It’s a casual, laid-back place, where recycling is more than just a long word, and Rodeo Drive involves horses rather than clothes-horses. In Portland a crowd will meet to mourn the axing of a favorite tree, whereas in downtown Los Angeles only a particularly gruesome murder attracts a street gathering.
In her first few weeks there, in the fall of 1993, Monica could have been excused for thinking that she had arrived on the moon. The collision between LA chic and Oregon grunge did not make for the easiest of transitions. For example, when it was her turn to do housework in the house she shared, she phoned her mother in a panic for instructions on how to clean the bathroom.
While her mother gave her much-needed domestic advice, her father helped with other arrangements. He and Barbara, whom he married in 1991, Monica singing at the ceremony, traveled with Monica to her new home, buying her a bed as well as pots and pans and other essential household items. She had decided to share with Kurt Carpenter and Karl Fulmer after spotting their ad asking for roommates on a bulletin board on the college campus. The three of them decided to rent an attractive four-bedroom clapboard house which, unbeknownst to Monica, was by an odd coincidence just a few blocks away from the home of Andy Bleiler’s uncle.
When Monica moved in, the mismatch in lifestyles was immediately apparent. While her roommates led a hippie-style existence, picking up cast-off furniture from church sales and playing rock music late into the night, Monica, a non-smoker, decorated her room in the then fashionable shabby-chic style, dominated by her love of color, roses, floral decorations and embroidered cushions. “It was my safe haven,” she says, although her room was chaotically messy. “She was a slob like the rest of us,” recalls her friend Lenore Reese, who was at Lewis and Clark with her, “although she always tidied up, and had her hair done and legs waxed when her mother visited.” But if Monica didn’t fit in with her roommates, it was not long before the ethos of the college and the city captured her heart. During the next two years she enjoyed some of the happiest and most stimulating days of her life.
The changes in her soon became obvious. While she had lost twenty pounds before she went to Portland, her physique changed dramatically once she got into the swing of the city. She was living apart from her parents for the first time; besides that, she had escaped the pressures of Beverly Hills and said farewell to an unsatisfactory love affair. “Growing up in Beverly Hills was not great and it was something I could have done without,” she says.
She joined an all-women gym, exercised regularly and lived on a diet of salads and lemon chicken pasta, her specialty dish. In short order she had lost a further twenty pounds. “I was feeling much better about myself,” she recalls. A bonus was that the Knot Shop in Los Angeles, where she had worked, had just opened a new branch in Portland when she arrived, and they were happy to hire her for part-time work. She augmented her allowance from her father by baby-sitting for neighbors. Her Aunt Debra was quick to notice the changes in her: “She began to grow as a person. She became more grounded and happier with herself.”
Equally important was the fact that she was engaged and enthused by her psychology course in a way that lifted her spirits. While her emotional life till then had been chaotic and damaging, her mind was always focused, analytical and searching. The course at Lewis and Clark neatly fused her interest in the human condition with her logical, inquiring mind, although she had a tendency to come to forthright conclusions before assimilating all the relevant information. “In that first semester I realized I had made the right decision. I love to learn, and taking the course gave me a real high,” she says. Indeed, so strong was the impression she made on her professors that several sent her touching letters of support when the scandal over her affair with the President became public.
As part of the course the students had to take part in a practicum, which in Monica’s case meant working with the mentally ill during her junior year. She and a couple of other students helped out at the Phoenix Club in Portland, a meeting place for mentally ill clients, who learned essential social skills there. Besides arts and crafts, there were pool tables and other games as well as a snack bar. Monica found it “a very rewarding experience,” as enriching as it was challenging, making her face up to her fears and prejudices about the mentally ill.
She found herself on a steep learning curve. She worked in the kitchen, using razor-sharp knives alongside mental patients with a history of violence, calmed down a woman who became hysterical, and dealt tactfully with a male patient who made untoward and inappropriate sexual advances to her and a fellow female student. Her interest in the theater led her to organize a visit by the Phoenix Club members to see a local performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. Although this was primarily intended to be an enjoyable evening out, it was also a way of helping her charges to understand that in society there are all kinds of unwritten rules—such as not talking during a performance—which have to be followed if people are to be accepted in that society.
The theater visit was a success, but Monica’s enthusiasm overcame her ability when she volunteered to make matzo-ball soup for the eighty or so club members. Even though she asked her mother for guidance, Monica, who does not list cooking among her interests, admits that the matzo balls were virtually inedible. As befits one brought up in Beverly Hills, she says, in her typically self-deprecating way, “I make one thing really well for dinner . . reservations.”
Indeed, while you could take the girl out of Los Angeles, it was more difficult to take Los Angeles out of the girl. Fellow students remember that their first impressions of her were of someone disarmingly frank and open, particularly about her weight and about sex, forthright in discussion, flirtatious but genuinely good-hearted. She was a larger-than-life character, who was too brash and loud for some tastes. Lenore Reese comments, “She is articulate, very quick and intelligent and very comfortable with her sexuality, which some people found a little forward.”
Others saw that behind the noisy chatter and sexual banter was a loyal, sensitive and genuinely kind human being. “She is the kind of woman who brought you chicken soup if you were ever sick,” says Linda Estergard, who met Monica during her first semester at Lewis and Clark. “She is one of my top three angels in the world. She will do anything for you, so very giving and nurturing.”
Linda, who was married, had enrolled at Lewis and Clark as a mature student. She fondly recalls their first meeting, in a lecture theater. Monica was seated next to Jason Lesner, a student from Los Angeles whom she was close to for a time, and was quite hostile when first introduced to Linda, fearing that she was going to make a move on him. She visibly relaxed when she realized that Linda was married. That encounter said much about Monica’s insecurity and low self-esteem. It was something Linda came to understand further during a two-hour heart-to-heart in the college parking lot, during which Monica frankly discussed her lifelong struggle with her weight. Given this mutual trust, it is no surprise that the two became firm friends, Linda acting as a kind of mother figure to a tightly knit circle of confidantes which eventually included, as well as Monica, Catherine Allday Davis, Carly Henderson, Moana Kruschwitz, Zach Isenberg, Bradford Duvall, Jason Lesner and Lenore Reese.
Monica gradually began to widen her social circle although she did not date any of her fellow students. She did go on a few casual dates with local men but the encounters amounted to very little. Inevitably there were times when she felt lonely, leading her to reach for the telephone to hear a familiar voice from back home. One of those voices was Andy Bleiler’s. Against her better judgment she kept in touch, and they met for a few stolen hours when she returned to Los Angeles to join her family for Thanksgiving in November 1993.
They stayed in contact during the winter and she saw him again in the spring vacation the following year. During that meeting her female intuition led her to suspect that he was seeing another woman—that is, besides his wife, Kate. It was a tempestuous and tearful reunion, especially as her instincts prove
d to be correct. She later discovered he had indeed formed an intimate relationship with a girl whom she knew from her days in Los Angeles. That secret relationship would soon stretch Monica’s loyalty to him to the limit.
Shortly after that meeting, Bleiler phoned Monica and told her that he too was thinking about moving to Portland, giving as his reason that he didn’t want to raise his son in Los Angeles, which he found too expensive. But whatever was behind that decision, it was news that Monica greeted with a mixture of eagerness and dread; with exhilaration at the prospect of seeing her erstwhile lover, but fear that she would be even more frequently driven back into the extra-marital routine of stolen moments, scratchy arguments, bitter betrayal, tearful reconciliation and guilty excitement.
Linda Estergard remembers talking to Monica shortly after she heard Bleiler’s news. “The day she found out that he was moving here she was very upset,” Linda said. “She is a very emotional girl and she was upset because she didn’t want him to come. One of the reasons for her leaving Los Angeles was to get out of his clutches. Now he was coming back to haunt her. She knew that if he moved she would be too emotionally weak to resist restarting the relationship.”
Monica confided her worries to other close friends. Fellow psychology student Carly Henderson recalls, “She didn’t want him to come because she knew in her heart that if he did she would start sleeping with him again.” It is a refrain echoed by Neysa DeMann Erbland: “She was anxious about him coming up. I remember her saying, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to be back.’ She knew that if he made a move she would fall right back into it. Monica was so worried about him coming up.” Other college contemporaries like Lenore Reese tell a similar story, testimony which is in stark contrast to Bleiler’s own version of events, a version he made public shortly after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke.
In June 1994 Bleiler, leaving his wife and children behind in Los Angeles, arrived in Portland to look for work and accommodation. The inevitable happened—the moment he arrived he visited Monica. “He was all over me, and for the first time he told me that he was in love with me—I was a wonderful person, he really cared about me and he loved me. It was incredible—he was sweet and romantic the whole time.” Then, after five “wonderful” days, he returned to Los Angeles, where Kate was involved in a protracted legal battle with her ex-husband over custody of their daughter. A few weeks later, however, he returned to Portland, resolved to spend the summer looking for work while Kate dealt with her legal affairs in Los Angeles.
Those summer months were the most tempestuous, intense and hurtful of Monica’s five-year relationship with Andy Bleiler, a time she remembers with a mixture of tenderness, sorrow, anger and bitterness. She thought this interlude would be a rerun of the weekend they had spent together earlier in June. It was not to be. “I look back on it now and it was such a horrible summer. It was so painful and damaging for me. It was so volatile—Andy would be very hot and cold, one minute all over me and then he would ignore me.”
His presence that summer also caused her to neglect her studies. She had planned to take a graduate course in forensic psychology, and in order to do so needed to get a high score on the GRE (Graduate Record Examination), a preliminary qualification test. With her mind on Bleiler she could not apply herself as she ought to have done, and in consequence received a very disappointing score on the exam. Those of her friends who saw the telltale signs in her behavior were quick to warn her off him. “When she started seeing him again I told her she was nuts,” says Neysa Erbland. “At times she was happy as a clam, at others consumed with guilt. It was not good for her.”
Once Kate and her children joined Bleiler in the fall of that year, 1994, the dynamics of the relationship changed significantly, in a way that Monica’s friends found difficult to accept, or even to understand. Although she and Bleiler split up again—this time at his prompting—she began to become friendly with his wife, and often baby-sat for the couple as she also did for Andy’s uncle. Before long, Monica’s affections were as much for Bleiler’s family as they were for Andy himself. Knowing that they had little money, she regularly bought clothes for the children and helped the family out in other ways. She was seen almost as part of the family, while she in turn liked Kate and adored the children.
Her mother, who was increasingly anxious about her daughter’s obsession, explains her behavior thus: “She was able to compartmentalize her sexual relationship with this man and her love for the wife and the children. She really did love those kids, she would baby-sit for them because she adored them and she saw no dichotomy in that. In the grown-up, adult world that split is obvious, but at her stage of development she did not see it.”
Not unnaturally, Monica’s view does not altogether chime with Marcia’s, although she does not spare herself, reflecting, “In the first year Kate was almost non-existent because my initial attraction to Andy came before he was married. It was very different to if I had met them as a couple and started having an affair with the husband. We didn’t become close friends until she moved to Portland. I have to confess that the relationship with her was sick because I came to care about her a lot as a person, and came to care about her, too, because I loved Andy so much.”
Her friendship with Kate, her affection for the children, and the continual conflict between herself and Bleiler—though they were not lovers at this point—eventually hardened Monica’s resolve. In November 1994, shortly before she left Portland to spend the Christmas vacation with her family, she wrote him a long letter saying that she didn’t want him in her life anymore, or even to be friends with him. After yet another tempestuous meeting they agreed to remain friends, but Monica left for her family feeling that the affair was finally over. She was to be sadly disillusioned. The moment she returned in the New Year, the phone rang. It was Andy Bleiler, pleading, begging, beseeching her to be his friend, saying that his wife hated Portland and that he couldn’t live without Monica. “He manipulated me, he played on my weakness, knowing that I had a soft spot for him,” she says.
Their relationship resumed in a halfhearted way, but Monica still had a nagging feeling that he was seeing someone else. Finally, acting on that instinct, she called the girl in question in Los Angeles and the full story came spilling out. Much younger and even more naive than Monica, the girl felt abused; Bleiler, she believed, had taken advantage of her. Worse still, the girl was seriously thinking about telling Kate about the whole tawdry business.
Horrified, Monica called Bleiler and arranged to see him. When they met, in February 1995, she told him in no uncertain terms what she thought about his behavior, at which he started crying “like a baby,” asking not only for her forgiveness but for her help. Monica recalls that he was in tears. He knew that his girlfriend was young, and he was desperately worried about the very real danger that she would tell his wife. “I am going to kill myself,” he told Monica. “So here I am,” she says, “brokenhearted because he had cheated on me and his wife with her [the girlfriend] and yet again he pulls on my heartstrings and I am faced with this dilemma: ‘Do I honor Andy or do I honor myself?’ So I honored him and his feelings. He just took advantage of me.”
As a result of that meeting Monica agreed to speak to the teenage girl and duly did so, managing to get her to agree to maintain her silence. Furthermore, with only three months left until she finished college, Monica decided that the only way she would continue to have anything to do with Bleiler was if he saw her regularly, as though theirs was a “normal” relationship. She also took a perverse satisfaction in paying him back for his treachery by having a fling with his younger brother Chris, who, Bleiler said, “would never like me because he only liked tall, skinny women.” Monica felt that she had showed him otherwise.
Looking back today over the whole history of her relationship with Andy Bleiler, Monica admits, “This is where the conflict in me lies, having deep feelings for someone as if I were in a proper relationship while the reality is so very different, full of c
ompromises and lies.” She acknowledges the full irony of the fact that, while she was seeing Andy Bleiler, she had studied, as part of her psychology course, François Truffaut’s 1975 movie The Story of Adèle H, based on the tragedy of Victor Hugo’s daughter, who traveled halfway across the world to be with a man who shunned her. Monica found that the portrayal of the woman’s obsession and how it drove her to madness carried echoes of her own emotional predicament. “It was,” she says, “a very telling movie.”
One of her closest friends, Catherine Allday Davis, who came to know her well during her final year at college and who spoke to her regularly during her affair with President Clinton, explains Monica’s behavior in this way: “Her relationship with Andy was damaging to her in the same way as her affair with the President. She was involving herself with a man who was never going to be hers and it was stopping her from being a normal woman and going on normal dates. In some ways she thought that she wasn’t good enough to be loved.
“Monica is a bright girl and she can vocalize what is going on but she can’t act on it. In her defense it’s not as though she is the only woman out there who has these issues in dealing with men. It’s a case of smart women, stupid choices.”
One of those foolish choices nearly cost Monica her college degree. It resulted from a series of decisions which, taken individually, were a testament to her generous heart and loyalty; when they were examined in the light of the presidential scandal, however, they seemed far more sinister.
A constant problem for the lovers was that Bleiler was always having to find an excuse to be away from the family home so that he could see Monica. When he had first arrived in Portland, Monica had introduced him to David Bliss, the Shop Foreman of the Lewis and Clark Theater Department, as a way of helping him to secure work or at least job contacts, and Bliss did occasionally offer Bleiler work. For a time, therefore, Bleiler told Kate that while she was out David Bliss had phoned, and that he had some extra work for him, a lie that enabled Bleiler secretly to meet Monica. When this excuse began to wear thin, Monica took a sheet of headed notepaper from the Theater Department and wrote a note to Bleiler saying that he was wanted for three dates in April and May 1995. She forged David Bliss’s signature at the foot of the letter and mailed it to Bleiler, believing that he would now have a cast-iron excuse as a cover for meeting her.
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