A night with Monica Lewinsky

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 14 MARCH 1999

WHEN I WAS 11, as cute as a grazed elbow in short pants and haversack, dreaming of growing up to be an ichthyologist or Joe Hardy or, in my more solitary moments, that woman from the Morkels advert, I conceived a fascination for a girl in my class. In fact, we all did, after it became known that Shirley Whiteside had gone all the way with Craig Barnsley, an oafish youth in Standard 5 who, with an unrelated passion, used to waylay me on the way home and make me eat grasshoppers.

I had only a fuzzy grasp of what going all the way might entail. Surely Shirley didn’t actually swallow the grasshoppers? (I used to stow their chewed-up corpses under my tongue, grinning and mumbling with a studious nonchalance, then covertly spit them out once Barnsley had released the downward pressure on the back of my head. It is a technique that even today serves me well in editorial conferences.)

Still, Shirley was pretty hot stuff among the boys of Mrs Kincaid’s form class – we speculated endlessly about the events of that hot Durban afternoon beneath the frangipani tree while Mr and Mrs Whiteside were at work. Steven Kenton thought it had happened in the shady ditch behind the woodwork room, but no one ever listened to Steven Kenton.

Shirley was the focus of a small-boy curiosity of almost unbearable intensity. I would lie awake at night in a restless fever – in the morning the sweat stains on the pillow (if you tilted your head and squinched up your eyes) described the silhouette of Shirley Whiteside. When she played those mysterious games on the playground with the other girls, involving a length of elastic and plenty of squeals, her calves flexed unfathomably and her ponytail shimmied and trembled with the impenetrable secrets of adulthood.

Happily, I never learnt what went on at the bottom of the Whitesides’ garden. As a result, my imagination prospered, and the sticky, tawdry disappointments of grown-ups had to wait until I was, well, grown up. And a good thing too – adolescence would have been positively unbearable without the comforting throb of itchy-fingered anticipation.

All of which may do little to explain why I felt so unshakeably empty and depressed while watching Jon Snow interview Monica Lewinsky last Sunday (Carte Blanche, M-Net, 7pm). “You have the right to see it all” is Carte Blanche’s oft-repeated motto, a sentiment with which I am in hearty disagreement.

Frankly, the world would be a great deal more attractive with a few more veils and secrets and frilly petticoats, several degrees more appealing if it maintained hidden areas of tangled undergrowth and deep shade, dark places where daylight never reaches.

The Lewinsky affair, of course, was never the stuff that dreams or fantasies are made of. It was a tatty little episode, as dull and workaday as a suburban husband flirting with his neighbour’s wife over the Sunday afternoon braai, as routinely tiresome as an attractive woman being interviewed by Tony Sanderson. It would be dreary enough to watch it unfold in real life; to watch it on television was to feel one’s own life shrink to the stature of a dripping garden tap.

There was a listless diversion in spotting how many sexual double entendres Snow could weasel into the interview (“What did you hope would flow from the relationship?”), but the pleasure soon congealed.

There was a brief interest in determining which of the two better carried their weight. Monica, though looking as slinky as a bag of charcoal briquettes tied in the middle, edged a narrow victory by virtue of her tactically sound legs-crossed position, which broke up her outline; Snowie just slouched in his chair with his belly thundering upwards like the dome on Capitol Hill.

There was even the perverse entertainment of watching Derek Watts acting like some husky-voiced shill for a Mills and Boon serial at each ad break: “He needed lovin’, she was ready to oblige,” Derek twinkled throatily. “After the break we pick up the story!”

But these were temporary pleasures. Ultimately nothing could disguise the fact that we were watching a perfectly ordinary young woman describing a depressingly ordinary encounter with her boss. “Did you feel a sexual connection?” demanded Snow delicately.

“Yes,” she said patiently.

“Did it make you tingle?” said Snow, drawing on a lifetime’s experience of cheap soap operas.

“Tee-hee,” said Monica Lewinsky.

Snow’s high-school debating-club gravitas rapidly became comical. “The sex was very one-way, if I may put it in a male sense,” he murmured, smoothing his tie. Monica frowned, as though displeased at the thought of him putting it at all.

“He was a quarter of a century older than you,” persisted Snowie gravely, for all the world as though discussing a matter of international importance.

“Oh, but age is just a number representing how long you have been on the planet,” said Monica confidently. There was no arguing with that.

She was likeable enough, was Monica, and bright in a general sort of way. She was the girl you see in orientation week at university – keen, well groomed, eager to be liked, drinking too much peach schnapps and giggling while she puts her hands in some postgraduate’s trouser pockets. Her ordinariness was too stark; it made our voyeurism too suburban. If we’re going to feel cheap, let us at least be entertained. Let’s have some sensation in our sensationalism.