Audition

by Barbara Walters

So here was my problem: how to meet this young woman and persuade her to talk to me.

  The key, as I saw it, was William Ginsburg, the lawyer Monica’s father had called in panic and despair. Ginsburg was a successful trial lawyer in Los Angeles whose specialty was medical malpractice. His field of work had led him to become a close friend of Monica’s father, a radiation oncologist. With his bow ties and a trial attorney’s gift for gab, Ginsburg took immediately to the press and was soon spending much of his time on camera helping to feed the media’s insatiable appetite for this story. He spent so much time in TV studios that the only way we were able initially to get to him was when my imaginative and aggressive producer, Katie Thomson, saw him speaking live on NBC and persuaded a security guard there to put Ginsburg on the phone as he was exiting the building. While everyone was trying to get to Ginsburg, Katie did. (Almost every correspondent has a booker-producer like Katie. They were, and still are, indispensable in tracking down and helping to line up big interviews.) We were then able to arrange one of the more unusual meetings of my career.

  That Saturday, Katie and I flew to Washington, D.C., to meet Ginsburg confidentially at a private place called the Cosmos Club. When we sat down at the bar, Ginsburg immediately confirmed that there was a relationship between Monica and the president. He explained the legal jeopardy that Monica was in, the independent counsel’s office having told Monica that she might serve more than twenty years in prison. He was horrified that Monica, a nice kid, he said, whom he had known since she was a baby, was in this position.

  Ginsburg then said he would like to speak to me more frankly than he felt comfortable doing in front of my producer. It turned out that he was a bit of a fan and said he enjoyed watching me on 20/20. It helped that ABC’s much-loved film critic, the late Joel Siegel, was a high school buddy of Ginsburg. Joel and I were friends and when asked, he had told Ginsburg that he could trust me. In any event he was prepared to talk to me candidly and totally off the record. No wonder. He said that Monica’s relationship with the president had “never been consummated,” that it wasn’t intercourse, and that I should draw my own conclusions.

  What he was telling me, he said, nobody knew. I pushed further, but that was all he would reveal. But it was more than just sexual. Clinton also gave her little gifts, like a hat pin, a marble figurine of a bear, and a special edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Among her gifts to him was a pottery frog. “What about the rumors of a stained dress?” I asked. He said he didn’t know of any such dress.

  “You cannot disclose anything I’ve told you,” Ginsburg warned me after our meeting and, as I had many other times in my career, I kept quiet. I would, of course, have loved to report what he had confided in me, but I had agreed to speak with him off the record and I had to keep my word. Though his revelations would have made headlines, I couldn’t afford to lose his trust. What I wanted was for him to lead me to Monica.

  So I kept Ginsburg’s confidence, despite all kinds of wild speculation in the press about the Lewinsky-Clinton relationship. Media reports began to appear, some quoting White House officials, questioning Monica’s character and credibility. She was, they said, a stalker, a liar, a desperate attention seeker. (Hillary Clinton, much later on, said she herself had believed those accusations.) Armchair psychologists said her parents’ divorce when she was fourteen and her problems with her weight made her an emotionally disturbed young woman.

  White House accusations or not, I believed Ginsburg—indeed, it would be hard to make up a story like that. When I was later able to share some of what he told me with my colleagues, our senior political correspondent, George Stephanopoulos, one of Bill Clinton’s former top aides, didn’t find it surprising that the president had talked to Monica at length at odd hours of the night. He said that Clinton had done the same with him, and as a night owl the president was happy to find people with whom he could hold forth into the wee hours. But George was stunned when I told him about Monica’s gift to him of a ceramic frog. He said that very few people knew of the president’s “thing for frogs,” and that made him very inclined to believe Monica did indeed have a close relationship with the president.

  While Monica and her family were still in hiding from the press, her lawyer was on TV more than I was. There was a Sunday when he appeared on the talk shows of all the networks, one right after the other. (I think it was a world record.) Countless articles and reports were appearing about Monica and her family, most of them unflattering. Ginsburg was trying to shoot them down. He was also trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get Monica immunity. Finally, in February, her father felt it was time to speak out. Thanks to Ginsburg, he decided to speak to me. It would be the first big “get” of the story. He didn’t want to do the interview at his home in Los Angeles, so we rented a suite in a relatively quiet hotel and managed to keep the interview under wraps until it was done.

  Bernard Lewinsky had been characterized as a fabulously wealthy Beverly Hills doctor but in fact was a hardworking cancer specialist whose practice wasn’t even in Beverly Hills. He was also a private man who was devastated by the prurient press coverage of his daughter. Like Monica he was outraged that the independent counsel had forced his ex-wife, Marcia Lewis, to testify to a grand jury, where she might possibly incriminate her daughter. Monica had been staying with her father in Los Angeles, and together, on February 11, they watched as cameras showed Monica’s mother being helped out of the courthouse after she collapsed under the stress of the questioning. In his interview with me, Dr. Lewinsky said, “What Ken Starr has brought upon her is unconscionable in my mind. To pit a mother against her daughter, to coerce her to talk, is reminiscent to me of the McCarthy era, of the inquisition, and you could even stretch it and say the Hitler era.”

  The interview aired on 20/20 on February 20, 1998, and Dr. Lewinsky’s comparison of the Starr inquiry with Hitler’s tactics attracted a lot of attention and some criticism. But many felt the interview finally put a human face to the name Lewinsky and helped people understand more about the pressure the family was under. It also gave me a leg up in trying to eventually get the interview with Monica. Her father was satisfied with our interview and now trusted me to be fair and accurate.

  Meanwhile Monica remained a shut-in, unable to talk with her friends or venture outside without fear of being descended on by hordes of media. When she did go out, she was often the subject of unflattering photos and cruel nicknames, based on her weight, such as “Tubby Temptress” and “Portly Pepperpot.” Anytime she stopped at a deli or ate at a restaurant, reports appeared of everything she supposedly consumed.

  As William Ginsburg was the only direct point of contact to Monica, journalists went all out to court him. I seemed to be ahead of the game, but I also played every card I could. Time magazine was about to throw a huge gala celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary. It was going to be attended by everyone from President Clinton to Tom Cruise. I was invited (along with every major journalist), and as I was allowed to bring a guest, I asked Ginsburg. He was delighted, but because Clinton was there, I found that my table was at the rear of the room while the dignitaries, stars, and well-known journalists, including most of my colleagues, were seated ringside. So I had a lousy time but I thought, “Oh well, it may pay off later.”

  But don’t think I was the only one romancing Ginsburg. The competition was getting more and more fierce. Once when I called Ginsburg he was having dinner with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes. Ginsburg told me of one of my colleagues who offered to introduce Monica’s father, a photography enthusiast, to famed photographer Richard Avedon. Ginsburg himself was receiving countless dinner invitations in addition to tickets to the theater and special events. He recognized what it was all about, and though he took it all with a grain of salt, he was flattered by the attention.

  In spite of my not enjoying the Time party, all was going well for me with Ginsburg. We were by now developing a quite friendly relationship. In April ’98 I found myself in the enviable p
osition of being the first and only reporter to have a private meeting with Monica. If I had reason to be in California, Ginsburg told me, he might arrange for me to “drop by” Dr. Lewinsky’s house. That was reason enough for me to go to California. Ginsburg brought me to the Lewinsky home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, ironically just blocks away from the site where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman had been murdered four years before. It was a fairly modest home in which Dr. Lewinsky lived with his second wife, Barbara, the walls decorated mainly with photographs he had taken.

  When Monica entered the room, you would have thought she had nothing pressing on her mind. She was smiling and cheerful. My first thought was that she was prettier than she appeared in photographs. She had beautiful skin, shiny black hair, and although she was somewhat heavy, she was far from obese. She was what my grandmother would have described as zaftig, which sort of means plump in a good way. Monica had been shopping and had bought some new hats. She happily tried them on for me, and they were very becoming. I was reminded of the beret photograph. Monica told me that her stepmother had taught her how to knit, and that had helped her pass the time while her legal fate was still in jeopardy. Before the knitting she had spent most of the time watching television and surfing the Internet for information about her case. This was the only time on my visit that we discussed the case. I didn’t want to say anything at this first meeting she might take offense at. I was impressed that she wasn’t whining or crying over what had happened to her. I remarked that I knew how difficult all this must be for her. She said that she had never been involved in any scandal before. “I was basically a good kid growing up,” she told me. “I didn’t smoke or take drugs. I had good grades and never shoplifted.” I told her: “Next time, shoplift.” She laughed, and I felt we had the beginning of a relationship. (Monica later told me that my offhand remark meant a great deal to her. She said it showed I had a sense of humor. “It is humor,” she said, “that got me through a lot of the pain. It is how I connect with people.”)

  But she was still a long way from being able to give an interview. As the independent counsel continued his investigation, she lived in constant fear of being arrested. Her father shared her fears. After six months with no immunity deal, and irritated by all the time Ginsburg was spending talking to the press, Dr. Lewinsky and Monica fired him. On June 2 they replaced him with two Washington insiders, Plato Cacheris and Jacob Stein.

  I liked Ginsberg personally, but that was that for my Monica-Ginsburg relationship. Onward.

  As it happened, I knew both of the new lawyers from two controversial and newsworthy interviews I had done with former clients—Cacheris had represented Fawn Hall, Lt. Col. Oliver North’s beautiful blond secretary who had smuggled potentially incriminating documents in the Iran-Contra case out of the office in her underwear, and Stein had worked for Senator Bob Packwood, who had faced accusations by twenty-nine women, all former employees or acquaintances, of sexual misconduct. Both clients had told me they were pleased with my interviews, considering them very fair. This, I hoped, would help.

  We called and wrote the new legal team, but by that time the Lewinskys had hired an experienced and respected spokeswoman, Judy Smith, to handle media inquiries. (This is the same Judy Smith I’ve already mentioned whose PR firm handled Saudi Arabia. We were together there for weeks, and she was very good at what she did.) I arranged a meeting with her to discuss Monica, but Judy was noncommittal and I began to worry about my prospects.

  Finally, that summer, Monica’s new lawyers were able to work out a deal for her to get “transactional” immunity, which meant that she would not be prosecuted for anything related to the case in exchange for cooperating fully with the independent counsel and testifying truthfully.

  By the end of July, Monica turned over the infamous stained blue Gap dress, which testing revealed did contain the president’s DNA. That August, with her immunity intact, she testified to a grand jury that she did have a sexual relationship with the president, even though she had denied it in her affidavit in the Paula Jones lawsuit. She was forced to disclose in detail every meeting and conversation with the president. Eleven days later, on August 17, Bill Clinton became the first sitting American president to testify to a federal grand jury about his own conduct. The testimony was given over closed-circuit television from the White House, but of course it leaked out. After months of denials he admitted to “inappropriate intimate contact” and “inappropriate sexual banter” with Monica Lewinsky. He denied, however, that he and Monica had sexual relations since, he said, they never had sexual intercourse. To Clinton, and later, it seemed, to Monica, only actual intercourse constituted “sexual relations.” The president also denied committing perjury, tampering with evidence, or asking others to lie under oath.

  In a four-minute address to the nation that night, he confessed, “I misled people, including even my wife. I regret that.” But, and this was important, he didn’t apologize to Monica or her family. Monica later told me in our interview that Clinton’s speech that night had made her feel “like a piece of trash,” someone who had just serviced him. After that address, cameras captured Clinton, his wife, daughter, and dog, Buddy, boarding the presidential helicopter to fly off for a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. The uncomfortable image was of Chelsea Clinton, walking in-between her parents, holding their hands.

  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.