This is the dramatic and disturbing story of one woman’s struggle to defend herself against the untrammeled power of the American criminal justice system and its leering media accomplices. It is a “fascinating human story of love, betrayal, and obsession.” It is, in fact, a revelation. For underneath the “brassy Beverly Hills babe” of pop mythology, Monica Lewinsky is revealed by Andrew Morton’s new authorized biography to be a real person with real hopes and real feelings. In the past, she has been cruelly caricatured. She has been transmuted into “the Other” through a psychological trick “used extensively by the military, on the principle that soldiers will be prepared to kill those who have thus been demonized.” And let’s face it: That is wrong. We should be ashamed.
Walk a mile in Monica Lewinsky’s shoes, why don’t you? Think it’s been easy? Think again. Try to imagine, for example, what it must have been like to be a Rubenesque child in 1980s Los Angeles, where all the other girls were willowy and blonde and had their own Snoopy telephones. Third grade was especially hard. Her classmate Matthew Spaulding — Hi, Matt! — teased her about her appearance. Hollywood superbrat Tori Spelling — Hi, Tori! — didn’t invite her to a “glittering” birthday party, even though they were in Brownies together. It still hurts.
As do some, well, issues with her father. Though he made a good living as a doctor specializing in “oncological cancer,” Bernie Lewinsky was sort of a tightwad. Granted, he forked over for summer-school “fat camp” in Santa Barbara and for an eating-disorders clinic in Culver City. But he wouldn’t buy Monica a Minnie Mouse dress during a trip to Disneyland — Hi, Dad! — and he was only willing to spend $ 500 on her bat mitzvah. Which is kind of, you know, uncool. Then, one day in 1987, Monica’s mother, Marcia, took Monica and her brother to the Sunset Boulevard Hamburger Hamlet and told them she was going to divorce their father, who was having an affair with his receptionist. Marcia “had thought they would be pleased” at this news. But instead — Hi, Mom! — they were both freaked out. A few days later, there was a big earthquake and several people died. Which, as Monica observes, “was symbolic.”
At Beverly Hills High, the social pressure was so bad that two of her contemporaries, Erik and Lyle Menendez, murdered their parents for money, as “has been widely noted.” Monica was made of sterner stuff. She did, however, get a D in freshman English and gain more than fifty pounds in less than a year. Also, the relationship she had with her first boyfriend, Adam Dave, was — Hi, Adam! — “yucky.” It was all too much. So Monica transferred to a smaller, private school, Bel Air Prep, where the emphasis was on “one-to-one tuition,” and where her teachers spent patient hours “enthusing her with an interest in poetry.” Some of her own poetry is reprinted in this book. It’s super good.
But Beverly Hills is super bad, and it kept Monica in psychic chains long after she’d switched to Bel Air. She regularly returned to her old high school to help the pretty girls make costumes for drama-department productions. The Beverly Hills theater technician was twenty-five-year-old Andy Bleiler, whom Monica had met the previous year when he was sleeping with one of her teenaged friends. Now this “very bright, witty, and creative” man listened sympathetically to her problems, and, “I mean, for a fat girl,” Monica remembers, “it was really rewarding.”
There was just “one immovable stumbling block”: Andy was married. So Monica, to whom “good manners and proper form” have always been very important, waited to have sex with him until his wife, Kate, was pregnant.
Then, in early February 1993, Monica and Andy broke up. Later that month, after a performance of Oliver! at Beverly Hills High, they got back together and “had sex in the light booth of the auditorium.” In July 1993, they broke up once more and Monica soon moved to Portland, Oregon, to study the “Psychology of Sex” and work in the “sex lab” of Lewis and Clark College. The next two years were “some of the happiest and most stimulating days of her life,” during which she developed a “profound intellectual understanding of the human mind and condition.”
In November 1993, armed with this new insight, Monica again took up with Andy Bleiler. And when, in June 1994, Andy, too, moved to Portland with his wife and infant son, Monica practically became “part of the family.” She had sex with Andy. She helped Andy cover up another affair he was having with a high-school girl. She had revenge sex — Hi, Chris! — with Andy’s brother. She had sex with Andy some more. And all the while she was becoming “close friends” with his wife and babysitting the kids.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, here. You want to stigmatize Monica Lewinsky as a weirdo, someone “beyond the normal boundaries of American family life,” so that the military will find it easier to kill her. But the Bleiler years really weren’t like that at all. “My initial attraction to Andy came before he was married,” Monica reminds us. “It was very different to if I had met them as a couple and started having an affair with the husband.” You hadn’t looked at it from quite that perspective, had you?
Just as it does with Monica’s formative years, this book offers a much-needed and thorough going corrective to the standard, cartoonish media account of her subsequent relationship with Bill Clinton. Have we been fair to imagine her as simply a moonstruck president-stalker? Hardly. Oh sure, there were incidents, no big deal: the “Where’s Waldo?” appearances at ropeline ceremonies and motorcade drivebys. And there were upsets, too. Monica “subscribed to the commonly held belief that the Clinton marriage was purely a business relationship,” but it was still a major bummer when she saw news footage of Bill and Hillary embracing on the beach. Clinton’s trysts with Eleanor Mondale — Hi, Eleanor! — were even worse. And at the end, when Monica realized it was all over? Well, who among us in such circumstances wouldn’t burst into “hysterical tears,” “hyperventilate,” and tell the assistant secretary of defense that we had to leave work early? After all, “this was my love — my spirit and my body.”
Besides which, it’s not as though this was her only love. She wasn’t totally obsessed or anything. Over the course of her more than two-year entanglement with Clinton, Monica carefully preserved her emotional independence, sharing her spiritual and corporeal abundance with other men. There was the Pentagon official — Hi, Thomas! — who got her pregnant. Next, so she could be sure, after the abortion, that “she could continue with her love life without any physical fears,” Monica had almost no choice but to take a bedroom test drive with Andy Bleiler. Good news: All the equipment worked. (Memo to Andrew Morton: You left out Jesse “the nutrition guy” from Monica’s June 1997 fat-farm holiday. You’ll want to make good this omission for the paperback edition.)
In any case, you know what? Bill made all the important moves on Monica, and not the other way around. It was Clinton, when they were first introduced, who “undressed me with his eyes.” The only thing Monica did was rush right home and stay up all night reading Gennifer Flowers’s autobiography for pointers. The thong business on November 15, 1995? That was nothing. It was Clinton who startled Monica with his intensity that evening, “holding me, taking in my worth and my energy as a woman and a human being.” The oral sex a few minutes later, which Kenneth Starr made sound so . . . so . . . degrading? Actually, it was beautiful. “The president took a call from a congressman as Monica continued to pleasure him.” And he was very solicitous of her, too. “The irony is,” she reports, “that I had the first orgasm of the relationship.”
So the affair proceeded, week by week, Clinton upping the ante every step of the way. First, he “took the relationship onto another level” by telling her she could sneak in to see him on weekends. Then he marked a “milestone” in their soul-mate connection by weeping in her presence over the U.S. intervention in Bosnia. In March 1996, Clinton watched appreciatively as Monica “moistened one of the president’s cigars in a most intimate fashion” — at which point she “realized that she had fallen in love.” In the ensuing months, as they were physically separated by her new job at the Pentagon, Clinton asked her to talk dirty to him on the phone, which was “important and nourishing to the relationship.” Finally, at a brief reunion in February 1997, “the president found sexual completion in her presence, a tiny sample of his semen staining her Gap dress.” In response to which she was, like, omigod! Because Clinton’s gift of DNA “signaled to Monica that at last he truly trusted her.”
In short, they really cared for each other. He told her funny jokes: “What do you get when you cross a Jewish-American Princess with an Apple? A computer that won’t go down on you.” She gave him endearing little nick-names — like “Butthead.” It was “sweet.”
Alas, it was also doomed, and in hindsight it’s all too easy to see why. As Monica herself notes, it is “a crime in Washington to be nice to people.” The city as a whole was bound to reject her sooner or later. The White House, in particular, was full of Clinton ex-girlfriends like Marsha Scott — Hi, Marsha! — who would inevitably destroy any vibrant young flower like Lewinsky out of pure, jealous rage. Modern political conservatism is best explained by the romantic frustrations of its converts: Monica should never have confided in Linda Tripp, whose “resentment at the course of her life — she and Colonel Tripp were divorced in the 1990s, after twenty years of marriage — made her a perfect recruit for right-wingers who hated Bill Clinton and all his works.” Right-wingers, for example, like Kenneth Starr, the “former Bible salesman turned lawyer,” whose hatred of Monica “for enjoying and being at case with her sexuality” could never be appeased.
And, hey, what right-thinking person could argue with judgments like these? Which raises an interesting question about how Monica’s Story will be received. If they want to, the book-review wisenheimers will be able to nitpick the book to death, fixating on its peripheral flaws: like that there are farm animals who can write better than Andrew Morton, that he makes dozens of factual errors, and that his heroine is a repellent airhead. But how heartless and delusional such criticism will be. At this late date, does it really matter any more that Monica is an airhead? It does not. What matters, instead, is that she has emerged from the depths of Hell with a vital message: Bill Clinton isn’t a very nice man, but that’s nobody’s business, and he remains an excellent president, and his enemies are vicious lunatics.
Listen up, America. Whom do you hear? Don’t be misled by the semen stain. The truth, in every essential respect, is that Monica Lewinsky isn’t “the Other” at all. She is the New York Times editorial page and the Democratic party and a clear majority of every poll. In Monica’s Story, we have met “that woman” at last. And she is us.
David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
