By MAUREEN DOWD
May 19, 1999
A colleague once brought me a present from Sunset Strip: a vintage poster of a B movie called ''The Leech Woman,'' a 1959 horror classic. The poster showed a voluptuous woman ensnaring a young man, with the legend: ''LEECH WOMAN! She drains men of their love and lives!''
This breed of she-monster is making an alarming comeback. The leeching ladies are everywhere.
There is the Leech Woman of the boomer generation, the indefatigably exhibitionistic Joyce Maynard, who has asked Sotheby's to auction 14 romantic letters that J. D. Salinger wrote to her in 1972 and '73. The publicity-phobic writer has been the object of Ms. Maynard's leech for quite awhile.
Then there is the Gen-X Leech Woman, the indefatigably exhibitionistic Monica Lewinsky, who insists, all her alleged humiliation notwithstanding, on not going away. The object of her leech, which will likely also last quite awhile, is the privacy-phobic President.
These two highly skilled predators keep trying to extract celebrity from old love affairs that were not only brief and puerile but sexually tortured. They want to gain immortality -- and big bucks -- by feeding off the detritus of their triste trysts with older, famous men.
This breed of she-monster is making an alarming comeback. The leeching ladies are everywhere.
There is the Leech Woman of the boomer generation, the indefatigably exhibitionistic Joyce Maynard, who has asked Sotheby's to auction 14 romantic letters that J. D. Salinger wrote to her in 1972 and '73. The publicity-phobic writer has been the object of Ms. Maynard's leech for quite awhile.
Then there is the Gen-X Leech Woman, the indefatigably exhibitionistic Monica Lewinsky, who insists, all her alleged humiliation notwithstanding, on not going away. The object of her leech, which will likely also last quite awhile, is the privacy-phobic President.
These two highly skilled predators keep trying to extract celebrity from old love affairs that were not only brief and puerile but sexually tortured. They want to gain immortality -- and big bucks -- by feeding off the detritus of their triste trysts with older, famous men.
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