(3 of 5)
Young and insecure but eager to go somewhere in a city consumed by politics--a subject in which she had little interest and even less expertise--Lewinsky sought out older women as mentors and older men as lovers. The State Department official, a woman, says she hardly noticed Lewinsky after their first meeting but got to know her because Monica often phoned proposing they have lunch or dinner. An older female colleague at the Pentagon, where Lewinsky worked after leaving the White House in April 1996, says she spoke to Lewinsky a few times a day and had drinks with her occasionally. In their conversations, Monica did not seem sex-starved or deluded, instead talking mostly about clothes, shopping, her family--and her boyfriend, an unmarried, stocky Pentagon official 20 or more years her senior. Lewinsky often complained that the relationship was sexually but not emotionally fulfilling. Yet she stayed with him until last year and apparently never told him stories about having sex with the President. "Monica knew her boyfriend was dating other women," the friend says. "She didn't like it, but she went on with the relationship. She'd get upset, she'd call him, she gave him a number of gifts, she worried the relationship was always on his terms."
Longtime friends say Monica's attraction to older people, male and female, can be traced back to insecurities stemming from her parents' acrimonious divorce in 1987. As a teenager she desperately sought the affection of friends, showering them with gifts. "Monica had this inner hunger," says Laraine Pieri Dave, a Los Angeles woman who became a surrogate mother to Monica following the Lewinskys' divorce. Monica, who had grown up in the luxury of a $1.6 million Beverly Hills home, was estranged from her father. Acquaintances say Monica struggled, and often failed, to please him. Her mother, Marcia Lewis, was devastated by the breakup and was struggling to start a career as a gossip writer. "Being a single mom, she was trying to make a life for herself," says Dave. "Monica missed the family."
At the time, Monica had a major crush on Dave's son Adam. Both were 14. "She really had an obsession for Adam," Dave says. "He was her first love, her first steady." So when Dave opened her doors to Monica, she rushed in, with all her vulnerabilities. She clung to the family, and Adam in particular, spending much of the next five years in their Bel Air house, swimming in the pool or watching the Dave boys play Nintendo and often engaging in long heart-to-hearts with Laraine, even counseling Dave about her stepdaughter. "She was Johnny-on-the-spot for us," Dave says. But Monica's family problems, compounded by those of adolescence, resulted in large weight gains (she was almost 225 lbs. at one point). To mask it, Lewinsky often wore black clothes and black makeup. Dave says she "worked with [Monica] on exercise and eating right and getting into the psychological perspective...how beautiful she is, and how beautiful she would be if she slimmed down." Monica had impulsively dumped Adam because he was inattentive, and he soon lost interest in her. Says Laraine: "She was very demanding, but she lived to regret it. He put a wall around himself."