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This story first appeared in the Jan. 28, 1998 edition of WW.
London Sun reporter Peter Sheridan was working on a profile of Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio last week when Monica Lewinsky became the most common two words in the English language.
The Sun, Great Britain’s No. 1 daily—the one with the infamous “page 3″ girlie pictures—is London’s equivalent of The National Enquirer. Wednesday night, the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper pulled Sheridan off the Hollywood beat and sent him to Portland.
Casually yet fashionably dressed in a black leather jacket, black leather shoes and jeans, the silver-and-black-haired Sheridan flew in from The Sun’s L.A. bureau Thursday morning and went straight to Lewis & Clark College to get the sordid details on Lewinsky’s past.
Sheridan made no bones about his motives. When he arrived at PDX he had no pretensions about serious journalism or meaningful political issues. The gossip-driven Sun, after all, gravitates toward headline stories like “FILTHY SOT CAUGHT IN UNDERCLOTHES.” The last time Sun reporters were in Portland, they were on the trail of Tonya Harding.
“There are two ways of looking at this story,” Sheridan says. “You can look at the politics of depositions and impeachment or you can go after what people are really interested in—how good is Monica in the bedroom?”
Sheridan scoffs at “snooty” papers like The New York Times and his “bloody appalling” competition, the London Guardian. “They leech the life out of stories,” he says in the heaviest of English accents.
Sheridan wanted to know if “Lewinsky had an inflatable Clinton doll in her closet.”
But, like the hundreds of news reporters who meandered around Lewis & Clark’s soggy campus in the days after the scandal broke on Wednesday morning, Sheridan found no skeletons—inflatable or otherwise.
After digging around campus for two hours, Sheridan discovered that most of the students on campus simply didn’t know Lewinsky. Lewinsky transferred to the small liberal-arts college in Southwest Portland in the fall of 1993 and graduated in the spring of ‘95. She lived off campus.
Her professors weren’t talking, either. Some of them, in fact, had gone into hiding.
By noon Thursday, when Sheridan decided to pack it up, a handful of reporters from Hard Copy, Newsweek and supermarket tabloid The Star were milling around in front of the Student Union, pestering each other for leads and Lewinsky photos.
Sheridan headed back to the parking lot. “What the fuck am I doing here?”
Puffing on a Marlboro Light while dictating his initial round of notes via cell phone to a Teletype machine back in London, Sheridan sounded disgusted with how little he had managed to get so far.
“She was quiet and unassuming and kept to herself,” Sheridan said, quoting the one student he’d scared up who had had a class with Lewinsky. “She was attractive, but I never saw her with a boyfriend.”
Sheridan shook his head in annoyance. “I didn’t get any dilly quotes,” he said (there’s that English accent again).
Sheridan and Sun photographer Jon Freeman, however, were not done. Hopping into their rented Ford Contour shortly after noon. they headed across town to Northeast 40th Avenue and Hassalo Street, where Lewinsky had lived for two years.
On the drive over, Sheridan and Freeman reflected on the seriousness of the story.
“This has powerful implications,” Freeman said. “It could topple the president. I mean, what do you make of the semen on the dress?”
“Oh, you mean the ‘First Stain’?” said Sheridan.
“Yeah, they might have to get some presidential semen under oath. ‘Place your right hand on the Bible, Sir, and your left hand...”
As they turned off 39th Avenue onto Northeast Hassalo Street, Sheridan clicked on his cell phone.
“‘Allo!” he announced to his colleagues back in London. “Here I am in the pouring rain of beautiful Portland, Oregon, on the trail of President Clinton’s lover.”
Hundreds of reporters—looking like a stream of trick-or-treaters—had been door-knocking up and down Lewinsky’s block for at least 24 hours by the time Sheridan and Freeman showed up at 12:30 pm Thursday. One neighbor, hearing Sheridan’s English accent, told him that someone from London’s Daily Mail had been by earlier in the day.
This unnerved Sheridan; he asked the neighbor for a detailed description of the rival who may have scooped him.
Sheridan had nothing to worry about. As he’d found on the Lewis & Clark campus, there wasn’t much of anything to scoop here.
Sheridan talked to the same cast of characters that had already appeared on the local news and in The Oregonian. Brian Larson, who lives in the house where Lewinsky lived; 75-year-old neighbor Shirley Pape; and chatty Theresa Lovett, who used Lewinsky as a baby sitter. They’d all told the same story over and over. “Bubbly.” “Nice.” “Unremarkable.”
Like the other reporters, Sheridan visited Larson first. But his approach differed somewhat: Charging up the steps to Larson’s door, Sheridan asked, “So, were you her former lover? Were there any sex toys with Bill’s name on it?”
Larson smiled politely and told a story he’d told probably a hundred times over the course of the past day. He could almost see the quotes before they were printed: “The first time I came over here to look at the house I met Lewinsky. She was the only one here. She looked like a typical college student. On her way to or from aerobics class. The place looked like they had a kegger the night before, with beer cans around....”
Moments later Sheridan was back in his car, hollering into his cell phone with all the seriousness of a correspondent reporting from the German front. And unlike The New York Times or the London Guardian, he didn’t “leech” anything from the story. In fact, he added some details of his own.
“The conditions were squalid. There were beer cans all over the floor. The debris of a wild party was strewn about. Conditions familiar to college students, but ones that hardly mirror the Lincoln Bedroom.”
Later, Sheridan asked Pape about the “wild parties.” She told him she remembered that Lewinsky had some friends over for Christmas dinner.
Discouraged, Sheridan packed it up again and headed back to the rented car.
The reporter from Newsweek was just arriving.
Sheridan’s reporting showed up Friday in the London Sun under the headline “Monica the Man Eater!” The story, culled from reports by a herd of Sun staffers all over the world, focused on rumors that Lewinsky was involved with one of her college professors.