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Edwards' toll for nights of the Hunter

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By Orla Healy
Sunday Aug 10 2008

NEW YORK DIARY ORLA HEALY

Edwards' toll for nights of the Hunter

AFTER weeks of pressure from Democratic big-wigs, on Friday evening one-time US presidential hopeful John Edwards finally admitted he cheated on his wife, Elizabeth, with former campaign worker Rielle Hunter -- and then, in what can best be described as tacky, tried to weaken the blow by explaining his wife's incurable cancer was in remission at the time of his infidelity.

Edwards also denied recent reports that he is the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, claiming their affair ended nearly a year before the infant's February 2008 birth. He has, however, agreed to take a paternity test.

But any hopes Edwards might have had that "coming clean" could salvage his political career were kaput. Instead of defusing the fuss created by the National Enquirer, which ran with allegations three weeks ago, Edward's evasive answers to key questions on Friday are bound to keep this scandal on the boil for weeks.

While Edwards denied paying Hunter to prevent her going public, he added that it is possible some of his friends or supporters may have made payments without telling him.

The 55-year-old senator (who had hoped to be in with a chance at the attorney general slot if Obama is elected) also claimed he told his wife about the affair nearly two years ago, but admitted Elizabeth did not know he was still in touch with his former mistress as recently as three weeks ago when he was photographed visiting her at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

Now Hunter (who, in photographs, looks remarkably like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction) becomes the most hunted woman in America and the race to get her side of the story is on. The 44-year-old blonde who used to be known as Lisa Druck, met Edwards just before he announced his presidential candidacy in 2006. Soon after, he paid the aspiring movie-maker $114,261 to shoot a set of short, image-enhancing documentary "webisodes", which have now disappeared from cyberspace. On a different deleted website, that used to belong to Hunter, called Being Is Free, she talks freely about her former hard partying ways.

In a 2005 online interview with ex-boyfriend and author Jay McInerney, he reveals that Durck/Hunter was the inspiration for Alison Poole, the main character in his bestselling novel, Story of my Life.

"It was narrated in the first person," McInerney writes on the site, "from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa . . ."

In the subsequent interview, Durck/Hunter explains: "I thought I was going to LA to be an actress and to get away from New York because I was doing so many drugs . . . the reason it was less druggy was because someone referred me to a healer who did a clearing on my energy field. I was in a state of ecstasy for about a week and realised what I was looking for, in terms of medication, was inside of me; it was a higher bliss."

As far as the Democratic convention in two weeks' time, Edwards said Friday that he doesn't know if he's going to attend, before adding, almost as an aside, that he hasn't actually been asked.

Time out from

Obama-mania

Don't expect to hear much about Barack Obama over the next two weeks. The candidate, who started a week-long holiday at his grandmother's house in Hawaii on Friday, admitted that even he's growing weary of the blanket coverage he got last week -- starting with a bizarre story that ran in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal asking if he is too thin to be president. (The inspiration for that gem came directly from a line in a McCain campaign memo that sneered "only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew -- Black Forest Berry Honest Tea -- and worry about the price of arugula". Add the speculation -- by the CBS network -- that the black-haired candidate has started dying his hair grey in an attempt to look more distinguished, and the Paris Hilton video, to get some sense of how outlandish the coverage has become.

"I think that the majority of people have been fed a constant stream of political chatter and I'm sure that having a couple weeks off and enjoying the Olympics is probably what the doctor ordered for everybody," Obama said during a campaign stop when he ordered a rake of pancakes.

Chatting with a woman and her four-year-old son, Obama asked the child what he had been doing all summer only to be told, "Watching you on TV." Enough said.

Miley needs a good minder

Teen sensation Miley Cyrus might want to take a break from Hollywood -- or at least from giving unsupervised interviews.

The 15-year-old, who caused a stir after trying to sexualise her image in a photo shoot with Vanity Fair's Annie Leibovitz, sounds shockingly in need of adult supervision in a story in the upcoming edition of Seventeen magazine.

Talking about her former clandestine relationship with heart-throb Nick Jonas, the Disney poster-girl blithely explains: "We became boyfriend and girlfriend the day we met. He was on a quest to meet me, and he was like, 'I think you're beautiful and I really like you.' And I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, I like you so much.' Nick and I loved each other. We still do, but we were in love with each other. For two years he was basically my 24/7."

Yep, she was 13 when they first hooked up.

Remarkably, the interview reads as if it was carried out with nobody (ie her parents or handlers) to edit the girl. Speaking about how upset she was when Nick ditched her (for rival Disney star Selena Gomez) Cyrus confides: "When we were dating, Nick wanted me to get highlights -- and so I did that, and I got myself looking great. And then, on the day we broke up, I was like, I want to make my hair black now -- I don't want to look pretty; I want to look hard-core. I was rebelling against everything Nick wanted me to be. And then I was like, I've got to be by myself for now, and just figure out who I really am."

Miley, who topped Forbes.com's just-published list of 'Hollywood's Highest Earning Tweens" with an income of $25m last year also flew to the top of the kooky list when she concluded: "I like being the girl nobody can have. No one can touch me, no one's mine. I'm myself. I think it's sexy to do your own thing."

- Orla Healy