Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [337]
The bespectacled attorney answered, “Oh, it will be great. Vanity Fair has assured me that it will be in the utmost of taste.”
Bernie and Barbara Lewinsky drove to the beach in Malibu for the shoot, where everything seemed over the top. Bernie recalled, “We got there when she [Monica] was all dolled up, and she looked like Marilyn Monroe with a pink poodle in her arms.… And I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is my daughter?’” One provocative photo snapped of Monica behind a fan of pink feathers made Bernie and Barbara shuffle in the sand with discomfort. Later in the day, when the photographers and wardrobe people moved down the beach to photograph Monica “vamping” barefoot in a “little black dress” and wrapped in an antique American flag, radiating “coy seductiveness,” Bernie finally popped his cork. He told Ginsburg, “I think this is really going a little too far.” The lawyer waved the crew to a halt, shouting, “Stop, stop, stop the photographing! I do not give permission for this photograph to be published.” Yet the paperwork was already signed; the picture with the American flag appeared in Vanity Fair, another traumatic experience for the Lewinsky family.
Ginsburg later defended the photo shoot, telling a reporter that Monica’s “libido” was suffering, and that this experience was designed to say, “Honey, you’re beautiful and sweet and we want the world to know.” Moreover, the photo with the American flag, Ginsburg felt, was “a very uplifting piece” designed to “lift her [Monica’s] ego.” He later explained, “It wasn’t time to take pictures of her, you know, washing dishes.”
There was also a hint that the lawyers had signed up Monica for the Vanity Fair experience on the advice of her psychiatrist, who feared that Monica was potentially suicidal and desperately needed to “assist her self-esteem.” This photo spread in a chic magazine, the theory went, would portray her as a “sophisticated, beautiful woman” who was “maturing and able to attract a president.” For the sake of Monica’s “mental health,” the suggestion was, her lawyers did the right thing by providing their client with an “exhilarating emotional high experience.”
Bernie, however, didn’t buy that explanation. He was shelling out piles of money to pay for airfare and other costs that seemed to be mounting by the minute, and it all seemed aimed at satisfying Ginsburg’s own thirst for a media buzz. “A psychiatrist suggested this?” Bernie later asked skeptically. “I never heard of it.”
By all accounts within the Lewinsky family circle, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Ginsburg’s infamous “Open Letter to Kenneth Starr,” published in the June issue of California Lawyer magazine. In this eloquent yet provocative piece, Ginsburg poured out his soul, expressing his love for the American Constitution and his abhorrence of Ken Starr’s guerrilla tactics: “Your investigation into President Clinton’s sexual conduct threatens to tear a giant hole in the fabric of our democracy,” Ginsburg wrote. He castigated Starr for “subpoenaing practically everyone in the Washington, D.C., phone book.”
And in the most startling paragraph of the article, the acerbic-tongued California lawyer seemed to concede that hanky-panky had probably occurred between Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton: “Congratulations, Mr. Starr!” he taunted. “As a result of your callous disregard for cherished constitutional rights, you may have