Chapter 3: Midcentury Madam: Madam Alex Rules LA and Teaches Heidi The Rules Of The Game (60s, 70s, 80s)
The story of how Madam Alex left a Catholic girlhood in the Philippines for a mid-century marriage in America, only to become the most powerful madam in Beverly Hills with her high-end escort business. And how the madaming business leads her to a young woman named Heidi Fleiss who will eventually dethrone her.
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Speaker 1 (00:18):
Listen to me. This is a woman's business. When a
woman does it, it's fun, there's a giggle in it.
When a man's involved, he's sleazy, he's a pimp. He
may know how to keep girls in line, and he
may make money, but he doesn't know what I do.
Alex Fleming Madam.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Madam Alex Hell. Yeah, she was crazy. She was out
of her mind. But it took a lot more than
just learning from someone. There's a lot more thought that
goes into the escort business than people realize. You have
to learn how to make people feel secure in dealing
with you. Heidi Flace.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Previously on Heidie World. Heidi Flice flunked out of high
school and lit the LA partying scene on fire. She
hooked up with Yvonne Naj, a sleezbag Hungarian director turned
full time sports bookie, who introduced her to LA's secret
world of high end prostitution.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Welcome to Heidi World.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Chapter three, Mid Century Matter. Madame Alex rules LA and
teaches Heidi the rules of the game. Nineteen sixties, seventies,
and eighties. Madame Alex went by a lot of names.
She was variously known as Elizabeth Adams, Betty Jensen, Alex Adam,
(01:57):
and Alex Fleming. But who exactly is the woman who
showed Heidi the ropes of running a high class escort business.
Lucky for us, she wrote an autobiography called Madam nine
O two one zero that fills in a lot of
the details. There's also a Vanity Fair story about her
called I'm Alex, Call Me, written in advance of her
nineteen eighty eight trial date. In the two decades she
(02:20):
ran her call girl business, Madame Alex didn't advertise, she
didn't need to. Word of mouth kept her phone ringing
off the hook. She called herself an antique stealer, and
that was the front she used for decades as she
ran her popular, high class call girl ring. She also
had a special relationship with the cops as an informant,
(02:41):
who were well aware of her and allegedly took bribes
in the form of sex. But she did make business
cards once in nineteen eighty five, with the engraved image
of a bird of Paradise and the copy Alex's aviary
Beautiful and Exotic Birds. But it wasn't the business cards
that got her busted. It was the word of mouth.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Madame Alex was a total blabbermouth. She loved to gossip.
She did not care if there was any truth to
her stories at all, Yet she maintained a classy persona
of hush hush.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Madame Alex knows everyone in town, including an anonymous talent
manager who also knows everyone in town.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
For now, we will call him Rick.
Speaker 5 (03:30):
One night at the Troubadour, I spotted this extraordinary girl.
I was standing with Hollywood's most celebrated lithario, so I
asked them who she was. A professional?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
He whispered.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
That was my first introduction to the notion that on
a scale of one to ten, there were women who
were fifteens, a beautiful bride, witty, and oh by the
way they worked. Once I became aware, I saw these
women everywhere, and I came to learn that most of
them were connected to Alex Rick clients of Alex.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
When I first met Madame Alex, I was surprised to
see that most of the girls working for her were
actually not that attractive. The girl's adrane was twenty eight
to forty three, but Alex kept a pristine reputation of style,
class taste. Whatever Alex maintained this reputation by getting anyone
she needed in her life laid for free. This included journalists, cops, lawyers,
(04:34):
what have you, and in return, these people would do
anything they could to please her to get the freebie.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Alex's exotic birds or creatures as she called them, were
mostly the type of girls she thought her clients wanted,
a type at its peak in the mid eighties, white
blonde and busty with a beechy tan in short, California
girls of the sort dominating hair metal music videos and
the public imagination about la in the nineteen eighties. One
(05:06):
client describes one of Alex's girls as having tawny skin
and an ass like two volleyballs.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
She had one.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Hundred and fifty girls working for her, but Alex stayed
at home, stuffing the millions of dollars she made into
the mattress far from the irs. Alex's business set the
model for Heidi in many ways. She was obsessed with
her girls, seeming classy and intelligent, blending in with the
other young ladies, lunching and shopping with rich older men
(05:34):
in Beverly Hills, always strictly on his dime, of course,
Over and over, the John Say was sheer disbelief that
the girls didn't seem like hookers. The talent impresario and
the vanity fair piece says he lived here for years,
believing that every prostitute in Los Angeles was a teenage
runaway working on Hollywood Boulevard before encountering Alex's flock. There's
(05:59):
a common note condescension from the Johns, a sheer disbelief
that a beautiful, intelligent woman would ever purposely choose sex work.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I was born in Manila to a Spanish Filipino mother
and German father, and when I was twelve, a Japanese
soldier came into our house with his bayonet pointed at us,
ready to do us in. He locked us in and
set the house on fire. I haven't been scared by
much since then.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Madame Alex was born Elizabeth Adams, although even that might
be an alias. She grew up in the Philippines in Makati,
which she calls the Beverly Hills of Manila, the suburb
of Walled Estates and Lovely Gardens. Her father was a
Connecticut born German American named August Hugo Kuntz who moved
to the Philippines there he met Alex's mother, who belonged
(06:52):
to a wealthy dynasty of Spanish colonialists. They produced Alex,
who grew up in pre war luxury in a with
servants and nannies, attending strict Catholic schools and churches. Her
mother reinforced the strict Catholicism at home, terrified that her
daughter would discover sex. In nineteen forty one, World War
(07:14):
II arrived in Manila. Alex's father was an American loyalist,
although his German name could have protected him had he chosen.
He took up with the Gorilla Resistance movement against the
Japanese occupation of the Philippines and was put in a
concentration camp. Alex's mother became obsessed with a fear that
the American gis would deflower her Catholic daughter and send
(07:36):
her to live with an uncle in Japan, where she
was promptly deflowered by an American GI. This gave Alex,
she says, a taste for Americans. She was back in
Manila at the Convent School within the year. Because of
the diverse nature of the Philippines, a place exploited and
financially striated by a long line of colonialist predators. Alex
(07:58):
grew up speaking Chinese, Tagalog, English, Spanish, and German. After
the war ended, Alex's parents divorced and her mother decided
they would move to San Francisco. On the ship that
headed to California via Hawaii, Alex got her first taste
of Hollywood when she befriended fellow passenger Howard Strickling, who
(08:19):
was the head of publicity at MGM Studios. He regaled
her with tales of stars like Carrie Grant. When they
reached San Francisco, Alex made a break for it from
her mom and ended up at another Catholic church in Oakland,
where she worked as a housekeeper for a group of priests.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
In nineteen fifty.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Three, with money wired to her from her dad, she
moved to Los Angeles and got a job at a
dance studio, first as a receptionist and eventually as a
tango instructor. In nineteen fifty five, Alex marries an aerospace
physicist and has what she describes as a typical Eisenhower
fifty's marriage, with a big house in Los Phelis, near
(08:58):
where Cecil B. De Mill lived, and a Cadillac with
tail fins and two wonderful sons. According to Alex, the
nightlife in nineteen fifties, La had nothing on Manila. Glamorous
Hollywood clubs like Ciro's and the Macambo had shut down.
Not that she and her husband went out much.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Most nights. We stayed home with Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Wilke.
After eight years, we found we had nothing to say
to each other and got divorced.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Her husband flees to another state with their two sons
and says if she doesn't agree to a divorce, he
will just keep them there. Keep them, says Alex, and
hangs up. She says she cares about her children, she
just hates her husband's attempt to manipulate her. Freshly divorced,
Alex gets a job at the flower shop in the
Tony Ambassador Hotel, which contains one of LA's last operating
(09:52):
big band supper clubs, the Coconut Grove. Through the flower
arranging world, Alex enters an underground socialis scene of gay
men and starts going to their parties, where she meets
a straight guy who becomes her second husband, an Austrian
businessman who wins her heart by telling her that she
looks like Joan Crawford. She says he has Frank Sinatra
(10:14):
blue eyes. He may also have a Frank Sinatra like
connection to the Italian mafia. They move to fancy Hancock
Park and have a son, but Alex keeps her job
at the Ambassador flower Shop. At the flower shop, Alex
tends to famous customers like Liza Minelli, Jane Fonda, and
(10:34):
the French model and actress Capuccin. One day, Alex gets
a call from a woman named Arabella Carlton, whose brother
is one of her customers at the flower shop. Arabella
asks if Alex wants to buy her business, which she
reveals is a madaming business. Alex is absolutely shocked that Arabella,
(10:55):
a classy, refined english woman, is a madam. Os isn't
sure why Arabella thinks she'd want to take over, but
Arabella sells her on it, saying Alex's people skills at
the flower shop and on the phone make her a natural,
plus it's a great opportunity to make a ton of money.
Alex is so flattered she says yes, and Arabella promises
(11:17):
to train her. At that time, getting caught madam ing
a charge called pandering, could only get you ninety days maximum.
In the Philippines, Alex says, prostitution was completely out in
the open, despite the Catholic culture. Manila had a designated
red light district for its sex workers, but in America
there was a veneer of secrecy to even street level dealings.
(11:41):
Arabella quoted a rate of two hundred dollars an hour,
which Alex compared to the twenty bucks an hour Filipino
bar hostesses got. Back home, she shows Alex how to
work the phones.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Here was this regal woman who looked like she'd be
having tea with Queen Elizabeth, saying things like how'd you
like to come over?
Speaker 4 (11:59):
And books.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
With a five thousand dollars insurance check from earthquake damage
to her house, Alex buys the business. Her husband, who
again was probably in the mafia, says, now you're getting
your feet wet. When she tells him what she's done,
Alex realized very quickly that she had vastly overpaid. She'd
bought Arabella's client lists, which it turns out consisted of
(12:26):
twenty five unfamous older men with erection issues, about half
of whom were already dead. Arabella's stable consisted of only
five girls, who all had day jobs as waitresses and secretaries.
The tremendous financial windfall Arabella had promised seemed unlikely, so
Alex took matters into her own hands to expand the business.
(12:48):
She confessed her new trade to a flower shop client
who ran a big construction company that built postwar homes
around the US. He offered to help by providing her
with a list of fifty big names producers, agents, and
studio executives and telling her to cold call them without
mentioning him, asking if they needed any help entertaining friends.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
The men on the list.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Were all quote unquote players known to hire call girls,
and they were always interested in seeing new talent. Furthermore,
it was the sixties, lots of older men wanted a
taste of the sexual revolution that they felt they were
missing out on. Alex describes the culture clash by saying
that these clients wanted the young, beautiful, and braless, sexually
(13:34):
free girls they kept seeing on the street everywhere, but
they wanted them in garter belts and corsets. Meanwhile, the
movie business was tanking after the studio excesses of the sixties,
while easy Rider ushered in a new era of youth
centric art film influence filmmaking that none of the studios
were primed to understand, and yet.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
The players were hornier than ever. Maybe they were so
depressed by the business that they wanted to lose themselves
in sex. Maybe it was an eat, drink and be
merry for tomorrow. The studio goes into chapter eleven, Attitude
Clute had just come out with Jane Fond as a
fancy hooker. The movie had everyone talking about call girls,
and there just weren't enough of them, not the fancy
(14:19):
New York kind in Los Angeles where the flower children
and rock groupies were giving it away, though not to
the players on my list.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
These are the guys who are way too old for
Woodstock but saw hair and want to meet some young nudists.
So Alex goes scouting for new girls to suit the
new tastes. La has to be full of girls with
untapped potential, girls who came out West to be actresses
and failed to hit the mark, beautiful girls who needed
(14:52):
money fast. Alex says she wants to help the girls,
to rescue them. She calls it a challenge, and the
way she he frames his quest like Catholic missionary work
is probably not a coincidence. Alex recruits at a Beverly
Hills beauty parlor, taking note of which pretty girls are
not wearing wedding rings, striking up conversations, and inviting them
(15:14):
back to hers for a drink. Alex thinks her house,
with its antiques and paintings, denotes a certain upper class
lifestyle they'll want in on. I don't think it occurred
to her that it might look a bit suffy and
old fashioned to their hip, young eyes. She plays up
the fact that she's a housewife with young kids to
show them that the sex business isn't as scary as
(15:35):
they'd been taught. Naming some of her A list clients,
she draws the girls out into confessing they wish they
had more money, and then offers them a new job
working for her.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
One day, Madame Alex was sitting on her bed in
her transparent moomoo, and she said to me, you know, Heidi,
blue and white are regal colors.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Alex's new girls recruit other new girls for her, as
well as adding more Johns to the client list. Some
of the new Johns are celebrities, and Alex can't believe
that even they want to pay for sex, but she
comes to see that high profile men like her girls
because it's a way to cheat on their sometimes also
high profile wives with women whose job it is to
(16:23):
be discreet. A civilian affair could blow up, but pros
don't expect anything more and they know when to leave.
When Heidi World returns, Alex scouts for new talent on
the Sunset Strip.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
Welcome back to Heidi Worlds.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Alex also scouts on Sunset Boulevard for hippie girls who
look like they go to doors shows and frequent The Source,
one of LA's first health food restaurants run by the
Source family cult and its leader father Yod. She gives
the hippie girls a Madam Alex makeover to make them
square enough that they won't scare the Johns who are
of the uptight suit and tie variety. Here's what a
(17:23):
former Alex girl says about Alex's styling technique.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
I wouldn't call what Alex gives you advice. She spares
you nothing. She makes a list of what she wants done,
and she really gets into it. I mean she wants
you get your arms waxed. She gives you the names
of people who do get facials. She tells you what
to buy Anima Marcus. She's put off by anything fleshy,
and if you don't dress conservatively, she's got no problem
(17:50):
telling you in front of an audience, ya look like
a cheap wore. I used to wear what I wanted
when I went out, and then change in the car
into a frumpy sweater, and I went in to get
her the money, and she'd always go, oh, you look
beautiful simon former Alex girl.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
She then backtracks on being so critical and praises some
of Alex's advice, since working for the madam did net
her a sports car and a mortgage down payment. After all,
she still brings Madame Alex flowers and candy for Mother's Day.
Madame Alex takes a cut of forty percent from her employees.
Soon she has a thriving business. By nineteen seventy two,
(18:34):
Alex is making enough bank to quit the Ambassador Flower
Shop and work as a madam full time. Even the
oil crisis and Watergate can't put a dent in her trade.
Her husband keeps his nose out of the ins and
outs of her new side gig, and she doesn't know
any of the particulars of his mob involved property business,
but Alex doesn't keep her mouth entirely shut about her
(18:55):
new occupation. She has a friend who tends bar at
the Ambassador, who she gives kickbacks to for bringing her
new clients. One of the new prospective clients ends up
being a cop doing a sting, and Alex catches her
first pandering case, receiving a sixty day suspended sentence, a
fifty dollars fine, and a year of unsupervised probation. A
(19:18):
week after the sentencing, Alex's second husband drops dead on
the same day as her father from dual heart attacks.
Her marriage of eleven years is suddenly tragically over. At
the same time, her successful madaming business of three months
is on ice. With three young sons to provide for,
Alex makes the decision to go back to madaming. The
(19:40):
field for high end escorts is still wide open. She
feels confident that the big money players will come back
to her for more action, so she prays for her father,
for her husband, and that she'll never get caught again.
In a practical measure, she also reaches out to the
LAPD Vice Division, who' trusted her to establish a useful
(20:02):
alliance behind the scenes.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
That was my big idea, not to expand the book
by aggressive marketing, but to make sure that nobody mistook
my girls for run of the mill hookers, and I
kept my roster fresh. This was not a business where
you peddle your ass, get exploited, and then are tasked
off ice green clients. I never sent girls to weirdos.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Despite her success as a madam in two marriages, Alex
still has hang ups about sex that she blames on
growing up Catholic. She is obsessed with the idea of
classiness as opposed to trashiness, and pushes her very specific
demure refined taste in looks on her girls. After the
death of her second husband, Alex starts putting on a
(20:50):
large amount of weight, which she says she does to
stop cat calls, which it obviously doesn't. Other people say
that Alex starts suffering some serious hell both issues that
affect her physical appearance. What Alex looks like doesn't matter
to her clients, to whom she is just a voice
on the phone.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
According to her book, she.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Saw herself as resembling quote, a darker Marlena dietrich, and
her arms were always covered in scratches from her cats,
who she fed whole fish from a market in Little Tokyo.
Alex falls in love again, this time with a TV
network executive who happens to be married. The affair lasts
seven years, during which Alex is gifted hundreds of thousands
(21:33):
of dollars in jewels and extravagant trips. She cries about
him in expensive therapy sessions, unable to break her addiction
to a taken man. When the therapy finally takes and
the long affair ends for good, Alex swears off men
forever in favor of the company of her cats.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
All of her pleasure is.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Channeled instead into madaming and watching her business take flight.
Every rich man in Los Angeles wants fancy call girls,
and Madame Alex is ready and waiting to heed their calls.
According to Alex, La is a hicktown when it comes
to high end escorting, lacking the glamour, wealth and elegance
of New York or Paris's escort scenes. She is nostalgic
(22:16):
for glory days. She has only heard tale of when
La had glamorous brothels that provided the after parties for
those nights at supper clubs like Ciro's. She even mentions
a mythical brothel that appears in James Elroy's La Confidential
as the Fleur de Lys, with hooker's cut to look
like movie stars such as Greta Garbo, Geene Harlowe, and
(22:38):
Rita Hayworth. There's a rumor that Howard Hughes frequented this brothel,
hiring the girls who looked like the actresses who had
rejected him. I will add that podcaster and film historian KARANEA.
Longworth couldn't find any concrete evidence of this legendary place's
existence when she wrote her Howard Hughes book entitled Seduction.
(22:59):
As the Pie's Roll on Alex surveys her competition, which
according to her includes a few middling madams with no
more than twenty girls working. There are what she calls
cheap street hookers working on Sunset in Hollywood, and what
she calls really scary street hookers on Western Avenue in
West Hollywood.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
There is a.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Massage parlor and the Paris Review, which is a place
where you can take nude photos of models. Amazingly enough,
the Paris Review still exists. It's now called Paris House
and it reopened after COVID.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
And that was it. That was the swinging seventies six
scene in Los Angeles movie Capital of the World.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Alex's main clients are older men longing for the past,
who rhapsodized to her about their glamorous glory days. She
sends them her sunset strip hippie girls turned Belle da Jour.
Everyone goes home happy. Alex gets really rich, what she
calls Beverly Hill rich. Then she says there are some
people she has to personally thank for her good fortune.
(24:05):
Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Michael Eisner, Jimmy Carter, John Travolta,
Donald Trump, Mike Milkin, the Ayatola Homani, Madame Claude, and
the Red Brigade. I know this sounds very cue and on,
but hold tight. She's just thanking them for kickstarting the
economy in the late seventies and early eighties, specifically Jaws
(24:27):
and Star Wars, for bringing in the blockbuster era of movies.
That signals the death knell for the experimental artistic output
of late sixties and seventies New Hollywood, as it makes
the big studios flush with cash again. Baby the tent
pole movies give executives well temp poles, and as cash
(24:49):
becomes king, they are eager to spend it on Alex's girls.
She gives the Hollywood guys glamour girls styled to her
particular taste in what she calls a classic style, which
means what Alex thought looked expensive, creating ladies out of groupies,
as she puts it, and introducing them to the new
generation of baby moguls. She thanks Donald Trump for making
(25:13):
conspicuous consumption come back into style. She thanks Jimmy Carter twice,
first for creating the circumstances under which oil sheiks could
come to Beverly Hills and need entertainment for the night,
and again for the fiscal decisions that backlashed into the
Reagan presidency and the greed is Good eighties. She thanks
the Iyatola for bringing rich Iranians fleeing the nineteen seventy
(25:34):
nine revolution to Beverly Hills, helping usher in a new
style of ostentatious luxury in Los Angeles, and attracting a
more glamorous cultural element into La that she calls admiringly eurotrash.
The jet set quickly outpaces the Hollywood set as repeat
customers willing to spend untold amounts. The rates she'd been
(25:55):
charging three hundred dollars an hour, one thousand dollars for
the night, two thousand dollars a night for trips seem
insultingly low to her highest rollers, so she raises them
to what the market will bear. Alex calls her operation
the Nieman Marcus of sex. The high rollers attract other
high rollers, and none of it attracts the attention of
(26:16):
the cops because the lapdr in Alex's pocket.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
She thrives in the.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
New era of studio millionaires and other rich men who
have to spend their endless money on something besides big
ticket items like luxury.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
Cars and homes.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
In the late seventies and early eighties, she scouts for
new talent at Ma Maison, the hip restaurant with the
unlisted number that launched celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. She becomes
friendly with some of the other major American Madams, like
Sydney Biddle Barrows, who runs a New.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
York escort service called Cachet. They share cross.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
Coastal referrals until Biddle is busted in nineteen eighty four
and dubbed the Mayflower Madam because she is descended from
Mayflower Pilgrims. Biddle Barrows claim the coastal difference between John's
is that men in New York just want to talk
and men in LA.
Speaker 4 (27:04):
Just care about looks.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
For the record, I don't think this is true at all,
because rich people are equally vapid everywhere. Plus think about
all the rich New Yorkers exiled in LA who just
want to talk to hot girls. Back to Alex, at
one point, eighty percent of Alex's clients are rich guys
coming to Los Angeles from the Middle East, so she
(27:27):
starts recruiting differently to fit the taste of her new clientele,
who prefer brunettes.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Alex's girls get.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
Passports and start traveling internationally for work. Some of them
complain back to Alex that the Johns who hired them
just ignore them while they talk and play cards at
parties for hours, only engaging in a fast round of
sex at the very end of the night. Alex doesn't care.
They're just paying for time. The Middle Eastern playboys are
her dream clients. They love to spend money, and they
(27:56):
love Alex, who loves catering to them. One client requests
four girls he saw on an aerobic show. Alex calls
a TV executive friend and gets the proper contacts, offering
the girls twenty five thousand dollars each, which would be
about eighty one thousand dollars now for a single night.
Everyone says yes. Meanwhile, the globalization of the madaming trade
(28:19):
is going both ways, eventually affecting Alex's business.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
In La.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Madame Claude is a Parisian madam with a world renowned
escorting business. She operates out of the Ritz and her
girls are multi lingual international beauties, countesses and models.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
Claude's girls have two years.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Of cultural training for their vocation, and many of Alex's
clients also see Madame Claude. In nineteen eighty, Madame Claude
moves her business to La and Alex is sure she
is screwed, but she quickly prevails in popularity over the
new wares. She compares it to the Beverly Hills Jewish Deli.
Nate Now's remaining more popular in the New York Transplanted
(29:01):
Stage and Carnegie Deullies when they arrived out West. She
also compares beating Madame Claude to the Lakers beating the Celtics.
Speaker 6 (29:11):
She's constantly trying to fix you up and marry you off.
She introduced me to my boyfriend. Marry your boyfriend. She
tells the girls it's better than going to prison. When
you go out with her, she'll value a present. She's
incredibly generous that way, and she'll always tell you to
save money and getell. It's frustrating to her when girls
call it the end of a month and say they
(29:32):
need rent money. She wants to see you do well.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Madame Claude lasted two years in La before she packed
up La suitcase and moved back to France. According to Alex,
it wasn't that.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
The men here had anything against getting blowjobs in French
or getting it on with countesses. But La is a
peculiar tone, a tough tone, and you'd have to sell
La sex, and La not snobby Parasex, but fun sonny
beachy La Sex.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
When Heidi World returns, Madam Alex's business meets the greatest
good eighties.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
Welcome back to Heidi World.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
So Madam Alex's business grows to even higher heights in
the early eighties. She says her clients at the peak
are heads, heads of state, heads of corporations, heads of universities,
heads of studios, heads of record companies. She invests in
real estate, buying a mansion in the Malibu Hills and
having parties there for her customers. In the early eighties,
(31:01):
the AIDS crisis begins. Alex worries it will hurt her
business in puritanical sex obsessed America. She starts insisting on
condoms for all clients and regular AIDS tests for her employees.
She claims this made people even more likely to use
her business, as the risks associated with picking up a
stranger had changed drastically, and Alex's girls were a familiar,
(31:24):
safer choice. The party continues, Alex says, now wrapped in latex,
heavy winter rains lead to mud slides on the Pacific
Coast Highway that render her Malibu pleasure Palace inaccessible to
even the richest mortals. So Alex moves her center of
operations to a bel Air mansion she calls Kasa Pussy.
(31:47):
Here she entertains her crowd of big money John's, she
claims as much with food and repartee as sex. She
tells of a producer bringing over an actress for Tea
to introduce her to some of Alex's girls for an
upcoming job where she was playing a prostitute in the
late eighties, Alex catches another charge and is thrust unwillingly
(32:07):
into the public eye. One of her girls is dating
a creep who snitches to some cops about his girlfriend's occupation,
and her boss, the LAPD, who already know about Alex,
still set up a staying operation, sending an undercover detective
who's an attractive woman to ask Alex about picking up
some work. Alex is open about her trade and invites
(32:28):
the woman to come work for her, which allows the
detective to accumulate enough evidence that by April of nineteen
eighty eight, the district attorney is charging Alex with two
counts of pandering and one count of pimping. By this point,
Alex is fifty six years old with several health conditions,
and she is scared by the prospect of doing time.
(32:49):
She threatens to go public about her special relationship with
law enforcement, which involves the LAPD turning a blind eye
to Alex's business operation. In exchange for her services as
an informant, and perhaps even some party favors for policemen
from Alex's girls. Then the Johns start freaking out, worried
that their names will come out in the wash of information.
(33:11):
Alex's clients reportedly include bold print names of all kinds
movie stars, producers, and politicians, as well as an international
cast of wealthy businessman in chiks. With her cover already
blown and her phone no longer ringing off the hook
with business, Alex decides to speak candidly with Vanity Fair
(33:31):
reporter Jesse Kornblooth. Alex had moved from bel Air to
a place in West Hollywood, where she poured over her
collection of fancy antiques. Cornbluth gets a good look at
Alex's chamber of secrets and describes it less glamorously than
Alex does, comparing it to a dollhouse. He takes in
the living room's de corps, the blue and white chintz couches,
(33:54):
fancy China crystal vases, and Dolly lithographs, juxtaposed with a kitchy,
moonlit winter night painting. The maid leads him down the
hall past the twelve perfectly clean litter boxes that belong
to Alex's twelve Persian cats. The bedroom is also blue
and white, with French doors and lush flowering indoor plants,
(34:16):
Alex's own take on macambo nightclub style Old Hollywood chic.
Alex is waiting for him on the bed, feeding Ecuadorian
shrimp from the Little Tokyo Fish Market to her favorite cat, Georgie.
She wears a kaftan over her large frame and is
holding Cort from the bed where she normally spends her
days and nights on the phone with clients. Her hair
(34:38):
is black, cropped and thinning, but her gaze is still intense.
Cornbluth compares her to Edith Peoff, Gertrude Stein, and Colette,
a symbol of an old, vanished Bohemian world. According to Alex,
she modernized the idea of running a prostitution business like
a studio stable of stars. The emphasis was on the
(34:59):
idea that Alex's girls were better than any other call
girls you could hire, which she accomplished by successfully creating
a glamorous mystique around them, a brand of elitism and
exclusivity that was reflected in the High Prices. Soon enough,
former Alex girl Heidi Flice will adapt this technique and
modernize it again for the end of the twentieth century.
(35:22):
The clientele being served are men who conflate price with quality.
The more it costs, the better they believe it to be.
It has a yuppie placebo effect, which was mutually beneficial
for the Johns, who wanted to pay a lot for
what they believed to be the top shelf of sex,
and Alex and her girls, who wanted to get paid a.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Lot for the sex.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
This is to help you pay for what your parents
couldn't provide. It's an honorable way station A lot of
stars did.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
This, according to the Johns. Alex could also be sort
of a flake. She put all of her energy into
the makeovers, breast augmentations, new clothes, and haircuts. She talked
up the newest girls to clients, but when it came
to setting a date for a date, she could disappear. However,
one anonymous client of Alex's admits that when the girl
(36:14):
did show up, she'd be the best, So maybe even
keeping the john's waiting was a tactic, if not necessarily
on purpose. Alex's signature piece of advice to the girls wash.
Speaker 7 (36:26):
That beaver like Alex.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Says she only fell in love one more time with
a chic that she never slept with. She visited him
in Europe, but never consummated the relationship. Believing he'd be disappointed,
he introduced her to all of his friends who met her.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
Friends.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
Alex said the girls never had any issues abroad, but
there were stories of girls getting stuck at customs with
wads of cash, and one room about a girl who
never came back from her trip to Saudi Arabia. Alex
sees herself ultimately as an arranger of relationships. There are
plenty of men who want a beautiful wife or girlfriend
but don't want to put in the work to find
(37:14):
and court her. In her eyes, Alex simplifies the process
by providing eligible young bachelorettes who are looking for symbiotic
relationships that will propel them up into the upper classes.
In Alex's view, she simply made the best of a
crooked world where rich men hold all the cards. Everything
was consensual, just under the table, by necessity.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
It's not like the arresting officer painted it. What happens
to these girls afterward, Well, I'll tell you they get
married to people. He wishes he knew.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Obviously, the LAPD hates to see a girl boss winning.
What Alex was doing was illegal, but not unethical, and
why was it illegal anywhay. Alex's own view of sex
was simple, if misogynistic.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
A man screwing around doesn't mean anything. He just likes
to get it off in a new hole once in
a while. Women shouldn't feel bad when their men go
to hookers. The men don't remember who they are.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
She claims to have gotten over her jealousy by letting
one boyfriend date her employees, a madam's version of if
you're going to do it, do it at home. Alex's
internalized sexism and leftover Catholic guilt had her believe that
men are sexual creatures women emotional for someone in the
oldest profession.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
Alex is very old school.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
Wives have one real reason for resentment. Their husbands don't
take care of them. Women aren't cheats by nature, but
they have to be cheats or, in their view, whores,
because their husbands neglect them. That's why I always ask
my clients, did you do your homework? Because you're more
likely to get your wife to understand your cheating if
you do her first.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
The woman who sends Alex to trial is a twenty
one year old undercover policewoman who goes by the name
Renee Berwick. She was introduced to Alex in nineteen eighty
eight as a potential girl and got invited to the
madam's house for tea. In the Big Pitch, Renee said
she was very interested, so Alex asked to see her breasts.
Renee nervously unbuttoned her shirt, trying not to reveal the
(39:29):
wire she was wearing underneath, but Alex demanded bra removal.
She needed to see the goods if she was going
to invest, so she could determine if they needed work.
The wire was almost certainly clipped to the undercover cops bra,
so she demurred.
Speaker 4 (39:44):
Out of feigned.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
Modesty, she departed and helped build the case against Alex.
The big question is why did the cops suddenly drop
a dime on the madam after she enjoyed a special
relationship with them for years. Unbothered, she was arrested a
few times and charged, that time in the seventies, but
presumably in the interim since then. In this late eighties case,
(40:05):
she'd collected as much dirt on the Los Angeles Police
Department as they had on her. A Detective Mike Brambles
from the Organized Crime Intelligence Division admitted to knowing Alex
for nine years. In court, he'd declined to speak about
his relationship with Alex, citing Section ten forty of the
California Evidence Code. Alex said she and Detective Mike Bramble
(40:28):
still talked even after that. Nobody is sure what prompted
the cops to come for her again. Maybe some aspect
of their special relationship soured. Maybe they got itchy about
what she knew about them.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
Faced with the.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
End of her business, Madame Alex rhapsodized about what other
careers she might have to try. She was interested in
opening a health spot in Yelm, Washington, home of the
religious cult Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. Or maybe she'd start
a catering business in La harnessing her old school flower
shop skills that had also served her so.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
Well as a madam.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Detectives testified that Elizabeth Adams had provided important information on
murder suspects, drug dealers, and terrorists, and the prosecutors agreed
to a nineteen ninety one plea bargain in which she
received eighteen months probation. While Alex is caught up in
the sticky case, someone else steps up to become a
(41:24):
high end madam. One of her best and favorite girls,
a young ambitious woman named Heidi Flice.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
This so called person, Heidi whatever did make her a madam? Nothing,
nothing did until that one year, and it was just
out of rage and out of anchor at Alex Elizabeth Adams.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Why does Heidi turn on her formerly beloved mentor and
madam Because when her friend Wendy Tarr was killed, Madame
Alex accused Hideh and her friends of descending like locusts
on the dead girl's apartment to divvy up her luxury
goods like dresses from Eliyah amongst themselves. Heidi found this
accusation so disgusting she decided to humiliate Madame Alex by
(42:15):
becoming her.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
She said, I robbed the apartment before the body was cold,
and I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
That fucking freak, that fat pig freak. I went fucking crazy.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
Heidi and Alex's relationship was clearly very close before it soured.
Madame Alex sent Heidi a book called The Perfumed Garden
a fifteenth century Arabic sex manual and inscribed.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
It to my little love. I'm sure I am more
exciting than your Hungarian fucker. Xoxo Alex.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
This one day, Madame Alex yelled at a girl she
was like you ro ripple in a pond compared to
my Heidi.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
But Heidi also studied Alex, carefully learning her trade. Whatever
distaste she had for Alex's brusque style and pretentious airs
was tempered with a genuine fondness.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Alex was both charming and very cruel. Alex trusted no one,
not even me. I mean I never lied, stole, or
cheated her out of anything, and deep down she knew this.
Speaker 4 (43:35):
That's why we were close.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Next time on Heidi World, with Madame Alex out of
the game, Heidi gets access to her little black book
of high roller clients and starts her own high end
escorting business with a cool nineteen nineties edge. Quickly, everyone
in Los Angeles and all around the world wants to
party with Heide's girls.
Listen to me. This is a woman's business. When a
woman does it, it's fun, there's a giggle in it.
When a man's involved, he's sleazy, he's a pimp. He
may know how to keep girls in line, and he
may make money, but he doesn't know what I do.
Alex Fleming Madam.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Madam Alex Hell. Yeah, she was crazy. She was out
of her mind. But it took a lot more than
just learning from someone. There's a lot more thought that
goes into the escort business than people realize. You have
to learn how to make people feel secure in dealing
with you. Heidi Flace.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Previously on Heidie World. Heidi Flice flunked out of high
school and lit the LA partying scene on fire. She
hooked up with Yvonne Naj, a sleezbag Hungarian director turned
full time sports bookie, who introduced her to LA's secret
world of high end prostitution.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Welcome to Heidi World.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Chapter three, Mid Century Matter. Madame Alex rules LA and
teaches Heidi the rules of the game. Nineteen sixties, seventies,
and eighties. Madame Alex went by a lot of names.
She was variously known as Elizabeth Adams, Betty Jensen, Alex Adam,
(01:57):
and Alex Fleming. But who exactly is the woman who
showed Heidi the ropes of running a high class escort business.
Lucky for us, she wrote an autobiography called Madam nine
O two one zero that fills in a lot of
the details. There's also a Vanity Fair story about her
called I'm Alex, Call Me, written in advance of her
nineteen eighty eight trial date. In the two decades she
(02:20):
ran her call girl business, Madame Alex didn't advertise, she
didn't need to. Word of mouth kept her phone ringing
off the hook. She called herself an antique stealer, and
that was the front she used for decades as she
ran her popular, high class call girl ring. She also
had a special relationship with the cops as an informant,
(02:41):
who were well aware of her and allegedly took bribes
in the form of sex. But she did make business
cards once in nineteen eighty five, with the engraved image
of a bird of Paradise and the copy Alex's aviary
Beautiful and Exotic Birds. But it wasn't the business cards
that got her busted. It was the word of mouth.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Madame Alex was a total blabbermouth. She loved to gossip.
She did not care if there was any truth to
her stories at all, Yet she maintained a classy persona
of hush hush.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Madame Alex knows everyone in town, including an anonymous talent
manager who also knows everyone in town.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
For now, we will call him Rick.
Speaker 5 (03:30):
One night at the Troubadour, I spotted this extraordinary girl.
I was standing with Hollywood's most celebrated lithario, so I
asked them who she was. A professional?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
He whispered.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
That was my first introduction to the notion that on
a scale of one to ten, there were women who
were fifteens, a beautiful bride, witty, and oh by the
way they worked. Once I became aware, I saw these
women everywhere, and I came to learn that most of
them were connected to Alex Rick clients of Alex.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
When I first met Madame Alex, I was surprised to
see that most of the girls working for her were
actually not that attractive. The girl's adrane was twenty eight
to forty three, but Alex kept a pristine reputation of style,
class taste. Whatever Alex maintained this reputation by getting anyone
she needed in her life laid for free. This included journalists, cops, lawyers,
(04:34):
what have you, and in return, these people would do
anything they could to please her to get the freebie.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Alex's exotic birds or creatures as she called them, were
mostly the type of girls she thought her clients wanted,
a type at its peak in the mid eighties, white
blonde and busty with a beechy tan in short, California
girls of the sort dominating hair metal music videos and
the public imagination about la in the nineteen eighties. One
(05:06):
client describes one of Alex's girls as having tawny skin
and an ass like two volleyballs.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
She had one.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Hundred and fifty girls working for her, but Alex stayed
at home, stuffing the millions of dollars she made into
the mattress far from the irs. Alex's business set the
model for Heidi in many ways. She was obsessed with
her girls, seeming classy and intelligent, blending in with the
other young ladies, lunching and shopping with rich older men
(05:34):
in Beverly Hills, always strictly on his dime, of course,
Over and over, the John Say was sheer disbelief that
the girls didn't seem like hookers. The talent impresario and
the vanity fair piece says he lived here for years,
believing that every prostitute in Los Angeles was a teenage
runaway working on Hollywood Boulevard before encountering Alex's flock. There's
(05:59):
a common note condescension from the Johns, a sheer disbelief
that a beautiful, intelligent woman would ever purposely choose sex work.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I was born in Manila to a Spanish Filipino mother
and German father, and when I was twelve, a Japanese
soldier came into our house with his bayonet pointed at us,
ready to do us in. He locked us in and
set the house on fire. I haven't been scared by
much since then.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Madame Alex was born Elizabeth Adams, although even that might
be an alias. She grew up in the Philippines in Makati,
which she calls the Beverly Hills of Manila, the suburb
of Walled Estates and Lovely Gardens. Her father was a
Connecticut born German American named August Hugo Kuntz who moved
to the Philippines there he met Alex's mother, who belonged
(06:52):
to a wealthy dynasty of Spanish colonialists. They produced Alex,
who grew up in pre war luxury in a with
servants and nannies, attending strict Catholic schools and churches. Her
mother reinforced the strict Catholicism at home, terrified that her
daughter would discover sex. In nineteen forty one, World War
(07:14):
II arrived in Manila. Alex's father was an American loyalist,
although his German name could have protected him had he chosen.
He took up with the Gorilla Resistance movement against the
Japanese occupation of the Philippines and was put in a
concentration camp. Alex's mother became obsessed with a fear that
the American gis would deflower her Catholic daughter and send
(07:36):
her to live with an uncle in Japan, where she
was promptly deflowered by an American GI. This gave Alex,
she says, a taste for Americans. She was back in
Manila at the Convent School within the year. Because of
the diverse nature of the Philippines, a place exploited and
financially striated by a long line of colonialist predators. Alex
(07:58):
grew up speaking Chinese, Tagalog, English, Spanish, and German. After
the war ended, Alex's parents divorced and her mother decided
they would move to San Francisco. On the ship that
headed to California via Hawaii, Alex got her first taste
of Hollywood when she befriended fellow passenger Howard Strickling, who
(08:19):
was the head of publicity at MGM Studios. He regaled
her with tales of stars like Carrie Grant. When they
reached San Francisco, Alex made a break for it from
her mom and ended up at another Catholic church in Oakland,
where she worked as a housekeeper for a group of priests.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
In nineteen fifty.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Three, with money wired to her from her dad, she
moved to Los Angeles and got a job at a
dance studio, first as a receptionist and eventually as a
tango instructor. In nineteen fifty five, Alex marries an aerospace
physicist and has what she describes as a typical Eisenhower
fifty's marriage, with a big house in Los Phelis, near
(08:58):
where Cecil B. De Mill lived, and a Cadillac with
tail fins and two wonderful sons. According to Alex, the
nightlife in nineteen fifties, La had nothing on Manila. Glamorous
Hollywood clubs like Ciro's and the Macambo had shut down.
Not that she and her husband went out much.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Most nights. We stayed home with Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Wilke.
After eight years, we found we had nothing to say
to each other and got divorced.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Her husband flees to another state with their two sons
and says if she doesn't agree to a divorce, he
will just keep them there. Keep them, says Alex, and
hangs up. She says she cares about her children, she
just hates her husband's attempt to manipulate her. Freshly divorced,
Alex gets a job at the flower shop in the
Tony Ambassador Hotel, which contains one of LA's last operating
(09:52):
big band supper clubs, the Coconut Grove. Through the flower
arranging world, Alex enters an underground socialis scene of gay
men and starts going to their parties, where she meets
a straight guy who becomes her second husband, an Austrian
businessman who wins her heart by telling her that she
looks like Joan Crawford. She says he has Frank Sinatra
(10:14):
blue eyes. He may also have a Frank Sinatra like
connection to the Italian mafia. They move to fancy Hancock
Park and have a son, but Alex keeps her job
at the Ambassador flower Shop. At the flower shop, Alex
tends to famous customers like Liza Minelli, Jane Fonda, and
(10:34):
the French model and actress Capuccin. One day, Alex gets
a call from a woman named Arabella Carlton, whose brother
is one of her customers at the flower shop. Arabella
asks if Alex wants to buy her business, which she
reveals is a madaming business. Alex is absolutely shocked that Arabella,
(10:55):
a classy, refined english woman, is a madam. Os isn't
sure why Arabella thinks she'd want to take over, but
Arabella sells her on it, saying Alex's people skills at
the flower shop and on the phone make her a natural,
plus it's a great opportunity to make a ton of money.
Alex is so flattered she says yes, and Arabella promises
(11:17):
to train her. At that time, getting caught madam ing
a charge called pandering, could only get you ninety days maximum.
In the Philippines, Alex says, prostitution was completely out in
the open, despite the Catholic culture. Manila had a designated
red light district for its sex workers, but in America
there was a veneer of secrecy to even street level dealings.
(11:41):
Arabella quoted a rate of two hundred dollars an hour,
which Alex compared to the twenty bucks an hour Filipino
bar hostesses got. Back home, she shows Alex how to
work the phones.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Here was this regal woman who looked like she'd be
having tea with Queen Elizabeth, saying things like how'd you
like to come over?
Speaker 4 (11:59):
And books.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
With a five thousand dollars insurance check from earthquake damage
to her house, Alex buys the business. Her husband, who
again was probably in the mafia, says, now you're getting
your feet wet. When she tells him what she's done,
Alex realized very quickly that she had vastly overpaid. She'd
bought Arabella's client lists, which it turns out consisted of
(12:26):
twenty five unfamous older men with erection issues, about half
of whom were already dead. Arabella's stable consisted of only
five girls, who all had day jobs as waitresses and secretaries.
The tremendous financial windfall Arabella had promised seemed unlikely, so
Alex took matters into her own hands to expand the business.
(12:48):
She confessed her new trade to a flower shop client
who ran a big construction company that built postwar homes
around the US. He offered to help by providing her
with a list of fifty big names producers, agents, and
studio executives and telling her to cold call them without
mentioning him, asking if they needed any help entertaining friends.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
The men on the list.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Were all quote unquote players known to hire call girls,
and they were always interested in seeing new talent. Furthermore,
it was the sixties, lots of older men wanted a
taste of the sexual revolution that they felt they were
missing out on. Alex describes the culture clash by saying
that these clients wanted the young, beautiful, and braless, sexually
(13:34):
free girls they kept seeing on the street everywhere, but
they wanted them in garter belts and corsets. Meanwhile, the
movie business was tanking after the studio excesses of the sixties,
while easy Rider ushered in a new era of youth
centric art film influence filmmaking that none of the studios
were primed to understand, and yet.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
The players were hornier than ever. Maybe they were so
depressed by the business that they wanted to lose themselves
in sex. Maybe it was an eat, drink and be
merry for tomorrow. The studio goes into chapter eleven, Attitude
Clute had just come out with Jane Fond as a
fancy hooker. The movie had everyone talking about call girls,
and there just weren't enough of them, not the fancy
(14:19):
New York kind in Los Angeles where the flower children
and rock groupies were giving it away, though not to
the players on my list.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
These are the guys who are way too old for
Woodstock but saw hair and want to meet some young nudists.
So Alex goes scouting for new girls to suit the
new tastes. La has to be full of girls with
untapped potential, girls who came out West to be actresses
and failed to hit the mark, beautiful girls who needed
(14:52):
money fast. Alex says she wants to help the girls,
to rescue them. She calls it a challenge, and the
way she he frames his quest like Catholic missionary work
is probably not a coincidence. Alex recruits at a Beverly
Hills beauty parlor, taking note of which pretty girls are
not wearing wedding rings, striking up conversations, and inviting them
(15:14):
back to hers for a drink. Alex thinks her house,
with its antiques and paintings, denotes a certain upper class
lifestyle they'll want in on. I don't think it occurred
to her that it might look a bit suffy and
old fashioned to their hip, young eyes. She plays up
the fact that she's a housewife with young kids to
show them that the sex business isn't as scary as
(15:35):
they'd been taught. Naming some of her A list clients,
she draws the girls out into confessing they wish they
had more money, and then offers them a new job
working for her.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
One day, Madame Alex was sitting on her bed in
her transparent moomoo, and she said to me, you know, Heidi,
blue and white are regal colors.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Alex's new girls recruit other new girls for her, as
well as adding more Johns to the client list. Some
of the new Johns are celebrities, and Alex can't believe
that even they want to pay for sex, but she
comes to see that high profile men like her girls
because it's a way to cheat on their sometimes also
high profile wives with women whose job it is to
(16:23):
be discreet. A civilian affair could blow up, but pros
don't expect anything more and they know when to leave.
When Heidi World returns, Alex scouts for new talent on
the Sunset Strip.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
Welcome back to Heidi Worlds.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Alex also scouts on Sunset Boulevard for hippie girls who
look like they go to doors shows and frequent The Source,
one of LA's first health food restaurants run by the
Source family cult and its leader father Yod. She gives
the hippie girls a Madam Alex makeover to make them
square enough that they won't scare the Johns who are
of the uptight suit and tie variety. Here's what a
(17:23):
former Alex girl says about Alex's styling technique.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
I wouldn't call what Alex gives you advice. She spares
you nothing. She makes a list of what she wants done,
and she really gets into it. I mean she wants
you get your arms waxed. She gives you the names
of people who do get facials. She tells you what
to buy Anima Marcus. She's put off by anything fleshy,
and if you don't dress conservatively, she's got no problem
(17:50):
telling you in front of an audience, ya look like
a cheap wore. I used to wear what I wanted
when I went out, and then change in the car
into a frumpy sweater, and I went in to get
her the money, and she'd always go, oh, you look
beautiful simon former Alex girl.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
She then backtracks on being so critical and praises some
of Alex's advice, since working for the madam did net
her a sports car and a mortgage down payment. After all,
she still brings Madame Alex flowers and candy for Mother's Day.
Madame Alex takes a cut of forty percent from her employees.
Soon she has a thriving business. By nineteen seventy two,
(18:34):
Alex is making enough bank to quit the Ambassador Flower
Shop and work as a madam full time. Even the
oil crisis and Watergate can't put a dent in her trade.
Her husband keeps his nose out of the ins and
outs of her new side gig, and she doesn't know
any of the particulars of his mob involved property business,
but Alex doesn't keep her mouth entirely shut about her
(18:55):
new occupation. She has a friend who tends bar at
the Ambassador, who she gives kickbacks to for bringing her
new clients. One of the new prospective clients ends up
being a cop doing a sting, and Alex catches her
first pandering case, receiving a sixty day suspended sentence, a
fifty dollars fine, and a year of unsupervised probation. A
(19:18):
week after the sentencing, Alex's second husband drops dead on
the same day as her father from dual heart attacks.
Her marriage of eleven years is suddenly tragically over. At
the same time, her successful madaming business of three months
is on ice. With three young sons to provide for,
Alex makes the decision to go back to madaming. The
(19:40):
field for high end escorts is still wide open. She
feels confident that the big money players will come back
to her for more action, so she prays for her father,
for her husband, and that she'll never get caught again.
In a practical measure, she also reaches out to the
LAPD Vice Division, who' trusted her to establish a useful
(20:02):
alliance behind the scenes.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
That was my big idea, not to expand the book
by aggressive marketing, but to make sure that nobody mistook
my girls for run of the mill hookers, and I
kept my roster fresh. This was not a business where
you peddle your ass, get exploited, and then are tasked
off ice green clients. I never sent girls to weirdos.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Despite her success as a madam in two marriages, Alex
still has hang ups about sex that she blames on
growing up Catholic. She is obsessed with the idea of
classiness as opposed to trashiness, and pushes her very specific
demure refined taste in looks on her girls. After the
death of her second husband, Alex starts putting on a
(20:50):
large amount of weight, which she says she does to
stop cat calls, which it obviously doesn't. Other people say
that Alex starts suffering some serious hell both issues that
affect her physical appearance. What Alex looks like doesn't matter
to her clients, to whom she is just a voice
on the phone.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
According to her book, she.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Saw herself as resembling quote, a darker Marlena dietrich, and
her arms were always covered in scratches from her cats,
who she fed whole fish from a market in Little Tokyo.
Alex falls in love again, this time with a TV
network executive who happens to be married. The affair lasts
seven years, during which Alex is gifted hundreds of thousands
(21:33):
of dollars in jewels and extravagant trips. She cries about
him in expensive therapy sessions, unable to break her addiction
to a taken man. When the therapy finally takes and
the long affair ends for good, Alex swears off men
forever in favor of the company of her cats.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
All of her pleasure is.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Channeled instead into madaming and watching her business take flight.
Every rich man in Los Angeles wants fancy call girls,
and Madame Alex is ready and waiting to heed their calls.
According to Alex, La is a hicktown when it comes
to high end escorting, lacking the glamour, wealth and elegance
of New York or Paris's escort scenes. She is nostalgic
(22:16):
for glory days. She has only heard tale of when
La had glamorous brothels that provided the after parties for
those nights at supper clubs like Ciro's. She even mentions
a mythical brothel that appears in James Elroy's La Confidential
as the Fleur de Lys, with hooker's cut to look
like movie stars such as Greta Garbo, Geene Harlowe, and
(22:38):
Rita Hayworth. There's a rumor that Howard Hughes frequented this brothel,
hiring the girls who looked like the actresses who had
rejected him. I will add that podcaster and film historian KARANEA.
Longworth couldn't find any concrete evidence of this legendary place's
existence when she wrote her Howard Hughes book entitled Seduction.
(22:59):
As the Pie's Roll on Alex surveys her competition, which
according to her includes a few middling madams with no
more than twenty girls working. There are what she calls
cheap street hookers working on Sunset in Hollywood, and what
she calls really scary street hookers on Western Avenue in
West Hollywood.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
There is a.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Massage parlor and the Paris Review, which is a place
where you can take nude photos of models. Amazingly enough,
the Paris Review still exists. It's now called Paris House
and it reopened after COVID.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
And that was it. That was the swinging seventies six
scene in Los Angeles movie Capital of the World.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Alex's main clients are older men longing for the past,
who rhapsodized to her about their glamorous glory days. She
sends them her sunset strip hippie girls turned Belle da Jour.
Everyone goes home happy. Alex gets really rich, what she
calls Beverly Hill rich. Then she says there are some
people she has to personally thank for her good fortune.
(24:05):
Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Michael Eisner, Jimmy Carter, John Travolta,
Donald Trump, Mike Milkin, the Ayatola Homani, Madame Claude, and
the Red Brigade. I know this sounds very cue and on,
but hold tight. She's just thanking them for kickstarting the
economy in the late seventies and early eighties, specifically Jaws
(24:27):
and Star Wars, for bringing in the blockbuster era of movies.
That signals the death knell for the experimental artistic output
of late sixties and seventies New Hollywood, as it makes
the big studios flush with cash again. Baby the tent
pole movies give executives well temp poles, and as cash
(24:49):
becomes king, they are eager to spend it on Alex's girls.
She gives the Hollywood guys glamour girls styled to her
particular taste in what she calls a classic style, which
means what Alex thought looked expensive, creating ladies out of groupies,
as she puts it, and introducing them to the new
generation of baby moguls. She thanks Donald Trump for making
(25:13):
conspicuous consumption come back into style. She thanks Jimmy Carter twice,
first for creating the circumstances under which oil sheiks could
come to Beverly Hills and need entertainment for the night,
and again for the fiscal decisions that backlashed into the
Reagan presidency and the greed is Good eighties. She thanks
the Iyatola for bringing rich Iranians fleeing the nineteen seventy
(25:34):
nine revolution to Beverly Hills, helping usher in a new
style of ostentatious luxury in Los Angeles, and attracting a
more glamorous cultural element into La that she calls admiringly eurotrash.
The jet set quickly outpaces the Hollywood set as repeat
customers willing to spend untold amounts. The rates she'd been
(25:55):
charging three hundred dollars an hour, one thousand dollars for
the night, two thousand dollars a night for trips seem
insultingly low to her highest rollers, so she raises them
to what the market will bear. Alex calls her operation
the Nieman Marcus of sex. The high rollers attract other
high rollers, and none of it attracts the attention of
(26:16):
the cops because the lapdr in Alex's pocket.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
She thrives in the.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
New era of studio millionaires and other rich men who
have to spend their endless money on something besides big
ticket items like luxury.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
Cars and homes.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
In the late seventies and early eighties, she scouts for
new talent at Ma Maison, the hip restaurant with the
unlisted number that launched celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. She becomes
friendly with some of the other major American Madams, like
Sydney Biddle Barrows, who runs a New.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
York escort service called Cachet. They share cross.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
Coastal referrals until Biddle is busted in nineteen eighty four
and dubbed the Mayflower Madam because she is descended from
Mayflower Pilgrims. Biddle Barrows claim the coastal difference between John's
is that men in New York just want to talk
and men in LA.
Speaker 4 (27:04):
Just care about looks.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
For the record, I don't think this is true at all,
because rich people are equally vapid everywhere. Plus think about
all the rich New Yorkers exiled in LA who just
want to talk to hot girls. Back to Alex, at
one point, eighty percent of Alex's clients are rich guys
coming to Los Angeles from the Middle East, so she
(27:27):
starts recruiting differently to fit the taste of her new clientele,
who prefer brunettes.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Alex's girls get.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
Passports and start traveling internationally for work. Some of them
complain back to Alex that the Johns who hired them
just ignore them while they talk and play cards at
parties for hours, only engaging in a fast round of
sex at the very end of the night. Alex doesn't care.
They're just paying for time. The Middle Eastern playboys are
her dream clients. They love to spend money, and they
(27:56):
love Alex, who loves catering to them. One client requests
four girls he saw on an aerobic show. Alex calls
a TV executive friend and gets the proper contacts, offering
the girls twenty five thousand dollars each, which would be
about eighty one thousand dollars now for a single night.
Everyone says yes. Meanwhile, the globalization of the madaming trade
(28:19):
is going both ways, eventually affecting Alex's business.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
In La.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Madame Claude is a Parisian madam with a world renowned
escorting business. She operates out of the Ritz and her
girls are multi lingual international beauties, countesses and models.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
Claude's girls have two years.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Of cultural training for their vocation, and many of Alex's
clients also see Madame Claude. In nineteen eighty, Madame Claude
moves her business to La and Alex is sure she
is screwed, but she quickly prevails in popularity over the
new wares. She compares it to the Beverly Hills Jewish Deli.
Nate Now's remaining more popular in the New York Transplanted
(29:01):
Stage and Carnegie Deullies when they arrived out West. She
also compares beating Madame Claude to the Lakers beating the Celtics.
Speaker 6 (29:11):
She's constantly trying to fix you up and marry you off.
She introduced me to my boyfriend. Marry your boyfriend. She
tells the girls it's better than going to prison. When
you go out with her, she'll value a present. She's
incredibly generous that way, and she'll always tell you to
save money and getell. It's frustrating to her when girls
call it the end of a month and say they
(29:32):
need rent money. She wants to see you do well.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Madame Claude lasted two years in La before she packed
up La suitcase and moved back to France. According to Alex,
it wasn't that.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
The men here had anything against getting blowjobs in French
or getting it on with countesses. But La is a
peculiar tone, a tough tone, and you'd have to sell
La sex, and La not snobby Parasex, but fun sonny
beachy La Sex.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
When Heidi World returns, Madam Alex's business meets the greatest
good eighties.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
Welcome back to Heidi World.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
So Madam Alex's business grows to even higher heights in
the early eighties. She says her clients at the peak
are heads, heads of state, heads of corporations, heads of universities,
heads of studios, heads of record companies. She invests in
real estate, buying a mansion in the Malibu Hills and
having parties there for her customers. In the early eighties,
(31:01):
the AIDS crisis begins. Alex worries it will hurt her
business in puritanical sex obsessed America. She starts insisting on
condoms for all clients and regular AIDS tests for her employees.
She claims this made people even more likely to use
her business, as the risks associated with picking up a
stranger had changed drastically, and Alex's girls were a familiar,
(31:24):
safer choice. The party continues, Alex says, now wrapped in latex,
heavy winter rains lead to mud slides on the Pacific
Coast Highway that render her Malibu pleasure Palace inaccessible to
even the richest mortals. So Alex moves her center of
operations to a bel Air mansion she calls Kasa Pussy.
(31:47):
Here she entertains her crowd of big money John's, she
claims as much with food and repartee as sex. She
tells of a producer bringing over an actress for Tea
to introduce her to some of Alex's girls for an
upcoming job where she was playing a prostitute in the
late eighties, Alex catches another charge and is thrust unwillingly
(32:07):
into the public eye. One of her girls is dating
a creep who snitches to some cops about his girlfriend's occupation,
and her boss, the LAPD, who already know about Alex,
still set up a staying operation, sending an undercover detective
who's an attractive woman to ask Alex about picking up
some work. Alex is open about her trade and invites
(32:28):
the woman to come work for her, which allows the
detective to accumulate enough evidence that by April of nineteen
eighty eight, the district attorney is charging Alex with two
counts of pandering and one count of pimping. By this point,
Alex is fifty six years old with several health conditions,
and she is scared by the prospect of doing time.
(32:49):
She threatens to go public about her special relationship with
law enforcement, which involves the LAPD turning a blind eye
to Alex's business operation. In exchange for her services as
an informant, and perhaps even some party favors for policemen
from Alex's girls. Then the Johns start freaking out, worried
that their names will come out in the wash of information.
(33:11):
Alex's clients reportedly include bold print names of all kinds
movie stars, producers, and politicians, as well as an international
cast of wealthy businessman in chiks. With her cover already
blown and her phone no longer ringing off the hook
with business, Alex decides to speak candidly with Vanity Fair
(33:31):
reporter Jesse Kornblooth. Alex had moved from bel Air to
a place in West Hollywood, where she poured over her
collection of fancy antiques. Cornbluth gets a good look at
Alex's chamber of secrets and describes it less glamorously than
Alex does, comparing it to a dollhouse. He takes in
the living room's de corps, the blue and white chintz couches,
(33:54):
fancy China crystal vases, and Dolly lithographs, juxtaposed with a kitchy,
moonlit winter night painting. The maid leads him down the
hall past the twelve perfectly clean litter boxes that belong
to Alex's twelve Persian cats. The bedroom is also blue
and white, with French doors and lush flowering indoor plants,
(34:16):
Alex's own take on macambo nightclub style Old Hollywood chic.
Alex is waiting for him on the bed, feeding Ecuadorian
shrimp from the Little Tokyo Fish Market to her favorite cat, Georgie.
She wears a kaftan over her large frame and is
holding Cort from the bed where she normally spends her
days and nights on the phone with clients. Her hair
(34:38):
is black, cropped and thinning, but her gaze is still intense.
Cornbluth compares her to Edith Peoff, Gertrude Stein, and Colette,
a symbol of an old, vanished Bohemian world. According to Alex,
she modernized the idea of running a prostitution business like
a studio stable of stars. The emphasis was on the
(34:59):
idea that Alex's girls were better than any other call
girls you could hire, which she accomplished by successfully creating
a glamorous mystique around them, a brand of elitism and
exclusivity that was reflected in the High Prices. Soon enough,
former Alex girl Heidi Flice will adapt this technique and
modernize it again for the end of the twentieth century.
(35:22):
The clientele being served are men who conflate price with quality.
The more it costs, the better they believe it to be.
It has a yuppie placebo effect, which was mutually beneficial
for the Johns, who wanted to pay a lot for
what they believed to be the top shelf of sex,
and Alex and her girls, who wanted to get paid a.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Lot for the sex.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
This is to help you pay for what your parents
couldn't provide. It's an honorable way station A lot of
stars did.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
This, according to the Johns. Alex could also be sort
of a flake. She put all of her energy into
the makeovers, breast augmentations, new clothes, and haircuts. She talked
up the newest girls to clients, but when it came
to setting a date for a date, she could disappear. However,
one anonymous client of Alex's admits that when the girl
(36:14):
did show up, she'd be the best, So maybe even
keeping the john's waiting was a tactic, if not necessarily
on purpose. Alex's signature piece of advice to the girls wash.
Speaker 7 (36:26):
That beaver like Alex.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Says she only fell in love one more time with
a chic that she never slept with. She visited him
in Europe, but never consummated the relationship. Believing he'd be disappointed,
he introduced her to all of his friends who met her.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
Friends.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
Alex said the girls never had any issues abroad, but
there were stories of girls getting stuck at customs with
wads of cash, and one room about a girl who
never came back from her trip to Saudi Arabia. Alex
sees herself ultimately as an arranger of relationships. There are
plenty of men who want a beautiful wife or girlfriend
but don't want to put in the work to find
(37:14):
and court her. In her eyes, Alex simplifies the process
by providing eligible young bachelorettes who are looking for symbiotic
relationships that will propel them up into the upper classes.
In Alex's view, she simply made the best of a
crooked world where rich men hold all the cards. Everything
was consensual, just under the table, by necessity.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
It's not like the arresting officer painted it. What happens
to these girls afterward, Well, I'll tell you they get
married to people. He wishes he knew.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Obviously, the LAPD hates to see a girl boss winning.
What Alex was doing was illegal, but not unethical, and
why was it illegal anywhay. Alex's own view of sex
was simple, if misogynistic.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
A man screwing around doesn't mean anything. He just likes
to get it off in a new hole once in
a while. Women shouldn't feel bad when their men go
to hookers. The men don't remember who they are.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
She claims to have gotten over her jealousy by letting
one boyfriend date her employees, a madam's version of if
you're going to do it, do it at home. Alex's
internalized sexism and leftover Catholic guilt had her believe that
men are sexual creatures women emotional for someone in the
oldest profession.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
Alex is very old school.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
Wives have one real reason for resentment. Their husbands don't
take care of them. Women aren't cheats by nature, but
they have to be cheats or, in their view, whores,
because their husbands neglect them. That's why I always ask
my clients, did you do your homework? Because you're more
likely to get your wife to understand your cheating if
you do her first.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
The woman who sends Alex to trial is a twenty
one year old undercover policewoman who goes by the name
Renee Berwick. She was introduced to Alex in nineteen eighty
eight as a potential girl and got invited to the
madam's house for tea. In the Big Pitch, Renee said
she was very interested, so Alex asked to see her breasts.
Renee nervously unbuttoned her shirt, trying not to reveal the
(39:29):
wire she was wearing underneath, but Alex demanded bra removal.
She needed to see the goods if she was going
to invest, so she could determine if they needed work.
The wire was almost certainly clipped to the undercover cops bra,
so she demurred.
Speaker 4 (39:44):
Out of feigned.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
Modesty, she departed and helped build the case against Alex.
The big question is why did the cops suddenly drop
a dime on the madam after she enjoyed a special
relationship with them for years. Unbothered, she was arrested a
few times and charged, that time in the seventies, but
presumably in the interim since then. In this late eighties case,
(40:05):
she'd collected as much dirt on the Los Angeles Police
Department as they had on her. A Detective Mike Brambles
from the Organized Crime Intelligence Division admitted to knowing Alex
for nine years. In court, he'd declined to speak about
his relationship with Alex, citing Section ten forty of the
California Evidence Code. Alex said she and Detective Mike Bramble
(40:28):
still talked even after that. Nobody is sure what prompted
the cops to come for her again. Maybe some aspect
of their special relationship soured. Maybe they got itchy about
what she knew about them.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
Faced with the.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
End of her business, Madame Alex rhapsodized about what other
careers she might have to try. She was interested in
opening a health spot in Yelm, Washington, home of the
religious cult Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. Or maybe she'd start
a catering business in La harnessing her old school flower
shop skills that had also served her so.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
Well as a madam.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Detectives testified that Elizabeth Adams had provided important information on
murder suspects, drug dealers, and terrorists, and the prosecutors agreed
to a nineteen ninety one plea bargain in which she
received eighteen months probation. While Alex is caught up in
the sticky case, someone else steps up to become a
(41:24):
high end madam. One of her best and favorite girls,
a young ambitious woman named Heidi Flice.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
This so called person, Heidi whatever did make her a madam? Nothing,
nothing did until that one year, and it was just
out of rage and out of anchor at Alex Elizabeth Adams.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Why does Heidi turn on her formerly beloved mentor and
madam Because when her friend Wendy Tarr was killed, Madame
Alex accused Hideh and her friends of descending like locusts
on the dead girl's apartment to divvy up her luxury
goods like dresses from Eliyah amongst themselves. Heidi found this
accusation so disgusting she decided to humiliate Madame Alex by
(42:15):
becoming her.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
She said, I robbed the apartment before the body was cold,
and I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
That fucking freak, that fat pig freak. I went fucking crazy.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
Heidi and Alex's relationship was clearly very close before it soured.
Madame Alex sent Heidi a book called The Perfumed Garden
a fifteenth century Arabic sex manual and inscribed.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
It to my little love. I'm sure I am more
exciting than your Hungarian fucker. Xoxo Alex.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
This one day, Madame Alex yelled at a girl she
was like you ro ripple in a pond compared to
my Heidi.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
But Heidi also studied Alex, carefully learning her trade. Whatever
distaste she had for Alex's brusque style and pretentious airs
was tempered with a genuine fondness.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Alex was both charming and very cruel. Alex trusted no one,
not even me. I mean I never lied, stole, or
cheated her out of anything, and deep down she knew this.
Speaker 4 (43:35):
That's why we were close.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Next time on Heidi World, with Madame Alex out of
the game, Heidi gets access to her little black book
of high roller clients and starts her own high end
escorting business with a cool nineteen nineties edge. Quickly, everyone
in Los Angeles and all around the world wants to
party with Heide's girls.
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