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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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Hanna, you masterfully parse Elizabeth Edwards' public persona, but you don't really touch on the other people who might be affected by her ill-fated tale. No, I'm not talking about John. I'm talking about her children: Catharine, Emma, and Jack. When Edwards was on the Today show earlier this week, she said she wrote the revealing Resilience explicitly for her children. This morning, Tina Brown and Gloria Allred argued in front of Today's Meredith Vieira about whether or not Elizabeth's choice to speak out about her husband's affair was a good one.
Gloria was staunchly pro-Edwards. She said that Elizabeth was revealing herself "with dignity," as she had done everything else in her life. Tina was anti-Edwards. She upheld Hillary Clinton as the model of how to weather a cheating husband in public, because she barely acknowledged Bill's wandering eye. Tina described the situation as "squalid" and added "I regret that [Elizabeth] used her book to drag everyone into this."
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Are you with Tina, thinking Elizabeth's young children must be damaged by their mother's public discussion of their father's philandering? Or do you side with Gloria, who believes that Elizabeth is being a good role model for her offspring by showing them that life is "complicated"?
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In a column
today on the famous Harvard Study of Adult
Development, which has followed the paths of a group of graduates from
college to old age, David Brooks quotes lead researcher George Vaillant's
conclusion about what matters in life: “Happiness is love. Full Stop." It's a
somewhat odd conclusion since... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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What struck me most, Kerry, about Elizabeth Edwards interview with Oprah was her repeated insistence John's possible child with Rielle Hunter is irrelevant. She told Oprah that she doesn't know if the baby is John's (She also said John didn't know if the baby was John's, which reminds me of Emily's post wondering why, if Elizabeth Edwards has such an infallible bullshit detector, she's married to this dissembler in the first place) and that it doesn't matter. Here's a quote of her talking about the child, always an "it", at length:
"It doesn't make any difference to me [if Hunter's son is John's]. If I have to analyze why that should make a difference to me [it would only be because] I care about something completely extraneous to my life. That is not my life. And if we were to discover it was, that would be part of John's life, but it is not part of mine. And I cant see any upside to making it part of my life. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't change anything. It's not going to change my life in any way. I could try to make it change my life and could keep myself up about if I thought he was trying to start a family with this woman. That would be one thing, but I do I not think that's true. I do not by any stretch of the imagination think that's true. And therefore, it doesn't have any effect on me. Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable about something that matters, or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn't matter."
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And her children's possible half sibling is something that doesn't matter? And can something, a something that's really a son, be "part" of John's life without being a part of hers? Does saying something won't change anything over and over make it true?
I found this exchange even more blinkered in the context of the entire interview, during which Edwards seemed, as she usually does, remarkably open, likeable, thoughtful, and authentic—as Hanna pointed out, her key trait. (In an age of disappearing privacy, it's worth remembering that we're not all equally equipped to kill our private lives. Some people, Edwards and Oprah among them, are better able to totally explode the distinction between their public and private lives by virtue of being more natural, comfortable, and open at television and publicity than the rest of us).
But on this subject, her husband's probable kid, Edwards seems willfully unthoughtful, as if she has artificially cordoned off one of the more painful aspects of her husband's philandering and decided that her ability not to think or feel about it means it doesn't warrant thoughts of feelings. I wonder if there will be another book that comes after Resilience, like Acceptance (or maybe Divorce).
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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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Compared to what's bubbling up in the culture this morning, Elizabeth Edwards seems positively demure. This morning on the Today Show, Kate Gosselin, star of the one family reality circus, Jon and Kate Plus Eight, went on to flog her new book, Eight Little Faces, but also to talk about whether or not her husband, who was seen walking out of a bar with another woman, is having an affair. (The woman's brother said they've been seeing each other for three years; Jon made a very unconvincing denial on the show.) Kate says she really wants to "weather the storm" and "just focus on the kids." She said this with her usual sweet, wholesome expression. The whole exchange left me feeling not that she was opportunistic, but that she actually believed that going on the Today Show to talk about whether he was or wasn't having an affair was the best thing for her family.
So there really is no distinction anymore in the culture between an actual private life and a private life chronicled on weekly television. The Truman Show, which came out in 1998, would seem like a relic now in an age when it's impossible to believe that the star of a reality show would not be complicit in his own exposure, or that he would be troubled by it in any way. And Elizabeth Edwards, who was blogging about her son's untimely death in a car accident before there were bloggers, is a pioneer in understanding the collapse of these distinctions.
If we need more proof, read this story in today's New York Times home section called "Branding the Family" about the fabulous duo of decorators, Robert and Cortney Novogratz, who will have their own Bravo reality show in the fall. Given that they only have seven children and are much more fabulous looking than the Gosselins, there will surely be a storm to weather soon. So tune in...
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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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Meghan, Susannah, Hanna, I think Maureen Dowd is right when she asks: Why is Elizabeth Edwards dragging this scandal back before the public? It just makes her look naive and foolish, and reminds us what a slimy cad her husband is. Dowd mentions, as have so many others, that Elizabeth herself could have been a successful politician. Her situation now speaks to the dangers of subverting one's entire life to the ambitions of someone else. Anne, I also agree that Margaret Thatcher doesn't get the credit she deserves for being a path-breaker and a role model. But also a model was her husband, Denis. He had been a successful businessman and while he was supportive of her career, he mostly stayed out of the way. Angela Merkel's husband, a scientist, barely ever shows up for her official events. These husbands of successful, ambitious women are perhaps better role models of what we should expect of a political spouse than Elizabeth Edwards' head cheerleader.
And while we're on the subject of ambition and marriage, Dahlia and Hanna have a fascinating look at why so many of the women on the short list for the Supreme Court are single. They raise the point that the pressures of getting to the top of the legal profession may discriminate against women with children. So it's comforting to remember that two women who got to the Supreme Court first, when women in the law were a distinct minority, were both happily married with children.
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Meghan, Susannah, I think we have to give Elizabeth Edwards some credit for what she does do. That moment where she portrays her husband as the victim of the vixen Rielle is really the only blind spot in an otherwise brutally honest—cringingly honest—account. Whether or not this counts as a public flogging, as Maureen Dowd suggests, is really beside the point. The typical thing for a political wife is to cover for her husband, stand by him on the stage the way Eliot Spitzer's wife, Silda did. And for that we liberated feminist types gave her a public flogging. I suppose Elizabeth did that to some degree, by standing by him during the campaign. But then she undid it, by writing this book which is a tick-tock of the entire affair, including his lies, the cheesy come-on line she has to know will make it to late night TV ("You are so hot") and more lies. And then she goes on Oprah and says she doesn't even know if she loves him anymore. Mixed in with whatever we fault her for is some serious moxie. What other political wife has ever done that?
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Meghan, I think Maureen Dowd's column on the Edwards debacle now chronicled in Elizabeth's new book, Resilience, is spot-on to call the media spectacle the book has spawned a wife's public flogging of her errant husband. What I find off about Elizabeth's take on the matter is her seemingly recurrent positioning of her husband as a victim of a wanton woman. After John revealed his affair to her, she called for him to “protect our family from this woman."
"It didn’t occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work,” Elizabeth writes in her book, “he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line ‘You are so hot’ and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.”
Targeted? Rielle lying in wait? Give me a break. When it comes to adultery, women too often posit the other woman as the enemy, their husband as the victim, the affair the two had some kind of sordid transgression that never would have happened were he not coerced by this Jezebel. Too bad that in her attempt to share the truth, Elizabeth got mired in the quagmire of not vilifying her husband for his misdeeds enough.
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So Maureen Dowd has a slightly caustic column about Elizabeth Edwards' new book, which details her reactions to her husband's affair, online today here. She says that Elizabeth is dragging John out for a public "flogging" and then notes, of Elizabeth's bewilderment about the affair: "She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men." It's hard to imagine a man writing this acerbically about another man's savvy about the other gender. But I'm curious: Who agrees with MoDo, and who thinks that she's wrong to describe this book as a public "flogging"? Does John Edwards merit a flogging, in any case?
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Willa, Hanna, isn't there a problem in writing a tell-all if you avoid telling about the most important thing? According to reports Elizabeth Edwards acknowledges that John confessed to her about his affair—although his confession was a lie in that he made it sound like a one-time slip instead of an on-going thing—but she does not mention at all the baby that has resulted. The fact that she doesn't is a kind of back-handed confirmation that baby is Edwards' since a tell-all book would be a good place to assert he wasn't the father if that was actually the case. I can understand Elizabeth wanting to tell her story. Hanna, as you point out, she feels comforted by being open. Because she is so ill, the criticism of her decision to do so, and of her choice to participate in Edwards' doomed presidential race will be muted. But why subject herself, and her family, to more public rehashing of what a creep her husband is? Hanna, he may have tried to create the appearance of sincerity, but he was always so disturbingly artificial. That actually may be the most authentic thing about him—how utterly insincere he is.
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Willa, you question whether Elizabeth Edwards should have written a tell-all about her husband's affair. In my experience covering her during the campaign, she is, in her bones, a tell-all kind of person. In her books, in her speeches, in her blog posts, she reveals an extraordinary amount of personal information for a political wife—exactly what she did after her son was killed, where John touched her when they discovered her cancer had returned, how she yells at her kids. That is, however, not exactly the same as being honest. I've always thought of her as a model of Lionel Trilling's concept of "authenticity." What's most important to her is being true to herself at any given moment. If she is angry at her staff she will yell at them. If she hates John she will kick him out of the house. If the next minute she feels love for him, she'll feel it. Authenticity requires no consistency. So in her book I imagine she is heartbroken one minute and vengeful the next (such as when she calls Rielle, the mistress, "pathetic.") John, on the other hand, veers more towards Trilling's concept of "sincerity." He conforms himself to an external standard of moral uprightness and honorable behavior. Not a hair out of place, not a word changes in his stump speech; it's always consistent and polished. This is an outdated model, which is why I think he always seemed so insincere when he was trying to be sincere. Also, as we all know, he fell badly short of it.
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Hanna, speaking of marriages that make you feel uncomfortable, the Edwardses are back in the spotlight today. The Daily News got its hands on a copy of Elizabeth Edwards' forthcoming memoir, Resilience, and have predictably highlighted the salacious stuff. (John Edwards told his wife Elizabeth about his affair with Rielle Hunter, whose name Elizabeth never uses in print, just days after he announced his candidacy. Upon finding out Elizabeth writes that she "cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.")
The excerpts seem—and not having read the book yet, big emphasis on the seem— to be a kind of correction to the Stepford, "stand by your man" approach so often taken by political wives (and Elizabeth Edwards did, at least, refuse to physically stand next to her man while he made his confession and apology)—but only kind of. Edwards tells her side of the story and publicly chastises her husband ("He should not have run," she writes) but he's still her husband. Her critique has a narrow outer limit. Is writing about this better than keeping mum? Or, in a way, is it exactly the same? Is telling us all the true, clichéd things about why a person might decide to stand by her jerk that different from, or that much more informative than, silently standing by said jerk?
The News does pull out one genuinely heartbreaking quote from the book: "I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my sparse hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters." And I'm sure it does matter, and yet, I can't help but wonder if the look she's describing resembles the supposedly earnest, empathetic stare Edwards utilized on the campaign trail, which some people, myself included, always found to be so disingenuous (and that turned out to be, to the extent that Edwards' ambition did trump his judgment, truly disingenuous). And then I wish I could un-think that thought, because it would be nicer to believe Elizabeth Edwards' version of things.
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Wow, this Detroit Free Press interview with Elizabeth Edwards about John's affair is only the eighth-most e-mailed story on their site today; that Motor City must be one exciting town. The true lede of the story, about half-way down, is that she postponed getting a mammogram "for about eight years even after a benign spot showed up on a test. She blames herself, saying that like many women, she was too busy with her children's lives and was preoccupied with trying to get pregnant.'' Though I continue to think the world of Elizabeth and pray for her every day—yup, that may be the least Slate-y thing ever said on this site—that is some world-class denial and explains a lot. (About her marriage, I mean.)
On the other hand, denial is not all bad! She says straight-up that she is consciously repositioning her husband in their children's eyes, buffing up his image and legacy where they are concerned. Because they are his constituents now, and she wants them to see "their father being an advocate for poverty, not for this current picture of him to be the one they carry with them, as young people and as adults." (She also makes clear that if it ever was all about him, those days are over: "[T]he decisions I make are based entirely on what is the best thing for my children.'') She did graduate work in English lit before going to law school, and she's also using her considerable narrative powers to reshape the story she tells herself. Which is something we all do as life goes on, though rarely as dramatically as this: "It's an ongoing process of finding your feet again, retelling your story to yourself. You thought you were living in one novel, and it turns out you were living in another." From Jane Austen to Jay McInerney—ouch.
Asking whether she's "over'' the betrayal is not the remotely the right question, she says, and points out that "had her leg been amputated, instead of a child dying or her husband having an affair, people would not ask: 'Are you over that leg thing yet?' " But while she's working on that leg thing, "she finds comfort in 'Anthem,' a Leonard Cohen song whose lyrics she has posted in her kitchen. ... Reciting the words, Edwards said: "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
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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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Just a couple of questions are clouding my understanding of all this, counselor, and stuff I'd still like to know includes:
Was all this going on when you renewed your wedding vows last summer at that intimate backyard ceremony where you wrote your own vows and there was not a dry eye in the house? (The one your wife of 30 years lost weight for, because she wanted to look pretty for you and fit into her wedding dress?)
Is this why you keep losing your wedding ring?
When Elizabeth waited to tell you that she had a lump in her breast the size of a golf ball because she swore to God after Wade died she'd never give you any bad news ever again ... your way of repaying her was with the news you'd betrayed her, Cate, Wade's memory, and the babies she gladly took dangerous hormones to conceive? Got it.
Oh, and just one more: Remember all those holier-than-Bill Clinton remarks? So do I. If you think anyone in the universe believes your beyond Clinton-esque "I was standing on one foot when we did it so it doesn't count'' nonsense, or cares whether you used the L-word, or trusts for a single segundo that you're not the baby daddy? I think you're about to find out how cold it can get in summer, senator.
And as for you, Miss Hunter? Even if all your dreams one day come true, life as the second Mrs. de Winter is going to look pleasant by comparison.
P.S. post interview: So sue me—anybody know a good lawyer?—but I can't help feeling just a little bit sorry for the whole human race when I see just one more ninny who threw it all away for five minutes with an 80s coke—nope, not gonna fall into that blame-the-woman trap. I don't know why Edwards kept repeating, "This is my fault and no one else's.' (Duh.) Nerves, I guess.
The most unbelievable part of the interview was when he said his buddy Fred Baron, formerly of Baron & Budd, had been paying his former mistress $15,000 a month behind his back; dude, you can lie better than that! Baron is a big Dallas lawyer who made his $$ suing people for asbestos exposure, even when there were no damages. I was in his house once a million years ago, for a party he threw when a friend of mine married one of his law partners, and asbestos has been very good to him, even if I do recall my fellow working stiffs from the paper standing around the pool making fun of his ugly art; that's what happens when you invite a bunch of reporters into chi-chi Preston Hollow. A little while back, Baron even sued his own law firm, so the idea that this total shark would lay out 15 large a month just for grins and all on his own is the lamest load of hooey I've heard outside a campaign ad.
But—yes, Mickey, this is the moment you've been waiting for—there is also no getting around the fact that Elizabeth was flat wrong, too, after she found out about the affair, not to tell him in no uncertain terms that he would not be running in '08 after all, for the good of the party if nothing else. I'm sure they convinced themselves that what he had to offer the country was worth the risk, but it wasn't, and that is some major enabling she was involved in; the Democrats are darn lucky they got No Drama Obama instead.
Melinda Henneberger will be chatting on Washingtonpost.com about the Edwards affair at 2 p.m. today. Send her a question!