Published Sept. 2, 1999|Updated Sept. 29, 2005
I ran into Kato Kaelin the other night.
He was at the premiere of the Showtime movie about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. So, Kato blithely asked a friend, did Clarence Thomas ever get confirmed?
The shaggy blond pool boy-moocher of the O.J. trial is doing great. He plays a shaggy blond pool boy-moocher on the new Showtime series Beggars and Choosers, which is about TV executives in Hollywood.
And he is developing a TV talk show called The 16th Minute about people, much like himself, who keep going after they have had their 15 minutes of fame.
It's an unexpectedly brilliant idea. I fear the millennium's promise of a clean slate may be a mirage. We are in an era when no one has the sense to know when the moment is over.
Monica, Hillary, Dan Quayle, Marcia Clark, Newt, Charlie's Angels, creationists, Viagra-promoting failed presidential candidates, Dick Morris, Oliver North _ everybody now insists on having posthumous careers. It doesn't matter anymore if you're a winner or loser, good or bad, right or wrong.
Flash the face. Notoriety works just as well as renown. Better, maybe, because there's no truth to trip you up or talent to get in the way.
Cable, talk radio and the Internet have created a ravenous maw that needs to be fed for a society obsessed with celebrities and survivors _ especially celebrity survivors. There's no such thing as out of sight in a universe with a Web site.
Monica Lewinsky is taking the route of Seinfeld ex Shoshanna Lonstein, trying to use her old boyfriend to springboard herself into a career in fashion. She is selling purses and totes on the Web, with names such as "Bohemian Baroque" and "Garden Patch," bearing a "unique" rose-bordered label reading "Made especially for you by MONICA." There are also instructions on each creation to "DRY CLEAN ONLY" from the young woman who changed American history with her failure to dry-clean.
The 26-year-old, now a Greenwich Village resident and possible Hillary Clinton voter, says in a Marie Claire interview that she would like to launch her own lipstick line. Conceding that companies might be put off, she suggests that her sex-based image has marketable value, citing the ads of Madonna for Max Factor: "I'd like to have a lipstick. I think it could be a neat thing, something that would be fun and lucrative and a respectable decision. Um, I'd like to be using my head again."
For sheer cringe-worthiness, a Monica lipstick ad, focusing on those shiny pillow lips, would probably top a Bob Dole erectile dysfunction ad.
Monica tells Lisa DePaulo, the writer for Marie Claire, that her friends admire her talent for making her lipstick last through meals: "The key, she says, lifting a plastic deli fork to her mouth, is to never let the utensil or the food touch your lips, but rather to deliver it straight to your tongue. "But first,' she instructs, demonstrating, "you have to open really wide.' "
Given that Monica still doesn't seem to appreciate the concept of a private life, much less that she was the occasion for a gross constitutional crisis, I suppose we should be grateful she isn't hustling her own line of lingerie "Made especially for you by MONICA."
The former intern would fit perfectly into the TV cosmos created by David E. Kelley, which features neurotic women who use sexual wiles to get ahead. On Ally McBeal, the female lawyers' skirts come up and their hair comes down. On his new fall show Snoops, Kelley offers a rehash of Charlie's Angels with three sexy girl detectives who do what it takes to crack cases.
The boss of the office, played by the sultry Gina Gershon, tells a new hire about the big case that financed her P.I. firm. "You know, there's a rumor about that case," the new hire says. "You promised to have sex with the kidnapper if he'd tell you where (the victim) was."
Ms. Gershon smirks: "Yeah, I give amazing phone."
Haven't we been here before? It's 16 minutes and counting.
+ Maureen Dowd is a New York Times columnist. +
New York Times News Service
