She was a drop-dead beauty with near mystical power to render men weak and helpless. Now an English newspaper calls her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Finally, Gennifer has nothing left to hide!
The Beauty and Controversy of Gennifer Flowers
Dinner’s served,” she jokes, offering popcorn, playing hostess as she prowls about her Dallas condo, catlike, vigilant after what she describes as a Watergate-style break-in last year and anonymous telephone threats surrounding her tabloid billing as the Candidate’s Ex-Honey Bun.
She glides past a print of snarling leopards, blond hair cascading over a black designer jogging suit. She mixes up her landscape to ward off boredom: animal skins on the floor, a Chinese screen, antiques alongside art deco, family photos near one of her posing with Jessica Hahn and Rita Jenrette from a recent HBO “bimbo” cameo, as she jokingly puts it. Her lair is snow white — carpet, walls, quilt — with a queen-size brass bed and floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
“The only thing about mirrors in the bedroom,” says the cabaret singer, “is they show every flaw on your body.” In the closet, above an Imelda Marcos pile of high heels, hang her sex-goddess gowns for the stage. “One of the few orgasms I ever had was onstage,” she says. “God, it can be sooo good when you’re singing well!” She checks an answering machine: callbacks from her stockbroker, her lawyer.
“It’s almost time,” she says, tuning a small color TV to “the Speech” on this steamy July night. Outside, downtown towers twinkle beyond the treetops. Five floors below, security guards eyeball TV monitors scanning the grounds and a garage where she parks a sporty black Nissan 300ZX-scandal booty. She pitched an ex-Dallas sugar daddy for a Porsche, then dropped the geezer cold when he gave to charity and not to her. As Gennifer Flowers likes to say, “You’ve got to pay to play.”
In her den now, she flips channels to tune in the candidate who has dismissed as fiction what she describes as their impassioned 12-year love affair, and Flowers as a mere “casual acquaintance.” But after listening to more than an hour of cassette tapes she secretly recorded while chatting him up in 1990 and 1991 phone conversations — tapes authenticated by an independent forensic audio expert hired by Penthouse — it sounds like they had something cozy going on at some point.
Now here he is, up on the TV in her den — Bill Clinton, live, at the Democratic National Convention, preaching family values, sanitized by the party hype machine and moments away from coronation as its nominee for president. She sighs, sinks into a love seat. “I made him a household name overnight,” declares Gennifer Flowers, hugging a white plastic bowl of salt-free popcorn — dieting to perfect her bodacious voluptuary at 42.
“Why doesn’t someone ask him directly,” grins Flowers, “‘Bill, have you ever had sex with Gennifer Flowers? Did you screw her?’”
Clinton campaign manager Betsey Wright never did say yes or no to that question. Instead, she dismisses Flowers as a “pathological liar,” responding with her own dossier of dirt on Flowers, much of it gathered by a lawyer/investigator hired by the campaign to handle “bimbo eruptions,” to use Wright’s words.
“Why should anyone be asking Clinton those questions?” Wright bristles in a telephone interview. “Ask her if she’s willing to take a lie detector test. Everything in her life is a lie, yet she continues to be able to throw out stuff like, ‘Why doesn’t somebody ask Bill?’ Why doesn’t somebody ask her?…”
Wright ticks off her dirty laundry list about Flowers. She alleges: resume hype, attempted blackmail, manufacturing a self-styled 12-year affair with Clinton to salvage a flopola singing career, and shenanigans involving a mink coat that Flowers reported stolen. Later, claims Wright, Flowers pocketed the $5,000 insurance reimbursement only to show up with a mink coat that a furrier says she asked him to repair in exchange for sex — and more.
“Absolutely ridiculous!” laughs Flowers, saying the mink coat was a cheapo she picked up with the money and paid about $200 to refurbish. “I’d never sleep with a furrier, especially not that one. He was nice but not all that good-looking, and certainly not for $200! Now I might go for the fur-company owner if he offered me a $20,000 sable, but only if I cared about him. Is that all the dirt they’ve got?”
With Election Day looming, Gennifer “just spell my name with a G” Flowers may be George Bush’s dream girl-canceling out his alleged Jennifer — a fatal attraction turned Clinton’s public accuser. But is Flowers “the most dangerous woman in America,” as one British newspaper labeled her — this sultry, out-of-work nightclub singer churning the “character” issue as she chums for notoriety and cash?
“On her own she’s not dangerous,” says Wright. “She only becomes dangerous when people like you give her lies credibility by writing about them. The phenomenon that bears dissecting is the fact that she is paid. She has taken money to lie about Bill Clinton before, and now has taken money from Penthouse to lie about Bill Clinton again.” So just what did they have if, as Clinton claims, the purported 12-year affair is Flowers’s fiction? “They had an acquaintanceship,” says Wright.
To hear Flowers tell it, she began taping her talks with Clinton after her name first surfaced during his 1990 race for Arkansas governor. “Just in case,” she says. “I was preparing for the worst.” After he won a fifth term, the gossip died. Then Clinton’s White House ambitions became known, and the national media picked up scandal’s scent, virtually ignored until then by the Little Rock press.
Initially, Flowers denied everything, until the spotlight cost her a $17, 500-a-year state job that Clinton is reported to have helped her obtain over what critics have sniped were more qualified applicants, and tabloids started staking her out. She cooperated with the weekly tabloid, The Star, she says, because she was told that the story was going to run with or without her, and the deal was too sweet to pass up. Now feast your eyes on Penthouse. More money in the bank.
“Who’s going to hire me to sing now?” she asks. “The scandal has made me unemployable, so I’ve got to look out for myself.” She’s contemplating a book, a movie, a 900-number to air her Clinton tapes. A recording on her phone refers callers to a Dallas attorney for booking information. She proffers a business card sporting hot red lips.
So here she sits in her den, seething as Clinton dances with his wife, Hillary, in a masterful Hollywood campaign documentary that glosses over purported delictos, grass, and draft-dodging. On the TV, Clinton chokes up, tells how he’s “worked out” marital riffs (without admitting affairs), a tactic apparently designed to defuse bimbo bombshells. It worked on “60 Minutes.” He speaks of never knowing a father who died before he was born, but says he “still believes in a place called Hope” — poignant, powerful stuff.
Flowers blushes, acts angry, hurt. Are these real memories rushing back from a mistress scorned, sad, and bitter over what might have been? Or worse — the crocodile tears of, as many in the press have put it, “a failed lounge singer” hell-bent on hyping fantasy-self-promotion at all costs. Or, as two former roommates suggest, has she pumped up “fling” to the level of “meaningful relationship, “pouting publicly as she tattles all the way to the bank?
She vanishes into a back room, emerging with her medical records. “I had an abortion,” she says, dating it to February 1978, shortly after she met Clinton the previous fall. She was a fetching TV cub reporter for a Little Rock station; Clinton was the dashing state attorney general who, she says, pursued her despite a jealous wife.
Not long after their alleged affair began, she claims she became pregnant by Clinton.
“The woman is a pathological liar,” smarts Wright, who says Flowers has been scheming to parlay her acquaintance with Clinton into a payoff for years, timing her scandal to debut with his run for the Rose Garden. “And this is an outright lie. How much longer will she fabricate these things? And why haven’t we heard this before?”
“Because,” laughs a former roommate, sarcastically, “Gennifer always says she likes to save dessert for last.”
Flowers responds, “It’s just not something I was comfortable talking about and had to really think about telling it. But I wanted to give Penthouse something that I hadn’t told anyone before.”
According to medical records provided to Penthouse, Flowers visited her gynecologist, Dr. K. M. Kreth, of Little Rock, on December 19, 1977. Her period was late. Kreth has since died, but records of the urine test at the Clinical Laboratory of Little Rock confirm that she was pregnant. She says she must have forgotten her diaphragm in the heat of passion, “or it just slipped.”
Of course, neither those records, nor she, can prove it was Clinton, but her mother, Mary Hirst, recalls: “At the time, she told me about the abortion. She said it was Bill [Clinton]. She said the only other guy she was dating had a vasectomy.” Flowers says the other man was an Arkansas businessman, also married, also named Bill. Asked about that in a phone interview, the man denied dating her, as well as the vasectomy. But others say her alleged affair with this Bill was no secret.
“There’s no reason for her to make that up,” says her mother, a devout Catholic who openly disapproved of Gennifer’s married men but welcomed her confession. “She had to talk to somebody, and I’m her best friend …. I believe it.”
What about his denials? “When he called her a ‘friendly acquaintance,’ “says her mother, “I laughed out loud. The real Bill Clinton is so deceptive. He wants everyone to think he’s a little angel. But he’s called my house a half dozen times over the years when Gennifer was visiting, asking to speak with her. He’d ask how I was doing, but I was cold on the phone. I think he could tell I was less than thrilled to talk to him. She’d told me about their relationship, but I didn’t want to hear about it. She knew I didn’t approve. But she was in love, and she believed he loved her, too. I have no idea what attracted her.”
On February 6, 1978, Gennifer visited her doctor for a “post-abortion exam,” according to her medical records. A month later she returned for a final checkup. “No complaints,” wrote Dr. Kreth. “Normal gyn. exam.” Shortly after that, she says she resumed her affair with Clinton.
Gennifer insists going public has nothing to do with revenge. “It hurts me to say this,” she says, “but I want Bill to love his daughter and care for his wife. But I wanted to be special, too. And I resent the hell out of what I went through alone.”
Suddenly, it’s over, as applause washes over the candidate. Clinton hugs his wife. Flowers blushes. On “A Current Affair,” she rated Clinton “9 ” out of a possible 10 as a lover. “He ate pussy like a champ,” she says. He called her “pookie,” she says; she called him “baby.”
Elaborating during 12 hours of interviews with Penthouse, she described Clinton as “sensitive and caring ” in bed, tender, showing concern for her pleasure with 15-plus-minute marathons of oral sex. She lost track of time. “I’d have to say, ‘Whoa, boy, come on up here.’ He was so aggressive with that.”
Indeed, on one tape dated September 23, 1991, she jokes with Governor Clinton. She asks if he recalls a chat they had earlier, which is not on any tape, where she recounts teasing him about how she just might respond to reporters probing about whether he was presidential timber:
“I’ll just tell them you eat good pussy.”
“What?” asks Clinton, sounding jerked awake.
“I’ll just tell ‘em you eat good pussy,” she repeats. She prods, reminds him “how you said, ‘You can tell ‘em that if I don’t run for president….’” Clinton never responds to confirm or deny that that’s what he said, and then Flowers adds: “I try to find the humor in things.”
“God, I know it,” says Clinton. “There’s no negative except this.”
In bed, Flowers says Clinton compensated for what she describes as modest measurements elsewhere. “I rated Bill high as a lover because he was so considerate,” she says.
Over 12 years, until she claims to have broken it off in 1989 after meeting a stockbroker she hoped to marry, she says they trysted, on average, two to four times a month, usually at her apartment in Little Rock, rarely stealing more than two hours together. Sometimes, she says, he jogged over from the nearby governor’s mansion, arriving sweaty but eager. Or, she says, his driver sat in the car downstairs and waited. She might cook, she says, or he’d bring her a take-out burger. They rarely wasted time eating food, she says.
About press reports of Clinton’s car and driver spotted in Gennifer’s apartment driveway, Betsey Wright says the governor visited the building only on official business.
“Coincidentally,” Wright says, “a number of his aides lived in that building.”
“He seemed to relax when we were together, like I was giving him something he wasn’t getting at home,” Flowers says. “We talked about everything, and he seemed to be genuinely interested in me and my ideas and my career.”
But watching his acceptance speech, and his beaming wife, Hillary, who told millions of Arsenio Hall viewers that Gennifer “has lots of problems,” Gennifer turns catty. “He’s got a small penis and she’s got fat ankles,” she explodes, “so they have to accept each other despite their physical imperfections. I dare Hillary to bare her butt in any magazine. They don’t have a page that broad!”
Tsk, tsk. Is this any way for a sister to behave? “No one ever accused me of being a liberated woman,” says Flowers.
Talk about a campaign cat fight! Imagine:
ASPIRING FIRST LADY vs ASPIRING FIRST MISTRESS!
MUD-WRESTLING MADNESS!
NEKKID!
THREE ROUNDS IN VEGAS!
A DON KING EXTRAVAGANZA!
HBO PAY-PER-VIEW!
NATIONAL ANTHEM BY GENNIFER FLOWERS.
“If Hillary just wants me to fade away, I’d watch what she said about me,” warns Flowers.
Indeed, after the speech, she’s labile. “I want a banana,” she says, a cereal commercial testing her diet resolve. “He said all the right things, but a man who will cheat on his wife will lie to the American public.”
Will she vote? “If I believed Bill could do what he’s saying he’ll do,” she says, “in spite of everything between us, I might go for him. Can’t vote for Bush.”
She’s a curious image to ponder: white-blond hair (dyed), exquisite features (doctored cosmetically, save for her abundant, God-given “tatas,” as she calls them), soft and seductive yet tough as nails, a honey trap fraught with danger and intrigue — Marilyn Monroe jumps to mind. Or is that a stretch, Gennifer with a G (her mother named her Eura Gean; a maternity nurse said it was French) as Camelot reincarnation in this era of kiss and tell? Alleged ex-temptress for the candidate mimicking hero JFK? More mistress mythology in the making?
Sex is one thing, and history tells us lots of presidents apparently enjoyed it illicitly and still governed well, so does it really matter? But an affair of the heart, as Flowers claims and Clinton denies, is quite another.
While Clinton has shifted media focus from the bedroom to the boardroom and the flagging economy, his brain trust has geared up for the likes of Flowers, wackos, and Republican dirty tricks. Indeed, last March, after Flowers nearly torpedoed the campaign, the Democrats hired their very own bimbo-buster — Jack Palladino, a crack San Francisco lawyer adroit at exposing smear campaigns. He works directly under Betsey Wright. Campaign financial reports show that he’s been paid more than $30,000. His job: scavenge the gutter and thwart “bimbo eruptions,” as Wright once put it.
Indeed, with the same Republican commandos who tarred Dukakis with Willie Horton now desperately digging Clinton dirt, it’s come down to a nasty game of spy versus spy on the campaign trail. Palladino versus Floyd Brown, the G.O.P. trickster behind Willie Horton.
“They’re very, very good,” Brown told one San Francisco paper, praising his opponent.
So far, Wright has neutralized more than 28 bogus bimbos, by the Democrats’ count. At the same time, Palladino has interviewed scores of Flowers’s friends: ex-roommates, lovers, alleged sugar daddies — apparently preparing a counterattack and assembling what interviewees tell Penthouse is a damaging dossier that paints Flowers as a liar and a calculating opportunist.
“She’s used men her entire life,” an estranged friend told Penthouse.
“Once she said, ‘It’s time I moved in with my boyfriend.’ So I asked her, ‘But I thought you didn’t like him.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to pay for anything for a while.’ Whatever fits her purpose, she does. She’ll tell you whatever she needs to get you on her side. She knows where to go to get money, where to get the kind of sex she wants …. She calls herself ‘Princess Pussy.’”
“What do you expect them to say?” shrugs Flowers.
“When I told Mr. Palladino that it wouldn’t matter what he uncovered, it wouldn’t slow her down, that she wouldn’t care, he sort of turned white,” says Lauren Kirk, a former roommate. In a phone interview, Palladino confirmed that he’d met with Kirk and others about Flowers but declined any further comment.
“You’ve talked to enough people to see she builds dossiers on people,” says Wright, who asserts Clinton was simply calling Flowers back to calm someone who was freaking out over her sudden notoriety in the alleged scandal. “I don’t interpret them as intimate. The tapes she made are no more than her trying to build a dossier against a guy [Clinton] who reaches out to people who are hurting, who tries to comfort and bring stress relief …. I wish his heart were not as big, that he didn’t do all these things to help people ….”
Indeed, Wright suggests Clinton has pulled his punches against Flowers to spare others, declining to name other men who Flowers has allegedly targeted, including another married man named Bill.
“Did you know about that Bill?” she wonders, suggesting some sort of bizarre transference. “Bill Clinton doesn’t want to drag others into this, but we’re aware of the threads she has pulled from others and applied to Bill Clinton.” Flowers calls it a smoke screen.
Over the years, Wright says, she’s “dealt with this woman leaving messages for Clinton, hoping she’d get a call back. I even returned a call to her in Dallas once, and it was clear she was trying to fabricate the story of this ‘relationship.’”
‘She described Clinton as “sensitive and caring” in bed, tender, showing concern for her pleasure with 15-plus-minute marathons of oral sex.’
In fact, Wright reads a statement she describes as coming to the campaign from another ex-Flowers girlfriend. “She plotted and schemed to marry a rich man,” she reads. “When the richest of her many lovers would not leave his wife, or come across with more money, she staged a suicide attempt with wine and Valium …. She is a gifted liar and would rather lie than tell the truth. Her biggest lie was the governor. As an excuse for her failure to perform, or if she was too hungover to show up,· her explanation was simple: The governor was in town.”
“Let me tell you about her,” says Flowers, referring to the ex-girlfriend. “She’s crazy, off her rocker.”
Gennifer’s a wonderful actress, say friends. Consider her press conference debut last January in New York for The Star. The pouting ex-lover demanded respect, indignant with those who dared to be crude.
“Did Governor Clinton use a condom?” shouted “Stuttering John ” Melendez from “The Howard Stern Show,” bringing down the house as the mood shifted from skepticism to Animal House. Flowers played it straight, turned away. “I won’t dignify that with a response,” she sniffed.
Later, however, she confessed it was all she could do to keep a straight face. “’I almost cracked up,’” ex-roommate Lauren Kirk says Flowers told her.
“’It was hilarious!’”
Told about investigators on her trail, Flowers shrugs. “They can bury me upside down and kiss my ass,” she says,
“as long as they spell Gennifer with a G.”
Say what?
“You think Madonna cares about all the wild sex stories about her?” she goes on. “At least people are talking about her, and they can’t buy enough of her stuff. Besides, I haven’t heard them coming up with anything that’s really bad, like drugs or alcoholism, or that I’ve stolen something valuable, or child or animal abuse …. I’ve never claimed to be a saint. If you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ve done a few things …. What if I did have sex with ten people? I didn’t pull Bill Clinton’s penis out of his pants. I didn’t make him fuck me.”
Suddenly she’s laughing, warming up a shtick: “Never had sex with animals, though I did see a porno movie once featuring a man and a dog. It was a football party years ago. We were all virgins back then, and I was pretty appalled.”
To hear Gennifer tell it, she passed up the husband-and-family path to chase stardom as a down-home Liza Minnelli, a hot Little Rock number with fans galore who finally sang her way to Dallas. Married men? Just part of the bargain: fun, exciting, hassle-free, like Clinton. So what if he was married; he was not the first. She says they usually came on to her at Little Rock’s Camelot Inn, at the Excelsior Hotel, and later, in Dallas, at the Cipango Club or the Pyramid Room in the elegant Fairmont Hotel, where she later sang.
“The men always made the first move,” says Dallas singer Marjorie Moore. “She had her pick — and Gennifer was very picky.”
They were usually very rich, well-tended, in control — like her late daddy, the daredevil Arkansas crop duster and Clark Gable look-alike who crashed and burned but sure did make his little girl feel special, she says. She liked that sort of package in a man, and sometimes she said yes.
Those were her dark-hair days as a Liz Taylor look-alike, a drop-dead beauty with ice-blue megawatt eyes and, by all accounts, near mystical power to render men weak and helpless, if she chose to bring them under the spell.
At the Cipango Club in Dallas, where she also hosted, Lauren Kirk, the ex-roommate who worked there, says Flowers once sashayed up to a tableful of “bidnessmen” and rendered one speechless as she locked eyeballs and inquired: “Has any woman ever told you she’d like to suck [dramatic pause] your lower lip?”
“Give me 30 days,” Kirk remembers her boasting. “He’ll tell me he’s going to leave his wife.” So it came to pass but ended ugly, as it often did with her married men. Contacted by phone, the man sighs when her name is brought up and says, please, not to mention him: He has a wife, children. Once, Flowers says another wife came after her with a pellet gun. “At the time, they were separated,” shrugs Flowers. “She was crazy. I heard they got a divorce.”
She never wanted to marry that one. “I usually throw them back,” she says. “I don’t want to keep them. Let the wives have them back.”
Just how does she do it? “She used to talk about how to get a man hooked,” says Kirk. “She’d say, ‘Okay, today I’ll go down on him at a red light, or strip in his office and fuck him on the floor,’ things the average woman just doesn’t generally do. She could write the book on how to get a rich man. When she looks at you, she can make you feel like the most important person in the world.”
Flowers concedes that she has never considered married men verboten. “I know it was wrong, but it fit my lifestyle so well,” she says. “I could have fun with some very interesting and exciting men, not just Bill. I could build my career, which gave me financial security and stroked my ego. I could travel and enjoy men without the complications that normally go along with a relationship or marriage.”
But Clinton, the Arkansas attorney general when they met in 1977, “rang my bell in a special way,” says Flowers. “I’ve dated men who weren’t married. I didn’t go out to try and save or destroy marriages, and I never put Bill in a position of having to make a choice.” Naturally, she fantasized what life together would be like, but “after a period of time, it became evident to me I wouldn’t be the winner.”
She keeps the tapes in a lockbox at a Dallas bank, and drives over in her 300ZX. She signs in and retrieves them, white-haired custodians treating her like Yellow Rose royalty. She says she taped Clinton several times on a cheap $20 answering machine before fleeing Little Rock last January in the wake of the breaking sex scandal that cost her a state job they can be heard discussing on tape.
She plays them later, tapes recorded, she says, as “an insurance policy” in case she was hung out to dry in the wake of reporters digging dirt.
While Clinton has denied it, the tapes — untampered with, according to the forensic audiologist retained by Penthouse — are subject to interpretation. Detractors might say they sound like a woman out to set up a political star with leading questions. But to others, including Penthouse, hearing them for the first time, with Flowers providing commentary, they can also play like the conversations between a couple of cozy coconspirators plotting to cover up a trail of flagrante delicto.
Locals say that the Clinton magic has always attracted ladies, from his teenage years in Hot Springs, when they flocked to hear him play the sax and impersonate Elvis, to the campaign trail.
But his purported affair with Flowers stayed quiet until September 11, 1988, when Little Rock Associated Press Bureau Chief Bill Simmons broke a story detailing how a state bureaucrat with the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, Larry Nichols, had billed 142 long-distance calls to the taxpayers, calls placed to leaders of the Nicaraguan contras.
After he was fired, Nichols, who says he’s an ex-Green Beret trained in tactical intrigue, began plotting revenge. “Time has no meaning to me,” he said in an interview with Penthouse.
‘Gennifer turns catty. “[Bill’s] got a small penis and [Hillary’s] got fat ankles,” she explodes, “so they have to accept each other despite their physical imperfections.”’
Two years later, when Clinton was gearing up to run for a fifth term as governor, it was payback time. His opponent was Republican Sheffield Nelson, a wealthy Little Rock businessman. That’s when Nichols dispatched to Clinton several letters suggesting that he knew all about the governor’s sexual peccadilloes. When he received no response, Nichols filed a lawsuit, charging he’d been fired as part of an attempted cover-up involving a slush fund used to fund Clinton sexcapades. “The people of Arkansas need to know what Clinton is really like,” wrote Nichols in a press release. “His wife could not stop him, only the press can. [But] the press has either been hoodwinked or has chosen to look the other way. Clinton’s … arrogance rivals that of Gary Hart.…”
Indeed, the local media ignored Nichols after he touted tape recordings of women confessing affairs but failed to deliver. He tried to subpoena five women to obtain their depositions, including several beauty queens, a Clinton aide, and Flowers. After his case died in state court, he refiled in federal court, but no woman was ever deposed.
Nichols courted local Republicans for advice. According to The Washington Post, he said that he lunched several times with Robert Leslie, a Republican committeeman from Arkansas, who advised him on whether depositions could be made public. Leslie never did respond to calls from Post reporters.
One well-connected Arkansas Republican told the Post that national Republicans spurned Nichols’s requests to finance his lawsuit against Clinton. Nichols claimed in interviews with Penthouse that he bankrolled the court costs alone. There are varying accounts as to whether Nelson, Clinton’s G.O.P. rival, used Nichols to derail the governor. Nelson denied it.
Meanwhile, during the 1990 governor’s race, Flowers began making her secret tapes — tapes that offer a rare window on the jungle of power politics, sex, sin, and spin-control. “I think we’re in the clear,” Clinton says at one point. On a tape dated April 12, 1990, he certainly believed Nelson was backing the trash campaign against him. “Nelson called me,” Clinton tells Flowers, “and said, ‘I want you to know we didn’t have anything to do with that.’”
Clinton said he didn’t buy it. “I said, ‘Yeah, you sent your little lawyer to the prison system to find inmates who would trash me.’” Clinton also accused one of Nelson’s people of manufacturing garbage. “He was calling people off the street, trying to get people to say I’d slept with them,” says Clinton on the tape.
Furthermore, Nelson’s press secretary, John Hudgens, was once a friend of Flowers; they’d worked together at a Little Rock television station, where he was assignment editor and she did a brief stint as a reporter in 1977-78. By his account, she discussed her relationship with Clinton as early as 1977 and several times afterward. Flowers says that other reporters covering Clinton made snide remarks about the attention he lavished on her. But she says Hudgens has exaggerated their friendship and his direct knowledge of her relationship with Clinton. Others say Flowers confided to them about Clinton years ago, long before it ever got out.
On October 19, 1990, Nichols called a press conference, where local media concluded he was dishing out what sounded like slander against women he named as Clinton paramours, including Flowers, hustling Clinton affairs without proof. So the story died, and Clinton won reelection. Flowers called Clinton after a disk jockey read Nichols’s press release over the air. At the time she denied the affair; her lawyer threatened to sue the station if it ever repeated the allegation. It didn’t happen again. On one tape Clinton says he’d long suspected a dirty trick — a trick that failed — courtesy of rival Sheffield Nelson, who denied it.
“We stuck it up their ass….” Clinton tells Flowers. “I know he lied. I just wanted to make his ass hole pucker!”
On the tape Clinton denies the charges, and he even starts joking about the list of his alleged lovers, read to him by local A.P. reporter Bill Simmons, who asked for his comment. “When he read me that list,” Clinton tells Flowers, “I said, ‘God, Bill, I kinda hate to deny it.’” On the list were several beautiful black women.
“I said to myself, ‘At least he’s an equal-opportunity fucker,’” laughs Flowers.
“I have good taste,” jokes Clinton on the tape. “I told you a couple of years ago when I came to see you that I’d retired. Now I’m glad I have because they have scoured the waterfront. And they couldn’t find anything!”
On this early tape, Clinton sounds more relaxed than during later conversations with Flowers, uncoaxed, relieved that the charges died in the local press. “I’m really glad it got nipped in the bud,” says Flowers.
“Are you gonna run [for president]?” asks Flowers on a later tape. “You can tell me that.”
“I want to,” says Clinton, “but I don’t want to be blown out of the water with this. I don’t see how they can hurt me so far. If they don’t have pictures of me and … if no one says anything, they don’t have anything. Or even if someone says something, they don’t have much.”
Flowers giggles. “If they could have blown you out of the water, they already would have.”
By the summer of 1991, with Clinton gearing up to run for president, reporters from out of town flew in to check on the old allegations in the Nichols suit and on other gossip, including one wild tabloid charge, which was never substantiated, that he’d fathered a child with a black hooker.
Women named in the Nichols suit, including Flowers, denied affairs with Clinton, until, Gennifer claims, reporters hounding her caused her to lose singing gigs in Little Rock and she beseeched Clinton for help. She says he responded by steering her to a $17,500 state job, and she promised to keep quiet. She also says she wanted a higher paying job with the state film office, but figured it was too visible and never got it. She was also hoping he’d plug her to his friend, Linda Bloodworth-Thompson, creator of “Designing Women,” for a possible guest spot.
Meanwhile, she told several friends about her dilemma, including Finis Shelnutt, a Little Rock stockbroker she’d begun dating after she claims to have broken it off with Clinton in 1989. She wasn’t getting any younger, the big break hadn’t happened with her singing, and suddenly she yearned for marriage, even children. After the rumors started, though, and her boyfriend heard them, she told him about Clinton. It didn’t particularly bother him, he says, even though he was getting lots of ribbing from Wall Street pals.
“I suggested she tape the conversations,” Shelnutt said in an interview, “just in case.”
Amid the pressure, their relationship fell apart, and a reporter from The Star dug up the Nichols lawsuit and began preparing a story he said would name Flowers, regardless of whether she cooperated or not. When they offered her a deal — purportedly $175,000 for her story — she says she agreed because she’d decided to flee Little Rock and her state job and had no other source of income.
Shelnutt was reading all about it. Out with a new girlfriend, he confessed that he wouldn’t mind dating Kim Basinger next. “After she dated Prince?” she asked, incredulous.
“First time we were together,” Gennifer says, “he came reasonably quick: within 15 minutes. Then he’d come two or three more times in the course of two or three hours.”
“Hell,” said Shelnutt, “I dated Gennifer after she dated Clinton.”
She never was a natural blonde. She grew up dark-haired and pretty, an only child who moved from Oklahoma City with her parents to tiny Brinkley, Arkansas (population: 4,500), a cotton patch between Little Rock and Memphis. Gennifer was nine. She became a cheerleader, sang in church, dated two football players — a nice girl from a nice family. Then her parents divorced.
After she graduated from Brinkley High in 1968, she spent two years at the University of Arkansas, then left for the big city — Little Rock — then Dallas, then back to Little Rock, where she says she lost her innocence at 20 in the back of her high school sweetheart’s car — “We’d done everything but that before” — worked as a dental assistant, and dreamed of becoming a star.
Only she never quite made it. She was lucky to pull down $5,000 a year singing, says her former booking agent, Jim Porter. “She had a knack of putting a song across as a torch singer, but she was spoiled. She didn’t have the determination to stick with it, to grind it out day after day. For her to make it, I figured it was going to be with her looks — TV or movies. She just wasn’t an outstanding voice.”
Her local fans disagree, but there weren’t enough to pay the bills steadily. Porter says he wangled her a job in 1977 as a reporter at KARK-TV, NBC’s Little Rock affiliate. It was on assignment one day that she bumped into Bill Clinton, the attorney general. “Where did they find you?” she recalls Clinton saying as he scanned her head to toe. She says he persisted — and she gave in.
“He was a good-looking man, a lot cuter than he is now, with great eyes and a very sexy mouth,” she says, “and the way he’d look at me across the room …”
“I loved his ambition, his looks, his sense of humor. Afterwards, we’d sit there and he’d hold my hand, rub my feet, do sweet, affectionate things. When he left, he’d say, ‘Love ya.’ But no, he never did look me in the eye and say, ‘I love you.’”
When she left the station to work on her singing career in clubs around town, she says he pursued her, showing up at her performances.
“I called his testicles ‘the boys,’ and he called my breasts ‘the girls,’ ” she laughs. “Sometimes, he’d come through the door of my apartment, and I’d reach down and say, ‘Is that a pistol in your pocket?’ And he’d just laugh and say, ‘No, baby, I’m just glad to see you.’”
“He was turned on all the time. Even in public, he’d get a hard-on. I’d make it a point to look at his crotch when he was making a speech, and he’d come over and lean down and whisper in my ear, ‘Would you like some of that?’”
“And I’d say, ‘Baby, I’ve already had it,’ or, ‘Sure, like about two hours worth….’ He never said, ‘You give the best blowjobs I ever had,’ but he’d say how he thought I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and that I was very talented. I probably wasn’t the best fuck he’d ever had, but I’m somewhat conservative. I like to do standard, safe things.”
Once during oral sex, she says she was unprepared when Clinton “came in my mouth,” purportedly the first time that had ever happened. But he apologized, she says. “He said, ‘Sorry, I thought you wanted me to,’” she recalls. “He thought it was kind of funny …. We didn’t hang from the chandeliers, but I didn’t have one. It was just real sweet, fun-loving sex, like in the shower.”
“We’d wash each other’s bodies, touching and playing. Sometimes we’d do it in a teasing way, and at other times in a very thoughtful and nurturing way.”
“When I was singing, he’d come to the club, and I’d look at him while I was singing ‘Since I Fell for You.’ He knew what I meant. Or it was ‘Sweet Thing’ by Chaka Khan.” Then it was often back to her place, where she says they made it on the floor or, during the day, on the couch with her curtains wide open, which she said Clinton was never concerned about. Often, to help him avoid the front door, she says she’d leave the back door open with a newspaper and he’d scoot up the stairwell.
“He was the kind of man I like,” she says. “Smart, ambitious, in control. I like that zest for life Bill had.” She gave him permission to be a little wild and kinky, she says. “We had a chemistry. Some people just have a body scent. It’s an animal sort of thing.” Beyond that, he acted like “he wanted to know about me,” she says.
Yet she says she experienced few orgasms. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had what I read about,” she says. “There were times when he made me get those chills, but I’ve never had my head blow off. It would be great to enjoy that, but there may have been other factors getting in the way.”
“It’s not like a man, who can climax by ejaculating. A woman has to have her head on right before her body is stimulated. Like with married men, you don’t want to let completely go — psychologically you hold back. As much as I cared about Bill, when I realized he wasn’t going to get a divorce and marry me, I held back. I didn’t want to get that hooked.”
She calls him a predictable lover who favored the old-fashioned missionary position. “He never wanted to do anything I’d consider outlandish or perverted,” she says. No golden showers or anal sex. “Had I suggested something, he might have gone along with the program. He did like me on top, or the doggie position. We made love everywhere — on the floor, in bed, in the kitchen, on the cabinet, the sink.”
When he phoned, she says, they had a code. “He’d say, ‘How are the girls doing?’ He was talking about my breasts. And I’d say, ‘The girls say hello.’” She presumes he was in a meeting or public place.
“He liked my breasts, but he wasn’t obsessed with them like some men,” she says. “I wouldn’t call him a ‘boob man.’ He liked the allover deal. If he had anything that was his thing, it was oral sex. He would have gone on forever if I’d let him.”
She says he didn’t cry out or yell but had definite orgasms. “The first time I didn’t know what to think, his whole body tensed up … he gave some ‘ooohs and ohs,’ and I kept thinking, ‘I wish I could have that.’”
Indeed, she says he never let her down. “First time we were together, he came reasonably quick,” she says, “within 15 minutes. Then he’d come two or three more times in the course of two or three hours.
“He’d get the first one out of the way, then he had staying power,” she goes on. “I’ve been with men who came in nine seconds, so 15 minutes is nothing to sneeze at. The quickest he came was one time [when] he came in my mouth. I’d just started sucking him and bammo. I was shocked he came so quickly.
“Sometimes,” she says, “he’d be on the verge after maybe ten to 15 seconds, and to overcome the urge, he’d back off. I’d say, ‘Is everything okay?’ I didn’t understand, but after a while, I began to know why he slowed down. I’d rather him do that than come and that’s that, leave me out to dry.
“I’ve had better lovers, just good down-home fucking,” she says, “but he was one of the best overall lovers I’ve ever had, because of his overall combination of sweetness. All those caring factors put him right up there.”
She says he liked her to talk dirty. “He’d say, ‘Oh, great, God, that’s good!’ He liked me on top, and sometimes sucked my breasts when I was busy doing what I was doing. I liked to scratch his back,” she goes on. “I’d give him massages with lotion or baby oil. I didn’t have to use that to excite him, though. I’d rub his feet and his hands and massage his back and legs. It was kind of in return for what he’d done for me. He was so eager to please me.”
She remembers his “very white skin. It was never all that appealing. He’s not real toned and has two big moles on his back. I’d consider his penis on the small side,” she says. “But I never put him down for that. Some women might say it’s not the size, it’s the motion of the ocean, but why take a chance? You might have motion for a few seconds, then you’re shit out of luck. No matter what women say, size does matter. But with Bill, at least I knew that he’d be aggressive with oral sex. I knew he’d been there.”
It certainly didn’t stop her from falling in love, she says. “Nekkid, he’s not a looker, but I don’t like a muscle-bound man, just someone who looks healthy. Even an older man who keeps himself up.”
Clinton did surprise her once. “I walked out with a hairbrush and he said, ‘Let me do that for you.’ Only my mother had brushed my hair before. I thought it was pretty neat. It sort of became our tradition, and it felt great. It really relaxed me, like some kind of therapy. My hair was black then, and so was his.”
By 1979 she’d hit the road as a back-up singer for Roy Clark, a six-month gig booked by agent Jim Porter, and their rendezvous diminished. But Clinton apparently kept in touch, even when she was on the road, dropping by a club in Fort Worth once in the early eighties, a place called Remingtons. “I do remember being introduced to Clinton there,” says a Fort Worth man, a hair-dresser, in an interview with Penthouse. It was the only time Clinton came by that club, says Flowers. She slipped him her apartment key, she says, and they met later.
Then she landed in Dallas, where she serenaded rich oilmen in the Pyramid Room of the Fairmont, then at the Cipango Club. “She was a pro,” says Bob Phillips, the singer who recruited her. Off work in the early eighties, ex-roommate Lauren Kirk says she fielded several calls from Clinton at their Dallas condo. “He’d say, ‘This is Bill, is Gennifer there?’ “She never saw him, but says Flowers spoke of the alleged affair often, and said he’d visited her at the apartment.
Kirk had no reason to doubt her, but soon came to know a darker side of Gennifer. “She has this sweet, very generous side, but she’s a sociopath, a split personality who can be very vicious. She figures out your weakness. Then it’s just a matter of time before she uses it against you.”
Last August, Kirk told Clinton bimbo-buster Palladino about the dark side, how Gennifer purportedly bragged about her sexual power, how she got even when she felt the urge.
First, says Kirk, came humiliation. She refers to a Dixie mogul who’s been quizzed by the sleuth. After he was less generous than her expectations, she said Gennifer bragged about telling him, “You’re a disgusting old man with a pin dick that could never satisfy a woman! Money is the only reason I have anything to do with you.” Then she said Flowers shifted to her sweet voice and said, “But I’m sure you’ll want to take care of me until I get back on my feet.”
To ensure the deal, two old friends interviewed by Penthouse say Flowers told them, she picked up souvenirs on one visit to the mogul’s mansion: his wife’s douche bag and one white tennis shoe. “She said she told him, ‘Now we wouldn’t want your wife to know who took them,’” said Kirk.
Kirk says Palladino told her Gennifer had been “going to a gynecologist, complaining of vaginal injuries. She was supposed to have told him this [mogul] was into S & M and had beaten her,” trying to document a bum rap.
Kirk says Flowers urged her never to discuss the mogul, among other things. “She said, ‘I’d never want people to think I go around plotting people’s downfalls.’” (But another old friend from Little Rock says that, on instructions of Flowers, she secretly took photos of Flowers and the mogul together in public, just in case Flowers might need them one day. Flowers says he was a Republican whom she suspected might offer her a deal to rat out Clinton, and she aimed to play double agent, turning them over to the governor as evidence of G. O.P. dirty tricks. Since no deal was offered, the photos were moot, she adds.)
“She was genuinely crazy about the old man for a while,” sighs Kirk, “then money reared its ugly head.”
At the same time, she juggled young hunks like Tim Allen, six four, 230 pounds of rock-hard, movie-star muscle. He was ten years younger, rough around the edges, and fresh off an off-shore oil rig when they met at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth. Gennifer came in a limo, dancing in wearing a mink coat. Allen remembers it:
“I went up to her and said, ‘Older women make good lovers.’” Her eyes bored right through him.
“All I’m going to say, big boy, is, ‘Don’t you go home without me,’” he remembers her saying. Then she just disappeared for several hours, suddenly driving up in her old Mazda RX-7. “She raised this pretty long fingernail and motioned for me to get in,” he sighs. “Didn’t say a word, drove me to this big old mansion,” apparently one of her sugar daddies’.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Allen. “She got this expensive bottle of Crown Royal from the bar, poured me a drink. Knew how to treat a man. I really loved Gennifer.”
One night, he remembers Lauren Kirk bragging how her boyfriend “fucked me seven times.” So Gennifer chimed in, “Honey, the record around here is 14!”
Flowers says he was violent, that he hit her, but Allen says no way. “She was my million-dollar girl,” he says. He even picked up the phone once when a man asked for her. “I said, ‘Who’s calling?’ And he said, ‘Bill Clinton.’”
“Sure it hurt,” he says, but he accepted her other men, especially the rich ones. “Gennifer was expensive pussy,” he says. But she “treated me so good, took me to fine restaurants, ordered me escargots, taught me all about good wine, how to treat a lady. She picked out my clothes, showed me which fork to use, bought me my first bottle of Polo. I was her toy, but I didn’t feel used. I was in heaven.”
And she knew all about big money. “She showed me what money was all about, what it could do, made me hungry for it.” One night at the Ci pan go Club, she consoled a man whose wife had left him. Later “she told me, ‘No wonder she left. He bought her a rabbit coat!’”
Once he drove her to Little Rock. “Ask her about driving over the Red River Bridge. She gave me the best blowjob of my life. She broke my heart, but she changed my life. Please give her my beeper, tell her to call me, hear?”
All the while, Kirk says Flowers was hatching her plot to maximize her Clinton affair. “Gennifer is a wonderful liar,” says Kirk, “because there’s always a kernel of truth in what she says.”
After Flowers moved back to Little Rock in the mid-eighties, she stayed in touch with Kirk. After a state G.O.P. official reportedly offered her $50,000 and a job in California to go public with Clinton last year, she phoned Kirk. “She said, ‘It’s tempting, but I’m going to wait until after he’s nominated. It will be worth a lot more.’”
“Until then, I’d always gone along with her. But I said, ‘Gennifer, this isn’t a game. It’s a race for president! Someone’s going to kill you.’ She said, ‘No, that only happens in the movies.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you keep your mouth shut, let him get elected and get a nice job in Washington?’ But she said, ‘I don’t want that. I want the publicity. I’d much rather be famous than rich.’”
Sighs Kirk: “She’s a frustrated actress who can’t do it onstage, so she does it in real life. She’s like Alexis on ‘Dynasty,’ a split personality. She can be wonderful and sweet and generous. But her other side is just plain cruel. She likes to investigate people, find their weakness, keep a mental dossier, then use it when the time is right.”
“Clinton has been planned out like a military campaign. She’s using it as a springboard because she never made it as a singer. She’s extremely talented but never got a real break, and when breaks don’t happen fast enough for her, she has this habit of giving up and moving on to something else. But she feels so resentful, she intends to become famous at all costs — and this was the perfect avenue.”
Kirk laid it all out for Palladino. “They want to neutralize her,” says Kirk, and “wanted to find out stuff to discredit her. I told them, ‘Sure, she puffs up her resume. She goes after married men for the sport of it. She’s written a hot check. She’s pumped up her affair with Clinton to make it look long and passionate.’”
“But, I told them, that doesn’t alter the fact — she did have an affair with Clinton. She just can’t accept the fact that he came, wiped himself off, zipped up, and left. He was probably using her, and she just doesn’t like being used. She likes to use.”
Not so, says singer Marjorie Moore. “If she’d taken advantage of the rich men who were chasing her,” says Moore, “she’d be one of the richest women in the country. She wouldn’t be struggling to pay the rent.”
“Don’t believe a word Lauren says,” sniffs Flowers, dismissing anyone who contradicts her as a liar. “She’s a transvestite, or a transsexual. Check out her heavy five o’clock shadow.”
“She said if I talked, she’d drag my name through the dirt,” says Kirk, who considers herself all woman, and happily married. “Gennifer threatened me. She said if I told what I knew, I’d be very sorry. She’d just deny it, and no one would believe me.”
Back home, all this sex talk has the locals buzzing about Razorback heresy: Shame on any Arkansan for trashing a homeboy with a shot at the White House — whether he dallied or not!
By the mid-eighties, Gennifer says Clinton cranked the affair back up, trysting, she guesses, about two to four times a month. “But I’d begun to lose some enthusiasm. A lot of times Bill wanted to see me, but I’d make excuses.”
“What if I did have sex with ten people?” she says. “I didn’t pull Bill Clinton’s penis out of his pants. I didn’t make him fuck me!”
Once, she says, she sang at the governor’s mansion, where Clinton pitched for a little action in a bathroom between sets, which she refused. “I said, ‘What if someone walks in?’” He was adamant until Flowers filibustered, noting that his wife had walked right past her without speaking, that she had to know. “He said, ‘You mean Hilla the Hun,’ and I said, ‘That’s a good way to describe it.’”
But Clinton aide Betsey Wright disputes that Clinton would ever disparage his wife, citing a local newspaper columnist, Deborah Mathis, who once used the phrase. “That’s where she obviously got it,” asserts Wright.
One night before they made love, Flowers says, she was stunned when Clinton jumped out of bed, stood with his back to the wall, and wept. “I didn’t know why and he wouldn’t tell me. I couldn’t tell if he felt guilty, if maybe he felt some deep emotion with me he realized he’d never get anywhere else, or what.” He never did explain, she says, then he climbed back into bed and they made love.
By 1989 she’d met her stockbroker, Finis Shelnutt, divorced with two daughters. She decided to break it off with Clinton, and says the candidate actually had tears in his eyes. “He said to call him any time I felt like seeing him,” she says, “and he phoned later to see if I’d changed my mind.”
“I really want to talk to you. I really want to see you,” Clinton tells her on the April 12, 1990, tape. “I’m really sorry you got involved in this.”
When names of other alleged Clinton women surfaced, she was hurt. “You always want to believe you’re the only woman, even if you’re the other woman.”
When it looked as if the story might break, she says she began taping calls to Clinton. On one tape he identifies himself as “Bill Clinton.” Isn’t that a mite formal for an alleged ex-lover? “Look,” says Flowers, “it had been two years since we’d broken up, and there were other Bills. I’d asked him to leave word like. that.”
On another widely reported taped conversation, Clinton responds, “He acts like one,” to Gennifer’s Mafia slur about New York governor Mario Cuomo and says Senator Bob Kerrey can bed anyone he pleases without hoopla because he’s single. Clinton later apologized.
On another tape they discuss how she might turn double agent and attempt to entrap the local Republicans who had approached her with a reported $50,000 offer to go public. Clinton suggests she consider signing an affidavit detailing any G.O.P. dirty tricks. On another tape, concerned about a grievance filed against her by a state employee — the job that Clinton helped procure — she phones Clinton at the mansion and urges him to help her get out of town before reporters begin digging into how she got the job. He promises to help.
Suddenly, the stakes were high. After Clinton went public with his White House dreams, Flowers phoned the candidate to alert him to all the snooping. Her mother and stepfather were visiting, asleep in the back room. She can be heard whispering on a tape dated September 23, 1991, “It’s the last thing I needed to happen.”
Clinton urges her to deny everything. “If they ever hit you with it, just say no and go on. There’s nothing they can do.” He says he “expected” the press “to look into it and interview you, but I just think if everyone’s on record denying it, you got no problems.”
Flowers: “Why would they waste their money and time coming down here?”
Clinton: “They’re gonna try and run this. [But if] everybody kinda hangs tough, they’re just not gonna do anything. They can’t. They can’t run a story like that unless somebody says, ‘Yeah, I did it.’”
Obviously this original article in Penthouse included a bunch of picture we cannot post out here in the “anyone and everyone can see it” part of our digital world. At the risk of sounding like a shill for the membership site — a description that absolutely fits in this case, admittedly — you can view all of the original layout photos in full Geniffer Flowers glory on the PenthouseGold membership site. At least you have options. Without options, life can be very, very sad.
