American Rhapsody (3 page)

They held traffic up now as the big Secret Service Suburbans came barreling through. For a moment, Bill Clinton's limousine stopped and he glanced at the row of cars waiting there. He saw a group of us watching him. He looked quickly away in the other direction. Those of us watching said not a word. Nobody waved.

[2]

Monica, Andy, and Handsome

“Why don't you just fuck your father,” Linda Tripp said to Monica, “and get it over with.”

S
he told her second-grade teacher she would be the president of the United States. She made it into the Oval Office, but . . .

Monica grew up in Beverly Hills, 90210. Her father was a doctor, a cancer specialist. Her mother wrote for a newspaper,
The Hollywood Reporter
, which chronicled the lives of movie stars. Her father called her his “little noodle.”

She got good grades, but she was physically clumsy. It took her a long weekend to begin to learn how to jump rope. She was fat. The other kids called her “Big Mac” and “Pig Mac.” She called her father “Dr. No.” He wouldn't let her get a Snoopy phone. He wouldn't buy her a Minnie Mouse dress at Disneyland. Dr. No wasn't all bad, though. He bought her a pink bike with a banana seat.

Her mother was her soul mate. She looked and talked like her mother. She reached puberty early. She hated being fat. The summer before she entered the eighth grade, her mother enrolled her in a fat camp in Santa Barbara. At fourteen, she met her first boyfriend, Adam Dave. She went to his baseball games; she spent hours on the phone with him; she let him touch her.

Her mother and father weren't getting along. She ate more and got fatter. She was hurt and upset that her parents were arguing most of the time; she'd grown up watching
The Brady Bunch
. Her mother filed for divorce. Her father was telling a woman patient that she was dying of lung cancer when his secretary interrupted to tell him there was a process server outside. Monica's mother told her that the reason she'd filed for divorce was that her father was having an affair with a nurse at the office.

She was often in tears. She spent whole days alone at the movies. She gained more than fifty pounds in her freshman year at Beverly Hills High. Her nicknames had followed her. “Big Mac!” The kids laughed. “Pig Mac!” While she was skipping her classes at Beverly Hills High, she was spending a lot of time in the drama department. She sewed costumes for the school plays. She got a tiny part in
The Music Man
. The drama department was her sanctuary. Often she'd eat lunch by herself there.

Her mother transferred her from Beverly Hills High to Bel Air Prep, where there was less emphasis on physical perfection. She fell in love with poetry, especially that of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. She wrote a poem that began:

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

Battling against
FEAR, ENVY, DEPRESSION,
and
REJECTION
,

I struggle.

Although no longer a student there, she still went back to the drama department at Beverly Hills High. She made a little money now sewing costumes. That's where she met Andy Bleiler, the school's new drama technician. He was twenty-five, eight years older, involved in a relationship with a divorcée eight years older than he. She knew he had a reputation as a lothario. He walked her back to her car one night after a play. He kissed her good night and he touched her breasts. Andy was good-looking and slim.

When she graduated from Bel Air Prep, she applied to Boston University. Dr. No said no. It was too expensive. She enrolled at Santa Monica College instead. She got a job at the Knot Shop, a place that sold neckties. She loved working with the ties, dazzled by the fabrics and colors. But she was putting weight on again.

Her mother sent her to a psychotherapist. Dr. Irene Kassorla was known as “the psychologist to the stars.” In 1980, Dr. Kassorla had written a book called
Nice Girls Do
. The book advised women to get in touch with their “magical push muscles.” Dr. Kassorla advised women to go to the bathroom, sit on the toilet, and begin to urinate. Then to stop in midstream. Then to hold it for a few seconds. Then to start urinating again. Stopping and starting this way, Dr. Kassorla said, would enable women to find their “magical push muscles.” Her book talked about “plunging into a passionate ride,” “turbulent, fleshy moments,” “sensual storms,” “romantic electricity.” “Your body swells with expectation,” Dr. Kassorla wrote, “your flesh is rosy with excitement and warmth . . . soon the hot juices will flow through you.”

As she was seeing Dr. Kassorla, Andy Bleiler, the drama technician at Beverly Hills High, now married to the divorcée Kate Nason, started hitting on her again. He told her she was sexy. He told her she was beautiful. He asked her to give her panties to him. They started spending afternoons together at local motels. She wouldn't have intercourse with him at first. She felt guilty he was married. But she went down on him. She felt she was in love with him.

She told Dr. Kassorla she was sleeping with Andy. Dr. Kassorla warned her about having an affair with a married man, but the author of
Nice Girls Do
didn't tell her to break it off. On the other hand, Dr. No said no. Her father told her to stop seeing Andy immediately. Her mother was furious. She thought Bleiler “a piece of garbage” for hitting on a woman so much younger.

When Andy's wife was four months pregnant, Monica told Andy she felt bad about what she was doing, and she ended the affair. Two weeks later, when he made another pass at her, she started having sex with him again. She was
s-o-o-o
in love with him. She got him a birthday cake shaped like an iguana. She made love to him in the lighting booth of the school auditorium. She sang “Happy Birthday” to him the way Marilyn had sung it to JFK.

Just before Andy's baby was born, Andy told her he was breaking up with
her
. He wanted to be a good father to the baby, he said. But weeks later, he started seeing her again, and she thought she understood now that this was the way married men behaved. They felt guilty; they wanted to stop, but they couldn't.

When she finished Santa Monica College, she opted to attend Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, because it felt like Bel Air Prep to her. She knew there wasn't a chance she could end the relationship with Andy in L.A. She didn't have the strength to say no. He was hot, good-looking, sexy. She felt herself to be none of those things.

She shared a house with two guys near campus. She went to flea markets to decorate her room with floral patterns (she loved roses) and embroidered pillows. “She was a slob,” a friend said, like most kids in college. She called her mother to ask how to clean the bathroom and always had her hair done and her legs waxed when her mother visited.

There was a Knot Shop in Portland, too, and she got a job there, working with the ties that she loved. She helped out at a meeting place for the mentally ill, the Phoenix Club, and tried to make matzo ball soup for the members, but the soup she made was inedible.

Her new friends noticed that she talked a lot about sex and a lot about her weight. Some described her as larger than life. Some said she was too loud. Most, though, liked her directness and sense of humor.

She went out with a few guys casually, but she badly missed Andy. So she called him in L.A., and, back home for Thanksgiving, she slept with him again. She slept with him again and again in L.A. during the winter and spring—when she discovered that he was cheating not only on his wife but on her, too.

In late spring, Andy called to tell her that he, his wife, Kate, and their baby boy were moving to . . . Portland. She was excited and distressed. She felt she still loved him, but she knew that if he came up to Portland, she wouldn't be able to break it off.

Andy came up in June, but he came up alone. He told her he'd have to find a place to work and a place for his family to live before they could join him. He told her he was in love with her. He said she was sexy and beautiful. He stayed in Portland without his family the entire summer. She and Andy were together all the time, intimate every day.

When Kate and the baby came to Portland in the fall, Andy told her, once again, that he felt so guilty, they had to stop being intimate with each other. She tried, but she couldn't do it. When she met Kate, she liked her. She and Kate became close friends. She felt that her feeling for Kate was partly the result of how much she loved Kate's husband. She started baby-sitting for Kate and buying clothes both for the baby and Kate's older daughter. And she slept with Andy at her apartment.

When Andy kept flying to L.A. on “business,” she became suspicious. She made some calls to friends in L.A. and they told her Andy was sleeping with a teenager at Beverly Hills High. She got the teenager's number and called her. The teenager was angry that Andy wasn't seeing her enough. The girl felt abused and said she was thinking about calling Andy's wife and telling her everything.

Monica confronted Andy and told him the teenager was thinking about calling his wife. Andy cried like a baby and said he was going to kill himself. He begged for her forgiveness and begged her to help him. She called the teenager back and convinced her not to call Andy's wife. In return, Andy agreed that he wouldn't just sneak away from Kate for a few hours to have sex with her. He'd take her out for a drink or dinner and treat her like a woman he loved. She still kept baby-sitting for Kate. And, to get back at Andy, she slept with Andy's younger brother, Chris. Andy had said Chris would never like her because he “only liked tall and willowy women.” Chris liked her. She made sure Chris liked her.

She schemed with Andy to provide excuses to Kate so he could get out of the house to see her. Whenever Kate left the house, Andy told her that David Bliss, shop foreman of the Lewis and Clark theater department, had called to offer him a few hours or a full day's work. Kate became suspicious of these calls coming exactly when she wasn't there. Andy was panicked about Kate's suspicions and came running to see Monica at her apartment. She knew what to do. She went down to the theater department and stole a piece of stationery. She wrote a letter to Andy, offering him work, and forged David Bliss's signature at the bottom.

While she was seeing Andy, she was also a teaching assistant in a course called Psychology of Sex. She was the group leader in a “sex lab.” When the others were shy about discussing their intimate lives, she charged boldly ahead, talking honestly about her weight problem and its effect on her sexuality. At the same time, she and a girlfriend paid forty dollars to hear a lecture entitled “How to Find a Mate.”

The day after she graduated, she accompanied two friends who were going to do a bungee jump. At the last moment, without even giving it a thought, she jumped as well.

Her father encouraged her to think about a career in the public defender's office in Portland. Her mother, who knew about her continuing relationship with Andy Bleiler, had a better idea, an idea that would get her out of town, away from Andy.

Her mother had a friend named Walter Kaye, a friend of Hillary Clinton's, a big Democratic contributor, whose grandson had been a White House intern. It would, her mother said, only be a six-week summer job, unpaid, and she'd be one of two hundred interns, but it sounded like fun, didn't it? What a thing to have on a résumé!

Her mother was already living in Washington, to be near her sister, Monica's aunt Debra. Monica could move in with her mother at the Watergate and have Bob and Elizabeth Dole for neighbors. Monica told her mother that it
really
did sound like fun. And her mother said she'd call her friend Walter Kaye, who perhaps would call his friend Hillary Clinton.

.  .  .  

She made out an application and . . . she was accepted! She would be working at the White House! She spent one final night before she left Portland with Andy Bleiler. She knew she still loved him.

She had a couple weeks before her job at the White House began, and she and her mother spent it at her aunt Debra's big, sprawling house in Virginia. Her Aunt Debra also had a small in-town apartment at the Watergate, so Monica was seeing a lot of her. But she couldn't get Andy out of her mind. She called him and then decided, after only two weeks away from Portland, to fly back to see him on the Fourth of July. He was only able to sneak away from Kate and the baby for a few hours, but they enjoyed the little time they had together.

On July 10, 1995, in room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building, she was given her White House assignment. She'd deliver sorted mail from the Old Executive Office Building to the West Wing, where the Oval Office was located. The first time she passed the Oval Office's mahogany door (a Secret Service agent standing guard), her pulse raced. She called Andy and breathlessly told him about what she'd felt as she'd passed the mahogany door.

The women at the White House, she soon discovered, were in awe of the forty-second president of the United States—not just as the president but as Bill Clinton, the horndog. She knew his reputation with women, but here she heard the gossip about specific women working at the White House: Marsha Scott, an old Arkansas girlfriend, an administrative assistant, who reportedly had spent the night with Bill Clinton when Vince Foster killed himself; Cathy Cornelius, young and stunning, Cybill Shepherd–like, who accompanied him on many of his trips abroad; Debbie Schiff, former stewardess on his campaign plane, now a White House secretary. She didn't get it. From what she'd seen on TV, Bill Clinton had a big red nose. His hair was gray and lusterless. He wore geeky sunglasses. He was old.

Sometime in mid-July, only a week or so after she'd started her internship, Walter Kaye invited her mother and her to watch an arrival ceremony for the president of South Korea on the White House lawn. It was a hot day. She was sweating. She wore a flimsy sundress and a straw sombrero-type hat. It was so hot, she was worried about fainting. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she heard over a loudspeaker, “the President of the United States, accompanied by the First Lady.” She heard military music from the Marine Corps Band. She saw him. Her heart skipped a beat. She felt short of breath. Butterflies circled inside her. She only saw him from far away, but it was enough. He was
s-o-o-o
handsome.