m thinking barns and haystacks. Well, the story on haystacks was that the Germans would spray a haystack with a machine gun instead of looking through it. I didn’t want to do that.” An Edgar Allen Poe story, “The Purloined Letter,” came to mind. In it, a letter has eluded discovery because it was hidden in plain sight. Sundlun decided a field would be his letter.

“I’m looking at plowed fields, furrows — deep furrows. I figure if I get down in one of those furrows, lay down, squirm around, get below the furrow — unless [a German] looks right up the furrow I’m lying in, he’ll never see me. All he’ll see is a vacant field. So that’s what I did.” Dragging a branch to erase his footsteps, Sundlun walked to the middle of a field, tossed the branch away, and lay on his back. The hours passed and he heard Germans, but they kept going.

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When darkness fell, Sundlun rose. He found a farmhouse, where a sympathizer put him in touch with the Belgian Underground. Sundlun spent several days in safe houses, then was smuggled into Paris, where he shared an apartment with four other Allied soldiers. He was learning to speak French — but after a drunken fight at a New Year’s Eve party, he lost the Parisians’ support. With a fake ID, his dog tags, and the clothes he wore, nothing more, Sundlun headed south. It was early 1944.

He was on his own now, a fugitive Jew in a land overrun by people who were bent on genocide. Sundlun remembered advice that a priest in Providence had given him.

If you find yourself in trouble, the priest had said, go to the nearest Catholic Church and tell the priest your problem. He may not be able to solve it — but he will know more people in that area than any other single person. And he will find somebody who has some skill or training who can help.

Leaving Paris, Sundlun explained his situation to a priest after showing his dog tags, which listed his religion. Sundlun believed in being forthright. He did not want the blood of someone who’d unknowingly assisted a Jew on his hands.

Can you find me some food and a place to sleep? Sundlun asked.

The priest did, as did the next priest, and successive priests after that, none ever refusing Sundlun as he neared the Spanish border. Avoiding the risks of bus or train, Sundlun rode bicycles that he stole, a new one every day. He passed his nights alone in barns and cellars.

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SUNDLUN REACHED Biarritz, a coastal town near Spain, and hired a fisherman to bring him to safety hidden in the hold of a boat. The man took Sundlun’s money and sailed at sunset. When morning came, the boat was back in Biarritz. The fisherman offered to try again that evening, but Sundlun figured he was being duped. He figured that when his money ran out, the fisherman would kill him.

So Sundlun traveled 50 miles inland, to a village in the Pyrenees, where a priest helped him find someone to take him over the mountains. A snowstorm ruined that plan. Sundlun returned to the priest, who told him about the Maquis, a resistance group that was waging guerrilla war against the Germans near the Swiss border, almost 500 miles away.

This is where you ought to go, the priest said. There are a lot of your friends up there.

Sundlun set off on a stolen bike, and reached the French city of Belfort some two weeks later. He contacted a member of the Maquis.

We can use you, the man said.

Code-named “Salamander,” after the secretive amphibian that leads a double life on land and in water, the American pilot joined French and foreign fighters who raided German convoys under cover of darkness. The guerrillas had the upper hand, since they knew the territory and the Nazis, retreating from Italy, did not.

“We would play it cool until sometime during the night, then we’d go in and attack their transport, find their fuel trucks, and shoot ’em up and try and set ’em on fire. The Germans would fight back and there’d be some gunfire, but we’d do more damage to them than they’d do to us ’cause we knew every rock and tree.”

Sundlun had been near Belfort for several weeks when Andrey A. Vlasov, an infamous Russian general who had defected to Hitler, arrived with his troops. Accounts of what Vlasov did next spread rapidly through the Maquis.

“Vlasov rode into a little village,” Sundlun remembers, “grabbed the first 10 women and children that he saw, put them up against a wall, and machine-gunned them down. Then he got on a public-address system and said: ‘I don’t like doing that. No general would like doing that, it’s not our job to shoot women and children. My job, however, is to stop this resistance and this is how I’m going to do it. Every day around noon, I’m going to shoot some women and children until this resistance stops. And when it stops, I want you to turn over to us the foreigners we know are running the show.’ ”

A short while later, an English-speaking man approached Sundlun on a motorcycle.

Vlasov just shot another bunch of kids and women, the man said. My orders are to tell you to get the hell out of here.

On May 5, 1944, Sundlun crossed into Switzerland. His country would later honor him with the Purple Heart, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and an Air Medal with oak leaf cluster. France would award him the Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur.

THE YOUNG Sundlun had left for college intending to make a clean break with his father, but nothing about their relationship was that simple. The two wrote regularly while Sundlun was at Williams and at war, and their correspondence was harmonious, even affectionate. “Soloed first in class after three hours 20 minutes. Happy. Amazed. Love, Bruce,” reads the telegram Sundlun sent home on Sept. 14, 1942. “Dearest Mother and Dad,” he wrote in August 1943, after arriving in England. “I hope that you have not been unduly worried since last seeing me and I hasten to tell you that everything has gone along smoothly.”

Walter took his son’s letters to local reporters, who used them in writing stories of this bomber-pilot hero who not so long before had been called a kike in his hometown. “Lt. Bruce G. Sundlun, son of Mr. and Mrs. Walter I. Sundlun of 195 Arlington Avenue, was one of the Flying Fortress pilots who decided ‘to win the war in a week’ by making four raids in five days, he has written his parents,” began a story in the Nov. 6, 1943, Providence Evening Bulletin. “His ‘Damn Yank’ bomber would just not be left behind despite engine trouble at take-off,” read the caption to Sundlun’s photo.

Sixty-three years later, Sundlun cannot explain his father’s contradictions. “He used to brag about me to others, but I never got any praise from him,” Sundlun says. “Never.”

A week after Sundlun’s plane failed to return from the Solingen run the War Department notified Walter and Jan that their son was missing in action. The Germans gave no comprehensive accounting of downed airmen they’d captured — but they did release a handful of names during their nightly English-language broadcasts. Walter listened to a short-wave radio for hours every night in the hope of hearing his son’s name. A Providence Journal story in January 1944 stated: “Sundlun is probably the most indefatigable listener to German propaganda broadcasts, which are baited by the wily Nazis with this tempting morsel: fresh and authentic news of loved ones missing in action who have turned up as prisoners of war.”

The months passed and Walter sacrificed sleep, but he never heard his son’s name. When Walter and Jan learned, on Mother’s Day 1944, that Bruce was alive, the news made the front page.

“ ‘It was the greatest gift any mother could receive on Mother’s day,’ Mrs. Sundlun said happily,” the newspaper account read. “She nodded at her husband, who was telephoning and laughing heartily. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is a sweet sound to me. It is the first time he has laughed since we heard Bruce was missing.’ ”

ONE EVENING before Election Day 2006, Sundlun drives into Providence in his $65,000 Volkswagen Phaeton, plate 525, a number that he inherited from his father. Sundlun returned from wartime England not only fond of double-breasted suits, but also Jaguar automobiles. He drove only Jaguars until three years ago, when, frustrated with the car’s performance in snow, he test-drove a Phaeton.

“I swore up and down I’d never buy a German car. Took me 15 minutes to change my mind!” Sundlun laughs mightily. “I’m a real principled fella!”

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Sundlun parks on Federal Hill and walks to the headquarters of the Charlie Fogarty for Governor campaign. Sundlun serves on numerous boards and teaches two courses at the University of Rhode Island: Political Leadership in the fall semester, and Politics in Rhode Island in the spring. During an election season, he is also busy supporting Democratic candidates.

Wearing his customary jacket and a URI ball cap, the former governor joins the crowd outside the lieutenant governor’s campaign headquarters. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry takes the microphone, sprinkling his endorsement of Fogarty with a joke about conservative pundit Ann Coulter having rabies.

“That’s a good line!” Sundlun says.

Fogarty pays tribute to the last person in his party to lead Rhode Island.

“I want to recognize our last Democratic governor, who’s here with us tonight. I know he’s over there somewhere: Governor Bruce Sundlun!”

The crowd applauds. Sundlun waves. Well-wishers line up to shake his hand.

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“Governor, thank you for your extraordinary leadership under very difficult circumstances. Bruce Sundlun was one of the most effective governors Rhode Island ever had.”

The speeches end and Sundlun heads down Atwells Avenue to a private fundraiser the Massachusetts senator is hosting for Fogarty.

“If I don’t go,” Sundlun laments, “Kerry will be pissed.”

SUNDLUN COMPLETED his senior year at Williams College in 1946, a year after the war ended. In 1949, he graduated from Harvard Law School and went to Washington as an assistant U.S. Attorney. He switched to private practice, leaving law in 1970 to become president of an executive jet company. Six years later, he was named president and CEO of Rhode Island-based The Outlet Company, which he transformed into the highly profitable Outlet Communications. At its peak, Outlet had 16 radio and television stations, including Channel 10. The company’s stock sold for $4 when Sundlun took over. It sold for $68 when he was done a decade later.

Success brought extravagant wealth. After owning a succession of homes in Washington, Sundlun bought a 200-acre estate in Virginia and named it Salamander, after his old Underground name. He bought a vacation home in Jamaica. He bought Seaward, with its five bedrooms and 4.5 waterfront acres. He bought a condominium on South Main Street in Providence. He bought an interest in the Biltmore Hotel. He hosted black-tie dinners and wore English riding attire on fox hunts at Salamander Farm. He was named to America’s Social Register and Newport’s Green Book. His name was linked to glamorous women.

Politics captivated him, as it had his father, unsuccessful in two tries for U.S. Senate. The younger Sundlun planned the inaugural parade for President Kennedy, served as chairman of reelection finance committees for his friend Sen. Claiborne Pell, and was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention several times. He served on statewide commissions and the Providence School Board. In 1986, at the age of 66, he ran for governor against incumbent Ed DiPrete.

DiPrete thrashed him, two-to-one. DiPrete won the rematch two years later — barely. In 1990, Sundlun, tapping into his fortune to finance his campaign, ran a third time. He buried DiPrete, who was mired in scandal that eventually sent him to prison.

Sundlun planned an imperial inauguration that included a B-17 flying over the State House. When the celebration ended, the new governor would have to confront one of the worst budget crises in state history: a deficit of almost $200 million that DiPrete had left him. That was a tall order, but the evening before he took office, Sundlun received worse news. The Rhode Island Share and Deposit Indemnity Corp., which insured 45 banks and credit unions, had collapsed. Untold numbers of people risked losing their life’s savings.

Even now, the memory rankles Sundlun. “When I look back at the mess I inherited from that f---ing DiPrete…,” he says, too angry to finish.

Hours after taking the oath of office, Sundlun declared an extraordinary “banking emergency,” freezing almost $2 billion held by 350,000 depositors. Sundlun eventually engineered a plan that restored all of the money, but protesters hounded him for months. Some burned him in effigy. Some compared him to Hitler.

The governor was unbowed. He would later say that he modeled himself after President Truman, whose motto was: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Sundlun counts his resolution of the RISDIC crisis among his proudest achievements, along with creation of the RiteCare program, overhaul of the workers’ compensation system, and support for building the Rhode Island Convention Center, the Providence Place mall, and expansion of T.F. Green Airport.

“I’m proud as hell of my terms as governor,” Sundlun says. “I make no bones about it.”

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THE FORMER Kara Hewes, 31, Sundlun’s only daughter, a TV anchor in Hartford, offers her father fresh fruit and muffins in the living room of the weekend house in Newport that she shares with her husband, Dennis House, also a TV journalist.

Kara is the child of an affair. Sundlun, who married his third wife in August 1974 — eleven months before Kara was born — paid Judith Hewes $30,000 to settle a paternity suit. Until 1992, Sundlun had seen his daughter once, when she was a baby. He got richer while Judith, divorced from another man, raised Kara by herself in Michigan.

“From the time that I was really little, my mom had told me, ‘Oh, your father is a man named Bruce Sundlun,’ ” Kara says. “She used to tell me: ‘You look just like your father, you act like your father.’ ”

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The father and the daughter indeed look strikingly similar, and they share mannerisms and the ability to fill a room. “A case for genetics, I guess!” Kara says with a girlish laugh. Sundlun nods in agreement.

Kara was watching the national news the night of Nov. 8, 1988, when “Bruce Sundlun” flashed across the screen in an election story. So he lives in Rhode Island, Kara thought. If I want to find him, seems like it wouldn’t be hard. Sundlun made headlines again in 1990, when he was finally elected governor. Two more years passed, and Kara, 17, decided to contact him, in a one-page letter she wrote on lined paper: “This is what I do, this is what I like, I’m your daughter, my mom has told me about you, I really would be curious to meet you,” was the essence of her introduction. She wrote “personal and confidential” on the envelope and mailed it to the Rhode Island State House. A short while later, an aide to the governor telephoned. Sundlun wanted to meet her.

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Kara flew by herself to Boston, and a Sundlun staffer drove her to the governor’s South Main Street condominium. It was the fall of 1992.

“She had a plaid skirt on,” Sundlun says.

“No,” his daughter says.

“No?”

“No! I actually had gray slacks on and a gray sweater. He greeted me the way he greets everybody: He gave me a firm handshake, ‘Hi, Bruce Sundlun.’ I remember him looking me up and down and he said: ‘You’re one of the smallest women I’ve ever seen. Your mom wasn’t that small, was she?’ ”

“I said what?”

“ ‘You’re one of the smallest women I’ve ever seen.’ I’m petite now, but I was maybe not even 100 pounds then.”

Sundlun ventured that Kara was about as tall as her mother.

Kara, who is five-three, corrected him. “I said: ‘No, my mom’s five-foot-six.’ ”

Sundlun has lost track of the story. He didn’t hear what Kara just said.

“Her mother’s a tall woman,” he explains. “How tall is she, five-seven, -eight, -nine?”

“Five-feet-six.”

“Six?”

“She looks taller,” Kara says.

“She wears high heels, then,” says Sundlun.

“She’s got long legs.”

“I would have sworn she was taller.”

KARA AND Sundlun brought photo albums to their secret meeting in 1992, and they spent the afternoon catching up on their lives. Kara was an outstanding student, a high school senior bound for college. Sundlun talked of being bullied as a kid, of being in Nazi-occupied Europe, of his years in Washington.

“We saw a lot of similarities in each other,” Kara says.

“I liked her,” says Sundlun. “I looked forward to having some sort of a relationship as life went on.”

Nonetheless, lawyers got involved. Sundlun agreed to pay for Kara’s college tuition and in June 1993, the girl and her attorney took the relationship public. Sundlun invited Kara back to Rhode Island, this time for an overnight stay at Seaward. The next day, father and daughter appeared together at a State House press conference, the likes of which Rhode Island had never seen. Both spoke of their hopes for a happy future together.

Their hopes were realized. Kara spent the summer of 1993 in Newport, developing friendships with Sundlun’s sons, who were many years older. Kara changed her last name to Sundlun while at the University of Michigan, where she majored in communications and political science. Having decided against being a lawyer, she entered broadcasting, Sundlun’s old business.

Today, she lives closer to Sundlun than any of his sons — Peter, the pilot, who lives in Virginia; Stuart, the businessman, from New York City; and Tracy, a sports marketer in California. Kara, with a home near Hartford and her Newport weekend place, sees her father often. They stay in daily touch by e-mail or telephone, if not in person.

“She’s got a better personality than I do,” says Sundlun. “She’s naturally nice, although I’m getting nicer.”

“Thanks to Soozie,” Kara says.

Sundlun agrees. Years ago, Sundlun says, he would try logic to boost Soozie when she was down. “I used to try and ‘lawyer’ her out of it — I’d try and take a problem apart and break it down into its small pieces. She’s taught me. Now I shut up, put my arms around her or hold her hand or kiss her a bit, just let her know that there’s somebody there.”

The noon hour approaches, and Sundlun and his daughter decide to visit Bailey’s Beach. He parks his Phaeton in a space marked with his initials, BS. Sundlun was among the first Jews voted into the club, formally known as the Spouting Rock Beach Association. He was blackballed on his first application, then accepted on his second, some 30 years ago. Now Kara and her husband, Dennis, also belong. Like the East Side of Providence, Bailey’s has changed, albeit less dramatically.

Sundlun greets Yusha Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s elderly stepbrother, and grand dame Eileen Slocum. Sheldon Whitehouse’s wife, Sandra, and Claiborne Pell’s son Toby are also here. Sundlun, Kara and Dennis visit the buffet, then take a table on the beachfront porch. Sundlun used to eat “anything and everything,” but now he avoids red meat and fat. Lunch today is shrimp cocktail, a salad, and a blueberry tart.

Sundlun never lacks for a story, and the one he tells now involves a friend who was in trouble the night before. The friend reached Sundlun on his new BlackBerry, but Sundlun, unfamiliar with the machine, couldn’t call out. The Newport police wouldn’t let him use their phone, which angered him. He finally found one in a restaurant. On and on Sundlun goes, in excruciating detail, until, mercifully, he ends.

He asks Kara how she would have handled the situation.

“I would have had a cell phone I know how to use!” she says.

SUNDLUN’S FIRST romantic interest was a Warwick girl who was a year younger. “A beautiful blonde,” Sundlun says. “I was a high school kid who had his father’s Cadillac to drive around.”

Sundlun dated girls while in college, while in the service, and while he waited in Switzerland to come home from war. He dated girls in law school. An album he kept in 1947 shows photos of young women in his circle. Most are beautiful. Many have nicknames: Breezy, D.O., Peanuts. Many are from prominent families. Sundlun had undeniable appeal, but asked to define it, he says today:

“Beats … me — ask them!” He turns serious. “I don’t know…. Speculating, I had had to deal with this bloody world since I was a little kid. I was a stranger to the world I was living in, and I wasn’t a welcome stranger. I got along on the fact that I was good-looking, and I got along on the fact that I was a good athlete as a kid and I liked women and women liked me.”

In 1949, Sundlun married his first wife, Madeleine (Schiffer) Eisner, a divorcee. She had Sundlun’s three sons. They divorced after Sundlun met Pamela (Soldwedel) Barrett, a sculptor whom he married in 1966 after she had left her first husband. “I was head over heels in love with Pam and we had a great romance,” Sundlun says. Marriage was something less. One night, Sundlun says, “I lost my temper and I slapped her face. I’m ashamed of that.”

Pam divorced him.

Sundlun was single for several years, during which he fell for the widowed Barbara FitzGerald, a champion of Washington-area children’s causes who had acted in movies and on Broadway. FitzGerald, English by birth, had three children and two grandchildren. Sundlun proposed marriage in Bermuda, where they spent much of the weekend behind closed doors. “We went to bed and we got all through and she said: ‘Now tell me, have you ever screwed a grandmother before?’ That’s exactly what she said! I roared with laughter! I still think it’s funny!”

But had he? “No!” he says.

Barbara developed terminal cancer before they could marry. She died in 1973.

“I lived in the hospital the last three or four weeks of her life,” Sundlun says. “I put a cot in her room and I slept there. I tried to put my feelings aside and do every bloody thing I could think of to make her feel comfortable.” Sundlun is uncustomarily wistful. “She was a wonderful woman,” he says.

Joyanne Carter, his third wife, was FitzGerald’s close friend — and also a widow. Sundlun married her in August 1974, 11 months before Kara was born. Sundlun has few regrets in his life, but this relationship is one of them. “I would not have married Joy if I had it to do over again,” he says. “It was all right as long as we were living on the farm in Virginia and spending the summers in Newport. When I got the job being the head of The Outlet Co. and had to go to work every day running department stores and broadcast stations in Providence, R.I., that wasn’t for Joy. She didn’t want to live up here at all. So she invited me for lunch one day in Washington and after dessert she said. ‘Well, now you’re deserving of a present.’ She served me with papers for a divorce.” It was 1983.

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Two years later, the divorce granted, Sundlun married Marjorie Lee, a woman two decades younger, whom he had met in 1972. Like Sundlun’s first two wives, Marjorie was divorced. Warm and vivacious, with a gift for making people feel comfortable, a quality Sundlun lacked, Marjorie became an asset on the campaign trail. As first lady, she was a balance to her often-combative husband.

Nine months after Sundlun began his first term as governor, Marjorie was walking with a childhood friend in her home-town in upstate New York when an elderly driver struck and nearly killed her. Doctors saved her life, but her brain was badly damaged.

Governor Sundlun flew to the hospital, where, in a news conference to discuss his wife’s condition, he wept, one of the few times in his life he has. Marjorie was never the same. Sundlun says he visited daily during the weeks she spent in a Massachusetts rehabilitation hospital, her progress measured in tiny increments. For months, he wore a pin with the letter M.

Eventually, Marjorie was discharged to Seaward, but the marriage had changed: Marjorie had lost interest in intimacy, Sundlun says. “It hit some nerve. The doctors explained it: ‘It’s just something you’re going to have to live with.’ ”

Sundlun, meanwhile, had met Soozie, and in 1999, he and Marjorie divorced. Soozie, who has two grown children (and two grandchildren), had divorced by then, too.

“Marjorie’s a good person, a very good person,” Sundlun says. “Life has not treated her very well. I don’t have any regrets that we got divorced. I got her a big settlement from the insurance company. When we sold the Newport house she got all of the money. So she’s adequately financially cared for. She seems to be satisfied and happy.” She lives in Providence.

THE SIGN on Sundlun’s door at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston reads “Governor in Residence,” a title he has held since leaving politics in 1995.

Sundlun has decorated his office with models of every airplane he ever flew, nine in all, including ones he piloted as a reservist during the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Berlin Airlift. He has photos of Damn Yankee’s crew, four of whom died on their final mission. Honorary degrees fill a wall, and the bookcases feature photos of his wife, children and grandchildren, and of him with Presidents Kennedy and Clinton. He has a framed letter from Jimmy Carter.

On this morning, Sundlun is at his desk, his reading glasses perched on his nose. He is thumbing through a catalog.

“I’m buying baby books!” he says.

Kara and Dennis are expecting their first child, and Kara has just e-mailed the initial sonogram to her father. The baby is healthy, and now the world can know that Bruce Sundlun’s third grandchild is on the way. Mom’s Almanac and The Little Big Book of Pregnancy are two of the titles he is getting Kara.

Sundlun is a tireless reader, but he has never written a book — until now. He’s writing his memoir.

“Soozie is pushing the hell out of me,” says Sundlun. “She says, ‘You’ve had a very unusual life and you’ve got a lot of children and grandchildren. They ought to have something to refer to.’ ”

Does he agree his life has been unusual?

“After having been told so by so many people, yes — but really, when I was living it, I didn’t think it was.”

Sundlun’s mother and father will be in the memoir, of course. He will have only praise for his mother. Not so for Walter, who died 30 years ago this fall.

“The temple wasn’t full when my father died,” Sundlun says. “It was full when my brother died. It was full when my mother died.”

As he waited by the limousine that would take him to the mausoleum where his father would rest, Sundlun, accompanied by family friend Arthur Darman, was approached by a stranger.

“A young man comes up to me and says, ‘Are you Bruce Sundlun?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, I just want to tell you how wonderful your father was to me. I’m a lawyer. We both had offices in the Hospital Trust building.’ ” The lawyer told Sundlun how grateful he was for Walter’s encouragement and help on several difficult cases.

“It went on for 10 minutes,” Sundlun recalls, “and I’m saying, ‘thank you, thank you.’ Eventually the guy pushed off. Arthur Darman hits me with his elbow and says: ‘Who the hell was he talking about?’ I roared with laughter! ’Cause I never saw any attitude like that, and Arthur knew I’d never seen it and probably Arthur himself had never seen it!”

If this episode makes it to Sundlun’s memoir, it might be tempered by a gentler assessment of Walter. Soozie believes that some of what made her husband so successful — the ambition, the resilience, the competitiveness and work ethic — are qualities he inherited from his father.

“Soozie thinks I’m too hard on him,” Sundlun says. “And maybe I am.”

AS HE works on his memoir, Sundlun has asked friends to remind him of stories he has told them. He is sorting through nine decades of photos, scrapbooks, documents and clippings, stored in dozens of boxes in his basement and boxes now cluttering his office. A URI library holds the gubernatorial collection.

Sundlun says his book will be a straightforward narrative, with no self-reflection, no philosophical musings, no attempt to answer the many whys: Why was my father a bastard? Why was I shot down? Why did I survive? Why was Marjorie injured? Why did Kara come into my life? Why Soozie?

Why a life so large?

“I’ll answer your question with a question, which is one of my habits,” Sundlun says. “And I’ll prove it to you with a live witness.”

Sundlun calls in Cecelia Richard, his longtime executive assistant.

“What’s my attitude toward ‘why?’ ” Sundlun says.

“ ‘Why?’ We don’t need why. We need who, what, where.”

“That’s only three. Who, what, when, where and how.”

“He doesn’t care about why,” Cecelia says.

“I will talk about ‘why’ with you all night long if you want,” Sundlun says, “drinking beer or whatever, but what the hell. When push comes to shove, why doesn’t make any difference. You’ve got to take action. Why doesn’t enter into it.”

SOOZIE AND BRUCE stand in their “spiritual room,” the open space on the second floor of their Jamestown house.

An orchid and a statue of Kuan Yin, the Chinese Goddess of Compassion, rest atop a wooden chest. A large guardian angel carved by a Jamaican artist, a wedding gift from the Sundluns to themselves, sits on the floor. A wall of windows provides a view of Narragansett Bay. Another wall holds what Soozie says is her favorite photo of the untold thousands she has taken over the years.

It consists of shadows — hers and her dog’s — on a leaf-covered boulder.

When she showed it to a friend after taking it some 15 years ago, Soozie says, the friend was astonished: A leaf in Soozie’s shadow, the friend observed, was shaped like a guardian angel, and a small shadow beneath the dog looked like an angel, too. There is a third image, which Soozie interprets as the outline of Father Time. Things like this, she believes, are not coincidental.

Soozie was raised in Florida, where her father, a World War II veteran, liked to gaze with her at the stars. A heart attack killed him when she was 13. Soozie’s adolescence was difficult. Sometimes then, and still sometimes now, she feels her father’s presence.

“I definitely believe there’s something after you die. Maybe I have to believe that because I miss my daddy so bad.”

Bruce may not ask the whys, but Soozie does. Meeting her husband was no random encounter, she believes; it was predestined.

“What’s the chance of someone from Pensacola, Fla., marrying the governor of Rhode Island? In my wildest dreams, that was not going to happen.”

Soozie smiles. "On most days," she says, "I'm glad."

"And on those other days," Bruce says, "I don't want to be around!"

Evening approaches. Soozie decides that the light is finally right for the photos she will shoot of Bruce's son Peter, Peter's wife, Karen, and their son Hunter, who have been staying with the Sundluns for the weekend.

The Sundluns walk to nearby Sunset Beach, and Soozie and an assistant from East Greenwich Photo turn busy. The Jamestown Bridge dominates the background. One of Bruce's favorite memories as governor is driving across in a convertible when the bridge opened in October 1992.

"Sweetheart, let's get a picture of you and Hunter," Soozie says. Bruce walks to the water's edge. "Hold Grandpa Bruce's hand," Soozie says.

Bruce strikes a pose. His wife wants something better.

"Smile," she says. "Give me that political smile."

Soozie asks her assistant to shoot her with Bruce.

"Bend your head over like you like me," Soozie tells her husband.

"Give him a kiss on the cheek," the assistant instructs Soozie.

The sun is heading down. Dinner beckons.

Soozie and Bruce walk home, holding hands.

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The staff