A Talk With Monica’s Main Man

We are driving to Junior’s on a crisp Easter morning, and Monica’s dad is telling Linda Tripp jokes. There’s this guy, see, and he’s overdosed on Viagra, the new drug that fights sexual impotence. Only one thing can help him return to his pre-Viagra state.

“They pull out a picture of Linda Tripp,” he says and hoots.

Dr. Bernard Lewinsky heard that one on TV. Lately, he’s been hearing a lot of jokes on TV that have a familiar ring. Strange, one day you’re John Q. Citizen, and the next your family and former friends are Jay Leno’s monologue.

We pull up to the Westwood deli to find a clot of Angelenos who haven’t maxed out on matzoh balls despite a zillion Seders the week before. We leave a name.

“Should we say Bernie Lewinsky?” snickers someone in our group.

“Should we say Bill Ginsburg?” snickers Lewinsky of Monica’s limelighted attorney.

Minutes after we’re seated, a young woman in a lime-green sweater set squats by our table. She’s an old friend of Monica’s, Michelle Glazov. Michelle is singing the FBI blues. The agency called her after she called Monica after the fur began to fly. Agents spent 20 minutes on the phone with Michelle, grilling her about names and e-mail addresses.

“If their conversation with me is indicative of how the FBI does investigations,” she’s telling Bernie and Barbara, his wife, “I understand why they don’t find anything out about anything. I don’t know anything anyway, but they didn’t even ask me anything worthwhile that was interesting. It was the most boring conversation.

“When we hung up the phone, [my] attorney and I looked at each other, and I said, ‘Is that normal?’ ”

Normal is becoming a relative term these days in Lewinskyland. At the moment, normal for Monica is limbo.

“Her life is not productive at all,” says Lewinsky, a balding and avuncular 55. “You go crazy sitting in a room, no matter how big the room is. There’s nothing to do. Bill Ginsburg takes her out to give her a little change of pace, but she can’t go anywhere. It’s lucky that the Watergate is what it is because there’s a supermarket there and a coffee shop.

“But other than that, she’s stuck. The FBI took her computer, so she can’t get into the Internet. I gave her that for a college graduation gift. They never replaced it.”

Photographers are still parked outside the Watergate at all hours. Things have gotten so cozy at Camp Monica that the photogs sent their quarry a picture of themselves. She sent back a box of cookies. Normally--if one can use that word--encounters aren’t so chummy. When Monica went to a hair salon, she was stalked by a crew with telephoto lenses.

“She was on TV with her hair being shampooed,” Lewinsky says. “All her privacy is gone, and it’s just terrible.”

Imagine waking up one day--Jan. 16 at 3 p.m., but who’s counting?--and finding your daughter at the center of a sex scandal involving the president. You open the paper and read details of your own bitter divorce that you think are skewed. Your colleagues stop you at your San Fernando Valley radiation oncology clinic to say they didn’t know you made so much money.

Your name is suddenly so well known that your identity is snatched by credit thieves. Your 1991 wedding pictures are sold to the Globe. Journalists stop cancer patients leaving your clinic to ask about you. Tabloid reporters call your office to sniff out a rumor that you’re having an affair with someone there.

You can’t talk to your daughter about anything personal--at a time when her personal needs must be great--because you think her phone is being tapped, and because you can’t know anything anyway or risk being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury.

All the while, your daughter’s legal bills are mounting at a rate of $100,000 a month. If she’s charged with perjury and goes to trial, they could easily top $1 million.

And you’re just a normal guy.

“Lo and behold, Monica is 24, and you can say, she’s an adult, why do I have to do it? The fact is, she’s my daughter. I have to help her. But nobody can make the kind of money it takes to fight the government.

“Look at [independent counsel Kenneth] Starr. He spent 40 million bucks. Clinton has a defense fund. He has a dinner party last week, and it was $15,000 a plate and he made $500,000 in one dinner for his legal bills. He’s got the machinery. When you donate to the president, the big corporations will do it, but they want something back.

“The reality is, we have nothing to offer to people. They have to give because they really feel the cause is something they want to support.”

You didn’t see much of Lewinsky until a few weeks ago, when he went on the “Today” show to announce the creation of the Monica Lewinsky Legal Defense Fund. The fund hasn’t exactly caught fire. Only $17,000 has come in to offset the tab to date of $300,000. Monica’s recently remarried mother, Marcia Lewis, isn’t contributing, Lewinsky says. She has her own legal bills after being subpoenaed by Starr.

Part owner of Western Tumor Medical Group Inc., he realizes America thinks of his family as those Mercedes-loving Lewinskys after the press picked up details of his divorce, filed nine years ago.

“[Marcia Lewis] wanted $20,000 for vacations, and it’s true that was part of the divorce,” he says. “But there’s the wish list, and then there’s the reality. The two were miles and miles apart because I didn’t make the kind of money they claimed.”

Lewinsky also knows it’s hard to drum up sympathy when people perceive his daughter as a hussy in a sex scandal, suspected of lying under oath that she didn’t have an affair with Clinton. He says the real battle is man against the machine.

“The bottom line is that she got trapped,” he says. “It’s a political game between Starr and the president, and she’s just the pawn that Starr has at this moment. And that’s why the Paula Jones case is sort of scary, because he lost another arena he was playing in.

“It’s frightening. The worst nightmare is to think she might go to jail. I don’t think the country would tolerate it, but then again you don’t know. And you don’t know what it’s going to take to defend her.”

As for Clinton, Lewinsky is circumspect. “I’m not going to say much about the president because I respect the office. I think he’s doing what he can to lead this country.

“On the other hand, he and I do have in common the fact that he’s got a daughter who’s 18 years old, who’s in college, who wants a future. And there’s no reason why I shouldn’t have the same aspirations for my daughter.”

Lewinsky doesn’t have much in common with the leader of the free world. He and Barbara live in an airy, but not opulent, home in a patch of Brentwood where houses are crammed together, a block and a half away from Nicole Simpson’s house, they note dryly.

Bernie met Barbara, 44, a returning student and former corporate administrator, on a blind date. She calls him “my honya.” Honya likes to cook elaborate meals. Barbara likes to be the sous-chef. Their walls are filled with landscape photographs Lewinsky takes on their trips throughout the Southwest.

Another picture, however, draws the eye--an AP photo of a somber Monica with a blur of her lawyer in the background.

Dad says Monica has her good days and bad. On a bad day, the enemy is everywhere. A bad day was discovering Linda Tripp was using her hairdresser. “After having been tape-recorded by Linda Tripp, she didn’t even think she could get her hair done because she didn’t know if her hairdresser would be involved or wired or whatever.”

Ginsburg is planning to give Monica clerical work to break the monotony. But for the moment, Monica doesn’t see beyond the moment. When Lewinsky brings up the future, she changes the subject. But all her father can see is her future.

“Monica is not a punch line to jokes. She’s a very smart, intelligent, beautiful girl who’s going to go places, and unfortunately she’s taking her licks, and hopefully she’ll come out OK from it.

“We’ll have to wait and see obviously. It’s going to take a lot of work on my part and on her part to try to get her back on track to do something with her life. But I think in the long run, she’ll be a better person.”

*

Dining Out on Friendship: Is there life after scandal? Probably. But there’s one thing you can definitely expect on the other side--a good meal.

Remember Faye Resnick? She is more than an FON (Friend of Nicole--Simpson, that is). She’s an FOS (Friend of Stacy--Gantzos, that is). Gantzos, former maitre d’ at Spago, Beverly Hills, and Drai’s, is now mistress of her own ship or “epicurean creation,” in press releases. That’s restaurant to you, bub.

Gantzos recently opened her own Amadeus Restaurant & Mozart Bar at 133 N. La Cienega Blvd., presided over by chef Paul Martel, a former protege of Claude Segal’s at L’Orangerie and Drai’s. Gantzos did it with a little help from her friend, Resnick, who worked with her on the decor. Neither woman has a professional design background, so Resnick just did what came naturally.

“My ex-husband and I had a lot of homes and decorated them all,” Resnick says, self-decorated in a white gown and matching boa. “So I just decided to decorate it like I would decorate my home.”

Judging from that, Resnick must be used to living among potted plants, reproductions of old masters, ornate columns and small armies of men carrying hors d’oeuvres.

Before taking on her emergency decorating duties, Resnick was working on her third book, “The Reinvention of a Woman.” It’s her prescription for women to get what they want out of life.

“ ‘The Reinvention of a Woman’ is how to do what you want to do, to forget about blocks by using visualization and yoga and tai chi, all of the different methods that in the past four years I’ve had to use. A lot. In order to cope.”

Hmmmmm. Now why would that be?

Resnick isn’t the only FOS in town. There were billions of them at the opening, including Frances Fisher, Mickey Rourke, Judd Nelson, Joely Fisher, Pete Rose, Tony Curtis and Vidal Sassoon. There were so many that the fire marshal closed down the party. For all you friendly Angelenos who like to clink glasses in rush-hour proximity, we have one request: Give chow hounds a fighting chance and learn to come fashionably late.