Once a week long-time radio producer and author Rick Kaempfer shares his favorite brushes with "greatness" in a feature he calls “Celebrity Snippets.”
Gennifer Flowers celebrated her 57th birthday in obscurity last week. Her notoriety forever faded after Monica Lewinsky’s “special internship” officially became public knowledge in 1998. In the years before Monica, however, Gennifer was a well known name in America. She had publicly claimed to be Bill Clinton’s mistress, and even had answering machine messages to prove it. Her claims were such a big story during the 1992 campaign that it caused Bill and Hillary to consent to their famous side-by-side 60 Minutes interview. By Rick Kaempfer
During the 1996 campaign, Gennifer was out on the interview circuit again. She had a book called “Passion & Betrayal” in which she chronicled the details of her affair with Bill. After leafing through the book, I knew we had to have her on the John Landecker show. She agreed to come into the studio one morning, and I’ll never forget it.
The first thing I noticed about her was how short she was. She claims to be 5’2”, but if she is, my wife is five or six inches taller than she claims to be (5’3”). Gennifer is a tiny, tiny woman.
She arrived moments before the interview, so I didn't have a lot of time to talk to her, but she was very pleasant and professional in the green room.
When she got into the studio, however, she and John hit it off immediately. He didn’t start the interview by warming her up with softball questions, he leapt right in. Some of his questions even shocked me, but to her credit, she not only answered them, she answered them flirtatiously.
My lasting visual of that day is the image of John pulling her to his microphone to ask some of the most personal questions. He lowered his voice and nearly whispered. It was as if he was saying to her, “hey, this is just between the two of us—no-one else will never know.”
When she answered John’s question about the size of Bill’s “political caucus,” it made several of the local gossip columns in the newspapers the next day.
I happen to have an audio clip of that interview. We used a small portion of it to introduce our most popular Bill Clinton song on the last Landecker & The Legends CD: “20th Century Hits & Bits.” The song is about Monica, but Gennifer will always be our favorite presidential mistress.
AUDIO: Gennifer & Landecker/"He's the President"
Stories like this one (and many, many more) are available via Allworth Press--in my How-To-Guide for producing radio shows (co-written with fellow radio producer John Swanson)Click on this link to order your copy: The Radio Producer's Handbook
