Of course the Paris Hilton negotiations were long after my discussions with Monica, but the situation was similar—money versus credibility.
With this predicament, I turned to David Westin, the president of ABC News. David, himself a highly regarded attorney, had first come to ABC as its legal counsel. We discussed Monica’s need for money and the fact that her family, specifically her mother, Marcia Lewis, felt that her daughter should accept one of the big deals being offered so that Monica could free herself from debt. David suggested that we meet with Mrs. Lewis, and we arranged to get together in the office of a new attorney for Monica, an entertainment lawyer named Richard Hofstetter. As it turned out, I also knew him well from past negotiations.
I had also previously been in touch with Marcia Lewis. We had talked several times on the phone. I liked her, and she was not at all the way she was being described by the press. She had been much maligned as a flashy, spoiled Beverly Hills socialite and castigated for supposedly not stopping her daughter’s relationship with the president. By some accounts she had actually encouraged it. Mrs. Lewis had recently married a man I knew, R. Peter Straus, who owned a string of newspapers and radio stations in New York. Peter, a widower, was a distinguished man. I could not imagine that he would have married a woman of Marcia Lewis’s description. I telephoned Peter, and it was he who had put me in touch with his wife. On the phone she was soft-spoken and polite. The last thing she seemed to want was exposure. Although she could certainly have sold her own story to help offset both her own and her daughter’s legal bills, she was turning down all requests for interviews, including mine. Indeed, she never sold her story to anyone. In my conversations with Marcia she seemed concerned only with her daughter’s welfare.
When David Westin and I met with her, Marcia called Monica, who was in California, and the three of us talked by speaker phone. David and I said together that Monica could indeed make a lot of money right now. We did not underestimate that. But over and above the money was the matter of her damaged reputation and her future credibility. For the rest of her life, we said, her credibility should be her major concern. Somehow she would find the money to pay her legal bills.
I fully believed what we were saying. Of course I wanted to do the interview, but I was not so ambitious that I didn’t have a conscience.
It was at this meeting that David came up with a most important compromise. He reiterated that ABC could not pay Monica any money for the interview but that the network would agree to air it just once and only in the United States and Canada. If Monica then wanted to do an interview for money for the international market, she could do it right after ours. If she was paid for that interview, it would be none of our business. No one in Europe would have seen our interview, and this meant the interest overseas would be huge. No decision was made in Hofstetter’s office, but David and I left hopeful.
Monica and I continued to talk on the phone. (By this time Monica was no longer being represented by Judy Smith.) In one conversation Monica told me that her mother had tried repeatedly to get her away from President Clinton, but that from an early age she had been hard to control. As she said later in our interview, “I’m stubborn…. From the time I was two years old, one of my first phrases was, with hands on my hips, ‘You are not the boss of me.’ I’ve been that way ever since.” Monica still had that same determination. Despite all the people who had advised her, she was pretty much going to make her own decision.
That fall Monica accepted an invitation to come to my apartment for dinner. She had evidently met with the other journalists, and it seemed that I was the front-runner, but the question of credibility and no payment versus selling her story for big money still loomed ahead. The decision had not been made. Monica arrived wearing a long black skirt and dark glasses and brought me a very nice scarf she had knitted. When I had seen her knitting at her father’s house, she reminded me of Madame Defarge from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, who stitched the names of the people she thought should be executed during the French Revolution. “Are you knitting the names of people you want to destroy?” I asked her, but I don’t think she knew what I was talking about.
Monica was warm and funny, the kind of girl who gives you hugs. I introduced her to Icodel, and Monica hugged her, too. Whenever I talked with her after that, she always asked me about Icodel. At dinner I brought up the money issue in the most forceful way. “Look,” I said. “You are going to have to do a major interview. It will have to be truthful and probably painful to do, but you can come out as a woman who cares about the truth and has tried to be honest or you can be seen as the person many people want to believe you are—an opportunist greedy for fame and money. That is essentially your choice. I can give you the forum and the opportunity to present yourself with the greatest dignity.” That was it. I couldn’t make the case anymore. Whatever would happen would happen.
I didn’t hear from Monica for over a month. Then, in November, she called to say she would like to meet the people who might be working on her interview. I asked her to lunch at my apartment.
With me were Phyllis McGrady, the ABC News vice president of special projects, and producers Martin Clancy and Katie Thomson. Monica brought some of her knitting to show us. Each item had a cute label that said, “Made especially for you by Monica.” We joked that the label made her knitting worth a lot of money. I also admired an upholstery tote bag that she used to carry her yarn and needles, and she told us that she had made the bag herself, finding the vintage fabric and sewing it together. (Later she launched a small and ultimately unsuccessful business selling similar upholstery bags.)
I don’t like to spend too much time with subjects before an interview, as answers don’t seem fresh if the person has already told them to me. So at our meeting, whenever Monica began to discuss something that could be a part of our hoped-for interview, I tried to cut her off. But she was so anxious to speak freely that it was difficult to stop her. Besides, we were fascinated. She told us details about the infamous blue dress; up until then it had been hard for us to understand why she would keep a soiled dress. She said that she had lots of clothes, because of her fluctuating weight. After she gained some weight she didn’t like the way the Gap dress looked on her. To save money she usually didn’t pay to dry-clean her clothes until just before she was going to wear them. When she finally decided to wear the dress again, she showed it to Linda Tripp. Then she noticed the stain and told Linda (and I will never forget these words) she figured it was either from Bill Clinton or it was spinach dip. Spinach dip, for heaven’s sake! Had it been spinach dip, Clinton would never have been impeached. (If I were writing a different kind of book, this would be the place to put in a good recipe for spinach dip.)
I did ask Monica why she had to give so much detail of every sexual encounter in her testimony. She said people didn’t realize she had told not just Linda Tripp about the president but ten other people, including her mother and her aunt. The independent counsel had questioned all of them. If her testimony differed from theirs, she could be accused of lying, lose her immunity, and be prosecuted.
During lunch we discussed the kind of promotion we would do—we would not show Monica’s answers, only her face and our questions, and in our ads and promotion we would keep a sense of decorum.
When the lunch was over Monica finally, finally, at last said that she would do her first interview with ABC. That meant no money. To take the high road and turn down millions of dollars in order to prove her credibility was a great act of courage. I don’t think Monica ever got full credit for that. There were still hurdles, but now, almost a year after the story broke, after months of my cultivating contacts, consulting with representatives, meeting with members of her family, and slowly gaining her trust, Monica agreed to break her silence with me. I believed in my heart that I could do the best possible interview for her.
After the lunch I asked Martin Clancy to walk Monica home, and although they only strolled together a few blocks down M
adison Avenue, Martin found himself described as Monica’s “mystery man.” The supermarket tabloid the Star had a large photo identifying him as “Monica’s Santa,” and exclaimed that they “went on a Manhattan shopping spree—and everything was bought on his credit card!” The article went on to say, “It seemed like a lovely romantic day out on the town together.”
We laughed at this, of course, but it meant we had to take every means to keep our future interview a secret until absolutely every issue was resolved.
Strangely enough Monica had been having trouble reaching an agreement with an American publisher for a book deal. A lot of publishers felt her story had already been told in The Starr Report. But on November 16, 1998, it was announced that Monica Lewinsky would be telling her story to Andrew Morton, the British author who in 1992 had collaborated with Princess Diana on a best-selling book about her unhappy marriage. The book deal was worth more than a million dollars to Monica, easing her financial burden.
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 th
at 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.
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