From Lisa Jo to Rielle with a bit part as Alison

Rielle Hunter was in a business meeting in the lounge of the Regency Hotel in New York City when she saw Sen. John Edwards across the room. He, too, was in a meeting. They eyed each other. And not just once.

She left the hotel but later in the day found herself walking along Park Avenue toward the Regency. As she approached the hotel, she saw John Edwards on the sidewalk.

Face to face, their connection was instant. They spoke briefly, flirtatiously.

They could have left it at that. But they didn’t.

Instead, they began an affair, according to Pigeon O’Brien, a friend of Hunter who said Hunter told her all about that first meeting. And Hunter fell in love.

“Head over heels,” said O’Brien.

The rest is tabloid history.

When Edwards confessed on national television last month to his affair with Hunter, 44, she was already the focus of the most sensational scandal of the political season.

Edwards’ public denial that he is the father of her 6-month-old baby girl was greeted with skepticism in many corners. So was his timeline.

Edwards said in his televised “Nightline” interview that their affair began after she had been hired in the summer of 2006 to produce the Web videos of an informal Edwards before the announcement of his candidacy at the end of December 2006.

O’Brien contends that the two met no later than February 2006 and started their relationship almost immediately.

O’Brien became friendly with Hunter in the 1980s in New York. The two women fell out of touch in the 1990s and reconnected at a Manhattan party for author Jay Mc- Inerney in 2004. O’Brien, 42, runs her own publicity company, concentrating on alt-country and Americana music performers. She also designs websites. She says she helped Hunter -- for free -- construct and maintain her own website, beingisfree.org. Hunter’s website no longer exists and she seems to have gone underground.

Indeed, Hunter has spent much of the past few months closeting herself away in Santa Barbara.

But wait. Let’s rewind the tape of the life that brought Rielle Hunter, nee Lisa Jo Druck, to that fateful meeting on Park Avenue with Sen. John Edwards.

And her name is pronounced “Ree -- elle.”

Hunter’s life has been equal parts magical mystery tour and perpetual job quest. She has been a party girl, a minor (but working) actress, a writer of oddly titled compositions, a yoga enthusiast and a spiritual seeker. During the 1980s and ‘90s, she bounced between coasts and made occasional forays in the world abroad, following one guru or another

McInerney -- a friend and former boyfriend -- immortalized Hunter to a degree by using her as the model for Alison Poole, the hard-partying, promiscuous, glib narrator of his 1988 novel “Story of My Life”:

The first year I was in New York I didn’t do anything but guys and blow. Staying out all night at the Surf Club and Zulu, waking up at five in the afternoon with plugged sinuses... Story of my life.

“She was thrilled,” O’Brien said of Hunter’s reaction to the book.

McInerney declined to talk for this story, although he did a Q and A interview with Hunter for a 2005 issue of a now-defunct magazine called “Breathe.” His narrator was “inspired by Lisa,” he wrote.

(Never one of his better-known works, “Story of My Life” is now hot; an additional 2,500 copies were ordered by the publisher last month.)

Hunter’s incarnations have been dramatically different.

She told McInerney that she found enlightenment in 2004 and wanted to help others find it.

But she was also intrigued by fame, according to O’Brien, and titled one section of her now dismantled website “fame i am lives forever.” She started the website, beingisfree.org, as an amalgam of spiritual musings and inspirations, but the site has vanished from the galaxies of cyberspace.

Barely a couple of years before she snagged the job of producing videos of Edwards for a six-figure sum, she was a hostess at Real Food Daily, a vegan restaurant in West Hollywood, for modest wages.

She has gone from renting rooms in people’s houses just a few years ago to spending the last few months variously cocooned in a gated home and a seaside house in the Santa Barbara area. As the story of her affair with Edwards was about to explode on national television, she was reportedly whisked away from Southern California by private jet to the Virgin Islands.

In the McInerney interview, she had a kind of “the universe will provide” mind-set. “I have a strong desire to help people wake up -- how about for free? How I will survive, I do not know. Enlightenment is living in the not knowing.”

She was born Lisa Jo Druck in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., one of four girls, and spent part of her childhood riding and showing horses.

“She rode nicely,” said Don Stewart, who runs his own stables and horse training business in Ocala, Fla. But what may be more memorable about the young Druck is her inadvertent connection to one of the greatest scandals in the history of the horse show circuit.

Her father, James Druck, was implicated in a horse-killing insurance scam. Druck, who died of cancer in 1990, was never charged. But a 1992 Sports Illustrated article chronicled the tale of confessed horse killer Tommy Burns, who said the elder Druck, a lawyer who defended insurance companies, showed him how to electrocute horses so the deaths appeared natural.

Burns said he electrocuted an acclaimed show horse, Henry the Hawk, in 1982. That was Lisa Druck’s horse. Mc- Inerney may have captured some of the teenage Druck’s reaction to the death of the animal through his narrator, Alison Poole, in “Story of My Life”:

I had eight horses at one point, but Dangerous Dan was the best. . . . I loved that horse. . . . .When he was poisoned I went into shock. They kept me on tranquilizers for a week. There was an investigation -- nothing came of it. The insurance company paid off in full, but I quit riding.

Druck attended the University of Tampa from 1982 to 1984 but did not graduate, according to a university representative.

When she got to New York in the mid-1980s, she spent much of her time partying. O’Brien was on her way to a party at a Manhattan apartment building when she first saw Druck -- laughing and tumbling out the front doors with McInerney in tow.

“She was very unfettered,” O’Brien said. “She reminded me of a colt just getting her legs -- exuberant, slightly unsophisticated, very post-adolescent.”

O’Brien said she herself dated McInerney some time after Hunter did and that all three ended up friends.

She migrated to Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Hunter told McInerney in the magazine interview that when she was in Los Angeles, “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 realized what I was looking for, in terms of medication, was inside of me; it was a higher bliss. With that clearing, all desire for drugs or alcohol vanished. I became sober overnight. And then I became a spiritual seeker -- addicted to higher consciousness, addicted to enlightenment.”

She also became Riell. She legally changed her name in 1994, and after a while added the extra ‘e.’

“I will say this about her -- she is a little kooky,” said a casual friend. “She was a little lost. Not lost. She was more just always searching.”

By the time Hunter got to Los Angeles, her pattern of dating “creative types,” as O’Brien put it, changed. She married lawyer Alexander Munro Hunter III, who is known as Kip. (In another brush with headlines, Kip Hunter’s father was the district attorney in Boulder, Colo., during the investigation of the JonBenet Ramsey killing.)

They wed in August 1991, lived in Beverly Hills and divorced in 2000, according to their divorce records.

Hunter’s divorce left her with $117,000 from the sale of the house and custody of 21 pieces of intellectual property -- possibly scripts or treatments -- with quirky titles including “Jupiter, Where Are You?”, “So Very Virgo” and “How Did I Get Here?”

“She was always trying to get films done,” recalled the friend.

As an actress, she had specks of roles in a few movies. In the 1991 film “Ricochet,” she’s the TV reporter who sticks a microphone in Denzel Washington’s face. In 2000, she managed to get produced a comedy film short called “Billy Bob and Them.” She wrote it and acted in it as well.

By late 2004, Hunter was back in New York. O’Brien reconnected with her that year at a 20th anniversary party for McInerney’s famous first novel, “Bright Lights, Big City.”

“She was very elegant,” O’Brien said. The now-familiar photographs of Hunter in a lilac top, smiling broadly, were taken that night. With her blond hair and angular chin, she vaguely resembled Tory Burch, the socialite turned fashion designer.

O’Brien, then living in St. Louis, began helping Hunter long-distance with her spiritualism website. They spent hours on the phone, O’Brien said.

At first, Hunter did not reveal much about her new love in 2006.

It was John, Hunter said. He was from North Carolina and he was married and had little children.

They gave him the pet name “love lips.”

That spring, O’Brien said, Hunter told her she might come to St. Louis to see “love lips” on “April 18 and 19.”

“I was watching TV and I saw something -- ‘John Edwards comes to Missouri,’ ” O’Brien said. “I thought, ohh, that’s him.”

Edwards spoke at the annual Public Affairs Conference at Missouri State University in Springfield on the evening of April 19, according to the school’s website.

Ultimately, Hunter was hopeful they would end up together, said O’Brien: “She said he assured her she shouldn’t have doubts.”

O’Brien -- who never saw them together -- was surprised by her choice.

“He just really did not seem her type,” she said. Nor did having a baby seem to be on her radar. When asked if Hunter had videography skills, O’Brien said, “None whatsoever.”

“The Buddhist Rielle was into honesty and integrity and having an affair with a married man might have been a lark at one point,” O’Brien mused, “but to move around the country and to keep a wife in the dark doesn’t seem to reflect the person I knew.”

Hunter, of course, has been silent, only issuing a statement through her lawyer saying that Edwards is not her baby’s father.

That silence was broken briefly a few days before Edwards’ TV interview -- when she called 911 from her car in California to say that paparazzi were following her as she drove with her child.

“They almost got into two wrecks following me. They are trying to take photos of me and completely harassing me,” she can be heard saying on the 911 tape that was released.

“What is your name?” the operator asks.

“Rielle Hunter,” she says.

“Why are they trying to take pictures of you?” asks the operator a tad skeptically.

“Because they are trying to prove someone is the father of my baby who’s not.”

It was the first time Hunter had been heard in public denying that Edwards is the father of her child.

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carla.hall@latimes.com