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Author Andrew Morton
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Morton on Lewinsky: 'I don't envy her'
Web posted on:
Thursday, March 11, 1999 4:25:29 PM
(CNN) -- Author Andrew Morton believes Monica Lewinsky was not mature enough to understand what she was doing when she began an affair with President Bill Clinton, and says that his writing a book about the White House intern's circumstances was very different than writing about Princess Diana.
"It was both her folly and her virtue to treat the president of the United States as a regular guy," Morton said Wednesday during an Internet chat with CNN. "If she had treated him like the president, and in turn, if the president had acted like the president," then the circumstances would have been much different.
Best known for his hugely popular 1992 biography, "Diana: Her True Story", Morton gained the scoop on scores of other biographers to write the book "Monica's Story".
How did he get the assignment to write the smitten intern's book? "I'd like to be able to say that this is the culmination of a year's endeavor of wooing Monica, but it came about by serendipity," Morton said in response to a question from a chat participant. "I was at home in North London in November (when) a tabloid journalist came to my house (saying) that they had information that I was writing Monica's story. Even though I smiled and denied it, they printed the story.
"That story became fact and found its way to New York. At the same time, my publisher in Britain had been independently approached about whether he would be interested in publishing Monica's story, and the confluence of these two bizarre coincidences came on a Friday night when Monica's lawyer phoned my publisher and asked if I would be interested in meeting Monica. When I stopped laughing I booked her flight to New York and met Monica. The rest, as they say, made history."
Morton said he spent about four weeks interviewing Lewinsky in her Los Angeles apartment, "going through every detail of her life, her relationship with the president, and the aftermath." He also interviewed her father and mother, stepfather and stepmother, her friends, her lawyers and others. "It was a very intensive," he said.
"One of my most vivid memories of this intense project was listening to Marcia Lewis, Monica's mother, telling about the day she went to the grand jury and was forced to testify against her own daughter," Morton said. "When I interviewed her, she sat on the floor and the whole episode came pouring out in a stream of consciousness, tears streaming down her face as she relived the day the state forced her to try and betray her daughter."
Researching the Lewinsky book was "refreshing" when compared to the 1992 book about the late Princess of Wales, Morton said.
"The Diana book was very different -- I interviewed her through an intermediary, who was a close friend of both of us. It was done in the utmost secrecy, knowing that one false move could have fatally compromised Diana and the book. I used a scrambler telephone so that my telephone calls could not be bugged, I had my office swept for listening devices, and was always worried about being followed. This is one of the reason why Diana and I decided not to meet. Because she had to have deniability," he said.
"It was, as everyone involved in that project will testify, an extremely nerve-wracking affair to know that you are taking on the might of the British monarchy and the media establishment. For Monica's story, it made a refreshing change to speak to the subject intensively, to ask follow up questions, and to be able to probe instantly the accuracy of what they were saying."
Asked about how Lewinsky responded to being "used," Morton said, "She feels very angry at the way the president let her swing in the wind. And there has been some remorseful reflection on her part to see how quickly the man she loved and adored became the politician."
And Lewinsky is now over that love, he said. "She still feels very sentimental about him, still dreams about him, still thinks about him, but is not in love with him. Recently, she was in Washington when the presidential motorcade drove by. In previous times, her heart would have skipped a beat. On this occasion, she felt nothing. And she told me ... it was a very liberating experience."
Questioned about Lewinsky's highly publicized appearance on ABC with Barbara Walters, Morton said the interview "only gave a snapshot of the real Monica that I've come to know."
"She smiled far too much, giggled far too much -- and that was because she was extremely nervous. She'd never given an interview before and I think that showed, even though she appeared poised and confident. It showed a very honest and candid Monica, a rather too candid Monica for the tastes of many."
And what does the future hold for Lewinsky? "Her past is being continually rerun in the present, and until the interest in her calms down and she can approach as normal a life as the media will permit, then she is going to have difficulty finding a new direction," Morton said.
"She truly wants to put something back into society, in some kind of charity work, maybe working with children. But the difficulties are clear when I was with her last Thanksgiving. She wanted to go to Los Angeles to help feed the homeless for the day. She didn't want any publicity, but the charities ... were worried about press attention and also that they would lose their federal funding if she was in their presence.
"She has a tough road to travel," Morton said. "I don't envy her."
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RELATED SITES:
Monica's Story, by Andrew Morton
Monica Lewinsky photo gallery
Monica Lewinsky Online Fan Club
Monica Fan Club
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