HEIDI FLEISS - MISTRESS OF THE MONTH
The book Once More With Feeling by Jeanne Parrent (with author Bruce W. Cook) is the primary reference for this month's posts. (The image on the book is a model and is not Heidi.) This book cover image was added August 2022. At the time I originally posted, no image was available.
I also watched the film "Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss" as part of my research and don't know how fictive it is. It's on YouTube and came out in 2004. I read numerous articles on the Internet about HEIDI FLEISS' life, her arrest, trials, prison, and attempts to resurrect herself as a business woman.
In the pages before Once More With Feeling begins, it is stated that the information that is presented (which includes name dropping celebrities including Heidi Fleiss) was both verified by lie detector test and by a private investigator. That's compelling! Parrent is known for a couple other "tell all" books including "You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again." The passages about Heidi come from one of the women who talked about her own life in Los Angeles as the daughter of a famous actor, Jennifer Young, whose dad was actor Gig Young. Jennifer was once a roommate with Heidi.
Here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, we learn that having a Sugar Daddy for a semester in college, a brief affair with a celebrity, or a thing with your married boss after hours probably isn't enough to fairly be called a "Mistress" or "Kept." Yet we also know that being a Mistress does not require being Kept - financially supported by a man.
Last month we looked at a new lexicon for describing sexuality. This month I want to start with the lexicon that's been used to describe Mistresses, Madams, and Sex Traffickers.
We know what a Classic Mistress is: she is a woman who is fully financially supported by a man, sometimes for many years or life - a house, investments - and can be called Kept. She doesn't have to worry about money though she may have to find something to do to keep her busy during his absences and is on call when he's available. Perhaps she travels with him and inhabits one of his houses or has children with him - a second (or third or fourth... family for him - which he visits in another town or country as he travels for business. Usually she is unmarried but he is.
Some people think that the era of the Classic Mistress is over. For sure there are probably many Classic Mistresses we will never know about because being very discrete, private, and secretive is usually part of their success. This blog would not be possible if it depended on my personal associations and relies on the famous or infamous, many whom have had books written about them or who have written their own memoirs.
Modern Mistresses tend to have their own work and income and involvement with a man may not be financial at all (so invalidating the Kept Woman stereotype) or her man simply makes life more pleasing with his financial contribution to their arrangement. She may hesitate or refuse to actually quit her education or job or career. She may be hoping that he will eventually marry her or she may have settled into the life she loves because she loves him. There are many possibilities.
Or there may be a "role reversal" and a woman may be Keeping a man the way Husbands used to keep Wives. I believe this is happening more and more often and sometimes the woman doesn't make much money but still does not require her man work for income.
The word "Madam" as in Hollywood Madam, which Heidi Fleiss was called, after her mentor, the previous Hollywood Madam, Alex Adams, was called that, also seems to be wrongly used and confused in the media.
For instance I read one article on Ghislaine Maxwell, a woman accused of the serious offences of sex trafficking, which called her Jeffery Epstein's Madam. There is no reason to think that any person who does not take a percentage or cut for introducing prostitutes to customers is a Madam and so I don't think that's the right term to use on Ghislaine. The accusations against Ghislaine Maxwell are that she was a "procurer" of underage girls and that she also abused them - or joined in sexually -making her someone who sexually assaulted underage girls. Under the age of 18 girls are by law not considered mature enough to make adult decision and they are not adult women who chose to prostitute. And so if Ghislaine is guilty, and as I understand it from extensive reading around the Internet she cannot even be found to go on trial, then she would also rightly be called a sex trafficker. But Madam? No. And frankly, though being innocent and underage or scared to quit a relationship is important to consider, some of the girls and young women who Epstein may have used and paid, went home and came back again and again - and that goes against them.
The opposite of Madam? The word "Pimp" is applied to men who run prostitutes, generally thought of the less well paid "street walker" prostitute. Pandering is more often applied to a woman who provides introductions. Escorts are women who will likely have sex on "dates" but supposedly don't have to, at least not every time since a client might not want more than company or a kind of fake date to take somewhere when he isn't dating anyone.
I recall from a Woman's Studies class I took in college that historically Madam's (Women who owned brothels) generally provided better pay and conditions for prostitutes (and often, historically, their housing) and that generally things got more violent when men, as Pimps, took over. I also learned in a Woman's Studies class that casual prostitution, such as having one or two men other than one's husband or because one did not have a husband to make ends meet was not uncommon in the 19th century America. For some prostitution was and is the only way to prevent one's starvation (and that of children) or homelessness.
Sometimes a woman has no choice. Sometimes a woman does.
I personally have a difficult time even imagining what it must be to prostitute.
So - So Heidi Fliess, the Girl Next Door whom I'm also electing to be our Mistress of the Month here at Mistress Manifesto, was properly called "The Hollywood Madam," though one book she wrote is called "Pandering." (She also wrote The Players Handbook for Men.)
She took a percentage of the earnings of those who worked for her - 40% - which they themselves turned over to her, in a kind of gentlewoman's agreement. She was thus rightfully called a Madam.
In 1987 at the age of only 22 years old, she became a protégé of the previous Hollywood Madam, Alex. in 1990 she became a Madam herself. She was arrested on June 9, 1993. She was charged with pandering. She'd been earning -approximately half a million a year. With inflation a typical sex for money arrangement would be about $3000 a night today. She hid money from the IRS with the help of her dad, who also got in trouble. She spent 1997-2000 in a federal prison.
According to Heidi Fliess' own testimonial, there will never be another Madam in Hollywood like her again. She mentions she was only about 26 years old when she became a major success in that world. She saw and sees her time being a Madam to some of the highest paid prostitutes in history and introductions she made to some of the wealthiest and most important men to have been a win-win situation for her and her "girls." She says her girls were all looking for rich men to date and would likely have had sex for free on those dates. Instead they profited so that they could, assuming they saved and invested, and have more choice about their lives - their education - their own businesses. Unlike Madam Alex, she refused to give the police information passed on to her by her prostitutes to them in exchange for being able to stay in business.
She wasn't the first and probably isn't the last Hollywood Madam. In my opinion someone else has to be at it. I personally have not heard of any names.
Heidi, in a Madam's Code of Honor, also refused to name names from her so called "Little Black Book," which means she was honorable as a Madam and didn't take down anyone else when she was arrested and put out of business. (It's said that many in Hollywood and Corporate America sighed with relief.) Heidi eventually seems to have lost everything though she has made efforts to be a successful business person since the scandal. She moved to Nevada and hoped to open a brothel for women clients there but did not succeed. Her little black book is described as several Gucci bound address books.
How did this Girl Next Door become a Madam?
Heidi Fleiss liked money and the things it could buy her. A daughter in a large family of six children with a doctor for a dad - one who made house calls! - Heidi grew up with enough, not the riches she wanted, but her entry into the social world of Los Angeles - Hollywood, allowed her to come into contact with some of the most powerful and important people in the world, not just in "the business" or "industry" of film making, but, she says, politics too. She was one of the girls who wanted to date rich men. A sports car - a gorgeous house to live in - but also eventually drugs. That's where she was at for some time in her young life.
Heidi could relate to all the young women she met who wanted rich boyfriends and she got one. She traveled with him as his Mistress and got a taste of the rich life. His name was Bernie Cornfeld. She wanted to please him. She was hurt and also challenged when she learned he wasn't faithful sexually. But she lived with him, traveled with him, and had sex with him for four years. In my opinion, she lived the life of a Classic Mistress. He was not the marrying kind.
Heidi decided she liked men over 40. Older men. They liked her.
After Bernie she got another boyfriend, this one, a film producer named Ivan Nagy. This is where the story goes in a couple directions. Some say it was Ivan who turned her over to Madam Alex. He says that when he told Madam Alex he had a girl for her, Alex claimed to already be employing Heidi.
The story goes that Ivan and Heidi were actually a great together, that they sparked each other. They liked to gamble. A motivation for Heidi to enter into prostitution might have been to pay off her own gambling debts.
So Ivan Nagy had ties to Madam Alex in Los Angeles and he took her over there to make an introduction. Who was lying, I don't know. It's also possible that Ivan conspired with Madam Alex to bring Heidi down. Alex, long an informant to LAPD finally got busted and Heidi used that moment to take over her business. After she prospered she may have grown tired of Ivan and wanted independence from him.
Heidi seems to have worked in the life as an internship. She was studying Alex, how she did things, and ambitious to share the business.
She has said that she was "too lazy" to be a good prostitute, but her acumen for business began when she took cuts for referrals to other girls for baby sitting jobs as a teenager. She and Alex got to be friends and by competing with her mentor, well, maybe Alex had something to do with her getting caught.
After she did her time and was released she wondered what else she could do. She considered opening a brothel of studly male prostitutes in Nevada. It didn't work out. She also had a relationship with legal Nevada brothel owner, Dennis Hof, now deceased. As things are today, Heidi lives in Nevada and her home is also a bird sanctuary. Were I to give Heidi advice, I would tell her to turn her personal advocacy into an official nonprofit for her life's work has found her! Personally, I wish her love. I think she needs lots of it. She is paying the price for her gamble while only one of her male clients is known; the actor Charlie Sheen.
She didn't tell on him.
Some time after Heidi Fleiss had served time, I saw and recognized her while I was out and about doing errands. We smiled at each other though we had never met before. I swear she let her shoulders down for an instant. I thought "She's the girl next door!" It wasn't until I read the book and saw the film that I realized she had also served time as a Mistress.
Even though I can't imagine being a prostitute and wouldn't want anyone I love to be and I'm very concerned about the terms and conditions of prostitution and the effect having sex for money has on a person's psyche. Even though I'm against porn because I think it can ruin people for the real sex they're likely to have in their lives... Even though I'm horrified by sex trafficking... I do think that there are some people out there who get into the world's oldest business by choice.
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