Audition (96 page)

Then I got a call from Freddie DeMann, an entertainment executive who had previously managed the careers of Madonna and Michael Jackson. He was the father of one of Monica’s best friends from Beverly Hills. He asked if Monica did the interview with me, could the book come out in conjunction with the interview?

David Westin agreed that the book could come out right after my interview. We would help to promote it, and indeed, as it turned out, there were passages from it that I had to read during my interview. We had promised to help Monica where we could, and we did. We couldn’t pay her, but we wouldn’t stand in the way of her making money as long as it didn’t affect my interview.

The next month Monica agreed to do a paid interview for England’s Channel 4. She earned something like $600,000 for an interview with British broadcaster Jon Snow, which was then sold to stations around the world. Monica also was paid another half million dollars for a photo spread in
Hello!
magazine, a popular European publication. Not a bad payday, but millions less than she would have made had she sold her first television interview.

As soon as we had Monica’s agreement, we began work on the interview. I read the hundreds of pages of transcripts of those Linda Tripp tapes, but that was just the beginning. I also reread
The Starr Report
and skimmed through the supplemental evidence that had been released. Plus I read the grand jury testimony of the key players in the case and various speeches President Clinton had made. The volume of material seemed endless. I read practically all day and all night for weeks. Fortunately I had help from some of our best producers, not just Martin and Katie but Chris Vlasto, who helped break the Lewinsky story. We didn’t want the questions to sound too tawdry, and yet this was a story about sex, so we worked hard to maintain some kind of balance. Katie opened up one meeting by musing, “I’ve been in the White House many times and I don’t understand how someone could flash her underpants to the president.” The very first question we wrote was this: “You lifted the back of your jacket, and showed the president of the United States your thong underwear. Where did you get the nerve? I mean, who does that?”

An early pass contained more than two hundred questions. My hardworking assistant Monica Caulfield put each of them on my usual index cards. (Throughout the Lewinsky affair we had to refer to her as “the original Monica” to avoid confusion with our interview subject.) I then cut the questions down to the ones I felt were vital to ask. We were chugging right along when we hit a snag. More than a snag, we hit an iceberg. It turned out that our interview was not going to happen anytime soon. Unbeknownst to us Monica still had to gain permission from the independent counsel to speak to us, something that proved far more difficult than we had anticipated. Monica’s immunity agreement said that
“pending a final resolution of this matter,”
Monica could not speak to
“representatives of the news media”
without first obtaining the approval of the office of the independent counsel. She was free to collaborate on a book and accept all kinds of money from a nonnews show, no matter how sleazy—but she could not speak to ABC News without permission.

To do an interview with me could violate Monica’s immunity agreement, which meant that the independent counsel could still prosecute her. ABC then began to reach out to anyone they could in Ken Starr’s office. (By the way, Monica had never then or ever since met Ken Starr.) Weeks dragged on without approval. The independent counsel felt that a “final resolution” of the matter had not occurred since Congress had not yet decided the president’s fate.

David Westin was tremendously helpful in this matter and in all our negotiations. He considered enlisting the aid of famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to file a lawsuit to overturn the ban on Monica giving the interview. The independent counsel knew we meant business.

In December 1998 the House voted to impeach President Clinton on two articles: that he perjured himself before the grand jury and that he obstructed the administration of justice. He vowed not to resign. We had now written and rewritten our questions more than a dozen times, but the year ended with no Monica Lewinsky interview.

In January 1999 the Senate impeachment trial began, along with the promise from the independent counsel’s office that once that trial was over, they would no longer stand in the way of Monica doing an interview. Our new concern was that Monica had been subpoenaed to give testimony, which would be shown to the public. Though her physical image was very familiar, it was the first time the public heard her voice. Her answers were brief and we hoped they wouldn’t quell our audience’s appetite for our interview. They didn’t.

On February 12, in only the second impeachment vote in its history, the U.S. Senate acquitted Clinton of both articles of impeachment. Four days later the independent counsel sent Monica’s lawyers a letter granting her permission to give me an interview. They imposed three restrictions, only one of which affected us: Monica was forbidden to say anything about the conduct of the prosecutors or their investigation, including the terrible day she was detained in a hotel room and interrogated after she met Linda Tripp at the mall. But there was no such restriction placed on me. As I had already received a copy of Monica’s about-to-be-published book, I decided in my broadcast just to read the book’s description of that night.

We wanted to get the interview done quickly so it could air within the crucial “sweeps” period, when network ratings set advertising rates. ABC set the date, Wednesday, March 3. We made another decision. There were so many questions to ask and so much interest that we wanted two hours. The network, mindful of its second place in the ratings, happily handed over the airtime. All we had to do now was the interview.

On the morning of February 20, with great secrecy and security, we took Monica through the building garage and into
20/20
’s studio. She was twenty-two when she first met Bill Clinton; she was now twenty-five. She was nervous but looked very pretty. Her heavy dark hair was pulled off her face. Her lips glistened. She wore a simple black suit, and because she was afraid of looking heavy, we sat her in a chair with arms to cover part of her body. The interview lasted just over four and a half hours, and the resulting transcript ran to 150 pages. Here are some of the highlights.

On our opening question about how she had the nerve to show the president her thong, she said it was “a flirtation, a dance. One person does something and then you meet that person and raise the stakes.”

She described the president as “a very sensuous man who has a lot of sensuous feelings. He also has a very strong religious upbringing and struggles with his sensuality. He tries to hold himself back and then can’t anymore.”

She proclaimed that her relationship with Bill Clinton was not just about sex. “Everyone will probably find it hard to believe, but when I asked him did he want to get to know me as a person, he started to tear up and told me that he never wanted me to think that he didn’t. And that’s not what this relationship was about.”

When I asked her why she thought the president was attracted to her, she said, “He thought that I had a lot of energy and that I lit up a room and that he thought I was smart.”

She said that after the relationship progressed she told Clinton that she was in love with him. He responded, “That means a lot to me.” But when she asked if he loved her, he said no.

She had wanted to have intercourse with him but when she asked him to, he said, “When you get to be my age, you’ll understand that there are consequences for those kinds of things.” She then told me, “I got really upset because to me that completes a relationship, and now I would never know what it was like to be that intimate with him.”

Later when she was officially banned from the White House, weeks, sometimes months, would go by without her seeing him. The almost nightly telephone calls stopped coming. Clinton tried to break up with her, but she refused to walk away and continued to try to see him.

“Where was your self-respect?” I asked. “Where was your self-esteem?”

Her answer was very sad. “I don’t have feelings of self-worth that a woman should have,” she said. “And I think that’s been the center of a lot of my mistakes and a lot of my pain.”

She showed the most emotion when talking about the toll the investigation and all the media attention had taken on her family. She said that not only was she suicidal at certain points, her parents had also felt great despair. With tears filling her eyes, she lamented, “People have no idea what this has done…that behind the name ‘Monica Lewinsky,’ there’s a person, and there is a family, and there has been so much pain that has been caused by all this…. It was so destructive.”

As for the notorious dress, she said she put it in a closet at her mother’s apartment and her mother didn’t even know it was there. Then she said that even though Ken Starr’s people didn’t actually know she had the dress, she nevertheless turned it over to them. I asked why.

“Because I had to. Getting and keeping my immunity became very important to me. I had to tell the truth about absolutely everything, including the dress, for if they found it, I might be brought up on charges of perjury.

“This dress,” she continued, “is one of the most humiliating things that has ever happened to me. Every man that I have met since this thing has happened eventually says to me, ‘So what is the real story with the dress?’ I wish I had never had it.”

My final question to her was, “What will you tell your children when you have them?” She replied simply, “Mommy made a big mistake.”

On the evening of March 3, I had the producers of the show and a few friends to my apartment to watch the program. It was an inflammatory evening in more ways than one. I had made a fire, but the flue wasn’t open. The room began to fill with smoke and the fire department came. (I was very sad to learn three years later that two of those firemen died in the 9/11 attacks.)

As the show began I couldn’t help but wonder how many people around the country were watching. So many had said, “Oh, I’m not going to watch Monica Lewinsky, that’s beneath me.” I thought that a lot of them would be true to their word, but at one point I went over to the window and looked down at the street below. There wasn’t a car on the avenue. Nothing was moving.

Strangely, the biggest question we got after the interview aired was about the shiny lipstick Monica was wearing. ABC received hundreds of phone calls and e-mails from viewers asking its name. Turned out it was a color called Glaze from a new makeup line by the clothing store Club Monaco. The lipstick quickly sold out around the country.

It is now ten years since the Monica Lewinsky story broke. After her book and interviews, since she couldn’t escape it, Monica tried to capitalize on her fame and took some TV jobs. She became a spokesperson for the Jenny Craig diet and then hosted a reality dating program called
Mr. Personality
on Fox. Nobody wanted to give her a real job. She eventually decided to try to become a private person again and went back to school. In December 2006 she earned a graduate degree from the highly respected London School of Economics. Her thesis was titled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity.”

After Monica’s graduation, the
Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen wrote this about her:

It does not take a Freudian to appreciate why Lewinsky chose the topic she did. She is the victim of publicity and her life has been a trial—enough to floor almost anyone. She is a branded woman. Yet she did what so many women that age would do. She seduced, or so she thought, an older man. Here was her crime. She was a girl besotted. But now she is a woman with a master’s degree from a prestigious school. She is going to be 34. Where is the guy brave enough, strong enough, admirable enough to take her as his wife, to say to the world that he loves this woman even if she will always be an asterisk in American history? I hope there is such a guy out there. It would be nice. It would be fair.

The last time I spoke to Monica, I told her that I would be writing about her in this book. She was still trying very hard to get a job. Most of all she wants, as she has always wanted, to have a husband and a family. I agree with Richard Cohen. It would be nice. It would be fair.

The View

I
N
1997
T
HE
V
IEW
sneaked up on me. The last thing I was thinking about was daytime television. I knew that Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue, who were on the air during the day, were each very popular. I had even appeared on their programs, but I had little interest in television until early evening when the news came on. I was fully occupied doing
20/20
along with the
Barbara Walters Specials.
By this time I had been doing four
Specials
a year for twenty years with great success, and for most of those years, with my producer, Bill Geddie. My plate was full. I had no room for gravy.

Enter gravy. The 11:00 a.m. period on ABC, which was controlled by the network and not by syndicators, was floundering. A lot of pleasant people had attempted to do a show during that time period, but no program lasted for more than a year or two. Unlike the earlier-morning and late-afternoon programs, it was considered a very tough time slot. By 11:00 a.m., it was thought, most nonworking women had sent the kids off to school and had finished their housework. It was time to go out and do the marketing, the errands, and maybe pick up the little ones from nursery school. So, sort of in desperation, the daytime network executives, who had nothing to do with the news department executives for whom I worked, came to me and Bill Geddie and said, “Got any ideas for a daytime program?”

Well, now that they mentioned it, I
did
have a concept that occasionally drifted through my head, and when the program finally made it to air, here is what I actually said: “I’ve always wanted to do a show with women of different generations, backgrounds, and views.” These women, I imagined, could chat away on all sorts of subjects. Then we could add a celebrity interview or two, perhaps followed by an informative segment on health, fashion, or whatever we deemed of interest to women. It was a relatively simple concept. I had two inspirations. The first came from watching the ABC Sunday-morning news program
This Week with David Brinkley.
Near the end of each hour-long broadcast, Brinkley moderated a roundtable with three or four other journalists who commented on the latest events in the news. It was informative, free-flowing, and often very amusing. I thought it was the best part of the program.