What Really Happened

by Rielle Hunter

  When we pulled up to the event, Johnny’s cell rang. He answered and even from the back of the car, you could hear screaming coming from the phone. Johnny said, “I will call you back,” and he hung up the phone. He got out of the car and walked half a block away from us, but anyone could see that he was having a heated phone call. He hung up and as he walked by he mumbled to me, “Elizabeth.” As if I hadn’t already figured that out.

  I wasn’t allowed to shoot this event so I wandered outside and ran into Jonathan Darman. Darman was a Newsweek reporter who was following the senator for a story and had flown in on the same commercial flight with us. I learned that you are always forewarned when press people are around so everyone who is traveling with the candidate is always aware that they are being watched. Johnny even texted me on the plane from the “other woman” cell phone to tell me exactly where the reporter was sitting. Outside this event, Darman gave me his card and his word that he would not write about me or our conversation, given that I didn’t have all the details of the upcoming project hammered out yet. Darman and I would later become close friends, at least from my perspective. I came to think of him as a friend first and a reporter second. This was a mistake—a stupid mistake.

  After Iowa, Johnny and I flew to Ohio to meet Josh. We were seated next to each other on a small commercial flight. Five months into our secret relationship and we were traveling together, working together right out in the open. It was surreal.

  Josh met us, and the ribbing and teasing me started immediately. Sometimes he was very funny, sometimes just plain mean—adolescent displaced anger. Even so, I realized within minutes of being around Josh that I would need to mic him too, and have a second camera, in order to capture the real relationship between Josh and Johnny. Josh would be a great way to inspire a younger generation’s interest in politics.

  Johnny and Josh had a lot of father-and-son stuff going on. And like any firstborn son, when a new member was added to the family, Josh turned defensive and unhappy when he was no longer getting all the attention. My existence alone irked him, without even counting all the ways I didn’t operate within what Josh thought was appropriate parameters for a political staffer. And Josh was right about that: I didn’t operate like a political staffer. I didn’t falsely bow to Johnny, or talk bad about him behind his back. I wasn’t interested in engaging in the pettiness. I really wasn’t one of them, nor did I try or pretend to be. I was in my forties and had been hired as a consultant in order to show a fresh perspective of what goes on behind the scenes. I wasn’t a staffer; I was removed from that and was also the boss’s (secret) girlfriend. Because of that, Johnny was nicer to me than he was to Josh. He often showed his humanity in his interactions with me. If Johnny was eating or getting something to eat, he would frequently ask me if I was hungry. In the airport, Johnny would often offer to help me with my luggage. This was basic kindness, which didn’t exactly extend to Josh, the male twenty-something body guy. I am sure Josh felt rejected—who wouldn’t?

  But Josh was also sporting an attitude, perhaps driven by his exaggerated sense of self-importance as Johnny’s gatekeeper. Even the most important donors mostly had to go through Josh to get to the senator. And yet, somehow, I had managed to get hired without Josh’s consent or even input. And try as he might, Josh just couldn’t control me. I was the new thorn in Josh’s side, and he was doing all he could to remove me.

  I often thought that it was going to take a miracle just to get their candidate to the next event, let alone the White House, with these kids at the helm. There were way too many unaware, underage, wannabe captains on this ship.

  While we were in Ohio, Darman’s piece appeared in Newsweek, and we read it in the car on the way to some event. As with much of his writing, it was quite snarky. He seemed so much nicer in person. Both Josh and Johnny told me that that was almost always the case: the reporters will act and appear to be favorable to you in person and then nail you to the cross in print, twisting and turning everything to fit the story they and/or their editor want to tell, or at the very least, take a few jabs.

  I couldn’t believe that could be true of all media. I should have listened to Johnny and Josh on this. Instead, I took it all with a grain of salt, which is to say I ignored it and chose to continue seeing the best in the media people. And look how long it’s taken me—it’s a lesson I’m still dealing with.

  I shot a lot of great footage in Ohio, which I remember as being a very fun place. There was a supporter there named Joyce whom Josh and I really liked. She was a hoot, and she clearly got a big kick out of us. Josh nicknamed her “like white on rice,” because she was glued to Johnny’s side during our entire Ohio stint. Josh is very quick with a joke, and his sense of humor is one of his strongest attributes.

  We went on to Arizona, where it was as hot as a sauna. We stayed one night at some fancy resort. Josh, Johnny, and I had margaritas with dinner. I remember Josh expressing concern about how comfortable I was with Johnny, and that his status didn’t intimidate me, which was true and would have been true regardless of our shared intimacy. I don’t know how successful I was but I certainly tried to explain to Josh my perspective. I told him I knew who I was, and that someone’s worldly status didn’t make me react as if they are more than I was, or that I was less than they were; I was at ease around everyone.

  On our last stop in Arizona, early in the morning, I beat Josh down to the hotel lobby and was waiting on both of them—a very rare occurrence. Josh was always first, then me, then, of course, Johnny. (Once I came down last—big mistake! That didn’t happen again.) Anyway, when Josh came down, his hair was disheveled and he was wearing glasses. When I saw him like that, something clicked in my brain and I felt my heart drop. Josh was the staffer I’d been standing next to Iowa the morning I went into the hotel for a parking validation! He looked like a completely different person with his hair messed up and wearing glasses. Anyway, he was tired—he, Johnny, and I had spent the night before drinking those margaritas again. He told me he was worried about receipts. Apparently he’d paid for a lot and if he lost receipts, he would not get reimbursed. I really felt for him in that moment, thinking about how much money was spent on food alone.

  From there we flew to Atlanta. There were glass elevators at our hotel that opened on to the atrium. On Johnny’s floor, you needed a special key to get off the elevator. I remember having a co mention the fact that commercial flying completely drains you of all your energy.

  In mid-July Josh, Johnny, and I flew privately to Seattle for the annual trial lawyers convention, courtesy of Fred Baron. I remember I shot a great monologue during the flight. Johnny was talking about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with Wade, only to discover that I had major audio problems.

  Josh told me not to worry, that I would have many opportunities to get that story on tape again, and again, and again.

  While we were in Seattle, Johnny had a suite attached to his room that was used for meetings. That’s where I met Fred and his wife, Lisa Blue. Fred and Lisa had made a fortune trying toxic tort and asbestos suits, generally on a contingency basis. They were heavy supporters of the Democratic Party and clearly, their favorite leader-to-be—a certain senator from North Carolina named Johnny Reid Edwards.

  Somehow the TV show 24 came up in conversation. Lisa was a huge fan of the show and suggested how great it would be if Johnny did something on 24, as Senator John McCain had done. She became very interested in me when she found out that I knew some of the producers on the show. Lisa was a bit of an eccentric for a successful lawyer; I liked her from the beginning. She told me about her love for learning languages and said that she watched the episodes of 24 in Spanish.

  From Seattle we hopped a ride to Santa Monica with Lisa on Fred’s plane. I talked with Lisa and Josh a bit about awareness. Lisa said she believed I was a witch, like her. I’m not exactly sure what she meant by this. Awareness is difficult to explain but it ha
s nothing to do with being a witch, which I do not believe I am by any stretch of the imagination. So I was trying to explain to Josh that awareness is the part of him that senses that something is going on in the front of the plane with Johnny, while you are back here on your BlackBerry, sending an email and listening to Lisa and me talk at the same time. Awareness is the space that sees all of it, including yourself.

  I don’t believe my explanation was very successful.

  When we got to Los Angeles, we stayed at the Beverly Hilton, which had just been renovated. For some reason, Josh began including me in the small meetings they were having with supporters. Maybe it was due to Lisa’s seal of approval. Although when Josh found out Lisa had already invited me to her annual Christmas party, a huge event that he had never been invited to, he wasn’t pleased.

  Both Josh and Johnny repeatedly expressed how much they hated LA. I kept saying how much I loved it, partly because there are some really great people who live here, even some who actually work in the entertainment industry. They didn’t believe me. I was determined to prove them wrong. After all, I had lived there for thirteen years. I told them I would introduce them to Jay Stern, a producer whom they would both love. Jay ran director and producer Brett Ratner’s company, and I had worked with him for a year trying to get a Jeff Goldblum TV comedy that I had created off the ground. (We weren’t successful.) Jay had a very endearing and often hilarious habit of injecting “by the way” into every third or fourth sentence that came out of his mouth. We all met up for drinks at Trader Vic’s and Jay brought along his friend, who was some big sports trivia fiend like Johnny. I thought Jay and his friend would help Johnny if they decided they liked him. I was right: both Johnny and Josh loved Jay. We all laughed so hard that tears streamed down our faces.

  Sometime in July, as we were in development and I was shooting footage and meeting with potential directors of photography, Johnny was in New York for a few days. I remember watching the footage of Mimi being in the car, on camera, in the backseat with Josh and Johnny going downtown to a brownstone for a small meet-and-greet. Mimi and Josh are both so great on camera—hilarious and not remotely self-conscious. I remember meeting Jonathan Prince (a political strategist in the Clinton administration) at that brownstone. Later, right before Johnny announced his run for the White House, I would rally hard on Prince’s behalf to get him his job, a high-level campaign position. Prince has a rare ability in the political world that is run so much by ego: the ability to see many sides to a situation, far beyond just his own agenda.

  At the very end of July, Johnny was at the beach in North Carolina. He told me that he really wanted to buy me a present and, even though he never went shopping, he wanted to prove to me how much he loved me. He said the act of going to a store all by himself and picking out a gift for me was proof of his love. (I thought the action of going to a store as “proof” was hilarious.) And he did—he went out by himself to a store and bought me a gift. He was so proud! He told me that he would bring it to me the next time we saw each other. He also told me he bought Emma Claire something similar at the store. Into my mind popped the thought: perhaps Emma’s gift helped as a cover in case anyone saw John Edwards buying whatever it was. I didn’t share the thought.

  Before I saw him again, he went to some party down the street from his beach house, where some new woman decided that she wanted a shot at Johnny. When he told me about this, it was almost like he wanted me to be impressed. Instead, I was extremely irritated and even more so the next day when he told me that this woman called him at his beach house. Of course, the first thing I asked was how she got the number. He claimed he didn’t know.

  She said, “I am calling to invite you out for a drink.”

  Johnny politely replied, “Thank you, but today is my anniversary, so I am going to do something with my wife.”

  “Oh.” She paused and then said, “Well, I guess she could come too.”

  Unbelievable.

  And yes, where is Elizabeth? From what I gathered from Johnny, at that point she was devoting most of her time and attention to buying furniture and furnishing their dream house. Occasionally, she would check back into his (or her) career, to scream at people or to talk to them in a demeaning way. I would hear reports on how dysfunctional and incompetent she believed everyone was—including her husband. Apparently she was very vocal about how she was the only one in his life with a brain.

  I realize that I’m not an objective source when it comes to Elizabeth, so I’m going to quote from Game Change, written by political journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Even though I believe their book has many inaccuracies, they got this part correct:

  . . . the romance between [Elizabeth] and the electorate struck them as ironic nonetheless—because their own relationships with her were so unpleasant, they felt like battered spouses. The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing. What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy woman.

  With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. The daughter of a navy pilot, Elizabeth had lived in Japan when she was a girl and considered herself worldly. She called her spouse a “hick” in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a particular book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t read books,” she said. “I’m the one who reads books.”

  From everything I heard, his staff loved him and tolerated her, mostly because of their belief in him and the public’s adoration for her. There were reports also from the staff that there were some great people in politics that would not work for him because of her.

  Not to oversimplify matters, but it seemed to me that all of their marital problems stemmed from Johnny’s fear of Elizabeth’s wrath. He would give Elizabeth her way on everything and attempt to stay out of her way. This was mixed with Elizabeth’s desire to have only her way. She would automatically reject most everything that was not her way.

  Johnny would tell me over and over again, “Elizabeth doesn’t care about the truth. She will insist that she does, but she doesn’t.”

  I didn’t believe him. I thought if he could just overcome enough fear, become brave enough to stand up and tell her the truth, they could get to the bottom of their dynamic, the place where it all went off track. I thought he was just afraid of her, and that he didn’t want to tell her because he had his cake and was eating it too.

  Sadly, and I mean sadly, he was right, and I was wrong.

  SIX

  The Real Deal

  “Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

  —Kahlil Gibran

  The first webisode that I made, Plane Truths, begins with us boarding a private plane and flying to a teacher’s event in Iowa. It was August 1st, 2006.

  After the teacher’s event, we flew to Texas. As usual, we drank wine on the plane at the end of the day. Johnny and I were in the front section; all the rest of the guys were in the back. Johnny and I were having a lovers’ spat because he was acting like a lunatic, flipping back and forth between a couple of personalities without any awareness that he was doing so. This was his typical behavior after he had spent any time around Elizabeth. It was maddening to be around, to say the least. Anyway, I was sure our spat was not overlooked by anyone in the back, especially Josh Brumberger.

  Later that night he gave me a pearl bracelet, the gift he had gone out and bought all by himself, just like a real person. I loved it and, naturally, I forgave him immediately.

  The next day we went to a luncheon
in Texas where Sam Cullman, my director of photography, covered the senator, and I covered Josh. Johnny forgot he was wearing a mic and as he was getting out of the car, he said something very flirty to me, which I didn’t hear, but Sam definitely did given that Johnny was plugged into Sam’s camera. Sam looked over at me, laughing out loud.

  I loved the stuff I shot with Josh and Fred at this event. We used it in a webisode called Where’s the Party that was later nixed by the PAC leadership. I believe it was because it contained many opinions about Senator Joe Lieberman’s switch to Independent after he lost the Democratic primary election in Connecticut, given that Lieberman eventually won the general election and remained a senator. (Heaven forbid, you speak your truth if it risks pissing off anyone in power.) What I loved most about the webisode was Fred. He was complaining to Josh about Johnny not wearing a tie (as usual). I loved the humanity of it all.

  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.