Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  Yet in spite of this veneer of self-confidence and her renewed academic vigor, anxiety about her weight remained close to the surface of her life. Her friend Neysa DeMann Erbland, who joined her at Bel Air from Beverly Hills recalls, “She was always upset about her weight, she was a little chubbette, an emotional eater. When she was upset she comforted herself by eating. She was distressed that she didn’t have a boyfriend and so ate more, becoming less attractive, and so it was a vicious circle.”

  Monica’s romantic spirit, her search for security and love, for emotional nourishment, led her into a series of inconclusive relationships. At Beverly Hills High she had developed a hopeless crush on a teenager four years her senior, while another young man who caught her eye eventually preferred one of her friends. The girl in question was typically willowy, but the fact that she was Monica’s friend made his rejection even more difficult to bear.

  This disappointment in starting a relationship led her back to her pursuit of a rekindled romance with Adam Dave, whom she had kept in contact with since Hawthorne Elementary School. In part she saw in him a window into her previous life, a time when her parents were still married, when she was thinner and doing well at school. Beyond that, however, she enjoyed his company and regularly sent him small gifts as well as poems she had written. “I thought I was in love with him, I pined over him,” she says.

  For his part, he made an unreliable friend, one moment allowing Monica to feel close to him, the next shutting her out. Certainly Monica’s romantic feelings remained unrequited and Adam treated her with the casual cruelty of the uninterested young man, knowing that no matter how badly he behaved she would forgive him. For Monica, insecure, overweight, and with a negligible sense of self-worth combined with a desperate thirst for approval, the relationship was as humiliating as it was futile. In short, as she herself says, “It was just yucky.” It continued throughout high school and Monica’s first year of college, and eventually petered out when she and Adam went their separate ways.

  While this personal drama was being played out, Monica, despite now being at college, was still active in the theatrical group at Beverly Hills High. As she was no longer a pupil at the school, she was now paid when she helped out making costumes for upcoming shows. Sometime earlier, the school had taken on a new drama technician when the previous incumbent, a dependable, middle-aged man of many years’ service, left. Andy Bleiler, a slim, light-haired young man, then aged twenty-five, soon got a name for flirting with the students, even though it was known that he was in a long-term relationship with Kate Nason, a divorcee eight years his senior with a daughter. During Monica’s junior year at Beverly Hills, she had only known him because of his secret romance with one of her friends.

  After she had left the school, Monica found that she was no exception when it came to Bleiler’s flirtations with the teenage students. On her visits to the Drama Department she was flattered by his attention but, knowing his reputation, thought little of it. Then on a spring night in May 1991, after a performance of one of the shows, he walked her back to her car. Encouraged by his manner, she talked about the difficult issues in her life, finding him a sympathetic listener. As she was about to leave he kissed her goodnight and then, as she says, “We made out,” though they never came close to having sex at this point; Monica remained a virgin until she was nineteen.

  Andy Bleiler was not married, nor did he even give the impression that he was engaged to Kate, as was in fact the case. Despite the fact that she was eight years younger than he was, during that summer he continued to flirt with Monica, asked her for her phone number and paid her flattering attention—surprising behavior in a soon-to-be-married man. So far as Monica was concerned, however, his flirtatious attentions were a welcome relief as her own life once again lurched into crisis. Not only was her friendship with Adam Dave hitting the skids, but her relationship with her father had reached an all-time low.

  The tension in the family had already been exposed at Michael’s Bar-mitzvah in 1991, during Monica’s final year at Bel Air. Even though the rabbi had recommended that the family should sit together in the temple for the ceremony, her father preferred to sit in the row behind his ex-wife and children with his new girlfriend, Barbara Lerner, who later became his second wife. Harsh words were spoken in the temple, and the animosity felt by Marcia from the extended Lewinsky family was almost palpable. Monica sang at the synagogue, and, says her mother, “Her voice was so hauntingly beautiful grown men at the service were weeping.” Monica herself remembers the whole occasion with pain: “It was so embarrassing—I was just so upset. It was really crushing to me and very, very traumatic.” At the same time she did not resent the fact that Michael had his own Bar-mitzvah; as she says, “I don’t begrudge Michael anything that he’s ever gotten. I’ve never felt like, ‘You shouldn’t have given to Michael, you should have given to me instead’.”

  Worse was to come. When she graduated from Bel Air Prep—she gave the graduation speech before the audience of parents, students and staff— she had assumed that her father would pay for her to go on to college (university) for the requisite four years. Without consulting him, she applied to various colleges both in California and in other states, only to learn later that, despite doing very well at Bel Air, because she had scored a “D” grade in English in her freshman year at high school—the year of her parents’ divorce—she was not eligible for University of California schools as they prohibit admissions with a “D” in any main subject. She was admitted to Boston University, but her father, considering that the state colleges of California provided a good enough education, declined to pay her fees. “It was one of the most devastating experiences for me. It was just so frustrating and I was so very bitter,” she says.

  Instead, they came to a mutual agreement that the only option, other than to take out a student loan, was to go for two years to the less prestigious local community college at Santa Monica (a junior college, that is, an institution offering two years’ study equivalent to the first two years at a university), where the fees would be significantly lower. She hoped to be able to save enough to pay her tuition fees for the last two years at a university. She had already been encouraged by her parents to take on part-time work—she was working at a tie store called the Knot Shop to pay off a loan on the Jeep her mother had leased in Monica’s senior years in High School and which she wanted to keep on.

  Her time at Santa Monica College, from 1991 to 1993, was as unhappy as it was frustrating. She felt that junior college was not academically challenging enough for her, and envied her friends who had gone to four-year schools. Depressed yet volatile, Monica was in a fragile state, literally at the end of her tether.

  Eventually the inevitable happened and she broke down, collapsing in floods of tears over something as trivial as another driver occupying her college parking space. She returned home in torment and her mother, seeing her overreaction to such a minor incident, realized that her daughter needed professional counseling. Monica’s association with her previous therapist had ended when she was eighteen, but Marcia had heard of a psychotherapist, Dr. Irene Kassorla, who had a reputation for giving patients the sort of practical help that would allow them to get on with their lives rather than continue to indulge in long-term psychotherapy. Marcia says, “It was my decision and I take full responsibility for the subsequent publicity. While she [Dr. Kassorla] turned out to be glitzier and more shallow than I had thought, she did three good things—she got Monica focused on studies, helped repair the relationship with Bernie and helped her lose weight.” Monica continued to consult Dr. Kassorla, both in person and by phone, for five years from 1992, discussing her affair with the President in detail.

  At about the same time—when Monica was going through a humiliating and unfulfilling relationship with Adam Dave, and when her relationship with her father was at its nadir, she was miserable at Santa Monica College and was once more putting on weight—the flirtatious Andy Bleiler began to enter her life w
ith increased frequency.

  Bleiler had married Kate Nason in October 1991, and just a few months later, in February the following year, he and Monica met again at a performance of West Side Story at Beverly Hills High. He began flirting and Monica, even though she knew he was now married, found his attentions flattering, greatly boosting her confidence and her morale. “It was great because he thought I was so sexy and, I mean, for a fat girl, for a guy to find you really attractive, it was really rewarding for me,” she recalls. Lenore Reese remembers her friend making constant self-deprecating comments about her weight. “She really battled with her weight and for a man like Andy Bleiler to find her beautiful was such a compliment. He was her first love and he totally took advantage of her. He was an adult with many years’ experience and she was a young, insecure girl.”

  The newly married drama technician continued to flatter and flirt with her, on one occasion asking her to leave her panties for him. Besides the sexual chemistry, she found him very bright, witty and creative, a combination that both attracted and intrigued her. They spent stolen afternoons together in local motels, talking and making out, though still stopping short of full intercourse. At the same time Monica’s work on the costumes at Beverly Hills High gave them a perfectly innocent reason to spend time together. Gradually she began to fall for him, finding his attentions more fulfilling than the worthless and in any case doomed relationship with Adam Dave. “The more times we were together the more I cared about him,” Monica says of Bleiler. There was, however, one immovable stumbling block—his marital status.

  Perhaps surprisingly, given the strength of her feelings for him, it was not until December 1992 that they became lovers, Monica losing her virginity to a man whose wife had recently become pregnant. She was much older than her contemporaries had been when they first had sex; indeed, she had deliberately waited until she was a little more mature, knowing that her friends had not really enjoyed the experience when they were younger. (A few years later, in February 1996, during a conversation about teenage sex, she told the President that she was glad she had waited because she was, as a result, much more comfortable with herself, and much more familiar with her body’s responses. He said he, too, had been a late starter.)

  The relationship with Bleiler epitomizes the clash between Monica’s dream of romance and the compromising reality, the contradiction at the heart of her emotional needs. She wanted the perfect relationship with a man who was hers alone, who would shower her with love and affection. Instead, and despite the fact that she is a self-confessed control freak, she began her adult love life with an unattainable man in a situation over which she had little control, let alone mastery. “Looking back it was just a lack of self-worth, of thinking that I did not deserve anything better. Deep inside I didn’t think I was good enough to have a full relationship. It was a very painful and raw time for me. I think too that a lot of women go through this kind of relationship at some time in their lives,” she observes.

  It is one of the many ironies of Monica Lewinsky’s young life that, while she was to go on to study psychology at college and to form a profound intellectual understanding of the human mind and condition, she was unable to apply that knowledge to her own life and decisions. For without a doubt one of her most endearing yet infuriating characteristics is that, while her head may tell her to take one course of action, her unruly heart will drag her in the opposite direction. The result is that her feelings of loyalty, however perverse, invariably triumph over her sense of self-preservation.

  It has always been Monica’s tendency, which became her tragedy, to confide, in varying degrees, about her love life to her family and close friends. Soon enough there were voices raised, counseling her against becoming involved with a married man. Dr. Kassorla cautioned her charge against continuing the affair, more for her own good than out of any moral judgment, but did not suggest that she break it off. Her father was much more forthright: “I told her in no uncertain terms that it was wrong and to cease the relationship forthwith. I had absolutely no idea that it had continued.”

  Her mother, by contrast, struggled to weigh her duty as a parent against her love for her daughter, watching helplessly as Monica embarked on a “destructive” affair with a man Marcia describes as a “piece of garbage,” a man who romanced teenage students while his wife was pregnant. She does not spare herself, either, commenting, “I think I could be criticized for not going to the school and reporting him. As a parent at the school, it was, in a way, my responsibility. But you don’t want your daughter’s name bandied about, you don’t want to make a big fuss. It would have caused our family embarrassment.

  “I figured that the damage is done, now let’s privately pull her away. It’s ironic that that situation was repeated a few years later in a much more horrendous way. I searched my soul whether there was a lesson to be learned from the Bleiler affair. If Monica had seen her mother confront this man, made a public protest of what happened, whether this wouldn’t have given her a better message than, very lovingly and with care, pulling her away, taking a gentler approach.”

  Monica’s earlier discussion with her father, which had started out as a frank conversation about her life, and had ended with Bernie commanding her to give up Bleiler, severely jolted her. She was torn between her attraction to the man and the hopelessness of the situation. In early February 1993, when Bleiler’s wife was four months pregnant, she decided to end their affair, admitting, “I felt bad about it, but at the same time when I spoke to him a few days later he said that he was feeling better because he didn’t feel guilty anymore. Perversely, that made me feel depressed.”

  The parting was short-lived. Later that February, just before Bleiler’s twenty-seventh birthday, he and Monica were working together on the musical Oliver! at Beverly Hills High. During a break in the production he once again made a pass at her. The relationship resumed almost as though it had never been ended. For his birthday party, which was held at the school, Monica organized a surprise cake in the shape of an iguana, his favorite reptile. Later, they had sex in the light booth of the auditorium and, afterwards, Monica said “Happy birthday, Andy” in the same breathy tones as Marilyn Monroe. Andy joked that she should have said “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”—and she duly did.

  In the spring of 1993, as Monica prepared to take her final exams at Santa Monica College, she and Bleiler were seeing each other a couple of times a week. By now, however, it was very much an on-off affair, and as her friends became increasingly aware of the man in her life, they could see how hurt and upset she was becoming. They both cared and worried about her, and regularly advised her to end the relationship for her own good. Her high-school friend Neysa DeMann Erbland, who herself admits to having been something of a “wild child,” recalls that the relationship was invariably tumultuous, Monica swinging between angry tears and sentimental forgiveness in her attitude toward her married lover. Neysa had a low opinion of Monica’s choice in men. “I thought he was an asshole and told her so. He behaved more like a boy, not an older man,” she says.

  Monica’s mother was also “appalled” that her daughter had resumed the affair against the wishes of both her parents, and likens trying to wean her off her obsession with Bleiler to trying to bring her off drugs, adding, “If you’ve ever tried to help a person through a bad romance, you know it’s not so easy.”

  Shortly before the birth of Andy and Kate Bleiler’s son in July 1993, he and Monica broke up again, this time at his behest. He told her that he felt guilty about the relationship and wanted to be a good father. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his resolve did not last long. Only weeks later, he approached her again and their affair resumed. From this she learned a lesson which she was to remember during her affair with the President. “I came to learn with married men that they feel guilty, say they want to stop it and then succumb to temptation anyway. So they always come back.”

  By now, however, Monica knew—for once—that she had a way of ending this unsat
isfactory affair for good. Even though she had loathed her time at Santa Monica College, she had earned good grades in the honors program, with the result that she had been accepted at a number of California universities, including Berkeley, her father’s alma mater. At the same time, Bernie had now agreed that she could study in the neighboring state of Oregon if she chose. The college she liked the look of was Lewis and Clark in Portland, Oregon, as it reminded her of Bel Air Prep. It was small, intimate and friendly, whereas Berkeley was large and anonymous, its sheer size sparking unhappy memories of her days at Beverly Hills High.

  Academic preference aside—she intended to major in psychology—there was a more personal reason for choosing Lewis and Clark. “I wanted to get away from Los Angeles,” she says, “and part of that was getting away from Andy. It was not that I didn’t have feelings for him, or didn’t want to be involved with him but I felt that I wasn’t going to get over him while I was still in Los Angeles. It was going to be too hard. I wanted to make a fresh start and make a new life for myself.”

  That fall she headed north.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Grunge, Granola and Andy

  PORTLAND, the largest city in the state of Oregon, on the northwest coast of the United States, is a jeans-and-sneakers kind of place, which is perhaps as it should be, given that the worldwide headquarters of Nike is just down the road. It boasts the highest concentration of coffee bars and bookstores in America—including Powells, the world’s largest bookshop, which takes up a whole block downtown.

  Beverly Hills it is not. With forty-four inches of rainfall every year, rubber boots rather than designer sunglasses are the vital fashion accessory. Plastic surgeons are thin on the ground here, and so too are men’s Armani jackets—only two of the city’s restaurants insist on formal attire. It is not a great surprise to learn that Portland is the birthplace of the late Kurt Cobain, legendary lead singer of Nirvana, the quintessential grunge band.