The Burden Of Being Bill’s Brother: ROGER CLINTON

LAST APRIL, ROGER CLINTON, WHO IS PARtial to motley Caribbean drawstring pants, squirmed into a tuxedo and showed up at the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel for a fancy fund raiser honoring his brother Bill. It was, in a way, a coming-out party for Roger. He was seated at the head table, and he led his band, called Politics, before some of Hollywood’s established entertainers. But then it came time for Bill to speak. He told the story of a man he had met in Northern California who had supported him because he was out of a job, living in his car, and desperately needed to believe. “You know,” said Bill Clinton, “while we are all in here, he is still out there, and he’s cold in his car, and he’d like to come home. I want to bring him home. It’s time to bring him home.” Roger had tears streaming down his face. When a friend asked why, he said, “I know what it’s like to be on the outside looking in.”

If career-conscious baby boomers are cringing in the glare of Bill Clinton’s achievements, imagine how tough it is for the next President’s half brother. After all, Americans reserve a special cruelty for the relatives of the prominent. In a country that despises losers, the biggest loser of all is perhaps the weak brother who is made even weaker by his brother’s success. At the same time, Americans want their leaders to be godlike but still connected to the soil from which they sprang; so it is psychologically useful if the President is a colossus but his brother has feet of clay.

Roger Clinton, 36, knows that by a twist of fate he has been cast as the suburban version of Billy Carter, the other honky-tonking younger brother with a history of substance abuse. When the comparison is thrown at him, Roger offers this artful riposte: Did you know, he says, that a cancer-stricken Billy spent the last years of his life counseling other terminally ill patients?

At a time when exploiting presidential connections has meant everything from Billy Beer to serving on the board of a savings and loan, Roger has to figure out more than ever how to avoid becoming the family’s buffoonish freeloader. It seemed benign for him to be employed by his brother’s friends, television producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, working on the set of Designing Women and warming up the studio audience with his band. But now Coke and Pepsi are talking about the possibility of endorsements; on a Los Angeles radio show last month, he was asked to answer questions about everything from his brother’s plans for the aerospace industry to his attitude toward the FCC. Chat hosts from Howard Stern to Larry King want him on their shows, and the calls are coming so fast he now has a private line on the set.

The offers began even before his brother was elected. His first putative sponsors were a group of journalists from Esquire magazine, who saw him perform at the Democratic Convention: Roger was the long-haired Clinton with the mike during the Circle of Friends finale who almost overshadowed the nominee every time he thrust his fist upward with the show-biz earnestness of a crooner. Mostly as a lark, the journalists formed a company called Snarling Jackass Productions, each putting up $250, to try to snag Roger a record contract. They persuaded him to cut a demonstration tape in Nashville, but after the election Roger sniffed the chance at a better deal and dropped them. Last month he signed a $200,000 contract with Time Warner’s Atlantic Records to record his first album. (It is likely to feature several guest stars.)

The essential ambiguity of Roger’s post-election career was summed up recently by the statements of his backer and would-be backers. “He has to have talent. He can’t just be the President’s brother,” said Atlantic Records head Ahmet Ertegun. “He can’t just have talent,” said Esquire editor David Hirshey. “He also has to be the President’s brother.” The man who signed him for Atlantic Records is Danny Goldberg, who is better known in Hollywood as a Democratic activist — he organized the music industry’s resistance to Tipper Gore’s system of rating records — than as Bonnie Raitt’s co-manager.

Roger seems willing to be exploited as long as he gets paid for it. As they were secretly negotiating the deal with Atlantic, Clinton and his manager, Norman (“Butch”) Stone, allowed the crew from Esquire to take them to Planet Hollywood, a touristy restaurant in Manhattan, where the two Arkansans ordered steak and a vast amount of appetizers (the remnants of which they took away in a doggy bag). Roger let patrons take pictures, and he was treated by the staff to free caps, T shirts and a private tour. “I think he and Butch thought it was the funniest thing in the world that suddenly he was now in the position to really cash in,” says Will Blythe, Esquire’s literary editor. “They would just look at each other during the meal and start to laugh.”

Roger is planning to market more than just his music. His moment in the public eye has come at a time when, even more than usual, there is a clear professional track for people from dysfunctional families. Last month he signed with the Greater Talent Network to give speeches around the country about “the triumph of the human spirit,” or how Roger overcame life with an alcoholic and abusive father, a brother who seemed anointed, and a cocaine addiction. He is hoping to give 20 to 40 speeches a year for as much as $10,000 each. Roger is also peddling a book on the subject.

It is easy to imagine the Roger Clinton tour from watching his performance last month on The Maury Povich Show. In many ways, Roger offers a voyeuristic peek at the childhood trauma Bill Clinton buried so carefully that even close friends read about it for the first time during the campaign. Bill went on to become the smooth talk-show candidate; Roger remains, in some ways, Bill turned inside out, the soap-opera version. It took just the slightest prodding from Povich for Roger to break down at the thought of his violent father. “I still go up in my hometown in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and when I happen to be home on my birthday, I go and visit the gravesite and talk to him,” he said, tears filling his eyes. Then he shook his head, trying to hold it all in, letting go a tiny “Oouuu,” then slapping his knees as if to contain the pain again, then letting go another tiny “Oouuu,” then looking up and saying slowly, “It’s been a while. I should be able to get through this. It’s not like it happened yesterday.” Then, with perfect comic timing: “Makeup!”

In the Clinton household, Bill was the four-year-old who witnessed his drunken stepfather fire a shot at him and his mother. But Bill, who is 10 years older than his half brother, was also the son who got the chance to play hero. In a now famous confrontation, the 14-year-old Bill told his stepfather, “Daddy, you cannot hit Mother anymore,” and the beating stopped. Roger’s childhood is filled instead with memories of helplessness — of having his older brother’s arm constantly around him, of being rescued from the house by a brother who took him everywhere, even on dates.

And then there is the central fact that Roger did not have simply an older brother; he had a perfect older brother. “Everyone was excited when Bill would come home,” says Roger’s childhood friend Will Schubert. “We would just sit on the front porch waiting for him to drive up in his Mustang.” Schubert is one of three close friends who describe how, early on, Roger internalized a sense of deficiency in relation to his brother and a need for approval from him. “When we’d get in trouble doing stupid things, he would punish himself so much because he perceived at a young age that Bill was pretty special and he might not be that special, and he put a lot of pressure on himself for that,” says Schubert. “In a lot of the things Roger does, in the back of his mind he thinks, ‘What would Bill think?’ “

In many ways, however, Roger and Bill are alike. They both revere Elvis. They both are night owls, although Roger tends to sleep in the next day. They both are gifted entertainers, although Roger likes to tell you so. (“I have a good rapport with a crowd, and a God-given ability to communicate, especially onstage,” he told the New York Post last month.) They both are optimists, although Roger’s optimism is tinged with naivete. (He once told a group that he loved living in Hollywood because it was a city built solely on talent.) They both are gregarious, although Roger has also made a career of being the cutup, the one who burst into song at all times, who performed comedy skits on the high school public address system and kept friends up at night with imitations of the Three Stooges and Deputy Dawg. They both have tempers, although Roger often says he has trouble controlling his in public. They both make friends fast, although Roger is even gushier than his brother. (“Everything has to be dramatized to an extreme,” says another of Roger’s childhood friends, Larry Jackson. “Everything needs to have a deep meaning.”) Most of all, both Clinton sons have a hard time saying no.

In Bill’s case, it has brought him a reputation as a panderer. In Roger’s, it led to a seven-gram-a-day cocaine habit and a life of lapses and relapses. He dropped out of Arkansas’ Hendrix College, where he was studying political science, to make a living in the bars of Hot Springs singing with his band, Dealer’s Choice. He also held a public relations job for a while at Oaklawn Park, the local racetrack. In 1985 he was arrested after an investigation that his brother, the Governor, had been informed about and had allowed to proceed. Roger was convicted of distributing cocaine, along with his New York City- based Colombian partner, and served more than a year in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas. The conviction was devastating to him, partly because he had violated the Clinton we’re-all-in-this-lifeboat-together code that for 25 years bound a long-suffering mother, Virginia Kelley, and her two sons. Recalls Schubert: “He told me that she looked at him in a way that she’d never looked at him before.” Roger told Povich, “I just never wanted to hurt her. She’d been hurt so much.”

After his release, Roger was a groundskeeper on a horse farm in Florida, lived for a while on the Arkansas farm of his current manager, Stone, worked at a convenience store and in road construction, and got entangled with the law again. He was found guilty of disorderly conduct after refusing to leave a club when he and a bartender got into an argument about the number of liquors that make up a particular cocktail. Three months later, he was arrested after he and his friends drove away from an early-morning fight outside a nightclub in Hot Springs; the judge found him guilty of “obstructing a government operation” for not quickly obeying the police order to get out of the back seat. A month later, he was almost sent back to the federal penitentiary when his probation officer reported he had a drinking problem and had used cocaine again. The judge extended his probation an extra year instead. Roger left Hot Springs soon afterward to take a traveling job manning the T shirt stand at the concerts of country singer George Jones. Around two years later, he was fired for what his supervisors claimed was excessive drinking.

In Los Angeles these days, friends of Bill’s are looking after him: besides the Thomasons, there is Gary Belz, whose family owns the landmark Peabody hotel in Memphis and who moved to California two years ago, where he runs recording studios and studies the teachings of an Indian guru. And then there is Stone, Roger’s manager, who favors lobster dinners and snakeskin boots and spent years sharing the road and mountaintop commune of the heavy-metal boogie band Black Oak Arkansas.

These days Roger is under orders from the Clintons to refrain from political comment and decline all interviews, including one for this story. His music associates, meanwhile, want Roger to get cracking on the record: since the deal was signed, he has spent thousands of dollars flying five of his oldest friends out to visit him in Los Angeles. He has also bought a sleek Dodge Stealth, in which he was stopped for speeding on Christmas Day. Yes, his brother beat him to the cover of Rolling Stone, and his mother beat him to the cover of the Daily Racing Form, a newspaper about his other passion, horse racing. But he appears to believe he can catch up. After all, he was savvy enough to write a song called Brother, Brother, a ballad about a young man who turns to life on the street while his brother seems beyond reach.