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.
