There is also reason to believe that in addition to frequenting Graffiti, [Clarence] Thomas was an avid consumer of sexually explicit magazines while Hill was working for him at the EEOC. Kaye Savage, the White House appointee, recalled visiting the chairman's first real bachelor pad in the summer of 1982, not long after Hill had moved to the agency and toward the end of the period that she identified as the hiatus in Thomas's attentions. It was a junior efficiency apartment in a high-rise building in southwest Washington, where he had moved after leaving Gil Hardy's spare bedroom.
Savage was friendly with both Thomas and Hill. Having learned that Savage was a jogger like himself, Thomas had offered to go shopping with her over a weekend for special running shoes designed for city pavements. Since becoming chairman of the EEOC that May, Thomas had relied on the agency's car and driver for official business, but this left him stranded on weekends. So Savage had agreed to pick him up at his apartment.
He had only recently set up housekeeping, and the place, as she recalled, was still underfurnished: there was little more than a mattress on the floor and a stereo. But one other feature made a lasting impression on Savage. Thomas had compiled and placed on the floor "a huge, compulsively organized stack of Playboy magazines, five years' worth of them, organized by month and year." The walls of the apartment were also memorably covered. There was only one main room, but all of its walls - as well as the walls of the little galley kitchen and even the bathroom door - were papered with centerfolds of large-breasted nude women.
Savage recalled staring awkwardly about her; the, display seemed so out of character with everything else she knew about Thomas. He was a fanatic about discipline and a daily churchgoer. He was serious about his career and honest to the point of indiscretion about his ambitious plans for the future. (Thomas had told her, as he had told others, that he planned to replace Thurgood Marshall on his retirement from the Supreme Court.) But his evident enthusiasm for pornography suggested to Savage that Thomas had a private side that was very different from his public persona. To her the contrast seemed, as she later put it, "a little crazy."
Savage couldn't contain her curiosity, so she asked Thomas why he had so many sexually explicit magazines. "I don't drink, and I don't run around," he replied, implying that the magazines were his one recreational vice. In fact, she later told a congressional investigator, Thomas said that the magazines were the only possessions he had deemed worth taking with him from his collapsing marriage.
It was a little unusual, Savage believed, for a man of Thomas's age to remain so absorbed by girlie magazines. As it happened, she thought it odd enough to mention in passing one day to Hill, with whom she occasionally went shopping in consignment stores on weekends.
"Yeah," she remembered Hill's saying wearily, without a flicker of surprise, "that's Clarence."
Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)
