by Julia Reed
The exotic nature of Edwin’s campaign was equally seductive. The last race I’d covered was the 1988 presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, whose fans were not nearly so ardent. At a roadside honky-tonk in Delcambre, for example, I asked the owner about the enormous framed portrait of Edwin above the bar, and she told me, in a Cajun accent so thick I could barely understand it, that after Edwin had kissed her cheek during his first campaign, she refused to wash her face for so long her husband finally left her.
Edwin had served his first two terms as governor from 1972 to 1980, and a third (state law says you can serve only two consecutive terms) from 1984 to 1988. When Roemer came out far ahead of him in the 1987 primary, Edwin, always good at counting, knew he wouldn’t win the run-off so he conceded the race. His first two terms had been buoyed by an oil boom that enabled him to make like Huey Long and build road after road and bridge after bridge, while spending big on education and health care and abolishing state property taxes. He was the reform-minded one that first go-round, forcing a constitutional convention to rewrite the state’s convoluted constitution and make government more transparent. He seemed invincible. He was quoted as saying he didn’t believe Christ had been resurrected (“it goes against natural law”) and after the inevitable outcry, he lampooned himself at a press club lunch with a mock stigmata, comprised of ketchup on his shirt and lipstick on his hands—and the Pentecostals stayed with him anyway. (Their support became clearer to me at a church service in Alexandria, where the pastor lavishly thanked Edwin for his earlier help, which somehow allowed the congregation to skirt the law and avoid installing a $40,000 sprinkler system.)
At the beginning of his first corruption trial, he told a reporter, “It will be long, but I guarantee you one thing, it won’t be boring.” When asked what he thought of the jury, which included a shoplifter, an admitted wife beater, and a man who had pleaded no contest to negligent homicide charges, he replied with a grin that they were “a jury of my peers.” But in the end, it wasn’t the trials that got him, it was the dramatic downturn in oil and gas prices that left the state with a $170 million budget deficit and forced him to raise taxes. The great benefactor had been forced to make the public foot part of the bill, and then Buddy came along and promised “fiscal responsibility” and hammered away at Edwin’s “dishonesty,” so that by the time Edwin stepped aside, his career was pronounced dead as a hammer. Reporters across the country wrote obituaries, not just for “the rogue,” but for the roguish nature of Louisiana politics itself.
But Edwin had no intention of walking off into the sunset. When he announced his comeback bid in 1991, one Louisiana political analyst told me it was all about “redemption,” but I came to realize that it was really about revenge. Buddy was a whiny-voiced Harvard graduate who used words like “neat” and “awesome,” and was famous for saying in an interview with Esquire that whenever he had a negative thought, he banished it by popping a rubber band he kept around his wrist (which prompted my father to comment at the time, “Hell, if I never had a negative thought I wouldn’t get anything done”). Buddy’s father, Charlie, who had been commissioner of administration in Edwin’s first term, had gone to jail for bribery in 1981, and it offended Edwin’s sense of loyalty that Buddy had given the reporter who had exposed Charlie’s crimes a job in the statehouse. Edwin wanted a showdown with the man who had cost him what he viewed as his rightful position.
My first meeting with Edwin was in July, just after I arrived, at the Monteleone Hotel in what I came to call the “sleaze suite,” a set of rooms on the hotel’s roof where Edwin typically stayed whenever he was in New Orleans, and where he had celebrated each of his election night victories. (“Twenty years, same three rooms,” one of his closest advisors, Robert D’Hemmecourt proudly told me.) When I’d called to request the interview, I was told to turn up at the same time as the reporter from the New York Times. I’m sure they had no idea what to make of me—a writer for Vogue who was doing a long piece on the election for The New York Review of Books—so they lumped me with another Yankee outfit and figured they’d be done with both of us.
When it became clear that I wasn’t going anywhere, they invited me to travel with them. It wasn’t because Edwin was making the sexual overtures for which he was so famous (his former bodyguard, Clyde Vidrine, had written a book called Just Taking Orders in which he described his role as chief procurer of Edwin’s women); to everyone’s astonishment he had become monogamous and was genuinely devoted to Candy Picou, a twenty-six-year-old nursing student from Gonzales whom he married after the election. “At my age,” he said prior to the happy event, “a man should have a nurse and a mistress and with Candy I have both.” I think the guys that comprised “the campaign” put up with me because they liked having some outside company—someone for whom they could put on their act. “You wouldn’t go away,” D’Hemmecourt told me when I saw him in New Orleans a few months after Katrina. “And we liked you.” I liked them too, and every day I’d check my messages to find out where to meet and when.
Usually we traveled via small plane, a six-seater that carried: Edwin; his son David, who served as pilot and chief bodyguard; Andrew Martin, who had been in the shrimp business in LaFourche Parish and Edwin’s confidante since the first race in 1971; and D’Hemmecourt, otherwise known as Bobby or Bobby D., who has deep roots in New Orleans (where there is a D’Hemmecourt Street) and who met Edwin during the gas rationing crisis of 1974 when Bobby was president of the service station operators association.
By definition, David’s job was fairly specific, though he sometimes went so overboard on the bodyguard part that Bobby would just look at me and shrug: “Nothing I can do,” he’d say. “It’s the legacy of Huey Long.” But the exact nature of the others’ roles was unclear. Once, when I asked Bobby if a guy who had joined us on a trip worked for Edwin too, he looked at me like I was crazy—“None of us work for him.”
They did, however, perform many vital services, including the placement of the football bets. I’d listen in amazement as they phoned their various bookies (Bobby called his “my author”), dropping $15,000 here and $35,000 there, before tuning into the Sony Watchman to monitor games from the road. During the Saturday afternoon parade that is the highlight of the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City, I watched as Edwin waved to the crowds from the bed of a pickup truck. Andrew clutched his waistband to support him and Bobby crouched out of sight, passing on the scores as he got them—information which prompted intermittent bursts of profanity amid the more jovial “Hey chere” and “How’s your mama?” Once, when someone jokingly referred to Bobby as the “numbers man,” he dryly corrected him: “No, I’m the communications coordinator, I supply information on the numbers.” Meanwhile, Andrew busied himself with the numbers that really mattered, collecting the checks, stuffing them into his inside pocket as we went from event to event and ripping open the envelopes later with his pocketknife so he could give Edwin the tally. On one trip, he told me without a trace of irony that he had been carrying Edwin’s breath mints since 1971, but that, too, turned out to be an important job. Edwin, who had picked cotton as a child, had an obsession with hygiene that bordered on the pathological. At every stop, he excused himself to wash his hands and scrub his face so hard that it shone.
After the second or third trip with them, I finally got up enough nerve to inquire as to what was in the briefcases. They kept them so close, I naively assumed there must be valuable donor lists or super-secret strategy papers lurking within. But when they popped them open in unison the only things inside were more phones, football spreadsheets, the breath mints (along with multiple dispensers of dental floss), and a whole lot of guns, including a semiautomatic and a .350 Magnum.
Edwin went everywhere—bingo halls in Kenner, dance halls in Westwego—but Buddy turned up in so few places that Edwin supporters had milk cartons printed up with Buddy’s likeness. During a rare Saints winning streak, Buddy showed up alone in his box at the Superdome, f
ell asleep, and left early. He was also a no-show at nearly every debate between the candidates, who included Duke as well as Kathleen Blanco, the public service commissioner who finally became governor two years before Katrina hit, and who persisted in deriding Edwin as a “jokester” and a “character,” stopping just short of calling him a crook. “I can’t stand the corruption and the lies anymore,” she said again and again. “I’m tired of the looks of pity.”
During this performance Edwin invariably did an excellent imitation of a man sleeping. He had no intention of acknowledging the presence of the former high-school teacher, much less of responding to her—preferring instead to marshal his vitriol for Buddy, the “hypocrite” who had switched parties, turning Republican midway into his term after heavy courting by the first Bush administration.
At a gathering of black leaders in a church in Evangeline Parish, Edwin said, “Buddy Roemer betrayed you who helped him get elected. He switched parties and got in with the rich folks.” Referring to Roemer’s plan to privatize one of the state’s Charity Hospitals that Edwin had built, he warned: “They’ll try to make money and not help the poor folks who cannot pay.” Then he returned to one of his favorite subjects, the overgrown weeds along state roads, which apparently had become a big issue among the voters. “You wanna know the difference between a man and a boy? I built the highway between here and Shreveport. Buddy Roemer can’t keep the grass cut.”
Edwin’s disdain was catching. All over Baton Rouge, bumper stickers appeared saying “Harvard Owes Charlie His Money Back.” The Harvard attack was even more effective than the party-switching one. Before a Sunday afternoon rally at a bait shop in Simmesport, a tiny town in Avoyelles Parish where he was born, Edwin greeted the folks inside, picking his way through the cages of crickets and tanks of minnows, the shelves of camouflage jackets and enormous gumbo pots. Outside, he took the mike and said, “I know what a shoupfish is, I know what a catfish is. I know what it is to make a living—I picked cotton…I don’t think Buddy Roemer likes us. He went to Hahvahd and got a Hahvahd education.” He mentioned that Buddy’s commissioner of education had been brought in from Massachusetts, “and I bet he doesn’t know where Simmesport is.” By the time he closed with, “The only people in Louisiana who are better off than they were four years ago are the people who got out of jail,” he had managed to push every button. During the raucous applause, an elderly black woman turned to me and said, “That man could run a hundred times and I’d vote for him every one.”
My own headquarters throughout these shenanigans was the apartment on St. Philip Street. A. had dubbed it the gas chamber, due to its lack of windows, Spartan furnishings (the bed was technically a cot), and the bolt on the door that was almost an inch in diameter. The bolt was more comic prop than effective lock since the door was so cheap and hollow almost anyone could have kicked it in, but it made me feel a tad better about the guy across the hall, who heard voices and went from wanting to be my chatty hall buddy one minute to thinking I was saying terrible things to his face, depending on his extremely volatile moods. At night I’d hear him yelling terrible things at his benefactor, a sweet old white-haired street artist, casting aspersions on the ability of his private parts and refusing to give him sex.
On the rainy afternoons Williams described, A. and I would picnic in the gas chamber with a bottle of red wine and a muffaletta sandwich from the Central Grocery. If a bomb had gone off outside, not only would we have missed it, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have cared. “There is just us,” he said one night over and over again. In any relationship, there is never, of course, “just us,” but I was reminded of lines from Robert Penn Warren then too: the passage in A Place to Come To in which he describes the “second stage” of a love affair, when time ceases to move laterally and context is all but gone, and, above all, there is total contempt for the rest of the world.
In New Orleans it seems possible to sustain that second stage forever—and it’s not just the people with no windows who lose track of the world outside. Indeed, much of the populace appeared to me to have adopted one or two of Warren’s characteristics permanently. I once interviewed a state legislator from New Orleans who told me: “I don’t know any Yankees, I don’t give a shit about them”; and “There is no reason to ever leave here.” Even before Katrina there were lots of reasons to leave, most of them stemming from that exact attitude. By the time I arrived the school system was in shambles, businesses had fled, and the economy was truly colonial in that it was based almost entirely on tourism, with the owners of the hotels, et al., living elsewhere and supplying only low-paying jobs (taxi drivers, hotel maids, bellmen) for the locals. Edwin’s panacea for the city’s every ill was to push for the passage of a law allowing the largest land-based casino in the world to be built at the foot of Poydras Street, an addition that would only reinforce the economy’s fragile dependency.
But that, in those days, was not my problem. I was a refugee from an earnest and ambitious urban environment, thrilled to be a long, long way from the Manhattan dinner parties I had grown to loathe, punctuated as they were by lengthy and very important monologues from guests who had just returned from somewhere like the Gaza Strip. Once, in the middle of just such a monologue at a dinner party devoid of any fun or even good food, the nurse of the then still with-it Brooke Astor arrived to fetch her at ten o’clock, her established departure hour, and I have never been so jealous of anyone in my life. I longed for the spontaneity and joie de vivre and glamour I felt had worn off New York during the over-the-top eighties, perhaps permanently. I read in a magazine once that true glamour requires at least the possibility of decadence, some hint of “enjoyable sin.” I was enjoying all the sin I could handle without the least thought of its consequences. And when I wasn’t with A., I was with a notably sinful and ultimately felonious politician. I was also having more fun than I had ever had in my life.
At the first organizational meeting of the campaign, Edwin had predicted he would be in a run-off with Roemer, unless the numerous second-tier candidates split the vote and then it would be Duke, whom he would certainly rout. “I’ve been lucky in politics all my life,” he said that day. “But I’ve never been that lucky.” On election night, though, Edwin’s luck did, in fact, hold—Roemer had lost big and he was in a run-off with Duke, whom he crushed a few weeks later in the second biggest landslide in Louisiana history (he had already won the first). At a news conference before the swearing in, Edwin said, “I hope I’m smart enough and mature enough to profit from the mistakes I made in the past,” and everyone was hopeful. “I want my grandchildren to sit on my lap and I can tell them I knew him,” Bobby told me. “I can tell them I helped give him the opportunity to turn this state around, to be the greatest governor who ever lived.”
It was not to be. In addition to the passage of the law allowing the New Orleans casino, his only notable achievement was the lining of his own pockets by extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars (some of which was stuffed into garbage bags and passed into a car waiting under a Baton Rouge overpass) from riverboat casino applicants. (One of those who “bought” a license and later profited handsomely from the sale of his Treasure Chest Casino—profits the Feds let him keep—was Bobby Guidry, a slimebag of a barge company magnate who testified that he routinely kept up to a million in cash on hand in his house for emergency purposes, hidden in either a secret compartment in his hot tub or beneath the wild ducks stored in his freezer, a secret stash location that was turning out to be increasingly popular among the white collar crooks of Louisiana.)
In 2001, Edwin was convicted of racketeering and fraud, along with son Stephen and Andrew Martin, and sentenced to ten years in the pen. Of the old gang, only Bobby had never been remotely implicated in the wrongdoings. “I told Edwin, ‘You know I’ll do anything for you, chief—anything but time.’” For his part, Edwin maintained his innocence to the last, telling reporters, “I have always been a model citizen and I will be a model prisoner.”
Bobby, who remains in constant contact with Edwin, reported to me that her two-day indecision over whether or not to allow the Guard troops to be federalized (keeping troops, including my boys from Oklahoma, literally sitting on runways) had floored the old “silver fox.” Edwin also told Bobby that he would have been on the phone urging the president to respond much sooner (and threatening to cut off every refinery and oil and gas pipeline in the state if he didn’t give him everything he asked for), much the way Senator Russell Long had prodded LBJ after Betsy. As for the Guard, “You always hand command of the military over to the president,” Bobby says Edwin told him. “Then it becomes his problem. It’s a no-brainer.”