minutes of fame. She wrote about

having sex with him on the steps of

the Capitol in a bestselling memoir,

posed nude for Playboy, turned up

on Fantasy Island and worked as

a reporter for A Current Affair. "I

made some choices that were not

so judicious, and 1 have to live with

that," says Jenrette, who was di-

vorced in 1981. (She and her hus-

band did not have children.) "But

you have to quit feeling sorry for

yourself and say, 'I will not let this

incident be my epitaph.' "

Jenrette began turning things

around in 1994, when she became

a real estate broker. She handles

high-end properties in several

states and has sold more than

$1 billion of real estate. Among

her big deals: helping broker the

sale of Manhattan's General Mo-

tors building to Donald Trump.

"She's the most dynamic broker

1 know, " says entrepreneur Barry

Akrongold, head of First Real

Estate Corp. and one of Jenrette's

classmates at Harvard (where

classes for the program are

jammed into an intensive month-

long session each year). "She's al-

ways trying these really wild, big

deals, and she used that same en-

ergy to rebuild her life."

Jenrette says starting in the Har-

vard program in 2001 was "the

best thing I've ever done for my-

self." In addition to beefing up the

New York-based commercial real

estate company she started in

1994, she works with several char-

ities, including a group that seeks to

help Sept. 11 victims who have not

yet received financial aid. Her long,

strange trip to respectability "has

been an intriguing journey," says

Jenrette, who lives in Manhattan

with her fiance, an architect she

declines to name. "It's painful, but

it makes you stronger." And she

knows her past is never too far

away. "It'll crop up at the most

inopportune times," she says. "But

now I've made it a footnote. "

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