Conflicting Images Emerge For Lewinsky -- `Two Monicas' Seen: One Is `Polite,' The Other `Arrogant'

WASHINGTON - The woman at the center of the storm that threatens a presidency remains an enigma wrapped in conflicting images:

She is a rich kid who alternated dresses with grungewear, who helped the needy in a series of unpaid internships, but then opted out for a career in corporate public relations. She is an ebullient, vulnerable "child" infatuated with a president. She is a despairing, ravaged woman who in tape-recorded conversations describes him as "the creep" and "Dear Schmucko."

One of President Clinton's closest confidants says her drive, ambition and personality were "impressive." But White House aides say she was distracted in her job and had a conspicuous crush on the president.

Her boss at the Pentagon calls her competent, reliable and energetic. But others there fault her for making sexually explicit jokes and time-wasting phone calls.

She is described by some as "sweet," "polite" and "intelligent"; by others as "arrogant," "spoiled" and "immature."

A government official who interviewed Monica Lewinsky when she first applied for her ill-fated White House internship experienced firsthand what might be called the problem of the two Monicas. The FBI had found nothing derogatory in her background. But then there were the intangibles.

"There goes trouble," the official said he thought to himself after the interview, "or there goes something special."

Beltway power, L.A. glitz

This account of Lewinsky is based on dozens of interviews with people who knew her in California, Oregon and Washington, D.C., including neighbors, teachers, fellow students, and co-workers. It is supplemented with court records and other documents obtained by The Washington Post.

This is the story of a strange collision of Beltway power and Los Angeles glitz, wilfulness and hard work, coursing ambition and careening naivete, and perhaps that explains why so many people disagree so strongly about the woman at the center of it.

To some, she was an accident waiting to happen. Not three years removed from her undergraduate days, Lewinsky claimed to have received gifts from the president - she bragged to a Washington Post reporter that she gave him a tie - and she got career help from Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan.

All this from someone who started the 1990s as a high-school student in Beverly Hills. Whose mother wrote a salacious book about opera singers. Who once gave the Los Angeles Times an admiring quote about a soap opera: " `Days of Our Lives' adds spice to life," Lewinsky told its reporter in a 1991 interview.

Now her life has become the ultimate soap opera, far more salacious than anything her mother could write.

"She is at the vortex of a storm involving probably the three most powerful men in the United States - the president, Vernon Jordan and the independent prosecutor, Kenneth Starr," Lewinsky's lawyer, William Ginsburg, told CNN Friday. "She's devastated."

So far the young life of Monica Samille Lewinsky, 24, doctor's daughter, psychology major, White House intern, Pentagon assistant, neatly divides into West Coast and East Coast. In both places she was bubbly, vivacious and ambitious, many say. On the West Coast she prospered. On the East Coast, she paid the price.

Her painful predicament comes through on conversations that were secretly taped by her friend and confidante Linda Tripp. One of those conversations was described by Newsweek this way:

"Look, maybe we should just tell the creep," Lewinsky says to Tripp. "Maybe we should just say, don't ever talk to me again, I (expletive) you over (by telling others about the affair), now you have this information, do whatever you want with it."

The demarcation occurred in the summer of 1995 when Lewinsky rode family connections into a job at the White House, fresh from a typical student existence at Lewis & Clark College, a school set among the tall firs outside Portland.

Within a few months, in the hallowed hush of America's most historic residence, Lewinsky would later claim to her friend Tripp that she began a sexual relationship with the president of the United States.

Her neighbors in Portland remember her with upbeat phrases: nice, pretty, amiable, sweet, energetic, vibrant. She baby-sat for her young married neighbors. She invited some elderly neighbors to a backyard barbecue. "It was all very decorous," recalled Carl Pape, 75. "We liked her."

Parents' acrimonious divorce

Her sweetness and edge developed in two of the nation's plushest neighborhoods, Brentwood and Beverly Hills. Born in San Francisco on July 23, 1973, Monica Lewinsky moved with her family when she was a young girl to the fashionable suburb of Brentwood, where her father is a prominent oncologist who practices in nearby Van Nuys at the Western Tumor Medical Group and teaches at the University of Los Angeles, California.

Her parents endured an acrimonious divorce in 1987. In the documents, the Lewinskys' lifestyle is described as "extravagant," including vacations that cost more than $20,000, a 1987 Mercedes 560 SEL and a Cadillac Avante. They split property that included a $1.6 million Beverly Hills home.

From 1988 to 1990, she attended famed Beverly Hills High School. Unafraid to speak up in class, she was known among classmates and teachers for her spunk. "She was very, very nice, very social, extra outgoing," the student said. "A very sweet person."

"A genuine big heart," the teacher said. "This girl was a hard, hard worker who put in long, long hours in the theater department working on the technical crews. She was working in the trenches. She was not one of those Beverly Hills 90210 girls."

She transferred and spent her last year of high school at Bel Air Prep School, an exclusive, 200-student private school where tuition is $12,000 a year. She was graduated from Bel Aire Prep, since renamed Pacific Hills School, in 1991.

Her principal, Richard Makoff, described her last week as "a nice young kid, neither an outstanding student nor a poor student. A very average, typical teenager," said Makoff, adding that she had a "nice singing voice" and was active in the school chorus.

Her less-flattering side

After graduation, Lewinsky attended Santa Monica College, a two-year community college.

In 1993, she transferred for her final two years to Lewis & Clark College, a 3,400-student liberal-arts school outside Portland, where she made the dean's list one term in 1994 and was one of about 40 psychology majors in a graduating class of 362 in 1995.

Her less-flattering side came through to a man who described himself as a college friend. Appearing on Nightline Thursday, Stephen Enghouse questioned Lewinsky's credibility, saying she was "kind of young, seeks attention, and I believe, would be prone to sensationalize or overdramatize or exaggerate specific areas or instances in her life that would cause her to gain more attention."

Several other college friends, however, said they had never known Lewinsky to stretch the truth or seek attention.

"I think she's a very wonderful individual," said Linda Estergard, also of Portland. "To see people go on TV and do something like that to someone, I was very depressed when I saw that. I do know there are a lot of people out here who are supporting her."

A resume Lewinsky provided to the Pentagon indicates that while in school in Portland she worked as an intern at a mental-health center and later in the Public Defender's Office.

Asked how Lewinsky performed, a spokeswoman at the Public Defender's Office, Kristin Constans, said, "There's nothing (indicated) that's been negative."

`Obsession' with Clinton

Lewinsky got from Lewis & Clark to the White House through the intervention of retired New York insurance magnate Walter Kaye, a friend of Hillary Clinton's and Lewinsky's family, according to a government investigator. Kaye is also a large contributor to the Democratic Party and was once an overnight guest at the White House.

Kaye is friends with Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis, 49, a writer. In 1996, Lewis published "The Private Lives of the Three Tenors: Behind the Scenes With Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras."

In the publicity for the book, Lewis teases the reader with the idea that she had an affair with Domingo, however the book provides no backing for an affair.

For at least part of her tenure as an intern in Washington, Lewinsky has lived with her mother in a family apartment at the Watergate Hotel.

As one of about 1,000 unpaid interns taken on by the White House each year, Lewinsky began work in June 1995 in the office of then-Chief of Staff Leon Panetta.

One White House intern, who worked near Lewinsky in the East Wing during the summer of 1995, recalled that she seemed obsessed with Clinton and portrayed herself as having an uncommon amount of interaction with him.

"She would come into our office . . . and tell stories," said the intern, who asked not be identified. "It would be things like, she got a message from the president, and he needed to see her as soon as possible, or the flowers she got on her desk were from the president."

The intern scoffed. "I would think, `Right. Well, I just got a call from the Kremlin.' After a while, I just couldn't believe her any more."

But another former intern, Shannon Joyce, a 22-year-old George Washington University senior who worked in the same office as Lewinsky during the fall of 1995, remembers her co-worker merely as extroverted, hardworking and ambitious. Lewinsky said nothing out of the ordinary, Joyce recalled.

Lewinsky moved from her unpaid position in the Chief of Staff's Office to a paid position handling letters for the Office of Legislative Affairs in December 1995, a month after the time she later claimed to Tripp that she began the relationship with the president.

Lewinsky stuck out in Pentagon

In April 1996, she went to the Pentagon as a $30,658-a-year assistant to chief Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. White House officials say they engineered the move because Lewinsky appeared to be infatuated with Clinton.

Lewinsky stuck out in the staid Pentagon because she was much younger and more colorful than everyone else. She usually worked well past 7 p.m., sometimes until 4 a.m. when she was on overseas assignment. "I respected her as a co-worker," Lt. Cmdr. Jamie Graybeal said.

Co-workers at the Pentagon said she had dated two top officials, both single men in their 40s. One relationship appeared to have been a brief romance; the other went on for about a year.

Her boss, Bacon, said, "I certainly found her able to do her job and I found her reliable."

One former colleague says he was impressed when she was invited to the formal welcoming ceremonies for Chinese President Jiang Zemin on the South Lawn last fall - and brought a mildly retarded office mate along as her guest.

"She chose him to bring to the ceremony and that's an indication of a thoughtfulness you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 24-year-old," he said.

The tapes Tripp recorded make clear that Lewinsky had recently lost some of that youthful idealism.

"I was thinking about the fact that I sent a note to Nancy (Hernreich, an assistant to the president), a note to Betty (Currie, the president's personal secretary), and a note to creep to thank them all for when my family came for the radio address. The note I sent to him, `Dear Schmucko, thank you for being, as my little nephew said, it was great to meet the principal of the United States.' "

Material from The New York Times is included in this report.