The nice Jewish girl from Beverly Hills whose lips launched a thousand quips, Monica Lewinsky has become the centre of an industry in which Americans have been offered total immersion.
She is the centre of morning radio shows, such as that hosted by the caustic Don Imus whose advice to the US President, recalling the photograph of an adoring Monica clutching Mr Clinton from a crowd, was: "Never hug a fat girl on a rope line".
Serious political discussions feature the same predictable pundits speculating about Monica and "a president in crisis". She dominates chat shows - without ever appearing on one. She is the butt of late night comedians such as David Letterman ("Monica is suing the president for a million and three dollars - one million for causing her pain, and three bucks for dry cleaning"). Lawyers who thought the end of the O.J. trials had ended their brief media fame, now rejoice in rehashing such legal intricacies as suborning perjury, an offence most Americans had never heard of and still little understand.
Her Hollywood-style photo portraits with even bigger hair, taken as a star-struck 17-year-old, have appeared in the National Enquirer. But she trumped the tabloid in a six-page Vanity Fair spread by photographer Herb Ritts with a caption by Christopher Hitchens, the (otherwise) socialist commentator. He compared Ms Lewinsky to Helen of Troy, Theodora of Byzantium, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Sally Hemings (Jefferson's black mistress), Wallis Simpson, Christine Keeler, Donna Rice (whose affair with presidential candidate Gary Hart ended his political career), and Camilla Parker Bowles.
Quite a list for a young woman who in 1991 had just finished Beverly Hills High School and Bel Air Prep, with an undistinguished academic record but, her headmaster recalled, a "fine singing voice" in the choir.
It was another kind of singing that also brought her to the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the left-wing magazine, The Nation, the right-wing American Spectator, and the world's media. In 1995, with a degree in psychology from a private college in Oregon, she arrived in Washington to a White House intern's post.
Despite Hillary Clinton's talk of a "vast right-wing conspiracy", Monica got her job through a prominent Democratic fund donor and friend of her father Bernard, a Los Angeles oncologist and Democrat.
During her affair with the President she was transferred to a Pentagon post needing "top secret" clearance and paid $32,700 a year. Later the US ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, interviewed her for a job, and she was recommended for a PR post at Revlon by Clinton crony and Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan, a board member and friend of Revlon chief Ron Perelman, another big Democrat donor.
Since January, when it emerged that Ms Lewinsky had told all to her Pentagon colleague Linda Tripp, who secretly recorded 20 hours of tape, the 25-year-old has been unemployed and mostly hidden in her mother's flat in the Watergate building. When this is over, Ms Lewinsky could make millions. Book estimates vary from $2 million to $10 million, but recent flops may have killed higher prices. The editor of the American tabloid Star, Scotsman Phil Bunton, has already offered $1 million for her story, but the Enquirer editor grumbles that few lurid details will be left unprinted.
Ms Tripp, the most maligned woman in America, has made only one statement in which, astonishingly, she compared herself to an average housewife. She will write a book, for she played a kind of Zelig character - popping up as the last person to see White House lawyer Vincent Foster alive before his suicide and witnessing a "dishevelled" Kathleen Willey emerge from the Oval office.
Another tape listener has been conservative literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, a Nixon "dirty trickster" in the sabotage of Democrats in the 1972 election. She now represents the O.J. case detective, Mark Fuhrman. Ms Goldberg and her son Jonah are often on television but, with Ms Tripp, have been craftily reticent about the tapes.
The Monica industry will make and break other reputations too, but for herself much depends on her demeanour when she goes public. Here her choir training should be useful, but however she handles herself, fame is guaranteed forever.