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That dress: An exclusive interview
from The Daily Telegraph, August 22nd 1998

August 22nd 2018

SHE IS OLDER now, her once dazzling looks undeniably faded, her famous beauty worn and creased.

“Sorry about that,” she says. “I was supposed to get ironed yesterday.”

Yes, it’s “that dress” - the dress that, 20 years ago this month, held the fate of a presidency in her lap. It has been two decades since the day she gave her dramatic testimony to the grand jury and then promptly disappeared into the federal witness protection program. Even as she recalls her brief moment in the spotlight, she looks drawn. But that’s because, following extensive reconstructive surgery, she’s been living quietly as a pair of curtains in Idaho.

“What do you think?” she says, saucily brushing her hem against the sill as her pleats ripple across the mullions. “It cost less than Paula Jones’ nose job.”

To be honest, I was lucky to get the interview. The dress was supposed to be doing the BBC - the full “Panorama special” treatment, Martin Bashir, the works - but, to protect her identity, they wanted to do that undercover secret-location protect-your-identity trick with the camera that makes part of the screen go all fuzzy and blurry.

“Are you crazy?” she yelled at them. “It’ll look like I’ve still got the stain.”

But, even for our meeting, when the Daily Telegraph photographer arrived, I was concerned we might be placing her life in danger. “For heaven’s sake. I’m a pair of curtains,” she snapped. “Just pull me together and the whole room will be plunged into darkness.” For an instant, you glimpsed the quick-wittedness that saw her through the dark days of January 1998 and her last visit to the Oval Office.

“I was couriered over in a Dunkin’ Donuts bag,” she recalls sadly. “I said to the President, ‘Bill, what happened to the limo? What happened to all the things we were going to do together? You said you were going to make an honest dress out of me; you said you’d have Barbra Streisand wear me to the banquet for Tony Blair. You still love me, don’t you, Bill?’ I was hysterical.

“‘Sure, baby, sure,’ he purred, running his finger along my seam. ‘Hey, tell you what, why don’t the two of us stroll over to Hillary’s office and I’ll show you the Whitewater document shredder?’ I knew then that, if I got out of the White House in one piece that night, I had to cut a deal with Ken Starr.”

She gives a rueful shrug. ‘Guess I’m not the first cocktail dress to find out the hard way that men always go back to the dowdy little trouser-suit at home. I can’t blame him - I knew what I was doing. But he made me feet sexy, vibrant, alive in the very fibers of my being. He loved the way I could be worn without a bra. ‘You’re an amazing dress,’ he said. ‘Do you have under-wiring?’ I said, ‘No, that’s Linda Tripp.’”

I inquire, gently, how Ken Starr had found out about her.

”Well, several witnesses had described me and he had Christian Lacroix draw up a composite sketch and held an identification line-up on the catwalk in Paris. And Kate Moss, Heidi Klum and the rest walked out modeling the samples. They all fell straight off except Elle MacPherson’s. Little did he know that, in fact, I was hanging in Monica’s mom’s closet with no one to talk to but a pair of souvenir pantaloons once worn by Placido Domingo in Simon Boccanegra.”

At first, she had scoffed at the notion of entering the witness protection programme. But then, late one night at the FBI crime lab, when she was lying on the examination table, the President burst in. “He said, ‘Is this the right way to the Pentagon? I need to find out if there are any more countries I can bomb.’ The nice boy from forensics was in the middle of giving him directions when Bill ‘accidentally’ tripped and sent his McDonald’s super-size vanilla shake, Xtra-large chili fries and three-quarter-pound Salsaburger flying through the air and splattering all over me. I was buried by the stuff, I was choking. The last thing I remember as I was rushed into intensive care was Bill biting his lower lip and saying, ‘I feel your stain.’”

She gives an involuntary shudder, which prompts the thought: why break her silence now?

“It was all a long time ago. Bill’s a different man now. He’s running that adult movie house in Amsterdam and, anyway, the Dutch are refusing to extradite. Besides, I got tired of people coming forward and claiming they had found me. I mean, it’s pathetic. They say, ‘Hey, I’ve got Monica’s dress!’ and all they’ve done is cut the hood off one of those Taliban outfits. Remember that guy who was your Foreign Secretary a couple of years back?”

“Douglas Hurd?”

“Yeah. They announced they’d found me when all they’d done was stumble across one of those funny green Alpine coats he used to wear to summits.”

“They found a loden?”

“God, I don’t know what it’s got on it, and believe me, honey, I don’t care. My point is, I want people to know the real me. Did you see that movie they made about us?”

“Yeah, I thought it was very good.”

“Good? Do you know what it’s like to be played by Elizabeth Hurley’s dress? It’s not even a dress, it’s two strips of material held together by safety pins. Safety pins! I mean, I know Monica’s no Calista Flockhart, but she never split my sides.”

I’m a hard-bitten journalist, but I confess by now I’m having to dab away tears with my napkin. “D’you ever see anyone from the old days?” I ask.

“Just Necktie,” she replies.

“Necktie?”

“You’re snuffling into him.” I look down at my napkin, and the yellow pattern seems oddly familiar. “He was the tie Monica gave Bill, the tie he was wearing on the first day of Monica’s testimony, supposedly to signal to her.”

Now I remember. When the President had been caught out, he had come up with what proved to be his last, most inspired, yarn: “My fellow Americans,” he had said. “Earlier today, I ordered raids on terrorist bases in Afghanistan using the latest in advanced communications technology: this simple necktie.” For a few weeks, the rest of the government did their best to play along. For the space shuttle launch, they would say things like “Paisley-paisley-polka-dot, we have lift-off”.

Finally, the big question: “Were you surprised when they found traces of semen on you?”

She shrieks with laughter. “You poor dear. That was just a clerical error. You know Bill never reaches 'completion' in anything - oral sex, Kosovo, whatever. It wasn’t traces of semen, it was traces of salmon.”

“Salmon?”

She gives a wistful sigh. “State dinner for Jacques Chirac. Proudest moment of my life. In public with the man I love all evening.”

“Right by his side?”

“Well, right by his crotch. He smuggled me in as his serviette.”

“Is that a tear in the seam?” I ask, peering closer.

“Chirac’s love-bite. Whole other story.”