This month, former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen is gracing the pages of Playboy for the second time. Back in 1992, when her nude shoot first appeared, Gracen was asked whether she'd had an affair with then-governor Clinton. She denied it -- a denial she recanted last month, when she admitted to one consensual fling with Clinton in 1983.
We now know that Gracen's 1992 denial came shortly after a meeting in the San her manager Miles Levy and Mickey Kantor -- then Clinton's campaign manager, subsequently his U.S. trade representative and secretary of commerce, and now his Sexgate fireman. (Kantor didn't return a call from the SCRAPBOOK, but a colleague of his confirms the meeting took place.) Mere weeks after the Levy- Kantor encounter, Gracen, who had been struggling in the decade since being named Miss America in 1982, had a job on one of the television shows produced by ur-friend of Bill Harry Thomason.
Gracen has retained as her lawyer Bruce Cutler, the brass-knuckles attorney be Cutler won't say who's paying the legal bills. Whatever legal vulnerability Gracen is worried about, she has never expressed any regret about being caught in a lie.
If it is a lie. After all, she never denied having sex with Clinton. What she said was: "At no time did any romantic relationship ever exist between the Governor and myself." The truth of her statement thus would appear to hinge on a Clintonesque distinction between sex and romance.
"Sex may not have much to do with the craft of acting," Gracen told a reporter in 1995, "but it does have a lot to do with Hollywood."
Washington, too, apparently.