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 Madam Alex. Hell. Yeah, she was crazy.
(00:44):
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. Heid de Flace previously on Heidi World,
Heidi Flice flunked out of high school and lit the
(01:07):
l A partying scene on fire. She hooked up with
Yvonne Nage, a sleezebag Hungarian director turned full time sports bookie,
who introduced her to l a secret world of high
end prostitution. Welcome to Heidi World, Chapter three, mid Century
(01:34):
Madam Madam Alex rules l A and teaches Heidi the
rules of the game. Sixties, seventies and eighties. Madam Alex
went by a lot of names. She was variously known
as Elizabeth Adams, Betty Jensen, Alex Adam, and Alex Fleming.
(01:58):
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
oh 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 trial date. In
(02:19):
the two decades she ran her call girl business, Madam
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, who were well aware of her
(02:42):
and allegedly took bribes in the form of sex. But
she did make business cards once in 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
card that got her busted. It was the word of mouth.
(03:06):
Madam Alex was a total blabber mouth. 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. Madame Alex knows everyone in town, including
an anonymous talent manager who also knows everyone in town.
(03:26):
For now, we will call him Rick. One night at
the Troubadoor, I spotted this extraordinary girl. I was standing
with Hollywood's most celebrated lothario, so I asked him who
she was a professional? He whispered, That was my first
introduction to the notion that on a scale of one
(03:47):
to tend, there were women who were fifteens beautiful, bride, witty,
and 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. When I first met Madam Alex, I was
(04:10):
surprised to see that most of the girls working for
her were actually not that attractive. The girl's Adrian 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 free
b 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 beachy tan in short, California
(04:59):
girls of the sort dominating hair metal music videos and
the public imagination about l A in the nineteen eighties.
One client describes one of Alex's girls as having tawny
skin and an ass like two volleyballs. She had a
hundred and fifty girls working for her, but Alex stayed
at home, stuffing the millions of dollars she made into
(05:20):
the mattress. Far from the I R. S. 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 in Beverly Hills, always strictly on his dime.
Of course, over and over the John say was sheer
(05:41):
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
a common note condescension from the John's a sheer disbelief
(06:03):
that a beautiful, intelligent woman would ever purposefully choose sex work.
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
(06:25):
much since that. Madam Alex was born Elizabeth Adams, although
even that might be an alias. She grew up in
the Philippines and Maccati, 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
(06:47):
Hugo Kuntz who moved to the Philippines. There he met
Alex's mother, who belonged to a wealthy dynasty of Spanish colonialists.
They produced Alex, who grew up in pre war luxury
in a mansion with servants and nanny's, attending strict Catholic
schools and churches. Her mother reinforced the strict Catholicism at home,
(07:09):
terrified that her daughter would discover sex. In nineteen forty one,
World War Two 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 guerrilla resistance
movement against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and was
put in a concentration camp. Alex's mother became obsessed with
(07:31):
the fear that the American gis would deflower her Catholic
daughter and sent 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
(07:53):
exploited and financially striated by a long line of colonialist predators,
Alex 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
(08:13):
taste of Hollywood when she befriended fellow passenger Howard Strickling,
who 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
(08:34):
group of priests. In nineteen fifty 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 Mary's an aerospace physicist and has what
she describes as a typical Eisenhower fifties marriage, with a
(08:56):
big house in Los Felis, near where Cecil B. De
Mille lived, and a Cadillac with tail fans and two
wonderful sons. According to Alex, the nightlife in n l
A had nothing on Manila. Glamorous Hollywood clubs like Ciro's
and the Macombo had shut down. Not that she and
her husband went out much. Most nights. We stayed home
(09:18):
with Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Wilke. After eight years, we
found we had nothing to say to each other and
got divorced. 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,
(09:40):
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 l A's last
operating big band supper clubs, the Coconut Grove. Through the
flower arranging world, Alex enters an underground social scene of
gay men and starts going to their parties, where she
(10:03):
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 blue eyes. He may also have a Frank Sinatra
like connection to the Italian mafia. They moved to fancy
Hancock Park and have a son, but Alex keeps her
(10:26):
job at the Ambassador flower Shop. At the flower shop,
Alex tends to famous customers like Liza Minnelli, Jane Fonda,
and the French model and actress Cappuccin. One day, Alex
gets a call from a woman named Arabella Carlton, who's
brother is one of her customers at the flower shop.
Arabella asks if Alex wants to buy her business, which
(10:48):
she reveals is a maddening business. Alex is absolutely shocked
that Arabella, a classy, refined englishwoman, is a madam. She
also I wasn'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
(11:08):
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 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.
(11:31):
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. Arabella quoted a rate of two
hundred dollars an hour, which Alex compared to the twenty
bucks an our Filipino bar hostesses got. Back home, she
shows Alex how to work the phones. Here was this
(11:54):
regal woman who looked like she'd be having tea with
Queen Elizabeth, saying things like how would you like to
come over? And of books. With a five thousand dollar
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 when she tells
(12:15):
him what she's done, Alex realized very quickly that she
had vastly overpaid. She had bought Arabella's client lists, which
it turns out consisted of 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
(12:37):
waitresses and secretaries. The tremendous financial windfall Arabella had promised
seemed unlikely, so Alex took matters into her own hands
to expand the business. She confessed her new trade to
a flower shop client who ran a big construction company
that built post war homes around the US. He offered
to help by providing her with a list of fifty
(12:59):
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. The men on the list
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
(13:23):
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 braw less
sexually 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
(13:45):
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 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.
(14:07):
The studio goes into chapter eleven Attitude Clute had just
come out with Jane Bond as a fancy hooker. The
movie had everyone talking about call girls, and they're just
weren't enough of them, Not the fancy 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. These are the guys who are way too
(14:32):
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. L A 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 money fast. Alex says she wants
(14:54):
to help the girls, to rescue them. She calls it
a challenge, and the way she frames this 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 back to hers for a drink. Alex
(15:17):
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 stuffy 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 they've been taught. Naming some of her
(15:37):
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. One day, Madam Alex
was sitting on her bed in her transparent Mumu and
she said to me, you know, I D blue and
white are regal colors. Alex's new girls recruit other new
(16:04):
girls for her, as well as adding more John's 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.
There sometimes also high profile wives with women whose job
it is to be discreet. A civilian affair could blow up,
(16:26):
but pros don't expect anything more and they know when
to leave. When Heidi World returns, Alex scouts for new
talent on the Sunsets Tripe Welcome back to Heidi World.
(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 l A's first health food restaurants run by
the Source family cult and its leader father Yad. She
gives the hippie girls a Madam Alex makeover to make
them square enough that they won't scare the John's who
are of the uptight studentie variety. Here's what a former
(17:23):
Alex girl says about Alex's styling technique. 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 to get
your arms waxed. She gives you the names of people
who do good facials. She tells you what to buy
(17:44):
a NeiMa Marcus. She's put off by anything fleshy, and
if you don't dress conservatively, she's got no problem telling
you in front of an audience you look like a
cheap poor I used to wear what I wanted when
I went out, and then change in the car into
a frumpy sweater when I went in to give her
the money, and she'd always go, oh, you look beautiful,
(18:05):
simone former Alex girl. 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 Madam Alex
flowers and candy for Mother's Day. Madam Alex takes a
(18:26):
cut of from her employees. Soon she has a thriving business.
By v two, 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
(18:47):
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 new occupation. She has a friend who
tends bar at the Ambassador who she gives kickbacks to
you 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
(19:11):
day suspended sentence, a fifty dollar fine, and a year
of unsupervised probation. A 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
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business of three months is on ice. With three young
sons to provide for, Alex makes the decision to go
back to madam NG. The 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 praised for her father, for her husband, and
(19:53):
that she'll never get caught again. In a practical measure,
she also reaches out to the l ap D Vice Division,
who usted her to establish a useful alliance behind the scenes.
That was my big idea, not expand the book by
aggressive marketing, but to make sure that nobody must took
my girls for run of the mill hookers, and I
(20:15):
kept my roster fresh. This was not a business where
you peddle your ass, get exploited, and then are cast
off ice cream clients. I never sent girls to weirdos.
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
(20:38):
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
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 how issues that affect
(21:01):
her physical appearance. What Alex looks like doesn't matter to
her clients, to whom she is just a voice on
the phone. According to her book, she 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
(21:22):
in love again, this time with the TV network executive
who happens to be married. The affair last seven years,
during which Alex has gifted hundreds of thousands of dollars
in jewels and extravagant trips. She cries about him an
expensive therapy sessions, unable to break her addiction to a
taken man. When the therapy finally takes and the long
(21:45):
affair ends for good, Alex swears off men forever in
favor of the company of her cats. All of her
pleasure is channeled instead into maddening and watching her business
take flight. Every rich man in Los Angeles wants fancy
call girls, and Madam Alex is ready and waiting to
heed their calls. According to Alex, l A is a
(22:07):
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 for glory days. She has only heard tale
of when l A had glamorous brothels that provided the
after parties for those nights at supper clubs like Cerros.
She even mentions a mythical brothel that appears in James
(22:30):
Elroy's l A Confidential as the Fleur de Leis, with
hooker's cut to look like movie stars such as Greta Garbow,
Gene Harlowe, and 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 Creina Longworth couldn't find any concrete
(22:52):
evidence of this legendary place's existence when she wrote her
Howard Hughes book entitled Deduction. As the Seven These roll on,
Alex surveys her competition, which according to her includes a
few middling madam's 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
(23:16):
hookers on Western Avenue in West Hollywood. There is a
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 and that was. That was
the swinging seventies six scene in Los Angeles, movie Capital
(23:39):
of the World. 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 belde Jour. Everyone goes home happy. Alex gets really rich.
What she calls Beverly Hill is rich. Then she says
(24:02):
there are some people she has to personally thank for
her good fortune. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Michael Eisner, Jimmy Carter,
John Travolta, Donald Trump, Mike Milkin, the Ayatollah, Homemaany Madam Claude,
and the Red Brigade. I know this sounds very cu
and on, but hold tight. She's just thanking them for
(24:22):
kickstarting the economy in the late seventies and early eighties,
specifically Jaws 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 flushed with cash again. Baby,
(24:44):
the tent pole movies give executives well tent poles, and
as cash 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, all which means what Alex thought looked expensive,
creating ladies out of groupies, as she puts it, and
(25:07):
introducing them to the new generation of baby moguls. She
thanks Donald Trump for making conspicuous consumption come back into style.
She thanks Jimmy Carter twice, first for creating the circumstances
under which oil chics 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
(25:28):
is Good eighties. She thanks the Ayatollah for bringing rich
Iranians fleeing the revolution to Beverly Hills, helping usher in
a new style of ostentatious luxury in Los Angeles, and
attracting a more glamorous cultural element into l a that
she calls admiringly eurotrash. The jet set quickly outpaces the
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Hollywood set as repeat customers willing to spend untold amounts.
The rates she'd been charging three dollars an hour a
thousand dollars for the night to the 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 Neiman Marcus of sex. The
(26:12):
high rollers attract other high rollers, and none of it
attracts the attention of the cops because the L A
P D R in Alex's pocket. She thrives in the
new era of studio millionaires and other rich men who
have to spend their endless money on something besides big
ticket items like luxury cars and homes. In the late
seventies and early eighties, she scouts for new talent at Mamaison,
(26:34):
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 York escort service called cash A. They share
cross coastal referrals until Biddle is busted in and dubbed
the Mayflower Madam because she has descended from Mayflower Pilgrims.
(26:58):
Biddle Barrows claim the coastal difference between John's is that
men in New York just want to talk and men
in l A just care about looks. 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 l A who just want
to talk to hot girls. Back to Alex. At one point,
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of Alex's clients are rich guys coming to Los Angeles
from the Middle East, so she starts recruiting differently to
fit the taste of her new clientele, who prefer brunettes.
Alex's girls get passports and start traveling internationally for work.
Some of them complain back to Alex that the John's
who hired them just ignore them while they talk and
(27:42):
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 love Alex, who loves catering to them. One
client requests four girls he saw on an aerobic show
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Alex calls a TV executive friend and gets the proper contacts,
offering the girls thod dollars each, which would be about
eighty one thousand dollars now for a single night. Everyone
says yes. Meanwhile, the globalization of the madam ing trade
is going both ways, eventually affecting Alex's business. In l A,
(28:25):
Madam 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. Claude's
girls have two years of cultural training for their vocation,
and many of Alex's clients also see Madam Claude. In
(28:45):
Madame Claude moves her business to l A, 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 NAL's remaining more popular in
the New York transplanted Stage and Carnegie Delis when they
arrived out West. She also compares beating Madame Claude to
(29:07):
the Lakers beating the Celtics. 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 get ll
(29:29):
It's frustrating to her when girls call at the end
in a month and say they need rent money. She
wants to see you do well. Madame Claude lasted two
years in l A before she packed up LA suitcase
and moved back to France. According to Alex, it wasn't
(29:49):
that the men here had anything against getting blow jobs
in French or getting it on with countesses. But Ella
is a peculiar tone, a tough tone, and you have
to sell l a sex in l A. Not snobby
para sex, but ferns, sunny, beachy l a sex. When
(30:10):
Heidi World returns, Madam Alex's business meets the greed is
Good eighties. Welcome back to Heidi World. So Madam Alex's
(30:39):
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, the AIDS crisis begins.
(31:03):
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, safer choice. The
(31:26):
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 bell Air mansion she calls Cosa Pussy. Here she
(31:47):
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 into the
(32:08):
public eye. One of her girls is dating a creep
who snitches to some cops about his girlfriend's occupation, and
her boss, the l a p D, 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
(32:28):
and invites the woman to come work for her, which
allows the detective to accumulate enough evidence that by April
of 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 l a p D 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 John start
freaking out, worried that their names will come out in
the wash of information. Alex's clients reportedly include bold print
(33:13):
names of all kinds movie stars, producers, and politicians, as
well as an international cast of wealthy businessman and 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 reporter Jesse Cornbluth. Alex had moved
(33:34):
from bel Air to a place in West Hollywood, where
she poored it 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 rooms, decre the
blue and white chintz couches, fancy China crystal vases, and
(33:57):
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 belonged to Alex's twelve Persian cats.
The bedroom is also blue and white, with French doors
and lush flowering indoor plants Alex's own take on macambo
(34:18):
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 court from
the bed where she normally spends her days and nights
on the phone with clients. Her hair is black, cropped
(34:39):
and thinning, but her gaze is still intense. Corn Bluth
compares her to Edith pe Off, 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
(35:00):
yea 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 John's, 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 lot for the sex. This is to help you
(35:46):
pay for what your parents couldn't provide. It's an honorable
way station. A lot of stars did this, according to
the John's. 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
(36:06):
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 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 that beaver.
(36:37):
Alex 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 friends. 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.
(37:00):
We're 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 and court her. In her eyes,
Alex simplifies the process by providing eligible young bachelorettes who
(37:20):
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. It's not like the arresting officer painted it.
(37:41):
What happens to these girls afterwards, Well, I'll tell you
they get married to people he wishes he knew. Obviously,
the l a p d. Hates to see a girl
boss winning. What Alex was doing was illegal, but not unethical.
And why was it illegal anyway. Alex's own view of
(38:01):
sex was simple, if misogynistic. 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. She claims to have gotten over
her jealousy by letting one boyfriend date her employees, a
(38:25):
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 belief that men are sexual creatures women emotional
for someone in the oldest profession. Alex is very old school.
Wives have one real reason for resentment. Their husbands don't
(38:47):
take care of them. Women are cheats by nature, but
they have to be cheats or in their view, whores,
because their husband's 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. The woman who sends Alex to
(39:08):
trial is a twenty one year old undercover policewoman who
goes by the name Renee Berwick. She was introduced to
Alex 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. Out of feigned modesty, She departed and
helped build the case against Alex. The big question is
(39:50):
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 charge that time
in the seventies, but presumably in the interim since then.
In this late eighties case, she had collected as much
dirt on the Los Angeles Police Department as they had
on her. A detective Mike Brambles from the Organized Crime
(40:14):
Intelligence Division admitted to knowing Alex for nine years in court,
he declined to speak about his relationship with Alex, sighting
section ten forty of the California Evidence Code. Alex said
she and Detective Mike Bramble 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.
(40:37):
Maybe they got itchy about what she knew about them.
Faced with the end of her business, Madam 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 Ramatha's School of Enlightenment. Or
maybe she'd start a catering business in l A, harnessing
(40:58):
her old school flower shop skills that had also served
her so well as a madam. Detectives testified that Elizabeth
Adams had provided important information on murder suspects, drug dealers,
and terrorists, and the prosecutors agreed to bargain in which
she received eighteen months probation. While Alex is caught up
(41:20):
in the sticky case, someone else steps up to become
a high end madam, one of her best and favorite girls,
a young, ambitious woman, named Heidi Flice, This so called
person Heidi whatever did make her a madam? Nothing, nothing
did until that one year, And it was just out
(41:41):
of rage and out of anchor at Alex Elizabeth Adams.
Why does Heidi turn on her formerly beloved mentor in
Madam Because when her friend Wendy Tar was killed, Madam
Alex accused Hide and her friends of descending like locusts
(42:02):
on the dead girl's apartment to divvy up her luxury
goods like dresses from Elijah amongst themselves. How had he
found this accusation so disgusting she decided to humiliate Madame
Alex by becoming her. She said, I robbed the apartment
before the body was cold, and I was like, what
the funk are you talking about? That fucking freak, that
(42:25):
fat pig freak. I went fucking crazy. Heidi and Alex's
relationship was clearly very close before it soured. Madam Alex
sent Heidi a book called The Perfumed Garden, a fifteenth
century Arabic sex manual, and inscribed it to my little love,
(42:47):
I'm sure I am more exciting than your Hungarian fucker.
X O x O Alex. This one day Madame Alex
yeld at a girl. She was like r a ripple
in a pond compared to my Heidi. But Heidi also
(43:09):
studied Alex, carefully learning her trade. Whatever distaste she had
for Alex's brusque style and pretentious airs was tempered with
a genuine fondness. 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
(43:32):
deep down she knew this. That's why we were close.
Next time on Heidi World, with Madam Alex out of
the game, Heidi gets access to her little black book
(43:55):
of high roller clients and starts her own high end
escorting business with a cool nineteen nineties edged. Quickly, everyone
in Los Angeles and all around the world wants to
party with Heidees 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 Madam Alex. Hell. Yeah, she was crazy.
(00:44):
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. Heid de Flace previously on Heidi World,
Heidi Flice flunked out of high school and lit the
(01:07):
l A partying scene on fire. She hooked up with
Yvonne Nage, a sleezebag Hungarian director turned full time sports bookie,
who introduced her to l a secret world of high
end prostitution. Welcome to Heidi World, Chapter three, mid Century
(01:34):
Madam Madam Alex rules l A and teaches Heidi the
rules of the game. Sixties, seventies and eighties. Madam Alex
went by a lot of names. She was variously known
as Elizabeth Adams, Betty Jensen, Alex Adam, and Alex Fleming.
(01:58):
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
oh 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 trial date. In
(02:19):
the two decades she ran her call girl business, Madam
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, who were well aware of her
(02:42):
and allegedly took bribes in the form of sex. But
she did make business cards once in 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
card that got her busted. It was the word of mouth.
(03:06):
Madam Alex was a total blabber mouth. 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. Madame Alex knows everyone in town, including
an anonymous talent manager who also knows everyone in town.
(03:26):
For now, we will call him Rick. One night at
the Troubadoor, I spotted this extraordinary girl. I was standing
with Hollywood's most celebrated lothario, so I asked him who
she was a professional? He whispered, That was my first
introduction to the notion that on a scale of one
(03:47):
to tend, there were women who were fifteens beautiful, bride, witty,
and 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. When I first met Madam Alex, I was
(04:10):
surprised to see that most of the girls working for
her were actually not that attractive. The girl's Adrian 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 free
b 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 beachy tan in short, California
(04:59):
girls of the sort dominating hair metal music videos and
the public imagination about l A in the nineteen eighties.
One client describes one of Alex's girls as having tawny
skin and an ass like two volleyballs. She had a
hundred and fifty girls working for her, but Alex stayed
at home, stuffing the millions of dollars she made into
(05:20):
the mattress. Far from the I R. S. 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 in Beverly Hills, always strictly on his dime.
Of course, over and over the John say was sheer
(05:41):
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
a common note condescension from the John's a sheer disbelief
(06:03):
that a beautiful, intelligent woman would ever purposefully choose sex work.
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
(06:25):
much since that. Madam Alex was born Elizabeth Adams, although
even that might be an alias. She grew up in
the Philippines and Maccati, 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
(06:47):
Hugo Kuntz who moved to the Philippines. There he met
Alex's mother, who belonged to a wealthy dynasty of Spanish colonialists.
They produced Alex, who grew up in pre war luxury
in a mansion with servants and nanny's, attending strict Catholic
schools and churches. Her mother reinforced the strict Catholicism at home,
(07:09):
terrified that her daughter would discover sex. In nineteen forty one,
World War Two 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 guerrilla resistance
movement against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and was
put in a concentration camp. Alex's mother became obsessed with
(07:31):
the fear that the American gis would deflower her Catholic
daughter and sent 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
(07:53):
exploited and financially striated by a long line of colonialist predators,
Alex 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
(08:13):
taste of Hollywood when she befriended fellow passenger Howard Strickling,
who 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
(08:34):
group of priests. In nineteen fifty 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 Mary's an aerospace physicist and has what
she describes as a typical Eisenhower fifties marriage, with a
(08:56):
big house in Los Felis, near where Cecil B. De
Mille lived, and a Cadillac with tail fans and two
wonderful sons. According to Alex, the nightlife in n l
A had nothing on Manila. Glamorous Hollywood clubs like Ciro's
and the Macombo had shut down. Not that she and
her husband went out much. Most nights. We stayed home
(09:18):
with Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Wilke. After eight years, we
found we had nothing to say to each other and
got divorced. 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,
(09:40):
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 l A's last
operating big band supper clubs, the Coconut Grove. Through the
flower arranging world, Alex enters an underground social scene of
gay men and starts going to their parties, where she
(10:03):
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 blue eyes. He may also have a Frank Sinatra
like connection to the Italian mafia. They moved to fancy
Hancock Park and have a son, but Alex keeps her
(10:26):
job at the Ambassador flower Shop. At the flower shop,
Alex tends to famous customers like Liza Minnelli, Jane Fonda,
and the French model and actress Cappuccin. One day, Alex
gets a call from a woman named Arabella Carlton, who's
brother is one of her customers at the flower shop.
Arabella asks if Alex wants to buy her business, which
(10:48):
she reveals is a maddening business. Alex is absolutely shocked
that Arabella, a classy, refined englishwoman, is a madam. She
also I wasn'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
(11:08):
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 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.
(11:31):
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. Arabella quoted a rate of two
hundred dollars an hour, which Alex compared to the twenty
bucks an our Filipino bar hostesses got. Back home, she
shows Alex how to work the phones. Here was this
(11:54):
regal woman who looked like she'd be having tea with
Queen Elizabeth, saying things like how would you like to
come over? And of books. With a five thousand dollar
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 when she tells
(12:15):
him what she's done, Alex realized very quickly that she
had vastly overpaid. She had bought Arabella's client lists, which
it turns out consisted of 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
(12:37):
waitresses and secretaries. The tremendous financial windfall Arabella had promised
seemed unlikely, so Alex took matters into her own hands
to expand the business. She confessed her new trade to
a flower shop client who ran a big construction company
that built post war homes around the US. He offered
to help by providing her with a list of fifty
(12:59):
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. The men on the list
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
(13:23):
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 braw less
sexually 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
(13:45):
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 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.
(14:07):
The studio goes into chapter eleven Attitude Clute had just
come out with Jane Bond as a fancy hooker. The
movie had everyone talking about call girls, and they're just
weren't enough of them, Not the fancy 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. These are the guys who are way too
(14:32):
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. L A 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 money fast. Alex says she wants
(14:54):
to help the girls, to rescue them. She calls it
a challenge, and the way she frames this 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 back to hers for a drink. Alex
(15:17):
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 stuffy 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 they've been taught. Naming some of her
(15:37):
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. One day, Madam Alex
was sitting on her bed in her transparent Mumu and
she said to me, you know, I D blue and
white are regal colors. Alex's new girls recruit other new
(16:04):
girls for her, as well as adding more John's 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.
There sometimes also high profile wives with women whose job
it is to be discreet. A civilian affair could blow up,
(16:26):
but pros don't expect anything more and they know when
to leave. When Heidi World returns, Alex scouts for new
talent on the Sunsets Tripe Welcome back to Heidi World.
(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 l A's first health food restaurants run by
the Source family cult and its leader father Yad. She
gives the hippie girls a Madam Alex makeover to make
them square enough that they won't scare the John's who
are of the uptight studentie variety. Here's what a former
(17:23):
Alex girl says about Alex's styling technique. 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 to get
your arms waxed. She gives you the names of people
who do good facials. She tells you what to buy
(17:44):
a NeiMa Marcus. She's put off by anything fleshy, and
if you don't dress conservatively, she's got no problem telling
you in front of an audience you look like a
cheap poor I used to wear what I wanted when
I went out, and then change in the car into
a frumpy sweater when I went in to give her
the money, and she'd always go, oh, you look beautiful,
(18:05):
simone former Alex girl. 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 Madam Alex
flowers and candy for Mother's Day. Madam Alex takes a
(18:26):
cut of from her employees. Soon she has a thriving business.
By v two, 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
(18:47):
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 new occupation. She has a friend who
tends bar at the Ambassador who she gives kickbacks to
you 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
(19:11):
day suspended sentence, a fifty dollar fine, and a year
of unsupervised probation. A 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
(19:32):
business of three months is on ice. With three young
sons to provide for, Alex makes the decision to go
back to madam NG. The 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 praised for her father, for her husband, and
(19:53):
that she'll never get caught again. In a practical measure,
she also reaches out to the l ap D Vice Division,
who usted her to establish a useful alliance behind the scenes.
That was my big idea, not expand the book by
aggressive marketing, but to make sure that nobody must took
my girls for run of the mill hookers, and I
(20:15):
kept my roster fresh. This was not a business where
you peddle your ass, get exploited, and then are cast
off ice cream clients. I never sent girls to weirdos.
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
(20:38):
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
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 how issues that affect
(21:01):
her physical appearance. What Alex looks like doesn't matter to
her clients, to whom she is just a voice on
the phone. According to her book, she 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
(21:22):
in love again, this time with the TV network executive
who happens to be married. The affair last seven years,
during which Alex has gifted hundreds of thousands of dollars
in jewels and extravagant trips. She cries about him an
expensive therapy sessions, unable to break her addiction to a
taken man. When the therapy finally takes and the long
(21:45):
affair ends for good, Alex swears off men forever in
favor of the company of her cats. All of her
pleasure is channeled instead into maddening and watching her business
take flight. Every rich man in Los Angeles wants fancy
call girls, and Madam Alex is ready and waiting to
heed their calls. According to Alex, l A is a
(22:07):
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 for glory days. She has only heard tale
of when l A had glamorous brothels that provided the
after parties for those nights at supper clubs like Cerros.
She even mentions a mythical brothel that appears in James
(22:30):
Elroy's l A Confidential as the Fleur de Leis, with
hooker's cut to look like movie stars such as Greta Garbow,
Gene Harlowe, and 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 Creina Longworth couldn't find any concrete
(22:52):
evidence of this legendary place's existence when she wrote her
Howard Hughes book entitled Deduction. As the Seven These roll on,
Alex surveys her competition, which according to her includes a
few middling madam's 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
(23:16):
hookers on Western Avenue in West Hollywood. There is a
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 and that was. That was
the swinging seventies six scene in Los Angeles, movie Capital
(23:39):
of the World. 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 belde Jour. Everyone goes home happy. Alex gets really rich.
What she calls Beverly Hill is rich. Then she says
(24:02):
there are some people she has to personally thank for
her good fortune. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Michael Eisner, Jimmy Carter,
John Travolta, Donald Trump, Mike Milkin, the Ayatollah, Homemaany Madam Claude,
and the Red Brigade. I know this sounds very cu
and on, but hold tight. She's just thanking them for
(24:22):
kickstarting the economy in the late seventies and early eighties,
specifically Jaws 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 flushed with cash again. Baby,
(24:44):
the tent pole movies give executives well tent poles, and
as cash 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, all which means what Alex thought looked expensive,
creating ladies out of groupies, as she puts it, and
(25:07):
introducing them to the new generation of baby moguls. She
thanks Donald Trump for making conspicuous consumption come back into style.
She thanks Jimmy Carter twice, first for creating the circumstances
under which oil chics 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
(25:28):
is Good eighties. She thanks the Ayatollah for bringing rich
Iranians fleeing the revolution to Beverly Hills, helping usher in
a new style of ostentatious luxury in Los Angeles, and
attracting a more glamorous cultural element into l a that
she calls admiringly eurotrash. The jet set quickly outpaces the
(25:49):
Hollywood set as repeat customers willing to spend untold amounts.
The rates she'd been charging three dollars an hour a
thousand dollars for the night to the 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 Neiman Marcus of sex. The
(26:12):
high rollers attract other high rollers, and none of it
attracts the attention of the cops because the L A
P D R in Alex's pocket. She thrives in the
new era of studio millionaires and other rich men who
have to spend their endless money on something besides big
ticket items like luxury cars and homes. In the late
seventies and early eighties, she scouts for new talent at Mamaison,
(26:34):
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 York escort service called cash A. They share
cross coastal referrals until Biddle is busted in and dubbed
the Mayflower Madam because she has descended from Mayflower Pilgrims.
(26:58):
Biddle Barrows claim the coastal difference between John's is that
men in New York just want to talk and men
in l A just care about looks. 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 l A who just want
to talk to hot girls. Back to Alex. At one point,
(27:22):
of Alex's clients are rich guys coming to Los Angeles
from the Middle East, so she starts recruiting differently to
fit the taste of her new clientele, who prefer brunettes.
Alex's girls get passports and start traveling internationally for work.
Some of them complain back to Alex that the John's
who hired them just ignore them while they talk and
(27:42):
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 love Alex, who loves catering to them. One
client requests four girls he saw on an aerobic show
(28:04):
Alex calls a TV executive friend and gets the proper contacts,
offering the girls thod dollars each, which would be about
eighty one thousand dollars now for a single night. Everyone
says yes. Meanwhile, the globalization of the madam ing trade
is going both ways, eventually affecting Alex's business. In l A,
(28:25):
Madam 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. Claude's
girls have two years of cultural training for their vocation,
and many of Alex's clients also see Madam Claude. In
(28:45):
Madame Claude moves her business to l A, 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 NAL's remaining more popular in
the New York transplanted Stage and Carnegie Delis when they
arrived out West. She also compares beating Madame Claude to
(29:07):
the Lakers beating the Celtics. 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 get ll
(29:29):
It's frustrating to her when girls call at the end
in a month and say they need rent money. She
wants to see you do well. Madame Claude lasted two
years in l A before she packed up LA suitcase
and moved back to France. According to Alex, it wasn't
(29:49):
that the men here had anything against getting blow jobs
in French or getting it on with countesses. But Ella
is a peculiar tone, a tough tone, and you have
to sell l a sex in l A. Not snobby
para sex, but ferns, sunny, beachy l a sex. When
(30:10):
Heidi World returns, Madam Alex's business meets the greed is
Good eighties. Welcome back to Heidi World. So Madam Alex's
(30:39):
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, the AIDS crisis begins.
(31:03):
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, safer choice. The
(31:26):
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 bell Air mansion she calls Cosa Pussy. Here she
(31:47):
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 into the
(32:08):
public eye. One of her girls is dating a creep
who snitches to some cops about his girlfriend's occupation, and
her boss, the l a p D, 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
(32:28):
and invites the woman to come work for her, which
allows the detective to accumulate enough evidence that by April
of 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 l a p D 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 John start
freaking out, worried that their names will come out in
the wash of information. Alex's clients reportedly include bold print
(33:13):
names of all kinds movie stars, producers, and politicians, as
well as an international cast of wealthy businessman and 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 reporter Jesse Cornbluth. Alex had moved
(33:34):
from bel Air to a place in West Hollywood, where
she poored it 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 rooms, decre the
blue and white chintz couches, fancy China crystal vases, and
(33:57):
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 belonged to Alex's twelve Persian cats.
The bedroom is also blue and white, with French doors
and lush flowering indoor plants Alex's own take on macambo
(34:18):
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 court from
the bed where she normally spends her days and nights
on the phone with clients. Her hair is black, cropped
(34:39):
and thinning, but her gaze is still intense. Corn Bluth
compares her to Edith pe Off, 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
(35:00):
yea 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 John's, 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 lot for the sex. This is to help you
(35:46):
pay for what your parents couldn't provide. It's an honorable
way station. A lot of stars did this, according to
the John's. 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
(36:06):
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 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 that beaver.
(36:37):
Alex 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 friends. 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.
(37:00):
We're 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 and court her. In her eyes,
Alex simplifies the process by providing eligible young bachelorettes who
(37:20):
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. It's not like the arresting officer painted it.
(37:41):
What happens to these girls afterwards, Well, I'll tell you
they get married to people he wishes he knew. Obviously,
the l a p d. Hates to see a girl
boss winning. What Alex was doing was illegal, but not unethical.
And why was it illegal anyway. Alex's own view of
(38:01):
sex was simple, if misogynistic. 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. She claims to have gotten over
her jealousy by letting one boyfriend date her employees, a
(38:25):
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 belief that men are sexual creatures women emotional
for someone in the oldest profession. Alex is very old school.
Wives have one real reason for resentment. Their husbands don't
(38:47):
take care of them. Women are cheats by nature, but
they have to be cheats or in their view, whores,
because their husband's 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. The woman who sends Alex to
(39:08):
trial is a twenty one year old undercover policewoman who
goes by the name Renee Berwick. She was introduced to
Alex 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. Out of feigned modesty, She departed and
helped build the case against Alex. The big question is
(39:50):
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 charge that time
in the seventies, but presumably in the interim since then.
In this late eighties case, she had collected as much
dirt on the Los Angeles Police Department as they had
on her. A detective Mike Brambles from the Organized Crime
(40:14):
Intelligence Division admitted to knowing Alex for nine years in court,
he declined to speak about his relationship with Alex, sighting
section ten forty of the California Evidence Code. Alex said
she and Detective Mike Bramble 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.
(40:37):
Maybe they got itchy about what she knew about them.
Faced with the end of her business, Madam 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 Ramatha's School of Enlightenment. Or
maybe she'd start a catering business in l A, harnessing
(40:58):
her old school flower shop skills that had also served
her so well as a madam. Detectives testified that Elizabeth
Adams had provided important information on murder suspects, drug dealers,
and terrorists, and the prosecutors agreed to bargain in which
she received eighteen months probation. While Alex is caught up
(41:20):
in the sticky case, someone else steps up to become
a high end madam, one of her best and favorite girls,
a young, ambitious woman, named Heidi Flice, This so called
person Heidi whatever did make her a madam? Nothing, nothing
did until that one year, And it was just out
(41:41):
of rage and out of anchor at Alex Elizabeth Adams.
Why does Heidi turn on her formerly beloved mentor in
Madam Because when her friend Wendy Tar was killed, Madam
Alex accused Hide and her friends of descending like locusts
(42:02):
on the dead girl's apartment to divvy up her luxury
goods like dresses from Elijah amongst themselves. How had he
found this accusation so disgusting she decided to humiliate Madame
Alex by becoming her. She said, I robbed the apartment
before the body was cold, and I was like, what
the funk are you talking about? That fucking freak, that
(42:25):
fat pig freak. I went fucking crazy. Heidi and Alex's
relationship was clearly very close before it soured. Madam Alex
sent Heidi a book called The Perfumed Garden, a fifteenth
century Arabic sex manual, and inscribed it to my little love,
(42:47):
I'm sure I am more exciting than your Hungarian fucker.
X O x O Alex. This one day Madame Alex
yeld at a girl. She was like r a ripple
in a pond compared to my Heidi. But Heidi also
(43:09):
studied Alex, carefully learning her trade. Whatever distaste she had
for Alex's brusque style and pretentious airs was tempered with
a genuine fondness. 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
(43:32):
deep down she knew this. That's why we were close.
Next time on Heidi World, with Madam Alex out of
the game, Heidi gets access to her little black book
(43:55):
of high roller clients and starts her own high end
escorting business with a cool nineteen nineties edged. Quickly, everyone
in Los Angeles and all around the world wants to
party with Heidees girls.
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