Obsessive self-delusion
Michael Vestey
The banality of the affair that the former president Bill Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky was laid startlingly bare in a Radio Four drama, Monica and Linda, last week (Friday). Laura Strausfeld worked her way through 2,000 pages of telephone transcripts to devise and direct this play, which was first performed as a stage show in New York. It contains some of the verbatim conversations between Lewinsky and Linda Tripp, the colleague she befriended and confided in at the Pentagon, in which the former discusses the affair. Tripp, of course, was secretly taping their chats.
Lewinsky, as she increasingly fantasises about their affair, even at one point wondering why Clinton can't marry her, had clearly lost all sense of perspective and judgment and was in the grip of an obsessive self-delusion, unable to see that she was just a plaything of the President, a diversion. She was played with great skill by Jean Taylor, who managed to capture the gushing airhead nature of Lewinsky and her fixated self-absorption. Patricia A. Chilsen was the manipulative Tripp pursuing her own anti-Clinton agenda, somehow managing to maintain her act of betrayal over a long period. Lewinsky was the White House intern who romped with Clinton in the Oval Office and was transferred to the Pentagon when aides thought she was stalking the President. From these conversations, which at times sound surreal, she clearly believed she was in love with Clinton.
She says to Tripp, 'We're getting off and I'm like, all right, I love you, Butthead. I called him Butthead!"You didn't! And what did he say?' Just nothing, he just kinda hung up or I hung up.' It's difficult to comprehend an intern in her early twenties talking to the President of the United States in such a fashion, such is the powerful aura of the office, but that was Clinton for you. As the relationship cools she becomes increasingly hysterical over the phone, wailing, 'Why can't he just say, look, go and enjoy your life and in three years we'll get married.' Tripp encourages Lewinsky to open up, pretending to be angry on her behalf at the way she's been treated. 'I wanna kick him in the nuts so they flatten into little pancakes and he can never use them again!'
Lewinsky decides she's bored at the Pentagon and would like a move to the United Nations in New York on a higher salary. Clinton obliges by putting her in touch with the US ambassador to the UN, but Lewinsky dithers, deciding that perhaps this is not the job for her, after all. She is just enough in touch with reality to sense that perhaps it might be a trifle awkward if, at the age of 24, she is appointed as a special assistant to the ambassador. Not that she knows much about the UN. Says Tripp, 'I believe the American public is clueless about the UN.' I'm clueless about the UN!' she replies.
She can't understand why the President is too busy to contact her. 'Now we have all this crap with Iraq . I guess it's hurtful that he didn't call, y'know.'
In 1998 Lewinsky signed a statement in the Paula Jones case, denying she'd had a sexual relationship with the President. That same week, Tripp handed over tapes of more than 20 hours of conversations with Lewinsky. Just to make sure, she agrees to an FBI request to record a meeting she has with her in a Virginia hotel. Tripp urges her to tell the truth under oath, but Lewinsky damns herself by trying to justify lying under oath, 'This is how family is. I would lie on the stand for my family. I was brought up with lies all the time. That was how you got along in life, by lying.' She still believed that she loved Clinton and would protect him.
All the tragicomedy of the affair is there, including the girlie talk about hairstyles. One is gripped by the calculating nature of the betrayal and the fantasies of a silly girl., At the same time one is saddened that the affair nearly brought down a president and diverted him from dealing with more pressing matters such as, say, the war on terrorism, which he failed to deal with in office. Despite the demeaning fumblings in the Oval Office and all the lies and sophistry about the affair, somehow Clinton survived and continues to charm all those who meet him. Imagine George W. Bush in such a situation; he would have been hounded from office and crucified. As drama, one has to say that this was gripping.
Previous page
