The Politician (40 page)

The senator eventually did call Rielle at the hospital, and Cheri told me that she seemed happy about what he had told her. I knew that he had merely played the role of the concerned father, transforming himself for the few minutes that he had to spend on the phone with Rielle and then dropping the pose as soon as he hung up. I knew he had this chameleon ability, and I no longer considered it a talent or a tool. I saw it as a symptom of something deeply flawed in the man, and it disturbed me to think about how he had used this ability to fool me and others so many times. It had taken me almost ten years to figure out the truth about the senator. Rielle had known him for only two years, and when they spoke she was drugged with painkillers and flooded with the feel-good endorphins that come with labor. She believed him.

Because she’d had a cesarean, Rielle stayed in the hospital for five days.
During this time, Cheri offered her expertise as a nurse to help her adjust to breast-feeding and learn all the other duties that come with a newborn. (Despite her years of experience with new moms, Cheri was a little taken aback when Rielle asked when she could resume having sex.) When Rielle and the baby were ready to be discharged, Cheri and Bob were there to help her. Cheri brought along a baby’s shirt that Rielle had asked our kids to decorate with the logo “I Am the Granddaughter of a Millworker.” Rielle wrapped the shirt around her baby, whom she had named Frances Quinn, for the journey home. (She chose Quinn, a derivation of the Latin word for “five,” because she was Edwards’s fifth child.)

The hospital’s final bill was paid with our credit card, and Rielle signed out under the name Rielle Jaya James Druck. The space for “father” on the child’s birth certificate was left blank. Bob drove mother and child to Montecito and through the gate at Ennisbrook and then to the house.

Within an hour of Rielle’s arrival at the house, I could see that she was not going to have an ordinary relationship with her child. I had witnessed the bond Cheri made with each of our children and watched other new moms with their infants, so I knew the attachment could be fierce. But Rielle believed, as she said, that the baby had been “sent to save the world.” Accordingly, she just couldn’t let anyone else hold her. In fact, in her first few days at the house with the baby, Rielle almost never put her down. With the slightest cry or snuffle, she would pick up the baby, coo something like “You are just soooo beautiful!” and try to nurse her.

In more relaxed moments, Rielle would do a funny imitation of Barack Obama’s famous campaign line “Fired up, ready to go.” Before it became annoying, it was actually heartwarming to see a mother with her baby, chanting, “Fired up! Ready to go! Fired up! Ready to go!” as the baby’s eyes widened and focused on her face. Unfortunately, Rielle’s positive spirit was reserved entirely for Frances Quinn. With us, she was irritated and impatient. She couldn’t bear the slightest noise from our kids and would try to get them to be quiet even when they were playing outside.

When Bob visited we had a few private minutes with him, and he tried to explain Rielle’s demanding and needy nature. He said that Rielle had suffered terribly as a child. With Frances Quinn, he said, “she’s trying to fill the void inside her.” Knowing that her father had been involved in an insurance fraud scheme and actually killed his own daughter’s beloved prizewinning horse, we found it easy to believe she carried deep psychological wounds. But although this information helped us have compassion for Rielle, it didn’t make living with her any easier. After a couple of days, we decided to go to North Carolina and check on our house, which was now months into construction. Rielle invited an old friend named Wendy to come up from Los Angeles and keep her company while we took a risk and flew back to Raleigh-Durham. (We left the kids with Cheri’s parents as we traveled.) I hadn’t been home since December.

At the construction site, we were able to see what the builder had done. Because we were forced to make decisions by phone, guided by our architect, the house had gotten much bigger and more expensive than we had planned. During the visit we offered whatever suggestions we could for bringing the project under control, but we could hardly blame the builder, because we had told him to do what he thought was best. “Best” in any contractor’s mind is going to be big and expensive, and in the world we now inhabited, which included private jets, Aspen vacation homes, and Santa Barbara rentals that cost twenty thousand dollars per month, a thousand dollars this way or that way didn’t seem to matter.

When we weren’t at the building site we were at the Montross house, which hadn’t yet sold. We went through piles of mail and a stack of notes left by reporters and photographers. We didn’t respond to any of them but brought the notes with us as we traveled back to California. We didn’t know when we would ever get to North Carolina again.

In Santa Barbara, we discovered that Rielle had just about driven her friend Wendy crazy with demands and criticisms. (Wendy actually broke down crying as she talked to us about the experience.) Rielle also had been
calling Senator Edwards’s phone several times a day and was threatening both him and Fred Baron with going public about the affair and the baby. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for anything to make Rielle more difficult to deal with, but motherhood had in fact given her an even greater sense of her own power and a willingness to use it.

One seemingly small incident from this period illustrates the point perfectly. After calling Cheri for a cup of coffee, Rielle let it sit for a moment and then summoned her back because she needed more sugar put in it. Cheri got her what she requested and left, only to receive another phone call from Rielle. The coffee now needed more milk. Cheri added milk, but now it was too cold. “Put it in the microwave,” said Rielle. A mother, nurse, and wife who was accustomed to caretaking, Cheri actually did this chore, but she was obviously unhappy and said something sarcastic about how Rielle must have been especially tired.

Soon Cheri and I were both fit to be tied as life with Rielle became more difficult and weeks passed without any sign of the senator telling the truth or any suggestion of a long-term resolution of this crazy mission. Communication with him was becoming more difficult. Where he once called several times a day, he now never dialed my number. When I got through to him, he kept the calls brief and guarded what he said. In the middle of March, I was shocked to hear that he had booked himself onto
The Tonight Show
with Jay Leno and that after the taping he was going to visit Rielle and the baby at a hotel in Beverly Hills.

Rielle told us of this plan with both excitement and anxiety in her voice. The meeting was set for March 19, which was about ten days away, and she was self-conscious about her physical condition. She instantly began fasting and exercising madly. (I’ll never forget how she chanted along with special recordings of Buddhist monks that she listened to as she worked out on the treadmill. The sound of the chants, with Rielle joining in, echoed through the house.) Rielle was also worried about how to relate to John Edwards now that she was the mother of his child and their relationship was
more complicated. Cheri, who was overloaded with the stress of Rielle’s demands, responded to this concern with one of her rare (considering the circumstances) displays of hostility.

“Well, of course you are worried,” she said. “Your whole relationship has been about nothing other than hanging out in hotel rooms, drinking, and having sex.” This time Rielle would get the hotel room, Cheri allowed, but since she was nursing, alcohol was out, and it was a little too soon for her to engage in much sexual activity.

As snarky attacks go, Cheri’s little commentary was fairly mild, and Rielle didn’t react. On March 18, Bob came to pick her up for the drive to Los Angeles, where they would stay in two of the more expensive suites available at the famous Beverly Hilton Hotel. I received text messages from Rielle that referred to the senator and his new daughter. The most telling one arrived at 1:39
A.M
.: “Yeah he is burping Quinn going to sleep when he is done. Soooo tired.”

The next night, I watched on television as the senator walked onto the Leno set, shook hands with the genial host, and answered questions. Like everyone, Leno was most interested in whether he had made an endorsement decision. The senator said Hillary Clinton was the choice he’d make with his head, but Barack Obama might be the candidate chosen by his heart. When asked if he might try one more time for the White House, he said, “I’m not thinking about running again. But never say never.”

It was mind-boggling to me that the senator was able to take the stage in such a relaxed manner and discuss national political affairs with such a sense of his own power, knowing that he could be brought down in an instant by a mistress lounging in a hotel across town with his newborn baby. Worse still, he was sitting on the same sofa he had shared with Elizabeth just months earlier, when they spoke lovingly of their thirtieth anniversary.

C
heri had had enough of Rielle, John Edwards, Elizabeth Edwards, and the freakish existence we had accepted and now seemed to be trapped inside.
She wanted our life back, and so did I. But I had signed for the $20,000-per-month lease on the Santa Barbara house, and my income was tied to John Edwards. Every time I talked to Fred Baron about ending the charade and helping us get back to a normal life, he said, “Don’t worry about it, we’re going to take care of you. We need to focus on getting him the vice presidency.” When I tried to call and text the senator myself, he refused to answer the phone or respond to my messages. He had no problem responding to Rielle, however, and called her half a dozen times a day. Once when I answered her phone when he called, he responded with cold indifference to my pleas for him to come clean and changed the subject by accusing my wife of talking to bloggers who were speculating on the Internet about Edwards’s connection to Rielle.

I could barely contain my anger. “Rielle tells everyone she knows about you. We haven’t even told our families. What the . . . ?” I shouted at him. I let him know that she had told her friends Mimi and Wendy everything about him, and when she talked to her friend Pigeon O’Brien in St. Louis, they laughingly referred to him as “Love Lips.” Our families still weren’t sure why we had disappeared, and our kids were beginning to forget their lives back in North Carolina. Senator Edwards didn’t seem to care about our distress, but he did ask if I could get a diaper to send for a DNA test. He still didn’t believe he was the baby’s father.

When the call was over, it was clear to me that I would have to take some action to solve our problems. I still heard from a few people who were connected with the campaigns and refused to judge me harshly. One of these friends actually gave my name to a prominent attorney in Tampa who had started a national nonprofit organization to help disabled people. Blinded in an accident when he was a teenager, Richard Salem called this group Enable America. Its goal was to help people with various disabilities gain access to employment. The project had stalled for lack of donations, and my track record as a fund-raiser got his attention. After he reviewed my history and we spoke several times on the phone, he flew Cheri and me to Tampa for an interview.

My first contacts with Richard Salem had restored my sense of confidence and given me some hope for the future. After a night in a hotel, where we talked about living in Tampa and decided it would be okay, Cheri and I went to meet him. We had breakfast at a restaurant that was high up in one of the city’s tallest buildings, and I thought an offer was pending. Toward the end of the breakfast Salem motioned to his assistant, who began riffling through her briefcase. While the assistant continued her search, Salem said, “Andrew, I want to tell you about a case in which I represented a Mob boss.” He proceeded to explain how he was up front with the jury about his client’s crime connections because “you should never ignore the elephant in the room.” His aide then handed over copies of
National Enquirer
articles about me, Rielle, and the senator. This was my elephant, said Richard Salem, and he couldn’t ignore it.

Unable to defend myself without the risk of blowing the entire cover-up, I thought the fact that I was sitting there with my wife showed the story was false. I said, “I would hope people would see what’s been printed and look at us together and know what is true.”

Although he obviously couldn’t “see” us, I know that Richard Salem could hear the strength of Cheri’s support for me when we had talked about the job and moving our family to Florida. Nevertheless, after recruiting me quite aggressively, he told me I could not have the job. We went home feeling ashamed and angry. When we got back to Santa Barbara, nothing had changed with Rielle. She was still extremely needy and so focused on her baby that she hardly ever left her alone to sleep. I never actually held Frances Quinn, and Rielle let Cheri, who had years of neonatal intensive care experience, handle her only a few times. She was happy to let us do chores for her, however, and would call us on the telephone when we were just two or three rooms away to help her with a task.

When we resisted her, Rielle became petulant but also tried to handle a few things on her own. On one morning she actually put coffee in the coffeemaker, filled it with water, and switched it on to brew. When she returned, she found that she had missed something in the setup and both coffee and
grounds had flowed out of the machine, over the counter, and onto the floor. She saw the mess, made a fresh pot of coffee so she would have something to drink, but decided against cleaning up. A little later in the morning, Cheri wandered into the kitchen, where the countertop and floor (both made of limestone, which was easily stained) were still wet with Rielle’s mess. She came back to our side of the house, where I was on the treadmill.