Although, some people have portrayed Marcia as a flighty socialite, perhaps because under her pen name “Marcia Lewis” she wrote a monthly column for the Hollywood Reporter Magazine, in reality she was a homebody, happy to devote her time and energies to her children. Which was just as well because besides Michael’s arrival, there was another significant change for Monica: at the age of six, she first went to school. The John Thomas Dye School in Bel Air is a well-established private school with a daunting academic and social reputation. With its immaculate buildings and grounds, high-caliber teaching staff and a roll-call of former students who have reached the political and economic summits of the country, it is a quintessential example of WASP culture. Its alumni include political friends of former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, the son of Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, and also a number of California congressmen and senators.
For a time, this bright, lively Jewish girl fit in well. She excelled at mathematics, her written work regularly earned top grades, and her love of poetry was recognized early on. The fact that both her parents read to her a lot as a child and encouraged her own reading was a significant factor in her early intellectual growth. In the hothouse atmosphere of John Thomas Dye it was perhaps no surprise that her stated ambition was to become President of the United States. She had other, less daunting, dreams, however. When she was seven she wrote that she wanted “to be a teacher and help other people to learn . . I would be nice but strict,” she stated.
Nancy Krasne, a family friend who was in the same school car pool as the Lewinskys, and who has known them for twenty years, remembers Monica as a “very special girl” among a high-powered group. “I always thought that she was the one who was going to be successful,” Nancy says. “Monica was very bright, bordering on the brilliant, and very expressive. She was hard-working, conscientious, very much the little adult in some ways, but in others, emotionally very immature. The problem was that she didn’t fit the Beverly Hills mold, even though she was so eager to please, to join in with the others.” As an example of this driving wish not to be set apart from her fellows or, worse, excluded by them, Monica once spent an entire weekend at home learning how to jump rope so that she could join in with the other girls on schooldays. For a girl who confesses that she is hopeless at sports, nothing could better demonstrate her overwhelming desire to be one of the crowd. She certainly made the grade academically, regularly winning commendations for her work, and invariably bringing home excellent report cards. She remembers it as “a really terrific school … very challenging and mind-opening.”
But there were drawbacks. The fact that she lived some way from the school in Bel Air meant that it was difficult for her schoolfriends to drop by to play—at that time Barbie dolls and Olivia Newton-John, star of the film musical Grease, were all the rage. When she was nine and entering third grade, there were incidents at school, if not of physical bullying, at least of the casual cattiness and cliquishness of children, particularly girls, which often remain as a canker in the psyche well into adult life. Nor was her cause helped by the fact that she was beginning to get a little overweight. She was dubbed “Big Mac” by one of her classmates, Matthew Spaulding, a gibe made all the more painful because at the time she was harboring a schoolgirl crush on him.
Monica also vividly remembers the time when Tori Spelling, the daughter of the Hollywood film mogul Aaron Spelling, held a birthday party at her parents’ palatial home. Pop superstar Michael Jackson and the world’s smallest pony were expected to be two of the competing attractions at this most glittering of occasions, and everyone in Tori’s class was invited—except Monica. Not knowing if the omission was a casual oversight or a deliberate snub, Marcia rang the Spellings’ social secretary to check. As a result, an invitation was duly sent out, even though Monica had not been on the original guest list.
Marcia, not surprisingly, concealed this fact from her daughter, and Monica only discovered that she had not been invited as a matter of course when two classmates taunted her about the late invitation. Monica had no idea why Tori should choose to exclude her, especially as they were in Brownies together. However, once she realized the truth of the situation she refused, as a matter of principle, to attend. It was a tough decision for a girl so eager to please and so desperate to belong, but it was also an early sign of one of Monica’s most formidable characteristics, her unshakable resolve. She says of the incident, “My mom always taught me to do unto others as you would want done to you. So you should invite everyone to your birthday parties, you should give everyone in your class a Valentine’s card. You shouldn’t exclude people. Not only is it bad manners, it is very hurtful.”
That emphasis on good manners and proper form, something which in part reflected the European influences of her parents, was noticed by those who visited her Beverly Hills home. A friend from her schooldays, Michelle Glazov, recalls that Monica was expected to behave with “almost Victorian decorum” at home, in marked contrast to most of their contemporaries. Moreover, while Bernie and Marcia were not overtly religious, they followed Jewish cultural traditions, sending Monica to Hebrew school at the strict Sinai Temple—a source of resentment in their daughter, who wanted to attend a less orthodox synagogue with her schoolfriends.
At the same time, the high sense of entitlement that comes with living in Beverly Hills led to frequent family clashes, particularly between Monica and her father. For example, when her best friend got her own phone line and Snoopy telephone, Monica asked if she could have the same, and there were tears and tantrums when her father said no. There were similar quarrels when he wouldn’t buy her a Minnie Mouse dress during a visit to Disneyland. “I guess growing up it seemed that Mom was the yes one and Dad was the no one,” says Monica, “which is not uncommon in a lot of families.” Bernie agrees: “Oh yes, I was called ‘Dr. No’ by my kids, all that kind of stuff.”
The focus on materialism, on owning the latest designer clothes and gadgets, was an inevitable corollary of growing up in Beverly Hills, a place where surface and show form the fabric of social life, where to be willowy, blonde and driving the latest BMW is for many people the standard. This obsession with status and money became too much for Monica’s beloved Aunt Debra, who decided to move east with her husband and son Alex for a less status-conscious life. “It’s a great place for people in their twenties but not good to raise children,” she says. “Monica never really fit in. If she had been very thin and in with the fast crowd she would have been OK. But it really wasn’t her.”
With hindsight, Marcia too regrets the years spent in Beverly Hills, recognizing that her children, particularly Monica, were not suited to the lifestyle. “I myself was never happy in LA. I felt that it wasn’t the right place, and I’m sure that was communicated—perhaps unwittingly—to my children.”
Monica is more pragmatic, recognizing that if children are raised in a certain environment, their parents have to accept the consequences of that upbringing. She accepts, too, that there is a streak of acquisitiveness in her character that she might not have had if she had been raised in a different city, a different culture. “I don’t think I’m a spoiled brat. I don’t fit into the Beverly Hills stereotype—in fact that was one of my problems growing up there. However, I do have a certain level of expectation about what I deserve, both from the way in which I was brought up, and from the environment in which I was brought up.”
Her high sense of expectation gave rise to a classic confrontation between father and daughter when she asked for a Bat-mitzvah to celebrate her coming-of-age. It is customary in Beverly Hills for Jewish children to have very elaborate Bar/Bat-mitzvah parties at the age of thirteen, usually held in a ballroom or the reception room of the temple with friends and parents’ friends: “Like a wedding for one,” recalls Monica. Sometimes the reception would be themed with a main attraction, such as a magician. Wanting to be like all the other kids, Monica anticipated a big celebration. Instead, Bernie offered to spend $
500 on a party in the backyard of the family home. A full-scale party was not beyond his means but he believed that that was quite sufficient to celebrate an event that was supposed to be religious. Monica, knowing well how this would fail to impress her peers, let it be known in no uncertain terms that it most certainly was not sufficient, nor was it what she wanted. When her mother took her side, the result was a hurtful family argument, in which, inevitably, things were said that would have been much better left unsaid. In the end she did have a birthday party, complete with a DJ and a hotdog stand, and admits that “it was fun.”
Yet the relationship between Monica and her father was by no means characterized by an endless locking of horns. Monica recalls spending hours watching him work at his hobby—woodworking—although she was never allowed to help. She remembers, too, with much pleasure the day when he gave her her first bike—a pink contraption with a banana seat—and then took her to the movie E.T., after which he cooked a special picnic supper of barbecue chicken.
Certainly Bernie seemed atypical of the disengaged Beverly Hills professional concerned more with with his career than with his children. He often woke Monica late at night or at dawn to watch important events on TV like the first launch of the space shuttle or the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. At other times they would sit out in the warm California night and he would point out and identify for her the stars and planets and constellations. When she was eleven she wrote him a touching Father’s Day tribute: “My dad is the best in the West. He is very kind and considerate twenty-four hours of the day. Maybe some fathers don’t deserve to be treated specially but my dad really does deserve it.”
Monica fondly recalls wearing a pink T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Daddy’s Little Girl,” and says, “I always wanted to be Daddy’s little girl.” She also says, though, that she was always trying to gain his approval but never really felt that she won it, taking very much to heart her father’s slightest criticism or adverse comment. In his own quiet fashion Bernie did and does love her dearly, but in Monica’s eyes he was never quite as expressive or demonstrative as she would have wished.
Thus it is not difficult to see how this emotionally needy child—a child, moreover, who had such high expectations of those she cared for—often felt disappointed or rejected when her desires were not met. “I always remember getting into fights with Dad, usually at mealtimes, and I would usually leave the table crying,” she remembers. While her childhood memories are of her father coming home from work tired and irascible, she now concedes that the draining emotional strains of a demanding job, where every day he was dealing with seriously ill patients, contributed to their increasingly fractious relationship. “Monica so wanted to be Daddy’s little girl,” says Marcia. “She had these very high expectations and her father was not like that. It’s not that he’s a bad man; it’s just that he’s not the sort to say: ‘Come and sit on my knee, you pretty little girl.’ It was not his way.”
While her relationship with her father was, and continues to be, tricky, Monica forged a close and affectionate bond with her mother, who almost invariably sided with her in family quarrels. “My mom and I are so similar,” she says. “We talk very similarly and have the same intonations.” Yet, while Monica seemed to be the dominant partner in the relationship, beneath the bluster and argument she needed her mother much more than she cared to admit, even to herself. Aunt Debra comments, “I think it is a typical mother-daughter relationship, very loving but with conflicts of opinion.”
Monica wrote of her deep emotional bond with her mother in a school essay about the Hungarian-born Jewish poet Hannah Senesh, a World War Two agent of British Intelligence; in 1944 she was captured in Hungary by the Nazis, tortured and shot. The young Monica got the story a bit muddled after seeing the 1988 movie Hanna’s War, and thought the Nazis had told Senesh that her mother would be killed unless she, Hannah, revealed details of the British spy network. In a telling passage in her essay, Monica wrote: “I wish that I had the inner conviction that Hannah Senesh had. I am not nearly half as brave as she was. However, what I have in common with Hannah is that I too share a very close relationship with my mother. Hannah and her mother had a bond that could not be broken by anything and that is the same with me.” As a result of seeing the film she may have got parts of the story wrong—when Senesh was arrested, her mother was in fact living not in Hungary but in Palestine—but the love and loyalty illustrated in her version of it affected her deeply. It became even more important to her on the day her “friend” Linda Tripp betrayed her.
Even so, although the deep emotional dynamics of the interdependence between herself, her mother and her father contain the key to understanding Monica’s personality, it would be a mistake to seat all her actions in those relationships. The craving to be respected and liked by her peers and, linked to that, her anxiety about her weight should not be overlooked as influences upon her character and behavior.
Whatever her emotional problems, there was no questioning her intellectual ability. By the time she left the elementary school in Beverly Hills, it had become clear that she had a photographic memory, particularly for numbers, while her logical mind—a quality she ascribes to her father’s side of the family—and eloquence made her a formidable student. Nancy Krasne believes that “she was definitely Ivy League material.”
When, aged ten, Monica transferred from John Thomas Dye to Hawthorne Elementary School, also in Beverly Hills, she soon proved her academic gifts. But fourth and fifth grade were to be difficult for Monica. Whilst she made friends she became increasingly hampered by her feelings of inadequacy and, like many teenage girls, these feelings became focused on her weight. In a world where to be thin corresponds to a high sense of personal worth and status, Monica’s unathletic build, coupled with the fact that she reached puberty earlier than her contemporaries, disturbed her. She desperately wanted to belong, yet her chubby figure made her feel like an outsider, contributing to her emotional burden.
However, it was around this time that Monica started to become interested in boys. Mark Streams, a classmate, gave her a chocolate-covered, heart-shaped lollipop and she considered him to be her “boyfriend.”
By sixth grade Monica had become popular with her schoolfellow and a growing spurt the summer before had resulted in a slimmed-down figure. However, the weight problems were to continue and Monica was thrilled, when, the summer before eighth grade, her mother allowed her to attend a “fat camp” in Santa Barbara, a summer school for overweight youngsters which offers a regime of healthy diet and regular exercise. “I wouldn’t say it was fun,” recalls Monica, “but of course I was dying to go. My mom really wanted me to go too because she had had her own battles with her weight in her life and so could empathize. Living in LA it was really important how you looked. It was upsetting to me because I didn’t want to be fat.” She arrived at Hawthorne for the fall term feeling leaner, fitter and much more confident. “It was the start of a great year for me,” she recalls.
That year, Monica was voted Vice-President of her class by her schoolfellows. It was then that the first President came into her life. It was not Bill Clinton, of course, but the President of her class, Danny Shabani. As President and Vice-President, he and Monica, then thirteen, spent a lot of time together, organizing events and chatting regularly on the telephone. They became close friends. “He was smart, cute and had a tender side to him, not something you saw all the time,” says Monica. Although she had had a crush on him the year before, Monica valued her friendship with Danny and the only time they came close to a date was in the summer of her fourteenth birthday when he invited her to the movies. When he brought her home, she found that, ever the gentleman, he had secretly arranged for the delivery of a bouquet of a dozen red roses, her favorite flowers. “It was,” she says, “one of the most romantic things anyone has ever done for me. It was so sweet.” The only thing which spoiled the moment was the fact that Michael, who idolized Danny, hung around the couple
spoiling Monica’s hopes of a kiss.
While her relationship with Danny remained platonic, Monica began dating a teenager who became her first real boyfriend, Adam Dave. “Adam was very, very smart. I’ve always been attracted to intelligent men,” she says. At the same time, to begin with, the relationship was fun. When he played baseball Monica was there to cheer him on, and she would spend hours in the evenings chatting to him on the telephone. Some nights she would even hide in her clothes closet whispering down the line because it was past the time she was supposed to be using the phone. However, their teenage romance went on to anticipate the pattern of all her relationships, an emotional roller coaster characterized by angry partings followed in turn by affectionate longing.
This behavior was to characterize her relationships with the two married men in her life. Monica explains it thus: “I am a very emotional and romantic person, but also pragmatic and logical. The combination of those elements means that I want to be in love and enjoy the perfect relationship, yet I only believe the relationship is ‘real’ if a man gets mad at me when I do something wrong. If a man is never upset with me or something I did, then he is not being honest about his feelings or honest with me—and so I feel that he is being a phony. I also feel this way about men who always agree with me.” So she had a fight with Adam Dave because—as illogical as it may seem—he refused to argue with her and thus confirm to her that their romance was real and therefore “true.” The result was that she ended their relationship, and then spent months pining for Adam when he refused to kiss and make up. It was another early sign that, though Monica knew her own mind, she had little control over her heart.
As Monica was grappling with the trials and tribulations of adolescence, her parents were trying to come to terms with the disintegration of their marriage. For many years their friends had seen the divide both in their characters and in their aspirations. “They should never have got married in the first place, they just weren’t suited to each other,” observes one family friend. Monica, who admits she literally internalized the family stresses and strains by eating, says of that time: “My family life was not pleasant. My father worked a lot and the stress of his job, dealing with sick and dying people, was toll taking. It did not help his mood to come home to a relationship that was not right for either of my parents. We always ate dinner together but they were often unpleasant. My parents fought, but not necessarily in front of us. They weren’t very affectionate or loving towards each other. We did things, the four of us, but we weren’t the quintessential family. I think that was hard for me because I really wanted that. I love the idea of a family Thanksgiving and family Christmas. I am very family-oriented, I grew up watching the Brady Bunch TV show and had ideals about how I wanted my family to be. It’s one of the things I would most like to change about myself—I have a tendency to write the script and to decide in my own mind how other people should act and what they should say and feel. Then I get disappointed when inevitably they don’t follow the script because it is an impossible scenario.”
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