The Politician (38 page)

T
he three of us watched the reports on the Iowa caucus results in Fred’s house in Aspen. (We had returned there once his friend from Georgia had vacated the place.) Barack Obama won handily, becoming the genuine front-runner for the nomination. John Edwards offered a raspy thank-you to the voters who had given him second place. Unfortunately for him, Edwards had gone “all in” in Iowa, and he finished with just 1 percent more of the vote than Hillary Clinton. And while Obama and Clinton had big organizations
in the next battleground state, New Hampshire, Edwards had no real organization there, and was quickly running out of money.

“It’s not about me,” said Edwards in New Hampshire. “It’s about the families who deserve a real chance in this country.”

With Obama trumpeting “change” and Hillary turning on the emotion (her eyes welled with tears when a voter asked about the rigors of the campaign), Edwards continued with the basic themes he had used in Iowa, stressing that he would fight for the average American. But as he faced opponents with far more resources and depth of support, he was eventually reduced, in his last days of campaigning, to pleading that a vote cast for him would not be wasted.

On New Hampshire primary day, the senator actually took time to call me in Aspen. I was out playing in the snow with the kids, so he left a message. It said, in part, “Just wanted
all
[his emphasis] of you, including her, to know that I am thinking about you. I will be in South Carolina tomorrow, flying in there in the morning, and should be by myself tomorrow night, so I will talk to you then.”

Rielle, whose belly was approaching basketball size, was now living for the moments when she could talk to the senator at length. Uncomfortable and lonely, she consulted Bob on a regular basis, watched the TV news channels, and when there was no election news, searched for reruns of
Law & Order
. This show and her pink cell phone, which now displayed a photo of her lounging with the senator whenever it was on, were comfort objects for her. She used them to pass the long hours in the house because she was unable to go out because of the paparazzi. Aspen was crawling with them.

Rielle knew long before the polls closed that the results of the New Hampshire primary were going to be worse for Edwards than the Iowa caucuses. We watched the results in the library, which overlooked snowcovered mountains. He got clobbered, finishing a distant third behind the winner, Hillary Clinton, and the runner-up, Obama. Mrs. Clinton claimed the title of “Comeback Kid,” and Obama finished just three points behind
her. This success, in a largely rural and almost entirely white state, would help propel his fund-raising toward a record-setting total. It also suggested that Democrats were ready for either a black candidate or a woman. Edwards gamely declared, “Two states down, forty-eight to go. I’m in this race to the convention, and I intend to be the nominee of my party.”

Realistically, the Democrats in New Hampshire had just made the contest for the presidential nomination a two-person affair, and if Edwards was running for anything, it was to be as candidate for vice president or for a spot in some future Democratic administration. After New Hampshire, even Fred Baron’s enthusiasm began to wane, but he remained interested because his friend might win the veep slot or be named attorney general. In either of these spots, Edwards could help protect the nation’s trial lawyers from Republican efforts to cut their business by imposing tort reform.

While some Democrats began calling for the senator to drop out, we turned our attention to finding a more permanent hideout where we could give our kids some semblance of a normal life. School was starting, and Cheri and I wanted to go home. But now Fred and the senator were insisting we stay away and keep Rielle under control until his part in the election was over or Mrs. Edwards died. Santa Barbara was now the only place Rielle was even willing to consider for her hideout. This decision had been made during a blowup that began with a suggestion from Fred Baron. He told us of a place in the Southwest “where they take care of situations like this” in utter privacy for wealthy clients. Rielle took this to mean that Fred wanted to send her to a clinic for late-term abortions. In fact, Fred was recommending a secluded retreat, with staff, where celebrities and other pregnant guests get the utmost privacy. But nothing anyone said could reassure Rielle, and the argument made her even more eager to live near Bob McGovern. On January 10, we took another private jet flight, this time from Aspen to Santa Barbara. While we were in the air, Fred left me a voice mail that confirmed how things might be changing now that the dream shared by John and Elizabeth Edwards (and the shared ambition that held them together) was breaking apart:

Andrew, it’s Fred. I just want to give you a heads-up on something. I’m gonna be meeting with the principal tomorrow, but they want you to know that he is not taking your calls or her calls right now because of his circumstance, uh, with EE [Elizabeth Edwards] and not to take it personally, but it will get better soon. But right now he is in a bad place . . . When you get settled out there, give me a buzz.

By calling the senator “the principal” and referring to Rielle as “her,” Fred Baron displayed a little of the lawyer’s impulse to assure himself plausible deniability. He may have spoken this way out of habit or because he worried about future legal problems. To me it just sounded strange, as if Fred were backing away emotionally. This turned out to be true. As Fred later told me, in the weeks after the New Hampshire primary the Clintons put extra pressure on him to abandon Senator Edwards and get him and the nation’s trial lawyers behind Hillary’s campaign.

Fred’s account squared with comments I heard from the senator, who was worried about losing his support. He had talked to me about how Fred’s cash would be only “our short-term solution.” Edwards believed this because he thought Fred would soon shift his interest to another candidate. He also knew that Fred had been diagnosed with cancer and, like Mrs. Edwards, might not be around for very long. With this in mind, he said that Bunny Mellon was more likely to provide “the long-term solution” to his need to fund both Rielle’s lifestyle and an organization to keep the Edwards name in front of the public after the election. (Bunny’s support would also keep me employed.) He was confident about Bunny’s loyalty because he had been building a relationship with her. She was so fond of him that she had given him one of her gold necklaces to carry as a good-luck charm.

Despite the concerns the senator expressed, in the winter of 2007–2008, Fred Baron’s short-term support was unwavering. He spent time on the phone with Rielle when she needed comforting and enlisted his wife, Lisa
Blue, to do the same. Fred also said that money was “no object” and told me to spend whatever it took to placate Rielle and Cheri, and he would pay the bills. But because Mrs. Edwards’s condition was not as dire as the senator had told us, this was beginning to look like a long-term project. Believing Fred would eventually stop writing checks, we set aside the money Bunny had sent for future use. As the senator kept saying, “Fred’s the short-term solution and Bunny is the long-term solution.”

On January 10, we boarded Fred’s jet to leave Aspen for good and landed in Santa Barbara to start house hunting. Encouraged by Fred to “make everyone comfortable,” I checked everyone into the Biltmore Four Seasons at Butterfly Beach. Although Rielle was disappointed that we couldn’t get suites at the exclusive Bacara Resort & Spa, the Biltmore was a luxurious five-star place. Built in Spanish colonial style with red tile roofs and bubbling fountains, the hotel offered attentive service from the moment you arrived and were greeted by bellmen wearing argyle sweaters. Rielle had to inspect three different rooms and request upgrades, but to her credit, we wound up with blissfully quiet accommodations overlooking the croquet green. When the kids ran to look at the ocean, they saw a pod of dolphins jumping in the water about a quarter mile from the beach.

The main task I had to accomplish in Santa Barbara was finding a home where Rielle could wait out the end of her pregnancy and raise her baby through the first few months of life. Cheri flew home for a couple of days to clean Eric Montross’s house (and take down the Christmas tree there) so he could put it back on the market. When she got there, she discovered reporters had left about a dozen notes and business cards slipped under the front door.

In Santa Barbara, Rielle and I met real-estate agents, who were told that she was my “stepsister,” and we scoured rental listings on the Internet. I found several nice houses in the $5,000 to $10,000 (per month) range and was sure I had discovered the perfect spot when I stumbled upon a mountaintop home owned by Herb Peterson, who had invented the Egg McMuffin for McDonald’s. Mr. Peterson, who was going into a nursing home, offered me a
Heineken, and we shared his last beer in that house while Rielle looked around and decided it did not have the right karma.

The winner in what became a dream house contest was a huge, single-level home in the gated Montecito neighborhood of Ennisbrook. Adjacent to Oprah Winfrey’s estate (where Barack Obama had recently held a fund-raiser) and hidden behind its own secondary gate, the hacienda-style home had nine-foot-high steel-and-glass entry doors, a great room with a grand piano and a view of the ocean and mountains, and a library with a fifteen-foot ceiling. The layout of the place, which offered separate wings for our family and Rielle, provided a measure of privacy for all of us. The final stamp of approval came from Bob McGovern, whom I met for the first time when he arrived in his BMW 740i to perform a blessing, which Rielle said would “clear the energy” of the place.

Roughly six feet two and well over two hundred pounds, Bob was not at all what I expected. A few years past sixty, he had bushy hair that was silvery gray and a big belly that made him look like Captain Kangaroo. His voice was extremely measured and soothing, and his smile seemed genuine. I didn’t go inside to watch him do his thing, but whatever it was, it made Rielle happy and calm, and I appreciated his effect on her.

When Cheri got back, we all moved in. We had gone to great lengths to hide from the press and the public, so we couldn’t risk enrolling the kids in school. Instead, we found a teacher who would come to homeschool the kids and establish a routine for them. Ennisbrook isn’t exactly teeming with kids, so I regularly took them to the park and the local YMCA, where they met lots of playmates, and I let them run on the beach as much as possible.

Because Rielle was late in her pregnancy and her picture was in the
Enquirer
and all over the Internet, she stayed home most of the time. She spoke often with Senator Edwards and told us that it didn’t matter that he was losing his bid for the nomination. “The universe” had other things in store for him, she said, including a life with her and a new baby.

When I spoke with him, the senator grumbled about John Kerry—“that asshole”—endorsing Barack Obama and speculated about how he could parlay his own endorsement into a position for himself. Cheri and I fell into a routine of taking care of Rielle’s basic needs almost as if she were our child. When we cooked meals she was included, and when we went to the store we bought her supplies along with ours. As an expression of rebellion, I ran these errands while listening to Hank Williams cranked up loud on the stereo in my redneck Jeep, which I had had shipped out from North Carolina. I waved to our neighbors, who drove Bentleys and Aston Martins, and I didn’t care that they never waved back. Once, as I pulled up to the front gate of the development, the guard looked at my four days’ growth of beard and my Jeep, and when I said, “Andrew Young, Ennisbrook,” he said, “Is he expecting you?” He didn’t believe me at first when I said, “
I’m
Andrew Young,” but a call to the manager, who confirmed the identity of the redneck in the Jeep, convinced him.

When the sun was shining and the breeze carried the scent of the ever-blooming flowers through the air, Santa Barbara was so beautiful that I almost forgot we were on the run with John Edwards’s pregnant mistress. But then I would get back to the house and discover that Rielle was ranting about some bit of praise John Edwards had offered to his wife during a TV interview or that my wife had received a hostile message on her cell phone from Elizabeth. In one, which we saved, she said, “We thought you should know that this is not Andrew’s first woman,” and then she cackled into the phone.

Listening to this stuff, I became convinced that her husband’s infidelity, the inevitable end of the campaign, and her ongoing battle with cancer had become too much for Mrs. Edwards to bear with any grace. She didn’t want to recognize the doubts sown in the minds of voters by the
Enquirer
or the possibility that Obama—with the help of several Edwards castoffs, including David Axelrod and Julianna Smoot—was simply a better candidate. She preferred to believe that I was responsible for John Edwards losing his
advantage and the caucuses in Iowa and getting clobbered in New Hampshire.

The last straw for the campaign came on January 26, when the senator finished third in the primary in South Carolina, where he was born. After this defeat, he quit the race. However, anticipating a convention split between Obama and Clinton, where his handful of delegates could determine the winner, he didn’t officially end his campaign but merely “suspended” it. “It’s time for me to step aside,” he said, “so that history can—so that history can blaze its path.” Ironically enough, Rudy Giuliani, whose sign had annoyed Elizabeth Edwards every time she left her house, dropped out of the Republican race on the same day her husband ended his run for the Democratic nomination.