Still in tears, she returned to the table and asked to be taken home. The lawyers refused to leave until they had finished eating, Ginsburg brusquely telling the sobbing girl to stop making a scene. As she sat there in misery, she made up her mind that this was the end: she had finally and absolutely reached the end of her rope. “I had decided that I was going to go home and kill myself. That was it. I’m out.”
When she got back to her apartment, she debated whether to take an overdose of pills or to slit her wrists. She weighed up the options, and then decided to call her therapist, Dr. Susan. “I was hysterical and that night she saved my life. I have never been that close to committing suicide in my whole life. I didn’t know how to function anymore but she calmed me down. At that time I had just a toehold on life but she pulled me back into the land of the living.
“Certainly if I had killed myself it would have been because of my unrequited love for the President of the United States. I felt that my life was over; I didn’t feel that there was any piece of me left. What was the point of living, anyway? There was nothing more here.”
After talking to Dr. Susan, Monica went to bed. When she woke the next morning, she found that she had gained a fresh perspective on life. She now knew that, come what may, she was going to get through this, and that, though she might have been down, she was far from being out. She had reached a turning point of sorts. Moreover, the whole incident had a more or less happy ending, for it later emerged not only that Sheri Densuk had been wrongly subpoenaed, but that there was in fact no Jane Doe Number 7. Monica had contemplated killing herself over a misunderstanding.
For once, though, she had no chance to brood. After two months, the prisoner of the Watergate was allowed her first visitor, her closest friend, Catherine Allday Davis, who had just testified before the Grand Jury. Monica had implored her lawyers to let her meet her friend afterwards. The lawyers were worried about the legal consequences, but had eventually relented—though they gave Monica strict instructions that the two women must not talk about the case. Typically, Monica spent the time before Catherine arrived in an anxious ecstasy of expectation, not knowing if, after her March 17 Grand Jury ordeal, her friend would still want to know her. She need not have worried.
Fearing that her apartment was bugged, they met in a conference room in the Watergate, It was an emotional reunion, neither girl sure how the other would behave. Catherine was worried that her friend would feel betrayed because she had been compelled to testify, while Monica was anxious because she could not recall whether, in her casual conversations with Linda Tripp, she had made any catty comments about her best friend. If she had, they would, of course, have been recorded and so would very likely appear among Starr’s evidence.
Catherine remembers their meeting vividly. “As soon as we saw each other we knew that everything was going to be all right. We cried and hugged each other and we talked about our emotions, our experiences with the media and so on. We both were expressing shock about how the media had latched on to her and wouldn’t let her go, and that the Monica that was out there was not the real Monica. We just laughed at the absurdity of it all.”
As for Monica, “Seeing Catherine that day was a great morale boost for me. I knew now that I had at least one friend in the world and that there was still a piece of me that existed, that there was someone out there who still loved the real me. If Dr. Susan had preserved my physical life, then Catherine saved my soul. From that day on I knew I would survive.”
When Monica woke the next morning, her face was really painful. She realized that she had smiled so much when she saw her friend that it had made her cheek muscles ache. It was the first time in two months that she had had something to smile about.
April brought cause both for tears and for more smiles. The tears were occasioned by the fact that she couldn’t go to her mother’s wedding to Peter Straus in New York that month. Had she done so, she knew, the ceremony would have been turned into feeding time in the media piranha pool, and Marcia and Peter’s special day would have been ruined.
To escape from her Washington prison for a time, Monica again visited with Bernie and Barbara in Los Angeles. Besides being able to live a life of at least partial normality there, she was able to mend more fences with her father. “It was a very powerful time for my dad and me,” she says. “I came to understand my dad and Barbara much better, and they came to appreciate me as well. For the first time, they were in the front line, following every twist and turn in the story, so it became as intense for them as it was for me.”
Stepmother and stepdaughter became almost inseparable. Barbara taught Monica to knit, and encouraged her to take up sewing again. She made bags and scarves for friends, tacking onto each item a red-and-white cotton label that read, “Made Especially for you by Monica.” “It was very therapeutic,” she says, “and reminded me that since I had been living in Washington I had allowed my creative skills to wither.”
Barbara’s family, the Lerners, were also good to Monica. Indeed, they were more supportive than some of Bernie’s family, who not only kept their distance but wrote to Monica in censorious tones, something that hurt Bernie almost as much as his daughter. (He also had to listen in helpless, silent indignation as local Orthodox Jewish elders discussed the possibility of using religious law to cast Monica out from the faith.) However, Bernie’s younger sister Hanna and her family were supportive.
It was not only Monica’s mind and emotions that were nourished by her stay in Los Angeles. The fitness guru Kacy Duke was spending a month in the city, and brisk workouts with her whipped Monica’s body into shape. “C’mon, girl,” Kacy would say in her distinctive New York accent, as she took Monica for a bike ride or a timed walk on the beach. “C’mon, girl, you have to be ‘scrong’, you need ‘scrength’.” The success of the workouts was amply demonstrated when Monica took a German cousin, Natalie, on a sightseeing tour of Venice Beach. The girl whose face had launched a thousand headlines was approached by a woman in a store and told, “You look just like Monica Lewinsky, only thinner.”
This battle, at least, she had a chance of winning.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Avuncular Mr. Ginsburg
SUDDENLY, the media had a new superstar. Within weeks of arriving in Washington, Bill Ginsburg had been transformed from an obscure Californian medical-malpractice attorney into a national figure, his beard, bow ties, hats and deep voice, like that of a sober W.C. Fields, making him instantly recognized by millions of Americans.
He enjoyed his stardom and when, in March 1998, he was asked to a glittering black-tie dinner to celebrate seventy years of Time magazine—it was billed as the celebrity dinner of the year—he accepted with alacrity. Both he and the guest of honor, President Clinton, he told Monica, would be speaking. His client was upset, not only because she herself could not possibly, under any circumstances, see her “Handsome” but also because Ginsburg had been invited only as a result of her miserable situation.
Yet the following day she was anxious to hear what had happened, and to know whether he had seen the President. Ginsburg was full of himself: “Yeah, I saw him, and he said, ‘I wish her all the best,’ and winked at me.” Monica was elated, pleased that the man she had striven so valiantly to protect still cared about her enough to send a fond message. It was only about a month later that she discovered that Ginsburg had been pulling her leg.
The incident characterized Monica’s tumultuous relationship with her showman attorney. He saw himself as her surrogate father, yet he never understood the depth of her feelings for the President, or the way in which his own inappropriate, and often sexual, comments added to her private pain and public humiliation. At the same time, the fact that he drove a wedge between members of the Lewinsky family showed another side of the self-styled “avuncular Mr Ginsburg.” Just as Kenneth Starr was the enemy without, so after a few weeks Bill Ginsburg came to be seen by Monica and her family as the enemy within, legally, emotionally and financially.
Peter Straus, typically, pinpoints the lawyer’s chief weakness: “With hindsight he was a terrible choice. The fact that he loved showbiz and razzmatazz only served to reinforce the image of Monica as a Beverly Hills girl who was over the top.”
While Monica watched her family disintegrate under the strain, her attorney relished his new life in the limelight. Every day a gaggle of reporters gathered outside the Cosmos Club, Ginsburg’s Washington quarters, and waited for him to hold forth on the issue of the day. It made great copy, but the new king of the soundbites caused eyebrows to be raised even in the media. Breakfast-TV-show host Katie Couric mentioned the fact that Ginsburg had boasted of appearing on five TV talk shows in a single day.
When Monica complained, he would shrug his shoulders and say, “If you don’t feed the [media] bear, it’ll eat you because it’s hungry. If you feed the bear too much, it’ll crap all over you. But if you feed the bear just enough, it’ll leave you alone.” Unfortunately, Bill Ginsburg just couldn’t stop feeding the bear, no matter how often it chewed his hand, whether he was making off-the-cuff remarks at a high-powered Washington Post editorial meeting, or thinking on his feet in a TV studio.
The way he courted coverage, tipping off photographers and reporters each time he and Monica went out to a restaurant or other public place, added to the pressure on her, and often resulted in her being labeled a media junkie. In early April 1998, for example, Ginsburg was due to address the American Bar Association in Philadelphia (the invitation itself a product of his startling climb to fame, if not notoriety), and took Monica along to give her a break from the four walls of her Washington apartment. He promised that, after they had checked into their hotel, he would take her to see the famous Liberty Bell, the symbol of America’s freedom.
She was taken aback, when they arrived at their hotel, to see camera crews, reporters and photographers massed outside. She had supposed that she and Ginsburg would be incognito, but he, she found, had other ideas: a journalist from CNN walked up and asked him what time they were going to see the Liberty Bell. Monica was furious with her lawyer. “I just looked at him in disbelief. I was so angry that I had to walk away.” They were followed by a dozen or so newshounds, photographers snapping away as lawyer and client stood in line to look around Independence Hall, where the bell with its celebrated crack is housed.
The media’s presence encouraged other tourists to take notice, and they certainly did: so much so that a parade celebrating Greece’s Independence Day was disrupted, to the annoyance of the organizers. The center of all this attention was mortified. “I felt like an exhibit in a traveling freak show,” she says. “It was so unnecessary and all because Bill loved the limelight.”
Ginsburg did not always have it his way, however. In early April, Monica and her family put their foot down when he threatened to attend the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, at which the President and First Lady are traditionally the guests of honor. It was the kind of occasion which, under normal circumstances, Monica would have loved to attend, but even though she was invited, she well knew that as things were it would be folly even to consider going. Her parents backed her, her father agreeing that if Ginsburg, in the face of their objections, accepted the invitation, they should look for a new attorney. In the end he backed down, but it was a battle that Monica and her parents considered should never have taken place. “It was,” she admits, “very frustrating, always trying to keep my lawyer’s ego in check.”
More distressing than Ginsburg’s penchant for playing the clown in public was the way in which he insinuated himself into the private dynamic of the Lewinsky family, pitting its members against one another. For example, in an interview with Time magazine in March, he had talked warmly about Bernie Lewinsky but commented on the “aggressive” behavior of Marcia Lewis, remarks which went far beyond his brief as family attorney.
The truth is that Ginsburg saw his role as being much more than just that of a lawyer, boasting often of his unique position as Monica’s surrogate father. He maintained that he had kissed her inner thighs when she was just six days old—“Look at those little pulkes,” he claimed he had said of the newborn Monica—even though in reality he did not meet her until she was in her early twenties. Given the sexual overtones of the case, these remarks were wildly inappropriate, as well as fanciful. More offensive to Monica, however, was when he described her as being like a “caged dog with her twenty-four-year-old libido,” a description that was duly printed in Time.
He was even more crass in private. During a dinner party at his home in Los Angeles for Bernie and Barbara Lewinsky, he remarked that the President only liked women with dark pubic hair—an obvious reference to Monica. His wife, Laura, was so disgusted by his vulgarity that she walked out of the room. Monica also found it disturbing that Ginsburg, a happily married father of two teenagers, wanted to know graphic details of her affair with the President, displaying a degree of interest that went far beyond the normal attorney—client relationship.
Certainly he took his self-imposed role as surrogate father to extremes. On one occasion in April, when father and daughter were talking together in Dr. Lewinsky’s Brentwood home, Ginsburg put his arms around them and said, “We don’t want you two getting too close, do we?” Ginsburg had dropped by with Barbara Walters, who had interviewed her father a few weeks earlier. As they chatted, Monica explained to Walters that when she was a growing up she was basically a good kid who kept herself out of trouble; she never smoked or took drugs, always got good grades and never shoplifted like other children. Without missing a beat, Walters said drily, “Next time, shoplift.”
While the two women were talking in one room, Dr. Lewinsky and Bill Ginsburg were engaged in a more serious conversation elsewhere. In the course of their conversation, the lawyer emphasized a point he had frequently made during their long-distance phone calls. “You know, Bern,” he said, “she is really angry at you. Did you know that Monica hates your guts?” If true, his comments were an intolerable intrusion into their lives; if false, they were unforgivable.
Monica was devastated when she learned what he had said. “Here’s my dad—his heart is breaking, his wallet is busting, he’s nervous and despairing, and he’s got Bill Ginsburg telling him that his daughter, for whom he’s going through all this pain, hates his guts. I love my father. He and Barbara have been wonderful during this whole crisis. Of course I have issues and problems with my dad, but who doesn’t? They are our business.” To this, her father adds, in his usual understated way, “Bill Ginsburg got involved in the family dynamic in a way that was inappropriate. His comments only added to the angst and stress that we were all feeling.”
Ginsburg’s policy of divide and conquer came into the open over the sensitive issue of money. For months he had claimed that Monica insisted on being taken everywhere in a chauffeur-driven limousine, and had sent hefty bills which reflected that wish. “Now you are going to have to be patient with Monica,” he told Bernie in his deep voice. “I’m trying to wean her off the limos.” In fact, Monica normally took a taxi or walked during her infrequent covert excursions from the Watergate apartment. The truth emerged only when she noticed her father signing yet another large check to Ginsburg, to pay a bill which included $5,000 for limos for “Monica’s security.”
Ginsburg again overstepped the mark when, during casual conversations with his friends, he told them that Monica had contemplated suicide. She discovered this indiscretion in March when one of his female friends approached her and said consolingly, “Bill told me how upset you were the other night, and I just want you to know no one is worth killing yourself over.” Her words were meant kindly, but the incident did little to improve Monica’s confidence in Ginsburg’s judgment or discretion.
Reluctantly, the rest of the family came to share her view of her attorney after the furor that blew up over a set of glamorous photographs of Monica which were published in the summer of 1998 in the glossy monthly, Vanity Fair. One shot in particular r
aised the blood pressure of many patriots: it showed Monica posing with the Stars and Stripes on the beach at Malibu in California.
The idea of Monica modeling for a set of pictures arose quite by chance when, in March, she and Bill Ginsburg attended a launch in Washington for a book by CNN TV host Larry King. It was one of the very few times that Monica had ventured outside her apartment, and it was only after some hesitation that she had decided to go along. As she chatted to various media folk at the party, a writer for Vanity Fair suggested that she have a set of portraits taken. Not unnaturally, the idea appealed, not least because all the photos of her that had thus far appeared in the media had been taken by stalking paparazzi when Monica was off-guard. At a time when everything in her life was out of control, including her image, it was a chance to take back some command.
So in April she flew out to Los Angeles for the photo shoot with the acclaimed photographer Herb Ritts. She remembers. “As I have always been concerned about my weight I was very nervous.” Besides worrying about the pictures themselves, Monica had discussed with Ginsburg issues of final approval, confidentiality and so on, expecting him to ensure that they would keep ultimate control over what was published. In his usual fashion, he became angry when she asked about the legal issues, and told her that, if she didn’t like the way he had organized matters, they could call the whole thing off. Unsurprisingly, Monica, intoxicated by the thought of being out in the open air and sunshine after months of virtual imprisonment in Washington, wouldn’t hear of it.
As she puts it, the shoot “was champagne for the soul. For the last four months I had been constantly ridiculed and criticized . . it really energized me.” Also, she enjoyed working with Herb Ritts, posing for him in a variety of outfits which gave her something of the look of the young Elizabeth Taylor. She had her own hairdresser, make-up artist and other attendants, including a security guard watching over $600,000 worth of diamond jewelery she wore for the photos. This time, she truly was “queen for a day.”
Monica's Story Page 33
