Chapter 10: The Desert And Beyond: Heidi Moves To Pahrump, Nevada To Start A Stud Farm And Starts A Bird Sanctuary Instead
After prison, Heidi Fleiss tries to hustle up some new work by starting a Stud Farm in Nevada and ends up on Celebrity Rehab instead. She also discovers a new passion: taking care of tropical birds. Dr. Paul Fleiss is embroiled in a new scandal unrelated to his daughter. Charlie Sheen becomes a sitcom star but encounters further complications. Heidi gets caught up in a cryptocurrency scam. And what happened to everyone in Heidiworld.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:34):
Everyone wants high ceilings, But how bad do you want it?
It's up to you how you feel, how hard you'll
work for it.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Heidi Flies. Previously on Heidi World, Heidi Flights has gone
from ELA's glittering hilltop mansions to its prison downtown as
a result of her remarkable rise and fall in the
nineteen nineties as a Hollywood madam. By the two thousands,
she is out of jail and back to hustling up
(01:05):
ways to make money and cash in on whatever is
left of her brand. Welcome to Heidi World all Right.
Chapter ten, The Desert and Beyond. Heidi moves to Perump,
(01:26):
Nevada and to start a stud farm and ends up
starting a bird sanctuary instead. Plus where everyone ended up.
Welcome back to the final installment of Heidi World. I'm
your host, Molly Lambert. It's the early two thousands and
(01:50):
Heidi Flices is out of prison, ready to rebuild her
life from scratch. Her first stop is the grocery store,
where she treats herself to salmon with mango salsa and
buys every single flavor of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Every woman at the market was looking at me as
if I was mentally ill.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Recently, she's been CouchSurfing through her rich friends' houses. Staying
in a guest room at a gated mansion in Brentwood.
She invites a journalist over to play chess with her
while she promotes her new memoir, a coffee table scrapbook
style tome called Pandering that retails for fifty dollars at
stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble. While she was
(02:37):
in prison, Heidi brushed up on her skills as a
former child chess champion and says she won every game
she played.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Inside I See a check Mate.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Heidi says she turned down publishing deals from people who
wanted her to do a tell all because she still
has no tension of snitching on clients.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Heidi, to do a book, now, you're basically a hasban
and you have to dig deep down and do some
soul searching and tell it all.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Instead, she started her own publishing company called One Hour
Entertainment and put out the book she wanted to write.
She raised a few grand and went to the publishing
trade fair Book Expo America, where, in true Heidi fashion,
she came back with a four book deal. She started
learning the ins and outs of the publishing business.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Whoever you think is doing it, is doing it, and
they're probably doing it in weirder ways than you can imagine.
Just because I got caught and I sunk the ship
doesn't mean I have to take everyone down with me.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
At thirty seven years old, Heidi is washed up as
a madam and aware that she could be considered unhirable
for virtually anything else by a lot of people. She
jokes about prison, but there is an underlying sadness. She
felt deserted when she was on the inside by everyone
except her family, who wrote her constant letters. She relapsed
(04:14):
on drugs almost immediately after re entering the straight world
and served a six month home detention for it pandering.
Her book is designed for an audience with increasingly short
attention spans. People don't read anymore.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Magazine subscriptions are way down, except for Maximum Stuff in
Fahm because their articles are half an inch. To do
a book now, you have to make it very visually
appealing and concise.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Heidi realizes that the world has changed in many ways
while she was serving out her prison term. While the
trial of Heidi Flies may have been an attempt to
sweep the sexual hypocrisy of powerful men under the rug,
like an inappropriate boner, it always seems to spring back up.
The media sites are now set on destroying and humiliating
(05:09):
another young Jewish woman with unique sexual charisma who grew
up in Los Angeles, Monica Lewinsky. Heidi Flies thinks the
Kenneth Star report on Lewinsky's affair with President Bill Clinton
shifted the cultural needle in ways she could have never imagined,
making things like blowjobs, rim jobs, and sexually pleasuring a
(05:29):
woman with a cigar before biting down on it and
saying tastes good into national news.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
He made the conversation different. He brought the subject of
oral copulation to the dinner.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Table after pandering. Heidi wants to put out other books,
including a book about Tupac Shakur, a tell all about
Beverly Hills tutors, and a collection by photographer Evan Clanfer
of photo of prostitutes and strippers in Florida. A made
(06:04):
for TV Heidifly's biopic is announced by the USA Network.
It will star Jamie Linn Siegler, best known for playing
meto soprano on the sopranos as the Hollywood Madam Heidiflies
is a public figure, which means the story is public domain.
In the meantime, a humbold and chastened Heidi will take
(06:24):
money however she can get it. She appears as a
judge at the Venice Beach semifinals of the LA's Sexiest Competition,
a promotion for the Erotica La convention taking place that weekend.
Erotica La is actively trying to make adult conventions more
female and couples friendly, part of a larger movement of
sex positivity that encourages women to buy their own sex toys.
(06:49):
The Hustler store in Hollywood may not have the feminist
credentials of San Francisco's pioneering sex toy shop Good Vibrations,
but it's part of an overall s shift spurred also
by HBO's hit show Sex in the City, towards women
owning their sexuality and also towards commodifying this type of sexuality,
(07:10):
telling women that they need a certain vibrator or expensive
brand of lingerie to feel truly sexy and empowered. It's
a twist on the yuppie ethos that Heidi profited off
of more money equals better than It's called third wave feminism,
and it encourages women to think of themselves as powerful
(07:30):
consumers like men. This puts them in the position to
exploit other less powerful women, which is how we get
to the concept of the girl boss. Heidi Flies opens
a new boutique on Hollywood Boulevard called Hollywood Madam, a
last ditch attempt to relaunch the Heidiwear brand, but she
(07:51):
is in the valley of her popularity. She is considered
a dlister now, but she still has a dream of
getting her valuation back up. The shop is at sixty
six twenty four Hollywood Boulevard, and the prices have gone
up with the times. Sweatpants are one hundred and fifty
dollars and there are corsets that cost nearly four hundred dollars.
(08:14):
The window display at Hollywood Madam is a nude mannequin
reclining in an antique bathtub's faux sets as bubbles float
down from a bubble machine in the ceiling. One of
Heidi's innovations for the new store is to equip one
dressing room with a webcam and offer a thirty percent
discount to any customers who allow themselves to be live
(08:37):
streamed on her pay website trying on clothes in the
dressing room. Once again, Heidi was right. Hollywood Boulevard did
start to gentrify again soon after that. Unbelievably, the name
Heidiflice is still visible on the storefront gate at sixty
six twenty four Hollywood Boulevard as of this recording. I
(08:58):
was completely sure it was going to get scrubbed and
flipped at some point while I was making this podcast,
but as of today, it's still there. One thing I
love about Hollywood Boulevard, which is to me the capital
of Los Angeles, is that, like New York's Times Square,
you can gentrify and flip and try to make it
(09:20):
upscale as much as you want, but you can never
wash the decades of vomit, glitter and piss off the street,
because that's what Hollywood is, and we love it. In
two thousand and five, Heidi moves down the Hollywood Corridor
to Kuenga Boulevard and opens a place called a Little
Shop of Sex next to the trendy new Club Beauty Bar.
(09:44):
It's the same inventory from the Hollywood Madam Store, with
a new investment from her friend Jessica Steindorf. Steindorf is
an actress from Malibu who was in the NBC show
Las Vegas. Her father is a producer named Scott Steindorf
who produced Las Vegas and more recently Station eleven. Jessica
Steindorf became a manager and producer, but she resurfaced in
(10:08):
the news when her Prius was one of the four
cars Caitlyn Jenner plowed into in the multi car crash
on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, where Jenner killed
sixty nine year old Kim Howe. Jenner settled with Steindorf
and the other survivors of the crash in court.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Now.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
In the distant past, especially in the Old West, Madams
often became locally revered. The mass genocide of the indigenous
people of the Western States was carried out by American men,
and when those men began illegally occupying that land, the
first thing they demanded was access to women. Brothels were
(10:46):
often the first things built in Western settlements, and you
can see this in fictionalized portrayals like Deadwood or Robert
Altman's mcab and Missus Miller. Madams were powerbrokers and considered
essential to a town success. One of early San Francisco's
most famous Madams, Sally Stanford, ran a notorious brothel on
(11:07):
knob Hill, where San Francisco Chronicle journalist Herb Kane joked
that the United Nations was founded because of how many
of its members were clients at Sally's. It wasn't even
really a joke, because apparently international relations were often actually
negotiated in the San Francisco brothels Lobby area. After the
(11:28):
brothel was raided in nineteen fifty, Sally Stanford became a
beloved local figure in the Bay Area, and she actually
became mayor of Sasolito, California, at the age of seventy two,
after their media scandals died down. Madams do sometimes become
beloved local figures symbolic of an earlier, less tame era
(11:50):
in a city, but despite the endorsement of the Hollywood
Business Bureau, Heidi's stores do not make it. But speaking
of the wild Wife, there is a place even more
lawless than Los Angeles, more blatantly sex selling, more corrupt,
and more geared towards conjuring luxurious fantasies out of thin air.
(12:14):
That place is the state of Nevada. Two thousand and five,
Heidi has a new business venture. It's an ambitious new vision.
She is going to open a brothel where women can
(12:35):
be serviced by male studs. The plan is to charge
two hundred and fifty dollars an hour at heidi Stud Farm,
which will be located in the Great State of Nevada,
where prostitution is legal, but only in licensed brothels in
towns under a certain population, which excludes Las Vegas.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Women are more independent these days. They make more money.
Is hard to meet people like you. Wouldn't believe the
number of women who've told me, Heidi, if you do this,
I will be the first in line. I mean, relationships
are harder than dieting, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Heidi's Stud Farm will operate in Crystal, Nevada. She moves
to the town of Parrump, sixty three miles northwest of
Las Vegas, and gets into business with Dennis Hoff, a
publicity loving businessman who runs a brothel in Crystal called
The Love Ranch. There's an HBO reality show about the
Love Ranch called cat House that airs as part of
(13:34):
HBO's adult theme After Dark programming block, which sadly Streaming
put an end to which I was sad about because
we love it. Heidi wants her stud farm to have
an old Hollywood theme, with palm trees and waterfalls, just
like the classic Sunset strip supper clubs. Madame Alex loved.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
It's gonna be like Leo DiCaprio and the Aviator, and
I'm going to put out a casting call for about
twenty guys. I bet I get thousands of applicants.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
People scoff at Heidi's plans for the stud Farm, insisting
women wouldn't want to pay for sex at a legal
brothel because they are emotional creatures who aren't sexually motivated
the same way as men, to which I say, shut
the fuck up. I personally think Heidi was again ahead
of her time, and also lawmakers with this idea. A
(14:32):
friend of mine said she believed the reason that they
didn't want to legalize a business that would let women
pay for no strings attached sex is because it would
enable women to control the world. Heidi also ends up
in possession of a large amount of birds.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I moved to Nevada to get back into the sex business.
I rented a house that, unluckily for me, happened to
be next door to a retired madam who is bedridden.
She ran the exotic bird department for the Tropicana Hotel,
so she had all these birds. One night, she called
me up at three in the morning saying she couldn't
breathe I went there as a helicopter was taking her away,
(15:13):
and as she's dying, she says, Heidi, you take care
of the birds.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
When Heidie World returns, what happened to everyone else in
Heidie World? Welcome back to Heidie World. In two thousand
(16:01):
and six, private investigator Anthony Pelicano is indicted for wiretapping
Hollywood journalists in order to scare them out of writing
stories that criticize his high profile clients. Pelicano worked for
Don Simpson as well as almost everyone else in town.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
I'm an old man now and all my associates are
either in prison or dead. The old days are gone forever,
Anthony Pelicano, private investigator.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
The Anthony Pelicano trial is the Hollywood bigwig studded affair
that everybody thought the Heidi Flies trial was going to be.
Hollywood power players like Mike Ovitz and Brad Gray are
witnesses on the stand denying they paid Anthony Pelicano to
do any illegal wiretaps for them or their companies. Brad
Gray even developed an HBO's show with Pelicano about a
(16:57):
Hollywood private detective. Two thousand and six, doctor Paul Flice
is back in the news for something unrelated to his
daughter Heidi. He's part of a story about a woman
named Christine Majory, whose three year old child, Eliza Jane,
died from AIDS related pneumonia. Majory is an HIV positive
(17:20):
AIDS skeptic who founded a group called Alive and Well
AIDS Alternatives, a nonprofit that encourages HIV positive mothers to breastfeed.
She is the author of a book called What If
Everything You thought you knew about AIDS was wrong. Paul
Flice is accused of not insisting to Majory that she
(17:41):
stopped breastfeeding her child and of not treating the child
with the proper anti viral therapy. You will remember all
the way back from episode one that doctor Fliss was
a strong proponent of wet nursing and breastfeeding. Wet nursing
fell out of favor eventually, even among the new ageless
feelis moms who or his client tele because the AIDS
(18:01):
epidemic made it more dangerous to swap fluids with other people,
including breast milk. A medical board seeks to revoke his license,
citing his treatment of another HIV positive child. Flie admits
he's somewhat of a skeptic about whether HIV causes AIDS,
saying he could be convinced either way. What is clear
(18:23):
is that doctor Fleisch allows AID skeptics and vaccine skeptics
to make their own decisions under his care, which puts
their children at risk. Now it turns out that doctor
Paul Fwis was not a straight up anti vaxer himself.
One of my friends who had him as her doctor,
told me that her mother was a vaccine skeptic who
(18:44):
didn't want to vaccinate her, and that doctor Fwiss actually
convinced her mother that they should just go ahead with
the vaccination and that's the reason why my friend is
vaccinated today. She also said that her mother was one
of Paul's many supporters who wrote into the court to
support him during the IRS trial. Doctor Flie thought that
(19:04):
patients should be allowed to decide for themselves, which gets
complicated when children who can't advocate for themselves yet are
involved and put at risk. He gave a not great
quote to the La Times saying that he was shocked
when Eliza Jane died because he'd never seen her look ill.
Christine Majori is not charged with the death of her daughter. Meanwhile,
(19:28):
Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards have divorced. He debuts a
children's clothing line called Sheen Kids with a Z. Two
thousand and seven, Heidi runs into some legal issues trying
to open the brothel. A lot of people are very
opposed to the idea of male prostitution. She whips up
a plan B and opens a laundromat in Parump called
(19:51):
Dirty Laundry Instead.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yeah, instead of Heidi's stud farm, I am going to
open Heidie's SuDS Fock.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Her ex boyfriend Tom Sizemore pays a settlement in Heidie's
case against him. He also gets busted for meth violating
the terms of his probation, also put on probation. Doctor
Paul Fleiss his medical license is put on probation for
his involvement with the Christine Majori case. Two thousand and eight,
(20:27):
Heidi appears on Nightline offering her thoughts on the Elliot
Spitzer sex scandal. She manages to get in a few
plugs for the Love Ranch on air. While she's at it.
A new documentary about her called Heidie Flice The Would
Be Madam of Crystal airs on HBO following Heidi's attempts
to open the stud Ranch. The documentary shows Heidi, now
(20:51):
forty two years old, living alone in the desert with
her birds. She is very protective of the birds, macaws
with yellow eyes. She is a high functioning drug addict
who uses math, valume, and vicotin but she also goes
through spurts of trying to get sober. She has bought
ten acres of land in the desert.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
I'm going to build my Hurst Castle.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Heidi gets busted in Nevada during a traffic stop for meth.
This marks another moment of shift. She wants to turn
her life around, and where better to get clean than
on reality television two thousand and nine Celebrity Rehab.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
That was the best show I've done in my life.
I was freaked out when I saw what I looked
like like I was in the desert doing drugs. I
realized first of all, that my problem was that bad.
You think, oh, I'll just stop whenever I want to.
I thought I would stop before the show, but I couldn't.
I thought, I'll go when my problem's not that bad.
When they called me to do it, I thought, hell no,
(22:13):
who wants to withdraw on TV? But then I was
so glad that it was so humiliating and so embarrassing,
like it did make me change big time.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Heidi appears on the VH one reality show Celebrity Rehab
for its third season. Celebrity Rehab is a show from
gigantic quack doctor Drew Pinsk. On Celebrity Rehab, a bunch
of celebrities are put in a rehab house together and
forced to withdraw and do group therapy in front of cameras.
It is one of the most fucked up things I
(22:49):
have ever seen, and doctor Drew keeps insisting throughout that
it's educational to show viewers what rehab is really like.
At the Pasadena recovery, Heidi checks in with her fellow castmates,
basketball star Dennis Rodman, Alison Chains, bassist Mike Starr, Miss
Teen USA, Carrie Ann Piniche, country singer Mindy mccrdy and
(23:13):
actress Mackenzie Phillips. Heidi is withdrawing from meth and spends
her time alone in a bedroom away from the rest
of the cast. She has also been completely isolated from
other people while she's been out at her compound in Nevada,
and has some trouble readjusting to being around other human beings.
When Doctor Drew forces her to socialize, she ends up
(23:36):
listening to Mackenzie Phillips talk. Phillips is the former teenage
star of the recovery themed seventy sitcom One Day at
a Time and the daughter of notorious maniac John Phillips
of The Mamas and the Papas. Mackenzie Phillips is the
ultimate cautionary tale of counterculture California parents without any boundaries whatsoever.
(24:00):
She tells Heidi about getting drugs for her dad and
about doing them together, about her father shooting her up
with coke. Later that year, Mackenzie Phillips will tell the
press that her father raped her continually when she was
a teen, only stopping after she got pregnant and had
an abortion. Heidi Flice is absolutely horrified as Mackenzie Phillips
(24:21):
talks about snorting coke with her dad for the first
time at age eleven, a year before she played a
teenage tomboy crushing on Harrison Ford in George Lucas's American Graffiti.
Other people's stories and struggles in the rehab house do
seem to galvanize Heidi into facing her own addiction demons,
perhaps realizing that while she's had a pretty rough time,
(24:45):
other people have had even rougher ones.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
I struggle, Yeah, I struggle with my addiction, and it's
tough because I'll be doing so well and I don't
know what will make me flip.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Well, Heidi detoxes and thinks about her entire life leading
up to this point. Other people like Mindy McCrady are
having seizures from withdrawal. In general, the experience seems to
be scaring Heidi straight until Doctor Drew does something so
medically unethical and blatantly sadistic as a stunt that it
(25:22):
could only happen on reality television. He surprises Heidi with
her abusive ex boyfriend, Tom Sizemore, who joins the cast
halfway through. Rather than reacting with anger or horror, Heidi
greets Sizemore at first with love. The initial moment when
they see each other again is one of the craziest
(25:45):
things I've ever seen, because it's so very clearly emotional
and intense for both of them, and the fact that
you're watching it it feels like something you shouldn't see
because it's such an intimate moment between two people that
it feels like you're suddenly watching a Cassavetti's movie in
the middle of celebrity rehab, and they hug each other
(26:06):
and sort of whisper I love you to each other
and look into each other's eyes and it's just fucking crazy.
But Tom size More arrives with his new girlfriend, also
an attict seeking treatment, and things between him and Heidi
turns sour again almost immediately, and as Heidi has to
face Tom size More, she seems to lose interest in
(26:27):
the treatment again and just sort of sink back into
depression and isolation. At the rehab graduation ceremony, Heiti gives
a very intense speech where she thanks Tom size More
for making her decide to be a lesbian because he's
so disgusting. Heidi does a season of Sober House, a
(26:47):
halfway house spin off of celebrity rehab, then goes back
to the desert to tend to her birds alone. Twenty ten.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Last year, Dennis had this guy who spent two point
six million in here in a couple months. The first
two girls got four hundred grand apiece. They were in
there for four days like old warhorse. They've been around forever,
and I was like, good for them, that's a lot
of money. And Dennis at Heidi, that guy isn't different
from you or me. He just wants to spend his
(27:28):
money having fun, and his family wants it going to
the church. And then some religious judge put an injunction
on his money because they wanted going to the church.
But remember Anna Nichol Smith and her sugar daddy in
the chair. He wants to go out with this blonde hair,
big tittied girl, and his stuffy, obnoxious kids want the money.
(27:49):
Those kids are fighting over his money. Why didn't they
just go We're in their own He wanted to go
out with this girl and her tits and do things
he's never done before, and these stuffy, snobby kids are fighting.
It's like, let him do what he wants.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Heidi and Dennis Hoff are briefly engaged, possibly just for publicity.
Heidi's dream of opening a stud ranch never comes to fruition,
but another woman named Bobby Davis does, opening The Shady Lady.
As male prostitution is legalized for the first time ever.
The Shady Lady ends up being a bust, however, not
(28:35):
necessarily because women don't want to buy sex, but more
because they don't necessarily want to drive all the way
out to Farmer Station, Nevada to buy it. It remains
open as a bed and breakfast called The Shady Lady Ranch,
but you can no longer buy sex there. At the
start of twenty ten, Heidi is preparing to enter the
Celebrity Big Brother House in the UK when she gets
(28:58):
the news that her Jason Flyce, has drowned. Forty one
year old Jason and thirty two year old Jesse Flyce
were swimming in Hawaii when Jason was swept out by
a strong tide. A surfer rescued Jesse Flyce, but Jason drowned.
Forty four year old Heidi Flyes enters the Celebrity Big
(29:20):
Brother House on January third, missing her brother's funeral.
Speaker 5 (29:38):
I put a billion dollars in the studio's packets. I
put half a billion dollars in Chuck's pocket, So this
is the freaking thanks I get. If people want me
to succeed, they should find the most comfortable chair in
their freaking house, lean back, open a beer, and watch
the show because it's about to get really gnarly. Charlie Sheen.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Charlie Sheen is arrested in a domestic violence dispute with
his third wife, Brooke Muller. He allegedly threatens her on
Christmas Day in Aspen, and she calls nine to one
one while the underwear company Haines dumps him as a spokesman.
CBS stands behind Sheen and says it's business as usual
on the Two and a half Men set. However, a
(30:27):
potential felony wrap for Sheen does have the potential to
affect Two and a half Men, which, as we said,
is a number one rated huge hit pulling in fifteen
million viewers. CBS and executive producer Chuck Lorie declined to comment.
Sheen is headed to court over serious charges, so Laurie
(30:48):
and CBS quietly start weighing their options regarding Sheen's long,
expensive deal and the future of the show, Laurie and
Sheen finally get into a public feud after Sheen calls
Lorii a quote little maggot and refers to him as
Hiam Levine in what some call an anti Semitic comment.
(31:10):
Laurie shuts down production for the rest of the season.
Sheen retaliates in the media.
Speaker 5 (31:18):
These guys are a couple of AA Nazis and just
blatant hypocrites. They do not practice what they preach. It's
so transparent and so say.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Twenty eleven CBS fire Charlie Sheen and replace him with
Ashton Kutcher. Heidi makes a television special for Animal Planet
called Heidi Flies Prostitutes to Parrots about flies and her
bird sanctuary from a Cause in Nevada, Charlie Sheen begins
a tour called My Violent Torpedo of Truth slash Defeat
(31:54):
is Not an Option. The same year, he is a
host at the annual gathering of the jug.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Ginger.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Allen auctions off some of the keepsakes from her relationship
with Charlie Sheen. She says she hasn't seen him in
fifteen years, but she still wishes him well.
Speaker 6 (32:14):
We all have demons, we all fight them, We fall down,
we get back up. I've done it. Everyone I know
has done it. It seems to me, without knowing any details,
that right now Charlie is going to take a little
different course. Hopefully he'll rise again. He'll be like the phoenix.
Gingerly Allen. Adult film star.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Dennis hoff is accused of sexually assaulting a woman at
the Love Ranch. Mindy McCrady, one of Heidi's Celebrity Rehab castmates,
commits suicide. Doctor Drew continues to defend Celebrity Rehab and
insists the show, which ended Forever in twenty eleven, was
(33:08):
not exploitative of the incredibly fragile drug users that put
on display. July nineteenth, twenty fourteen, at the age of eighty,
doctor Paul Flis dies at his home. He had been
recovering from a recent bicycle accident. Jesse Flice heard his
(33:32):
father having some trouble breathing in his bed, and by
the time paramedics arrived, he was dead. November sixteenth, twenty sixteen,
Heidi's defense lawyer, Anthony Brooklyer hangs himself at his Century
City home at the age of seventy. A year earlier,
(33:52):
one of his sons, also named Anthony Brooklyer, had also
committed suicide by hanging. Brooklaire had been struggling with the
loss of his son.
Speaker 7 (34:17):
At age ten, I started working at the local dairy
queen sweeping the parking lot, and the manager told me
I was the best parking lot sweeper he'd ever seen.
I put most of my money into pinball machines, and
that's when I first became aware of the connection between
money and pleasure. If you had money, you had a
good time.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
If not, you didn't.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Dennis Hoff, entrepreneur. Inspired by Donald Trump's presidential victory, Dennis Hoff,
the owner of legal brothel The Love Ranch, decides to
run for office. Hoff credits Trump with inspiring him to
switch from his former Libertarian Party affiliation to run as
(34:58):
a GOP candidate.
Speaker 7 (35:01):
We're both famous and infamous. We're both high profile, we're
both celebrities. We're both successful businessmen. We both have reality
television shows, we both have written books. We're both rich
and we can't be bought. There's a lot of similarities,
and we're doing it for the right reasons.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
His opponent says, Dennis Hoff is not even a real Republican.
He just uses whatever is happening politically to promote business
at the Love Ranch. He works both sides of the
aisle for the Almighty Dollar. For example, he once did
a Hooker's for Hillary promotion. After running as the Trump
from Perump, Dennis Hoff wins the Republican primary for the
(35:43):
Nevada state Legislature. He celebrates with Heidi in Perump, and
Heidi wears a vote Hoff shirt. In a June seventh,
twenty eighteen, Hollywood Reporter interview with Heidi on the twenty
fifth anniversary of her arrest, Hide continues to evade simple
classifications of good and bad. She seems to replicate some
(36:06):
of her dad's more outrap pseudoscientific medical views with a
comment about AIDS being less deadly than asthma now that
there's medication for it, and she uses certain outdated terms
for trans women while discussing the idea of opening a
trans staffed brothel in Perrump. She is mixed on the
me too movement, and when one of her ex boyfriends
(36:29):
alleged assault on an eleven year old girl is brought up,
she says, if it's true, he should be castrated. She
is neither a conventional California liberal nor a full on
reactionary libertarian. She says that the Black Book or Red
Gucci Planner showed up on eBay and she called to
have it taken down. The book had been stolen by
(36:51):
some people who were also trying to latch onto Stormy Daniels,
the porn star who had a sexual relationship with Donald Trump.
When the reporter asks if Heidi'sill has the book herself,
she says no, then changes her answer to kind of,
and then asks why it matters at all?
Speaker 1 (37:10):
I don't know. Actually, it was just something that seemed
very private and personal that was no one else's business.
That's just how I feel about it today and how
I always felt. I was offered a lot of money
to sell that book, and there were times when I
really needed that money, but that was never something that
I would do.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
October of twenty eighteen, Dennis Hoff wins his election. He
spends the weekend partying at the Love Ranch for several
days straight to celebrate his win, and then.
Speaker 4 (37:49):
He was totally stiff, and I said, honey, we have
a problem here.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Ron Jeremy Hoff drops down at age seventy two during
his election victory bender at the Love Ranch and is
found by his friend, the porn star and serial rapist
Ron Jeremy. Heidi is shaken up by Hoff's death, as
are the Love Ranch as sex workers. Everyone is very
(38:16):
confused about what's going to happen with a dead guy
being in office.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
You want to do the right thing with money inherited
from your parents. I will not disrespect my father. Look
at what I already did to him. He worked hard
and I was a madam.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Time continues to pass and Heidi learns about a new
kind of money making scheme, cryptocurrency, but she's out of
her depth, and even Heidi Flies can get scammed. She
gets fleeced in a bitcoin scammed by a former friend
named Elizabeth Keating, who worked for her for years and
talked her into going in on some bitcoin that she
said would help Flies fund her Bird saying so, Heidi
(39:02):
bought four hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoin at six
hundred dollars a coin, and it rose to twenty thousand
dollars a coin, at which point Keating locked her out
of the account and sold the money. Heidi says it's
morally despicable to steal the money from her and her birds.
She sues Keating for four million dollars after tracking her
(39:23):
down and having her served with a summons in a
flour delivery.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I've known Steve Bing since I was twenty one, and
we talked on the phone twice a day every day.
We were really close. In your twenties, your lovers with everyone,
and then in your thirties you become friends. I snort
meth like I'm drinking a cup of coffee. I don't
stay up all night doing rails. I have birds to
(39:48):
feed in the morning.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Heidi is quoted in The New York Post about the
suicide of her friend Steve Bing, who jumped to his
death from the roof of his Onery City high rise.
Steve Banng inherited six hundred million dollars from his grandfather,
real estate developer Leo es Bang, at the age of eighteen.
Heidi says that Bing strung her along with extravagant promises
(40:13):
of money for her bird sanctuary. He was going to
set her up with a new space in Palm Springs
where she could live with the birds in comfort. She
also really needed the money after losing her inheritance from
her father. In the Bitcoin scam. Heidi thinks the reports
of Steve Bing only having three hundred thousand dollars when
he killed himself are false. She knows for a fact
(40:37):
that he recently had twenty million. Although Bang is known
for spending his inheritance compulsively on drugs and sex workers,
he hires a lot of trans women who are sex
workers and often pays for their surgeries. He's also an
investor in things like the Clinton Foundation and the Polar Express.
(40:57):
After his death, there are immediate rumors that he was suicided,
as he was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein's. Heidi is
sad about her friend dying, but also about his lifelong
promises to give her money. Vanishing into smoke, Heidi says
she's been celibate for five years. All she cares about
(41:17):
now is the birds. When Heidi World returns, what happened
to everyone in Heidie World? Welcome back to Heidie World
(41:56):
the present.
Speaker 8 (42:00):
Everybody's reclusive. When you make a certain amount of money,
especially if you've had a tough life, you try to
fortify yourself with your friends and kind of keep the
world out. I used to date all young girls, and
then it was like I could be your grandfather? What
am I doing? John Peters?
Speaker 7 (42:17):
Film producer.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
John Peters paid out three point three million dollars in
a sexual harassment suit in twenty eleven. In January of
twenty twenty, he married Pamela Anderson, then got divorced, with
Anderson claiming the marriage was never real because papers were
not filed. He was recently portrayed by Bradley Cooper in
Paul Thomas Anderson's Lickerge Pizza. When I profiled Alta him
(42:43):
for a magazine, she said that she didn't know that
much about the real John Peters and that the movie
character might be an exaggeration, to which I said, Oh no,
it's a documentary that's exactly what John Peters is like.
Robert Evans died at the age of eighty nine in
Beverly Hills, California. Evans, a New York Russian Jew who
(43:06):
came out West to act and then started producing films
in the early sixties, was a self made legend who
loved telling people about it. He was convicted of cocaine
trafficking in nineteen eighty convicted of making Chinatown sequel The
Two Jakes in nineteen ninety, and called to the stand
in the Cotton Club murder trial in nineteen ninety one.
(43:28):
His autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture came out
in nineteen ninety four and was adapted into a successful
documentary of the same name in two thousand and two
that burnished evans legend as producer of films like The Godfather.
Evans was married seven times but died a bachelor. His
(43:48):
last film credit as a producer while living was How
to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, one last hit
for The Ultimate Hollywood Hustler. In July of twenty nineteen,
ten Paramount decided not to renew their contract with Robert Evans' Productions,
a deal that he'd had there since nineteen seventy four.
(44:09):
Evans died in October of twenty nineteen, but, like Don Simpson,
due to reboot Culture, Robert Evans IMDb continues to accumulate
credits as he executive produces from beyond the Grave. Yvonne
Naj moved into softcore and hardcore porn after his CD
(44:31):
rom venture Fizzle, directing titles like Trailer Trash, Terry with
Terry Starr, All Nude Nikki with Niki Nova, and Izzy
Sleeze's casting couch quties. In nineteen ninety nine, he makes
a porno called Wild Desire with the quote most downloaded
woman on the Internet Danny ash Ivonne Naj dies in
(44:53):
twenty fifteen. In twenty seventeen, he receives a posthumous executive
producer credit on a movie called Hitchhiker Massacre, starring Drew
Barrymore's half brother John Blythe Barrymore and David Carradine's daughter
Callista Carrodine. Adult Video News Hall of Famer, an Original
Vivid Videos Contract star Vivid Girl. Ginger Len Allen continues
(45:17):
to act in horror films like twenty twenty's Slash Laurette
Party and the upcoming Pig Killer, while her adult scenes
are re released in compilations like My Mom Is a
Lesbian and the ongoing I Want to Come Inside Your
Mom series. After her relationship with Charlie Sheen ended, Ginger
Lenn Allen had a son with porn producer Stephen Hirsch.
(45:41):
Heidi's cousin, Mike Feiss, creator of the Bachelor, is accused
of domestic assault and takes a public step back from
the Bachelor franchise, which continues to be one of the
most popular shows on television. In twenty fifteen, Alexandra Dattig
gets engaged to fellow wing media rising star Larry Elder.
(46:02):
After an eighteen month courtship, she moves in with him
and gets a tattoo that says Larry's Girl at his request.
She says that she was working as more or less
as personal assistant, helping himself produce his streaming radio show
from home, but wasn't paid a salary. The engagement ended
acrimoniously later that year. Elder was the right wing candidate
(46:26):
during the twenty twenty one attempt to recall California Democratic
Governor Gavin Newsom, at which point Alexandra Daddigg spoke up
during his campaign to allege that Larry Elder had once
threatened her by showing her his gun during an argument.
Daddig also had her own campaign to recall LA Mayor
Eric Garcetti, the son of Gil Garcetti, over LA's escalating
(46:48):
homelessness crisis. She started an online petition to gather the
signatures to recall Garcetti. And you may know about how
easy it is to trigger or recall vote in California.
Because it's been happening instantly since the recall of Gray
Davis that got California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jody baby Doll
Gibson aka Sasha of the Valley dies in January of
(47:13):
twenty twenty two in Yucca Valley.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
The other players, like Madame Alex, were all working with
the LAPD giving lists of their clients on a weekly basis.
Heidi wouldn't play the game. She broke all the rules.
She kind of did it for fun, which was why
she was so successful. Nick Broomfield.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Nick Broomfield most recently put out a documentary called Last
Man Standing, Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie and Tupac,
after other documentaries like Leonard and Mary Anne about the
relationship between Leonard Cohen and his lover and muse Maryanne
Illan and Whitney Houston. Can I Be Me which is
really depressing but really good and I recommend James con
(48:04):
Is on Twitter. Tom Sizemore was in Twin Peaks The Return.
He works seemingly constantly in b movies, and some upcoming
projects from his IMDb include Dark Karma, Eat Lead, and
Father's Day in twenty seventeen, it was revealed that he'd
been kicked off the set of a movie in two
thousand and three for allegedly molesting an eleven year old girl,
(48:27):
which he denied doing. In twenty nineteen, he was arrested
in Burbank for possessing quote various illegal narcotics. Charlie Sheen
came out as an anti vaxer during his marriage to
Denise Richards, and cited their differences in views on the
subject as one of the reasons for the split. This
means Denise Richards is pro vaccine. Good for you, Denise,
(48:50):
we love your work. In twenty eleven, Charlie Sheen was
living with a twenty four year old adult actress named
Brie Olsen and a twenty four year old model and
graphic designer named Natalie Kess, and he referred to the
two girls as his goddesses. They both moved out in
the next two months. Sheen revealed in twenty fifteen that
he was HIV positive and on the cocktail, and then
(49:13):
he went public because he was being extorted for several
years by a group threatening to reveal his HIV positive status.
In twenty sixteen, he went on The Doctor Oz Show
and said he'd gone off his HIV meds and was
seeking alternative treatment in Mexico from an Australian quack doctor
named Sam Chatchua. In twenty sixteen, Charlie Sheen also came
(49:36):
under investigation by the LAPD for threatening to kill his fiancee,
scottene Ross, a former adult star who went by the
stage name Brett Rossi. In twenty seventeen, he was sued
by an unnamed ex girlfriend for knowingly exposing her to
HIV without telling her. On the acting side, he had
a TBS sitcom called Anger Management that started in twenty twelve,
(49:59):
the year after he crashed his two and a half
Men gig. Most recently, Sheen was on Instagram promoting a
podcast slash pilot that he made with Entourage's Doug Ellen
called Ramble On. It is I Think a podcast that's
the spinoff of Doug Allen's podcast Victory about Entourage, but
also a backdoor TV pilot because stars they're just like us.
(50:23):
Ramble On the TV show pilot stars Charlie Sheen as himself,
alongside E from Entourage who I won't dignify with his
government name, and Kevin Dillon as themselves, plus veteran character
actor John C. McGinley, who was in Platoon with Charlie Sheen,
and then cameo appearances from people like Martin Sheen, Mark Cuban,
(50:45):
and Jamie Lynn Siegler. IMDb says it's a show about
established showbiz folks and newcomers, and it appears to mostly
take place at the Smokehouse Restaurant in Burbank, which is
an old school place that I obviously love from nineteen
forty six, which for la is like a million years old,
and it is a showbiz hangout because it's right across
(51:05):
from where a lot of television shoots. Charlie also has
a website www. Dot genius dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
At the time, what was going on in my house
hanging around girls just goofing around, playing in the pool.
It really seemed like a time of innocence, like a
sick sorority club.
Speaker 2 (51:31):
As we reached the city limits of Heidieworld, I've been
thinking a lot about what drew me to the story
of Heidiflace in the first place. I did not set
out to make this podcast autobiographical, but it ended up
being that way because it turns out that I clearly
always identified in some way with Heidiflice as a frizzy haired,
self conscious Jewish girl from Los Angeles, eager to make
(51:53):
a name for herself in a city where her name
didn't mean anything to anyone. Yet the sexual hypocrisy on
display in the Heidi Fly story also made a big
lasting impression on me because it revealed something about society
that I really wanted to reject as being true, which
is that it's deeply misogynistic on a core level. Other
(52:14):
events since the Heidi Flies trial have only reinforced the
way in which womanhood, sexuality, and spectacle are weaponized to
send messages about women who transgress traditional roles or try
to benefit off their own sexuality in any way. And
for the most recent example of this, I mean check
out the coverage of the Johnny deppen Amber Heard trial.
(52:37):
I also appreciate that Heidi Fliss just is who she is.
She's not a perfect role model or spokeperson, and she
doesn't ever try to be, but she is still alive,
still talking and still making jokes. She feels unkillable in
some way, and well, it may not be a flawless victory,
it still feels like a little bit of hope, a
(52:59):
shot against the mainstream narrative that sex workers always die
or terrible things always happen to them. She's allegedly still
a drug user and very open about that. And another
thing that making this podcast really made me think deeply
about is addiction and the way addiction is treated in
American society. A lot of the people in this story
(53:20):
struggle with addiction throughout their lives, and it's clearly passed
on genetically in families without excusing any of the abuse
committed by the many, many abusive men in Heidi World.
I found myself coming away with a view of these
alpha males that was more complex than I expected. Addiction
fucking sucks and it ravages people, and I feel bad
(53:45):
for anyone who struggles with themselves. I did not go
into Heidi World expecting to come out of it like wow.
Charlie Sheen Shure has a lot of pathos to him.
But I also vividly remember during the Tiger Blood era, thinking, man,
this guy really needs to not be on camera right now.
He is clearly not well and everyone who is letting
(54:06):
him be on camera is complicit. Making Heidi World also
just got me interrogating why I'm drawn to stories like
this and drawn personally to your John Peters types like Heidi.
I love charismatic talkers and Hollywood alpha males, which made
me realize on some level, I must want to be
(54:27):
a Hollywood alpha male. Thinking about how to drop people
in while you're talking to them and get them absorbed
enough to keep listening to you is something I also
thought about obviously making a ten episode podcast where I'm
talking a lot. I hope that resurfacing the Heidifly story
with this podcast will inspire people to get involved with
(54:47):
sex workers' rights and the laws around them. Sex work
is both more visible and under more threat than ever,
and groups like Sex Workers Outreach Project USA are doing
great work around these issues. Here in Los Angeles, the
strippers from a club in my hometown of North Hollywood
in the San Fernando Valley called Star Garden are striking
(55:09):
against work conditions where management allowed them to be groped
by customers against their will without any punishment. The striking
North Hollywood strippers recently voted to unionize, and you can
follow them on Twitter at Stripstrike NoHo and follow their
sister organization, Strippers United, at strippers unite on Twitter and
(55:29):
let sex workers themselves tell you what kind of material
and online support they actually need.
Speaker 1 (55:40):
People think I sat back and made money off someone else,
and that's not true at all. As far as exploiting women,
women are exploited in the world, people are exploited.
Speaker 2 (55:52):
I was not exploiting them.
Speaker 1 (55:53):
The girls who met me did very very well. These
people sewing downtown that is exploitation. The street pip that
is exploitation. I might be a hypocrite, but I always
thought that I was trying to do the right thing.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Thanks everyone for joining me your host Molly Lambert on
this journey through weird California history from the nineteen seventies
up until now, and a story about the importance of
decriminalizing and desigmatizing sex work. And as for Heidi Flies,
she has a YouTube channel where she posts videos of
(56:32):
her macause and screeds against the woman that she's mad
at about the bitcoin scam. She's on Instagram too, and Heidi,
if you're listening, by any chance, call me.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
Credits.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
Heidi World would never have been possible without the incredible
production team of Anna Postnier, Becca Ramos, and Trisha Mukherjee.
Thanks to Rory Geegan, who beautifully edited and sound designed
an insanely complicated thing. Special thanks to Chris Chang, who
shot and edited the Heidi World promo trailer that we
(57:22):
made with Annie Hamilton to announce the show. Chris and
Annie were the first two people to volunteer their time
for this project, and I'm really grateful for them. Chris
also wrote the stick ass song that's in the promo trailer.
And thanks to Bethan Macaluso, who worked with me on
the scripts and helped shape this into something that anyone
else could ever listen to. And now, because it is
(57:43):
my show, and because I think it's funny, which is
what this entire show is really about, is pleasing me personally.
I am going to read the entire cast list like
it's movie credits. A huge thank you to everyone who
agreed to voice act for me, many of whom had
never done it before. And special thanks to Annie Hamilton
and Max Silvestry for bringing real acting chops to the
(58:05):
leads and making this world grounded so that anything else
could make sense. Heidi World an iHeartRadio production. Annie Hamilton
as Heidi Flyes, Max Silvestry as Yvonne Nasch, Karen Tonksen
as Madame Alex, Glenn Lambert as doctor Paul Fleiss, Sarah
(58:30):
Sherman as Shana Flice, Audrey Kaufman as Kim Flice, Jack
O'Brien as Jesse Flice, Anna Hosnier as Alyssa Ashflyis, Jamie
Loftus as Victoria Sellers, Mollie Young as Alexandra Dattig, John
(58:50):
Daly as John Peters, Miles Clee as Don Simpson, Jason
Stewart as Charlie Sheen, Chris Black as Billy Idol, Robert
Evans as Robert Evans, Corarina Longworth as Julia Phillips, Dylan
Jelula as Angelica Houston, Brody Gupta as Melanie Griffith, Hunter
(59:16):
Harris as Rita Wilson, jud Nick Mayard as Sean Hubler,
Emily Yoshida as Leanne, Isabelle Badi as Marilyn Joel Monique
as Brandy McClain, Rachel rabbit White as Julie Connister, Sarah C.
(59:37):
Johnson as Simone former Alex Girl, Alex Papadmus as defense
attorney Anthony Brooklyer, Andrew t as Detective Sammy Lee The Second,
Jason Conceptsion as Prosecutor Alan Carter, Julianne Smolensky as Norma,
Jean Alma Dovar, Nom Fry as Sherry Lansing, Miles Gray
(01:00:01):
as James Kahn, Harry Eskin as Bernie Cornfeld, Tess Lynch
as Elaine Young, Kate Raft as Michelle Pfeiffer, Joan Ford
as Amy, Holden Jones, Liza Die as Whoopi Goldberg, Joe
Mandy as Frank Sinatra Junior, Lindsay Webber as Judge, Judith
(01:00:25):
al Champagne, Eva Anderson as Ava Gabor, Aidan Arrata as
Meg Ryan, Liz fran Sack as Sharon Stone, Josh Loci
as Bob Crow, Felix Biederman as Tom Sizemore, Siri Dall
as Sheila Matrowski, Young Chomsky as Elliot Mintz, Andrew Deyong
(01:00:49):
as Andy Sedaris, Dan Longino as Vince Conti, Dean Fleischer
Camp as Paul McCarthy, Richard Kelly as Robert Altman, Yassi
Solik as Ginger Lynn Allen, Holly Anderson as Cher, John
Levinstein as Mayor, Richard Reardon, Ryan Johnson as Adrian Lyne
(01:01:16):
Grace Belden as JJ, the King of Beepers, Gracie Hadland
as Liz Smith, Jack Allison as Anthony Pellicano, Carrie O'Donnell
as Mike Flice, Paul F. Tompkins as Dennis Hoff, Bug
Maine as Ron Jeremy Leslie Lee the Third as O. J. Simpson,
(01:01:40):
John Daly again as Jay Leno, Carvel Wallace as Nick Broomfield,
Ben Lambert as Robert Evans press agent, Eloy Lugo as
Billie Idols publicist, and Becker Ramos as Nancy Reyis. And
thanks to everyone who came along with us on this
long wild ride through Los Angeles. I'm your host, Molly Lambert,
(01:02:05):
signing off one last time from Heidi World,
Everyone wants high ceilings, But how bad do you want it?
It's up to you how you feel, how hard you'll
work for it.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Heidi Flies. Previously on Heidi World, Heidi Flights has gone
from ELA's glittering hilltop mansions to its prison downtown as
a result of her remarkable rise and fall in the
nineteen nineties as a Hollywood madam. By the two thousands,
she is out of jail and back to hustling up
(01:05):
ways to make money and cash in on whatever is
left of her brand. Welcome to Heidi World all Right.
Chapter ten, The Desert and Beyond. Heidi moves to Perump,
(01:26):
Nevada and to start a stud farm and ends up
starting a bird sanctuary instead. Plus where everyone ended up.
Welcome back to the final installment of Heidi World. I'm
your host, Molly Lambert. It's the early two thousands and
(01:50):
Heidi Flices is out of prison, ready to rebuild her
life from scratch. Her first stop is the grocery store,
where she treats herself to salmon with mango salsa and
buys every single flavor of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Every woman at the market was looking at me as
if I was mentally ill.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Recently, she's been CouchSurfing through her rich friends' houses. Staying
in a guest room at a gated mansion in Brentwood.
She invites a journalist over to play chess with her
while she promotes her new memoir, a coffee table scrapbook
style tome called Pandering that retails for fifty dollars at
stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble. While she was
(02:37):
in prison, Heidi brushed up on her skills as a
former child chess champion and says she won every game
she played.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Inside I See a check Mate.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Heidi says she turned down publishing deals from people who
wanted her to do a tell all because she still
has no tension of snitching on clients.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Heidi, to do a book, now, you're basically a hasban
and you have to dig deep down and do some
soul searching and tell it all.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Instead, she started her own publishing company called One Hour
Entertainment and put out the book she wanted to write.
She raised a few grand and went to the publishing
trade fair Book Expo America, where, in true Heidi fashion,
she came back with a four book deal. She started
learning the ins and outs of the publishing business.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Whoever you think is doing it, is doing it, and
they're probably doing it in weirder ways than you can imagine.
Just because I got caught and I sunk the ship
doesn't mean I have to take everyone down with me.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
At thirty seven years old, Heidi is washed up as
a madam and aware that she could be considered unhirable
for virtually anything else by a lot of people. She
jokes about prison, but there is an underlying sadness. She
felt deserted when she was on the inside by everyone
except her family, who wrote her constant letters. She relapsed
(04:14):
on drugs almost immediately after re entering the straight world
and served a six month home detention for it pandering.
Her book is designed for an audience with increasingly short
attention spans. People don't read anymore.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Magazine subscriptions are way down, except for Maximum Stuff in
Fahm because their articles are half an inch. To do
a book now, you have to make it very visually
appealing and concise.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Heidi realizes that the world has changed in many ways
while she was serving out her prison term. While the
trial of Heidi Flies may have been an attempt to
sweep the sexual hypocrisy of powerful men under the rug,
like an inappropriate boner, it always seems to spring back up.
The media sites are now set on destroying and humiliating
(05:09):
another young Jewish woman with unique sexual charisma who grew
up in Los Angeles, Monica Lewinsky. Heidi Flies thinks the
Kenneth Star report on Lewinsky's affair with President Bill Clinton
shifted the cultural needle in ways she could have never imagined,
making things like blowjobs, rim jobs, and sexually pleasuring a
(05:29):
woman with a cigar before biting down on it and
saying tastes good into national news.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
He made the conversation different. He brought the subject of
oral copulation to the dinner.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Table after pandering. Heidi wants to put out other books,
including a book about Tupac Shakur, a tell all about
Beverly Hills tutors, and a collection by photographer Evan Clanfer
of photo of prostitutes and strippers in Florida. A made
(06:04):
for TV Heidifly's biopic is announced by the USA Network.
It will star Jamie Linn Siegler, best known for playing
meto soprano on the sopranos as the Hollywood Madam Heidiflies
is a public figure, which means the story is public domain.
In the meantime, a humbold and chastened Heidi will take
(06:24):
money however she can get it. She appears as a
judge at the Venice Beach semifinals of the LA's Sexiest Competition,
a promotion for the Erotica La convention taking place that weekend.
Erotica La is actively trying to make adult conventions more
female and couples friendly, part of a larger movement of
sex positivity that encourages women to buy their own sex toys.
(06:49):
The Hustler store in Hollywood may not have the feminist
credentials of San Francisco's pioneering sex toy shop Good Vibrations,
but it's part of an overall s shift spurred also
by HBO's hit show Sex in the City, towards women
owning their sexuality and also towards commodifying this type of sexuality,
(07:10):
telling women that they need a certain vibrator or expensive
brand of lingerie to feel truly sexy and empowered. It's
a twist on the yuppie ethos that Heidi profited off
of more money equals better than It's called third wave feminism,
and it encourages women to think of themselves as powerful
(07:30):
consumers like men. This puts them in the position to
exploit other less powerful women, which is how we get
to the concept of the girl boss. Heidi Flies opens
a new boutique on Hollywood Boulevard called Hollywood Madam, a
last ditch attempt to relaunch the Heidiwear brand, but she
(07:51):
is in the valley of her popularity. She is considered
a dlister now, but she still has a dream of
getting her valuation back up. The shop is at sixty
six twenty four Hollywood Boulevard, and the prices have gone
up with the times. Sweatpants are one hundred and fifty
dollars and there are corsets that cost nearly four hundred dollars.
(08:14):
The window display at Hollywood Madam is a nude mannequin
reclining in an antique bathtub's faux sets as bubbles float
down from a bubble machine in the ceiling. One of
Heidi's innovations for the new store is to equip one
dressing room with a webcam and offer a thirty percent
discount to any customers who allow themselves to be live
(08:37):
streamed on her pay website trying on clothes in the
dressing room. Once again, Heidi was right. Hollywood Boulevard did
start to gentrify again soon after that. Unbelievably, the name
Heidiflice is still visible on the storefront gate at sixty
six twenty four Hollywood Boulevard as of this recording. I
(08:58):
was completely sure it was going to get scrubbed and
flipped at some point while I was making this podcast,
but as of today, it's still there. One thing I
love about Hollywood Boulevard, which is to me the capital
of Los Angeles, is that, like New York's Times Square,
you can gentrify and flip and try to make it
(09:20):
upscale as much as you want, but you can never
wash the decades of vomit, glitter and piss off the street,
because that's what Hollywood is, and we love it. In
two thousand and five, Heidi moves down the Hollywood Corridor
to Kuenga Boulevard and opens a place called a Little
Shop of Sex next to the trendy new Club Beauty Bar.
(09:44):
It's the same inventory from the Hollywood Madam Store, with
a new investment from her friend Jessica Steindorf. Steindorf is
an actress from Malibu who was in the NBC show
Las Vegas. Her father is a producer named Scott Steindorf
who produced Las Vegas and more recently Station eleven. Jessica
Steindorf became a manager and producer, but she resurfaced in
(10:08):
the news when her Prius was one of the four
cars Caitlyn Jenner plowed into in the multi car crash
on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, where Jenner killed
sixty nine year old Kim Howe. Jenner settled with Steindorf
and the other survivors of the crash in court.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Now.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
In the distant past, especially in the Old West, Madams
often became locally revered. The mass genocide of the indigenous
people of the Western States was carried out by American men,
and when those men began illegally occupying that land, the
first thing they demanded was access to women. Brothels were
(10:46):
often the first things built in Western settlements, and you
can see this in fictionalized portrayals like Deadwood or Robert
Altman's mcab and Missus Miller. Madams were powerbrokers and considered
essential to a town success. One of early San Francisco's
most famous Madams, Sally Stanford, ran a notorious brothel on
(11:07):
knob Hill, where San Francisco Chronicle journalist Herb Kane joked
that the United Nations was founded because of how many
of its members were clients at Sally's. It wasn't even
really a joke, because apparently international relations were often actually
negotiated in the San Francisco brothels Lobby area. After the
(11:28):
brothel was raided in nineteen fifty, Sally Stanford became a
beloved local figure in the Bay Area, and she actually
became mayor of Sasolito, California, at the age of seventy two,
after their media scandals died down. Madams do sometimes become
beloved local figures symbolic of an earlier, less tame era
(11:50):
in a city, but despite the endorsement of the Hollywood
Business Bureau, Heidi's stores do not make it. But speaking
of the wild Wife, there is a place even more
lawless than Los Angeles, more blatantly sex selling, more corrupt,
and more geared towards conjuring luxurious fantasies out of thin air.
(12:14):
That place is the state of Nevada. Two thousand and five,
Heidi has a new business venture. It's an ambitious new vision.
She is going to open a brothel where women can
(12:35):
be serviced by male studs. The plan is to charge
two hundred and fifty dollars an hour at heidi Stud Farm,
which will be located in the Great State of Nevada,
where prostitution is legal, but only in licensed brothels in
towns under a certain population, which excludes Las Vegas.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Women are more independent these days. They make more money.
Is hard to meet people like you. Wouldn't believe the
number of women who've told me, Heidi, if you do this,
I will be the first in line. I mean, relationships
are harder than dieting, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Heidi's Stud Farm will operate in Crystal, Nevada. She moves
to the town of Parrump, sixty three miles northwest of
Las Vegas, and gets into business with Dennis Hoff, a
publicity loving businessman who runs a brothel in Crystal called
The Love Ranch. There's an HBO reality show about the
Love Ranch called cat House that airs as part of
(13:34):
HBO's adult theme After Dark programming block, which sadly Streaming
put an end to which I was sad about because
we love it. Heidi wants her stud farm to have
an old Hollywood theme, with palm trees and waterfalls, just
like the classic Sunset strip supper clubs. Madame Alex loved.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
It's gonna be like Leo DiCaprio and the Aviator, and
I'm going to put out a casting call for about
twenty guys. I bet I get thousands of applicants.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
People scoff at Heidi's plans for the stud Farm, insisting
women wouldn't want to pay for sex at a legal
brothel because they are emotional creatures who aren't sexually motivated
the same way as men, to which I say, shut
the fuck up. I personally think Heidi was again ahead
of her time, and also lawmakers with this idea. A
(14:32):
friend of mine said she believed the reason that they
didn't want to legalize a business that would let women
pay for no strings attached sex is because it would
enable women to control the world. Heidi also ends up
in possession of a large amount of birds.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I moved to Nevada to get back into the sex business.
I rented a house that, unluckily for me, happened to
be next door to a retired madam who is bedridden.
She ran the exotic bird department for the Tropicana Hotel,
so she had all these birds. One night, she called
me up at three in the morning saying she couldn't
breathe I went there as a helicopter was taking her away,
(15:13):
and as she's dying, she says, Heidi, you take care
of the birds.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
When Heidie World returns, what happened to everyone else in
Heidie World? Welcome back to Heidie World. In two thousand
(16:01):
and six, private investigator Anthony Pelicano is indicted for wiretapping
Hollywood journalists in order to scare them out of writing
stories that criticize his high profile clients. Pelicano worked for
Don Simpson as well as almost everyone else in town.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
I'm an old man now and all my associates are
either in prison or dead. The old days are gone forever,
Anthony Pelicano, private investigator.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
The Anthony Pelicano trial is the Hollywood bigwig studded affair
that everybody thought the Heidi Flies trial was going to be.
Hollywood power players like Mike Ovitz and Brad Gray are
witnesses on the stand denying they paid Anthony Pelicano to
do any illegal wiretaps for them or their companies. Brad
Gray even developed an HBO's show with Pelicano about a
(16:57):
Hollywood private detective. Two thousand and six, doctor Paul Flice
is back in the news for something unrelated to his
daughter Heidi. He's part of a story about a woman
named Christine Majory, whose three year old child, Eliza Jane,
died from AIDS related pneumonia. Majory is an HIV positive
(17:20):
AIDS skeptic who founded a group called Alive and Well
AIDS Alternatives, a nonprofit that encourages HIV positive mothers to breastfeed.
She is the author of a book called What If
Everything You thought you knew about AIDS was wrong. Paul
Flice is accused of not insisting to Majory that she
(17:41):
stopped breastfeeding her child and of not treating the child
with the proper anti viral therapy. You will remember all
the way back from episode one that doctor Fliss was
a strong proponent of wet nursing and breastfeeding. Wet nursing
fell out of favor eventually, even among the new ageless
feelis moms who or his client tele because the AIDS
(18:01):
epidemic made it more dangerous to swap fluids with other people,
including breast milk. A medical board seeks to revoke his license,
citing his treatment of another HIV positive child. Flie admits
he's somewhat of a skeptic about whether HIV causes AIDS,
saying he could be convinced either way. What is clear
(18:23):
is that doctor Fleisch allows AID skeptics and vaccine skeptics
to make their own decisions under his care, which puts
their children at risk. Now it turns out that doctor
Paul Fwis was not a straight up anti vaxer himself.
One of my friends who had him as her doctor,
told me that her mother was a vaccine skeptic who
(18:44):
didn't want to vaccinate her, and that doctor Fwiss actually
convinced her mother that they should just go ahead with
the vaccination and that's the reason why my friend is
vaccinated today. She also said that her mother was one
of Paul's many supporters who wrote into the court to
support him during the IRS trial. Doctor Flie thought that
(19:04):
patients should be allowed to decide for themselves, which gets
complicated when children who can't advocate for themselves yet are
involved and put at risk. He gave a not great
quote to the La Times saying that he was shocked
when Eliza Jane died because he'd never seen her look ill.
Christine Majori is not charged with the death of her daughter. Meanwhile,
(19:28):
Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards have divorced. He debuts a
children's clothing line called Sheen Kids with a Z. Two
thousand and seven, Heidi runs into some legal issues trying
to open the brothel. A lot of people are very
opposed to the idea of male prostitution. She whips up
a plan B and opens a laundromat in Parump called
(19:51):
Dirty Laundry Instead.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yeah, instead of Heidi's stud farm, I am going to
open Heidie's SuDS Fock.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Her ex boyfriend Tom Sizemore pays a settlement in Heidie's
case against him. He also gets busted for meth violating
the terms of his probation, also put on probation. Doctor
Paul Fleiss his medical license is put on probation for
his involvement with the Christine Majori case. Two thousand and eight,
(20:27):
Heidi appears on Nightline offering her thoughts on the Elliot
Spitzer sex scandal. She manages to get in a few
plugs for the Love Ranch on air. While she's at it.
A new documentary about her called Heidie Flice The Would
Be Madam of Crystal airs on HBO following Heidi's attempts
to open the stud Ranch. The documentary shows Heidi, now
(20:51):
forty two years old, living alone in the desert with
her birds. She is very protective of the birds, macaws
with yellow eyes. She is a high functioning drug addict
who uses math, valume, and vicotin but she also goes
through spurts of trying to get sober. She has bought
ten acres of land in the desert.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
I'm going to build my Hurst Castle.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Heidi gets busted in Nevada during a traffic stop for meth.
This marks another moment of shift. She wants to turn
her life around, and where better to get clean than
on reality television two thousand and nine Celebrity Rehab.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
That was the best show I've done in my life.
I was freaked out when I saw what I looked
like like I was in the desert doing drugs. I
realized first of all, that my problem was that bad.
You think, oh, I'll just stop whenever I want to.
I thought I would stop before the show, but I couldn't.
I thought, I'll go when my problem's not that bad.
When they called me to do it, I thought, hell no,
(22:13):
who wants to withdraw on TV? But then I was
so glad that it was so humiliating and so embarrassing,
like it did make me change big time.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Heidi appears on the VH one reality show Celebrity Rehab
for its third season. Celebrity Rehab is a show from
gigantic quack doctor Drew Pinsk. On Celebrity Rehab, a bunch
of celebrities are put in a rehab house together and
forced to withdraw and do group therapy in front of cameras.
It is one of the most fucked up things I
(22:49):
have ever seen, and doctor Drew keeps insisting throughout that
it's educational to show viewers what rehab is really like.
At the Pasadena recovery, Heidi checks in with her fellow castmates,
basketball star Dennis Rodman, Alison Chains, bassist Mike Starr, Miss
Teen USA, Carrie Ann Piniche, country singer Mindy mccrdy and
(23:13):
actress Mackenzie Phillips. Heidi is withdrawing from meth and spends
her time alone in a bedroom away from the rest
of the cast. She has also been completely isolated from
other people while she's been out at her compound in Nevada,
and has some trouble readjusting to being around other human beings.
When Doctor Drew forces her to socialize, she ends up
(23:36):
listening to Mackenzie Phillips talk. Phillips is the former teenage
star of the recovery themed seventy sitcom One Day at
a Time and the daughter of notorious maniac John Phillips
of The Mamas and the Papas. Mackenzie Phillips is the
ultimate cautionary tale of counterculture California parents without any boundaries whatsoever.
(24:00):
She tells Heidi about getting drugs for her dad and
about doing them together, about her father shooting her up
with coke. Later that year, Mackenzie Phillips will tell the
press that her father raped her continually when she was
a teen, only stopping after she got pregnant and had
an abortion. Heidi Flice is absolutely horrified as Mackenzie Phillips
(24:21):
talks about snorting coke with her dad for the first
time at age eleven, a year before she played a
teenage tomboy crushing on Harrison Ford in George Lucas's American Graffiti.
Other people's stories and struggles in the rehab house do
seem to galvanize Heidi into facing her own addiction demons,
perhaps realizing that while she's had a pretty rough time,
(24:45):
other people have had even rougher ones.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
I struggle, Yeah, I struggle with my addiction, and it's
tough because I'll be doing so well and I don't
know what will make me flip.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Well, Heidi detoxes and thinks about her entire life leading
up to this point. Other people like Mindy McCrady are
having seizures from withdrawal. In general, the experience seems to
be scaring Heidi straight until Doctor Drew does something so
medically unethical and blatantly sadistic as a stunt that it
(25:22):
could only happen on reality television. He surprises Heidi with
her abusive ex boyfriend, Tom Sizemore, who joins the cast
halfway through. Rather than reacting with anger or horror, Heidi
greets Sizemore at first with love. The initial moment when
they see each other again is one of the craziest
(25:45):
things I've ever seen, because it's so very clearly emotional
and intense for both of them, and the fact that
you're watching it it feels like something you shouldn't see
because it's such an intimate moment between two people that
it feels like you're suddenly watching a Cassavetti's movie in
the middle of celebrity rehab, and they hug each other
(26:06):
and sort of whisper I love you to each other
and look into each other's eyes and it's just fucking crazy.
But Tom size More arrives with his new girlfriend, also
an attict seeking treatment, and things between him and Heidi
turns sour again almost immediately, and as Heidi has to
face Tom size More, she seems to lose interest in
(26:27):
the treatment again and just sort of sink back into
depression and isolation. At the rehab graduation ceremony, Heiti gives
a very intense speech where she thanks Tom size More
for making her decide to be a lesbian because he's
so disgusting. Heidi does a season of Sober House, a
(26:47):
halfway house spin off of celebrity rehab, then goes back
to the desert to tend to her birds alone. Twenty ten.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Last year, Dennis had this guy who spent two point
six million in here in a couple months. The first
two girls got four hundred grand apiece. They were in
there for four days like old warhorse. They've been around forever,
and I was like, good for them, that's a lot
of money. And Dennis at Heidi, that guy isn't different
from you or me. He just wants to spend his
(27:28):
money having fun, and his family wants it going to
the church. And then some religious judge put an injunction
on his money because they wanted going to the church.
But remember Anna Nichol Smith and her sugar daddy in
the chair. He wants to go out with this blonde hair,
big tittied girl, and his stuffy, obnoxious kids want the money.
(27:49):
Those kids are fighting over his money. Why didn't they
just go We're in their own He wanted to go
out with this girl and her tits and do things
he's never done before, and these stuffy, snobby kids are fighting.
It's like, let him do what he wants.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Heidi and Dennis Hoff are briefly engaged, possibly just for publicity.
Heidi's dream of opening a stud ranch never comes to fruition,
but another woman named Bobby Davis does, opening The Shady Lady.
As male prostitution is legalized for the first time ever.
The Shady Lady ends up being a bust, however, not
(28:35):
necessarily because women don't want to buy sex, but more
because they don't necessarily want to drive all the way
out to Farmer Station, Nevada to buy it. It remains
open as a bed and breakfast called The Shady Lady Ranch,
but you can no longer buy sex there. At the
start of twenty ten, Heidi is preparing to enter the
Celebrity Big Brother House in the UK when she gets
(28:58):
the news that her Jason Flyce, has drowned. Forty one
year old Jason and thirty two year old Jesse Flyce
were swimming in Hawaii when Jason was swept out by
a strong tide. A surfer rescued Jesse Flyce, but Jason drowned.
Forty four year old Heidi Flyes enters the Celebrity Big
(29:20):
Brother House on January third, missing her brother's funeral.
Speaker 5 (29:38):
I put a billion dollars in the studio's packets. I
put half a billion dollars in Chuck's pocket, So this
is the freaking thanks I get. If people want me
to succeed, they should find the most comfortable chair in
their freaking house, lean back, open a beer, and watch
the show because it's about to get really gnarly. Charlie Sheen.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Charlie Sheen is arrested in a domestic violence dispute with
his third wife, Brooke Muller. He allegedly threatens her on
Christmas Day in Aspen, and she calls nine to one
one while the underwear company Haines dumps him as a spokesman.
CBS stands behind Sheen and says it's business as usual
on the Two and a half Men set. However, a
(30:27):
potential felony wrap for Sheen does have the potential to
affect Two and a half Men, which, as we said,
is a number one rated huge hit pulling in fifteen
million viewers. CBS and executive producer Chuck Lorie declined to comment.
Sheen is headed to court over serious charges, so Laurie
(30:48):
and CBS quietly start weighing their options regarding Sheen's long,
expensive deal and the future of the show, Laurie and
Sheen finally get into a public feud after Sheen calls
Lorii a quote little maggot and refers to him as
Hiam Levine in what some call an anti Semitic comment.
(31:10):
Laurie shuts down production for the rest of the season.
Sheen retaliates in the media.
Speaker 5 (31:18):
These guys are a couple of AA Nazis and just
blatant hypocrites. They do not practice what they preach. It's
so transparent and so say.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Twenty eleven CBS fire Charlie Sheen and replace him with
Ashton Kutcher. Heidi makes a television special for Animal Planet
called Heidi Flies Prostitutes to Parrots about flies and her
bird sanctuary from a Cause in Nevada, Charlie Sheen begins
a tour called My Violent Torpedo of Truth slash Defeat
(31:54):
is Not an Option. The same year, he is a
host at the annual gathering of the jug.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Ginger.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Allen auctions off some of the keepsakes from her relationship
with Charlie Sheen. She says she hasn't seen him in
fifteen years, but she still wishes him well.
Speaker 6 (32:14):
We all have demons, we all fight them, We fall down,
we get back up. I've done it. Everyone I know
has done it. It seems to me, without knowing any details,
that right now Charlie is going to take a little
different course. Hopefully he'll rise again. He'll be like the phoenix.
Gingerly Allen. Adult film star.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Dennis hoff is accused of sexually assaulting a woman at
the Love Ranch. Mindy McCrady, one of Heidi's Celebrity Rehab castmates,
commits suicide. Doctor Drew continues to defend Celebrity Rehab and
insists the show, which ended Forever in twenty eleven, was
(33:08):
not exploitative of the incredibly fragile drug users that put
on display. July nineteenth, twenty fourteen, at the age of eighty,
doctor Paul Flis dies at his home. He had been
recovering from a recent bicycle accident. Jesse Flice heard his
(33:32):
father having some trouble breathing in his bed, and by
the time paramedics arrived, he was dead. November sixteenth, twenty sixteen,
Heidi's defense lawyer, Anthony Brooklyer hangs himself at his Century
City home at the age of seventy. A year earlier,
(33:52):
one of his sons, also named Anthony Brooklyer, had also
committed suicide by hanging. Brooklaire had been struggling with the
loss of his son.
Speaker 7 (34:17):
At age ten, I started working at the local dairy
queen sweeping the parking lot, and the manager told me
I was the best parking lot sweeper he'd ever seen.
I put most of my money into pinball machines, and
that's when I first became aware of the connection between
money and pleasure. If you had money, you had a
good time.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
If not, you didn't.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Dennis Hoff, entrepreneur. Inspired by Donald Trump's presidential victory, Dennis Hoff,
the owner of legal brothel The Love Ranch, decides to
run for office. Hoff credits Trump with inspiring him to
switch from his former Libertarian Party affiliation to run as
(34:58):
a GOP candidate.
Speaker 7 (35:01):
We're both famous and infamous. We're both high profile, we're
both celebrities. We're both successful businessmen. We both have reality
television shows, we both have written books. We're both rich
and we can't be bought. There's a lot of similarities,
and we're doing it for the right reasons.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
His opponent says, Dennis Hoff is not even a real Republican.
He just uses whatever is happening politically to promote business
at the Love Ranch. He works both sides of the
aisle for the Almighty Dollar. For example, he once did
a Hooker's for Hillary promotion. After running as the Trump
from Perump, Dennis Hoff wins the Republican primary for the
(35:43):
Nevada state Legislature. He celebrates with Heidi in Perump, and
Heidi wears a vote Hoff shirt. In a June seventh,
twenty eighteen, Hollywood Reporter interview with Heidi on the twenty
fifth anniversary of her arrest, Hide continues to evade simple
classifications of good and bad. She seems to replicate some
(36:06):
of her dad's more outrap pseudoscientific medical views with a
comment about AIDS being less deadly than asthma now that
there's medication for it, and she uses certain outdated terms
for trans women while discussing the idea of opening a
trans staffed brothel in Perrump. She is mixed on the
me too movement, and when one of her ex boyfriends
(36:29):
alleged assault on an eleven year old girl is brought up,
she says, if it's true, he should be castrated. She
is neither a conventional California liberal nor a full on
reactionary libertarian. She says that the Black Book or Red
Gucci Planner showed up on eBay and she called to
have it taken down. The book had been stolen by
(36:51):
some people who were also trying to latch onto Stormy Daniels,
the porn star who had a sexual relationship with Donald Trump.
When the reporter asks if Heidi'sill has the book herself,
she says no, then changes her answer to kind of,
and then asks why it matters at all?
Speaker 1 (37:10):
I don't know. Actually, it was just something that seemed
very private and personal that was no one else's business.
That's just how I feel about it today and how
I always felt. I was offered a lot of money
to sell that book, and there were times when I
really needed that money, but that was never something that
I would do.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
October of twenty eighteen, Dennis Hoff wins his election. He
spends the weekend partying at the Love Ranch for several
days straight to celebrate his win, and then.
Speaker 4 (37:49):
He was totally stiff, and I said, honey, we have
a problem here.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Ron Jeremy Hoff drops down at age seventy two during
his election victory bender at the Love Ranch and is
found by his friend, the porn star and serial rapist
Ron Jeremy. Heidi is shaken up by Hoff's death, as
are the Love Ranch as sex workers. Everyone is very
(38:16):
confused about what's going to happen with a dead guy
being in office.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
You want to do the right thing with money inherited
from your parents. I will not disrespect my father. Look
at what I already did to him. He worked hard
and I was a madam.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Time continues to pass and Heidi learns about a new
kind of money making scheme, cryptocurrency, but she's out of
her depth, and even Heidi Flies can get scammed. She
gets fleeced in a bitcoin scammed by a former friend
named Elizabeth Keating, who worked for her for years and
talked her into going in on some bitcoin that she
said would help Flies fund her Bird saying so, Heidi
(39:02):
bought four hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoin at six
hundred dollars a coin, and it rose to twenty thousand
dollars a coin, at which point Keating locked her out
of the account and sold the money. Heidi says it's
morally despicable to steal the money from her and her birds.
She sues Keating for four million dollars after tracking her
(39:23):
down and having her served with a summons in a
flour delivery.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I've known Steve Bing since I was twenty one, and
we talked on the phone twice a day every day.
We were really close. In your twenties, your lovers with everyone,
and then in your thirties you become friends. I snort
meth like I'm drinking a cup of coffee. I don't
stay up all night doing rails. I have birds to
(39:48):
feed in the morning.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Heidi is quoted in The New York Post about the
suicide of her friend Steve Bing, who jumped to his
death from the roof of his Onery City high rise.
Steve Banng inherited six hundred million dollars from his grandfather,
real estate developer Leo es Bang, at the age of eighteen.
Heidi says that Bing strung her along with extravagant promises
(40:13):
of money for her bird sanctuary. He was going to
set her up with a new space in Palm Springs
where she could live with the birds in comfort. She
also really needed the money after losing her inheritance from
her father. In the Bitcoin scam. Heidi thinks the reports
of Steve Bing only having three hundred thousand dollars when
he killed himself are false. She knows for a fact
(40:37):
that he recently had twenty million. Although Bang is known
for spending his inheritance compulsively on drugs and sex workers,
he hires a lot of trans women who are sex
workers and often pays for their surgeries. He's also an
investor in things like the Clinton Foundation and the Polar Express.
(40:57):
After his death, there are immediate rumors that he was suicided,
as he was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein's. Heidi is
sad about her friend dying, but also about his lifelong
promises to give her money. Vanishing into smoke, Heidi says
she's been celibate for five years. All she cares about
(41:17):
now is the birds. When Heidi World returns, what happened
to everyone in Heidie World? Welcome back to Heidie World
(41:56):
the present.
Speaker 8 (42:00):
Everybody's reclusive. When you make a certain amount of money,
especially if you've had a tough life, you try to
fortify yourself with your friends and kind of keep the
world out. I used to date all young girls, and
then it was like I could be your grandfather? What
am I doing? John Peters?
Speaker 7 (42:17):
Film producer.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
John Peters paid out three point three million dollars in
a sexual harassment suit in twenty eleven. In January of
twenty twenty, he married Pamela Anderson, then got divorced, with
Anderson claiming the marriage was never real because papers were
not filed. He was recently portrayed by Bradley Cooper in
Paul Thomas Anderson's Lickerge Pizza. When I profiled Alta him
(42:43):
for a magazine, she said that she didn't know that
much about the real John Peters and that the movie
character might be an exaggeration, to which I said, Oh no,
it's a documentary that's exactly what John Peters is like.
Robert Evans died at the age of eighty nine in
Beverly Hills, California. Evans, a New York Russian Jew who
(43:06):
came out West to act and then started producing films
in the early sixties, was a self made legend who
loved telling people about it. He was convicted of cocaine
trafficking in nineteen eighty convicted of making Chinatown sequel The
Two Jakes in nineteen ninety, and called to the stand
in the Cotton Club murder trial in nineteen ninety one.
(43:28):
His autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture came out
in nineteen ninety four and was adapted into a successful
documentary of the same name in two thousand and two
that burnished evans legend as producer of films like The Godfather.
Evans was married seven times but died a bachelor. His
(43:48):
last film credit as a producer while living was How
to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, one last hit
for The Ultimate Hollywood Hustler. In July of twenty nineteen,
ten Paramount decided not to renew their contract with Robert Evans' Productions,
a deal that he'd had there since nineteen seventy four.
(44:09):
Evans died in October of twenty nineteen, but, like Don Simpson,
due to reboot Culture, Robert Evans IMDb continues to accumulate
credits as he executive produces from beyond the Grave. Yvonne
Naj moved into softcore and hardcore porn after his CD
(44:31):
rom venture Fizzle, directing titles like Trailer Trash, Terry with
Terry Starr, All Nude Nikki with Niki Nova, and Izzy
Sleeze's casting couch quties. In nineteen ninety nine, he makes
a porno called Wild Desire with the quote most downloaded
woman on the Internet Danny ash Ivonne Naj dies in
(44:53):
twenty fifteen. In twenty seventeen, he receives a posthumous executive
producer credit on a movie called Hitchhiker Massacre, starring Drew
Barrymore's half brother John Blythe Barrymore and David Carradine's daughter
Callista Carrodine. Adult Video News Hall of Famer, an Original
Vivid Videos Contract star Vivid Girl. Ginger Len Allen continues
(45:17):
to act in horror films like twenty twenty's Slash Laurette
Party and the upcoming Pig Killer, while her adult scenes
are re released in compilations like My Mom Is a
Lesbian and the ongoing I Want to Come Inside Your
Mom series. After her relationship with Charlie Sheen ended, Ginger
Lenn Allen had a son with porn producer Stephen Hirsch.
(45:41):
Heidi's cousin, Mike Feiss, creator of the Bachelor, is accused
of domestic assault and takes a public step back from
the Bachelor franchise, which continues to be one of the
most popular shows on television. In twenty fifteen, Alexandra Dattig
gets engaged to fellow wing media rising star Larry Elder.
(46:02):
After an eighteen month courtship, she moves in with him
and gets a tattoo that says Larry's Girl at his request.
She says that she was working as more or less
as personal assistant, helping himself produce his streaming radio show
from home, but wasn't paid a salary. The engagement ended
acrimoniously later that year. Elder was the right wing candidate
(46:26):
during the twenty twenty one attempt to recall California Democratic
Governor Gavin Newsom, at which point Alexandra Daddigg spoke up
during his campaign to allege that Larry Elder had once
threatened her by showing her his gun during an argument.
Daddig also had her own campaign to recall LA Mayor
Eric Garcetti, the son of Gil Garcetti, over LA's escalating
(46:48):
homelessness crisis. She started an online petition to gather the
signatures to recall Garcetti. And you may know about how
easy it is to trigger or recall vote in California.
Because it's been happening instantly since the recall of Gray
Davis that got California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jody baby Doll
Gibson aka Sasha of the Valley dies in January of
(47:13):
twenty twenty two in Yucca Valley.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
The other players, like Madame Alex, were all working with
the LAPD giving lists of their clients on a weekly basis.
Heidi wouldn't play the game. She broke all the rules.
She kind of did it for fun, which was why
she was so successful. Nick Broomfield.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Nick Broomfield most recently put out a documentary called Last
Man Standing, Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie and Tupac,
after other documentaries like Leonard and Mary Anne about the
relationship between Leonard Cohen and his lover and muse Maryanne
Illan and Whitney Houston. Can I Be Me which is
really depressing but really good and I recommend James con
(48:04):
Is on Twitter. Tom Sizemore was in Twin Peaks The Return.
He works seemingly constantly in b movies, and some upcoming
projects from his IMDb include Dark Karma, Eat Lead, and
Father's Day in twenty seventeen, it was revealed that he'd
been kicked off the set of a movie in two
thousand and three for allegedly molesting an eleven year old girl,
(48:27):
which he denied doing. In twenty nineteen, he was arrested
in Burbank for possessing quote various illegal narcotics. Charlie Sheen
came out as an anti vaxer during his marriage to
Denise Richards, and cited their differences in views on the
subject as one of the reasons for the split. This
means Denise Richards is pro vaccine. Good for you, Denise,
(48:50):
we love your work. In twenty eleven, Charlie Sheen was
living with a twenty four year old adult actress named
Brie Olsen and a twenty four year old model and
graphic designer named Natalie Kess, and he referred to the
two girls as his goddesses. They both moved out in
the next two months. Sheen revealed in twenty fifteen that
he was HIV positive and on the cocktail, and then
(49:13):
he went public because he was being extorted for several
years by a group threatening to reveal his HIV positive status.
In twenty sixteen, he went on The Doctor Oz Show
and said he'd gone off his HIV meds and was
seeking alternative treatment in Mexico from an Australian quack doctor
named Sam Chatchua. In twenty sixteen, Charlie Sheen also came
(49:36):
under investigation by the LAPD for threatening to kill his fiancee,
scottene Ross, a former adult star who went by the
stage name Brett Rossi. In twenty seventeen, he was sued
by an unnamed ex girlfriend for knowingly exposing her to
HIV without telling her. On the acting side, he had
a TBS sitcom called Anger Management that started in twenty twelve,
(49:59):
the year after he crashed his two and a half
Men gig. Most recently, Sheen was on Instagram promoting a
podcast slash pilot that he made with Entourage's Doug Ellen
called Ramble On. It is I Think a podcast that's
the spinoff of Doug Allen's podcast Victory about Entourage, but
also a backdoor TV pilot because stars they're just like us.
(50:23):
Ramble On the TV show pilot stars Charlie Sheen as himself,
alongside E from Entourage who I won't dignify with his
government name, and Kevin Dillon as themselves, plus veteran character
actor John C. McGinley, who was in Platoon with Charlie Sheen,
and then cameo appearances from people like Martin Sheen, Mark Cuban,
(50:45):
and Jamie Lynn Siegler. IMDb says it's a show about
established showbiz folks and newcomers, and it appears to mostly
take place at the Smokehouse Restaurant in Burbank, which is
an old school place that I obviously love from nineteen
forty six, which for la is like a million years old,
and it is a showbiz hangout because it's right across
(51:05):
from where a lot of television shoots. Charlie also has
a website www. Dot genius dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
At the time, what was going on in my house
hanging around girls just goofing around, playing in the pool.
It really seemed like a time of innocence, like a
sick sorority club.
Speaker 2 (51:31):
As we reached the city limits of Heidieworld, I've been
thinking a lot about what drew me to the story
of Heidiflace in the first place. I did not set
out to make this podcast autobiographical, but it ended up
being that way because it turns out that I clearly
always identified in some way with Heidiflice as a frizzy haired,
self conscious Jewish girl from Los Angeles, eager to make
(51:53):
a name for herself in a city where her name
didn't mean anything to anyone. Yet the sexual hypocrisy on
display in the Heidi Fly story also made a big
lasting impression on me because it revealed something about society
that I really wanted to reject as being true, which
is that it's deeply misogynistic on a core level. Other
(52:14):
events since the Heidi Flies trial have only reinforced the
way in which womanhood, sexuality, and spectacle are weaponized to
send messages about women who transgress traditional roles or try
to benefit off their own sexuality in any way. And
for the most recent example of this, I mean check
out the coverage of the Johnny deppen Amber Heard trial.
(52:37):
I also appreciate that Heidi Fliss just is who she is.
She's not a perfect role model or spokeperson, and she
doesn't ever try to be, but she is still alive,
still talking and still making jokes. She feels unkillable in
some way, and well, it may not be a flawless victory,
it still feels like a little bit of hope, a
(52:59):
shot against the mainstream narrative that sex workers always die
or terrible things always happen to them. She's allegedly still
a drug user and very open about that. And another
thing that making this podcast really made me think deeply
about is addiction and the way addiction is treated in
American society. A lot of the people in this story
(53:20):
struggle with addiction throughout their lives, and it's clearly passed
on genetically in families without excusing any of the abuse
committed by the many, many abusive men in Heidi World.
I found myself coming away with a view of these
alpha males that was more complex than I expected. Addiction
fucking sucks and it ravages people, and I feel bad
(53:45):
for anyone who struggles with themselves. I did not go
into Heidi World expecting to come out of it like wow.
Charlie Sheen Shure has a lot of pathos to him.
But I also vividly remember during the Tiger Blood era, thinking, man,
this guy really needs to not be on camera right now.
He is clearly not well and everyone who is letting
(54:06):
him be on camera is complicit. Making Heidi World also
just got me interrogating why I'm drawn to stories like
this and drawn personally to your John Peters types like Heidi.
I love charismatic talkers and Hollywood alpha males, which made
me realize on some level, I must want to be
(54:27):
a Hollywood alpha male. Thinking about how to drop people
in while you're talking to them and get them absorbed
enough to keep listening to you is something I also
thought about obviously making a ten episode podcast where I'm
talking a lot. I hope that resurfacing the Heidifly story
with this podcast will inspire people to get involved with
(54:47):
sex workers' rights and the laws around them. Sex work
is both more visible and under more threat than ever,
and groups like Sex Workers Outreach Project USA are doing
great work around these issues. Here in Los Angeles, the
strippers from a club in my hometown of North Hollywood
in the San Fernando Valley called Star Garden are striking
(55:09):
against work conditions where management allowed them to be groped
by customers against their will without any punishment. The striking
North Hollywood strippers recently voted to unionize, and you can
follow them on Twitter at Stripstrike NoHo and follow their
sister organization, Strippers United, at strippers unite on Twitter and
(55:29):
let sex workers themselves tell you what kind of material
and online support they actually need.
Speaker 1 (55:40):
People think I sat back and made money off someone else,
and that's not true at all. As far as exploiting women,
women are exploited in the world, people are exploited.
Speaker 2 (55:52):
I was not exploiting them.
Speaker 1 (55:53):
The girls who met me did very very well. These
people sewing downtown that is exploitation. The street pip that
is exploitation. I might be a hypocrite, but I always
thought that I was trying to do the right thing.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Thanks everyone for joining me your host Molly Lambert on
this journey through weird California history from the nineteen seventies
up until now, and a story about the importance of
decriminalizing and desigmatizing sex work. And as for Heidi Flies,
she has a YouTube channel where she posts videos of
(56:32):
her macause and screeds against the woman that she's mad
at about the bitcoin scam. She's on Instagram too, and Heidi,
if you're listening, by any chance, call me.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
Credits.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
Heidi World would never have been possible without the incredible
production team of Anna Postnier, Becca Ramos, and Trisha Mukherjee.
Thanks to Rory Geegan, who beautifully edited and sound designed
an insanely complicated thing. Special thanks to Chris Chang, who
shot and edited the Heidi World promo trailer that we
(57:22):
made with Annie Hamilton to announce the show. Chris and
Annie were the first two people to volunteer their time
for this project, and I'm really grateful for them. Chris
also wrote the stick ass song that's in the promo trailer.
And thanks to Bethan Macaluso, who worked with me on
the scripts and helped shape this into something that anyone
else could ever listen to. And now, because it is
(57:43):
my show, and because I think it's funny, which is
what this entire show is really about, is pleasing me personally.
I am going to read the entire cast list like
it's movie credits. A huge thank you to everyone who
agreed to voice act for me, many of whom had
never done it before. And special thanks to Annie Hamilton
and Max Silvestry for bringing real acting chops to the
(58:05):
leads and making this world grounded so that anything else
could make sense. Heidi World an iHeartRadio production. Annie Hamilton
as Heidi Flyes, Max Silvestry as Yvonne Nasch, Karen Tonksen
as Madame Alex, Glenn Lambert as doctor Paul Fleiss, Sarah
(58:30):
Sherman as Shana Flice, Audrey Kaufman as Kim Flice, Jack
O'Brien as Jesse Flice, Anna Hosnier as Alyssa Ashflyis, Jamie
Loftus as Victoria Sellers, Mollie Young as Alexandra Dattig, John
(58:50):
Daly as John Peters, Miles Clee as Don Simpson, Jason
Stewart as Charlie Sheen, Chris Black as Billy Idol, Robert
Evans as Robert Evans, Corarina Longworth as Julia Phillips, Dylan
Jelula as Angelica Houston, Brody Gupta as Melanie Griffith, Hunter
(59:16):
Harris as Rita Wilson, jud Nick Mayard as Sean Hubler,
Emily Yoshida as Leanne, Isabelle Badi as Marilyn Joel Monique
as Brandy McClain, Rachel rabbit White as Julie Connister, Sarah C.
(59:37):
Johnson as Simone former Alex Girl, Alex Papadmus as defense
attorney Anthony Brooklyer, Andrew t as Detective Sammy Lee The Second,
Jason Conceptsion as Prosecutor Alan Carter, Julianne Smolensky as Norma,
Jean Alma Dovar, Nom Fry as Sherry Lansing, Miles Gray
(01:00:01):
as James Kahn, Harry Eskin as Bernie Cornfeld, Tess Lynch
as Elaine Young, Kate Raft as Michelle Pfeiffer, Joan Ford
as Amy, Holden Jones, Liza Die as Whoopi Goldberg, Joe
Mandy as Frank Sinatra Junior, Lindsay Webber as Judge, Judith
(01:00:25):
al Champagne, Eva Anderson as Ava Gabor, Aidan Arrata as
Meg Ryan, Liz fran Sack as Sharon Stone, Josh Loci
as Bob Crow, Felix Biederman as Tom Sizemore, Siri Dall
as Sheila Matrowski, Young Chomsky as Elliot Mintz, Andrew Deyong
(01:00:49):
as Andy Sedaris, Dan Longino as Vince Conti, Dean Fleischer
Camp as Paul McCarthy, Richard Kelly as Robert Altman, Yassi
Solik as Ginger Lynn Allen, Holly Anderson as Cher, John
Levinstein as Mayor, Richard Reardon, Ryan Johnson as Adrian Lyne
(01:01:16):
Grace Belden as JJ, the King of Beepers, Gracie Hadland
as Liz Smith, Jack Allison as Anthony Pellicano, Carrie O'Donnell
as Mike Flice, Paul F. Tompkins as Dennis Hoff, Bug
Maine as Ron Jeremy Leslie Lee the Third as O. J. Simpson,
(01:01:40):
John Daly again as Jay Leno, Carvel Wallace as Nick Broomfield,
Ben Lambert as Robert Evans press agent, Eloy Lugo as
Billie Idols publicist, and Becker Ramos as Nancy Reyis. And
thanks to everyone who came along with us on this
long wild ride through Los Angeles. I'm your host, Molly Lambert,
(01:02:05):
signing off one last time from Heidi World,
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