Who Is Eleanor Mondale?

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At this time, of course, Clinton was winding down his affair with Lewinsky -- who had been transferred to the Pentagon in April, and was to have no more sexual relations with Clinton for the rest of 1996. It's not much of a stretch to imagine Monica picking up a newspaper in June, seeing the photo of Mondale jogging with Clinton and reading more than she should have into the suggestive headlines. Mondale's national profile was rising; she had already done a photo shoot for Vogue (she would do another in November 1997, just before visiting the White House). If Monica was watching her boyfriend's moves with anything like the obsession her character suggests, it was here -- a year before the Northwestern gate incident -- that the seeds of jealousy were planted.

As it turned out, 1997 was Mondale's year. Her coverage of the 1996 Democratic convention for E! caught the eye of the networks; in November '97, she joined the team at CBS "This Morning," reporting from L.A. She had a grueling schedule, having to be up at 3:30 a.m. and ready to go live on the air two hours later. Then she had to rush over to the E! studios to work on her weekly show. At the same time, Mondale hired an acting coach and started auditioning for sitcoms again. And she began to be linked romantically to the Philadelphia-born billionaire Ron Perelman. Perelman was chairman of Revlon, and a friend to both Vernon Jordan and the President. In fact, he was one of Clinton's most dependable contributors, his mainline to Hollywood money. Like Eleanor, he was twice divorced; he was also extricating himself from a third marriage. In October, the New York Post spotted the pair in a clinch at Le Cirque 2000. Once again, Eleanor was the darling of the gossip pages.

It was against this busy backdrop, this social whirlwind of a life, that the December visit that caused Monica so much anguish took place. Mondale was in town to cover the Kennedy Center honors, and remembers it like this: "I briefly stopped at the White House to say hello on my way to interview the honorees, as our families have been friends for decades. I have no knowledge of anything else that may have taken place that day. Ms. Lewinsky's speculation is baseless, and has absolutely no foundation in fact."

That's what Mondale told the grand jury on July 16 this year, when Starr called her in to testify. Like the obsessive prosecutor he is, Starr wanted to cover all the angles. And so Mondale ended up contributing a single word to the Starr report: "correctly" -- as in "Ms. Lewinsky correctly surmised that the President was meeting with Ms. Mondale." Was Starr trying to make the proverbial, subtle-as-a-brick inference of a Clinton-Mondale affair? That's certainly the implication of footnote 739 -- Lewinsky's jealous comment to Tripp -- which isn't even referenced in the text. Still, her presence in the report has given rise to something Mondale is very used to by now -- a lot of gossip. "We knew there was some rumor back in January that Monica Lewinsky was jealous of my sister," Ted Mondale told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last week. "That's pretty ridiculous. The fact that she'd have a meeting at the White House is not news. We've known their family a long time."