Audition (95 page)

The president’s admission didn’t help Monica. By now she was the butt of every comedian’s joke.

Finally, on September 9, armed guards delivered independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report and its eighteen boxes of accompanying material to the House of Representatives. Two days later Starr’s report was released to the public. For almost five hundred pages it described in virtually pornographic fashion every encounter Monica Lewinsky had with President Clinton. Could anything have been more mortifying to either of them?
The Starr Report
became a best seller, and, still hoping I might be doing an interview with Monica, I was one of the people who read every page of it. I thought it was horrendous and unnecessarily graphic. It didn’t need five hundred pages to make its point. I felt very sorry for Monica and even for the president, who was obviously suffering while still trying to run the country.

The morning the report came out, President Clinton, at a Washington, D.C., prayer breakfast, for the first time publicly apologized to Monica Lewinsky and her family, including them in a list of people he acknowledged hurting.

Monica never wanted to testify about her relationship with the president, but after being forced to do so in such detail, she now thought she was free of the independent counsel, the grand jury, and the FBI. Ready to move on with her life, she began to think seriously about giving an interview. She wanted to tell her own story in her own words. But she had another consideration: huge legal bills. By the end a whole team of attorneys was working on the case. Monica said that at some point her legal fees were $15,000 a day and, as a result, she owed more than a million dollars. Her mother and four of her friends who had testified before the grand jury had also accrued legal bills. Monica wanted to pay it all back. Her family also realized that she would need money for her own living expenses. She had become so notorious that finding a regular job would be difficult if not impossible.

Monica now faced a very difficult decision. It is the policy of network news divisions in the United States not to pay for interviews. That is not the case in many foreign countries, like the UK. There were also U.S. talk and interview shows not under news departments that would pay plenty for her first interview, as would many magazines. What would she do?

I hadn’t seen or talked to Monica since our meeting at her father’s house almost five months earlier. I heard that she and Judy Smith were meeting with many different journalists. I never knew who they were. For obvious reasons everyone kept the meetings private. Meanwhile Monica’s family had enlisted the help of a friend, Richard Carlson, a former television journalist and director of the Voice of America. Carlson worked quietly behind the scenes with Monica, going through bags of mail requesting interviews, appearances, and even endorsements. One food company wanted Monica to do a commercial for their coffee creamer, wearing a navy blue Gap dress and complaining, “Oh no, not again” when the product spilled on her.

I began to hear about huge deals being offered. It was reported that Rupert Murdoch was dangling some five million dollars for a package that included two television interviews for his Fox network—one to be shown here on the Fox channel, another with a British broadcaster to be seen internationally. In addition he was offering a book deal with a publishing company he owned and lord knows what else. This was never confirmed, but there was no doubt that Monica could sell her first exclusive interview for all kinds of money.

This was not the first time, or the last, that someone in the headlines has had to make that kind of a decision. I will digress for a moment to talk of Paris Hilton. In June 2007 the young woman was serving time in jail for, among other things, driving with a suspended license. At that time I had a great many conversations with Paris’s mother and with Paris herself, who called me from jail. I assumed that I would be doing the first interview with her. But as it turned out Paris’s father, Rick Hilton, was asking for money. Both NBC and ABC found ways of paying the family by purchasing personal photographs and videos of Paris. This was not uncommon practice. However, ABC offered much less money than NBC. The network felt the amount it was offering was legitimate, but the six-figure amount that Rick Hilton was asking for was not. Rick Hilton then told me that NBC had offered so much money that ABC was, in his words, “not in the galaxy,” and therefore the interview with Paris would be done by that network. When I said I thought Paris’s credibility might be a factor, he answered that it was too much money to turn down. Eventually, when news of the NBC offer leaked out, it made extremely unpleasant headlines and the network withdrew from the deal. The family then offered the interview to me for no money, but by then the whole thing seemed shoddy to me, and I turned it down. My network stood by my decision. Paris finally did an interview with Larry King, which was fine if bland, but her tarnished reputation was not helped by her family’s push for money.

Of course the Paris Hilton negotiations were long after my discussions with Monica, but the situation was similar—money versus credibility.

With this predicament, I turned to David Westin, the president of ABC News. David, himself a highly regarded attorney, had first come to ABC as its legal counsel. We discussed Monica’s need for money and the fact that her family, specifically her mother, Marcia Lewis, felt that her daughter should accept one of the big deals being offered so that Monica could free herself from debt. David suggested that we meet with Mrs. Lewis, and we arranged to get together in the office of a new attorney for Monica, an entertainment lawyer named Richard Hofstetter. As it turned out, I also knew him well from past negotiations.

I had also previously been in touch with Marcia Lewis. We had talked several times on the phone. I liked her, and she was not at all the way she was being described by the press. She had been much maligned as a flashy, spoiled Beverly Hills socialite and castigated for supposedly not stopping her daughter’s relationship with the president. By some accounts she had actually encouraged it. Mrs. Lewis had recently married a man I knew, R. Peter Straus, who owned a string of newspapers and radio stations in New York. Peter, a widower, was a distinguished man. I could not imagine that he would have married a woman of Marcia Lewis’s description. I telephoned Peter, and it was he who had put me in touch with his wife. On the phone she was soft-spoken and polite. The last thing she seemed to want was exposure. Although she could certainly have sold her own story to help offset both her own and her daughter’s legal bills, she was turning down all requests for interviews, including mine. Indeed, she never sold her story to anyone. In my conversations with Marcia she seemed concerned only with her daughter’s welfare.

When David Westin and I met with her, Marcia called Monica, who was in California, and the three of us talked by speaker phone. David and I said together that Monica could indeed make a lot of money right now. We did not underestimate that. But over and above the money was the matter of her damaged reputation and her future credibility. For the rest of her life, we said, her credibility should be her major concern. Somehow she would find the money to pay her legal bills.

I fully believed what we were saying. Of course I wanted to do the interview, but I was not so ambitious that I didn’t have a conscience.

It was at this meeting that David came up with a most important compromise. He reiterated that ABC could not pay Monica any money for the interview but that the network would agree to air it just once and only in the United States and Canada. If Monica then wanted to do an interview for money for the international market, she could do it right after ours. If she was paid for that interview, it would be none of our business. No one in Europe would have seen our interview, and this meant the interest overseas would be huge. No decision was made in Hofstetter’s office, but David and I left hopeful.

Monica and I continued to talk on the phone. (By this time Monica was no longer being represented by Judy Smith.) In one conversation Monica told me that her mother had tried repeatedly to get her away from President Clinton, but that from an early age she had been hard to control. As she said later in our interview, “I’m stubborn…. From the time I was two years old, one of my first phrases was, with hands on my hips, ‘You are not the boss of me.’ I’ve been that way ever since.” Monica still had that same determination. Despite all the people who had advised her, she was pretty much going to make her own decision.

That fall Monica accepted an invitation to come to my apartment for dinner. She had evidently met with the other journalists, and it seemed that I was the front-runner, but the question of credibility and no payment versus selling her story for big money still loomed ahead. The decision had not been made. Monica arrived wearing a long black skirt and dark glasses and brought me a very nice scarf she had knitted. When I had seen her knitting at her father’s house, she reminded me of Madame Defarge from Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
, who stitched the names of the people she thought should be executed during the French Revolution. “Are you knitting the names of people you want to destroy?” I asked her, but I don’t think she knew what I was talking about.

Monica was warm and funny, the kind of girl who gives you hugs. I introduced her to Icodel, and Monica hugged her, too. Whenever I talked with her after that, she always asked me about Icodel. At dinner I brought up the money issue in the most forceful way. “Look,” I said. “You are going to have to do a major interview. It will have to be truthful and probably painful to do, but you can come out as a woman who cares about the truth and has tried to be honest or you can be seen as the person many people want to believe you are—an opportunist greedy for fame and money. That is essentially your choice. I can give you the forum and the opportunity to present yourself with the greatest dignity.” That was it. I couldn’t make the case anymore. Whatever would happen would happen.

I didn’t hear from Monica for over a month. Then, in November, she called to say she would like to meet the people who might be working on her interview. I asked her to lunch at my apartment.

With me were Phyllis McGrady, the ABC News vice president of special projects, and producers Martin Clancy and Katie Thomson. Monica brought some of her knitting to show us. Each item had a cute label that said, “Made especially for you by Monica.” We joked that the label made her knitting worth a lot of money. I also admired an upholstery tote bag that she used to carry her yarn and needles, and she told us that she had made the bag herself, finding the vintage fabric and sewing it together. (Later she launched a small and ultimately unsuccessful business selling similar upholstery bags.)

I don’t like to spend too much time with subjects before an interview, as answers don’t seem fresh if the person has already told them to me. So at our meeting, whenever Monica began to discuss something that could be a part of our hoped-for interview, I tried to cut her off. But she was so anxious to speak freely that it was difficult to stop her. Besides, we were fascinated. She told us details about the infamous blue dress; up until then it had been hard for us to understand why she would keep a soiled dress. She said that she had lots of clothes, because of her fluctuating weight. After she gained some weight she didn’t like the way the Gap dress looked on her. To save money she usually didn’t pay to dry-clean her clothes until just before she was going to wear them. When she finally decided to wear the dress again, she showed it to Linda Tripp. Then she noticed the stain and told Linda (and I will never forget these words) she figured it was either from Bill Clinton or it was spinach dip. Spinach dip, for heaven’s sake! Had it been spinach dip, Clinton would never have been impeached. (If I were writing a different kind of book, this would be the place to put in a good recipe for spinach dip.)

I did ask Monica why she had to give so much detail of every sexual encounter in her testimony. She said people didn’t realize she had told not just Linda Tripp about the president but ten other people, including her mother and her aunt. The independent counsel had questioned all of them. If her testimony differed from theirs, she could be accused of lying, lose her immunity, and be prosecuted.

During lunch we discussed the kind of promotion we would do—we would not show Monica’s answers, only her face and our questions, and in our ads and promotion we would keep a sense of decorum.

When the lunch was over Monica finally, finally, at last said that she would do her first interview with ABC. That meant no money. To take the high road and turn down millions of dollars in order to prove her credibility was a great act of courage. I don’t think Monica ever got full credit for that. There were still hurdles, but now, almost a year after the story broke, after months of my cultivating contacts, consulting with representatives, meeting with members of her family, and slowly gaining her trust, Monica agreed to break her silence with me. I believed in my heart that I could do the best possible interview for her.

After the lunch I asked Martin Clancy to walk Monica home, and although they only strolled together a few blocks down Madison Avenue, Martin found himself described as Monica’s “mystery man.” The supermarket tabloid the
Star
had a large photo identifying him as “Monica’s Santa,” and exclaimed that they “went on a Manhattan shopping spree—and everything was bought on his credit card!” The article went on to say, “It seemed like a lovely romantic day out on the town together.”

We laughed at this, of course, but it meant we had to take every means to keep our future interview a secret until absolutely every issue was resolved.

Strangely enough Monica had been having trouble reaching an agreement with an American publisher for a book deal. A lot of publishers felt her story had already been told in
The Starr Report
. But on November 16, 1998, it was announced that Monica Lewinsky would be telling her story to Andrew Morton, the British author who in 1992 had collaborated with Princess Diana on a best-selling book about her unhappy marriage. The book deal was worth more than a million dollars to Monica, easing her financial burden.