Wink, wink

New Orleans

It all feels so ‘90s. So of a bygone era -- when stocks were climbing and presidential indiscretions were still a matter of national importance. Or at least prurient interest.

But here in the heart of the French Quarter, where ghosts walk the iron balconies alongside the living, and characters with tales to tell are cultivated like hothouse blooms, Gennifer Flowers still stokes the flame of her fast-fading notoriety.

She was the first of Bill Clinton’s bimbo eruptions, and the last time most of us saw her was in the pages of the Star. Or on “Larry King.” Or detailing the president’s preferred sexual positions in Penthouse. This month she was in the news again when a federal appeals court ruled that Flowers may pursue a libel and conspiracy case against Hillary Rodham Clinton and two former presidential aides, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.

For most of the country, Clinton’s onetime paramour is an occasional blip in our collective consciousness. But here at 720 St. Louis St., the legend of Gennifer Flowers lives on.

Flowers has returned to her career as a lounge singer, belting out standards Thursday through Sunday at the Gennifer Flowers Kelsto Club. Far from putting the purported pain of the Clinton scandal behind her, she works it for all it is worth, weaving it into her nightclub act and seizing any media attention that comes her way.

Who knows why people come -- titillation? a firsthand brush with scandal? a way to keep their rage against Democrats alive? -- but night after night, they sit and watch Flowers lean against her gold grand piano and croon into her mike.

And they eat her up.

You don’t go for the music

The club is just off Bourbon Street, right across from Antoine’s, the legendary French Creole restaurant that caters to new wealth and old New Orleans. It opened a year ago, and, in a city full of crazy stories, it still makes some locals shake their heads.

“You don’t go to see Gennifer Flowers for the music,” says a cabdriver, who confesses he has never been to the club and doesn’t plan to go. “That’s like saying you read Playboy for the articles.”

“How long is she going to ride this thing?” asks a local merchant, who says he has never been either.

The sign outside is adorned with a giant lipstick kiss. A head shot of Flowers hangs in the window.

The club was once a stable for a rich slave owner and most recently housed Lucky Cheng’s, staffed by Asian drag queens. Before that, in the early ‘90s, it was a bar called Bogie and Me, run by a former Hollywood hairdresser who claims to have been Humphrey Bogart’s mistress. The focal point of the room is that great gold piano, purchased in Las Vegas and said to have once belonged to Bugsy Siegel. (It’s nicknamed “Virginia” after the mobster’s starlet girlfriend, Virginia Hill.)

Flowers takes the floor at about a quarter to 10. She is accompanied by pianist Mimi Gustd, a feisty woman with a sultry voice who pounds away on the keys like a mad Muppet and has a face more expressive than a silent film star’s. Tony Seville, bald and bereted, pulls out assorted instruments like a magician with a hatful of tricks.

Flowers wears a white tuxedo jacket and a lace camisole. Her bottle-blond hair is piled atop her head in her trademark up-do. Her eyes are turquoise. Her lips are red, luscious, always freshly painted.

When she receives a business card from a patron she smiles, then tucks it into her cleavage. “I don’t have anywhere else, baby,” she drawls.

She sings jazz, blues and R&B.; She sings Billie Holiday and some Patsy Cline. Always, she sings about love gone wrong.

“This is our sentiment to any guy out there who happens to do us wrong,” she says to the ladies in the bar. “Hey, did you happen to see, the most beautiful guy in the world who walked out on me,” she croons. “Say it, ladies, ‘Love gone wrong ... ‘ “

She’s singing “Just One of Those Things” when she breaks into a playful patter. She includes herself in the great American pantheon of Women Scorned and celebrates herself as an icon of mistress culture. She talks about Tammy Faye Bakker and Ivana Trump. Then she talks about herself: “Gennifer whispered in the president’s ear, ‘Wanna face the facts, my dear?’ ”

A collective intake of breath. She said it. The crowd titters, then goes crazy.

The patrons are a mix of locals, tourists and Quarter characters. It’s a place where everyone seems to be on a first-name basis with Bill and Hillary.

“Last night this girl was in here,” Finis Shelnutt, Gennifer’s husband of five years and her greatest admirer, whispers to Rush Biossat, a neighborhood regular. “She paid $10 to get her picture taken with Gennifer. She was a major liberal, a big-time Democrat.

“But this girl met Gennifer,” he says proudly. “Now, this girl, she is one of Gennifer’s major fans.”

The club seems to be a magnet for disgruntled Republicans, for whom the Clinton years were the best and worst of times. They come to reinvigorate their moral outrage and to pay homage to one of the women who took Slick Willie down.

That’s fine with Flowers, who says she votes Republican now because of her pocketbook but does not identify completely with either party. She says her campaign was never about Republicans or Democrats, it was about telling the truth and being called a liar.

On Democrats: “I think the people who want to be angry at me, after all that has come down the pike, are the dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who see me as a threat to their party.”

On Republicans: “I did have more Republicans come to my aid because they are not Clinton supporters. I was invited to attend inauguration balls by some Republicans, and invited to debates by some Republicans, but they simply wanted to use me as a vehicle to destroy Clinton. I wouldn’t say that they cared about me.”

At one table sit some well-heeled Manhattanites. “I came tonight to wish Gennifer luck in her new case,” says Richard Blecka. “I’m not real nuts about Bill.” His wife, Patricia, is delighted by the show, by Flowers’ charisma, presence and, yes, her voice.

The Bleckas purchase two autographed pink plastic shot glasses shaped like lips (Gennifer’s kiss for $10) as political souvenirs: one for their daughter who works in the Bush administration, and one for a hardheaded Democratic aunt who used to defend Clinton and his wandering ways.

Other self-confessed Republicans see that famous name and just have to stick their heads in. “He saw the name ‘Gennifer Flowers’ and he absolutely loved the scandal part of it,” says Donna Stephens, from Atlanta. Her husband protests. “There is no question, when you saw that name on that sign, that is what brought you in,” she says.

“We came in for the scandal,” Jim Stephens admits. “She’s great! She can really sing.”

“She’s average,” corrects his wife. “She is just like any typical nightclub singer in Atlanta.”

“She’s average,” says Jim Stephens.

Clinging to her notoriety

Flowers is not just a campy act, a pathetic political footnote. The truth is much more messy. She has a sly sense of humor and invites her audience to be in on the joke with a big, flirty wink. She clings to her 15 minutes of fame with the ferocity of a professional publicist, welcoming journalists and gawkers alike into her club.

“I could care less what brings them in,” she says of her patrons. “I appreciate their curiosity.”

She wants to cash in -- a picture of her Penthouse cover hangs on a wall of the bar. But when she talks, her vulnerability, her pain, her anger at having been made a laughingstock are apparent. It’s hard to decide if she is funny, tragic or absurd.

Her claimed 12-year affair with Bill Clinton may be what defined her in the public eye, but singing has always been a part of Flowers’ life. She started singing at age 5 in church, back in Brinkley, Ark., and got her first recording contract, with United Southern Artists, at 11.

She used to sing a song called “There Ought to Be a Law.” “I sang, ‘I wish I had a chance to go to Washington and make a law,’ ” she recalls. “Boy, little did I know ...”

She abandoned her recording career to become a regular kid and cheerleader, and eventually a television news reporter. “That’s when I met Bill,” she says. But singing was always the constant in her life, until the Clinton Thing.

“Nobody would touch me with a 10-foot pole,” she says. “One of the things that really hurt me was that my ability to perform was taken away from me. I couldn’t go to venues where I used to perform because I would have had the media all over me, the stalkers....

“I was presented by the Clinton propagandists as a vindictive big blond bitch, a bimbo -- and I do mean bimbo. If they used that word once they used it 90,000 times. Where were the women’s groups then? It was like riding a wild bull across an arena for days. I was like a little girl up against a huge power structure that was bent on destroying me.”

She married Finis Shelnutt, a high-powered Little Rock stockbroker, and moved to Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas. But wherever she went, the Clinton Thing always came up.

“The Las Vegas Hilton offered me a yearlong contract as a featured performer. I was just elated,” she says. “Then I get a call from the production manager. He sits me down, he says, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this ... ‘ “

He had just received a call from Arthur Goldberg, an executive vice president of the Hilton Hotels Corp. “He said, ‘Bill Clinton is a friend of mine. She will never work in any hotel of mine, anywhere, any time, ever.’ ”

She moved to New Orleans a year ago, after attending a wedding in the French Quarter and having a spiritual experience. The wedding was in the mansion once owned by Virginie Avegno Gautreau, the beauty known as “Madame X” after the scandalous portrait of her painted by John Singer Sargent.

Chuck Robinson, an antiques dealer who now owns the Madame X Mansion on Toulouse Street, where a replica of the portrait hangs, says Flowers was bewitched by it. “She told me, ‘I want to tell you how transported I was by the spirits in your house. Your home is fabulous, but tell me about this woman.... This woman is calling to me.’ ”

“As soon as we got back to Vegas I said, ‘Finis, we need to move to New Orleans,’ ” Flowers says. Three months later they bought their first property, on Pirate’s Alley.

Shelnutt has bigger plans: He’s looking for a huge venue on Bourbon Street for Gennifer’s act. “It will be like the Copacabana,” he says. “I want to do a crazy show where they will roll me in on a pair of giant satin lips and have six drag queens all dressed up like me,” she says. They also have plans for a Web site, said to be up any day now, that will allow visitors to pay a fee of $5 to $10 to see Flowers perform live online.

“Since when is ‘opportunist’ a bad word in the United States?” she asks.

Her feelings about Clinton seem more conflicted. She calls him “Bill” in conversation, and speaks in a tone so intimate it sounds as if they’re still lovers. Then she lashes out in her sweet but deadly Southern drawl.

“I wish the [new] case didn’t have to be about money,” she says. “I’d like to put him in jail. Unfortunately, it’s a civil case.”

Given all her pain, maybe people would forget about the whole thing if she let them, a visitor ventures. That sets her off.

“That Clinton thing has consumed me for the last 12 years. I feel that is something that I will be dealing with for the rest of my life.” She frets about how her heirs will deal with the aftermath, although she has no children. “They will be auctioning my things off at Sotheby’s someday, saying, ‘This belonged to the president’s mistress.’

“How do you put a dollar figure on integrity? On a reputation that has been destroyed?”

She seems proud of her past but also wounded by it.

“I don’t know how to roll up in the fetal position. People say, ‘She just wants to be famous.’ Well, what’s fame without dignity?”

Another tourist attraction

Whatever happens anywhere else, here in the Vieux Carre, history counts more than today, and a good story is worth even more than the truth.

“People embellish here,” Flowers says. “Stories become almost fictionalized. So-and-so’s mistress lived here. So-and-so’s mother lived here “

Here only a year, Flowers is already a part of local lore, as vivid and colorful as Marie Laveau the voodoo queen, Jean Lafitte the pirate captain and assorted other mistresses, lovers and suspicious characters said to have once walked these streets.

“On the left, we have Gennifer Flowers’ place,” says mule driver Dave Rowe as his carriage full of tourists clip-clops down St. Louis Street on a Sunday morning. “She is a singer, by the way. Now, Gennifer, she used to date Bill, when he was governor of Arkansas.” He turns to the tourists with a sly grin. “Aren’t I nice?” he says.

Back at the club, passersby peer in. They point. They step inside and gawk.