President Wojciech Jaruzelski's daughter says she posed for magazine photos in a nightgown and on a bearskin rug in an attempt to humanize her father's image, but now the experience has left her bitter.
Even as reform and a new openness sweep Poland, the pictures in Paris Match of Monika Jaruzelska - as the feminine form of the surname is spelled - and a text suggesting she would rather live in Italy have left her on the defensive."She's 26 years old, she rides a horse, frequents hip clubs, dreams of living in Italy . . . " starts the four-page article in the Oct. 26 edition of the news and picture weekly magazine under the headline "Miss Poland? No: Mademoiselle Jaruzelska."
There are six photographs, the main one a double-page spread showing her in a nightgown reading in bed with a tray holding a coffee cup and a pitcher.
In others she is smoking a cigar, sitting on a bearskin rug in front of a fireplace, wearing a dark wig and a sheer polka-dot blouse, and putting on lipstick while wearing a fur and sitting at the wheel of a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
"Like other young people, Monika would like to have a 4x4 like the one she's posing in here," the text reads. "This happy young woman loves to change personality and look: `I have a few wigs. I wore the black one in a video made in the West."'
"It's her way to live pluralism a la Polonaise," the article concludes.
But back in Poland, Ms. Jaruzelska told a Warsaw newspaper that her venture into the free-wheeling Western media has turned into "a new and bitter experience in life."
The recent Warsaw University graduate now working on a film for a Swiss director said she had hoped the pictures would contribute to a new image of her father.
"I always considered as unjust and harmful the attacks of the Western press on the allegedly `gloomy man in dark glasses,' " she told the Zycie Warszawy newspaper.
Little has been known about the private life of Jaruzelski, the ram-rod straight military officer who imposed martial law in 1981 to crack down on the Solidarity movement.
But in a year of historic political and economic change, including the East bloc's first non-communist government, a television special showed Jaruzelski at home, and other bits of his personal views have reached print.