All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (12 page)

Of course, by that time, Hart also must have known—subconsciously, if not consciously—that he had set events in motion that would make his “premonition” much more likely to come true. He had only recently exposed himself and his campaign to exactly the kind of relentless, trivial scrutiny he feared. But this was something Shore had no way of knowing.

Running for president in the modern age—like being president—is a uniquely isolating experience. You are surrounded, always, by supporters and handlers, and yet none can fully share in the constant absurdity of being the central figure in a campaign, and none can ever be entirely themselves in your presence. Often they lie to you outright—about next week’s schedule, or about when you’re stopping for lunch, or about how many people will show up at the next rally. You do not go home to your family or take the weekend off; if you’re lucky, you get five hours in a hotel and thirty minutes to exercise before the sun comes up. (There is a surreal scene, in a long-lost
Frontline
documentary about his 1984 campaign, of Hart, dressed in suit and tie, frantically squeezing in some weightlifting while his aides brief him on strategy.) You become, in a sense, the CEO of your own life, the titular head of an existence that is said to be yours, but that is in every practical sense orchestrated and controlled by other people, some of whose names you can’t remember or never knew.

And so candidates who reach a certain level of presidential politics tend to draw in someone—a “body man” who knows their flaws and keeps their secrets close, who can smooth over some messes and anticipate others, who can translate gestures and moods for exhausted staff members, and who can help the candidate relax, laugh, and generally feel moored to the world he knew before. (This is to be distinguished from the paid “body man” whom the new beat reporters love to write about every election cycle, the kid who carries around hand sanitizer and snack food and that kind of thing.) Nixon’s number one body man was Bebe Rebozo. Clinton’s traveling alter ego and fixer was Bruce Lindsey. Barack Obama leaned on a Chicago pal named Martin Nesbitt.

By 1987, Hart had not one, but two such body men. As coincidence
would have it, each of them went by the nickname “Billy,” and each embodied an opposing side of Hart’s contradictory nature.

Billy Number One was Shore, the kind-faced and unassuming thirty-two-year-old, who ten years earlier, fresh out of Penn, had wandered into Hart’s Senate office looking for an internship, because he had read about the new young senator who wanted to revitalize liberalism. Shore didn’t meet the senator, or get the internship, but eventually he got hired in the mailroom, and then he worked his way up (because Shore was, if nothing else, immensely competent). And then one day in the early 1980s he found himself sitting at a table in the Senate Dining Room with the boss, whom he really didn’t know very well, and Hart was talking about presidential politics, and he told Shore, “Maybe you ought to go up to New Hampshire and just take a look around.” Just like that, Shore became the senator’s one-man covert operation, gathering intel and recruiting soldiers for years before anyone really caught on.

Hart was like that. He would evaluate his personnel and formulate a plan gradually, keeping it entirely to himself, and then one day he would offhandedly utter a single line, and your life would be changed forever. It happened to Shore again, in New Hampshire, after the little grassroots campaign had suddenly ignited and grown much too quickly, and the Secret Service agents were getting into it with some of Hart’s staff over logistics, right in front of the candidate, and if you knew Hart, you knew that he’d rather be digging his way through a landfill than referee something like that. “You know, you should probably just stick with me from now on,” Hart said to Shore, almost as an aside, as if the idea had just occurred to him. And that was it. After that, if you wanted something from Gary Hart, everyone knew, it was best to go through Billy.

Shore’s father had run a congressional office in Pittsburgh, so he had an innate sense for scheduling and staffing, the way the coach’s kid instinctively knows how to turn the double play. But Shore’s real skill and value were in enabling Hart to be the introvert he still was, at least much of the time. Shore provided a force field of protection around Hart’s solitude, sitting nearby with a binder or a book, knowing how to be quiet, silently warding off others who didn’t. And
where Hart could be, as the writers never tired of pointing out, “cool and aloof,” Shore was congenitally warm and considerate. Where Hart intended to remain above the indignities of cheap political theater, Shore understood that everyone around a campaign had a job to do; he was happy to help if he could, and genuinely apologetic if he couldn’t. By filling in the gaps in his candidate’s personality, Shore made it possible for Hart to go on being Hart without leaving a trail of scorched egos and resentment in his wake.

If Billy Number One played to Hart’s pensive side, then Billy Number Two had a different brief. Throughout his adult life, Hart had been inexorably drawn to what he would call “colorful characters”—outsize personalities and raconteurs who seemed to relish the moment and knew how to have fun, which is something the Nazarenes hadn’t taught. Warren Beatty was like that, and so was Hunter Thompson; Hart loved telling the story of sitting in the famous writer’s living room while a wild turkey paraded around the house. Hart had a similar fascination with the blustery Russian poet and dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, with whom Hart spent a good deal of time during his 1986 visit to the Soviet Union, and even with world leaders like Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, both of whom cultivated an air of danger and mystery. In ways he wouldn’t have cared to consider, Hart was still the boy who had learned everything he knew of the outside world sitting in the Carnegie-endowed library back in Ottawa. But if Shore appealed to the side of him that had happily passed those afternoons reading alone, these other figures reminded him of the worldly spies and swashbucklers whose adventures on the page he could only imagine.

Billy Broadhurst wasn’t a famous actor or a defiant dictator, but he fit this mold nonetheless. Ray Strother, Hart’s adman from 1984, had introduced Hart to his fellow Louisianan—a smooth-talking, silver-haired lobbyist who was an intimate of Louisiana’s roguish governor, Edwin Edwards. Broadhurst would bring New Orleans cuisine back to Washington, where he lived part-time, and would host what he called his “Cajun kitchens” for a group of senators, Hart included, who would drop by after the day’s final votes were
cast. He was a voluble storyteller and repository of dirty jokes. Hart found him vastly amusing.

Broadhurst had a talent—an extremely valuable talent in politics—for discerning what other people wanted, without their having to ask for it. At the time, for instance, Broadhurst was carrying around one of those first-generation cell phones, the size of a woman’s purse, with the pullout antenna and a battery that lasted an hour. Billy Shore wasn’t a guy who cared much about the latest gadget, and he certainly never asked anybody for anything, but for some reason he did secretly covet that phone. And somehow Broadhurst must have noticed him eyeing it, or maybe Shore asked him about it not quite as offhandedly as he’d meant to, because one day Broadhurst showed up with another one. Shore needed it for the campaign, Broadhurst explained. It was a political necessity.

And so Broadhurst figured out, pretty quickly, that with Hart, when you were out to dinner or on a plane, it was often best to say nothing, to let the man simply be. If Shore wanted nothing so much as that clunky phone, then Hart wanted only respite from the endless, droning small talk, which probably no top-tier candidate since Nixon had found so profoundly draining. Broadhurst was acute enough to know when to shut up and give Hart his room to think, and for this reason he became a near constant traveling companion.

Broadhurst did have some semiofficial duties on the campaign. Bill Dixon, the campaign manager, had figured that if Broadhurst was going to keep dropping by the Denver headquarters and going to staff meetings here and there, it would be nice to know what he was actually supposed to do, and so Broadhurst had written him a memo with some ideas. The two men agreed that Broadhurst would take some meetings to screen people who wanted to see the candidate, and he would raise some money down South, both of which he delivered on. (Broadhurst, as you might expect, had also taken it upon himself to furnish the headquarters with a nice coffeemaker and microwave oven, which endeared him to everyone.) But Billy Number Two’s real and unspoken job, everyone at the top of the
campaign knew, was to keep Hart laughing and relaxed, or at least as relaxed as a guy like Hart could be.

Broadhurst quietly took responsibility for the downtime Hart kept insisting he needed, and which the schedulers promised to give him but, let’s face it, never would. Hart demanded one weekend off a month—that was it—to unwind and pace himself for the long campaign ahead. And that weekend on the calendar belonged to Broadhurst. If the arrangement raised any alarms with Dixon or Shore or Sweeney, or with any of Hart’s aides, no one would remember it later. What they remembered, instead, was a certain feeling of security in knowing that someone connected to the campaign was keeping an eye on Hart while he was off relaxing. And anyway, there were schedules to set and arrangements to make, speeches to write and reporters to mollify, and long-standing campaign debts from 1984 still shadowing the campaign. (The week of the Red Rocks announcement, federal marshals tasked with collecting those debts raided a fundraiser hosted by Beatty at the Los Angeles home of Marvin Davis, an oil tycoon, carting away $30,000 in cash and creating embarrassing headlines.) No one really had time to wonder what kind of relaxing Hart and Broadhurst had planned.

It was Broadhurst who conceived of a weekend in Miami at the end of March 1987, a last gasp of rest and freedom before the official campaign announcement that was two weeks away. He accompanied Hart to a fundraising meeting on Friday night in Miami, and on Saturday the two of them went down to the dock at the swank Turnberry Isle resort and boarded
Monkey Business
, an eighty-three-foot yacht Broadhurst had chartered for the weekend. Hart would later tell me he had intended to use the time for some deep thinking about campaign strategy. “It wasn’t just fun and sun,” he insisted. Whatever the plan, dozens of locals had gathered around to gawk at Hart and shake his hand, when an attractive blonde came up and said she knew him.

Actually, Donna Rice was an attractive blonde only in the sense that the Sistine Chapel had some pretty good artwork. She was twenty-nine and positively breathtaking, a model and aspiring actress when she wasn’t selling pharmaceutical products for Wyeth.
As fate would have it, she had been walking on the dock when she saw the crowd and decided to investigate.

Rice reminded Hart that she’d met him only three months earlier, on New Year’s Eve, at the rocker Don Henley’s house in Aspen. She and Henley had been a thing for a while, and Donna had been preparing some food in the kitchen, and that’s when she’d chatted with the handsome older guy who was apparently some kind of big political star, although she’d had no idea until Henley and some of the others had told her. (Lee had been there, too, although Donna didn’t seem to remember that part.) Rice was smart, engaging, and undaunted by celebrity, and she didn’t know a whit about politics. And you can imagine how all of that appealed to Hart, who loved women and thoughtful conversation, but who was feeling suffocated by fame and was tired as hell of talking about New Hampshire and Iowa. He invited Rice to come back to the boat later on. He and Billy were taking a quick lunch cruise to Bimini, where Broadhurst’s boat was being repaired, and it would be great if Rice could come along.

Rice wasn’t up for joining the excursion by herself, so she called her friend Lynn Armandt, who owned a bikini boutique in Turnberry Isle and who would likely come aboard at a moment’s notice. Of all the bad choices Donna Rice would make in the weeks ahead that would affect her life as much as they did Hart’s, this would prove to be one of the worst. But Armandt said yes, and the four of them—Hart, Broadhurst, Rice, and Armandt—sailed to Bimini, drinking and lunching on lobster salad while Hart went through the plot of his next spy novel. (Rice later said she asked Hart, at one point, if he had ever been married, and he said yes—in fact, he
was
married.) When they got ashore, they all drank some more, and then all four of them sang and danced onstage at a bar.

Then they gathered on the pier, surrounded by tourists, where Rice handed Armandt her camera so she could have some photos by which to remember the trip, and she posed on Hart’s lap. In the days ahead, she would give some of the shots to her pal Lynn, just for fun. This wasn’t an especially sage decision, either, although it would only matter after the fact.

As Hart would later tell it, what happened next was that Broadhurst’s
newly fixed boat got stuck in Bimini, because the customs office had closed for the day, and so, as luck would have it, the four of them had to spend the night. Hart and Rice would later insist the men and women slept apart, with Donna and Lynn on
Monkey Business
and the men on Broadhurst’s boat. But when Armandt told her story months later to
People
, which paid her many thousands of dollars for the privilege, she would say that she woke up to find Rice missing from the cabin and assumed she must have been with Hart. Whatever the sleeping arrangements, they all sailed back to Miami in the morning and said their goodbyes—at least for the time being. Broadhurst had talked to Armandt about maybe doing some work for him in Washington, because he had a job open. And he thought there might be a role for Rice, too, doing some fundraising for Hart. He said they should keep in touch.

In
What It Takes
, Cramer alluded to the “true believers” in Hart’s camp who would posit, in the months that followed, that everything was Broadhurst’s fault, and not Hart’s—that it was Billy Number Two who stupidly set up the cruise in the first place, and who kept them in Bimini, and who couldn’t just let the women walk off the boat and out of Hart’s life forever. Decades later, Billy Shore would clearly remember a moment in an airport holding room in Iowa, just a few days before Hart met Broadhurst and the two women for a second engagement in Washington. Shore had a stack of those old pink message slips that used to say “While You Were Out” on them, and leafing through the pile, he handed Hart the one from Broadhurst, since he knew Hart would want to return that call. Then Shore left the room for a moment, probably to use the men’s room. When he returned, Hart was on the phone, and Shore could hear only his side of the conversation.