Chapter 1: An LA Story: How Heidi Fleiss’s Family Came To Be And How One Car Accident Changed Them Forever (The 1970s)
In Chapter One we meet young Heidi and the rest of the Fleiss family, delving into the bohemian California lifestyle of the 70s as Heidi ditches high school for her first hustles.
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Speaker 1 (00:26):
The only place for a man in the sex business
is paying for it.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Heidi Flies, America is a casino. You can be up
one night, down the next, then back up again, and
then with just one bad hand, lose it all. Despite
the myth that this country is a meritocracy where anyone
can work their way up, we all know that the
rich are born with the chips up, and that the
(00:53):
only way for anyone else to get ahead is to
game the system. At the height of her power, nobody
plays the game better than Heidi Flies. The Heidi Fly
Saga is a classic American story about one of the
greatest hustlers of all time. But unlike the hustlers in
movies like Goodfellas or Casino, Hidie never killed anybody. All
(01:17):
she did was dare to broke her sex work. Welcome
to Heidi World, the Heidi Fly Story and the Secret
History of LA I'm your host, Mollie Lambert, and I
will be your guide through Los Angeles high and Low.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
In the nineteen.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Nineties, the world was captivated by Heidi Flies, the twenty
seven year old woman who briefly and memorably became the
most powerful madam in Los Angeles before she was brought
down by a combination of snitches, hubris, and.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Plain old bad luck.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
The scandal enveloped a major movie studio when employees were
alleged to have bought sex from Heidi's girls using checks
from the studio. Her trial threatened to lay bare the
depths of moral hypocrisy in la among the super wealthy
law enforcement agencies and the entertainment industry. But instead, Heidi
(02:19):
was made a pariah and suffered the only consequences of
the scandal as the men who bought sex from her
went back to their lives and sometimes even got promotions.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Put it this way, the person Heidi that people talk
about in the history of time, no one did what
she did in one year. No one. When I was
twenty five, I went out on my own. I said,
fuck all of them all. Show them how to do
things right with integrity and treat girls like their girls,
not force a girl to do something she doesn't want
(02:52):
to do. I never once solicited a person. I never
once pushed drugs upon a person. I've always told people,
never sell out. Only do something you want to do.
If you're ever in an uncomfortable situation, whatever it is,
get out you're a person with rights, you never have
to do anything.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Heidi World will follow Heidi Flies from her earliest days
as a young Jewish girl in Los Phelis running a
babysitting ring at her high school, through her party girl
dropout years on the hair Metal Sunset Strip. We'll introduce
you to memorable characters like Madame Alex, the woman who
ran the world of high class prostitution in Beverly Hills
(03:35):
for years and showed Heidi the ropes, then got busted
and accused Heidie of stealing her business and little black
book of clientele, battling Heidi for years in what she.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Called the Whore Wars.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
We'll also go over the varying rachamon like accounts of
what really took place with that little Black book. We'll
get into evil boyfriend's abusive John's corrupt and legal hypocrisy.
We'll explore how the invention of twenty four hour court
TV coincided with the media circus of several big LA
trials in the nineties, including the OJ Simpson trial, the
(04:13):
Menendez Brothers trial, and the Heidi Fly's trial. We'll talk
about how we are still feeling the after effects of
the profound shift in the way news is covered and
prioritized in what we all now know as the content cycle.
And of course we will get into Heidi's line of
vanity sleepwear Heidiwear. At its heart, the Heidi Flight scandal
(04:36):
is a Los Angeles story. There's so much local history
that runs through it. Many of the major players are
second generation LA kids whose parents were notable local figures
in entertainment and loss of other industries. It's like a
Russian novel about a family in a particular place at
a very specific time. Some of the people involved in
(04:57):
the scandal are dead, which means we can talk openly
about them. Some of them are very much still alive,
some even still working in Hollywood. Some are even portrayed
by Bradley Cooper in the Paul Thomas Anderson movie Licorice Pizza.
In the same spirit as Licorice Pizza. I have made
(05:18):
the casting of Heidi World a family affair, casting my
own father as doctor Paul Flie and my brother is
in this podcast, as well as a voice cast of
nearly hundreds of notable podcasters, directors playing other directors, and
more fun cameos. All of the quotes you will hear
(05:39):
are sourced from contemporary media that came out while the
scandal was happening, things like magazines, TV segments, books.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
And newspapers.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Heidi Flice is voiced throughout Heidi World by actress Annie Hamilton.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Looks are only a head start.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
You do not have to be classically beautiful to get
the man you want. An average looking woman who is confident, happy,
and slightly reserved is way more appealing to a man
than a dumb girl with a nice ass.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Along the way, we'll use Heidi's story to make the
argument for why sex work must be decriminalized and discuss
the horrifying way sex workers have been pushed even further
to the margins since this story happened. Thanks largely to
pressure from the extreme right, but also centrists and clueless Libdems,
there has been a concentrated agenda in recent years to
(06:34):
conflate consensual sex work with sex trafficking. This is the
movement behind Sesta Fausta, a set of laws passed in
twenty eighteen that were sensibly aimed at eradicating internet sex trafficking,
but in reality we're purposely designed to deplatform and shadow
band sex workers on the few online outlets where they
could safely still do their jobs and earn a study income.
(06:56):
Why are people so obsessed with keeping sex work criminal
because go with me here. If it was decriminalized, those
people couldn't find ways to profit off of it being criminalized.
It's too threatening to the powers that be when sex
workers control the means of production. Heidiflies herself is no
longer in the sex work business. She runs a bird sanctuary,
(07:19):
a private airfield, and a laundromat in parump, Nevada, after
a failed attempt at opening a brothel for women there.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Called the stud Farm.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Right now, she's considering leaving Nevada for Missouri after someone
shot a bb gun at one of her exotic birds.
She's also embroiled in a fight over cryptocurrency with a
former friend, and eventually we will get into all of
that too, But first we have to go back to
the very beginning to Heidi's childhood in Los Felis.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
This is Heidi World.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Chapter one an La. So how Heidi Fleisch's family came
to be and how one car accident changed them forever
the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I was born and raised in La My dad was
a famous pediatrician. When he died, they donated a bench
to him at the Griffith Park Observatory.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
I goten in big trouble. I felt shitty about that.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Dad gave me really the best childhood possible and all
of the opportunity in front of me. I wish that
I took school seriously and won a different route. But
it was not my father's fault at all.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
Just love him. They can't love your kids too much.
Paul Fleisch, pediatrician.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
When Heidi World returns, meet the Fly's family and learn
about her doctor father's New Age beliefs and connection to
Leonardo DiCaprio. Welcome back to Heidie World. Let's meet the
(09:11):
Fly's family.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Shall we?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Our story begins in the La neighborhood of Los Phelis.
Paul Flice is a Jewish American pediatrician who runs his
practice out of a craftsman house on Hillhurst, which is
still there and was most recently an ice cream shop
called ample Hill's Creamery. Paul Flice is a beloved local
doctor known for treating the rich and poor alike, but
he also becomes known as a pediatrician to the stars
(09:39):
in his own way. Paul Flice is also a bit
of a hustler himself. He trains in Detroit as an
osteopath and pharmacist. In nineteen sixty two, California passes a
law that allows osteopaths to convert their degrees into MD's,
and he moves to La to take advantage of it.
While osteopaths are generalists, the MD allows flies to choose
(10:03):
a specialty, and he goes into pediatric medicine, becoming a
resident at USC Medical Center in LA. A friend introduces
Paul to a hippie school teacher named Alyssa Ash.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
They fall in love.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Instantly in or wed within the year. A few months
after that, one of Alissa's underage sisters gets pregnant. Alyssa
and Paul offer to take in the baby, whose name
is Kim. The next year, one of Paul's sisters becomes
fatally ill, and the couple agree to adopt her young daughter,
Amy as well. Alissa then gives birth to Paul's child
(10:37):
in nineteen sixty five, a girl they name Heidi Lynn Flice.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
I am one of six kids. I describe my parents
as intellectual hippies, but minus the grateful dead and Charles
manson aspects.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
Before they would sleep at night, I'd lie down with
each one of them, and I'd always save Heidi for last,
because she was the most most fun. Alissa ash Heidie's mom.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
By the time, they move into a three story house
in the hills of Griffith Park that they bought for
seventy seven thousand dollars in nineteen seventy around five hundred
and seventeen thousand dollars today, the family adds daughter Shana
and son Jason. In nineteen seventy seven, they have another son, Jesse,
bringing the Flic's family to a grand total of six kids.
(11:26):
They all live in the four thousand, three hundred square
foot house built in nineteen thirty, with five bedrooms and
a three story spiral staircase going up to a crow's
nest observation tower.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
There's a grotto with a fish.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Pond, stained glass windows, and murals painted on the walls.
Los Felis is known as an artsy kind of bohemian neighborhood,
although it was never cheap to live there. It's directly
next to Hollywood and provides easy proximity to most of
the major studios. Early movie stars built Los Phelis's art
deco mansions. The main street set from the nineteen fifty
(12:01):
four Western melodrama Johnny Guitar just stood there on Sunset
Boulevard for decades before it was finally demolished.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Los Felis is.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Also famous for being the neighborhood where Rosemary and Leno
la Bianca, an Italian immigrant couple who ran a successful
grocery store, were murdered by the Manson family on the
second night.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Of their murders free.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Aside from Heidi Flice, there are two other incredibly famous
A List Hollywood stars from Los Felis. One of them
is Mickey Mouse, who was born in the original Disney
Studios building on Hyperion Avenue in.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Los Felis, which is the reason why the Main.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Street USA corollary in Disney's beleaguered California Adventure Park is
an idealized replica of nineteen thirties Los Felis.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
The other movie star from Los.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Phelis is Leonardo DiCaprio, whose legal secretary mother an underground
comics artist father, separate when he is one, but for
a while live next to each other in bungalows with
a shared backyard to co parent baby Leonardo DiCaprio is
even delivered by Heidi's father, Paul Flice, who is best
friends with his father George DiCaprio. In nineteen seventies California,
(13:14):
some people are experimenting with new definitions of family and
domestic life. The Flices are a blended family of four
biological children and two adopted kids, a Jewish boho Brady
bunch living in a three story fairytale hacienda with lots
of pets. They take family camping trips to national parks together,
(13:35):
where everyone fights in the car. They go to Hurst Castle.
They're a tight group.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
I love my daddy. He's the best aat on earth.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
My dad never spanked us. He would say, I'm not
gonna ask any questions. This has happened, and now it's
too late, and we're just gonna figure it out. Shane
of Flice.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Paul Flice is on lots of medical boards, and his
opinions are often quoted in the Los Angeles Times. But
Paul Flice also holds some views that were considered at
the time unconventional. Some of them are more potentially harmful
than others. His beliefs tend towards the New age. He
is a believer in the family bed, where parents and
(14:23):
children all sleep in one big bed together. This is
now known as co sleeping, and its most famous advocate
is former Blossom my Embiolic. He wears birkenstocks and the
kids are all vegetarians. He's against rewarding or punishing children,
believing the main thing parents should.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Do is be kind.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
He's pro breastfeeding and anti formula. Doctor Flie is quoted
in a nineteen eighty eight La Times article about a
silver Lake childcare co oper. Women breastfeed each other's children,
also known as wet nursing.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
While some of the other.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Doctors the article worn that breast milk can contain infectious agents.
Doctor Flice advocates not only for breastfeeding, but for wet nursing.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
Mothers have been doing this for a long long time.
It's not quite as good as the baby's mother, but
it's better than propping the baby up with a bottle.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
The California counterculture seeped fully into the medical practices of
the time, and on the spectrum of outrageous nineteen seventies
medical thought. Paul Flies was by no means the wackiest
or most out there person. He was among many professionals
questioning traditional medical practices and child rearing methods, interested in
(15:43):
exploring new, hopefully better possibilities. Doctors were also pushing the
limits in fields like group psychotherapy. There was Paul Bindram's
Theory of Nude Psychotherapy in nineteen sixty seven, which involved
long marathon naked group therapy sessions. There's an incredible nineteen
seventy one documentary called Out of Touch about the nude
(16:04):
therapy movement. Critics of the nude therapy movement said it
was too charged of an atmosphere and that participants might
mistake the adrenaline high of being naked with strangers for
emotional breakthroughs.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
But supporters said.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
The nudity became non sexual very quickly, and as someone
who's spent to a couple of adult film conventions and
one European beach, I absolutely think.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
This is true.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
There are still nude therapy workshops in California, offered by
a place called the Human Institute for Awareness. There's also Esslyn,
the Big sur retreat with a nude hot tub, founded
in the sixties by two Stanford grads after they heard
a life changing Aldus Huxley lecture about human Potential. There
were new experimental techniques for things like drug rehabilitation with
(16:49):
the Experimental Rehab Center turned eventual cult Synanon in Santa Monica.
Doctor Flie considered his philosophy of medicine holistic. He was
vehemently anti circumcision, believing the procedure caused children unnecessary pain
and that the foreskin could be cleaned manually, and he
(17:10):
advocated for treating children with the same respect afforded to
adults and not physically punishing them. His saying was no
rewards or punishments, no threats or bribes. Here's the less
great part. He wasn't anti vaccine, but he didn't insist
that his patients vaccinate their children. Despite, but also probably
(17:33):
because of this bullshit, he was a beloved family doctor
throughout Los Angeles. Doctor Fwiss was also a paid consultant
for a board called the Los Angeles County Milk Commission,
which was put together by Altadena. Altadena is a milk
company that advertised untrue health benefits of its unpasteurized milk.
(17:54):
Doctor Fleiss was essentially paid to say that raw milk
did have real health benefits, something he likely believed given
his own bent towards holistic snake oil. A report on
the La County Milk Commission alleged that the entire board
of milk had been bought off by Altadina Dairy so
that the San Bernardino Milk Farm could continue to produce
(18:14):
raw milk in violation of health codes.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Our parents always stressed the importance of an education. Our
home was filled with love and stability.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Heidi was Mom's favorite.
Speaker 6 (18:30):
I mean, I knew my mom loved me, but she
and Heidi had their own language.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
For me.
Speaker 7 (18:37):
Coming into this family that was so generous and open minded,
it really turned me around. But for Heidi having a
lot of leeway when she acted up, her actions were
considered not wrong, but witty or cute instead. Kim Flice's
oldest sister.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
The Flice kids had the kind of freedom and lack
of boundaries you might expect out of a bohemian Los
Angeles family in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
In a nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Five profile of Paul Flights by journalist Sean Hubler, Alyssa
Flices calls herself a quote flower child mother, and Hubler
refers to Paul flices as quote the prototypical nurturing male.
Speaker 6 (19:23):
Our house was the house on the block where everybody
went because they knew. Our parents were flexible about what
time we came home. So our friends would say, I
want to stay at Shana's, and their parents would think, well,
the mother's a school teacher, the father's a doctor, there
shouldn't be any problems, and then we'd just go stay
out at night, going to clubs. My parents didn't have
a clue. By the time our parents started talking about curfeuse,
(19:45):
it was too late. We were like fifteen or sixteen.
I had been going out and doing things since I was.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Twelve years old.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
Shana makes it sound like they were just allowed to
run loose, and that certainly was not the case.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
While Paul Flies defends his parenting style, other people do
confirm that the Flight's parents took a hands off approach
popular at the time, basically trusting their kids to make
their own choices. A friend of mine, whose mother was
close friends with doctor Paul Flice, sent me an email
but asked for anonymity. She describes Paul Flies, like most
people do, as a beloved family pediatrician who would slot
(20:23):
in patients even if they couldn't pay and take house
calls long after everyone else stopped doing house calls. She
says the Fly's family had a parenting style she calls
seventies California very hands off. Her mom believed the flies
kids became a mix of high achieving and burnouts. In
Heidi's case, both we have to contextualize the laissez fair
(20:46):
seventies California parenting style as a product of its time in.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Reaction to what came before it.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Childcare manuals from the first part of the twentieth century
were filled with concepts like the Refrigerator Mother, which blamed
cold parental behavior from women for children who developed autism
or schizophrenia. In nineteen forty six, doctor Benjamin Spock put
out Baby in Childcare, the first parenting book to involve
(21:13):
psychoanalysis and advocate for a more touchy feely approach to parenting,
telling parents it was okay to comfort and kiss their
babies if they cried, instead of just ignoring them. Spock
was a proto hippie whose anti Vietnam War views made
him the eventual subject of conservative backlash. So by the
(21:34):
sixties and seventies, the more liberal Spock influenced parents believe
in treating children as the individuals they are now. Some
parents absolutely took the idea of breaking down the boundaries
between parents and children too far, especially in bohemian nineteen
seventies California. Their accountless stories, particularly of famous parents pushing
(21:57):
their children into adulthood prematurely, or blurring the boundaries between
parenting and friendship in a way that harmed their children,
providing their kids with access to drugs or alcohol or
sex too early, and creepy stories like the one about
the rock star who quote gave his daughter's virginity to
(22:17):
another rock star he was friends with as a gift.
The seventies was also the high point of working class
latchkey kids whose parents weren't around to see what they
were doing, and the high point for upper class kids
with resources whose parents let them run free without any rules.
In the nineteen seventies, people still hitchhiked in California. Things
(22:40):
were so repressed in the first part of the century
that when they swung in the other direction, they really
swung hard.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Of course, there was a swift backlash.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
To all the sixties and seventies freedom and exploration called
the nineteen eighties. This is all to say that the
Flics family existed somewhere on this spectrum between additional parenting
and letting children fend completely for themselves, much like most
other gen X kids experienced. Which is not to say
that the Fly's parents were absent or distant. By all accounts,
(23:11):
they were involved, even strict sometimes, and the family was
legendarily close knit on celebrity rehab, which we'll get too
much later. Heidi is horrified when Mackenzie Phillips, the daughter
of Mama's and the Papa's musician John Phillips, perhaps the
poster child for nineteen sixties and seventies bad parenting, talks
(23:31):
about her dad asking her to get him drugs.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Later that year, Phillips.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Opened up about the adult, incestuous relationship she had with
her father. Heidi is completely horrified and says she would
never have so much a smoked pot with her dad.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
I always had my own agenda. I was always looking
for something else.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
She's always been a wheeler dealer.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Hidie was desperate to get West of Doughheiny von Nage producer.
That was Ivon Naje, the Hungarian director producer and all
around dirtbag who will introduce you to In episode two,
he's talking about how Heidi was desperate to get west
of Doheeny. Doheiny is a street that is sort of
(24:22):
a dividing line into the neighborhood of Beverly Hills. It
is named after Edward L. Doheeny, who was the first
person to successfully drill an oil well in Los Angeles,
setting off a Southern California oil boom and making a
ton of money, becoming one of the first dynasties of
La Doheiny was the inspiration for Upton Sinclair's nineteen twenty
(24:44):
seven novel Oil exclamation Point, which was in turn the
inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which
features Daniel day Lewis as a Doheny inspired character named
Daniel Plainview. Heidi is the ringleader of the Fly's Family gang.
She's a kid who ties her younger sibling shoelaces together.
(25:05):
In photos of Heidi as a child, she's a skinny
little stick with long, scraggly black hair, a tomboy in
a football jersey. Growing up, Heidi makes little movies with
her siblings using a Super eight camera. In one of
Heidi's movies, her brother, dressed in drag, pushes their younger
sister in a baby carriage, then appears to lose control
(25:25):
of the carriage and watches as a kareem's down a
steep hill in what we can only assume is an
homage to Battleship Ptempkin. When the flight's kids show the
short to their mom, she freaks out, thinking they'd actually
push the carriage down the hill with their sister in it.
Heidi has to jump in and explain the magic of
movie editing. They replace their real baby sister with a
doll before pushing the carriage down the hill. That should
(25:48):
give you an impression of the kind of kid. Heidi
was the one who ropes the other kids into making
a movie and scares her parents a little bit in
the process. Heidi Flies attends Jehan Mary High in Los Phelis,
a beautiful Gothic public school built in nineteen thirty featured
in A Million Things, probably most famously as Rydel High
at the End of Greece. Besides Heidi, other notable John
(26:12):
Marshall students include Michelle Phillips from The Mamas and the
Papas Sue Lyon, who played Lolita in the Stanley Kuprick film,
Judge Lance Edo from the OJ Simpson Trial, and will
I Am an Apple d App from The Black Eyed Peas.
Van Halen's Hot for Teacher music video was also shot
at John Marshall High which was closed at the time
(26:34):
due to lack of city funding. The band, who also
themselves met in La Area Public Schools in Pasadena, donated
an undisclosed amount of money to refurbish and reopen the school,
which is cool as hell.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
When I was a teenager, all I wanted to do
was blendon. I felt awkward around my peers. The things
that were on my mind were different from anything they'd
talked about. Once I went with some friends to a
party at UCLA, and I remember watching a group of
girls who dressed the same, laughed the same, and talked
the same, and I wanted so badly to just be
(27:11):
like them.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Heidi is clearly very smart. She wins a citywide chess
championship twice at age thirteen and fourteen. Around the same
time she starts babysitting to make money and figures out
she can make even more money by helping set up
other girls to babysit too. Thus, the first incarnation of
Heidi Girls is born a babysitting ring of twenty or
(27:38):
so teenage girls that Heidi matches up with her first
clients parents who need babysitters. In junior high, Heidi, who
had been a stellar elementary school student, starts falling behind.
She can't keep up with the schoolwork, and she's very
frustrated by and embarrassed about it. Her parents value education,
(27:58):
and Heidi plans to go to a good college someday
like they want. But her grades keep dropping and the
only reason she keeps going to school at all is
because of a crush on a teacher named mister Jamie.
When she gets a C in one class, she begs
the teacher to change it to a BEE, and he refuses,
so she gives up on trying and starts ditching school.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
I've always in the classroom staring at the blue sky,
thinking I gotta go, I gotta go. After a while,
I hardly went to school at all. I'd cut glass
and go to the beach with a race track.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
When Heidie World returns, Heidi ditches high school for hustling.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Welcome back to Heidie World.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Although she's been truant from high school, she manages to
hold down a part time job at a flower shop
called Flowers by Judith. One of her jobs is to
bring roses over to the Greek theater and sell them
to people after shows. One day, she is doing her
job and sells out out of all of the roses,
and although her boss had told her to just stop
(29:19):
when she finished, she goes back to the flower shop,
gets more roses and sells all of them too. So
you can see that Heidi has unnatural talent for finding
money and then turning that money into more money. Flower
shops figure heavily into Heidi world, and it's not hard
to see why a bouquet of beautiful blooms for sale
(29:40):
arranged just right can fetch a significantly marked up price
when the right person is selling them. But this outside
success doesn't translate back to school, where she feels like
a misfit, like she doesn't quite fit in with the
other kids her age. She develops an attraction to much
older men.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
I don't like them under forty five.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Just show me a six year old guy with a
million dollars Point me in that direction.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
However, Heidi does date some guys her own age, like
her best friend Steve, the blonde guy next door who
becomes her first boyfriend. There's also a boy named Scott
who resembles young Johnny Depp, that Heidi describes.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
As her first love.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Her ideas of romance are forged by movies like Excalibur,
the nineteen eighty one epic medieval fantasy movie depicting Arthurian legends.
Excalibur features Helen Mirren as Morgan le Fay, a powerful
female enchantress who can use magic to bend powerful men
to her will. But in her own life, Heidi is
(30:46):
not the sex goddess that she wishes she was.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
I didn't lose my virginity until I was almost eighteen.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I'm real slow.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
I'd go to bed at night and say, why can't
I have tits like Dolly Park? But I remember the
first guy. He was blonde. I've never slept with a
blonde again, and I want to understand what everyone was
talking about. So I just did it, and it was like,
this is so painful. I will die. I will never
do this again. I'll be a nun.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
No way will I do this again. She also spends
an ever increasing amount of time at the Hollywood Park
racetrack in Inglewood, where she develops a taste for betting
on the horses. She bets on her first horse at
the age of fifteen, which is definitely illegal. Her boyfriend
(31:38):
Steve goes with her on these racetrack hookie trips at first,
but he gets sick of the scene at the racetrack,
which he finds sort of depressing and CD and stops going.
But Heidi loves it there so much she just keeps
going to the racetrack alone. Heidi likes to gamble.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
She'll bet on which rain drop we'll make it down
the window first, any Brooklay attorney at law.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Now officially failing out of school, Heidie's parents tell her
if she brings her grades up, they'll give her a
car for her sixteenth birthday, a common motivational strategy used
by parents of rich kids in LA and.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
It works if only briefly.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Heidi hits the books just long enough to raise her
grades and is rewarded by her parents with the brand
new car. But the lesson she learns from the experience
is not to study, but to start forging.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Her report cards.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
On top of all that, she also starts selling pot, shoplifting,
and stealing car radios.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
I lied to my parents for a year and told
them I was going to school. I goofed around instead.
That was restless as hell.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Heidi has some wealthier friends whose famous parents wield more
power and influence than a low, feeless pediatrician, even a
pediatrician to the stars. These friends also have the kinds
of la luxuries that come with lots and lots of money,
fancy cars, Palm Springs houses, good tables at hip restaurants,
(33:14):
expensive clothes from nice department stores. This becomes the blueprint
for the kind of life Heidi wants for herself. When
she's sixteen, Heidi meets a girl who will become her
best friend, Victoria Sellers, daughter of legendary comedian Peter Sellers
and Swedish actress brit Ecklund.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Victoria Sellers is the only friend I have ever felt
completely comfortable around. We met in our teens during spring
Break and Palm Springs. We are very different from each other,
but also very much alike.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Heidi is starstruck by Victoria's glamorous lifestyle and Hollywood connections.
Victoria's beauty, a full blonde bond girl mother has dated
famous playboys like Warren Batty, Rod Stewart, and the producer
Lou Adler, who still sits front row at every Lakers game.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Heidie's smart. When she puts her mind to something, she
gets it. Victoria Sellers, Heidi's best friend, The.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Fly's parents, who are very concerned about Heidie's truancy and
lack of interest in school, have her transfer to a
private Catholic girls' school called Immaculate Heart, where she flunks
out in her first semester. Her senior year, Heidie drops
out of high school entirely, promising her parents that she'll
use the time to get her ged high school equivalency
(34:42):
diploma and sign up for early enrollment in college.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
But back to that car you know?
Speaker 2 (34:50):
In Clueless how Cher, Horowitz says, look at the loked
out jeep Daddy got me, referring to the white jeep
wrangler that she can barely drive, or when Murray asks
d if she was jeep in I E creepin in
a jeep, Heidi like share, Horowitz drives a Jeep, a
burgeoning trend for off road sport utility vehicles and a
(35:11):
timeless California taste for convertibles made jeeps the it car
for a certain kind of moneyed young girl in that era.
But while jeeps, which started as military vehicles, are cute,
they aren't the ideal starter car for someone just learning
to drive. Like any suv, they're prone to tipping over.
(35:32):
Nineteen year old Heidi is behind the wheel of the
jeep when she flips the car of eight passengers over
in a nightclub parking lot, trapping her sister Shana underneath
the car and injuring Shana's arm to the point where
it almost has to be amputated. Heidi panics, allegedly drunken
on downers, Frantic, but unhurt herself at first.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
She flees the scene.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
None of the other passengers, including her, badly hurt, so
her file charges against her.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Her parents, perhaps.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Naively still set against the idea of punishing their kids
in a traditional sense, by her another jeep.
Speaker 6 (36:12):
It was July tenth, nineteen eighty four, and after it happened,
it changed everyone's lives.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
When I was eighteen, I flipped a jeep over with
eight girls in it. The only person who was hurt
was my younger sister. She had a multiple fracture, the
kind where the bone comes out, because her forearm and
her upper arm got trapped under the roll bar. But
(36:40):
mentally it might have caused more harm to me.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
You see, I wish it was me.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Okay, she was sixteen years old, she couldn't finish school,
and you.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Know how your ego is when you're sixteen. Well, I
felt responsible. The jeep flipping inside the changes the entire
family's dynamic, forever fulfilling. Elyssa Flices's worst fears from when
she thought Heidi had pushed her sister down a hill
in a baby carriage in.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
That Super eight movie.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
Heidi's own recklessness was becoming a liability to more than
just herself. Heidi goes into a deep depression, allegedly even
maybe going to a mental hospital for a while, feeling
like she has completely ruined her sister's life. Heidi is impulsive,
but she's also very sensitive. But Shana doesn't even really
(37:32):
blame Heidi, who stays with her at the hospital through
all of her painful operations. By the end of the year,
the Fly's parents announced that they are getting a divorce.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Heidi is at a crossroads.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Will she get on the straight and narrow by going
back to school and figuring out a stable career, or
will she plunge deeper into partying and try to lose
her in sex, drugs, and rock and roll on the
debaucherous Sunset strip. Like Heidiflies, I'm a half Jewish woman
with hippie parents from the flatlands of Los Angeles who
(38:12):
has spent her life trying to claw her way up
into the Hollywood Hills. The Hidifly scandal broke when I
was first developing my ideas about sex and morality. I
remember wondering why it was even illegal to sell sexual services.
From a steady diet of television, magazines, movies, and billboards,
I already understood that sex was used to sell virtually everything,
(38:37):
and I was interested in the pornography industry that operated
around me in the San Fernando Valley as a shadow
economy of the mainstream film industry. Fascinated by the mundanity
of the work of cranking out glamour and arousal for
public consumption, A sexy young woman was the ultimate product,
a symbol of desire and commerce itself. You could make
(39:00):
a killing selling the female image, but the people who
did make a killing selling the female image always seemed
to be men, Hugh Hefner, male directors, producers, and executives.
That a woman couldn't sell her own body consensually to
customers who were paying consensually made no sense to me,
(39:21):
even as a child. Here was Heidi being punished, basically
burned at the stake, by the media for something that
didn't seem like it should even be against the law.
Legacy news outlets and tabloids alike had a clear narrative
(39:42):
in mind for the Heidi Fly scandal, one where sex
work is bad. Sex workers are either bad people or
naively coerced innocence, and the experience of doing sex work
leads only to drugs, degradation and death. The La Times
has always notoriously functioned as a mouthpiece for lawaw enforcement agencies,
but it was especially clear during the Heidi Flight scandal
(40:04):
when they printed absolute Lives from the Cops connecting an
unrelated murder to Heidi's madaming business. The media angle made
no sense because the drugs, degradation and death narrative was
not the Heidi Fly's story at all. Sure, there were drugs,
but everyone involved was a willing participant and the sex
was always a consensual exchange of goods between consenting adults.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Heidi Flight's arrest itself.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Was meant to serve as propaganda for the Los Angeles
Police Department, Just a few years after four LAPD officers
were filmed beating Rodney King and then subsequently acquitted, the
police force, known around the world for its brutal, racist
treatment of civilians, was looking for a public relations coup, something.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
To show that they were the heroes.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
They thought of themselves as cleansing the city of vice
and crime, and in arresting Heidi Flies, they also sent
a clear message to other sex workers that they would
be targeted too, literally targeted. In the nineteen eighties, the
LPD supposedly had an internal acronym NHI, which means no
(41:12):
human involved. Allegedly, the cops used NHI as code when
a sex worker, unhoused person, junkie, or gang member was murdered.
So that should tell you something about how the cops
viewed sex workers, these people they allegedly are claiming to protect.
What the cops really cared about was that Heidi Flights
(41:32):
had made the cops as an institution look as corrupt
and stupid.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
As they really are.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
But busting Heidi didn't have the effect the LPD expected.
It made the cops look again like jackasses for wasting
city time and money on an over the top raid
of a woman brokering and escorting business for a bunch
of men with too much money who want to spend
it on sex.
Speaker 4 (42:02):
In her name figure type of.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Even though Heidi Flies didn't set out to become famous,
and the glare of the spotlight she was thrust into
almost broke her, she did set a lot of rules
for a new kind of fame. It's the only type
of fame that exists now and the driving force behind
all social media, the person who you just can't stop watching.
The media Maelstrom capitalized on Heidi's youth and sex appeal
(42:28):
at the same time as it condemned her and vilified her.
But Heidi did her best to cash into launching a
very ahead of its timeline of pajamas and accessories she
called Heidiwear while she was on trial. Once Heidi became
notorious after she got out of jail, she continued to
leverage what was objectively a horrible situation into money by
(42:50):
becoming that newest thing a reality TV star. She also
has a very deep family connection to the Bachelor. I'm
not saying Heidi is a saint. I think the details
and documents will speak for themselves. To me, she's the
most interesting anti hero. And with the continued persecution of
sex workers by a fanatical right wing anti porn lobby,
(43:13):
for whom sex work is always without exception, somehow degrading
and exploitative, even when the workers themselves are telling you
it's not, it seems like the perfect time to take
a fresh look at the Heidi Fly story and discuss
what went wrong and why America is still so fucked
up about sex, especially when there's money involved. Next time
(43:48):
on Heidi World, Heidi gets a job waitressing on the
world famous Sunset Strip, is introduced to the glamorous world
of VIP partying with celebrities at notorious club of Helena's,
and meets a wealthy, mysterious, much older man named Bernie
Cornfeld who will change her life forever.
The only place for a man in the sex business
is paying for it.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Heidi Flies, America is a casino. You can be up
one night, down the next, then back up again, and
then with just one bad hand, lose it all. Despite
the myth that this country is a meritocracy where anyone
can work their way up, we all know that the
rich are born with the chips up, and that the
(00:53):
only way for anyone else to get ahead is to
game the system. At the height of her power, nobody
plays the game better than Heidi Flies. The Heidi Fly
Saga is a classic American story about one of the
greatest hustlers of all time. But unlike the hustlers in
movies like Goodfellas or Casino, Hidie never killed anybody. All
(01:17):
she did was dare to broke her sex work. Welcome
to Heidi World, the Heidi Fly Story and the Secret
History of LA I'm your host, Mollie Lambert, and I
will be your guide through Los Angeles high and Low.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
In the nineteen.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Nineties, the world was captivated by Heidi Flies, the twenty
seven year old woman who briefly and memorably became the
most powerful madam in Los Angeles before she was brought
down by a combination of snitches, hubris, and.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Plain old bad luck.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
The scandal enveloped a major movie studio when employees were
alleged to have bought sex from Heidi's girls using checks
from the studio. Her trial threatened to lay bare the
depths of moral hypocrisy in la among the super wealthy
law enforcement agencies and the entertainment industry. But instead, Heidi
(02:19):
was made a pariah and suffered the only consequences of
the scandal as the men who bought sex from her
went back to their lives and sometimes even got promotions.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Put it this way, the person Heidi that people talk
about in the history of time, no one did what
she did in one year. No one. When I was
twenty five, I went out on my own. I said,
fuck all of them all. Show them how to do
things right with integrity and treat girls like their girls,
not force a girl to do something she doesn't want
(02:52):
to do. I never once solicited a person. I never
once pushed drugs upon a person. I've always told people,
never sell out. Only do something you want to do.
If you're ever in an uncomfortable situation, whatever it is,
get out you're a person with rights, you never have
to do anything.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Heidi World will follow Heidi Flies from her earliest days
as a young Jewish girl in Los Phelis running a
babysitting ring at her high school, through her party girl
dropout years on the hair Metal Sunset Strip. We'll introduce
you to memorable characters like Madame Alex, the woman who
ran the world of high class prostitution in Beverly Hills
(03:35):
for years and showed Heidi the ropes, then got busted
and accused Heidie of stealing her business and little black
book of clientele, battling Heidi for years in what she.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Called the Whore Wars.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
We'll also go over the varying rachamon like accounts of
what really took place with that little Black book. We'll
get into evil boyfriend's abusive John's corrupt and legal hypocrisy.
We'll explore how the invention of twenty four hour court
TV coincided with the media circus of several big LA
trials in the nineties, including the OJ Simpson trial, the
(04:13):
Menendez Brothers trial, and the Heidi Fly's trial. We'll talk
about how we are still feeling the after effects of
the profound shift in the way news is covered and
prioritized in what we all now know as the content cycle.
And of course we will get into Heidi's line of
vanity sleepwear Heidiwear. At its heart, the Heidi Flight scandal
(04:36):
is a Los Angeles story. There's so much local history
that runs through it. Many of the major players are
second generation LA kids whose parents were notable local figures
in entertainment and loss of other industries. It's like a
Russian novel about a family in a particular place at
a very specific time. Some of the people involved in
(04:57):
the scandal are dead, which means we can talk openly
about them. Some of them are very much still alive,
some even still working in Hollywood. Some are even portrayed
by Bradley Cooper in the Paul Thomas Anderson movie Licorice Pizza.
In the same spirit as Licorice Pizza. I have made
(05:18):
the casting of Heidi World a family affair, casting my
own father as doctor Paul Flie and my brother is
in this podcast, as well as a voice cast of
nearly hundreds of notable podcasters, directors playing other directors, and
more fun cameos. All of the quotes you will hear
(05:39):
are sourced from contemporary media that came out while the
scandal was happening, things like magazines, TV segments, books.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
And newspapers.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Heidi Flice is voiced throughout Heidi World by actress Annie Hamilton.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Looks are only a head start.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
You do not have to be classically beautiful to get
the man you want. An average looking woman who is confident, happy,
and slightly reserved is way more appealing to a man
than a dumb girl with a nice ass.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Along the way, we'll use Heidi's story to make the
argument for why sex work must be decriminalized and discuss
the horrifying way sex workers have been pushed even further
to the margins since this story happened. Thanks largely to
pressure from the extreme right, but also centrists and clueless Libdems,
there has been a concentrated agenda in recent years to
(06:34):
conflate consensual sex work with sex trafficking. This is the
movement behind Sesta Fausta, a set of laws passed in
twenty eighteen that were sensibly aimed at eradicating internet sex trafficking,
but in reality we're purposely designed to deplatform and shadow
band sex workers on the few online outlets where they
could safely still do their jobs and earn a study income.
(06:56):
Why are people so obsessed with keeping sex work criminal
because go with me here. If it was decriminalized, those
people couldn't find ways to profit off of it being criminalized.
It's too threatening to the powers that be when sex
workers control the means of production. Heidiflies herself is no
longer in the sex work business. She runs a bird sanctuary,
(07:19):
a private airfield, and a laundromat in parump, Nevada, after
a failed attempt at opening a brothel for women there.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Called the stud Farm.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Right now, she's considering leaving Nevada for Missouri after someone
shot a bb gun at one of her exotic birds.
She's also embroiled in a fight over cryptocurrency with a
former friend, and eventually we will get into all of
that too, But first we have to go back to
the very beginning to Heidi's childhood in Los Felis.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
This is Heidi World.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Chapter one an La. So how Heidi Fleisch's family came
to be and how one car accident changed them forever
the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I was born and raised in La My dad was
a famous pediatrician. When he died, they donated a bench
to him at the Griffith Park Observatory.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
I goten in big trouble. I felt shitty about that.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Dad gave me really the best childhood possible and all
of the opportunity in front of me. I wish that
I took school seriously and won a different route. But
it was not my father's fault at all.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
Just love him. They can't love your kids too much.
Paul Fleisch, pediatrician.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
When Heidi World returns, meet the Fly's family and learn
about her doctor father's New Age beliefs and connection to
Leonardo DiCaprio. Welcome back to Heidie World. Let's meet the
(09:11):
Fly's family.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Shall we?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Our story begins in the La neighborhood of Los Phelis.
Paul Flice is a Jewish American pediatrician who runs his
practice out of a craftsman house on Hillhurst, which is
still there and was most recently an ice cream shop
called ample Hill's Creamery. Paul Flice is a beloved local
doctor known for treating the rich and poor alike, but
he also becomes known as a pediatrician to the stars
(09:39):
in his own way. Paul Flice is also a bit
of a hustler himself. He trains in Detroit as an
osteopath and pharmacist. In nineteen sixty two, California passes a
law that allows osteopaths to convert their degrees into MD's,
and he moves to La to take advantage of it.
While osteopaths are generalists, the MD allows flies to choose
(10:03):
a specialty, and he goes into pediatric medicine, becoming a
resident at USC Medical Center in LA. A friend introduces
Paul to a hippie school teacher named Alyssa Ash.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
They fall in love.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Instantly in or wed within the year. A few months
after that, one of Alissa's underage sisters gets pregnant. Alyssa
and Paul offer to take in the baby, whose name
is Kim. The next year, one of Paul's sisters becomes
fatally ill, and the couple agree to adopt her young daughter,
Amy as well. Alissa then gives birth to Paul's child
(10:37):
in nineteen sixty five, a girl they name Heidi Lynn Flice.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
I am one of six kids. I describe my parents
as intellectual hippies, but minus the grateful dead and Charles
manson aspects.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
Before they would sleep at night, I'd lie down with
each one of them, and I'd always save Heidi for last,
because she was the most most fun. Alissa ash Heidie's mom.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
By the time, they move into a three story house
in the hills of Griffith Park that they bought for
seventy seven thousand dollars in nineteen seventy around five hundred
and seventeen thousand dollars today, the family adds daughter Shana
and son Jason. In nineteen seventy seven, they have another son, Jesse,
bringing the Flic's family to a grand total of six kids.
(11:26):
They all live in the four thousand, three hundred square
foot house built in nineteen thirty, with five bedrooms and
a three story spiral staircase going up to a crow's
nest observation tower.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
There's a grotto with a fish.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Pond, stained glass windows, and murals painted on the walls.
Los Felis is known as an artsy kind of bohemian neighborhood,
although it was never cheap to live there. It's directly
next to Hollywood and provides easy proximity to most of
the major studios. Early movie stars built Los Phelis's art
deco mansions. The main street set from the nineteen fifty
(12:01):
four Western melodrama Johnny Guitar just stood there on Sunset
Boulevard for decades before it was finally demolished.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Los Felis is.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Also famous for being the neighborhood where Rosemary and Leno
la Bianca, an Italian immigrant couple who ran a successful
grocery store, were murdered by the Manson family on the
second night.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Of their murders free.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Aside from Heidi Flice, there are two other incredibly famous
A List Hollywood stars from Los Felis. One of them
is Mickey Mouse, who was born in the original Disney
Studios building on Hyperion Avenue in.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Los Felis, which is the reason why the Main.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Street USA corollary in Disney's beleaguered California Adventure Park is
an idealized replica of nineteen thirties Los Felis.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
The other movie star from Los.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Phelis is Leonardo DiCaprio, whose legal secretary mother an underground
comics artist father, separate when he is one, but for
a while live next to each other in bungalows with
a shared backyard to co parent baby Leonardo DiCaprio is
even delivered by Heidi's father, Paul Flice, who is best
friends with his father George DiCaprio. In nineteen seventies California,
(13:14):
some people are experimenting with new definitions of family and
domestic life. The Flices are a blended family of four
biological children and two adopted kids, a Jewish boho Brady
bunch living in a three story fairytale hacienda with lots
of pets. They take family camping trips to national parks together,
(13:35):
where everyone fights in the car. They go to Hurst Castle.
They're a tight group.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
I love my daddy. He's the best aat on earth.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
My dad never spanked us. He would say, I'm not
gonna ask any questions. This has happened, and now it's
too late, and we're just gonna figure it out. Shane
of Flice.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Paul Flice is on lots of medical boards, and his
opinions are often quoted in the Los Angeles Times. But
Paul Flice also holds some views that were considered at
the time unconventional. Some of them are more potentially harmful
than others. His beliefs tend towards the New age. He
is a believer in the family bed, where parents and
(14:23):
children all sleep in one big bed together. This is
now known as co sleeping, and its most famous advocate
is former Blossom my Embiolic. He wears birkenstocks and the
kids are all vegetarians. He's against rewarding or punishing children,
believing the main thing parents should.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Do is be kind.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
He's pro breastfeeding and anti formula. Doctor Flie is quoted
in a nineteen eighty eight La Times article about a
silver Lake childcare co oper. Women breastfeed each other's children,
also known as wet nursing.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
While some of the other.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Doctors the article worn that breast milk can contain infectious agents.
Doctor Flice advocates not only for breastfeeding, but for wet nursing.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
Mothers have been doing this for a long long time.
It's not quite as good as the baby's mother, but
it's better than propping the baby up with a bottle.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
The California counterculture seeped fully into the medical practices of
the time, and on the spectrum of outrageous nineteen seventies
medical thought. Paul Flies was by no means the wackiest
or most out there person. He was among many professionals
questioning traditional medical practices and child rearing methods, interested in
(15:43):
exploring new, hopefully better possibilities. Doctors were also pushing the
limits in fields like group psychotherapy. There was Paul Bindram's
Theory of Nude Psychotherapy in nineteen sixty seven, which involved
long marathon naked group therapy sessions. There's an incredible nineteen
seventy one documentary called Out of Touch about the nude
(16:04):
therapy movement. Critics of the nude therapy movement said it
was too charged of an atmosphere and that participants might
mistake the adrenaline high of being naked with strangers for
emotional breakthroughs.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
But supporters said.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
The nudity became non sexual very quickly, and as someone
who's spent to a couple of adult film conventions and
one European beach, I absolutely think.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
This is true.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
There are still nude therapy workshops in California, offered by
a place called the Human Institute for Awareness. There's also Esslyn,
the Big sur retreat with a nude hot tub, founded
in the sixties by two Stanford grads after they heard
a life changing Aldus Huxley lecture about human Potential. There
were new experimental techniques for things like drug rehabilitation with
(16:49):
the Experimental Rehab Center turned eventual cult Synanon in Santa Monica.
Doctor Flie considered his philosophy of medicine holistic. He was
vehemently anti circumcision, believing the procedure caused children unnecessary pain
and that the foreskin could be cleaned manually, and he
(17:10):
advocated for treating children with the same respect afforded to
adults and not physically punishing them. His saying was no
rewards or punishments, no threats or bribes. Here's the less
great part. He wasn't anti vaccine, but he didn't insist
that his patients vaccinate their children. Despite, but also probably
(17:33):
because of this bullshit, he was a beloved family doctor
throughout Los Angeles. Doctor Fwiss was also a paid consultant
for a board called the Los Angeles County Milk Commission,
which was put together by Altadena. Altadena is a milk
company that advertised untrue health benefits of its unpasteurized milk.
(17:54):
Doctor Fleiss was essentially paid to say that raw milk
did have real health benefits, something he likely believed given
his own bent towards holistic snake oil. A report on
the La County Milk Commission alleged that the entire board
of milk had been bought off by Altadina Dairy so
that the San Bernardino Milk Farm could continue to produce
(18:14):
raw milk in violation of health codes.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Our parents always stressed the importance of an education. Our
home was filled with love and stability.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Heidi was Mom's favorite.
Speaker 6 (18:30):
I mean, I knew my mom loved me, but she
and Heidi had their own language.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
For me.
Speaker 7 (18:37):
Coming into this family that was so generous and open minded,
it really turned me around. But for Heidi having a
lot of leeway when she acted up, her actions were
considered not wrong, but witty or cute instead. Kim Flice's
oldest sister.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
The Flice kids had the kind of freedom and lack
of boundaries you might expect out of a bohemian Los
Angeles family in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
In a nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Five profile of Paul Flights by journalist Sean Hubler, Alyssa
Flices calls herself a quote flower child mother, and Hubler
refers to Paul flices as quote the prototypical nurturing male.
Speaker 6 (19:23):
Our house was the house on the block where everybody
went because they knew. Our parents were flexible about what
time we came home. So our friends would say, I
want to stay at Shana's, and their parents would think, well,
the mother's a school teacher, the father's a doctor, there
shouldn't be any problems, and then we'd just go stay
out at night, going to clubs. My parents didn't have
a clue. By the time our parents started talking about curfeuse,
(19:45):
it was too late. We were like fifteen or sixteen.
I had been going out and doing things since I was.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Twelve years old.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
Shana makes it sound like they were just allowed to
run loose, and that certainly was not the case.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
While Paul Flies defends his parenting style, other people do
confirm that the Flight's parents took a hands off approach
popular at the time, basically trusting their kids to make
their own choices. A friend of mine, whose mother was
close friends with doctor Paul Flice, sent me an email
but asked for anonymity. She describes Paul Flies, like most
people do, as a beloved family pediatrician who would slot
(20:23):
in patients even if they couldn't pay and take house
calls long after everyone else stopped doing house calls. She
says the Fly's family had a parenting style she calls
seventies California very hands off. Her mom believed the flies
kids became a mix of high achieving and burnouts. In
Heidi's case, both we have to contextualize the laissez fair
(20:46):
seventies California parenting style as a product of its time in.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Reaction to what came before it.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Childcare manuals from the first part of the twentieth century
were filled with concepts like the Refrigerator Mother, which blamed
cold parental behavior from women for children who developed autism
or schizophrenia. In nineteen forty six, doctor Benjamin Spock put
out Baby in Childcare, the first parenting book to involve
(21:13):
psychoanalysis and advocate for a more touchy feely approach to parenting,
telling parents it was okay to comfort and kiss their
babies if they cried, instead of just ignoring them. Spock
was a proto hippie whose anti Vietnam War views made
him the eventual subject of conservative backlash. So by the
(21:34):
sixties and seventies, the more liberal Spock influenced parents believe
in treating children as the individuals they are now. Some
parents absolutely took the idea of breaking down the boundaries
between parents and children too far, especially in bohemian nineteen
seventies California. Their accountless stories, particularly of famous parents pushing
(21:57):
their children into adulthood prematurely, or blurring the boundaries between
parenting and friendship in a way that harmed their children,
providing their kids with access to drugs or alcohol or
sex too early, and creepy stories like the one about
the rock star who quote gave his daughter's virginity to
(22:17):
another rock star he was friends with as a gift.
The seventies was also the high point of working class
latchkey kids whose parents weren't around to see what they
were doing, and the high point for upper class kids
with resources whose parents let them run free without any rules.
In the nineteen seventies, people still hitchhiked in California. Things
(22:40):
were so repressed in the first part of the century
that when they swung in the other direction, they really
swung hard.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Of course, there was a swift backlash.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
To all the sixties and seventies freedom and exploration called
the nineteen eighties. This is all to say that the
Flics family existed somewhere on this spectrum between additional parenting
and letting children fend completely for themselves, much like most
other gen X kids experienced. Which is not to say
that the Fly's parents were absent or distant. By all accounts,
(23:11):
they were involved, even strict sometimes, and the family was
legendarily close knit on celebrity rehab, which we'll get too
much later. Heidi is horrified when Mackenzie Phillips, the daughter
of Mama's and the Papa's musician John Phillips, perhaps the
poster child for nineteen sixties and seventies bad parenting, talks
(23:31):
about her dad asking her to get him drugs.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Later that year, Phillips.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Opened up about the adult, incestuous relationship she had with
her father. Heidi is completely horrified and says she would
never have so much a smoked pot with her dad.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
I always had my own agenda. I was always looking
for something else.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
She's always been a wheeler dealer.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Hidie was desperate to get West of Doughheiny von Nage producer.
That was Ivon Naje, the Hungarian director producer and all
around dirtbag who will introduce you to In episode two,
he's talking about how Heidi was desperate to get west
of Doheeny. Doheiny is a street that is sort of
(24:22):
a dividing line into the neighborhood of Beverly Hills. It
is named after Edward L. Doheeny, who was the first
person to successfully drill an oil well in Los Angeles,
setting off a Southern California oil boom and making a
ton of money, becoming one of the first dynasties of
La Doheiny was the inspiration for Upton Sinclair's nineteen twenty
(24:44):
seven novel Oil exclamation Point, which was in turn the
inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which
features Daniel day Lewis as a Doheny inspired character named
Daniel Plainview. Heidi is the ringleader of the Fly's Family gang.
She's a kid who ties her younger sibling shoelaces together.
(25:05):
In photos of Heidi as a child, she's a skinny
little stick with long, scraggly black hair, a tomboy in
a football jersey. Growing up, Heidi makes little movies with
her siblings using a Super eight camera. In one of
Heidi's movies, her brother, dressed in drag, pushes their younger
sister in a baby carriage, then appears to lose control
(25:25):
of the carriage and watches as a kareem's down a
steep hill in what we can only assume is an
homage to Battleship Ptempkin. When the flight's kids show the
short to their mom, she freaks out, thinking they'd actually
push the carriage down the hill with their sister in it.
Heidi has to jump in and explain the magic of
movie editing. They replace their real baby sister with a
doll before pushing the carriage down the hill. That should
(25:48):
give you an impression of the kind of kid. Heidi
was the one who ropes the other kids into making
a movie and scares her parents a little bit in
the process. Heidi Flies attends Jehan Mary High in Los Phelis,
a beautiful Gothic public school built in nineteen thirty featured
in A Million Things, probably most famously as Rydel High
at the End of Greece. Besides Heidi, other notable John
(26:12):
Marshall students include Michelle Phillips from The Mamas and the
Papas Sue Lyon, who played Lolita in the Stanley Kuprick film,
Judge Lance Edo from the OJ Simpson Trial, and will
I Am an Apple d App from The Black Eyed Peas.
Van Halen's Hot for Teacher music video was also shot
at John Marshall High which was closed at the time
(26:34):
due to lack of city funding. The band, who also
themselves met in La Area Public Schools in Pasadena, donated
an undisclosed amount of money to refurbish and reopen the school,
which is cool as hell.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
When I was a teenager, all I wanted to do
was blendon. I felt awkward around my peers. The things
that were on my mind were different from anything they'd
talked about. Once I went with some friends to a
party at UCLA, and I remember watching a group of
girls who dressed the same, laughed the same, and talked
the same, and I wanted so badly to just be
(27:11):
like them.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Heidi is clearly very smart. She wins a citywide chess
championship twice at age thirteen and fourteen. Around the same
time she starts babysitting to make money and figures out
she can make even more money by helping set up
other girls to babysit too. Thus, the first incarnation of
Heidi Girls is born a babysitting ring of twenty or
(27:38):
so teenage girls that Heidi matches up with her first
clients parents who need babysitters. In junior high, Heidi, who
had been a stellar elementary school student, starts falling behind.
She can't keep up with the schoolwork, and she's very
frustrated by and embarrassed about it. Her parents value education,
(27:58):
and Heidi plans to go to a good college someday
like they want. But her grades keep dropping and the
only reason she keeps going to school at all is
because of a crush on a teacher named mister Jamie.
When she gets a C in one class, she begs
the teacher to change it to a BEE, and he refuses,
so she gives up on trying and starts ditching school.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
I've always in the classroom staring at the blue sky,
thinking I gotta go, I gotta go. After a while,
I hardly went to school at all. I'd cut glass
and go to the beach with a race track.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
When Heidie World returns, Heidi ditches high school for hustling.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Welcome back to Heidie World.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Although she's been truant from high school, she manages to
hold down a part time job at a flower shop
called Flowers by Judith. One of her jobs is to
bring roses over to the Greek theater and sell them
to people after shows. One day, she is doing her
job and sells out out of all of the roses,
and although her boss had told her to just stop
(29:19):
when she finished, she goes back to the flower shop,
gets more roses and sells all of them too. So
you can see that Heidi has unnatural talent for finding
money and then turning that money into more money. Flower
shops figure heavily into Heidi world, and it's not hard
to see why a bouquet of beautiful blooms for sale
(29:40):
arranged just right can fetch a significantly marked up price
when the right person is selling them. But this outside
success doesn't translate back to school, where she feels like
a misfit, like she doesn't quite fit in with the
other kids her age. She develops an attraction to much
older men.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
I don't like them under forty five.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Just show me a six year old guy with a
million dollars Point me in that direction.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
However, Heidi does date some guys her own age, like
her best friend Steve, the blonde guy next door who
becomes her first boyfriend. There's also a boy named Scott
who resembles young Johnny Depp, that Heidi describes.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
As her first love.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Her ideas of romance are forged by movies like Excalibur,
the nineteen eighty one epic medieval fantasy movie depicting Arthurian legends.
Excalibur features Helen Mirren as Morgan le Fay, a powerful
female enchantress who can use magic to bend powerful men
to her will. But in her own life, Heidi is
(30:46):
not the sex goddess that she wishes she was.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
I didn't lose my virginity until I was almost eighteen.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I'm real slow.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
I'd go to bed at night and say, why can't
I have tits like Dolly Park? But I remember the
first guy. He was blonde. I've never slept with a
blonde again, and I want to understand what everyone was
talking about. So I just did it, and it was like,
this is so painful. I will die. I will never
do this again. I'll be a nun.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
No way will I do this again. She also spends
an ever increasing amount of time at the Hollywood Park
racetrack in Inglewood, where she develops a taste for betting
on the horses. She bets on her first horse at
the age of fifteen, which is definitely illegal. Her boyfriend
(31:38):
Steve goes with her on these racetrack hookie trips at first,
but he gets sick of the scene at the racetrack,
which he finds sort of depressing and CD and stops going.
But Heidi loves it there so much she just keeps
going to the racetrack alone. Heidi likes to gamble.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
She'll bet on which rain drop we'll make it down
the window first, any Brooklay attorney at law.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Now officially failing out of school, Heidie's parents tell her
if she brings her grades up, they'll give her a
car for her sixteenth birthday, a common motivational strategy used
by parents of rich kids in LA and.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
It works if only briefly.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Heidi hits the books just long enough to raise her
grades and is rewarded by her parents with the brand
new car. But the lesson she learns from the experience
is not to study, but to start forging.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Her report cards.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
On top of all that, she also starts selling pot, shoplifting,
and stealing car radios.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
I lied to my parents for a year and told
them I was going to school. I goofed around instead.
That was restless as hell.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Heidi has some wealthier friends whose famous parents wield more
power and influence than a low, feeless pediatrician, even a
pediatrician to the stars. These friends also have the kinds
of la luxuries that come with lots and lots of money,
fancy cars, Palm Springs houses, good tables at hip restaurants,
(33:14):
expensive clothes from nice department stores. This becomes the blueprint
for the kind of life Heidi wants for herself. When
she's sixteen, Heidi meets a girl who will become her
best friend, Victoria Sellers, daughter of legendary comedian Peter Sellers
and Swedish actress brit Ecklund.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Victoria Sellers is the only friend I have ever felt
completely comfortable around. We met in our teens during spring
Break and Palm Springs. We are very different from each other,
but also very much alike.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Heidi is starstruck by Victoria's glamorous lifestyle and Hollywood connections.
Victoria's beauty, a full blonde bond girl mother has dated
famous playboys like Warren Batty, Rod Stewart, and the producer
Lou Adler, who still sits front row at every Lakers game.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Heidie's smart. When she puts her mind to something, she
gets it. Victoria Sellers, Heidi's best friend, The.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Fly's parents, who are very concerned about Heidie's truancy and
lack of interest in school, have her transfer to a
private Catholic girls' school called Immaculate Heart, where she flunks
out in her first semester. Her senior year, Heidie drops
out of high school entirely, promising her parents that she'll
use the time to get her ged high school equivalency
(34:42):
diploma and sign up for early enrollment in college.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
But back to that car you know?
Speaker 2 (34:50):
In Clueless how Cher, Horowitz says, look at the loked
out jeep Daddy got me, referring to the white jeep
wrangler that she can barely drive, or when Murray asks
d if she was jeep in I E creepin in
a jeep, Heidi like share, Horowitz drives a Jeep, a
burgeoning trend for off road sport utility vehicles and a
(35:11):
timeless California taste for convertibles made jeeps the it car
for a certain kind of moneyed young girl in that era.
But while jeeps, which started as military vehicles, are cute,
they aren't the ideal starter car for someone just learning
to drive. Like any suv, they're prone to tipping over.
(35:32):
Nineteen year old Heidi is behind the wheel of the
jeep when she flips the car of eight passengers over
in a nightclub parking lot, trapping her sister Shana underneath
the car and injuring Shana's arm to the point where
it almost has to be amputated. Heidi panics, allegedly drunken
on downers, Frantic, but unhurt herself at first.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
She flees the scene.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
None of the other passengers, including her, badly hurt, so
her file charges against her.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Her parents, perhaps.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Naively still set against the idea of punishing their kids
in a traditional sense, by her another jeep.
Speaker 6 (36:12):
It was July tenth, nineteen eighty four, and after it happened,
it changed everyone's lives.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
When I was eighteen, I flipped a jeep over with
eight girls in it. The only person who was hurt
was my younger sister. She had a multiple fracture, the
kind where the bone comes out, because her forearm and
her upper arm got trapped under the roll bar. But
(36:40):
mentally it might have caused more harm to me.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
You see, I wish it was me.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Okay, she was sixteen years old, she couldn't finish school,
and you.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Know how your ego is when you're sixteen. Well, I
felt responsible. The jeep flipping inside the changes the entire
family's dynamic, forever fulfilling. Elyssa Flices's worst fears from when
she thought Heidi had pushed her sister down a hill
in a baby carriage in.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
That Super eight movie.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
Heidi's own recklessness was becoming a liability to more than
just herself. Heidi goes into a deep depression, allegedly even
maybe going to a mental hospital for a while, feeling
like she has completely ruined her sister's life. Heidi is impulsive,
but she's also very sensitive. But Shana doesn't even really
(37:32):
blame Heidi, who stays with her at the hospital through
all of her painful operations. By the end of the year,
the Fly's parents announced that they are getting a divorce.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Heidi is at a crossroads.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Will she get on the straight and narrow by going
back to school and figuring out a stable career, or
will she plunge deeper into partying and try to lose
her in sex, drugs, and rock and roll on the
debaucherous Sunset strip. Like Heidiflies, I'm a half Jewish woman
with hippie parents from the flatlands of Los Angeles who
(38:12):
has spent her life trying to claw her way up
into the Hollywood Hills. The Hidifly scandal broke when I
was first developing my ideas about sex and morality. I
remember wondering why it was even illegal to sell sexual services.
From a steady diet of television, magazines, movies, and billboards,
I already understood that sex was used to sell virtually everything,
(38:37):
and I was interested in the pornography industry that operated
around me in the San Fernando Valley as a shadow
economy of the mainstream film industry. Fascinated by the mundanity
of the work of cranking out glamour and arousal for
public consumption, A sexy young woman was the ultimate product,
a symbol of desire and commerce itself. You could make
(39:00):
a killing selling the female image, but the people who
did make a killing selling the female image always seemed
to be men, Hugh Hefner, male directors, producers, and executives.
That a woman couldn't sell her own body consensually to
customers who were paying consensually made no sense to me,
(39:21):
even as a child. Here was Heidi being punished, basically
burned at the stake, by the media for something that
didn't seem like it should even be against the law.
Legacy news outlets and tabloids alike had a clear narrative
(39:42):
in mind for the Heidi Fly scandal, one where sex
work is bad. Sex workers are either bad people or
naively coerced innocence, and the experience of doing sex work
leads only to drugs, degradation and death. The La Times
has always notoriously functioned as a mouthpiece for lawaw enforcement agencies,
but it was especially clear during the Heidi Flight scandal
(40:04):
when they printed absolute Lives from the Cops connecting an
unrelated murder to Heidi's madaming business. The media angle made
no sense because the drugs, degradation and death narrative was
not the Heidi Fly's story at all. Sure, there were drugs,
but everyone involved was a willing participant and the sex
was always a consensual exchange of goods between consenting adults.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Heidi Flight's arrest itself.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Was meant to serve as propaganda for the Los Angeles
Police Department, Just a few years after four LAPD officers
were filmed beating Rodney King and then subsequently acquitted, the
police force, known around the world for its brutal, racist
treatment of civilians, was looking for a public relations coup, something.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
To show that they were the heroes.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
They thought of themselves as cleansing the city of vice
and crime, and in arresting Heidi Flies, they also sent
a clear message to other sex workers that they would
be targeted too, literally targeted. In the nineteen eighties, the
LPD supposedly had an internal acronym NHI, which means no
(41:12):
human involved. Allegedly, the cops used NHI as code when
a sex worker, unhoused person, junkie, or gang member was murdered.
So that should tell you something about how the cops
viewed sex workers, these people they allegedly are claiming to protect.
What the cops really cared about was that Heidi Flights
(41:32):
had made the cops as an institution look as corrupt
and stupid.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
As they really are.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
But busting Heidi didn't have the effect the LPD expected.
It made the cops look again like jackasses for wasting
city time and money on an over the top raid
of a woman brokering and escorting business for a bunch
of men with too much money who want to spend
it on sex.
Speaker 4 (42:02):
In her name figure type of.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Even though Heidi Flies didn't set out to become famous,
and the glare of the spotlight she was thrust into
almost broke her, she did set a lot of rules
for a new kind of fame. It's the only type
of fame that exists now and the driving force behind
all social media, the person who you just can't stop watching.
The media Maelstrom capitalized on Heidi's youth and sex appeal
(42:28):
at the same time as it condemned her and vilified her.
But Heidi did her best to cash into launching a
very ahead of its timeline of pajamas and accessories she
called Heidiwear while she was on trial. Once Heidi became
notorious after she got out of jail, she continued to
leverage what was objectively a horrible situation into money by
(42:50):
becoming that newest thing a reality TV star. She also
has a very deep family connection to the Bachelor. I'm
not saying Heidi is a saint. I think the details
and documents will speak for themselves. To me, she's the
most interesting anti hero. And with the continued persecution of
sex workers by a fanatical right wing anti porn lobby,
(43:13):
for whom sex work is always without exception, somehow degrading
and exploitative, even when the workers themselves are telling you
it's not, it seems like the perfect time to take
a fresh look at the Heidi Fly story and discuss
what went wrong and why America is still so fucked
up about sex, especially when there's money involved. Next time
(43:48):
on Heidi World, Heidi gets a job waitressing on the
world famous Sunset Strip, is introduced to the glamorous world
of VIP partying with celebrities at notorious club of Helena's,
and meets a wealthy, mysterious, much older man named Bernie
Cornfeld who will change her life forever.
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