Reno Confidential

Despite the Fact that Reno, Nevada, ranks internationally as a mecca for gamblers, matrimony remains its most popular spectator sport. First it was quickie divorces for out-of-towners; now that divorce laws in other states have caught up to Nevada's liberal standard, the city of 126,000 has turned the tables and issues about 35,000 marriage licenses every year--95 percent of them to out-of-staters. A lot of people just like to get married in this capital of glitz. Like the mayor. He liked it so much, he did it three times--twice to the same lady. Indeed, nothing has excited Reno's matrimonial fever more than the stormy union of its twice-married, twice-divorced first couple, Mayor Pete Sferrazza and--as the local newspapers put it--his leggy blonde wife, Leslie, the sizzling subject of the photographs on the next few pages. At the time of Leslie and Pete's first marriage in 1986, each had been married once before. Like other good Reno tales--why does The Misfits come to mind?--theirs starts in divorce court. Leslie's friend Mayor Sferrazza, a working attorney whose mayoral job is only a part-time one, was handling her case against a scion of the Cord auto family. One thing led to another, and as soon as Leslie was single again, she married Pete. All Reno was agog: Its mayor, 41, had teamed up with a first lady who, at 22, was close to half his age. "Mayor Pete Sferrazza and his new bride will honeymoon at Disneyland," teased one media gossip. The newlyweds had actually gone off to Mexico, which was deemed less than enchanting copy. News stories perked up even more after the publication of wedding pictures revealed that the bride wore braces. Love--who can explain it? As first lady, Leslie inherited an exhausting tour of duties: nonstop volunteering for community work, journeying around the country with Pete for his work on the advisory board for the U.S. Conference of Mayors and campaigning all over the state--Pete was running for Congress. "It meant traveling through cow towns for days," she says with a groan. "Once, we had seven campaign dinners in one night. One was country-and-western, the next was ultraformal, and so forth. I had to change my clothes in the car and in closets. It was not exactly the giddy, glamorous life one may imagine. You have to knock on doors from nine in the morning until eight at night. And you travel everywhere." There was the night, for example, that the campaign went to Lovelock during Frontier Days and every hotel was full. The Sferrazzas holed up in a dirt-floored shack, with garbage bags for a mattress. Not surprisingly, the Sferrazzas' marriage eventually hit rough ground. In early 1988, to the delight of Reno's headline writers, it ended--for a while at least--in divorce court. But some habits are hard to break. Within a few months, Leslie married Dr. William Ford, a Reno surgeon. The marriage, Leslie's third, lasted 45 days. That's when she divorced Dr. Ford and remarried Pete--all within six hours. Got all that? Good. There's more. Six months later, the first couple was back in court. The mayor filed for divorce and Leslie discovered another liability of being married to a politician--not one Reno attorney would take her case. So she represented herself--and won what she considers a satisfactory settlement. While a divorce decree has been handed down on grounds of incompatibility, the couple has refrained from having it filed. At technically three divorces and counting, Leslie now has some decisions to make, but she admits to having no regrets. "I have absolutely nothing to hide," she says boldly. Hence, our lovely pictorial. "I am honored to be doing Playboy. This could be very good for our city," says Leslie, adding one last thought: "In the future, I hope the voters of Reno are smart enough to vote on Peter's political, not his personal, life. He's been a fine politician." Would she vote for him? "Yes." Somehow, we suspect this isn't the end of the story.

"I've been dumped on in Reno because of my age and because I'm blonde," says Leslie Sferrazza of her troubles as first lady. "My husbands have been the only men in my life. I've never slept with anyone else. Most twenty-five-year-old women nowadays have had a hell of a lot more men than three."