I think I may have felt differently about this if I had been Johnny’s first mistress instead of his last. When I met Johnny, he was leading a life that was completely separate from his married life. He was making his own decisions; I just happened to be a part of that other life. Because he told me when we first met that he was involved with other women and had been for the last twenty years, I felt that Elizabeth’s anger had nothing to do with me. But as the third party, I would be the obvious target of her misplaced anger. I did feel like my relationship with Johnny, and our love for each other, did help move him forward, and thus helped bring his problems with Elizabeth out of the dark. And yes, that is a painful experience for anyone to go through.
Suffice it to say, it was the worst New Year’s Eve of my life. I stayed in bed and faced my pain head-on, tortured by the hang-up calls from Elizabeth. I answered every single one, always hoping that Johnny would be on the other end.
On the evening of New Year’s Day, Johnny finally called. He had gone out to get food. Obviously, he had been going through hell. He told me that Elizabeth was physically attacking him in between all the screaming. He just kept saying to me, “You have no idea. You have no idea.”
He was right—I didn’t. I had never heard him like this. It sounded like he was drowning. He said he had to go and didn’t know how or when he could call because she had taken his phone. But he would be in New York on Thursday as planned, so I should call him at the hotel.
The next day I went to the AT&T store. I changed my number to end my hang-ups from Elizabeth and bought Johnny a new phone to give him on Thursday. There was no way I was leaving this relationship right now. He needed me more than ever—I was sure of it.
But when I called his room on Thursday, I did not recognize the person on the other end of the line. His voice was weird and distant. He said he couldn’t see me.
I began to cry, but he was not moved by my tears. In fact, he had a new, strange reaction to my sadness. As I was crying into the phone, I could hear him turning to stone. I realized that he was in survival mode and shielding himself from any possible emotional manipulation.
I told him I had bought a new phone for him. And suddenly his entire demeanor changed. “I want that phone. I want to keep talking to you. But what am I going to do with it? Elizabeth will go through all my bags. I can’t take a phone to my house.”
The whole situation sucked, but I was in love with this man and I was going to make it work. I thought for a moment. “Why don’t you give it to Andrew? Let him keep it and then give it back to you when you leave the house. That may work. He knows you like talking to me. He’s already said he loves how happy you are around me. If he asks, tell him you want to keep talking to me. I’ll talk to him.”
As we continued talking, Johnny started becoming more recognizable.
“I think Elizabeth may have someone following me. I’m afraid to have you come see me tonight. But I really want that phone. It’s been bad. You have no idea what I’ve been through the past few days.”
I went to the Regency that night and called from the lobby. I was sitting on the couch in the lobby and I saw Josh walking into the lounge. I assumed he was going to meet his old work buddies, John Davis and Brian Mixer. Josh didn’t see me. Johnny told me what room he was in and I went up. He was in a corner room, a suite.
He was a mess. Strangely detached, he reminded me of an abused animal. He was skittish, wary, and withdrawn. I started crying again but like before, my tears had no effect on him. The man I had known and loved had disappeared. He was a shell of himself. I think back on this now and it breaks my heart to know that he was like that, and still had a long road of abuse in front of him.
He told me Elizabeth was going to call and he needed to take the call. I said okay.
When she did, he went into the bedroom. I went in the bathroom to give him some privacy. I sat down on the floor and started thinking. I hadn’t given him the phone yet and I thought to myself, “If I leave now, he will never be able to reach me.” I thought about just getting up and walking out. But I didn’t want to abandon him as he was drowning. I decided I didn’t care, that it wasn’t my problem. “Oh fuck it, I’m going to leave,” I thought to myself. I tried to move and I couldn’t. What was holding me here? I wanted to go, but I couldn’t move. As I was doing an internal scan of my new paralysis, Johnny opened the bathroom door. He looked terrible.
Years later, I would revisit that moment in the bathroom many times over. It was one of those turning points. Would my daughter even exist today had I been able to move my body and get the hell out of that bathroom and out of his suite? What kept me there? Why couldn’t I move my body? And what was I doing involved in this mess? The latter was a question I would ask myself repeatedly over the next two years; the only answer I received back was, “learning.” Learning about relationships. And now looking back, that is the understatement of the century.
And wow. He wasn’t kidding about Elizabeth screaming at him. About two hours later the phone rang again and she went off. I have never heard anyone scream like that in my entire life. I could hear every word and was wondering if the people in the room next door could.
Johnny immediately warped into some person I had never seen before, attempting to calm her down, playing right into her drama. She would hang up and call back. This went on for hours in between me helping translate what was actually happening and showing him what patterns they were in. In Elizabeth’s defense, she was bonkers because she had been in denial for years and was now attempting to put the pieces of her life back together. I really get that. She was torturing herself by asking for details of every night we’d spent together—what we did, where we did it, and how we did it. Johnny, in an attempt to be honest, was giving her way too much information. He was revealing way more than the “one-night stand” claims that I would later hear throughout the media. His details were feeding her frenzy, and the phone calls got worse.
What was clear to me was that I needed to get out of there, and that they needed professional help. What was not completely clear to me at the time was that their disagreement wasn’t a one-time issue triggered by an outside event. What I was witnessing was their actual dynamic, the way they had always related to each other. Of course, the intensity of her rage varied depending on what she was thinking about. Her own random thoughts about anything and everything varied wildly at any given time, and his reaction varied depending on the intensity of the venom she directed at him. He had lived every day for the last thirty years tiptoeing around land mines. No wonder he liked being away from home so much!
I left well before dawn. He was paranoid that she had a detective following him. I doubted it because, from what I could tell, she did not sound like someone who wanted truth. From everything I had just heard, it sounded like she was stuck in a pattern of avoidance, and he was just playing right into it. That pattern is a deflection, an ego-control game, and it keeps you from discovering the truth. It keeps you in denial of what’s really going on inside of you. But there was no way for me to foresee the depth of her attachment, the strength of her will to fight viciously to get her way. I underestimated her desire not to know (and her desire not to have anyone else know), as well as her attachment to her life in denial. And even more importantly, I underestimated Johnny’s fear of her wrath.
I called a car service and left the suite. The first call came on my way home. Elizabeth was apparently threatening him with all kinds of things. I didn’t buy any of it. The problem was, he did. She would beat him into submission with her emotionally charged words, repeating over and over, “How could you do this to me?”
He began calling me often from the new phone. Between being in his bubble, the alternate universe of campaigning, and Elizabeth’s hysteria, that new cell phone turned out to be his lifeline to reality. Over the next few days, as he processed everything he had been through, he told me what
had been going on the night Elizabeth had discovered the phone.
The night of December 30th, when he called me, Elizabeth was in full accusation and attack mode and had gone looking for him. She found him in the “barn”—a huge four-bedroom guesthouse with an indoor swimming pool that is attached to the basketball court, which is attached to the main house by what feels like a mile-long corridor. Upon hearing her approaching, he hung up quickly, and went to meet her, leaving both his cell phones next to each other.
They went back to main house and, after more fighting, finally went to sleep. Elizabeth had awakened early to take Cate to the airport. Johnny, lying in bed alone in the early morning, had the thought, “Go move the phone.” But he ignored this thought because he was exhausted and didn’t want to get out of bed. He went back to sleep.
Elizabeth returned and rang his cell phone in an attempt to find it, suspecting he had been in the barn last night talking to me. She finally found it, and next to his phone was the phone that I had bought for him. She picked it up, and rang the only number in it, the last call the phone had made. I answered and said, “Hey, baby.”
She confronted him again, just as she had been doing the night before, and he denied some more, and then finally caved. Yes, he was having an affair.
And that’s when he called me, saying it was over and he needed the tapes.
She then stayed glued to his side—screaming, yelling, and attacking—so he would not be able to call me again until the next night, when he went out for food. I guess she thought if she left his side for one minute, he would call me. She was right.
When he got back to the house, Elizabeth was waiting for him at the gate and took his phone away from him. She was now going to attempt to control his every move.
After listening to Johnny’s side of the story, I had a fuller understanding that this marriage was a sad and very sick relationship filled with issues that clearly neither Johnny nor Elizabeth wanted to address. They did not want to disclose the truth to themselves, much less to the public. I have learned that such behavior is not only generational but also geographical. It’s very Southern to talk around things and to avoid directness at all costs.
What was important to Elizabeth was how she was perceived, what people thought about her, and anything—including the factual truth—that didn’t fit into how Elizabeth wanted to be perceived would cause an extreme reaction. She would go on a venomous attack with complete disregard for the people she was hurting. And then she would work very hard at fixing that image by blogging and talking to reporters and her friends at People.
The last thing Johnny wanted was to get in the way of Elizabeth controlling her image, because that would cause her a great deal of pain, which, of course, would be directed at him.
TEN
On and On
“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
—Mark Twain
Elizabeth was now obsessed with getting the tapes back and wanted all the footage I had shot. Johnny told me to go through it all and pull whatever I wanted—anything I might think that would be a bad idea for Elizabeth to see, which meant anything that might trigger the venom. I did and stored them with my personal stuff in my hatbox.
During one of my many phone calls with Andrew, I told him that his boss wanted me to have his schedule, so that I would always know where he was, what hotel he was staying in or speaking at, and when his run time was, so I could call the landline if needed. Andrew started sending me all the schedules.
I also informed Andrew about his new duties as master of the cell phone, which he liked because he loved having something on Elizabeth—or Ursula, as he called her, after the sea witch from The Little Mermaid.
I knew the one tape that would drive her over the edge more than any of them was the one that I couldn’t pull because she knew about it—the day I shot footage of Johnny and was given a tour of her dream house with Johnny’s parents. I had no idea at that point how much she disliked his parents or the degree to which she ostracized his entire family, but to see them giving a tour of her house would have been a trigger.
And just as Johnny suspected, Elizabeth took the footage and locked herself in a room to watch it all. Hour after hour. She found the footage of Johnny walking into the room before he got his shots for Africa and she saw his reaction to seeing me, the way he lit up. She apparently told Johnny that he never once looked at her the way he looked at me. So she took that little bit and put it on her computer as a screen saver in order to watch it over and over again.
He wanted to take those tapes away from her, but she hid them from him. It became a battle: whenever he was home, he would search for the tapes, but she would hide them or lock them away in drawer that he couldn’t open.
Hiding Elizabeth’s craziness from the world was something Johnny had a lot of practice in doing. Apparently, late at night she would often go into what he would describe as the dark place; her voice would change and she would begin saying extremely vile things or emailing such things or calling people and harassing them. According to Johnny, Elizabeth had a very long history of very bad nights.
Johnny and Elizabeth come from the school of “just stay busy,” and they both stayed very busy indeed. His campaign schedule was a primary part of his survival tactic. She continued on her path of relentless self-torture, watching footage and calling Johnny to scream at him or disguising her voice and making odd calls to people in search of my number. She went into full damage control, blogging happy stories on the campaign website about their wonderful marriage and romantic time together after the announcement tour.
I found all of this to be beyond heartbreaking and beyond disturbing.
But, of course, I was not about to leave him alone with his mess. I had warned him it was going to be bad, and he had announced his run at the worst possible time. I wasn’t about to abandon him at that crucial point. I did continually suggest therapy but I also really did understand the resistance to that. How bad does it sound for a presidential candidate and his wife to be in therapy?
Shortly thereafter, he told me that Elizabeth wanted to renew their wedding vows in July. When he told me, my first thought was, “Yeah right, there is no way that’s going to happen.”
I flew down to Palm Beach, Florida, to see Johnny on January 17th or 18th. I went to The Breakers for the first time ever and had dinner in the bar until he called around 8:30. I then took a cab to the Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach, where he was staying.
My traveling to see him had become more complicated because I had worked for him and now most of his staff knew me. But now Johnny was actually running for president. I had to stay completely away from John Davis, and now Elizabeth knew about us. Johnny had no idea where John Davis was after they had parted but he guessed the bar. Johnny gave me the instructions on how to get to the elevators and how to stay clear of the bar (in case John Davis was in there and not in his room), so when I arrived at the Four Seasons, I knew where I was going and made it to the room without being spotted.
As usual, when he saw me he lit up, and, as usual, my heart melted. I realize that it’s a really lame way to describe what we have, what happens when we are together. But when we looked into each other’s eyes, as we did in the hallway when I walked into the room of the Four Seasons that night, it took my breath away, made my heart pound, and my head spin. I loved this man like no other and there was just no way that I was going to leave him alone in his hell.
This visit was far better than the one in New York because we had been talking regularly and because his schedule had kept him away from Elizabeth; he was still beat up but he wasn’t as beat up as he was the last time I saw him.
John Davis was set to come to Johnny’s room in the morning, so we figured the best idea would be for me to just go wait in the stairwell until John g
ot into the room, and then I would go downstairs and grab a cab.
So there I was, standing in the stairwell of the Four Seasons. I waited and waited and waited. Johnny did not call. I finally gave up, exited the hotel, and sat on a bench outside. The concierge had called a car for me. My phone rang. Johnny said that Davis had still not shown up in Johnny’s room. “Where are you? Did you see him?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m outside and I did not see him.”
As I was checking in at the airport, the computer asked me if I wanted to take another flight, one that was already boarding, or wait another hour? Now please! I hopped on that flight, turned off my cell, thereby missing Johnny’s call to change my ticket and fly to Louisiana or Arkansas or Timbuktu, wherever he was headed next, I can’t remember. I remember it was a remote location and difficult to get to. But had I not missed his call, I would have tried. Instead, I went home to Jersey.
Somewhere around this time Johnny and Elizabeth finally started seeing a therapist. Praise the Lord.
I flew to Detroit in February for two nights. Johnny and John Davis were staying at a Westin some twenty minutes from the airport. In the elevator at this Westin, you needed a key to get up to your room, so Johnny had to come down and get me. This would always tickle me. There was never anyone on the elevator with him, nor did the elevator stop to pick up anyone. What are the odds?
The next day I left early (with my own key so I could return later) and walked to a hotel next door for coffee and my morning CNN. I then took a cab to a multiplex movie theater and spent the day at the movies. I have always loved going to the movies by myself during the day for as long as I can remember. It’s also something I did a lot during my stint as a mistress.
What Really Happened Page 9