The misanthrope's corner

National Review, July 20, 1998 by Florence King

The woman of mystery has never been an American type. Maintaining a vague "past" runs up against high-school yearbooks, friendly seatmates asking "Whereya from?," and TV shows such as This Is Your Life where everyone we would prefer to forget comes crashing through a rose-covered trellis.

We have always associated the woman of mystery with unstable Middle European governments that fell a lot and citizens with forged "papers" who went underground a lot, but that's all changed now. Monica Lewinsky has taken the woman of mystery and painted her red, white, and blue all over, especially red. Thanks to her Vanity Fair photo-op and the reception accorded it, American women have learned how to be mysterious in a democracy: do something so idiotic that people from all walks of life lie awake nights racking their brains trying to figure out why you did it.

The racking and figuring got off to a rousing start when Time published the fan-dancer picture. Normally blase talking heads cawed "How could she?" and "What possessed her?" like querulous chaperones, while tolerant-or-bust Richard Cohen fumed, "What was she thinking? What was Ginsburg thinking? Where were Lewinsky's parents?"

William Ginsburg, self-described "avuncular family friend," took credit for the whole idea, saying Monica needed the photo spread to boost her morale and renew her sense of herself as a desirable female after her months as a shut-in. This was believable in that nothing Ginsburg says is beyond belief, but then, true to form, he gilded the lily. Setting himself up as a Moses with one Israelite, he blamed Monica's psychological captivity on Pharaoh Ken Starr and thundered, "Let her libido go!"

I suspect the libido he wanted to liberate was not Monica's but his own. The first lurid hint of disquiet on the avuncular front was his claim to have kissed her infant thighs. Combine this with her only outings, when the two of them hit every steak house in Washington, and what do you have? The eating scene from the movie Tom Jones in which the Deadly Sin of gluttony symbolized the Deadly Sin of lust.

Each outing brought him one steak house closer to immolation in the charcoal fire in his loins, but knowing his chances were nil, he dreamed up the photo session as another vicarious way to possess her. That he masterminded the whole thing, from the clothes to the poses, seems obvious. The flouncy, flirty, Fifties-era motif could not have been Monica's idea; only the most provincial Southern girls still think it's cute to fling sidelong glances and peek from behind feathers. These are the fantasies of a man for whom a stripper in baboon-hindquarters red was an overworked law student's idea of hot.

The debate over why Monica went along with it left me wondering why anyone should even ask. Why do 35-year-old divorcees remarry in formal church weddings wearing long white dresses and veils? Why do people walk over graves at cemeteries? Why do women breastfeed and change babies' diapers in public--and even at restaurant tables? Because nobody knows how to behave anymore. The collapse of savoir-faire pervades Monica's photo shoot. You don't wear a diamond if you're not engaged because you just don't. You don't wear dark polish on short nails because you just don't. You don't play with the American flag because you just don't. And you don't expect Monica's America to understand because the only just-don't they recognize is political incorrectness.

She reminds me of two other girls about her age who made more history than was good for them when they got involved with famous men. The first, born almost exactly a century earlier than Monica, was Marie Vetsera, whose new-money family wanted into Viennese society. Since the pinnacle of that society was Hapsburg royalty, Marie's mother turned a blind eye when an influential friend placed her daughter's zaftig teenage charms in the path of Crown Prince Rudolf.

Historian Betty Kelen's words could be the accompanying text for Monica's photo spread:

Not even the soggiest retelling of her

story has ever insisted that Marie was

intelligent. She is instantly recognizable as

one of those plump girls whose moods

alternate between bubbling affection and

moping depression. Had she been put in a

box with a lid on it until she was older,

she might have brought to some bureaucrat

the enchantment of a submissively

amorous and soulful wife with excellent

judgment in cooks.

Marie was put in a box all right. Rudolf decided to shoot himself, so he asked if he could shoot her too and she said okay. Much racking and figuring has gone into learning her reason, but as far as historians can tell she went along with it because she went along with it, leaving posterity no choice but to turn her into a romantic heroine.

An unnamed media consultant quoted in the Washington Times said the photos show "the new, contemplative, take-charge Monica ... much more serious, much more down-to-earth, much more intelligent, much more in charge of her own affairs.... It gets her away from this image of a helpless damsel. You are definitely seeing the birth of the new Monica."