First there was Paula Jones and her lurid tale of a furtive attempt at seduction by then Governor Clinton in an Arkansas hotel room. Tacky and seemingly out for a buck, it was easy to disbelieve Paula Jones.
But then came Monica. What gave 24-year-old Monica Lewinsky a sad credibility was that she never had a tale to tell the public. She never accused the President of anything. All she did was giggle and snort and whine about "the big creep" on the telephone to an older woman she considered her friend.
The fact that Lewinsky had no axe to grind, the fact that she sounded on those tapes like a rather silly and smitten and spoiled young woman who wasn't getting all she wanted from an inattentive boyfriend had a disastrous ring of credibility that did more damage to Mr Clinton that the most besmirched litigant ever could have.
Where did Monica come from? And how does it occur that a young woman who does not, charitably, bear a physical resemblance to Sophia Loren or share an intellectual kinship with, say, Madeleine Albright, whose diary entries do not put one in mind of Virginia Woolf, how is it that this young woman can manage to find herself everyday traipsing the narrow, thickly carpeted hallways of the White House West Wing to have a chat with the leader of the free world?
The answer is the Hollywood-Washington neighbourhood, a land of campaign contributions, favours owed and debts collected on, a place that, more than Mount Rushmore, forms the permanent landscape of American politics. Monica Lewinsky would never have been able to get near the White House if she came from Montana. Instead, Monica Lewinsky hailed from Beverly Hills, from a world that values power and connections and money and that is both the beginning and end of the story.
Monica's father is a well-known Los Angeles oncologist named Bernard Lewinsky. Her mother, Marcia Lewis, is a familiar breed in Beverly Hills, a well-heeled socialite who in 1995 turned her attraction to glamour to publishing, writing a book about opera stars' private lives. Monica's aunt and a close confidante is Debra Finerman, a woman who writes a gossip column about the Kennedy family called "Kennedy World" for the Washington DC magazine, Capitol Style. Her parents were divorced, and Monica soon was shuttled back and forth from her mother's Beverly Hills home and her father's home in Brentwood. From accounts of people who knew her then, Monica was a troubled adolescent struggling with a weight problem in a world where beauty and thinness are exalted. Her academic record was spotty. Though it is often reported she attended Beverly Hills High School, she also attended a private school called Bel Air Prep, an institution known in these circles as a not particularly prestigious but nonetheless pricey (tuition is about $7,000 a year) place that caters for difficult rich kids. Classes are small and teachers can keep a close eye on students.
Still, on graduation, Monica was fairly directionless. And that's where the White House internship comes in. Monica's parents prevailed upon a family friend and wealthy Clinton campaign contributor named Walter Kaye to obtain an internship for their daughter. Not to disparage many deserving White House interns, but the fact is that White House internships are for rich, well-connected American kids in the 90s what a summer in Europe was in a previous age. It's what you do when you don't know what else to do with yourself. Walter Kaye picked up the telephone and Monica Lewinsky became a White House intern, sorting mail for the President's chief of staff.
Despite such presidential proximity, some 21-year-olds might be too intimidated to flirt with the President of the United States, much less consider an extra-marital affair. But not Monica Lewinsky and it easy to understand why. She comes from a neighbourhood where anything seems possible, anything can be purchased. Two blocks away from her father's home in Brentwood, Monica's home when she stays in Los Angeles, lived a woman named Nicole Brown Simpson, a simple young woman who once married the most famous football star in history, O. J. Simpson. Across the street on Barrington Boulevard lives a little 87-year old lady named Gloria Stuart who after 40 years in obscurity got a starring role in Titanic and was nominated for an Oscar.
It's an upscale place, but it's also a neighbourhood that some are beginning to call the Bermuda Triangle of Brentwood. Television trucks and satellites dishes, stationed to record the comings and goings of Monica and her father, now seem as native to the area as Starbucks coffee outlets and 24-hour-a-day gyms.
In any neighbourhood, there is the other, lesser, side of the street. The other side of such an "anything is possible" hallucination is the abrupt realisation that sometimes not everything is possible. Connections and power take the residents of both Brentwood and the White House a long way. But the law about lying under oath is clear, and both Ms Lewinsky and Mr Clinton gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones lawsuit. After months of dodging and obfuscating, Monica Lewinsky is going to have to go before a grand jury and tell the truth. President Bill Clinton will have to do the same.