Issue #07/62, April 8 - 21, 1999 
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| Negro Comix |
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By John Dolan
| Monica's Story by Andrew Morton St. Martin's Press New York 1999 $24.95 |
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As we wait for the US to invade Kosovo after blasting most of Serbia from the air, it's worth remembering that the person responsible for assisting the Pentagon's main spokesman on Bosnia in 1997 was Monica Lewinsky--a nice girl, but...well, we learn from Morton's bio that Monica had to take the GRE three times. And that she couldn't make it into the University of California system, attending a two-year institution instead. And of course, during the time she was accomplishing her "outstanding achievement" in analysing the Balkan situation, Monica was also a bit distracted by that, uh, personal-relationship deal. You know. With the President.
I think I understand American policy in the Balkans much better now.
Of course Morton's bio isn't interested in talking about Monica's involvement in US policy toward the Balkans; like her, he's totally obsessed by her affair with "Handsome," her imaginative term of endearment for Clinton. Morton is a British journalist who made a hell of a lot of money from his Princess Dieography, Diana: Her True Story. In that book (which I haven't read), Morton apparently did a skilful job of depicting Di not as the adulterous brat tabloid readers had loved to hate, but as a sweet girl victimised by an alliance of mean older women (like the Queen) and cruel men (Big Ears, aka Prince Charles). Well, what he did for Di in that book he does for Monica in this'un. Lays it on pretty thick, too. In Morton's simple, formulaic narrative, Monica is the good girl who falls for the cynical older man--that'd be Bill, the President-guy--and then gets betrayed by her "treacherous" older-woman friend Linda Tripp; and from then on, has a wonderful masochistic time as the center of crazed, ambivalent media attention. Just like Di.
One difference: Di was thin. Maybe she had to go to the toilet and heave after every meal to manage it, but Di stayed thin and left a beautiful corpse. By contrast, Monica, as she herself says over and over, is...not thin. Fat is an overwhelming obsession in Morton's book, and apparently in Monica's life. But then that makes sense; Monica's a California girl. Southern California, worse still. Beverly Hills--worst of all. Went to Beverly Hills High. As a fat girl. No easy life. Maybe not up there in terms of raw suffering with being an East Timorese peasant, but nonetheless, it's tough being a fat girl in Beverly Hills. A thousand small cruelties befall our Monica before she even gets through high school. For example, Morton tells in terrible detail how the pubescent Monica was snubbed by Tori Spelling:
Monica...vividly remembers the time when Tori 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.
How dare that fish-faced Tori pick on Monica! Monica may not be able to walk through a bead curtain without making it clatter, but at least she doesn't look like an albino halibut! Everybody knows that if her Dad wasn't a big producer Tori'd still be modelling for Gorton's fish sticks, the snotty little bitch!
You know what else worries me? Michael Jackson and that pony. What's this about "competing attractions"? What is Morton implying with that "attractions" stuff? I hope nobody left the pony alone with Michael. What could the world's smallest pony do against the King of Pop? And a single experience like that can scar a pony for life--specially a really small pony like that.
Of such tiny tragedies Morton weaves his simple talk of a nice chubby girl who goes lookin' fur luv in all the wrong places. Like the White House. And you do end up kind of liking Monica. I did, anyway. She seemed very familiar: a California girl who started life with two big disadvantages: she was fat and feminine. You can't really afford to be either of those things in California, and all the girls I knew who were both...well, they found some solace in drama class, but they had a pretty miserable time every other hour of the day. California forgives murder easily, and flat-out worships some other crimes, like fraud; but it will not forgive the fat, nor those who fail to look out for themselves, ruthlessly and at all times, in all interpersonal relationships.
So Monica grows up being laughed at at school, gets doomed crushes on guys who use her for sex when nobody else is around, and gets involved with a married hippie twice her age who works with her drama class. A rotten, familiar life.
Very familiar. I knew those girls at Berkeley. A lot of them came from exactly the sort of family which produced Monica: LA Jewish second-generation ambitious parents who have two kids, divorce early and find they've raised two jittery, lonely children who haven't inherited their drive and confidence. (Monica's father is a doctor, and her mother an author; Monica and her brother were both fat, nervous and undistinguished students.) The girls of families like that had it especially hard. They wanted so much to be locked into some sort of romantic love...and it wasn't going to be there for them, or in fact for anybody except the top of the foodchain: a cutthroat clique of mean-skinny, self-seeking weasels of both genders.
A century ago a strapping girl like Monica would have been appreciated, and Tori Spelling would be making her living in a sideshow: "See the Incredible Turbot-Girl!" Monica's actually sort of beautiful, in some of the pictures included in Morton's book. In a fat way, but they liked that back then. She would have married early and had children and been...happy? Happier, anyway. Happier.
Which nobody like Monica could ever be in contemporary Los Angeles. As Morton tells it, Monica's big break was moving from LA to Oregon for her last two years of college. Portland was kinder to her. There's a really touching shot of Monica (who was so happy she lost 20 pounds) standing with her friends at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. They all look like nice girls; they're all kind of plain, in various ways--there's an element of caricature about the group picture--but for one moment, they're standing upright and looking at the camera with something like happiness and confidence. Even Monica.
But the refuge lasts only til Monica graduates. Then it's back to the inexpressibly lonely world of the single American. Monica is a psych major, which is to say she majored in nothing; so the choice of career is a difficult one. Family connections get her an internship at the White House; Clinton, smart enough to appreciate the zaftig look, catches her eye; and, well, you know the rest of the story. Morton doesn't tell it especially well, and doesn't add much to the standard version other than his consistent portrayal of Monica as innocent victim.
Which I'm inclined to accept--not because Morton's storytelling is so effective, but because, like I said: I knew these girls. I don't believe the prose in this book but I do recognize the pictures Morton culled from Monica's albums. They verify her species and thus her story. Hers was, in my experience, kind of a nice species, going extinct for the simple reason that it wasn't mean and cold enough to survive in California. I wish it well; I wish her well.
But I also wish we had somebody a little less easily distracted--somebody who went to a four-year college, passed their GRE and maybe spoke some Serbo-Croatian--working on American Balkan policy.
Thanks to Shakespeare & Co. 1-Nekuznetskoy Pereulok, Paveletskaya, Moscow Phone 951-9360
