What Really Happened (8 page)

After this event, I remember Johnny in the car talking about his parents naming him Johnny, not John—footage that also never made it into the webisodes. It seems crazy to me that he ran for president
twice
and most people never knew his legal name is Johnny! I caught a lot of “what a bimbo” flak in the media for calling him Johnny instead of John and yet, shockingly enough, I’m the one who actually had his name correct.

On to Oklahoma, where the big news of the evening was Josh had a little “heart to heart” talk with his boss. He informed Johnny that the staff was talking about his relationship with me and was very concerned about it. Johnny related this exchange to me minutes after Josh told him. Johnny also insisted that he wasn’t the least bit interested in what his twenty-seven-year-old body guy thought. He used to say to me, “I have one word to describe Josh Brumberger—history.” It seemed to me that sooner or later this situation with Josh would come to a head and it probably wasn’t going to be pretty.

After Oklahoma, I remember being in Minnesota, along on Johnny’s never-ending quest to try to get every Democrat elected, and then driving to Iowa. It was a long drive that began the moment Johnny got off the stage after a large speaking event. After Johnny spoke he would have a post-performance high, which sometimes triggered his belief that the crowd was in love with him and oh, what a great man I am! Of course, some of the staff didn’t have any understanding that this was just a “performance high” reaction and reacted bitterly, resenting his egotistical behavior and the fact that he ignored them. Naturally, all of this went unspoken, but on that occasion it did make for a very uncomfortable, very long car ride.

Somewhere during that ride, Kim Rubey, the very intelligent, extremely dry-witted PAC communications director, noticed my pearl bracelet and said, “I like your bracelet.” I believed that she knew the second she saw it that it was from Johnny. She had just been at the Ponderosa (which is what Johnny and I call his house in Chapel Hill) for something, probably for one of the many
People
photo shoots, and I assumed she had seen whatever Johnny had bought for Emma, which he had said was similar to my bracelet. Anyway, it was clear to me—she knew.

Later that night, we were all eating at Centro in Des Moines and Newt Gingrich was in the restaurant, so the subject of infidelity came up. Mudcat Saunders, who was with us, went off on it. He had zero tolerance for infidelity, whereas Kim defended it. Of course Johnny and I didn’t say a word but we were both surprised by Kim’s response. She spoke as someone with a great deal of understanding of the complexities of marriage. We both wondered, because we knew nothing of her personal life, if she had some sort of personal experience with infidelity.

On our next outing (go Democrats go), Johnny, Josh, Sam, and I flew privately to Montana. We stopped in Salina, Kansas, for fuel, and oh no, our plane broke. Thank God it broke while we were parked on the ground! After we spent many hours waiting inside the FBO, the repair crew finally realized that it couldn’t get the part before the next morning. So Josh charmed the FBO personnel and got us a courtesy car. When Josh pulled around the building to pick us up, everyone started laughing. It looked exactly like a car from a junkyard. It was amazing to us that the car actually worked.

We piled into our no-A/C, far-from-luxurious car and sputtered down the road to the Courtyard by Marriott, laughing most of the way. Josh then spent the next few hours trying to locate a way out of there, hoping to make it to the scheduled event in Montana. Josh spent much of his time being a travel agent, trying to locate planes from donors and/or commercial flights. In the second webisode, as he was filling out his job description for his visa application to China, he didn’t know what to write, and suggested his title should be Political Mastermind, or just Bitch.

It was during this little layover in Salina that Johnny told me that he informed Josh that he took care of his “issue” with me. I assume what Josh thought happened was that Johnny ended his relationship with me and valued Josh’s opinion. But what actually happened was that Johnny ignored everything Josh had to say because he felt it was none of Josh’s business.

I also remember watching the Lieberman nomination drama unfolding on TV with Josh and Sam. I stopped by Johnny’s room only to get into a fight with him over his “other woman” cell phone, which had a text on it from another woman. I didn’t read the text, but I threw his phone across the room and stomped out. (Yeah, that will show him!)

Around August 17
^th
I had to strongly pitch—actually, almost argue with—Nick Baldick about going to Connecticut to follow Johnny when he met with Ned Lamont. Nick didn’t want me to go, but I already had a lot of great footage about this Lieberman/Lamont issue. I ended up going, but the webisode
Where’s the Party?
(the one with Fred that I loved) never saw the light of day.

While still in Connecticut, I got really pissed off
again
about Johnny’s cell phone. I read a text from the same old girlfriend (the one he spoke to on the phone next to me months ago) who clearly wanted to take their relationship back to more than friends. I was fed up with that phone. Without it, the other women would have no way to reach him. I was determined to replace it. This, of course, happened
after
dinner (and lots of wine). We had all gone out to dinner, and I remember the dinner fondly because Matt Giobbi was there, whom I called Advance Matt. He was in the second webisode. Matt was great at his job and took it so seriously. There was something so earnest, honest, and humorous about his mannerisms that just seeing him made me laugh. Johnny was also very fond of Matt. (I think this was in part because the mere sight of Matt cracked me up and Johnny loved it when I laughed.) I think Matt liked having me around because ever since I had joined the team, the senator loved eating with the staff, and the staff all loved eating out with him.

At the end of August, Johnny invited me to fly to North Carolina to shoot footage of his parents, Bobbie and Wallace, at the Ponderosa—his brand-new, ever-so-humble twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot house. I wanted to capture footage of his father, Wallace, because there was so much continual hype about Johnny being the son of a mill worker. I thought this could potentially be a comedy gold mine. I stayed at a Marriott; Johnny later came to visit for a few hours. He told me to take a cab to a clinic the next morning; he was going in order to get some of his vaccinations for Africa and suggested I should get my shots too. The next morning Johnny was late, which was not a shocking development. I believe Andrew had gotten lost—also not a shocking development. I had my camera on and was already getting my shots when Johnny walked in. As usual he lit up when he saw me, something I captured on camera. I turned it off, finished getting my shots, and then went outside. Johnny’s parents pulled up in their car. They had an appointment in the area and arranged to meet us there afterward. This was where I first met Johnny’s parents—in the parking lot of a health clinic. I remember Johnny telling Andrew to go ahead and pay for my shots as well, which I would later hear (as usual) became an issue with the PAC.

After arriving at Johnny’s house, it turned out that Wallace and Bobbie were less than interested in talking on camera, even though Wallace allowed me to mic him as Johnny gave us a grand tour of his new home.

Of course, the press turned Johnny’s large house, and overall lifestyle, into a campaign issue. It frustrated me that the campaign couldn’t turn this into “the guy from nothing is now living the American dream, able to afford four-hundred-dollar haircuts and million-dollar houses,” as opposed to “the hypocrite who says he is for poor people is living the high life.” I think the real reason they couldn’t turn it around is Johnny wasn’t actually proud of it—he was embarrassed by it. Otherwise he would have be able to get out in front of that story, speaking from the heart and with pride, saying, “Yeah, I built that house, all cash. I can afford it and my family deserves it and now I want to help all of you be successful as well.” In reality, he was judging himself for spending money like that. I know him very well and that house isn’t close to who he is, and yet he allowed it to happen. He didn’t stop Elizabeth from doing it.

When Jack and Emma came home from school, I interviewed them both on camera in exchange for giving them five dollars cash and promising them I would never show anyone. I kept my word on that, although this was one of the tapes that “magically” disappeared out of my hatbox (more on this later).

I remember Andrew being there the night after Bobbie and Wallace had gone home. Johnny, Andrew, the nanny’s husband, Jed, and I sat on the porch drinking wine. It was raining. After dinner with the kids and the nanny, Jed, Andrew, and one of the nanny’s girlfriends, Andrew drove me back to my hotel. Johnny didn’t visit that night. He fell asleep with Jack, in Jack’s room.

The next morning I accompanied Andrew, Johnny, and some poverty woman who was really snotty to me to the University of North Carolina, where I shot some footage of Johnny speaking that ended up with lighting issues. Then I went with Andrew and Johnny to some office where I sat outside the office talking on the phone with my editor.

The three of us then drove back to the Ponderosa. I flew out later that day, before Elizabeth returned to the house. Andrew drove me to the airport and before I left, I remember Johnny ribbing Andrew several times about his never wanting to go home. He clearly wasn’t doing any necessary work but he was still hanging around. In response, Andrew got very vocal about how he was not interested in going home. Apparently his wife was very bitchy. The more she bitched, the more he wanted to stay away and the more he stayed away, the more she bitched. It seemed that Johnny and he had a lot in common on the marital front.

Back at home, Sam and I were gearing up for a trip to New Hampshire over Labor Day weekend. When I booked Sam for this trip, he informed me that he needed to get back to New York in order to shoot his documentary that he was codirecting. (The documentary,
If a Tree Falls
, was later nominated for an Academy Award.) But the staff was supposed to stay a day later and take a commercial flight home, while Johnny was to fly privately back that night. I told Johnny that Sam needed to get to New York and I obviously would prefer to stay with Johnny, not the staff, and I asked him to please take care of it. I don’t actually remember whether he ever addressed it with the PAC leaders or if I just ended up putting my foot down that Sam and I were flying back with him because Sam could not miss his workday. However the details of this silly drama played out, Sam and I ended up flying back with Johnny and Josh did not. And despite Josh’s little tizzy about this all that day, we really did miss Josh on the plane ride back to DC. Josh was a major pain-in-the-ass drama queen and whiner but he was also a really good guy with a great sense of humor.

Andrew picked us up at an FBO near Dulles. He had driven from North Carolina to escort Johnny to Bunny Mellon’s the next morning. I believe this was the first time Johnny ever met Bunny, but in any case, this meeting was the first I heard of the two of them meeting. One weird thing I remember about that night: Andrew called me on my cell phone very late to ask me if I wanted to join him for a drink in the bar. I answered my cell (not from my own room) but believe me, the last thing in the world I wanted to do, especially after the workday I had just had, was to join Andrew Young in the bar. I declined and as I hung up, I wondered why he had called. I told Johnny that was Andrew on my cell and asked, “Why would Andrew ask me to join him for a drink so late at night?” Johnny gave me a look that told me he had less-than-zero interest in talking about Andrew Young. I briefly thought about how flirty Andrew was to me when he first met me back in June and that Johnny had warned him in a funny way when we got off the plane: hands off. Was he hitting on me now? It felt like he was, but it was late, I was exhausted, and I had already given it too much thought. I shrugged it off.

Johnny spoke at some big union event in California in September, and I remember saying to him right before he went on, “I bet you drinks tonight that you can’t get through this speech without bashing Bush.” He said, “You’re on.” Of course, I won the bet. Somewhere in nearly every speech, he habitually slipped into automatic pilot, and he would go for the easy applause, how bad President Bush is and how great we Democrats are, and the crowd would go wild. So predictable. So boring.

From there we went to California and then on to Las Vegas. It was my first trip to Vegas. Ever. Every time I vetoed Vegas as a destination, my friend Angela Janklow would say, “Vegas is the exact opposite of everything you are about.” She was right, but it was fun anyway. We stayed at the Paris Las Vegas. It was like an indoor Disneyland. After Johnny spoke that morning, we all stopped by some walk-in restaurant at the Paris, one of the many in the hotel lobby; Johnny was looking at salads. He turned and asked me if I was hungry. Not Josh, not Kim, just me. Josh had a
huge
reaction to this. Anger, sulking, back-handed comments. Poor Josh.

From time to time, when I felt especially bad for him, and because I already knew that his days were numbered, I would offer Josh my unsolicited opinion, telling him that he was very talented, and perhaps better suited for a different job. Because my loyalty was to Johnny, I could never do more than hint at that. I felt sorry for him. From everything I could see, Johnny wasn’t ever going to be any nicer to him. That’s just life. I was the girlfriend; Josh was just the staffer.