Fred Thompson, Lonely Guy

Jeri Thompson makes it all sound like something out of Steve Martin’s 1980s movie, “The Lonely Guy.”

There is Fred, on the Fourth of July, when everybody else is at the beach or backyard barbecues getting sloshed with friends, standing on a supermarket checkout line with a pathetic pre-made half a tunafish sandwich and a can of high-cholesterol beanie-weenies.

"I looked at him and just said, 'I'm so sorry,'" she tells People, lets him carry her groceries to the car and invites the lonely guy to a friend’s party that night.

In the Steve Martin movie, a friend takes him to a gathering where most of the guests are life-sized cardboard cutouts of celebrities. But life does not imitate art. Fred Thompson is luckier and, before you can say fireworks, loses his lonely guy status and is living in Washington with a beautiful young wife and kids.

As Jeri tells it, far from being a “trophy wife,” she is a kind-hearted young woman who saved Fred Thompson from the fate of the Steve Martin character who has to get lessons in how to talk to the ferns in his bachelor apartment.

Now the party celebrities are real, but watching Thompson’s listless interactions with them on the campaign circuit, the inner Lonely Guy may be longing to be home with the cutouts and the ferns.