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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.