All these—all the meanness and agony without end, I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
WALT WHITMAN from Leaves of Grass
Table of Contents
Epigraph
Title Page
Foreword
PREFACE - Betrayal at Pentagon City
CHAPTER ONE - “My Little Farfel”
CHAPTER TWO - Tremors at Home
CHAPTER THREE - Grunge, Granola and Andy
CHAPTER FOUR - Monica Goes to Washington
CHAPTER FIVE - “He Was Like Rays of Sunshine”
CHAPTER SIX - The Waiting Game
CHAPTER SEVEN - Not Right in the Eyes of God
CHAPTER EIGHT - “To Have Him in My Life”
CHAPTER NINE - “Everyone Gets a Job with a Little Help”
CHAPTER TEN - Enter Kenneth Starr
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Terror in Room 1012
CHAPTER TWELVE - “I Didn’t Matter Anymore”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Starr Chamber
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The Avuncular Mr. Ginsburg
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - “An Utterly Preposterous Document”
CONCLUSION - Girl on a Swing
Photograph Acknowledgments
Author’s Acknowledgments
POSTSCRIPT - “Sometimes I Miss Him So Much”
Index
Copyright Page
Foreword
I AM DRINKING WATER from a glass engraved with the seal of the President of the United States, in a room on the tenth floor of a smart apartment building in Beverly Hills. The late November sun glints on the glossy high-rise offices of downtown Los Angeles a few miles south.
The apartment is blandly sophisticated in a slightly Middle Eastern manner; the living room has one long mirrored wall, white carpeting and the other walls white, with doors leading off to a white, modern open-plan kitchen and a featureless bedroom. All around is evidence of the unfinished business of moving, an untidy sea of half-empty packing boxes, discarded wrapping paper, unread newspapers, unopened parcels.
The new occupant has tried to impose her more homelike and, as she would call it, “shabby-chic,” taste on this unprepossessing setting; an antique armoire decorated with roses, lamps with rose-covered shades and pink rose fabrics intrude into the insipid decoration, while numerous paintings of the ubiquitous roses in antique frames—one she bought from the Portobello Road market in London for thirty dollars—adorn the white walls. This girl likes roses a lot, just as she enjoys rummaging through flea markets for antiques.
This is the new home of Monica Samille Lewinsky, the young woman whose affair with Bill Clinton has resulted in the first impeachment trial of an elected President in American history. Yet the girl in question seems the very antithesis of a sophisticated courtesan as she sits in an armchair covered in cream fabric that she has just bought on discount, knitting a teal and gray scarf as a Christmas present for a friend. She is of medium height, around five foot six inches, with a luxuriant helmet of dark brown hair, and is dressed for comfort in a dark blue Old Navy jogging suit, her bare feet tucked under her thighs. Her lips are full, her hands small but expressive in their movements, her voice light and young, and when she laughs a dimple appears on her right cheek.
In the background, the television relays live coverage of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the man who has made her life an utter misery for the last year, giving evidence before the House Judiciary Committee. As he presents his detailed account as to whether President William Jefferson Clinton should face impeachment and removal from office, Monica talks about her childhood, her needles clicking as she chats. It is a scene as surreal as it is incongruously domestic. While Starr speaks—for a total of twelve hours—to this august Congressional body about impeaching the President, the name Lewinsky never far from his thin lips, Monica worries about changing to smaller needles to make her scarf less bulky.
She only becomes animated when Starr is cross-examined by the President’s counsel, David Kendall, about the worst day of her young life when, in January 1998, she was confronted by armed FBI agents, taken to a hotel room, and held for twelve hours while Starr’s deputies questioned her. When, on television, Starr repeatedly denies that she was held during this “sting operation,” Monica puts down her knitting and shouts at the screen, “How on earth would you know? You weren’t even there!”
First impressions of Monica, then, are of a feisty, self-possessed young woman who, as she talks in detail about her life to date, reveals her remarkable capacity to remember times, places and dates with precision and accuracy. Her wit, too, is as nimble as her small knitting fingers; “Why don’t you ask Linda Tripp?” is her tart response when I mention a problem with the tape recorder which we are using during our conversations. Monica’s anger towards the woman who betrayed her by recording their phone conversations is never far beneath the surface.
It is also easy to see why Starr’s deputy prosecutors found her such a compelling and convincing witness when, in twenty-two lengthy interviews, she talked about her affair with the President. All her family respect her photographic memory, often telling me, in response to some question of mine, “Ask Monica about when that happened, she will know.” Like the President, she enjoys solving logical puzzles and games although she is no intellectual; ironically, she also displays little interest in political issues, apart from education.
Yet leafing through her school and college essays, which display lucid lines of thought and argument, it takes little imagination to realize that she was the author of the famous “Talking Points,” a memo she wrote advising Linda Tripp as to how she should structure her affidavit in the sexual harassment case brought against the President by Paula Jones.
While Monica’s mind is ferociously orderly and logical, the organization of her day-to-day life is chaotic, a constant searching for keys, shopping lists and the other essential paraphernalia of existence. She is one of the untidiest people I have ever met, a quality which she airily dismisses as being the result of her upbringing, the family having always had a maid to do the tidying up. Monica is the kind of girl who finds it easier to discuss the merits of exculpatory evidence in a law case than to boil an egg.
If she is a woman certain of her own mind, she is less sure about her own heart. As we leaf through family photograph albums, this emotional uncertainty quickly becomes apparent: “God, I look so fat in that picture”; “Look how much weight I put on over this summer”; “I’d lost twenty pounds here”; and so on. Such photos are early evidence of her insecurity, and her low sense of self-esteem, as well as a record of her unhappy family background—her parents divorced when she was a teenager—all translated into her fluctuating weight and her continuing worries about it. Moreover, it is clear, after even a few days of knowing Monica, that her disorderly routine and her neurotic behavior over her weight perfectly explain why she never cleaned the notorious blue Gap dress that was stained with the President’s semen.
Indeed, it was the gulf between the real Monica Lewinsky and her image as a Beverly Hills playgirl who stalked the President that brought us together. I had met her the previous week in the offices of her New York attorney, Richard Hofstetter. I would like to be able to boast that she thought me her ideal biographer because I had written about Diana, Princess of Wales, and that she loved my prose style, leading her to insist that I tell her story. In fact, she had never read my book, Diana, Her True Story, or ever thought much about the late Princess. The reason was more prosaic, but also rather more amusing.
One wet and windy Saturday morning in early November 1998, a reporter from a British Sunday newspaper arrived on my doorstep in North London and told me that his paper had a cast-iron story which said that I was writing a book ab
out Monica Lewinsky. This was news to me and I said so, but the Sunday paper in question, living by the Fleet Street motto, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” duly printed it the next day as true. This false story then winged its way across the Atlantic and onto the radar screen of Monica’s lawyer, Richard Hofstetter, who, out of the blue, the following Friday night contacted Michael O’Mara, my publisher, at his London offices and asked if I was indeed interested in meeting Monica. It is one of the more delightful ironies of this entire project that it began as a result of a complete myth.
Mike and I managed to stop laughing long enough to book a pair of airline tickets to New York to meet the lady in question. On the airplane, over a couple of glasses of in-flight champagne we mapped out a complex and cunning strategy—if Monica was as unpleasant as everyone said, we resolved that we would make our excuses and spend a day or two on a little light Christmas shopping.
So it was that, in a rather claustrophobic conference room in her attorney’s office, we first met Monica, a demure, polite young woman who was a far cry from the brassy Beverly Hills babe of media mythology. The Monica I discovered is a bright, lively and witty young woman who, while she bears the scars of her continuing public shaming, remains undefeated. She is a well-educated girl who likes singing, shopping and poetry—T.S. Eliot is her favorite poet—and has seen her life measured out, not in coffee spoons, but in the contents of her e-mails, her computer hard-disk drive and her closet. Strong-willed and determined, she exhibited a degree of courage and trust to allow me to delve into the inner recesses of her heart without any editorial control—apart from being given the chance to check the facts.
With these editorial provisos in place, it was obvious that here was a fascinating human story of love, betrayal and obsession, and one that had been obscured by the legal debate about impeaching the President. At heart, it is the tale of how an immature and emotionally vulnerable young woman came to Washington and fell for the world’s most powerful man, himself a flawed individual riddled with doubt and desire. Their secret affair was certainly more than a passing sexual fling, their twenty or so meetings over more than two years sustained by countless late-night phone calls, all of them made by the President. Neither faced up to the truth of their relationship, nor to their mutual obsession; both have paid a high and continuing price, she for her loyalty and her love, he for his desires and his lies. Reflecting on the affair today, Monica admits, “We were both responsible, we both wanted it. It was wrong because he was married, but I was young. It was a mistake, but it happened. I realize that I put myself in a situation where I had no control. He had control over when he talked to me. He had control over when he saw me. He had control over the relationship . .”
How heavy a price she has paid for that mistake became clear when we took her, her mother Marcia Lewis and her stepfather Peter Straus, among others, to an Italian restaurant facing Central Park. The conversation was light and lively, Peter Straus, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa in the Kennedy administration, was interested in my latest book on the President of Kenya, Daniel T. arap Moi, while Mike O’Mara chatted about opera with Monica’s mother, herself the author of a book about the Three Tenors.
The jolly mood instantly evaporated, however, when Monica, her mother and stepfather left the restaurant early, only to be ambushed in a hail of flashlights and abuse by waiting photographers supplying New York tabloids. As they snapped away, they shouted foul abuse at Monica in the hopes of provoking a reaction. Next morning her photo was on the front page of the New York Daily News, complete with a wholly fabricated story, under the headline “Monica’s Big Fit,” of how she had thrown a tantrum in another restaurant, as well as the almost obligatory unflattering comments about her weight. (The story brought her an unlikely protector. A homeless man living in a doorway near her hotel to whom she took food and drink every day promised that he would chase away any paparazzi who bothered her.)
Unpleasant as this incident was, its saddest feature was that it indicated that Monica has reached a point where she simply accepts it as part of her daily life; she has become a piece of meat to be chewed on by the mass media, the Special Prosecutor and the White House. “It’s a good thing you guys didn’t take me to a cigar bar,” she joked wickedly afterwards, a reference to her behavior with one of the President’s cigars, an episode lovingly chronicled by Judge Kenneth Starr in his famous report.
In fact, that rather dark, self-deprecating sense of humor has enabled her to survive the crisis, lightening the blackest moments in her constant fight to avoid becoming the sacrificial lamb in a battle between two powerful men. She tells “Monica-and-Bill” jokes herself, and when, after Thanksgiving last year, she stayed with her father in Los Angeles, she was entertained by an amusing parody of the entire scandal written by a family friend, Paul Horner, a TV-comedy scriptwriter.
Indeed, through the dark days of the last year, the love and support of her family and friends, above all, have sustained her as every intimate detail of her relationship with the President has been revealed in withering and humiliating detail by the Special Prosecutor and the media. Her mother, a quietly spoken, self-effacing woman who lives for her family, has been Monica’s sounding board and emotional punching bag during that time, accepting her tantrums, her tears and her torment. Not altogether uncritically, however: “No matter how much we love Monica, no matter how we defend her,” Marcia admits, “we do recognize that she bore responsibility for what happened.” There is, too, something of the weariness of defeat in that remark, for although she supported Monica tirelessly, Marcia Lewis’s own spirit was broken when Kenneth Starr effectively pitted mother against daughter in court as he labored to snare the President. It has left an indelible scar, just as Monica’s father, Dr. Bernie Lewinsky, still has nightmares about his daughter going to jail. If nothing else, the story of the intern and the President illustrates how easily the modern high-tech state can dissect and destroy not only individuals, but the basic building block of society, the family.
The one positive outcome of a year which has seen Monica and her family tested almost to emotional annihilation, has been the fact that she has come much closer to her father, from whom she was estranged during her teenage years when he and Marcia divorced. Since the scandal erupted, Monica has spent much time with him and her stepmother Barbara in their Los Angeles home, renewing her emotional bond. When she is with him she is noticeably quieter, more deferential and more careful than she is with her mother, with whom she has an intensely loving but sometimes explosive relationship.
Just as the scandal has both destroyed and renewed the Lewinsky family, so too it has brought Monica much closer to her friends who supported her during her worst moments. In order to maintain those links, and thus her sanity, however, she has to plan visits to them like a military operation. Her stepfather Peter Straus explains the estranging effects of worldwide, twenty-four-hour media attention, most of it hostile: “She’s been bruised and isolated so she can’t go flying around, seeing people. It’s been very lonely.” Thus, when in November last year, Monica and I flew to Portland, Oregon, to visit her friends from her days there at Lewis and Clark College, we behaved like a pair of fugitives—false names, heads down, baseball caps on, no eye contact—to make sure she was not recognized.
It proved to be a weekend of renewal for Monica, for she was able to relax and be herself with those who knew the real person behind the headlines, the unadorned friend with all her faults and weaknesses, but all her many virtues, too. She found it truly energizing to commune with friends like Catherine Allday Davis, Linda Estergard and Carly Henderson, joining in the laughter and singing in the back of the car as they drove to a restaurant for a Thai meal. As Catherine says, “She’s mature, she’s thoughtful and she’s caring, but she makes mistakes, big mistakes. But the human being is really very different than the person portrayed in this scandal.”
The girl who caught the eye of President Bill Clinton, a
man of acknowledged sexual charisma and more than twice her age, is a person of endless contrasts: sure of her own mind yet unsure of herself; possessed of a high sense of entitlement but a low sense of self-worth; a girl with a fierce and sometimes perverse loyalty to others but little regard for her own survival. She leads not only with her chin, but with her heart, desperate to find a meaningful relationship yet impatient of the modern mating ritual. It is no coincidence that her two serious adult affairs have both been with married men.
For someone who appears, on meeting her, to be worldly and sophisticated, she remains rather naive, achingly honest and trusting, the Beverly Hills gloss masking a vulnerable, human being. Her close friend from schooldays, Neysa DeMann Erbland, observes, “She is a flawed but good woman,” adding that Monica has “endured the public ravaging of the most personal parts of her life.” In public, too, she is always sunny, almost too solicitous and helpful; on her own she is prone to pessimism and despair.
It was, however, the public face of Monica, the bright, lively, entertaining and rather pushy twenty-two-year-old, that first caught the eye of the President in the summer of 1995, when an extraordinary set of circumstances brought them together at the White House. Today, she remembers that moment with almost painful clarity: “There was an intense flirtation, an intense chemistry between us, but I don’t think it was that much different to the other women he’s flirted with, or seen or been attracted to. I think it was a combination of mutual attraction and the timing being right.”
If “right” is the correct adjective, then Monica Lewinsky was the right girl in the right place at the wrong time. The rest, as they say, made history.
PREFACE
Betrayal at Pentagon City
STIFLING A YAWN, Monica Lewinsky pulled on black leggings and a gray T-shirt, then made for the door, negotiating her way around the half-filled packing boxes that littered her ground-floor apartment in the Watergate Building in downtown Washington. Once outside, she climbed into her brother’s Jeep Cherokee and nursed it through the morning traffic for the fifteen-minute journey to her new gym on fashionable Connecticut Avenue.
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