For example, until Mrs. Edwards barred me from the campaign, I had managed many of the day-​to-​day expenses the senator incurred, including his haircuts, which were more of an issue than you might imagine. Naturally thick and lustrous, his hair was a fixation with him. He insisted on using just one kind of shampoo-HairTec Thick & Strong Shampoo for Fine, Fragile Hair-which Mrs. Edwards bought by the case. His hair also had a tendency to grow in a way that made him look like Opie Taylor on the old Andy Griffith Show. A gifted barber could make him look mature and presidential, and when the senator found one with this skill, he was willing to pay whatever it cost to obtain his services. In 2006 his favorite was Joe Torrenueva, a Beverly Hills stylist who charged between three hundred dollars and five hundred dollars per appointment.

For years, I had used my credit cards or the Edwardses’ personal credit c {sonards to pay for the senator’s personal items so that they wouldn’t be charged to the campaign and then turn up in the public reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Political opponents and news reporters scoured these documents as they were submitted each quarter, hoping to see something juicy in the spending. The senator’s pricey haircuts would certainly catch the eye of any journalist interested to see if the man who was the champion of the poor was a spendthrift. I made sure that no one ever knew about them. When the new, inexperienced staff got the job of arranging for the senator’s personal on-​the-​road needs, they pushed two bills for four-​hundred-​dollar haircuts through the normal campaign channels, and the payments were included in the big public quarterly report submitted to the FEC.

The revelation of the four-​hundred-​dollar haircuts, which was discovered by the Obama campaign, would have been bruising for any candidate under any circumstances, but it was worse for Senator Edwards because of his antipoverty focus and because of a video on YouTube that showed him having makeup applied and fussing over his hair to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” as sung by Julie Andrews. For a few weeks the “Pretty” video, which went viral at the start of spring, was one of the most viewed political items on the Internet, and it revived a mean-​spirited line of attack that officials in the Bush White House had devised to use against John Edwards in the 2004 campaign.

Back then, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times made public the Bush team’s decision to refer to Edwards as the “Breck Girl” and emasculate him by playing on his boyish good looks. Dowd has a habit of using gender issues to attack people, often suggesting something’s wrong with any man showing so-​called feminine traits. In this case, she gave currency to the Bush rhetoric, which just happened to be accurate.

Unstated, but always part of the context when it came to their public image, was the idea that John Edwards was actually prettier than his wife. This was an issue inside their marriage, and it contributed to her insecurity and his roving. It was also an unstated factor in the campaign and in the minds of many women voters who found him attractive and were reassured that his attachment to Mrs. Edwards remained strong as she aged more rapidly than he did and cancer stole some of her beauty. He gained political capital by loving the real Elizabeth, no matter what age and childbirth and illness did to her body. He lost a little of it when he spent too much time and money attending to his hair. And as they both knew, he risked losing all of it if his relationship with Rielle Hunter became known. Since Mrs. Edwards assumed that I was responsible for keeping Rielle around, she connected me with the threat inherent in the haircut problem. I thought she should have realized that I had always protected the senator from similar unpleasant episodes and that this one arose because she had tried too hard to marginalize me. Mrs. Edwards also didn’t know that my work for the senator was going to yield a remarkable offer of aid that would prove essential to keeping alive the senator’s hope of becoming president and Mrs. Edwards’s dream of being First Lady.

In the midst of the negative publicity, which forced Senator Edwards to tell the press he didn’t know his haircuts were so expensive and confess the issue was “really embarrassing,” a letter from our friend in Upperville, Virginia, landed {ginon my desk. Written in delicate script on pale blue stationery, it was decorated with a sketch of a graceful tree with the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background.

As she wrote, Bunny Mellon was appalled by the treatment John Edwards was receiving. “I see jealousy coming from somewhere in this news report,” she said, and then she volunteered to pay whatever expenses the senator incurred that could not be covered by the campaign, including the employment of a valet. She instructed me to simply send the bills to her attorney, Alex Forger, and rest assured that they would be paid.

Bunny had written the letter as she sat in the room of her…

Ten

Heather North, the nanny, was one of the few people who knew what I knew about the Edwardses and Rielle Hunter, and there were times when she and I compared notes. These talks were part gossip and part mutual support, which we needed, considering the stress that comes with keeping secrets. We were both struck by the midlife crisis aspect of John Edwards’s affair and how he had obviously found in Rielle someone who was his wife’s opposite. A New Age drifter who made her own rules, Rielle was always working the “fun-​and-​single-​blonde” angle. She was someone who offered sex, spiritual advice, or good company as you had a few drinks. Mrs. Edwards looked like who she was-a highly educated, middle-​aged mother, cancer victim, and wife of thirty years.

As different as they were in style and background, Rielle and Mrs. Edwards were both ambitious and self-​confident. Both were certain that John Edwards should be president and that if he was elected, the world would be a much better place. And they both believed in the power of their own insight and intuition. Mrs. Edwards followed hers to guide the campaign. Rielle relied on hers to advise the senator personally. Finally, they were both insecure about the future and the senator’s true intentions. These feelings led Mrs. Edwards to try to push me out of John Edwards’s life. They led Rielle to depend on me to connect her to him. I was squarely in the middle.

On the day the senator went home to deal with the recurrence of his wife’s cancer, Rielle called me at least half a dozen times to complain ~ about spending her birthday alone. “He loves me,” she would say, “and it’s just not right that we’re not together.”

In the weeks that followed, Rielle seethed over the attention Mrs. Edwards received from the media, but she also celebrated the jump in the senator’s poll numbers. We spoke every day, usually more than once. With his schedule in hand, Rielle was able to meet him in various hotels when he was campaigning without his wife. However, the rules of engagement, so to speak, had changed as Mrs. Edwards had become keenly aware of Rielle Hunter. She monitored call histories on phones (at least those she could locate) and called her husband many times a day when he was away. Mrs. Edwards also forbade hotel operators from transferring calls from women to his room and regularly changed his check-​in pseudonym.

More concerned than ever about being caught, the senator required Rielle to be as furtive as possible. When he was in New York, she could no longer wait in the hotel lobby and then go up to his room. Instead, she had to hang out in a bar next door and hope to either catch sight of the entourage entering or wait to receive a cell phone call. During one of these stakeouts, she looked up to see John Davis, the body man, enter and take a seat at the counter, which was between her and the door. Panicked, Rielle ran to the restroom and hid. After a long wait, the woman who had served her a drink came to ask if she was all right. Rielle told her a tale about how she was hiding from one of the customers, and the kindly waitress let her slip out a back door.