Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  Though Monica saw almost every moment of the drama unfolding in her parents’ marriage, she didn’t realize that its final curtain was about to fall. Nor, for that matter, did Bernie.

  In September 1987 he was in his office, gently explaining to a woman patient that she was suffering from lung cancer, and that it might prove to be terminal. Suddenly his receptionist interrupted the consultation, telling him that there was someone to see him, and that it was urgent. As he walked out into the lobby a small man scurried up to him, shouted, “Divorce papers!” and threw a package at him—it hit him on the chest—before scuttling away.

  Bernie’s comment on the incident is as understated as it is literal. “It came like a bolt from the blue.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tremors at Home

  IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE a quiet and happy evening out, but it ended as the saddest day of Monica’s young life. On September 21, 1987, Marcia Lewinsky took Monica and Michael to their favorite restaurant, Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Over shakes and fries she told them that she and their father were divorcing. It was, Marcia thought, news that her children would welcome. She believed that what she saw as their jagged relationship with their father meant that they didn’t love him and so they would not be upset by his departure, but instead would see it as the end of their unhappy family life and the beginning of a new era, an idyll starring just the three of them. She had thought they would be pleased. She was badly mistaken.

  Michael burst into tears, and Monica ran to the rest room, where she was promptly sick. When, pale and shaken, she returned to their table, she vented her anger and shock upon her mother, who was stunned by the vehemence of her daughter’s tirade. As they were leaving, Marcia, stung by Monica’s criticism, took her to one side and said that the reason why she and her father were divorcing was Bernie’s infidelity with a nurse at his practice. Marcia recognizes now that if she had not been so upset, so thrown off balance, by her daughter’s reaction, she would never have spoken so plainly. But the damage was done.

  Numb with shock and disbelief, Monica and her brother came home to find their father waiting in the family den. As Monica sat with him, for the first time in her life she saw him cry, shedding tears of regret for a failed marriage, and for his children. “It was really sad,” she remembers. “It was shocking, it was shattering, a really painful moment and one of the saddest days of my life.”

  A few days later, on October I, Los Angeles was rocked by an earthquake which left six dead and a hundred injured. To Monica, it seemed as though nature itself was mirroring her life. “It was symbolic,” she says.

  Ever the romantic, Monica had cherished a fond hope that, though her parents were not getting along, and had not done so for some time, they might one day become the kind of idealized family she dreamed of. Indeed, she still has vivid dreams that her parents are still together, and that the pain of the past has become just a distant memory. “One of the hardest things for me was shattering this fantasy that I had of a family life,” she says, acknowledging that even now she has much to resolve about that trauma in her life, especially her relationship with her father.

  Under California law a couple must be legally separated for a year before a divorce can be finalized. So Bernie, after sleeping in Michael’s room for a couple of nights, moved out of the house and took an apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. As Monica and Michael struggled to adjust to his absence, the anxiety and tension at home inevitably unsettled them. “The divorce was very difficult for Michael and me. For many years, and even sometimes today, we have been in the middle of their disagreements. I often feel like I am taking sides. I look back on this period of my life and see anger, confusion, and disappointment,” says Monica. Not surprisingly, given the differences not only in their ages but in their characters, Michael’s memories of his parents’ marriage and the divorce differ somewhat from Monica’s. “In the beginning there were a lot of difficulties between my parents,” he remembers, “and I found myself in the middle as Monica tended to side with her mother. That made me even more kid in the middle.” “It was an emotionally complex and confusing time for Michael, as he spent the week with Mom and every other weekend with Dad, having to adjust quickly to their different personalities,” Monica adds. They were a family divided, and Michael, now a student at Carnegie Mellon College, admits that he found it difficult to accept the change, especially as Marcia and the children moved to a different apartment every year. At the same time, he sees the optimistic, rather than pessimistic, side of their life together, unlike his sister. While he sees his childhood as having been happy and relatively uneventful, Monica, for all her outwardly smiling and ebullient character, always broods on the darker side.

  Coinciding with the family breakup, Monica had started her first year at Beverly Hills High School—the setting for the long-running teenage soap drama Beverly Hills 90210, a zip code synonymous with the beautiful and the bland. Already nervous and apprehensive about starting at a school with a roll call of old alumni straight out of central casting, and notorious for the emphasis its pupils placed on status and glamour, Monica found her self-esteem plummeting. As her friend Lenore Reese, daughter of a US Army Engineers officer, observes, “Beverly Hills is a relentless place. It is very unkind to heavy people.”

  For Monica, those stresses, coupled with the nightmare of her parents’ divorce, proved almost unbearable. Michael remembers her as being often upset and sometimes in tears after the divorce, the sweet elder sister now morose and taciturn. It was not just the family’s trauma that depressed her, however, but also the elitist, snobbish atmosphere at Beverly Hills High. She skipped class and ignored her homework assignments, either going to the houses of friends who lived nearby or spending whole days at the movies. She ate for comfort, putting on more than fifty pounds in less than a year. As the weight piled on, her unhappiness with herself and her life increased. Her misery was complete when she got a “D” grade in English, a humiliating experience for a teenager long thought of as an intellectual high achiever.

  Once the divorce was finalized in 1988 and the family home, on Hillcrest Road, sold—at the time it was valued at $1.2 million—Marcia and the two children lived in a series of rented apartments in Beverly Hills, a further unsettling experience, particularly for Michael, who wanted to live in a house. “It was devastating for Michael,” recalls Monica. “He was very distressed when we moved out” after the divorce.

  Now that the children lived permanently with Marcia, it was perhaps inevitable that they should find themselves siding with her in the emotional battle between their estranged parents. Monica’s growing hostility towards her father was strengthened when she read the divorce papers which her mother had inadvertently left on the kitchen table. As she studied the documents, she was both confused and deeply shocked by the bitter words said about each other by two people whom she loved so dearly. For example, Marcia accused Bernie of having a violent temper and of belittling the children, and compounded these charges by making lavish financial claims against him. In her inventory she asked for $720 a month for tennis lessons for Monica and Michael—neither is athletic—as well as $720 to pay for therapy for the two children, anticipating the need for counseling during the divorce and after. What with claims of $20,000 a year for holidays, $100 a month for Monica’s hair and $2,400 a month for the family’s clothes and shoes, Marcia was asking for $25,000 a month in maintenance. Bernie countered by saying that his wife was a spendthrift who had talked him into leasing a new Mercedes for her and buying her a $3,000 fur coat only days before serving the divorce papers.

  Today, both parents independently agree that the divorce papers which became so embarrassingly public after the scandal about their daughter broke in 1998, were drafted by lawyers as nothing more than bargaining chips in the financial discussions. They did not reflect the reality of the Lewinskys’ lives, nor the fact that their divorce, though painful, was not as acrimonious as many believe. Nevertheless, th
e whole affair was a classic example of how not to handle a divorce. As Marcia admits, “It’s nothing to be proud of, and I wish I had known then what I know now about how much children suffer. At the time I thought kids were adaptable. I was very wrong.”

  The effect on Monica, especially after she had read the harsh sentiments in the divorce papers, was profound. Increasingly angry, as well as confused and saddened, she directed her fury at her father, blaming him for the breakdown of the marriage and refusing to see him on the weekends when he had custody of the children. She says, “I had this secret hostility towards my dad. He didn’t know that I knew he had had an affair and that I was angry with him about it. He wanted to see me a lot more but I didn’t want it. We didn’t really spend much time together. I was angry with him—very angry with him. At the time I was very supportive of my mother; she was the good guy and my dad was the bad guy. I see things differently now, though—there were faults on both sides.”

  Her animosity towards her father was, and remains, a source of sadness for him. Dr. Lewinsky remembers that at the time of the divorce he wrote two letters, one to each of his children, expressing his thoughts about his marriage, and his feelings toward and love for Monica and Michael. He has kept them, waiting for the day when his children will read what he had to say about their lives together. Although they know about them, they have yet to open them. Bernie himself takes up the tale: “After the divorce Michael came every other weekend and sometimes during the week, but not Monica. She was angry. I felt the way to deal with it was to let her work out her own feelings and hope she would come around and discuss the issues with me. But she elected not to.”

  Michael, unaware of his father’s infidelity, developed a very strong bond with him, whereas, angry, unhappy and hurt, Monica found solace in food. She explains her feelings thus: “One thing about food for me is that it’s very reliable. You always know what your favorite cookie is going to taste like. You always know it’s going to be good and it’s very easily obtainable. There’s a security about it.”

  When she skipped her ninth grade classes, she would also hang out in the Drama Department at Beverly Hills High. It was here that she discovered a source of renewal, throwing herself into costume-making, learning to design and sew costumes for the school shows. In her first year she won a third prize for an Elizabethan dress which she had designed and which was used in the school’s Shakespeare Festival. As to acting, in a showpiece department which could boast actors like Nicolas Cage and Richard Dreyfuss as graduates, competition for acting roles was of course fierce. As a freshman, Monica was not allowed to audition, so she was thrilled when in her sophomore year, she was chosen for a small role in the musical The Music Man. “That was a really terrific experience for me,” she recalls.

  Inevitably, Monica’s circle of schoolfriends—which included Michelle Glazov, Natalie Ungvari (who would later be forced to testify against her friend before the Grand Jury), Pamela Revel and Susie Morris—was drawn from those who took an active part in the work of the Drama Department. “I had a full life in drama,” recalls Monica. “It was like a family. People would hang out together in Room 181 for lunch, after school and the weekends were often spent in rehearsal—no matter what side of the footlights you were working. It was one of the places at Beverly where freshmen really intermingled with sophomores, juniors, and seniors.”

  But while she felt at home in the world of drama and make-believe, Monica “hated”—her word—the social side of Beverly Hills High. “A ‘normal’ High School girl was thin, a cheerleader, had lots of boyfriends and went to endless parties. That wasn’t me. Everybody looked great, everyone was very conscious of how they looked there and so being overweight was not acceptable. The pressure was horrid,” she says. It has been widely noted that two of her contemporaries were the now notorious Menendez brothers, Erik and Lyle, who in 1989 murdered their rich parents for their money.

  By now, Monica’s weight had become an overriding concern, blighting her attitude towards boys, school and herself. Her schoolfriend Michelle Glazov observed at the time, “I think often Monica was insecure in her physicality. She didn’t necessarily think she was as pretty as other girls, or as wanted by boys as other girls.” Nothing seemed to work, however, for as Monica entered her junior year at Beverly Hills High her weight continued to spiral upwards. At last her mother, seeing her daughter’s unhappiness and deepening depression, suggested a solution.

  The Rice House in North Carolina is a specialist eating-disorders institution where students are placed on a strict rice-only diet, aiming to lose thirty pounds in a month. If Monica enrolled for a few weeks, Marcia argued, and took extension courses from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), it would help her to recover both physically and academically. Much to Monica’s fury and dismay, her father disagreed with the plan, even though it was clear that she needed professional help and guidance to come to terms with an emotional burden that was souring her teenage years. She and her parents therefore went to see a therapist at UCLA, at Bernie’s insistence, who recommended that the troubled sixteen-year-old be admitted to an eating-disorder unit at the Rader Clinic in Culver City, Los Angeles.

  It was a turning point. She spent a month in the clinic, discussing her problems each day with professional therapists as well as attending a self-help group called “Overeaters Anonymous.” It was a stormy road to recovery as Monica, argumentative to the last, fought a daily battle of wills with her eating-disorders counselor, Lisa Ladin—although the latter’s insistence on setting limits and on strict discipline earned her patient’s lasting respect.

  During her stay at Rader, Monica explored her feelings about her parents and the divorce which had so deeply scarred her. In one essay, in which she touched on her innermost longings, she wrote that a witch had cast a spell on her father, and this explained why he had been so indifferent toward her. In her story the spell was broken so that now he was free to love her, and at last to show her he did. As painful as some of this therapy must have been, Monica emerged from her course not only much slimmer, but with a newfound determination to get on with her life. “I felt energized and elevated,” she says, although she continued to see a therapist for some time afterwards.

  An essential part of her rehabilitation was the decision in 1989 to transfer her away from the hothouse atmosphere of Beverly Hills High to a school where she would find it easier to fit in. Her mother chose Bel Air Prep, a much smaller, private school where the emphasis was on one-to-one tuition. Besides the academic advantages, the importance attached to looks and slimness, as well as to wealth and status, was not quite so pronounced as it had been at her previous school.

  In this atmosphere, Monica, then sixteen, flourished. Her English teacher, Everol Butterworth, rekindled her love of language, enthusing her with an interest in poetry. She read widely and avidly, finding the poetry of, among others, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and particularly T.S. Eliot—whose “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is her favorite poem—and others a source of inspiration for her own musings. “It was life-changing for me,” she says.

  In a compilation she made of her favorite poetry and poets, she interspersed their work with her own offerings. One of her poems in particular, which she called “The War of Emotions,” gives an insight into the turmoil in her adolescent soul.

  I crouch in a corner all by myself fighting the war of emotions,

  Battling against FEAR, ENVY, DEPRESSION, and REJECTION,

  I struggle.

  I am trying to survive but they tug and yank me.

  The more they pull, the weaker I become.

  I hope and pray for my survival.

  Poetry appealed to the eternal romantic in Monica’s character, itself a part of her endless search for a white knight who would gallop up on his charger and sweep her off her feet. She is a sentimental young woman who loves antiques, roses, and very feminine decorations, and admits, “I cry very easily.”

  She pu
t her expressive nature to good effect when she won a school talent show, singing “On My Own” from the hit musical Les Misérables. Indeed, her fine singing voice led one of her contemporaries to comment that she was the girl most likely to see her name in lights.

  In spite of the confusion in her life, Monica, always a strong-minded girl, was never slow to voice her opinions about matters she held dear. One incident highlights a quality that emerges time and again: her readiness to prove her loyalty. In May 1991, not long before her eighteenth birthday, she sent an emotional petition to the principal of the Bel Air school, urging him to reconsider his decision to expel (for brawling) a classmate who came from a deprived background. “I am begging you to have compassion in your decision and allow him to graduate so he can experience Life, not life on the streets,” she wrote, arguing that he had always been a good student and that she herself had learned much from him.