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And Monica does not like walls. Even after she transferred to Bel Air Prep School in her junior year, she kept a jealous eye on Adam, who became, according to his mother, the heartthrob of Beverly Hills High. In 1990, when he was named homecoming king, she "did everything in her power to get him back"--giving him presents and writing him an adoring letter "about how he walks down the hall like Moses, how everything parts for him." When she couldn't have Adam, she became pals with G.T., his younger brother. The two went to dinner and the movies, but it was all a device to get close to Adam, his mother says. By 1991 it was getting to be too much, and Laraine Dave quietly told Monica to move on. Shortly after, she began the relationship with Bleiler. Dave advised her against the affair, but she recalls the younger woman responding, "I'm just starving for love. And he's attracted to me."
With Monica, says a woman who met her in Washington in early 1996, "everything is tinged with sexuality. She always dressed in low-cut dresses. I remember a conversation once with her near tears because [then White House deputy chief of staff] Evelyn Lieberman had sent her home that day because of her clothing." Last week Jake Tapper, a writer for the weekly Washington City Paper, published an account of a date he had with Lewinsky a few weeks ago. Little happened, but she was smart and funny. Says Tapper: "I noticed her because, unlike most women in this town, she actually had some style." An acquaintance says Lewinsky was "one of the very few people where after the first 15 minutes you would remember her... She's very outgoing. Very extravagant." Once, she says, Lewinsky went to the birthday party of a woman she had never met before, arriving with a huge bouquet of balloons as a gift. There were always instant familiarity and intimacy. Says the acquaintance: "It wasn't so much that she'd be personal in a one-on-one conversation but with a group of five people she had never met before."
Such social graces were inherited. At Lewinsky's 23rd birthday party at the Palm, an expensive restaurant in Washington, her mother and her aunt Debra Finerman, Lewis' partner in the short-lived gossipist career, invited six women who seemed to know the celebrator only casually. "I think everyone at the table was surprised they'd been invited," says a friend. Lewinsky's mother tried to make everyone comfortable, but it was awkward. "I remember how affirming her mother was," says the friend, "to the point that she couldn't possibly have meant what she said, because everything was 'This is so fantastic, this is great, you girls are all so wonderful.'" And then, at the end of the meal, talk-show host Larry King stopped by the table. Says the friend: "It was obvious Monica had met Mr. King before." (Through his publicist, King says he has no recollection of the party. "I stop by birthday parties all the time," he said.)
Because of their brief reportorial careers, Lewis and her sister know many celebrities. Lewis, who has a place in a tony apartment building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, was not above dropping her daughter's job to impress. When Kevin McDonough, the editor of her book The Private Lives of the Three Tenors, told Lewis he was leaving New York City to do some work in Washington, Lewis told him, "My daughter works at the White House. She can give you a tour."