Bungalow Bill Clinton, Lady Monica, Linda Day Tripper, Polythene Paula and all the other fools on the Hill certainly got into a mess this past year.

And paperback writers Andrew Morton, Michael Isikoff and George Stephanopoulos all did their best to cash in with their own sordid chronicles of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga.

But last week's cover of the New York Times Book Review was surely the most artful statement on the incident so far. A parody of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, it substituted scandal figures for the Fab Four and famous historical faces.

Hillary, Monica, Bill and Ken Starr, decked out in the psych-edelic Pepper bandmaster togs, replaced the boys from Liverpool beneath a headline that read: "The News This Year, Oh Boy!"

But that's only the beginning. A quick spin through the Beatles catalog suggests that a politically savvy DJ with symptoms of Beatlemania could cut a complete scandal soundtrack, even without such hits as "I Should've Known Better," "You Can't Do That," and "Help!"

Pub Date: 04/11/99