SEX SCANDALS WILT LIKE FLOWERS

By MARGARET CARLSON

Gennifer Flowers is sucking so hard on the straw in her bottle of spring water that it's turned orange with thick, sticky lipstick. She's sitting behind a table stacked high with her book, Passion & Betrayal, along with a shiny new pen, perfect nails, heavy-duty makeup -- and almost no takers among the lunchtime crowd jamming the Market Place East mall in downtown Philadelphia last Monday. For the half a dozen or so people who buy the book, she signs "Best Wishes," with her initial in the shape of a treble clef on a sheet of music. Frustrated, a little ticked off, she gets up, paces, fidgets with her hair and decides to leave early, sniffing, "There's usually a long line; I don't know what's happening here."

What's happening may mean there are no second acts for sexual scandals in America -- which holds out some hope for Senator Bob Packwood, whose ethics case for sexual misconduct entered Phase 2 last week. (The first phase ended with his unsuccessful televised plea from the well of the Senate to keep his diary secret.) When Gennifer Flowers first dished the sexual dirt during the 1992 campaign, talk shows tripped over one another to have her on, and CNN covered her press conference live with all the solemnity of a Gulf War update. Then, hordes of reporters were panting for the full skinny; now she can't give it away. Her original tale commanded big money from a tabloid, and Penthouse paid well for Gennifer unclothed. But she waited a bit too long to hawk her memoir; mainstream publishers passed on her book proposal, and she was relegated to a small California publisher, Emery Dalton Books. And despite a 19-city promotional tour and wide distribution, the 100,000-copy first printing is headed for the $4.98 table. As of Friday, her book had not even broken into the top 100 titles at Barnes & Noble.

Content may have something to do with Passion's lackluster performance: the details Flowers has hung on her lurid tale are not very convincing. She offers a picture of her bed as proof that Clinton slept there, and a picture of a black teddy as evidence that he both purchased the undergarment and then removed it. The actual sex is so clichad and vulgar that a high school sophomore would be turned off, and the juicy parts can be read standing up at the store: intimate organs have names like Willard and Precious (p. 71); the act involved, at times, mascara, blusher, blindfolds and honey (pp. 71-75). Hillary was vastly inferior to Flowers in every department, especially sex (p. 42).

In the old days, the press covered up the sexual misconduct of Presidents and Senators because the public was thought to be insufficiently sophisticated to process it. But in fact voters seem quite capable of analyzing human frailties. After the initial wave of prurient interest in the Flowers revelations died down and Clinton made his contrite nondenial on 60 Minutes, a large segment of the public integrated this information into the picture they had of the candidate and decided to vote for him anyway. By contrast, Packwood pursued the Clarence Thomas strategy: deny everything and attack the credibility of your accuser. Worse, he may have tried to cover up evidence. Voters ended up feeling betrayed.

For more than two years now, Packwood has been in the stocks with a scarlet H on his pinstripe suit -- the appropriate subject of ridicule -- and the question now is how harshly he should be punished. No one should resort to the old saw that he's suffered enough because he's suffered some, but there should be an effort to reconcile the two Packwoods: the lout -- who purportedly pounced on unsuspecting women, sticking his tongue in one's mouth, running his hands up the legs of another, 18 reprehensible acts over 21 years -- with the Senator who was a lonely champion of women's rights, and who is proving himself to be a voice of honesty and probity among the budget slashers in his own party. Is it soft on harassers to look for an appropriate punishment for the bad Packwood that would keep the good Packwood from being replaced?

It's a hard question to ask and keep one's head up in the sisterhood, much less answer. Packwood's alleged victims have nothing in common with Flowers; they were blameless recipients of unwanted sexual advances, and while they may not be permanently damaged -- for he was more pathetic than coercive -- he must be held accountable for his alleged acts. Flowers, by contrast, was complicit in the very behavior she hoped would ruin candidate Clinton, and she timed her disclosure for maximum damage, plumbed it for maximum career advantage and then tried to cash in with a book.

Unfortunately for her, the public has made up its mind and moved on. And there's some evidence that Packwood's constituents have done that as well. Recent polls in Oregon show that more people now think he should keep his job than give it up. He might have been better off admitting his sins at the outset and taking his chances with the voters; for in the klieg-light process of public hearings, Packwood's Senate colleagues may be tempted to chop off his head to save their own.