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'Monica’s Story' by Andrew Morton

Monica’s book sheds little light

Saturday, March 06, 1999

By Bob Hoover, Book Editor, Post-Gazette

	Monica’s Story By Andrew Morton St. Martin’s Press $24.95

The anticipation to get yet another chance to make jokes about the pudgy intern and the Bubba president is what “Monica’s Story” presented.

It was, indeed, the only thing to look forward to in what otherwise would be wasted hours sloughing through the now familiar territory of this depressing little affair that tarred everyone it touched.

The creators of this project — Monica Lewinsky’s agent, the publisher and the writer, Andrew Morton — certainly worked hard to give us plenty of laugh material.

The feverish efforts to rush the book into print, the “secrecy” behind the project, the tie-in with the Barbara Walters interview and the desperate sincerity of Morton to convince us (and himself) that his subject was more that what she really is left them wide open for gags about greedy mercenaries and empty-headed bimbos.

The result is a major disappointment for the comedians and the historians. Oh, I wanted to write my own subtitle — “I Love You, Butt-head, I Really Do” — but the pathetic scenes of this young woman’s heartbreak and panic make it hard to laugh.

Up to the moment when FBI agents took Lewinsky away for interrogation, “Monica’s Story” was a clichéd farce about an unremarkable victim of our culture’s romantic fantasies who would not leave her dead love affair alone.

But, when Kenneth Starr entered the stage, portrayed like a mustache-twirling melodrama villain, this Cosmopolitan magazine picture turned dark and disturbing. What followed was an emotional and financial nightmare for her and her family as well as an enduring spot for Monica among history’s losers.

Her story might have been more compelling and dramatic in the hands of talented, sensitive people. Lewinsky could have told “her story” in her own words, prompted somehow to replay her affair with the understanding that hindsight can bring.

What, for example, makes “the Big Creep” tick? It’s hard to say. As relayed by Lewinsky through Morton, the president is a bland, occasional presence whose memories of his life sound straight out of a campaign biography.

Now and then, he would get irritated with his “Kiddo,” who didn’t seem to understand that the president of the United States had more to do than eat pizza with her.

Oh, the cigar was her idea.

As for Lewinsky, she is shown as intelligent, but ignorant; sexually naive, but an experienced performer; easily exploited, yet determined to make use of her relationships; and a prisoner of media publicity who willingly posed for Vanity Fair.

Only her treatment at the hands of Starr’s prosecutors elicits any sympathy for her and her parents — treatment that, if true, calls into question the motives of the independent counsel.

“Monica’s Story” is, like the woman herself, too full of contradictions for a writer of Morton’s limited talents to tell with any conviction. Take away her immature fling with Bill Clinton and she is, like many, an ordinary person with an unremarkable life.