‘Twas Ever Thus: Rats Are Rats

Watching Monica S. Lewinsky’s seemingly unending interview with Barbara Walters earlier this week, a French cliche kept running through my mind like a mental version of subtitles smoothly rolling across the proscenium at the opera: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same: Married men who dally will forever want to have their cake and eat it, too.

I was one of the 48% of everyone who stopped what they were doing to hear Lewinsky speak in her own words about what happened during her 18-month long affair with the most powerful man in the world, and I was struck by several things: How poised she was, a distinct contrast to the whiny, hysterical snippets of her aired on the tapes her ersatz friend, Linda Tripp, used to publicize the affair. How much better looking she was than the photos taken of her on the fly indicated she was. How disconcertingly savvy she seemed about sex and her own sexuality. And how clueless she was in believing the pap her powerful boyfriend spoon-fed her.

I wanted to shake her and ask, “Honey, haven’t you watched any classic movies about women in love with married men? Don’t you know how this goes?” She seemed so sophisticated in some respects, so hopelessly naive in others.

She flirts with him in the workplace. It quickly goes from ribald joking to physical intimacy. Afterward she plaintively asks him if she’s just a sexual outlet for him or if she means more, and he tearfully protests she should never think of herself that way, that yes, she means something to him. Translation: “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning!”

She sat at his feet while he stroked her hair and talked about things he allegedly didn’t share with anyone else. Their Special Time. His version of “my wife doesn’t understand me.” He mused that he “might be alone in three years.” She, eagerly, assumed this to mean he would be leaving his wife--finally. (How many times have women involved with married men heard that?) She grows anxious, jealous and depressed as she watches him with his wife, traveling the globe, laughing with her, using the conversational shorthand of a long marriage.

And, as the script usually has it, after he’s 1) had enough; 2) become convinced that she’s is taking too much away from his real life (you know, the one he had no intention of giving up), and/or 3) he’s finally so embarrassed at his indiscretion, he walks away. Or runs away. Or trashes her.

Monica’s boyfriend, Monica tells her new best friend, Barbara, chose options two and three--on national television. Denied her. Refused to speak her name. Shook his finger in our faces in the classic counteroffensive the Cheater’s Handbook advises (“deny everything--vigorously and often”) and left her feeling, she says, “like a piece of trash. Dirty, used.” That’s what happens in the movies, too. The more things change, the more they do, indeed, stay depressingly the same.

Now it’s time for Monica to write her own script. (Hint: “Fatal Attraction” is not the way to go, hon). As Patricia Hearst sighed in an interview recently, “

as far as the public is concerned, I’ll always have three words--’kidnapped newspaper heiress’--before my name.” For a long, long time the words “Monica S. Lewinsky” will be fodder for late night talk show hosts and stand up comedians. But other young women who exercised bad judgment have gone beyond their initial mistakes to make lives for themselves.

Maybe Monica should dig up Donna Rice’s number, or Megan Marshak’s, and ask how they managed to do it.