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The jester of Monicagate
By Inda Schaenen
As the president falls, Lucianne Goldberg's son rises
(09/18/98)

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BROWSE THE
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_Monica's dilemma:
-------^{G A G  M E  W I T H  A  K E N  S T A R R   D E C R E E}

BY SUSAN LEHMAN

This week Monica Lewinsky was rumored to be signing a $3 million multimedia deal (domestic and foreign TV and a HarperCollins book contract) with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The story follows rumors that Lewinsky was to do interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters and that she had a $16 million pay-per-view offer. Monica won't be appearing in any of these venues, however, unless she gets permission from her friend Kenneth Starr.

Lewinsky, you see, is under a gag order. Paragraph 1B of the immunity agreement struck between Lewinsky and the Office of the Independent Council states that "pending a final resolution of this matter, neither Ms. Lewinsky nor her agents will make any statements about this matter to witnesses, subjects, or targets of the OIC's investigation, or their agents or to representatives of the news media, without first obtaining the OIC's approval."

A source close to Lewinsky says she recently asked for relief from the gag order and that the OIC denied that request. Lewinsky's lawyers would not comment. Charles Bakaly, spokesman for Kenneth Starr, said he'd heard rumblings that Lewinsky wished to be relieved from the order, but said he could not comment further. Pending resolution of "this matter," the OIC, per Paragraph 4 of the immunity deal, also agreed not to make statements about the agreement.

Starr seems to enjoy gagging women: He has also apparently kept Linda Tripp from talking to the press. Meanwhile, Newsweek reported that Gattinoni, an Italian fashion house, offered Lewinsky $470,000 to stroll down the catwalk next month in a blue suit from its new "Roma Outsize" line. Lewinsky can model without Starr's permission. Just so long as she doesn't talk.

Drenka and the Nobelists

Placing bets on future literary Nobel Prize winners? You might want to look at longtime Harcourt Brace editor Drenka Willen's list. José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for literature, was the third of Willen's writers to win the big prize.

Nobelists Octavio Paz and Wislawa Szymborska are on Willen's list too.

"We have always published Saramago in the U.S.," says a Harcourt spokesperson. "Willen bought and published Szymborska long before anyone thought anyone would want to read this obscure Polish poet"

Who else is on Willen's magic list?

Umberto Eco, Gunter Grass, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Cees Nooteboom and Georges Konrad. Though she does a lot of literature in translation, Willen also publishes a number of American writers including David Guterson and Mark Helprin and a young novelist, Claire Messud, whose new novel will be out next fall.

Struggling writers, take heart: Saramago had no major literary success until he was 60.

Nice, balding celebs sporting resplendent lifestyles need not apply until the fin de siècle

A short list of verboten words among copy editors at various magazines:

The New Yorker: balding, prestigious, home (meaning house)

The New York Times Book Review: compelling, poignant, nominated, masterly

Digital City: Monica, resplendent, nice, motorhead, soufflé

Salon: l'affaire Lewinsky, veritable cornucopia, netizen, anynumbersomething, information superhighway

New York: celebs, authored, bigs (meaning prominent people), boast (meaning have), comely, comfort food, duo, don (meaning put on), dubbed, eatery, eponymous, fin de siècle (Salon breaks its own ban by mentioning that one), flicks, graced, hails from, hubby, indie (except for indie rock), lifestyle, maven, overly, penned, queried, scripted, sport (as a verb), staffer, tapped (meaning chosen), comma um comma, comma uh comma, comma well comma, a who's who of, Zeitgeist

The power of the Press

The New York Press' annual Best of New York issue provides a useful compendium of information about city life. This year's "Best" issue includes a new category: "Best Breasts of Any Waitress in the East Village."

Here's a partial excerpt: "There is this Eurasian waitress at Cafe Mogador who has the most beautiful breasts in all the East Village, and if you have the best breasts in the East Village you might have the best breasts in all of Manhattan. Each morning ... she is there to serve us and to give us pause -- the thrall of beauty ... She takes our order -- she is neither friendly nor rude, a woman with breasts like that has a life outside her restaurant job -- and we stare at those glorious, shapely orbs and when she asks us what we'll have, we'd like to order her breasts rather than two scrambled eggs, toast and cappuccino, but we don't ... We go to Mogador and we take what we can get -- we look and we long and we imagine."

Maybe, but the anonymous author of this rapturous item probably didn't imagine that the huge throngs of patrons that flooded Cafe Mogador to ogle would make life so unpleasant for the gifted Eurasian waitress that she'd have to leave her job.

More dirt in the public discourse

Coming on Election Day: "Glass Houses: Shocking Profiles of 100 Congressional Sex Scandals and Other Unofficial Misconduct" (St. Martin's). This little title promises to let the skeletons out of 100 current congressmen's closets. It reveals, for example, that Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. of Oklahoma fathered two children out of wedlock, that seven women accused Pennsylvania Rep. John E. Peterson of inappropriate advances (Peterson says, "I may have been an excessive hugger") and that police found California Rep. Ken Calvert partially naked and with a prostitute when they pulled his car over one evening. The book was written by psychologist Anne-Renee Testa and Stanley G. Hilton, a San Francisco lawyer who went to law school with and was a friend of Kenneth Starr. Who knows, maybe by Election Day everyone will be obsessed with welfare, poverty, criminal justice, national health and the troubled situation in Kosovo.

Harper's publisher fangs Post and Times

The Washington Post and the New York Times have been taking their lumps lately for their moralizing about Clinton. First came a veiled slap across the face from the New Yorker, which tweaked certain unnamed media organizations (read: You know who) for their pomposity over the affair. Now John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's, has let fly with a vicious roundhouse to the gut. In an excoriating piece in Newsday, MacArthur writes, "The two paragons of journalistic excellence have institutionally done everything they can, aided by the incompetent and biased reporting of, respectively, Jeff Gerth and Susan Schmidt, to encourage the dangerous ambitions of Kenneth Starr and his hateful sponsors." Joining the long list of people who have speculated about why the Times, in particular, chose to travel down this unlikely road, MacArthur muses that it may be due to "the newspaper of record's humiliation at the hands of the Washington Post in the Watergate scandal." He goes on to deride a Times editorial that thundered, "Whatever Mr. Starr's failings, they will never achieve the grand malignancy of Clinton's folly and miscalculations." "This last phrase is an absurdity proving the Times' own malignancy," MacArthur writes. "Compared with the wild and unscrupulous political assault on Clinton by Starr, the president's lying under oath in a sex case is a triviality."

Don't give Times editorial page editor Howell Raines a gift subscription to Harper's for Christmas.
SALON | Oct. 15, 1998