Interview: Love and death in slow motion

At 20 Dani Shapiro was a kept woman, a mistress in a world fuelled by drugs, lies and money. She tells Sharon Krum why she stayed, and of the tragedy that saved her

T he first thing you do when Dani Shapiro opens the door to her New York apartment is try and hide your disappointment. She is dressed casually, a loose shirt sweeping over her early pregnancy, her hair cut in a blunt pageboy. She speaks softly, politely, looking and sounding like a university professor or an author, and indeed she is both. But she used to be a "kept woman", mistress to a hotshot playboy lawyer, living a life so wild and fast, so fuelled with money, booze and sex it could have been drawn from a Jackie Collins novel.

And it's the mistress you really want to meet, to take a vicarious snapshot of that gilded life. Shapiro, however, shut the door on that woman, that persona, 10 years ago, replacing her with a drug- and alcohol-free wife and expectant mother who now, she says, gets off on living without chaos as much as she once needed it.

And yet she still felt the need to document those heady days, a trip into what she describes numerous times in our conversation as "Kafkaland". Slow Motion, Shapiro's tale of the Orthodox Jewish good girl gone bad and the violent wake-up call that hurtled her into adulthood serves both as cautionary tale and window to the New York of Eighties excess.

Spare in its portrayal of the young Shapiro as needy, immature and naive, dense with family conflict, she takes full responsibility for embracing the high life that precipitated her descent. She does not consider herself an unwilling participant who was duped, but a woman who chose to cloak her parental rebellion in mink and down it with vodka.

"I was so concerned that there not be an ounce of self pity," says Shapiro, 35, talking about the slew of memoirs that can veer to being glossy and contrite. Shapiro's attitude in the writing was to spit the truth on the page, even if she hardly comes out smelling like roses. "If you write memoir it can't be about blame or hurt, it has to be creative."

It has to be said, however; Slow Motion has enough glitz - and also the requisite fall from grace and rise - that you could sell it to Hollywood. Shapiro acknowledges this. She says she does feel her life story has the arc of a novel, and as a writer of three works of fiction, you assume she saw the potential in publishing her exploits. The question is why? What was the purpose in exposing her own failings, her parents' conflicted marriage, her seduction by a man who was so patently duplicitous and transparent? Shapiro likens the process to getting a monkey off her back.

"I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life. My first novel (Playing With Fire) has elements of Slow Motion - a car crash, a married older boyfriend - but it was very fictionalised. I started to feel if I kept on writing novels and didn't approach these themes head on, it might start adversely affecting my fiction."

Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in New Jersey, Shapiro came to rebellion early. An only child growing up in an anti-Semitic neighbourhood she was isolated and lonely. As a teen she was afforded a front row seat to her parents arguments and her father's addiction to prescription drugs.

By the time she hit university, Shapiro believes she was ripe for someone like Lenny Klein. The step- father of a college friend, she met Klein, the caricature of a high-flying Eighties New York lawyer, on her first day of college. Her impression was of a stocky, middle-aged guy there to drop off his daughter. But her cool blonde beauty caught his eye immediately.

Klein had, unbeknownst to Shapiro, five other mistresses, and simply decided to add her to his harem. His seduction was artful and calculated. He called her to meet him in New York to discuss his daughter, giving Shapiro the impression it might be about a surprise party. But after an expensive dinner, a hand running along her thigh, she knew what Klein was really driving at. Their first meeting was chaste but Klein was laying the foundations. Next came phone calls and vases of flowers delivered to her dorm. "Another 20-year-old might have called the campus police, filed a complaint. But secretly Lenny's attentions made me feel like the most special girl in the world."

It was not long before Shapiro, feeling rudderless at university, dropped out. Lenny Klein's attention, particularly to her looks, was important. "My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks and I had no sense of myself as beautiful. So the idea of someone coming along and telling me this was enormously seductive."

Shapiro acquired an agent, carved a middling career as an actress in television commercials, but really settled into the full-time job of Lenny Klein's mistress. And what a ride it was for a former yeshiva girl. A black Mercedes, a mink, a triplex townhouse in Manhattan, dinners at the best restaurants, all topped of with jewellery by Cartier. There was Concorde travel to London, trips to Europe, sex in five-star hotel rooms. And there was also underlying depression from being so out of her depth, which Shapiro held at bay with copious amounts of alcohol and cocaine.

"Cocaine started for me in an innocent college way. I mean, everybody did a little bit of experimenting, but it escalated during my time with Lenny. He didn't do drugs, he was more an expensive bottle of wine guy." Shapiro got high when she was feeling particularly anxious. "The cocaine I would do in binges, my real problem was the drinking."

You have to ask Shapiro what she was thinking all that time. Klein was a powerful man, a fixer (he paid the gravediggers at her father's funeral to work faster) but an inveterate liar who told her he couldn't leave his wife because he had cancer, she had mental problems and one child had leukemia, all of which she believed. "He was a brilliant liar. I understand why someone who could make the world safe for me was very attractive. My father was so afraid of life. He was constantly taking his own pulse to see if he was going to have a heart attack. I completely adored him but he seemed so frail to me. I was very ripe for Lenny Klein. And he had all this bad luck so I convinced myself he needed me."

Shapiro says today she might well still be somebody's mistress (though she now cringes at the thought) if it weren't for a phone call at a California health spa at the age of 23. Her parents had been in car accident, both hovering near death. Her pious, stockbroker father would die two weeks later, her mother would survive, but with 80 broken bones.

The call had the effect of jerking her back into the real world. She switched roles from mistress to caregiver. "I dove into everything I did in life - that's how I am. Rebellion, taking care of my parents, writing my first novel. I always did it to the extreme."

The accident, she said, also supplied her with what she had been long missing: structure. "In my new routinised life, I had a purpose, a reason to wake up in the morning. I was needed. The centrepiece of each day was a medical crisis."

There were operations, decisions, relatives to be contacted, a funeral to plan, a mother to nurse back to health. Shapiro kicked cocaine (drinking would come later) and moved into care-giver mode.

As her mother began to recover, the cumulative effect of taking responsibility also woke Shapiro up to the insanity of her life with Klein. In the months following the accident she split from him, returned to university, penned and sold her first novel at 27, and entered Alcoholics Anonymous.

Reviews for Slow Motion in the US have been positive, but Shapiro said she was far more concerned with the reaction of her mother than the critics. "When you write a memoir you don't want to hurt anyone, but I had to go a certain distance because how I was raised and who my mother was explained a lot of where I was at the time."

Irene Shapiro is depicted as a feisty if adolescent figure, covertly supportive of her daughter's status of kept woman. Hardly your typical Jewish mother. "I really had to reconcile myself to that," says Shapiro of her mother's attitude. "I got quite angry at her while writing, wondering, why didn't you say something? Not that I would have listened at the time, but I think she was taken in by the flash. In some ways she was vicariously living it."

Her mother has a different version of events and would have preferred her daughter stick to fiction. "She has been quoting Cynthia Ozick to me lately, who said no family wants a writer in their midst who will write about them. My mother is a survivor. She survived the accident and she will survive this book."

Inevitably, Monica Lewinsky crops up in our conversation - both were involved with older married men who dripped power and influence. Not surprisingly, Shapiro is sympathetic to Monica. "I look at her and to me she looks like an amoeba, a formless creature, and I want to say, do people realise how young she was when this started? Not that she shouldn't take responsibility, but she was young enough to believe that the President was in love with her, that he would leave his wife for her. This is something only a 21-year-old can think."

By the time Lenny Klein was indicted for fraud, he was out of Shapiro's life. Then as now, Shapiro blames no one but herself for her involvement with him. She didn't go looking for Lenny Klein, but when he showed up, she wanted to be seduced by his power and promise of escape. "Before I wrote the book I didn't connect the dots. But now I see it was inevitable I would rebel, and if it wasn't Lenny Klein it would have been another bad boy."

'Slow Motion' (Bloomsbury, pounds 12.99) is published 5 Nov

IN HER OWN WORDS

On writing a memoir

'I was so concerned that there not be an ounce of self-pity. If you write memoir it can't be about blame or hurt. It has to be creative'

On relatives' reactions

'My mother has been quoting Cynthia Ozick to me lately, who said no family wants a writer in their midst who will write about them. My mother is a survivor. She survived the accident, she will survive this book'

On drugs and booze

'Cocaine started for me in an innocent, college way. I mean, everyone would do a bit of experimenting. The cocaine I would do in binges, my real problem was the drinking'

On (fellow young mistress) Monica Lewinsky

'Do people realise how young she was when this started? Not that she shouldn't take responsibility, but she was young enough to believe that the President was in love with her, that he would leave his wife for her. This is something only a 21-year-old can think'