At ‘Monica Beach,’ a High Tide of Media and Waves of Curious

The sun had barely cleared the dome of the nearby Capitol when Monica S. Lewinsky arrived at the courthouse Thursday morning for her long-awaited first date with a federal grand jury. But the jacket of her dark blue linen suit already had begun to wrinkle and her trip through the wringer was only beginning.

“It’s a national tourist attraction,” Frank Viscomi, a spectator from Glen Rock, N.J., declared. “It’s as big as Ellen going gay. It’s the 11th minute of Monica’s 15 minutes of fame.”

In an era when political scandal has replaced bear baiting as spectator sport, events such as Lewinsky’s grand jury appearance have taken on the trappings of formal ritual. From independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation of her relationship with President Clinton back to the Iran-Contra and even Watergate scandals, the choreography has become as precise as a minuet.

“I know what a historic event this is,” said Dave Cook of St. Augustine, Fla., explaining why he had dyed his hair orange, donned a pink T-shirt and positioned himself outside the courthouse with a poster saying: “It’s not the stain on the dress--It’s the stain on our country, Stupid.” Echoing many of his fellow Americans, Cook said he wished Clinton would apologize and, after that, “let’s move on.”

Faithful to tradition, Lewinsky arrived at the courthouse in a motorcade, amid the heavy security appropriate to such an occasion. A member of her legal team, Sydney Jean Hoffmann, gave her a hug. And Lewinsky used a side entrance to the building, not hiding exactly but giving television cameras their indispensable footage without risk of unseemly questions from the horde of reporters.

Across the way, a street musician played “The Star Spangled Banner” on his saxophone.

In Washington these days, all the world’s a stage. And every player has one eye on the evening news.

Accordingly, right on cue, farther down Pennsylvania Avenue after Lewinsky had entered the courthouse, President Clinton appeared before cameras in a carefully staged Rose Garden ceremony about the life-sparing effectiveness of the Brady gun-control bill. He looked serene and confident as always.

The moment Clinton finished speaking, the Marine Band struck up “Stars and Stripes Forever,” drowning out a reporter shouting “Are you concerned about Ms. Lewinsky testifying today?”

Many of the lawyers involved in the controversy--including Lewinsky attorneys Plato Cacheris and Jacob A. Stein--honed their scandal skills 25 years ago during Watergate.

But Cacheris and Stein did not ignore changing fashions. They delivered Lewinsky to the courthouse in a gleaming black sport utility vehicle, not the black Cadillac limousine or just-a-regular-guy taxicab favored during Watergate.

For Lewinsky and Clinton, the stakes of the ongoing controversy are enormous: for her, a potentially inescapable cloud over the rest of her life; for him, the possibility of a an impeachment ordeal in Congress.

For spectators, however, Thursday’s event resembled a carnival. Hundreds of photographers, television technicians and reporters mobbed the courthouse.

Television networks erected tents. Reporters brought in picnic lunches. A Republican political action committee opened a free lemonade stand. Cable News Network trundled out a cherry-picker crane to hoist its cameras above the fray.

And what event such as this would be complete without its own jokes? “Camp O.J.,” some called the media stakeout. “No, it’s Monica Beach,” others insisted. And the New York Daily News recounted CNN’s use of the crane under the heading, “My Cherry Amour,” a play on a rock song from Clinton’s youth.

Similarly, the midday White House briefing had the awkward tone of a comedy show in church. Deputy spokesman Barry Toiv could not suppress a smile as he repeated the same non-answers over and over. How can the White House pretend it doesn’t know what’s going on? a reporter finally demanded.

“What is going on?” Toiv dead-panned as the briefing room dissolved in laughter.

Tourists leaving the National Gallery of Art, just across Pennsylvania Avenue on the northeast corner of the Mall, were drawn to the circus-like panorama outside the courthouse.

They snapped pictures, sometimes filming bored professionals filming them. A passing dog attracted a swarm of cameras. Foreign correspondents broadcast home in Spanish, French, Japanese and proper English.

The curious visitors soon found that they had a fairly good chance of appearing on television themselves, interviewed by correspondents with time on their hands and little hope of learning what was going on inside the courthouse.

Phyllis Hancock and her 32-year-old son, George, of Bowling Green, Ky., carried hand-lettered signs that proclaimed “Mothers for Monica” and “Monica Tells the Truth, Slick Willie Must.”

“We were on the way to Niagara Falls,” George Hancock told reporters, “when we decided that two people should stop and say that Monica was abused.”

When Lewinsky entered the courthouse, Hancock rushed forward to wave his supportive sign, pushing himself into the sight-line of several cameras. The offended cameramen loosed a burst of lusty curses, and a policeman rushed to push him out of the way.

“I thought he was going to get arrested,” said Phyllis Hancock.

Theresa Walterbach of St. Louis has been walking on Pennsylvania Avenue every morning since she arrived in Washington earlier this week and came upon the courthouse this morning a few minutes before Lewinsky did. Walterbach snapped several photos from perhaps 30 yards away, somewhat closer than most camera crews.

“I was right there,” she said, “but they [the professionals] have telescopic lenses. I’ll see in tomorrow’s papers what theirs look like. But I won’t see mine for eight days.”

Walterbach lamented the tawdriness of the matters under discussion in the grand jury room. “Explaining it to the kids is the worst,” she said.

Lilie Smith of Manassas, Va., a 72-year-old woman in a wheelchair, carried a defiant, homemade placard that thundered: “No matter what Clinton says or does, no matter who supports him, there is a vile stain in the White House--spreading.”

Smith, however, seemed more upset over Clinton’s foreign policy than his private conduct. She told reporters that she had voted for him for a first term and then turned against him.

In the courthouse, which is off limits to photographers but open to reporters, journalists scurried about for tidbits of information. When Judy Smith, the spokeswoman for Lewinsky, came down to the cafeteria in the basement, she was quickly surrounded by a dozen reporters.

“Is Monica hungry?”

“No,” Smith replied. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“How is it going? We don’t have anything. We’ll take anything you can give us.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s a tough job.”

At day’s end, as reporters who had been waiting in the lobby for hours were herded back by guards, Lewinsky slipped out the side door of the courthouse and left as she came, in a sport utility vehicle.

Some reporters called out questions at her back, their focus reflecting their view of the event:

“How was it?”

“Did you cry?”

If the atmosphere of the day was half circus, half soap opera, some remembered the painful reality underneath.

“I feel sorry for the president,” a television cameraman staking out Lewinsky’s Watergate apartment said. “I mean, how does he sit at the breakfast table with Chelsea and Hillary with newspapers about Lewinsky facing him?”

And, putting the whole business in a larger perspective, an official at the Saudi Arabian Embassy across the street confessed that, until today, he had not realized Lewinsky was his neighbor. He had never understood what all those TV cameras were doing, he said.

Times staff writers Elizabeth Shogren, Chun Lee and Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story.