of a pretty young woman named Brooke White. I had trouble settling on just one, so I changed my vote from week to week, which made the debates we had about the talents of the various singers that much more fun.
The Idol show moved from the audition phase to the true competition in mid-?February, just as the due date for Rielle’s baby came and went. Feeling ever more uncomfortable, Rielle didn’t move much off the sofa, where she waited for the senator’s calls and scanned the TV news channels for stories about him. On February 17, I got a voice mail from Rielle saying she’d just seen a picture of the Edwardses meeting with Barack Obama, who had gone to Chapel Hill seeking an endorsement. “Johnny and Elizabeth could not be farther apart from each other,” she said, laughing. “I mean, like, they’re on separate sides of the driveway.”
Although she took pleasure in seeing the Edwardses look alienated from each other, Rielle was always pained by the sight of Elizabeth Edwards and frustrated over being unable to contact the senator whenever she wanted to talk. On the night after she saw the “Obama visits Edwards” TV report, Rielle found Cheri’s phone and used it to try to call him at his home. It was eleven P.M. there, and when Mrs. Edwards answered, Rielle hung up without saying a word. The senator’s wife promptly called back and left a message that began in a pleasant tone as she said, “Cheri, I don’t know whether it was you or Andrew who called us. You are welcome to call us anytime you want.” But then, as she got wound up, she became contradictory and scolding. “You have a pretty screwed-?up life right now, I understand, with… uh, another child… [pause] and I am willing to talk to you, Cheri, but I don’t want Andrew to call us, and you all can’t be a part of our lives. We are trying to wash our hands of this filth.”
After we heard this message, I called the Batphone, which the senator now kept hidden somewhere in the barn/gymnasium, where he spent most of his days and nights in a form of marital exile. The phone wasn’t set up to receive messages, but every once in a while he would tell Elizabeth he was going to exercise or shoot baskets so that he could check the call history. When I talked to him this time, he told me I needed to control Rielle more closely and to just ignore his wife. We talked politics for a while, and I encouraged him to find something to do that would connect him to his main issue of fighting for the poor and middle class.
“Imagine if instead of Hillary and Barack seeing you at your house, they met you at a Habitat for Humanity work site in New Orleans or even in Greensboro, a few miles away,” I said. “That would have been“wou a better picture.”
He brushed off the suggestion by saying something about how he was going through a difficult time and needed to be home. He then went on to gush about his encounter with Obama. He said he was leaning toward endorsing him, but Elizabeth had been appalled by Obama’s lack of detailed ideas about health care reform. However, the senator was most excited by how his onetime adversary was impressed by the basketball court at the mansion, which is a replica of the floor at UNC, where they traded shots in a game of H-?O-?R-?S-?E. (Edwards crowed about how he had won.) Hillary Clinton had already made a similar pilgrimage to Chapel Hill (no H-?O-?R-?S-?E), and although Mrs. Edwards wanted her to get the endorsement, he wanted only to endorse the eventual winner. He believed his endorsement was influential enough to determine the winner. He told me he offered it to both Clinton and Obama-first come, first served-in exchange for their commitment to his being named vice president.
Three months would pass before the senator announced his preference for Obama. As he used that time to angle for either the vice presidency or a spot in the cabinet of a future administration, the one Chapel Hill friend who still spoke to me, Tim Toben, became ever more agitated about the man’s audacity.
A decade of being “the good soldier” had reinforced my tendency to be loyal to the extreme. And besides being loyal to the senator, I had been boxed in by Elizabeth Edwards, who had called every person who might have helped me start over in a new job to say that I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief. She spread the rumor that Rielle was just “one of Andrew’s women” and I had delivered her to the senator as if I were a pimp. Under the cloud she had created, beginning when the campaign was still in full swing, only John Edwards was in a position to clear my name and help me start over. The only hope I had was that once his new child arrived, he would be moved to do the right thing.
On February 26, when she was roughly a week overdue, Rielle was scheduled to have her delivery induced. When she was ready to go to the hospital, she came to our side of the house and said, “Let’s take a picture.” She also said, “Will you call him for me, Andrew?”
Our kids knew what was going on and started to run around and shout, “The baby’s coming!” After we shushed them, Cheri went to call Bob McGovern to come with his car, and then she helped Rielle get ready. I tried the senator’s Batphone. When Rielle returned and I told her that he hadn’t answered, she barked, “Call Fred!” but then caught herself and said, “Sorry, Andrew. I’m a little emotional right now.” Fred did answer and spoke to Rielle, wishing her good luck.
When Bob arrived we took a few pictures and gave her a hug, and Rielle left for the hospital with him. About twenty minutes later, Edwards called me. I had trouble hearing because of the kids. He was abrupt and sounded irritated.
“Hey, what’s up?” he said.
I was in a good mood and said, joking, “The eagle is about to land.”
“What?”
“Just kidding. She is on the way to the hospital and wanted to talk to you. Hold on, I will patch you through.”
As I removed the phone from my ear to hit the buttons, I heard him raise his voice: “Andrew… Andrew, don’t patch me through!”
I put the phone back to my ear and said, “What?”
“I don’t want you to patch me through. Just tell her I couldn’t talk because of Elizabeth and I will call you later. Tell her I am thinking of her.”
“Senator, you have to talk to her. She will freak out if you don’t.” Pause. “Boss, you have to. Just for a minute.” He insisted it was a bad time and he would call back later. I didn’t hear from him all night.
While I talked to the senator, Bob McGovern delivered Rielle to Cottage Hospital in downtown Santa Barbara. In a photo taken before they went inside, Bob has his arm around Rielle. She’s wearing a white turtleneck that doesn’t quite cover her enormous belly and has her signature pink scarf looped around her neck. Over their heads, a sign announces, EMERGENCY TRAUMA CENTER.
At the admissions desk, Rielle signed in under the name Jaya James and let them run one of our credit cards to pay the bill. (Yes, the mother of John Edwards’s baby did not have health insurance.) The initial authorization was for five thousand dollars. When they went to the obstetrics ward, Bob blessed the room (“cleared the energy,” in Rielle’s words).
Rielle labored all night, but her cervix never dilated. Cheri was there at a little before nine A.M. on Wednesday, February 27, when Rielle agreed to a cesarean section, and a baby girl came into the world. She was twenty-?one and a half inches long, weighed eight pounds one ounce, and had blue eyes and a full head of brown hair like her father. Although the baby scored high on the scale they use to assess neonatal health, she had had her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck during the labor and her heart rate was a little fast, which caused some concern among the professionals in the delivery room. After letting Rielle visit with her briefly, they transferred the baby to an intensive care unit for observation. Cheri and Bob followed the baby to the ICU, where the nurses, assuming Bob was the father, made sure he got to hold her first.
Fortunately, the baby’s heartbeat normalized quickly, and she was soon reunited with her mom. In a photo taken during this“ken reunion, Rielle looks peaceful and relaxed as the baby rests on her chest. The picture also shows that Rielle is wearing the long heavy gold chain that Bunny Mellon gave Senator Edwards as a good-?luck charm.
When I got the news about the baby, I called and texted the senator again. I then called Fred. About an hour later, Edwards called me and I was short with him. “You need to call her. Let me give you Cheri’s cell. Be sweet-Rielle is very scared right now.” He gave me a vague assurance that he would call her, and I asked him if he wanted me to send her flowers from him.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” He paused. “But don’t sign it from me. Someone might see it.”
In this moment, I felt as though a switch had turned in my heart. After watching and hearing John Edwards practice a thousand little deceptions and tell a thousand different lies, ostensibly in the service of some greater good, I finally recognized that he didn’t care about anyone other than himself. A precious living, breathing human being-his daughter-had come into the world, and he wasn’t inclined to even call the woman who had given birth to her. Instead, I had to prompt him to do the right thing, to do the most basic, human thing. My faith in him died almost instantly, and I felt both ashamed of my naivete and very afraid for the future of my family.
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 the“isbn 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 “omaBarbara, 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.
