Word: scandalous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...type as old as melodrama itself, ranging from the truly malignant (Iago) to the merely heedless and goofy (Auntie Mame). Where you place Lucianne between the two extremes is a matter of taste and political predisposition. But there's no denying that she brought color and diversion to a scandal that might otherwise have sunk under the weight of its own tawdriness. The highlights of her bio became quickly familiar even (maybe especially) to those who pretended to hate the scandal. She served as a hired spy for Richard Nixon's factotums on George McGovern's press plane...
Most everybody loves a saucy gossip at one remove; pot stirrers can be vastly amusing as long as they're stirring someone else's pot. But in the Lewinsky scandal, the pot Lucianne was stirring wasn't merely Clinton's but the country's. Some resentment, to put it mildly, was inevitable, and so were the counterattacks. Clients and old friends dropped her. Within days of the scandal's eruption, the Democratic National Committee faxed reporters an "information sheet" it hoped would prove damaging. A sheaf of unflattering profiles appeared...
...that she cares, but she now says she was slightly miscast when the scandal broke. She loves dish, of course, but she had a higher purpose in loosing the Lewinsky scandal upon the world...
...country, needed a test," she says. "And that's what this scandal was: a little priority test, for everybody--particularly for people who've had kids in the past 30 years, when all this nonsense was going on. You know what I mean, this whole mind-set: screw everybody you want. Don't have a husband if you have a baby. Walk out on relationships. Latchkey kids are O.K. Don't marry anybody. The whole general morality. Get [oral sex] in the bathroom of the Oval Office. We needed a wake-up call, and this was a major wake...
...mind reels: Lucianne Goldberg, moralizer? Hearing her discourse on moral rot, you realize the extent to which the scandal of 1998 was an extension of her--not simply in its mechanics but in its tone and flavor. "Everything is gossip," she likes to say, and who, having lived through the Lewinsky scandal, can doubt her? The scandal was a gossip's dream--and a moralist's too. For a solid year we were all part of Lucianne's phone network, and the media culture was remade in her image. Our giddy appetite for gossip--for chicanery and sexual indiscretion...