It would become one of the most famous dresses in American history, better known than Scarlett’s red dress in Gone With the Wind, its impact upon America’s government nearly as deadly as the blood-splattered pink suit Jackie Kennedy wore as LBJ was being sworn in on Air Force One.
This simple “work dress,” as Monica called it, would also become known as one of the sexiest dresses in recent popular culture—sexier than Barbra’s nearly see-through Oscar pantsuit, sexier than Marilyn’s sewn-on white sequins, sexier than the black safety-pin number that got Elizabeth Hurley a modeling contract. Monica’s navy blue work dress was certainly the Gap’s biggest fashion statement since Sharon Stone, Handsome’s other friend, had worn her black Gap turtleneck to the Oscars.
On February 28, 1997, Monica Lewinsky hadn’t seen Bill Clinton for eleven months, although they’d had phone sex half a dozen times as he crisscrossed the country campaigning against Bob Dole and the Tin Soldier. The day before, Betty Currie had invited Monica to Bill Clinton’s weekly radio address. Monica watched him give the speech with six other guests, then had her photograph taken once again with the Handsome she’d been intimate with for nearly a year only on the phone.
They were a blue couple. He wore a navy blue blazer and a denim button-down shirt; she wore the navy blue dress she’d recently had dry-cleaned. She liked the way it fit her. After the photo was taken—“I was really nervous,” Monica said—Bill Clinton told her to go up to Betty Currie’s office because he wanted to give her something.
She chatted with Betty as Bill Clinton spoke to the other guests at the radio address, and when Bill Clinton came into Betty’s office, Betty walked them both into the Oval Office. She walked the two of them into the private study and left.
“Come here,” Monica said to Bill Clinton. “Just kiss me.”
“Wait, just wait,” he said. “Be patient. Be patient,” and he handed her a little box decorated with gold stars. She opened it and found a glass pin that was the color of her dress. As she admired it, he almost sheepishly slipped something into her purse and quietly said, “This is for you.”
Monica reached into her purse and found a gorgeous leather-embossed volume of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It was, she thought, the most “meaningful” and “beautiful” gift he had given her. She felt he was telling her, through Whitman’s words, of the depth of his affection for her.
Bill Clinton told her he’d seen the message she’d sent him on Valentine’s Day in the Washington Post’s classified section, a note addressed to “Handsome,” quoting Romeo and Juliet: “With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls/For stony limits cannot hold love out/And what love can do, that dares love attempt.” Bill Clinton told her how much he loved Romeo and Juliet.
He kissed her then and they moved to the hallway she’d missed so much. She unbuttoned his denim blue shirt. He said, “Listen, I’ve got to tell you something really important. We have to be really careful.” He kissed her again and unbuttoned the top buttons of her navy blue dress. They did what they had done before and she knelt down. He froze suddenly. He thought he’d heard someone in the Oval Office.
They moved into the bathroom off the hallway and she knelt down again. After a while, he stopped her and started to push her away. She stood up and put her arms around him and whispered, “I care about you so much. I don’t understand why you won’t let me make you come. I mean, it’s important to me. I mean, it just doesn’t feel complete, you know? It doesn’t seem right.”
He whispered, “I don’t want to get addicted to you. I don’t want you to get addicted to me.”
They looked at each other for a moment. “I don’t want to disappoint you,” he said.
She knelt down again and, for the first time, she felt Willard find closure in her mouth.
“I was sick after it was over,” he would say later.
“You’ve got to put yourself together again,” he told her now. She buttoned her dress up and put her lipstick on, and Betty Currie magically reappeared and was suddenly knocking on the door of the private study. Betty walked them both into the Oval Office and then walked her out.
Though her departure had been abrupt, Monica was sky-high. She had gained his trust. He had allowed her to finish what he’d never allowed before. They hadn’t had intercourse, but until this day, he hadn’t really allowed her to do fellatio, either.
They had moved now from fellatio interruptus to fellatio. She dreamed of the day they would move from fellatio to coitus . . . or at least to coitus interruptus. This was the best day, Monica thought, they’d ever had. He had given her Leaves of Grass and seeds of himself. She was grateful for both.
She went straight to dinner with some friends at McCormick and Schmidt’s and then went home to her apartment. She threw the blue dress into her closet. Weeks later, she saw the dress there before going out with her friends. She tried to put it on, but she’d gained some weight and it didn’t fit.
She noticed two “tiny dots” on it—stains in the area of her chest and lower hip. She wondered if they were the president’s stains. She also wondered if it was either the guacamole or the spinach dip she’d had at McCormick and Schmidt’s that night. She threw the dress back into her closet. She told two of her girlfriends about it, though, saying that Bill Clinton “should pay the dry-cleaning bill.”
She also told the Ratwoman about it. Linda Tripp had been on a diet, with Monica’s help, and, as a reward, Monica invited her over to her apartment to pick out clothes Monica wasn’t wearing. And there in the closet was the navy blue dress. Monica told Tripp the story and showed her the stains.
The Ratwoman went into a frenzy. She called Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff and told him about the stained navy blue dress.
“Should I take it?” Tripp asked.
“And do what with it?” Isikoff asked.
“Give it to you.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Have it tested,” Tripp said.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” Isikoff yelled.
“DNA?”
“Where the fuck am I supposed to get a sample of the president’s DNA?” Isikoff said, and hung up quickly afterward.
When Tripp called her, Lucianne Goldberg had the answer. Staying with her at her New York apartment—in the right place at the right time—was a man who knew all about stains and DNA. From out of the O. J. Simpson case’s toxic sewers came the ex-cop known as “Führer Man” and “Fuhrman the German,” to become an accomplice now to the plot to bring down the president of the United States.
The former Los Angeles detective, Mark Fuhrman, was ungodly perfect casting to be teaming with Tripp, the former Delta Force black-bagger, and Goldberg, the former Nixon spy. Once a marine, the collector of Nazi memorabilia, Führer Man, an author now, had been accused of planting evidence at the Simpson trial. He had once told a police psychiatrist that he tired of the Marine Corps “because a bunch of Mexicans and niggers were telling me what to do.” A witness claimed to have overheard him rant about “burning all the niggers.” He was living now in a small Idaho town not far from the headquarters of the Aryan Nation, a town filled with other ex-LAPD retirees.
Führer Man knew just what the Ratwoman and the Bag Lady of Sleaze could do with Monica’s navy blue dress. A Q-tip would do it. A plastic bag. Sterile water. But they somehow had to get the dress.
Tripp and Goldberg knew very well what the dress meant. With a DNA-tested dress with his semen on it, Bill Clinton couldn’t “deny, deny, deny” (as he’d suggested to Gennifer). The White House spin doctors wouldn’t be able to turn this into another he said/she said. And if Bill Clinton should deny in court his encounters with Monica Lewinsky, he could go to jail. They somehow had to get a hold of that navy blue dress!
Together in the office at the Pentagon one day, Tripp turned to Monica and said she was running out of money. She was so broke, she said, that she was selling her clothes. That morning, someone had see
n the suit she was wearing and wanted to buy it. Right now. Literally off her back. So could she go over to Monica’s apartment, the Ratwoman asked, and borrow something out of her closet? Right now? So she could sell the suit she was wearing? Monica said okay, she’d go to her apartment with Tripp.
Oh no, Tripp said, she didn’t want to put Monica to all that trouble. Couldn’t Monica just give her the key to her apartment? Monica thought about it, then said she didn’t really feel comfortable having anybody in her apartment alone. The Ratwoman foamed and accused Monica of not trusting her.
If Tripp and Goldberg couldn’t physically get the dress, they had to try to make sure that Monica wouldn’t send it to the dry cleaner. They decided to try to frighten her out of doing that.
“I want you to think about this,” Tripp said to Monica. “And don’t just dis what I say, okay?”
“I don’t always dis what you say,” Monica said.
“You’re very stubborn,” Tripp said. “You’re very stubborn.” She sighed. “The navy blue dress. Now, all I would say to you is I know how you feel today, and I know why you feel the way you do today, but you have a very long life ahead of you, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. Neither do you. I don’t know anything, and you don’t know anything. I mean, the future is a blank slate. I don’t know what will happen. I would rather you had that dress in your possession if you need it years from now. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
Monica said, “You think I can hold on to a dress for ten or fifteen years with semen from—”
“Hey, listen,” Tripp said. “My cousin is a genetic whatchamacallit—” It was a lie. The cousin she was referring to was the Bag Lady’s houseguest, Führer Man.
“—and during O. J. Simpson I questioned all the DNA and do you know what he told me? I will never forget this. And he’s like a Ph.D. and blah blah blah. And he said that on a rape victim now—they couldn’t do this, you know, even five years ago. On a rape victim now, if she had preserved a pinprick size of crusted semen, ten years from that time, if she takes a wet Q-tip and blobs it on there and has a pinprick size on the Q-tip, they can match the DNA with absolutely—with certainty.”
Monica said, “So why can’t I scratch that crap off and put it in a plastic bag?”
Tripp said, “You can’t scratch it off. You would have to use a Q-tip. And I feel that this is what I’d tell my own daughter. That’s why I’m saying this to you. I would say it to my own daughter: For your own ultimate protection, which, mea culpa, I hope you never need it. But I don’t want you to take the dress away, either. I’m telling you, I would say this to my own daughter, who would tell me to fuck off, but—”
“Well, I’ll think about it,” Monica said.
Tripp said, “Believe me, I know how you feel now. I just don’t want to take away your options down the road, should you need them. And believe me, I know better than anybody, probably, other than your own mother, that you would never, ever use the dress if you didn’t have to. I know this. Believe me. I just don’t trust the people around him [Clinton] and I just want you to have that dress for you. Put it in a Baggie, put it in a Ziploc bag, and you pack it in with your treasures, for all I care. I mean, whatever. Put it in one of your little antiques.”
“What for, though?” Monica asked. “What do you think—”
“I don’t know, Monica,” Tripp said, picking her frightening words carefully. “It’s just this nagging awful feeling I have in the back of my head.”
“What if I don’t have the dress?” Monica asked.
“I think it’s a blessing you do,” Tripp said. “And it could be your only insurance policy down the road. Or it could never be needed, and you can throw it away. But I—I never ever want to read about you going off the deep end because someone comes out and calls you a ‘stalker’ or something . . . and in this day and age . . . I don’t trust anybody. Maybe I’m being paranoid. If I am, indulge me. I’m not saying you should do it if you don’t want to. I’m just saying it would be a smart thing to do. And then put it somewhere where no one knows where it is but you . . . .”
Fear . . . Paranoia . . . Motherly Concern . . . Using Monica’s own mother in her arguments . . . pretending to speak to her as though she were her own daughter . . . at the same time taping her and conferring daily with the Bag Lady, whose houseguest was Führer Man. A conspiracy of scum. But a successful one. In a later conversation, Monica talked about not betraying her Handsome or the White House: “I would not—for fear of my life—I would not cross these—these people—for fear of my life . . . .” She did exactly what the Ratwoman had told her to do. She put the navy blue dress in a Ziploc bag with her “treasures” (tapes of his messages left on her machine) and hung the bag in the closet of her mother’s New York apartment.
. . .
When Tripp blew the whistle by calling Kenneth W. Starr’s deputy, Jackie Bennett, Tripp told the prosecutors about the navy blue dress, which Monica would never have told them about. Starr’s prosecutors knew they had Clinton and Monica by their short hairs, thanks to what Tripp had told them about the existence of the dress.
If Clinton denied under oath that he had sex with Lewinsky, the stains on the dress would prove him guilty of perjury. If Monica denied having the dress or if she dry-cleaned it, she would be guilty of perjury or obstruction of justice, destroying evidence. They even had a witness—Tripp—who had not only seen the stains but who had discussed with Monica on tapes (that they now possessed) the blue dress’s importance.
When Monica finally got her immunity deal, the prosecutors immediately asked for the dress and she had to turn it over or go to jail. She had no choice. The Ratwoman had taken all of her choices away. The navy blue dress was tagged as item number Q3243 and taken to an FBI lab. The president of the United States was forced to provide a blood sample. The stains on the blue dress were revealed to be neither guacamole nor spinach dip.
[6]
Jay Leno and the Cigar
“Oh,” Linda Tripp said, “I’m beginning to think he’s a huge moron, but that’s my opinion.”
“And I’m beginning to think he’s an asshole more than a moron,” Monica said.
“How about a combination, a moron and an asshole?” Linda Tripp said.
He had played his sax on Arsenio Hall’s show, had nearly flashed his underwear on MTV, and now, as all the scurrilous rumors and charges inundated America, he tried to be hip again. He gave it the Bart Simpson response: “I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove anything.” But Bart Simpson wasn’t working. More and more newspapers were calling for his resignation.
Fellow Democrat Bob Kerrey’s old quote—“Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?”—had been pulled out of the newspaper morgues and was reappearing everywhere. A column in the Washington Times called him “a lying, thieving hick in Allen Edmonds wingtips.” A former Reagan aide said he was “as full of shit as a fertilizer bomb and he might go off in the White House.” The same aide, Lyn Nofziger, gleefully pointed out, “With all his legal bills, Clinton can no longer afford $200 haircuts.” The chairman of the Republican party in Ohio said Bill Clinton “operated with a rectal-cranial inversion.” A columnist asked, “Do we really need the CIA to answer to a guy whose main interest is uncovering Victoria’s Secret?” And fellow Democratic senator Fritz Hollings, of South Carolina, said, “Clinton is as popular in South Carolina as AIDS.”
Even the shrine he had ordered constructed for himself in the Pentagon was suddenly under fire. The Pentagon’s third-floor corridor, known as the “Commander in Chief’s Corridor,” was filled with wall-size photographs of Bill Clinton alongside top-rank military brass. Never a popular project, because of his actions to dodge the draft in the Vietnam War, the picture collection and the corridor were now being avoided by those Defense Department officials whose offices were near it. A janitorial worker had been assigned to wash the glass in which the photos were mounted every mornin
g . . . to remove the spit that had been left there the day before.
But doing the most incendiary damage to the Clinton presidency, some of his aides felt, was the nightly evisceration of Bill Clinton seen by 70 million Americans. Jay Leno was America’s cynical conscience in the nineties and his nightly machine-gunning Clinton jokes were not in the relatively gentle spirit he had shown toward senators Bob Packwood and Bob Dole.
The jokes Jay Leno lacerated Bill Clinton with each night and which much of America was repeating the next day were, Bill Clinton felt, belittling him, making him look like “the dumb hick” and the “Caligula of the Ozarks” that the columnists accused him of being. “It came out today that Clinton once tried to have phone sex with Hillary, but she said, ‘Not tonight, I have an earache.’ ” Or “Al Gore is just an orgasm away from the presidency.” Or “Monica is considering suing the president. She wants a million dollars for pain and suffering and $2.50 for dry cleaning.”
The Leno joke that Bill Clinton told a friend he really hated was this: “Former president Jimmy Carter has been hospitalized for the treatment of a skin rash. He’s going to be fine, but if any Democratic president came down with a skin rash, I’d think it’d be Clinton.”
Leno’s jokes spawned thousands of Internet imitators, E-mailed to offices all over America: “Why does Bill Clinton wear boxer shorts? To keep his ankles warm.” . . . “What’s the most popular game in the White House? Swallow the leader.” . . . “What’s Bill’s definition of safe sex? When Hillary’s out of town.” . . . “What’s the only election promise Clinton has kept? Reuniting Fleetwood Mac.” . . . “What’s the difference between Bill Clinton and a gangbanger? A gangbanger screws in turn; Bill Clinton screws interns.” . . . “Why is Bill Clinton always losing his voice? He keeps eating his words.” . . . “Why is Bill Clinton not circumcised? It would have been throwing away the best part.” . . . “What are the two worst things about Bill Clinton? His face.” . . . “What’s Bill Clinton’s favorite instrument? The strumpet.” . . . “What’s Bill Clinton’s idea of foreplay? ‘Yo, look at this, bitch!’ ”
American Rhapsody Page 21
