Read What Really Happened for Free Online

was clear to tell me what room we were in, and I happily joined him. In the morning, he called his assistant Josh Brumberger, presumably “to go over the schedule,” but it was just a ruse to keep Josh on the phone so I could get out of the hotel without being seen. Josh would recognize me, of course, from our meeting at the Regency.
    One day at the end of May, when Johnny called me at home in New Jersey, he said, “We have a problem.”
    He was at an event, and Elizabeth had called with an emergency. She said, “Someone has stolen your bank card. There was fifteen hundred dollars taken out in New York.”
    Johnny said, “No, it’s not stolen. I took out that money.”
    “Why do you need that much money?”
    They had a big fight. Her radar was up.
    He was angry. He knew from the beginning that getting me money to travel to see him was going to be a problem.
    I told him I would figure something out.
    I found it strange but I didn’t say a word about their money dynamic. Couples have the oddest money issues. I don’t know many who are exempt from this. He seemed to have no control or awareness of the money he made. She was in charge of spending; he wasn’t supposed to spend.
    I flew to West Palm Beach, Florida, at the end of May and had dinner in the hotel while I waited for him and his entourage to arrive. Once they showed up, I watched them from the dining room while they unloaded their cars. I remember watching Johnny get his own bag out and wheel it into the hotel. I was touched watching a “big wig” wheeling his own bag. I remember having the same feeling when I watched Al Gore wheeling his own bag through airports in An Inconvenient Truth .
    Johnny called me and told me when the coast was clear. Josh was not along on this trip, and no one he was with would recognize me. I remember going down to the lobby in the morning and withdrawing the new limit of four hundred dollars out of the cash machine and bringing his card back to him. I saw his staffers in the lobby and walked right by them as I hopped in a cab and went on my way to the airport.
    To solve our problems, both logistical and monetary, I came up with the idea of shooting a documentary, which quickly evolved into doing shorts for the web as well. I had made many shorts in LA while one of my scripts was in development, and documentaries are my favorite. When I pitched it to Johnny, he loved it. He was crazy about the idea of showing the campaign “behind the scenes,” showing the real him, and also the idea of me traveling with him and putting me to work. I told him I would write up a treatment for him. We were both excited about this development.
    In June, I flew to Moline, Illinois, and drove to the Radisson Hotel in Davenport, Iowa—the very place Johnny was staying when I fell in love with him over the phone. The hotel had an open eating area and indoor atrium in the center, with the rooms opening on to the atrium. I went directly into the bar and ordered a glass of wine while I was waited for my call. Johnny called right on schedule to say that they had brought his dinner, but uh-oh, dinner disaster! They had forgotten the ketchup, so he asked me to sit tight while they brought back some ketchup. Sure enough, I saw the man whom I would later meet as John Davis, an earnest blond who was very clearly a political staffer. He was coming down in the glass elevator. I waited for the big ketchup delivery to be complete before joining Johnny for dinner in his room. The food was great. We celebrated his birthday with the presents I brought him. One was a pair of classic aviator Ray-Bans. He was only fifty-three years old, but not the hippest guy in town. He later got many comments about how those sunglasses were “too cool” for his homey Southern husband image. His operatives didn’t really need to worry too much because, like most of his sunglasses, he ended up losing them shortly thereafter anyway.
    A big mistake I made that night: I taught Johnny