|
||
How's Remnick doing? New Yorker fans discuss the latest issue in the Media area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Gentrification X Throw the disk at him! Hush, hush, sweet Monica Torah! Torah! Torah! The st*r report BROWSE THE
|
___The jester of Monicagate
How Lucianne Goldberg's son Jonah has turned his 15 minutes of fame into a full-time job.
Did you think the Clinton scandal was about the fate of the presidency, the fury of the press, the shape of democracy? Actually it's about Jonah Goldberg's career plans. Jonah, agent fatale Lucianne Goldberg's 29-year-old son, entered the national stage when he listened to the Linda Tripp tapes with his mom. His 6,000-word opus on the subsequent media siege of his mother's New York apartment was cut to an amusing -- but trim -- 900-word item that ran in the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section. A lesser man's 15 minutes of fame might have ended there, but Jonah Goldberg was just revving up. He took to the air: "Nightline," "Larry King Live," "Today" to start; soon thereafter "Hardball," "Crossfire," "Politically Incorrect," "Equal Time," "Good Morning America" and "The NBC Nightly News." A debate in Slate and a contributing editorship at the conservative National Review followed. This month Goldberg began work on a full-length book about the Clinton affair and his personal involvement with it. The project, Goldberg says, may be a little "'Bonfire of the Vanities' type thing about stories peripheral to the scandal." Movie deals may follow the final book deal, he says. Most people might find such activity would provide a sufficient outlet for the thoughts, insights and feelings of a bit player in the constitutional crisis that now faces the country. But not Goldberg, who recently quit his job to devote himself full-time to his Lewinsky-related activities. Goldberg, who is vice-president of his mother's company, the Goldberg Literary Agency, makes no attempt to conceal his peripheral role in the scandal. "The fun part is my irrelevance," he says. He characterizes his ascent in purely capitalist terms. "I had information to barter," he explains, referring to the fact that he actually heard the Tripp tapes. "And when you have information to barter you become a clearinghouse for other information. People want to trade. At one point I had 12 reporters around the country calling me up, cultivating me as a source." As a result, Goldberg says he's made some friends. Goldberg, who claims to distance himself from political affiliations, has impeccable conservative credentials. From an early age, his mother, who has acknowledged being an undercover Republican political operative during the McGovern campaign, exposed her son to feisty right-wing hi-jinks -- and instilled in him a strong sense of family loyalty and affection. Indeed, Goldberg says he first entered the media fray "to defend my mom" from those who deemed her the money-grubbing Wicked Witch of the Upper West Side. Until he decided to devote more time to his experience with the Lewinsky matter, Goldberg was a producer at New River Media, where he worked closely with Ben Wattenberg -- a former Lyndon Johnson aide who endorsed Clinton in '92, and was proud to be known as Reagan's favorite Democrat. Nevertheless it was charm, not politics, that kept Goldberg's media stock running high. "He's an honest, straight-ahead guy," says Newsweek contributing editor Mickey Kaus. "And he's undissembling, even at the risk of saying, 'I made a fool of myself.'" "He was a new face on the screen and bookers liked having him on," says Mark Allen, a producer/booker at CNN. "He's not a typical person who wants to be on TV. He was refreshing. He didn't seem to be speaking from talking points, he spoke in paragraphs. He filled a void." Indeed, the refreshing void-filler says he found it "very seductive" to be on television, "getting to yell at your opponent face-to-face instead of at the TV." Calling the TV appearances "the experience of a lifetime," Goldberg adds, it "was a fantastic media education." "This is not what I wanted to do with my life," says the would-be-up and-comer who went to Prague after college to be a starving fiction writer but, by his own account, failed on both scores. "What the hell am I doing on these shows? It makes no sense. Going after the president is not my thing. My girlfriend hates it. She doesn't think it's particularly serious." Goldberg's take on the whole affair does promise to be different. Of the many books likely to emerge from the scandal -- including a factual account by the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin, a rumored chronicle by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, and a potential memoir from Linda Tripp -- only Goldberg's will offer what he calls the "humorous perspective." "On the one hand, this is as serious as cancer," Goldberg says. "And on the other hand, it's ironical." Oh, really? "This is dead serious," says Mama Goldberg. Meanwhile, who exactly will shepherd the junior Goldberg's story of the president and the intern, as told by the son of the literary agent who put the whole thing in motion? "If he goes to anyone else," says Lucianne Goldberg, "I'll kill him."
Inda Schaenen is a regular Salon contributor who lives in the Midwest. |
|
![[Salon Magazine]](/media/src/salon_logo.gif){kind=logo}
