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Guest post by Sarah Elizabeth Richards, the author of "The Clock Ticker's Reprieve," a narrative account of how egg freezing affected the lives of five women, to be published by Simon & Schuster in summer 2010.
In response to my article about Rielle Hunter's chances of having a baby at 43, a reader asks how researchers determine a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant each month, especially when they don’t know when or how frequently she is having intercourse. Since a woman is only fertile about three days a month, the stat assumes she’s had sex during this window ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Emily, I agree that modern women don't really want a Don Draper,
but at least he's a way better fantasy than fellow affair-havers Mark
Sanford and now John Edwards. First, Sanford had that lame Appalachian
Trail excuse and the even more embarrassing press conference. In a New York Times article over the weekend,
it was revealed that Edwards promised mistress Rielle Hunter that he
would "marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance
by the Dave Matthews Band." What is wrong with our chronically
unstylish philandering politicians? ... (Read the rest of this post, or the full thread, in DoubleX.)
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As a woman who has declined to put her picture on Facebook—my profile
photo is a drawing of me by my daughter—I respectfully disagree with Katie Roiphe's assumption
that this somehow represents some reprehensible self-effacement on my
part as a working woman. I'm admittedly a little late to social
networking, and not exactly a devotee. A friend of mine jokes that my
status line should read... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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In her much-discussed Tuesday column on Elizabeth Edwards, Maureen Dowd wrote:
Elizabeth said when they married, the only gift she asked John for was to be faithful.
Yesterday, while interviewing Edwards in her home, Oprah teed up the same anecdote. "You asked your husband for just one gift when you got married; what was that?" she asked. "I wanted him to be faithful to me," Edwards replied.
I found this strange in Dowd's column and stranger during the interview. Maybe I'm naive, but... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!"
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Hanna, I have to take issue with your statement that Elizabeth Edwards has an "infallible bullshit detector." Sure, she would have spotted what an on-the-make idiot Rielle Hunter was. But her detector's been on the blink for the past 30 years as far as John Edwards was concerned. As soon as he appeared on the scene it wasn't hard to see he was an oily, vain phony who would take on whatever pose seemed useful for his own advancement. You're right, Elizabeth is not simply "standing by her man" and pasting a fake smile on her face. But as Susannah points out, she's trying to portray John as a naif taken in by a New Age seductress, which just prompts an "Oh, please." But John Edward's political career is over, and Elizabeth Edwards is mortally ill—it's understandable that given the circumstances she doesn't want to end her marriage. Still, why is she making so public this private pain?
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Meghan, it kills me to read that Newsweek piece about Rielle Hunter and her "New Age jargon," as Jonathan Darman calls it, and offers this example:
Human beings were dragged down by "blockages" to their actual potential; history was the story of souls entering and escaping our field of consciousness...Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.
One undeniable thing about Elizabeth Edwards is her infallible bullshit detector. When I interviewed friends and staff that's the first thing they all mentioned about her. If one of her assistants had tried this "blockages" line on her—or God forbid mentioned it as a cause of her cancer, as New Age types are wont to do—she would have dunked the assistant's head in the sink. It must be doubly dismaying to her that her own husband was seduced by it.
Also, as you mentioned, she is a curious combination of vulnerable and strong. This New Republic story I wrote about her opens with all the times she told other women she met on the campaign trail how pretty they were. Then, in a roundtable with all the wives of candidates, she said:
"My gosh, you are all so beautiful. Which one doesn't belong? I feel a little bit like that—one of these things just doesn't belong." The remark was typical of Elizabeth Edwards—spontaneous, unfiltered, generous, and a little domineering: It takes a unique combination of vulnerability and supreme confidence to say something like that on a stage. The main effect of her compliment was to set her apart. They were a group of fresh faces one could marvel at, and she was the old hand, a woman to be dealt with on her own terms.
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Hanna,
I hear what you say about moxie. What interests me about Edwards is that she
doesn't fit any clear mold. She seems at once very strong and very vulnerable.
One almost feels that in the very fact that she has lived with advanced cancer
for such an extraordinary length of time. On the other hand, Susannah's
close reading of the passage about Rielle Hunter is spot-on, to my ear. In
this description of how the affair began, Edwards uses language that implicitly
depicts Rielle as a fierce, amoral hunter (her last name, after all), and John as
little more than biological silly putty; if Elizabeth doesn't quite make John out
to be an innocent pup, she does suggests he is merely too pliable. The agency is all the Huntress's.
I suppose that's natural; most of would be angry at the other woman,
especially if she's as touchy-feely as Rielle sounds. Do any of you remember this Newsweek piece by
Jonathan Darman about his encounters with her? If I were Elizabeth, I'd
be both threatened by Rielle's brand of sinuous femininity and put off by it. If
you buy the portrait painted in the Darman piece, Rielle seems to possess a
brand of sexual wile that I can’t help feeling is somehow more deeply
associated with womanhood, to this day, than almost any other quality. When I read
about these women, with their New Age sensitivity, their way of leaning in
close at the bar and asking “What sign are you?” I often find myself thinking
they're the true "XX" and I'm, say, X and a 1/2.
What's interesting to me about the passage Susannah posts is how you can see
that Edwards sort of feels that too, otherwise she would never use words like “target.”
The Rielle that Edwards writes about is just a new version of Crystal Edwards from
The Women. She sees something she wants and doesn't hesitate to wreck a
marriage to get it. These days, though, Crystal Allen doesn’t sell perfume at the
perfume counter; she is into astrology and cleanses and freelance video
work. In this reading, Elizabeth, of course, is the wholesome wife (Mrs.
Stephen Haines) played by Norma Shearer; only the movie doesn't end with her
reconciliation with her husband. It ends with her on a talk show, sharpening
her nails a bit. And who could blame her?
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Welcome, Eve, and good call about Politico's top 10 blunders. The piece doesn't itself point out that the screw-ups it lists were sexist (though Fox does get dinged for taking two "racially tinged shots at Michelle Obama"). I'm with you in not complaining. Better to mount a broader critique of some of the coverage of Michelle and Hillary and Sarah Palin than to slap a sexist label on it. As we watched all of this unfold over the past year, what drew us in, I think, were the ambiguities and complexities, as well as the high drama. Maybe that, too, is a reason to take heart--as we got to know these women as public figures, we kept coming back for more because they only got more interesting.
Also, a quibble: I don't agree entirely with your list. The NYT's presentation of Vicki Iseman's affair-nonaffair with John McCain was an old-fashioned story without the goods—or at least, without the goods in print. I'm not sure it's more problematic than that. And the failure of the mainstream press to run with John Edwards and Rielle Hunter, after the National Enquirer nabbed them—well, nobody likes to get beat, and once the tabloids make a story their own, it's tainted from the point of view of major newspapers and TV. I'm not defending the laggards—as I said ad nauseam at the time, the Edwards story was wholly legit. But I'm not sure you can chalk up the way the press handled it to the pitfalls of covering women.
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Poring through Michael Calderone's "Top Ten Media Blunders of 2008" in the Politico, it was hard not to notice how many of his favorite Fourth Estate screw-ups had to do, in some obvious or oblique way, with sexism purportedly making its way into the press. You've got the whole Hillary-in-New-Hampshire episode, in which Hillary wept and the media's subsequent mockery mobilized women voters on her behalf (or so the mythology goes); you've got MSNBC's choice to hand its election coverage over to Chris "She-Devil" Matthews; you've got the "Obama's baby mama" Chyron on Fox; and you've got the David Shuster pimp-Chelsea Clinton thing—along with the questionable coverage of two alleged Big Macher mistresses, Vicki Iseman and Rielle Hunter.
You could make the case that all the media's stumbles over sexism should alarm women, but I wonder if the opposite isn't the case. It shows how sensitive we've become to the various pitfalls inherent in covering women. (And, well, maybe too sensitive, but that's another debate.)
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I agree with Rachael and think that unequal hush installments were not only sexist, the distributions were too small. Don't you think $15,000 and $20,000 a month seems measley for the sacrifice Hunter and Young's family were making in their personal lives?
Were the payments to go on indefinitely, one wonders, or simply until Hunter would be eligible to become the second Mrs. de Winter?
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Rielle Hunter had to spend nine months pregnant and an unreported number of hours in labor before she could milk John Edwards' supporters for $15,000 a month (allegedly).
If the New York Post is to be believed (and why not, at this point?), all Andrew Young had to do before he could milk John Edwards' supporters was claim he fathered little Frances Quinn. And he's getting $20,000 (allegedly).
Ladies, what do we have to do to break the political-scandal glass ceiling?
(hat tip: InstaPundit)
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Go, Ruth! In her column in the Post this morning, she says there isn't a wife in the world who doesn't want to slap "99 percent'' Honest John Edwards silly right about now. And on account of the senator's perfidy, are husbands across the land enduring conversations about what kind of dumb you'd have to be to fall for that "in my eyes, you are Gandhi'' silliness? But here's a question: Do we really know anything about John Edwards' vanity, hubris, and self-indulgence now that we didn't know after the $400 haircut he expensed to his campaign? I still say every canyon in Bill Clinton's moral landscape was mapped out in the New Yorker piece on how he let a mentally disabled man—so uncomprehending he saved the cherry pie from his last meal for later—be executed to prove how tough he was and distract from revelations about Gennifer Flowers. And was there any question at all about George W. Bush's capacity for empathy that was not answered by Tucker Carlson's piece about him having a good old time imitating Carla Faye Tucker's pleas that he spare her life? There are plenty of unsexy windows into virtue, too: When I spent some time around Kofi Annan for a profile, the detail that spoke to me most clearly about his character was that he was exactly the same with waiters and clerks as with heads of state. People tell us who they are every day, often even when fully clothed.
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Meghan, I couldn’t agree more about how depressing the “I’m suffering!” political apology has become. Elizabeth Edwards has terminal cancer; John Edwards has terminal narcissism. Let’s call it a tie? But the more we pick at the threads of rampant narcissism here, the sadder the whole story gets. Melinda points to the weird Newsweek account by Jonathan Darman in which Rielle Hunter emerges as a patchwork of reality show clichés: part actress, part “spiritual adviser,” “New York party girl,” screenwriter, part married, and part divorced.
Her “webisodes,” in which John Edwards drones on and on about John Edwards, manage to be all about Rielle.
The most astonishing part of the Darman piece is Hunter’s disclosure that “she and novelist Jay McInerney were working on a ‘genius' idea for a television show about women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them.” She apparently “wanted to pitch this idea to Darren Star, creator of ‘Melrose Place’ and ‘Sex and the City.’ ” Betcha $15,000 it’s in production by September.
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John Edwards is reminding me more and more of poor Henry Cisneros, who was on his way to becoming the Latino Obama before he cheated on his saintly wife, Mary Alice, while she was pregnant with their third child, a son born with no spleen and a malformed heart and stomach. Bill Clinton asked Cisneros to serve as his housing secretary anyway, a few years later, and by then, the affair was such old news that it never even came up during his confirmation hearings. Yet in the course of his background check for the cabinet post, Cisneros lied to the FBI—not about whether he was supporting his former mistress, but about the amount he paid her—and as a result, was subjected to a four-year investigation by a special prosecutor, a probe that cost taxpayers $9 million. Heck of a public servant, Henry, so big-hearted and capable; watching him work a crowd in San Antonio back in the day, you'd have sworn you were looking at the future. But at some point after he stopped paying Linda Medlar, she started taping their phone calls, and triggered the investigation. When the judge who presided over his trial finally asked Cisneros why he'd lied in the first place, he explained that while he wasn't positive himself about the amount he'd paid Medlar, he was positive he didn't want his wife to know how high that figure was. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor, and when he left public life, we all lost out. So, what's the relevance?
First, it's that scary as we wives can be, federal investigators are scarier, and if any of the $15,000 a month that's being paid to Edwards' ex-girlfriend came from campaign funds, I cannot overemphasize how seldom fudging the facts with the Feds works out. Second, what do Monica Lewinsky, Linda Medlar, and Rielle Hunter have in common? All were employees, and world-class blabbermouths. (You never really hear about the guys who get involved with the quiet types, do you?) It's silly to say we don't care if politicians fool around as long as they don't lie about it; how is that supposed to work? (Though if we replaced those one-minute morning speeches they give in Congress with a daily adultery roll call, CSPAN would definitely do some box office.) And until we figure it out, we're stuck pretending these people are perfect and then, when we find out otherwise, pretending we're surprised.
As it is, we're so perplexed about how to treat this stuff I can't even tell what this first-person Newsweek piece is trying to say. In it, reporter Jonathan Darman tells about his own adventures with Rielle Hunter, a woman so fascinating that after meeting her on a trip to Iowa with Edwards in 2006, Darman spends weeks trying to track her down and months getting to know her. After concluding she's an unreliable source, he keeps in touch anyway: "I continued to see her. ... I liked Rielle'' and "let her do my astrological chart.'' From the way he describes their boozy first lunch, I can't tell if he suspected she and Edwards were carrying on or not: Is the tone confessional because he missed the story, because he had the story and sat on it, or because he fell for the "I can tell you're an old soul'' hoodoo himself? (The last guy I knew who talked like that wound up blowing town with the life savings of several women who each thought they were going to marry him and start an ashram.) Hunter told Darman that in this incarnation, she wanted to help Edwards become a transformational figure on a par with Gandhi or MLK; better luck next time?
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OK, so John Edwards cops to the affair but says he's not the baby daddy to Rielle Hunter's infant. A few problems with all of this. First, is he trying to help himself by saying "he did not love her"? Is that supposed to make Elizabeth feel better, that not only did he jeopardize their personal relationship but also his candidacy--the one that she insisted he continue despite her diagnosis of a terminal disease, the one that she worked so hard on--for some action on the side?
And, I may be proved wrong, but I don't buy that he's not the father. He and Andrew Young, the "admitted" father, both had an affair with Hunter? Possible, but yuck. And if Young is not the father, and Edwards is not the father, then who the heck is Young covering for? And why was Edwards visiting Hunter and the baby at 2:45 in the morning?
I guess it's time for Edwards to go campaign with Bill Clinton touting the benefits of monogamy!
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On Thursday, the usual taping of Slate's Political gabfest turned into a smackdown on the question we've been debating on "XX Factor"—should the National Enquirer have published its John Edwards story. Here's the resulting slugfest, from Slatesters John Dickerson, David Plotz, Bill Smee, and me. Go to minute 29:00 (about two-thirds of the way through) for the Edwards bit (the earlier segments are about Obama and McCain). Forgive the profanity—don't listen to it with the kids!
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I'm with Emily B that you can feel terrible for Elizabeth Edwards and still recognize the John Edwards' love child story is news. It's especially news since Edwards has always made biography his strongest selling point. I see Edwards as a sanctimonious phony with no public policy accomplishments, and no record of the kind of executive skill it takes to head a Cabinet department. So if the National Enquirer story has killed his chances of having a high post in an Obama administration, then thank you, National Enquirer.
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OK, Melinda and Hanna, I wouldn't want to have the job of stalking John Edwards either. But so what? If it's true, the National Enquirer story about him and Rielle Hunter is news, absolutely clearly and by any definition I can think of. And if I'd stumbled on that story—yes I realize that's a fairly ridiculous hypothetical, since the prize goes to the digger, but just imagine for a sec—I'd surely have published it. And I don't really care if the hypocrisy parallel with Larry Craig is exact or not, or how far down the VP list Edwards was when the story broke. He is a major Democratic politician. He could run for election again. He could be in an Obama Cabinet. The press has been poring over sex scandals involving Republicans all year—not just Craig but also David Vitter and the D.C. Madam and whoever else I'm forgetting. I am sorry for Elizabeth Edwards, and their kids, and for the disillusionment of Edwards fans everywhere. But Rachael is right. His middle-of-the-night hotel skulking is fair game. (Plus the part of the story involving his friend Andrew Young is so odd that it's begging to be explained.) Sure, maybe Edwards would still make a great labor secretary or head of HHS, whether or not he's had an affair, etc. And if he loses out on that post because of this, that may be too bad. But tough patooties. He should have thought about that before he started it (if, if, if it's true). The purported hubris is staggering, and we're better off knowing about it.
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While we are quoting ourselves today: In December I wrote a profile of Elizabeth Edwards for the New Republic (which for some reason is not showing up online). My main point was that Elizabeth has an overshare problem. In her book, on the campaign trail, to her friends, she spills everything—everything—freely: about her son who died, her cancer, her marriage, her other kids. Now the tell-all strategy which has served her so well in the past has come back to bite her. So she—the real victim of this story—would be hard pressed to unleash her fury at the press.
But I will do it for her. There is no reason on earth I can think of to have run this story, much less stalked the guy at a hotel. Public figure? Who isn't a public figure? Unless the guy is having Nazi orgies in a brothel, this seems a pretty weak excuse. Vice -presidential candidate? Also weak. That was hardly likely, and you can kill that with rumors. Jack Shafer's hypocrisy argument I find totally unconvincing. The kind of hypocrisy that counts is when someone's public position is at odds with their private behavior. If Larry Craig votes against all gay rights legislation but solicits gay sex, then the gay community is allowed to out him. Ditto Pastor Ted Haggard, who preached weekly on the evils of gayness. But when a man says he's not having an affair when he is—that's just lying, same as most men would do in that circumstance. There are honorable reasons to lie in such a situation—namely, protecting your wife and children. We are still in the private realm here. This is just one of those cases where the press gets into a froth merely because the guy lied about something they thought they had him on, and then late one night they all made a bet to screw him. No honor there, no larger purpose served.