Dan's Papers -July 10, 2009

"If an erection lasts for more than four hours, see your doctor."
- Cialis TV commercial

Ten years ago, visiting New Zealand, I encountered for the first time the grand tradition of great leaders in remote areas going off by themselves into the wilderness to spend a few days in vigorous exercise and deep contemplation. I don't recall the name of the Prime Minister of the country who was in office at the time, but whoever he was he was off on one of these walks, out of touch with the rest of the government, the whole time we were in Auckland. It was his "walkabout," backpacking through the woods of the South Island with some friends, enjoying hunting and fishing and whatever else might come along while out there roughing it.

It seemed absolutely understandable at the time for a great leader to be doing this.

On June 24, a reporter named Gina Smith, who works for The State, Columbia, South Carolina's leading daily paper, was out at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, where, responding to an anonymous phone tip, she was keeping an eye on Governor Mark Sanford's SUV, parked in the long term parking lot there.

The governor soon appeared. And thus a story, which on at least three occasions includes the Hamptons, began.

Sanford, all tanned and sunburned and wearing a blue and white button down shirt and tan pants, was not long in coming out to his car with his luggage. He chirped the clicker. Smith approached him. She asked him where he'd been. His staff had been telling the press he'd been out hiking the woods of the Appalachian Trail. Why had they said that?

"I don't know," the governor said. "Well, in fairness to them, I guess I did tell them that. I'd considered it. You know, We just had this long session. I needed a break. At the last minute, though, I thought to just do something more exotic."

An aide came over and tried to lead the governor away.

"Buenos Aires?" she asked.

"It's really a great city," he said. "You know this whole thing is really getting blown all out of proportion."

And then he was gone. He'd left out the part about the hoochie coochie girl. But he'd talk about that at the press conference.

The hoochie coochie girl, it turns out, is an Argentine TV news reporter named Maria Belan Chapur. He met her in a beachfront nightclub in Punte del Este some years ago. His wife, Jenny, didn't know about it. But then, recently, she discovered a love letter. It hurt her badly.

"I've been very bad," the governor said at the press conference. "I apologize to my wife, to my children, to my supporters. I did a terrible thing."

He and his future wife, Jenny, had met vacationing in the Hamptons in 1989. He was 29. She was 27. Mark worked as a financial analyst. Jenny worked as a merger and acquisitions expert at Lazard Freres.

In an interview from the driver's seat of her car after the press conference, Jenny Sanford told a TV reporter that they were taking a trial separation. Would she forgive him? "I think this is something he is going to have to work out with himself," she said.

The affair with the hoochie coochie girl had been going on for several years, Sanford told the media at another press conference. He also said they had had trysts in numerous locations outside of Argentina. He mentioned New York City. And he said they had snuck out to the Hamptons twice.

Sanford has been governor of South Carolina for seven years. He's a hard charging, chest thumping, penny pinching, Republican who famously sleeps on the sofa in his State House office so as to save on hotel bills when not in his hometown of Sullivan's Island. He requires his staff to use both sides of post it notes. Once, he brought two pigs he said were named "Pork" and "Barrel" into the state house. They pooped on the rug. He went into a rage when he heard about Bill Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinski. He has been mentioned as a possible candidate for president in 2012.

His latest foray into national affairs has been to refuse to accept the $787 million in stimulus money due the state from the Obama administration. That's his take on spend and spend.

Here's an excerpt from one of his e-mail love letters.

"You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light."

6/14/09 TO MARIA [after Jenny discovered the love letters.]

"I wish so much that we could put the genie back in the bottle."

"I wish we would not put genie back in the bottle."

A month ago, at the urging of Mark, Jenny consented to allow Mark to see Maria one last time, just to say goodbye. They would be chaperoned. They would be accompanied by a priest. They would go to church and pray and repent. And they did.

But enough about Mark and Maria.

What about the Hamptons? Nobody seems to know where they stayed out here or what they did. Were they in disguise? Did they wear sunglasses? They don't call me the King of the Hamptons for nothing. I have worked tirelessly, excitedly, feverishly, day after day, talking to everybody out here, piecing it all together, coming up with this sighting and that spotting. Here it is, for what it's worth, all the gossip. I know nothing.

Maria was seen buying three pounds of scallops at Stuart's Seafood in Amagansett.

A couple looking much like them were seen wandering hand in hand through the scrub pines of Westhampton, adventuring off to the former site of the Bomarc Missile Base to see what the Air Force left there. Very exciting.

Mark played golf at the Maidstone Club as a guest of somebody who wishes to remain nameless in 2007. Maria shopped at London Jewelers.

A masseuse at Gurney's Inn in Montauk recalls massaging somebody who felt very much like Maria Belen Chapur in August of 2008.

A charter boat captain in Hampton Bays says he took Mark Sanford out deep sea fishing to the Grand Banks in August of 2008 with a very beautiful Argentinian woman who threw up numerous times.

They rented a cottage on the ocean in Quogue from a couple who owns a cotton importing company in Georgia in September. She wore Blahnik and Gucci and carried a Prada bag. They strolled through the Sears-Bellows Park and rode the ponies.

An important southern governor with a very exotic South American woman ate at the American Hotel one time, said the owner, Ted Conklin.

One evening Mark took Maria for a lobster dinner watching the sunset over Napeague Harbor while sitting at one of the picnic tables at Amagansett's Fish Farm Multi-Aquaculture Systems Restaurant. She had corn on the cob. He didn't. Afterwards, when the wind sprang up, they went parasailing from Lazy Point in the descending dusk.

Mark and Maria were guests of Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw on Georgica Pond one weekend in July 2007. But it might have been somebody else. A gardener told me this.

They stayed at the Southampton Inn one weekend, lunched at San Ambrose standing at the bar and then had dinner at La Parmagiana. They were not recognized.

They choppered out from the helipad on Meadow Lane in Southampton on a Sunday evening in August 2005, heading back to LaGuardia.

And future betrayed wife Jenny and cute Mark? She met him when he fell to the floor while climbing through a kitchen window at 2 a.m. at a share house in Westhampton Beach in 1989, and she liked him instantly. Somebody said that.