Monica’s Mom, the Reluctant Starr Witness

“We all dance around in a ring and suppose, But the secret sits in the middle and knows.”

--Robert Frost

Marcia Vilensky was 14 years old when her father died. Samuel M. Vilensky, a Lithuanian emigre, had escaped the horrors of Stalinism and the Holocaust to build a new life in the United States and then in postwar Tokyo as an import-export broker.

That life was idyllic for Marcia and her 4-year-old sister, Debra. The girls enjoyed all the opportunities and privileges that came to members of the prospering American business community.

When this carefree existence was shattered by their father’s death, Debra recalls, her big sister offered this advice: “We have to be strong, just like the girls in ‘Little Women.’ We have to keep up a front.”

For Marcia Vilensky Lewis, the need to present to the world a composed and confident face would recur as she grew older. But nothing has tested her so severely or pushed her so near the breaking point, friends and others close to the family say, as the allegations that her daughter, former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, had an intimate relationship with President Clinton and took part in a possibly illegal effort to conceal it.

And now Lewis, who was put on notice last week that she may have to reappear before the grand jury investigating the president, has emerged not only as a pivotal figure in that inquiry but also as the most influential figure in her daughter’s life.

Lewis projects two seemingly irreconcilable images.

Is she, as some accounts suggest, a shallow, narcissistic woman who packed Monica off to a fat farm at an early age and pampered herself with luxuries? Is she a tough, cynical schemer who counseled her daughter on thwarting the legal system and coolly faced down the FBI agents and federal prosecutor who confronted Monica last January?

Or is she, as friends and others close to the family say, a good, caring single parent who has lived in affluence, but who also has worked hard to make a better life for her children and who now faces one of a mother’s worst nightmares?

One thing is clear: Lewis is almost alone in the center of the ring, burdened with knowledge of the secret--of what happened or didn’t happen between her daughter and the president--and also with a parent’s inescapable sense of responsibility.

“I would think Marcia could handle anything that comes her way,” says Laurie Lund, a longtime friend. “But the difference here is that she’s dealing with her daughter. The magnitude of this thing, I think, would unnerve anyone.”

Once Again, Secrets in the Watergate

Inside the bunker, the scene suggests elegant desolation.

Lewis and her daughter occupy one moderate-sized apartment in the Watergate complex; Lewis’ mother, Bronia, has another nearby. Impressionist oil paintings adorn the light-colored walls. The furniture, French Empire with a sprinkling of antiques, gleams in the soft light.

But the buoyant bustle that once filled the apartment is gone. The occupants almost never venture out. There are few visitors except lawyers, whose footsteps alternately echo on the bare floors and disappear across the scattered area rugs.

Friends are afraid to telephone. The occupants, unsure whom they can trust, seldom reach out. Even Lewis’ son, Michael, away at college, has hesitated to call and worries about his mother from a distance, friends say.

“The family’s in shock,” says one. “They don’t know who’s doing what. They’re guarded, very guarded.”

Lewis herself is said to be struggling. After two days of grand jury questioning by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s prosecutors in February, she was excused as too distraught to continue, although the judge overseeing the proceedings ruled against her petition last week for a permanent exemption from further appearances.

Today, medical care and counseling have done much to restore her spirits, according to sources close to the family, but they say she remains shaken.

“She has up days and down days,” says R. Peter Straus, her fiance in New York.

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More jolting than the grand jury process, one source close to the family says, is what she has learned about her daughter. Mother and daughter shared an apartment and were close, this source says, “but kids don’t tell their parents everything.”

Most worrisome to some friends is Lewis’ seeming loss of enthusiasm for life, the disappearance of the eternal-optimist quality that, along with her well-bred manner, had been her hallmark.

“She doesn’t talk to her own family that much,” says a friend.

“I don’t know what they did to her, but after she was in the grand jury room she just changed,” says another source. “She’s so nervous and withdrawn. . . . She just wants to stay home, where it’s safe.”

Skeptics are incredulous that merely appearing before a grand jury could bring on emotional collapse. Unstrung by salacious accusations? Isn’t this the woman whose book “The Private Lives of the Three Tenors” focused on gossip about the sex lives of Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti?

Hasn’t her editor said the original manuscript contained a fantasized love affair between Domingo and an imaginary fan? What about Lewis’ suggestion, described by her publisher, Stephen Schragis, president of the New York-based Carol Publishing Group, that they pump up interest in the book by spreading rumors that Lewis herself had had an affair with Domingo?

Friends answer that these are fragments of a life out of context: “Three Tenors,” for example, was standard fare in the world of People magazine journalism.

As for her emotional state, “I don’t know how strong she is,” says one person who has known Lewis for many years. “She tried to keep going and give her kids the semblance of a normal life” after the divorce, “but it was her love of her kids that kept her going. . . . I don’t think of her as all that much of a tower of strength.”

A Family Forged in Hardship

Marcia Kay Vilensky was born on April 30, 1948, at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, the same hospital in which her daughter would be born 25 years later.

Marcia’s father was 42 and had been living in San Francisco for six years then. Details of his earlier life are obscure, but he attended Moscow University, and some evidence suggests he may have belonged to a rare group of Holocaust survivors known as the “Sugihara Jews.”

In the early 1940s, in apparent defiance of his own government, the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, issued thousands of transit visas to desperate Jews and others to go to Japan. Many survived the perilous trip across the Soviet Union and entered Japanese-held Manchuria.

Somehow Samuel Vilensky got to the United States and, by 1948, had established himself as a self-employed import-exporter and married Bronia Poleshuk, a 28-year-old Russian refugee born in the British Concession at Tianjin, China. She had attended Yenching (now Beijing) University and, like thousands of other Jewish and White Russian emigres, apparently survived World War II in northeastern China, only to flee the ensuing civil war.

For a time, Marcia and her parents lived in a modest row house in the Outer Sunset district of San Francisco, but Samuel was attracted to business opportunities in Tokyo.

There, over the next 10 years, fortunes smiled. Upon Samuel’s death, Bronia moved back to the United States and settled in Santa Rosa near her mother.

Marcia finished high school there, attended a local junior college for two years and transferred to Cal State Northridge, earning a degree in urban planning. And she met Bernard S. Lewinsky, a medical student beginning his internship at Los Angeles County General.

They were married in 1969 at San Francisco’s elegant Fairmont Hotel, a source of great pride to Marcia’s mother. But they soon settled into the less glamorous life of a doctor-in-training, first in Los Angeles and then in the Bay Area. Marcia worked for local social welfare agencies, sometimes with troubled children.

Eventually, Lewinsky entered a lucrative radiology oncology practice in Los Angeles. By the late 1970s, he had moved his family--which now included Monica and her younger brother, Michael--into the glittering lifestyle of Beverly Hills.

It was here that Marcia launched her journalism career, adopting Lewis as her professional name. Her sister, Debra, had married a cardiologist, Willmore “Bill” Finerman Jr., whose mother’s involvement in local politics led to an invitation for Marcia and Debra to cover city council meetings for Beverly Hills Today.

They graduated to lighthearted society news, wrote similar pieces for the Hollywood Reporter and tried publishing their own upscale quarterly, Beverly Hills Magazine, which survived for only three issues.

The Lewinskys divorced in 1988. The record is shot through with assertions of cruelty and infidelity on Bernard’s part and profligate, self-indulgent spending on Marcia’s. Given the inflated rhetoric and jugular tactics endemic to such contests, it is hard to judge what the record proves about the individuals, except that it was bruising for everyone--including Monica.

Friends paint a picture of Lewis as mother that is far different from the one suggested by the divorce and the Hollywood reporting career.

Lund, whose son Tyler became close to Michael, remembers Lewis as one of the most devoted of mothers. For at least two years, Lewis was team mother to the baseball squads the two boys played on, responsible for the life-or-death trivia of snack schedules, coaches’ gifts and team parties.

“Game after game after game, Marcia and I were in the bleachers rooting for the kids,” Lund recalls. “Some parents did a lot, some did nothing. She was always ready to go the extra mile.”

As for growing up in a glitzy place where hair salons and weight-loss programs were common even for young girls, Lund says: “The situation we have out here, living in Beverly Hills, is completely different from anything you’ll find anywhere else in the country. . . . Kids raised here live in a world that seems unreal to the rest of the country. But you’re expected to be like everyone else or you’re an outcast.

“Without going overboard, Marcia tried to give Monica and Mike what other kids in Beverly Hills had.”

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Throughout this period, Lewis and her sister remained close personally as well as professionally. The Finermans supported the Los Angeles Opera; Lewis met Placido Domingo and others through opera-related social events and began gathering material for her book.

Her close relationship with her sister also led Lewis to transplant herself, her children and her mother to Washington in 1994, when Bill Finerman joined a cardiology practice in the Washington area.

Describing the unusually close ties between the sisters, one source says: “When you lose a parent so young, you either draw apart or draw closer. They drew closer, for mutual support.”

In Washington, Lewis finished “Three Tenors,” delivering a clean manuscript on time. She also played a savvy role in promoting it, her publisher says.

Although sales were moderate, the book brought the author together with R. Peter Straus, a member of a distinguished New York family who now heads a media company. For many years, Straus had been married to Ellen Sulzberger, a member of the family that owns the New York Times, who died of cancer in 1995.

Last year, Straus attended a book party for “Three Tenors” in Westchester County, N.Y. He remembers that the author “had a bad cold” and he drove her home.

They were making plans to be married when the storm broke over Monica.

Once They’re Grown, You Lose Control

If the portrait of Marcia Lewis provided by friends is generous, as such evaluations are meant to be, the harsh lines drawn by skeptics are probably a caricature, freed from the reality check of direct experience.

So if Marcia Vilensky Lewinsky Lewis has been something less than Super Mom, the evidence of her life also suggests something well short of a demon. The testimony of a woman who met her in the arm’s-length setting of a job interview, but who paid close attention to her subject, may come as close as any to striking the balance.

A little more than a year ago, at a time when Lewis had probably learned at least some of what had been transpiring in her daughter’s life but well before the country knew, Lewis and her sister spent several hours talking with M.J. Firestone, editor in chief of Georgetown and Country Life, a community newspaper in Washington, about writing a column.

Firestone liked their clippings: “Light and fun and sophisticated,” she says. “They weren’t ‘War and Peace,’ but we weren’t looking for ‘War and Peace.’ ”

And as people who have worked with Lewis often do, Firestone came away with a good impression. “I thought she was smart. I thought she was tough enough to get through life. . . . Not a victim sort of person.

“One of the things we talked about was our kids,” Firestone recalls. “We agreed that once they’re grown, you don’t have any control over them . . . much as you might like to.”

* Times staff writers Geraldine Baum, Josh Getlin, John J. Goldman, Carla Hall, Matea Gold, Anne O’Neill and Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.