What Really Happened (5 page)

This was the first time Johnny had ever removed his “belief that what they were saying was true” from the equation. He burst out laughing. Laughter is a normal reaction when you begin to free yourself from your thoughts. Most of us don’t realize that our minds have taken us prisoner, and as we begin to free ourselves, to
see
our thoughts instead of
being
our thoughts, there is usually a lot of laughter and a big release of energy.

Johnny saw for the first time that what women would say to him was a pattern. Once he stopped getting hooked into what they were saying, he could see why they were saying it, that it actually had nothing to do with him, how good-looking he was, how they believed in him, how they wanted to help him—and everything to do with their agenda and how they wanted to use him.

John Edwards got hurt a great deal because he believed what people were saying to be true, because he wanted it to be true. He blinded himself to what was underneath the words. He couldn’t see that people were using him.

Years before he met me, he really believed he was the savior, the golden boy for the Democratic Party. People told him that all day long. His wife. People he paid. People he met on the street who wanted him to be that.

I left the hotel early in the morning before he did, and once again, it was painful to part. At the airport, as I sat at the gate waiting for my plane I was absolutely astonished by my feelings. I had the most intense longing for him and I had just left him. It was so surprising to me. He apparently was feeling it too. When he called me later, during was his run time (two hours blocked out every day on his schedule in order to run), he told me that he actually went looking for me in the airport. He didn’t find me, because my plane left earlier than his, but I was very pleased to hear that he had looked.

The next time I saw him was in May, when I took the train to Boston. I arrived late, and it was raining. The hotel was the Fairmont Copley Plaza, two blocks from the Back Bay train station. I was a tad angry when I arrived because Johnny and I were talking on the phone while I was on the train and his other line beeped and he hung up with me to answer it. We talked only on the “other woman” cell phone, so that meant he was hanging up with me to talk to another “other woman.” NOT COOL. He had already told me the coast was clear, so I went right to the room. The other woman was the one he’d had dinner with at the beach, his old girlfriend, and that was the last time he made that mistake. After seeing how much it annoyed me, he never answered the phone again if it beeped while he was talking to me. And this old girlfriend (who he claimed was now just a friend) was an issue between us that he also claimed he was going to do something about.

Johnny was in New York a couple nights that month. And true to his word, one of those nights he had a very long conversation on the “other woman” cell phone with this old girlfriend as I sat next him on the bed. He was attempting to wind down their friendship, and, from what I gathered, this was something she didn’t really want to do. The fact he did this with me sitting there did show me he was at least trying to clean up his life, but it also irritated me how difficult it was for him to actually cut the cord. He claimed that he didn’t want to hurt her. I kept thinking, as he was on the phone: how do I help you see that’s just your projection, that you don’t want to hurt yourself? But no natural opening presented itself that night so I kept my thoughts to myself. The next morning, to pay for my New Hampshire travel from April that I had put on my Amex, I took his bank card to an ATM on Madison Avenue on my way to Penn Station and took out fifteen hundred dollars—three five-hundred-dollar withdrawals. I returned his ATM card to him when I came back that night. As usual, I was unable to hold on to “issues” about our relationship and there were no more talks that evening with or about the old girlfriend.

I again took the Acela down to DC to see him. The Acela rocks. It is the greatest way to travel. I loved eating at the Daily Grill in Georgetown while I waited for him. It’s just a few blocks from his townhouse. It was a restaurant chain I ate at frequently in LA; they serve a great Cobb salad.

From DC I took the Acela to see him in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. I arrived before he did, dropped my bag off at the Latham Hotel, and went out to explore the city because it was my first time there. I had a delicious crab cake dinner at a seafood restaurant on Rittenhouse Square. He called when the coast was clear to tell me what room we were in, and I happily joined him. In the morning, he called his assistant Josh Brumberger, presumably “to go over the schedule,” but it was just a ruse to keep Josh on the phone so I could get out of the hotel without being seen. Josh would recognize me, of course, from our meeting at the Regency.

One day at the end of May, when Johnny called me at home in New Jersey, he said, “We have a problem.”

He was at an event, and Elizabeth had called with an emergency. She said, “Someone has stolen your bank card. There was fifteen hundred dollars taken out in New York.”

Johnny said, “No, it’s not stolen. I took out that money.”

“Why do you need that much money?”

They had a big fight. Her radar was up.

He was angry. He knew from the beginning that getting me money to travel to see him was going to be a problem.

I told him I would figure something out.

I found it strange but I didn’t say a word about their money dynamic. Couples have the oddest money issues. I don’t know many who are exempt from this. He seemed to have no control or awareness of the money he made. She was in charge of spending; he wasn’t supposed to spend.

I flew to West Palm Beach, Florida, at the end of May and had dinner in the hotel while I waited for him and his entourage to arrive. Once they showed up, I watched them from the dining room while they unloaded their cars. I remember watching Johnny get his own bag out and wheel it into the hotel. I was touched watching a “big wig” wheeling his own bag. I remember having the same feeling when I watched Al Gore wheeling his own bag through airports in
An Inconvenient Truth
.

Johnny called me and told me when the coast was clear. Josh was not along on this trip, and no one he was with would recognize me. I remember going down to the lobby in the morning and withdrawing the new limit of four hundred dollars out of the cash machine and bringing his card back to him. I saw his staffers in the lobby and walked right by them as I hopped in a cab and went on my way to the airport.

To solve our problems, both logistical and monetary, I came up with the idea of shooting a documentary, which quickly evolved into doing shorts for the web as well. I had made many shorts in LA while one of my scripts was in development, and documentaries are my favorite. When I pitched it to Johnny, he loved it. He was crazy about the idea of showing the campaign “behind the scenes,” showing the real him, and also the idea of me traveling with him and putting me to work. I told him I would write up a treatment for him. We were both excited about this development.

In June, I flew to Moline, Illinois, and drove to the Radisson Hotel in Davenport, Iowa—the very place Johnny was staying when I fell in love with him over the phone. The hotel had an open eating area and indoor atrium in the center, with the rooms opening on to the atrium. I went directly into the bar and ordered a glass of wine while I was waited for my call. Johnny called right on schedule to say that they had brought his dinner, but uh-oh, dinner disaster! They had forgotten the ketchup, so he asked me to sit tight while they brought back some ketchup. Sure enough, I saw the man whom I would later meet as John Davis, an earnest blond who was very clearly a political staffer. He was coming down in the glass elevator. I waited for the big ketchup delivery to be complete before joining Johnny for dinner in his room. The food was great. We celebrated his birthday with the presents I brought him. One was a pair of classic aviator Ray-Bans. He was only fifty-three years old, but not the hippest guy in town. He later got many comments about how those sunglasses were “too cool” for his homey Southern husband image. His operatives didn’t really need to worry too much because, like most of his sunglasses, he ended up losing them shortly thereafter anyway.

A big mistake I made that night: I taught Johnny how to text. He told me soon after that night he started receiving texts from other women.
I assumed that the woman who bought him the phone had noticed on the phone bill that he was now texting, so she started using it as another method to attempt to reach him. I read some of the texts, if one came in while I was sitting there. (He hid nothing from me.) The ones I always read were from the old girlfriend, the one he went to dinner with at the beach. Irritating? That’s an understatement. Clearly this “friendship” was not ending soon enough for me.

In the morning, we went running together. I went out in my running clothes; and he joined me five minutes later and we ran together, right out in the open, next to the Mississippi River. I really couldn’t believe we were running together side by side in light of day. I still can’t believe it. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.

After he left the hotel, I took a shuttle bus to the airport and rented a car to drive to Des Moines, Iowa.

I took a little tour of booming Des Moines and ended up at the Hotel Fort Des Moines. I parked my little white rental car in the parking lot across the street and went into the restaurant. I ordered a burger and red wine. As I was eating, I saw John Davis, the ketchup guy, walking outside, talking on his cell phone. Johnny called me on the phone and told me I had to wait until they brought him food from Centro. I really didn’t realize that being a mistress would involve so much waiting. I ordered another glass of wine.

The next morning, I put a bandana over my wet hair, and my small purple Paul Smith sunglasses. As I walked out of the hotel, a tall guy in his late twenties, with disheveled hair wearing glasses, was walking into the hotel as I was walking out. I knew this was a staffer but I didn’t look at him closely. I wanted out fast. I went out to my car and realized I’d forgotten to get a validation from the front desk of the hotel to get out of the parking garage. I walked back, hoping that the staffer would be finished with his checkout, but he was standing there, checking out the room number I had just stayed in.

The lady at the desk asked what room I was in before she validated my ticket. I panicked, said, “Never mind,” and hightailed it out of there.

I kept thinking that the staffer must have known something. I just had a feeling that he knew me. I was freaked out. Did I just get Johnny busted over a parking validation?

I paid the parking garage and drove to the airport, my mind racing the entire time. This was all my fault, I was in trouble, and I was going to get punished. What would the punishment be? He would break up with me.

When Johnny called me later, he laughed. He said nobody saw anything, and if they did they didn’t tell him.

But who was that guy in the glasses? Johnny didn’t know which staffer he was. My description did not ring a bell, but more than that, he didn’t seem to care. He was more interested in the contents of my mind. He thought it was hilarious that my little run-in had triggered the notion that he was going to break up with me. But mostly he seemed to be in awe of the fact that I shared the whole experience with him. Nobody else in his life was ever open with him.

FOUR

Working Girl

“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

—
J
OAN
C
RAWFORD

I
WROTE UP A TREATMENT but I knew from my years in LA attempting to get projects off the ground that to get the video project up and running, I needed someone who could bring what I was lacking to the table: big credentials. This was low-budget filmmaking in uncharted waters. And at that time, I happened to know a guy, Cary Woods, who was known for being a groundbreaking indie producer. His movies had much bigger budgets than this, but he was an innovative guy, and I was pretty good at guerrilla filmmaking, given my experience writing and directing many shorts on very small budgets, so I thought it might work.

My first step was to talk to Cary about producing or consulting on this documentary and/or the shorts for the web. He wanted to meet with Johnny to see if he liked him. I set up a dinner meeting at Serafina with Johnny and Cary in NYC and they hit it off, as I suspected they would. I joined them for part of the dinner. It was a go, but because of Cary’s schedule, he only wanted to commit to consulting.

The next step was for Cary and me to meet with Nick Baldick, the guy running Johnny’s political action committee, or PAC as the people in politics call it. I set up the meeting in DC and took the train down the night before the meeting. I was in Johnny’s living room, eating takeout from Paolo’s, when Nick called to get my date of birth for a flight. Nick wanted our info because Cary and I were invited after our meeting to travel via private plane to Raleigh with Johnny for a Dave Matthews Band concert. I was excited about this because, thanks to Mimi, I was a new Dave Matthews fan.

After I hung up with Nick, Johnny’s “other woman” cell rang. He didn’t answer, but boy I was not happy about it ringing. It was his old girlfriend (again), which really bugged me. He insisted (again) that she was his friend, and he wanted to handle it the right way. Because I am friends with most of my exes, and he wasn’t hiding this from me at all, what could I say? After I expressed my jealousy, I dropped it.