May 2, 2022 • 56 mins
Chapter 4: Little Black Book (late 80s, early 90s)
In episode 4, Madam Alex’s loss is Heidi Fleiss’s gain as her high end madaming empire takes off. Heidi recruits a new kind of call girl to suit her Gen X taste and sends them out to rich guys all around the world. She buys a mansion in the LA hills and throws an extravagant party. She even starts a Sunset Strip nightclub. But she also starts getting perhaps too comfortable talking about her business to strangers.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
I was probably born with a hooker's mentality because I
do believe men should pay for everything. I think men
should pay for girls, houses, cars, diamonds. I don't think
girls should have to do anything. Girls should have fun.
That's it, Heidi flies.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
It starts like anything else. You know, you work for
a law firm, and the next thing you know, some
client says, listen, I don't like the firm, but I
like you. So you set up your own office and
now you're the law firm. Heidi accumulated a lot of numbers,
and all of a sudden, people started calling her up
and it started yvon Nage.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Poposa Previously on Heidi World, Heidi Flice has gone from
hard partying teenage girl to twenty something madam building a
high end la escort service who's smart branding, sheen of
exclusivity and good word of mouth takes it viral with
rich male clients eager to spend it all on young
(01:25):
beautiful women. Welcome to Heidi World. Chapter four. How Heidi
got Madame Alex's Little Black Book and what she did
with it late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties. It's nineteen
(01:57):
eighty nine and Madame Alex is forced out of the
game and put on probation, taking her out of the
Madaming business for at least eighteen months. Her young protege,
Heidi Flies, has stepped in to take her place and
take over the high end escort business on LA's West
Side in nineteen ninety, Heidi somehow ends up in possession
of Alex's Black Book. Alex fervently believes that Heidi and
(02:20):
Ivon Naje have stolen her Black Book and are trying
to take over her empire. Fuming from the bed at
her downsize new home, Madame Alex starts plotting her revenge
on Heidi. She is not wrong that Heidi and Yvonne
are back together after her friend Wendy Tar is murdered.
Heidi is a mess and ends up back in the
(02:40):
arms of the man she despises.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
He was the most sickest thing on earth, and I
was history. Then I had this horrible experience, and I
went back to him for a few months, and it
was the biggest mistake of my life.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Like the functionally useless black book, Alex had received herself
when she bought into the Madaming business from a customer
at her flower shop, Alex's Black Book is full of
outdated information. By the time Heidi gets full access to it.
The girls on Madame Alex's roster are half retired and
half out of style. None of them are the type
(03:19):
of girls Heidi wants representing her in her new solo
business venture. But there is some useful information in the
black Book, the numbers of a few major player customers
that Heidi immediately calls to let them know that Alex
is done for and there's a new girl running the town,
Madam Heidi Flice.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
When a guy tells you how much he loves you
and wants to have babies with you, he really means
I love having sex with you for free, free meaning
no obligations.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
While Heidi had never thought about going into the sex
business before meeting Alex, she has now seen what kind
of profit and prestige such an operation can pull in.
She likes the taboo aspect of madaming, and the job
involves lots of money and attention from powerful men, two
of her personal obsessions. Furthermore, Heidi feels she can do
(04:15):
a much better job than Madame Alex, whose personal taste
in everything has always been a tad out of touch.
Just as the uptight men in suits of the sixties
had wanted Alex to provide a taste of the young
hippie girls they kept hearing about. Heidi caters to eighties
men who want nineties gen x babes, young, cool, and
(04:35):
casual about sex, and Heidi knows exactly how to cater
to their needs.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I'm not a sexually oriented person that's sexually obsessed all
the time, but somehow I just know a lot about it.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I'd get more enjoyment.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Off of successful business than off a night of good sex,
whereas most people would choose a.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Knight of great sex with somebody.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
As long as there's money, I don't get hair, I
will do anything. I'll be really upfront about that. I
don't care about being famous. I'll go where the money is,
and if fame comes along with it, that's just fine.
If I want to be famous, I would have tried
to be an actress or sports. I would have tried
to be something else besides in an illegal business, which
I never thought I was going to get famous from.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
One day.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
I thought I'll get in trouble and have to pick
something else.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
For her new roster of employees Heidie seeks out girls
with a different style from the fusty Beverly Hills glamour
favored by Mount and Alex. She wants girls who are sleek, modern,
and sophisticated IT girls for the incoming new decade, the
nineteen nineties. With a few clients to spread the word
and the business acumen she'd learned from Mount and Malex,
(05:48):
Heidi is ready to go. She has a photographer friend
scout girls for her, and word of mouth spreads through La.
Heidi understands that there are covert networks which beautiful young
women meet rich older men. One of them is Playboy magazine.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
The rock stars and actors flip through it like it's
a catalog. They see a picture of a woman they
want to meet. It's one phone call and they can
marry her. And that's why the girls want to be
in Playboy in the first place.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
It's a two way street because the women want a
meal ticket and the men want a fantasy girlfriend up
to their exacting physical standards. Directors and other rich guys
pass along the knowledge that you can call up a
magazine and get a model's info to set up a date.
This brings to mind the story about Alfred Hitchcock seeing
Tippy Hedron for the first time in a TV commercial
(06:44):
and calling her in for an audition. Is it creepy? Sure?
Does it happen constantly.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Some of these girls who hit the jackpot find someone
at a vulnerable time in his life. It could be
that the people who handle a celebrity or telling him
it would be a good time to get married. I've
seen even screwed up gold digging women stabilize the guy
and help him.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Having grown up around Hollywood herself, Heidi has seen fame
firsthand and knows that it can be as corrosive as
it is glamorous. Being with a power player is exhausting.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
It's so fleeting.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
There's a lot of anxiety because there's always someone more
famous than you, who's making more money. It takes a
certain type of woman to handle the reality of being
with someone who's always worried about staying on top. Is
the type who has no agenda of her own except
to be a Hollywood wife.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Even though there are other Madams competing to take over
Madam Alex's spot, Heidi rises immediately to the top, nabbing
all of the biggest fish clients, for herself, producers agents act.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
In the beginning, I'd meet thirty girls a day.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Maybe I would only like one, Maybe I would like five.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Heidi Fly starts running her madaming business out of a
fairytale cottage just off the trendy Melrose Avenue strip. Soon enough,
there are luxury cars pulling up to Heidi's house in
the otherwise quiet neighborhood every single night. She also starts
throwing parties, mixers if you will. Some of them are
business oriented, but often she just parties with her friends.
(08:36):
She pays the new Heidi Girls in cash as well
as checks, some of which are made out directly to
them from real estate and movie production companies. She charges
John's fifteen hundred dollars a session and takes a forty
percent cut. She never withholds money from her girls, which
means she never saves anything herself. She is as addicted
to spending as she is to gambling.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I change the rules. I tell the guys you get
what you pay for. You can find girls for less,
but they're not the best. Mine are the best.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
I saw it as a way the girls could.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Really take advantage of men, and we did exactly that.
Every man was taken advantage of. I tell the girls
don't ever sell out. Leave if you want. You're the boss,
You're in charge.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Madame Alex is understandably pissed. She feels betrayed by Heidi.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
What took her years to build I built in one.
It's just hard for Madame Alex to accept her ship
has sunk and she's been forced out.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
When Heidi World returns, we'll take a look at the
day to day operation of a high end escort service
(10:17):
Welcome back to Heidi World, to get a sense of
what day to day operations were like for Heidi. We're
going to read from Madam Alex's book, Madam nine O
two one oh. Madam nine O two one ozer is
written by Alex in the first person as an autobiography,
but part of it is written as veiled pseudo fiction,
(10:38):
presumably for legal reasons. Co author William Stadium uses a
mix of pseudonyms and real names of famous people to
paint a portrait of the high end escort world. I
will also do my best to connect the dots of
who is being talked about when I can. Also, it
might all be totally made up. No promises, Heidi appears
(10:58):
under the name Lissa. The first section of the book
is called The Life in a Day nineteen eighty seven,
and it tells the story of an unnamed A list playboy,
now a married father, who heard one of his old
flames had started working for Alex. Described as the girlfriend
of many stars and former wife of one, this woman
was now a high end call girl. The book calls
(11:21):
her Lynn Armstrong. For her compensated reunion with her ex
boyfriend and his new girlfriend, Lynn picks up a pizza
at the top of Mulholland Drive at a trendy Italian
place off Beverly Glenn Canyon that we passed on my
Junior High bus route called Fabriccini's. Allegedly, while picking up
the pizza, Lynn says she randomly spots Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood,
(11:43):
Warren Beatty, and Gary Hart, the Democratic front runner soon
to be disgraced in a sex scandal.
Speaker 5 (11:49):
She does not.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Specify if they are together. I do believe that they
would all be there at the same time, though, because
that place has always been a total hotspot, because it's
one of the only restaurants in the canyon and the
food is really good. They have a great knockoff version
of the liscala chopped Italian salad that everybody in La loves.
Lynn didn't want any of the famous people, some of
(12:10):
whom she knew, to see her, lest they put it
together that she was now a pro at the age
of twenty eight. She wore high heels and a black
cocktail dress, which came from quote a French boutique run
by Persians in the Beverly Center. Lynn had been a
rock star wife, a brunette rarity in the blonde world
of rock trophies. Rock stars in the eighties were at
(12:33):
the top of the charts and the hearts of the
girls who came to La to take their shot at
love and fortune. Here's a representative quote from the book.
Speaker 5 (12:42):
The game of.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Hollywood pickup was a lot like bridge, just as spades
beat hearts, music beat movies. The wildest dream was not
to win an oscar, but to sing backup for Axel Rose.
So the woman they're calling Lynn had married a big
rock star, then cheated on him with an act who
she was now going back to for more under different circumstances.
(13:05):
Her friends didn't understand the appeal of the actor who
was older and less cool than her rockstar x. Lynn
is met at the door of the mansion by the
famous actor who they called Jed Revel and his new girlfriend,
who they call Ellie. Jed shows off his new ed
Ruche painting and their new baby. Ellie's from Utah and
(13:25):
it's pretty, but seemingly just a beautiful mirror to reflect
Jed back to himself. Jed and Ellie are both in AA,
so Lynn politely excuses herself to the bathroom for two
lines of coke and a valium. In the enormous kitchen,
Jed took a six pack of diet coke for the
sober crowd and a bottle of champagne for Lynn. Then
he invites them back into the screening room for the
(13:46):
main event. That's right, Baby, a screening of a VHS
of the Bob Dylan movie Hearts of Fire, which had
bombed after the director died of a heart attack during production.
Then Jed asks Lynn what it was like to fuck
Bob Dylan. She asks why he'd say that, and he
says because she loves having sex with rock stars and
Jewish intellectuals. She says, I would have loved to fuck
(14:10):
Bob but Bob never wanted to fuck me. You can
guess where things go from here. Like all people talking
about Bob Dylan, they get really horny and start having
a threesome and talking about how great everyone's tits are.
It was somewhere around this point that I began to
doubt the journalistic credentials of this part of the book,
which reads entirely like horny nineteen eighties LA fan fiction
(14:34):
and is very good if you're into that. But for
the purposes of telling the story, I'm going to skip
ahead to the relevant parts about Alex and Heidi aka Lisa.
Despite the rumors, there was no literal Black Book, says
Madame Alex, Alex claims the so called black Book was
really just a mental rolodex in her own head of
(14:56):
about three hundred girls. According to Alex, she had their
phone numbers memorized. She admits there might have been some
phone numbers on slips of paper, but nothing so organized
as an actual address book. There was, however, a hot
file of her fifty top earners. Alex sorted the hot
file into categories racehorses, which were the superstar girls the
(15:20):
clients loved, and discoveries newer girls she was hoping to
turn into racehorses. Alex knew Hollywood was obsessed with novelty
and youth, so she made sure to constantly bring on
fresh talent. Some of these girls would try working a
trick or two and realize they weren't made for the lifestyle.
Others would last a month. Most girls didn't make it
(15:42):
a year before dispatching for other careers. Alex maintained a
rotating roster of three hundred girls total, and the Johns
never stopped calling. Alex has a not great habit of
referring to her girls as creatures. She also disparages the
girls of La as long on looks but short on class.
(16:03):
The Johns, Alex says, craved sublime bimbos. They wanted Marilyn Monroe,
not the real person who's smart and complicated, but their
idea of Marilyn Monroe from movies, A soft, sweet sex
kitten with a pillowe bosom in Hollywood, she says, they
wanted their idea of Hollywood. The book then brings in
(16:28):
a character who clearly seems to be Heidi, but some
of the details are obscured or blended with other stories.
The character's name is Lisa Trapp, and while the book
describes Lisa as an Italian American girl from the wrong
side of the tracks in Beverly Hills, some of the
specific details line up too clearly with Heidi for it
to be anyone else. Alex had a group of young,
(16:50):
wealthy girls from Beverly Hills working as hookers that she dubbed,
in her usual tasteless fashion, the Jap Pack because they
were Jewish American princesses. Just telling you what she says
in the book. The job Packer described as being rich
girls who loved nightclubs, porsches, Versachi, and Coke, mostly went
to UCLA on and off, and wanted even more money
(17:13):
than their rich parents gave them. This sounds a lot
like the Beverly Hills girls that Heidi was jealous of.
Here's how they introduced Lisa Trapp aka probably Heidiflies.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Lissa trap one of Alex's favorite girls, was a stepsister
of the Jackpack. Lissa Adoleste in a permanent state of envy,
bitterly jealous of her classmates, Baby Mercedes and twenty pairs
of guccies and five digit monthly bills at Neiman Marcus
and Cool Moroccan coke dealers. Her classmates were equally envious
(17:51):
of Lissa's sultry, olive skin, beauty, her hypnotic eyes. Hers
were mad crazy eyes, but in this case, madness was
an aphrodisiac. Lisa didn't care about accolades. She didn't even
care that much about boys. Although she enjoyed her effortless
(18:11):
power over them, Lisa took a perverse, sadistic pleasure in
making them act like fools for her favors. My body
is a temple, she would equip the temple of doom.
She once seriously considered getting a tattoo over her mom's
venerous of the Dante line about another inferno. All hope
(18:33):
abandon ye who enter here, but Lisa was convinced would
bring her true happiness had nothing to do with love
or sex. All she wanted was to be Jewish and rich,
like the.
Speaker 4 (18:49):
Beverly Hills in crowd.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
What Lissa's parents can give her were the cars, the clothes,
the coke, the comfort and the confidence that came with
never having to worry about My.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
Money was all Assa worried about.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Simply because she was in such blinding proximity to it.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
Although she undoubtedly could have gone.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
To a successful white collar career. Lisa was terminally impatient.
She couldn't wait to be rich Beverly Hills rich. Lissa
was smart and conniving and managed to find Alex and
quickly became one.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Of Alex's stars.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Lissa, a child of Los Angeles, was as starstruck as any.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Gawker on Hollywood Boulevard.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
That Lissa didn't worship stars because they were stars, She
worshiped stars because they were money.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Then there is a dubious slash highly fictionalized erotic encounter
between Lissa and a famous New York actor at the
book calls Harris Fox and describes as thus.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
In the endless War between New York and Los Angeles,
Harris Fox was one of the most frequently given reasons
why New York was the better place. This short, ethnic,
introspective celebrity, whose public persona was so anti La that
he might not even turn right on a red light
on general principle, had become a major consumer.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Of Alex's California Girls.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
He claimed he came to Alex out of sheer boredom
when he was doing a studio film. There were no
streets to walk, no egg creams to drink, nowhere to
go after eleven o'clock hookers were the only sign of
life in this city of the dead.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
I personally think Harris Fox is meant to remind us
of a director whose name rhymes with Schmitdy Schmeallen, or
possibly an actor whose name rhymes with Bustin Offman. Anyway,
Harris Fox pays Lissa to eat Reese's pieces and about
his smallness while he goes down on her. Whatever works.
(21:04):
Then Lissa is off to her next gig, shitting on
a glass coffee table while a famous producer lays underneath watching.
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Lisa was one of Alex's pets.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Alex loved Lissa's sense of humor, her flair for gossip,
her greed. Lisa adored making money as much as Donald
Trump or Mike Milken did as much.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
As Alex did. That was their bond.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Also, Alex was very maternal towards the young Lissa, who
had just turned twenty and turned her back on her
own mother. Lisa had great potential, and Alex wanted her
to realize it. In return, Lissa was Alex's own truffle hound,
Alex's eyes and ears. Because Alex who was bedridden with
(21:51):
heart problems and diabetes, rarely left her home. She relied
on her girls to tell her everything that went on
with their dates. No girl was a better, more vivid
reporter than Lisa. There was a true symbiosis between the
two women. In some ways, Alex and Lissa were the
same woman, Alex the brain's Lyssa the body.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
Their adventures were won.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
In her first year with Alex, Lisa had earned nearly
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She was one of
the most highly paid twenty year old women in the world.
This was amazing for someone who had dropped out of school,
who wasn't tall enough to be a model, and couldn't sing.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Yet, Lisa had.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Nothing left, not after her three thousand a month rent
that BMW, the clothes from the Beverly Center, and of
course the drugs. There was nothing left and nothing else
to do but give blowjobs, shit on glass tables and
dumb on movie stars. What was it going to be
(23:00):
like at thirty when she developed real taste and how
much more could she make as a call girl? Most
tricks were three hundred to five hundred dollars. The one
thousand dollars. Harris Foxes were rare, and Alex had never
sent her on a two thousand dollars overnight, much less
a ten thousand dollars weekend. On a great day three tricks,
(23:23):
lyssaie grows fifteen hundred dollars and met nine hundred, but
she usually had no more than two great days a week.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
Some days, all she could eek out was a.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Three hundred dollars missionary with one hundred dollars to Alex.
The remaining two hundred dollars wouldn't even buy her the
shoes she needed at Charles Jordaane get it.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
One hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a year, Lissa
was close to a call girl's beek.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
It wasn't going to get that much better, and it
might get a lot worse. Lissa wasn't one for planning
for the future, but if she saw it ten years
from now, one hundred and fifty K wasn't going to
get her much further than being a Beverly Hills back lady.
(24:10):
That the bags were from Neiman Marcus didn't make that
future seem any more appealing to her.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Okay, a rare moment of personal reflection. Here, alex is
painting Heidi as an extremely materialistic person, but providing context
some of the other sources lack. Heidi definitely wasn't poor,
but she was not Beverly Hills rich, and she ran
with a privileged party crowd. I went to a fancy
private school in la with some of the richest kids
(24:41):
in the city who had all kinds of things they
didn't earn. And my feeling is that proximity to this
kind of insane wealth can sort of radicalize you in
a couple directions. For someone like Heidi, it inspires a
kind of envy that manifests itself as action, a determination
to law one's way up into the comfort of the
(25:02):
upper upper classes. So I think that class anxiety in
a place which is as segregated and extreme in terms
of wealth and poverty as Los Angeles crystallizes in everyone
at some point in a couple of ways, either aspirationally
or as a desire to demolish the entire system. Heidi
Flies is like a lot of children of the seventies
(25:22):
and eighties who came up in the wreckage of the
attempted leftist revolution of the sixties and took sort of
a nihilistically cynical viewpoint in reaction. The main example of
this trend is Michael J. Fox's young conservative character Alex P.
Keaton on eighty Seccomb Family Ties, which I've never seen.
Heidi was clearly drawn to money like a moth to
(25:43):
a flame from a young age. She was a born
hustler whose addictive personality matched perfectly with gambling. She gambled high,
and for a while, she won. And that's why I
think stories like Heidie's about people who scam their way
into the American dream, movie like Scorsese's Goodfellas and Casino
or Lorraine scafarre As hustlers are so popular because they
(26:06):
acknowledge that the American dream of wealth and comfort is
a scam and that the only way to achieve it
is to scam your way into it, like the gentry did.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
Now.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
The difference between Heidi Flies and someone like Jordan Belfort
from The Wolf of Wall Street or Henry Hill from
Goodfellas is that Heidi wasn't exploiting anyone or enabling violence.
The sex work ring that Heidi Flies ran was entirely consensual,
and like Alex, Heidi took a forty percent cut. Working
for Heidi was seemingly completely different from working for a
(26:38):
traditional pimp. There was no threat of violence, and the
work environment wasn't abusive. The only people being juiced were
rich men who gave it up willingly. It's now nineteen
(26:59):
ninety one, with Madame Alex out of the way, and
nobody else got serious. In the high end escorting lane,
Heidi zooms ahead of any competition, passed any lingering memories
of Madame Alex's brand into the go go nineteen nineties.
She is where she belongs now, partying with stars and players,
sacheting past velvet ropes to the VIP section, choosing what
(27:22):
car to drive from her stable, a Corvette, the Benz
or the nineteen sixty seven white Mustang convertible her ex,
Burnie Cornfeld, gave her.
Speaker 6 (27:33):
She stolen my business, my books, my girls, my guys,
and now finally she's stolen my jewels. She's told people
she wants to be the Madame Alex of her generation. Ha,
She'll never be me. When I gave it up. It
took seven ladies to do what I did, all by myself.
(27:53):
Alex Fleming Madam.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
There's an old saying in Los Angeles that you can
get into almost any party if you bring a few
beautiful young girls, especially if you are also a beautiful
young girl yourself. Heidi had a vision for what the
ideal Heidie girl looked like, just as Madame Alex had
a more outdated set of stiling rules for hers. Like Alex's,
(28:19):
Heidi's specifications were based on her own taste and ideals.
Heidie's dream employee was a girl who looked naturally expensive
the way rich girls do, groomed, styled, chic, but not
try hard, and because Heidi was who she was, the
Heidi girl had a bit of gen X grit, a
sharp stare maybe or a dead pan wit. Her ideal
(28:42):
look was described as clean cut, perfect like. She was
born and raised in Beverly Hills, So by nineteen ninety one,
Heidi Fly has somewhere around five hundred clean cut and
perfect but also cool and sexy girls working for her.
Word spreads among ce producers, actors, rock stars, and anyone
(29:03):
else who can afford it that Heidie's girls are the best.
Heidi charges clients about fifteen hundred dollars a night, which
is about two eight hundred dollars today. Of which she
took forty percent. She was soon clearing three hundred thousand
dollars a week, which would be slightly over half a
million now.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
The men gave huge gifts.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
One girl got two apartment buildings completely paid off, no mortgage.
Now their income for her. She owns apartment buildings.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
At prices like those The sex had to be unreal.
As with all luxury branding, Heidie's pricing said to customers
that they were being offered something better than what the
pleabs buying pussy on the street could get. Meanwhile, Heidi
reported an income of thirty three thousand dollars a year
and listed her job as counselor on her nineteen ninety
(29:59):
two tax returns.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
When you are a madam, you are always working. That
is the way it has to be if you want
to be successful in this business.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
The more people pay, the more they tend to believe
it is worth. And when you are dealing in a
commodity that is in as high as a demand as sex,
sell to the highest bidder. Heidi was catering specifically to
a subset of rich Hollywood dickheads coming off the greed
as Good Eighties in film. These were the archetypal American
psycho yuppies. They had the most expensive sound systems, the
(30:39):
most expensive cocaine, the most expensive glass brick mansions in
the hills. Naturally, they also wanted to buy the most
expensive sex. It worked like a charm. Heidi and her
Heidi Girls, as she called them, were in demand all
over the wealthy enclaves of La. Instead of a black book,
she allegedly kept her client list in a twenty eight
(30:59):
pece red Gucci planner.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Of course, looking back, you see how stupid you were.
It's easier to look at all your mistakes. But I
definitely say, if you're going to live in La, I
don't see how anyone can do it better than I did.
You want to go out to every nightclub, you want
to meet famous people, have sex with different people, eat
at the best places, all that kind of stuff, And
I don't see how it could have been any more fun,
(31:27):
that is for sure.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
When Heidi World returns, Heidi decides to buy a house
in the hills. Welcome back to Heidie World. Heidiflice is
(32:05):
making so much money, she decides to buy a house,
and not just any house, her dream House, an enormous
one point six million dollar mansion that was formerly owned
by Michael Douglas with a Beverly Hill zip code at
the very top of the Santa Monica Mountains on Tower
Grove Drive. This was another trick she learned from Madame Alex.
(32:26):
Clients need to be impressed by your zip code, even
if Madame Alex may have overestimated how the clients received
her army of cats and collections of porcelain kitch. The
Tower Grove Drives House's location is perfect for Heidi. It's
high enough above the city to see the glittering lights below,
but just half a mile from her stomping grounds on
(32:48):
the Sunset Boulevard. It's remote enough to throw raucous parties
without kissing off neighbors or attracting cops, but it's close
enough for clubbing. To buy such an expensive house herself
at such a young age, Heidi needs a co signer,
so her father, Paul Flice, agrees to help her out.
He puts his name down after being convinced by Heidi
(33:08):
the house is an investment property. Remember, Heidi has told
her parents she's working as a realtor like her friend's mother,
Elaine Young. It seems like her parents had no reason
not to believe her. She was making a lot of money, sure,
but high end realtors were known to She wanted to
buy an expensive house, but it seemed like she could
afford it with how well she was doing. The whole
(33:30):
family was very proud of her for finally following through
on something. Not long after Heidi and her operation are
firmly ensconced at her new mansion, Madame Alex calls Heidi
(33:51):
and says she will have her revenge. She's on probation
after a plea bargain, but her legal bills have gobbled
all her Madaming profits and the catering business she started
is not taking off. Rather than take this as a
warning shot from Madame Alex and laylow collecting her checks,
what does Heidie Flies do? Instead? She throws a gigantic
(34:11):
house party for Mick Jagger to chrisen her new place
in the hills.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
There was one party for Mick Jagger and the house
just got thrashed. There were women climbing up the side
of the hill to get in.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
She knows major, major people, but I never asked what
was going on in that other part of her life.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
I figured that was her private thing.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
Victoria Sellers, Heidi's best.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Friend, Allegedly guests at the birthday party for Mick Jagger
included Jack Nicholson, Prince Johnny Depp, and the Red Hot
Chili Peppers. Because I am an incredible journalist, I decided
to message Flee the basis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers,
who follows me for some reason, and ask if he
(34:58):
remembered anything about party at Heidie FLA's house. Flee, who
was kind enough to respond, said he'd never been a
guest of Heidie's, which means either he wasn't at this party,
but maybe some other PEPs like Anthony Keatis were, He
doesn't remember it because it was the early nineties and
he was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or he
didn't know it was Heidie's house or her party. The
(35:19):
last one also seems plausible, because this just sounds like
the kind of legendary rager where nobody knew who was
throwing it, just that it was a Beverly Hills mansion
party and that Mick Jagger was there. Flee did also
say that while he had no recollection if being at
this party. Heidie's father, doctor Paul Flies, was his daughter's pediatrician,
proving my theory once again that La is a small town,
(35:41):
especially Los Phelis. Flee also wrote a great book called
Acid for the Children that you'll like if you like
this podcast that's also about California children of the counterculture.
In nineteen ninety one, someone at Columbia Pictures allegedly asks
Heidi to bring some girls to the Columbia Pictures Hall
party that year, which she allegedly does. She allegedly supplies
(36:05):
some girls for Charlie Sheen's birthday party, and through it all,
of course, she goes out clubbing. Heidi can be found
regularly at Monkey Bar, a windowless restaurant on Beverley Co
owned by Jack Nicholson where the stars hang out. Heidi
and her crew also frequent a West Hollywood dance club
called The Roxbury, which is the club that the SNL
(36:26):
Sketchen Movie Night at the Roxbury refer to. In December
of nineteen ninety two, Heidie's friend Benita Money, an actress
who appeared in Doctor dres Let Me Ride video and
later executive produce the DMX and Jetly movie Cradle to
the Grave gets in a public shoving match outside the
club with Beverly Hills nine O two one O actress
Shannon Doherty after her castmate Brian Austin Green supposedly steps
(36:50):
on Money's boyfriend's toes. One night, on a double date
with Victoria Sellers, Heidi ends up hanging out on the Rocks,
a room on the second floor or of the Roxy
used occasionally for parties. This gives Heidi another idea, a
club that she can use as her office to screen
clients and host parties.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
As I looked around the room, I noticed it resembled
a cozy living room. It had deep, thick, comfortable couches,
unique shaped table, sexy candle lighting, and custom made area rugs.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
It had a long.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Bar on one side of the room that faced huge
windows overlooking the action on the sunset strip.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
I thought this would be the perfect setting for a nightclub.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Luckily, Victoria's stepfather, Lou Adler, owns the Roxy, so together
Victoria and Heidi take over the upstairs part and start
a club at on the Rocks. Heidi's sojourn into the
nightclub industry lasts about six months, but it helps cement
her brand amidst LA's hard partying rich clients.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
How On the Rocks made my business easier for a
few reasons. The word spread that if a girl wanted
to meet Heidi, she could go to On the Rocks
in a certain night.
Speaker 4 (38:13):
This cut down on all the traffic in my house.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
On many nights, I'd walk in and look at the
area where I sat and there would be twenty to
thirty girls waiting to meet me.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
Sometimes it was uncomfortable turning down a.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Girl in my house, but the activity in the nightclub
that made it easier.
Speaker 4 (38:36):
It was a party.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
We let in who we wanted, and a lot of
people were upset. A lot of people were jealous because
we had the key.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
Like Madame Alex before her, Heidi understood that she was
selling men a fantasy image as much as a material good.
They wanted to see the hedonistic Hollywood Babylon and the
La party girls they'd heard so much about, and Heidi
knew just what to show them.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
When men came in from out of town, they'd call
me and ask, where is the cool place to go?
Speaker 1 (39:18):
They wanted to see the beautiful girls and the hit people,
and I tell them to go to On the rocks.
All the different people frequenting the club made it the
quintessential La fantasy. I'd make sure they were treated well,
and they'd make sure I was paid well.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Heidi maybe having the greatest success of her life with
her career, but it's not translating to better odds in
her love life. She is still entangled with the disgusting
Yvonne naj in a toxic on and off relationship where
he regularly abuses her verbally and physically. On a break
with Yvonne, Heidi reconnects with the high school sweetheart and
(39:55):
thinks real romance is finally nigh, until it turns out
he just wants her help pay off an eighty thousand
dollars gambling debt. Madame Alex meanwhile, is having her own
financial woes. She had to sell as many of her
assets as she could to pay her legal bills. After
Madame Alex vacated sixteen fifty four Doheny Drive, it was
(40:15):
bought by Shannon Doherty, who allegedly trashed the place and
moved out in the middle of the night with fourteen
thousand dollars in rent due in November of nineteen ninety two,
Madame Alex has a friend get robbed for the bag
of precious jewels she had stashed at his house. She
is fully convinced that Heidi is responsible, although it will
turn out to be completely unrelated. When Alex's nest egg
(40:39):
of jewels gets stolen, she calls up The La Times
from her bed and talks to a reporter named Sean Hubler.
Alex tells Hubler that she had half a million dollars
worth of diamonds, sapphires, pearls, and Cardier watches in a
tan Louis Vuitton bag. The bag of jewels was stashed
at the house of her friend, producer David Niven Junior,
(41:02):
the son of British actor David Niven and allegedly one
of Alex's own paramours. David Niven Junior tells police that
two bag men showed up at his house pretending to
be ups delivery, held him at gunpoint and hogtied him,
Asking for Alex's bag of jewels. He directed them to
the guest bathroom of his bel Air mansion, where Alex's
(41:23):
jewels were in the Louis Vuitton bag. They took the
bag and ran, leaving Niven to wiggle himself free and
call the police. The LAPD wouldn't confirm Alex's story and
told Hubler that Alex was an unreliable narrator. When Alex
talks to Sean Hubler, she directly names Heidi Flie as
the person she thinks contracted the gunmen to steal the
(41:44):
bag of jewels and then give Sean Hubler Heidi's number.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
This is where I fucked my whole life up.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Heidi not only picks up the phone, she unwisely starts
talking to shit on Hubler. She must have known talking
to the press was a bad idea, but she can't
help herself. She wants to defend herself to clear her
own name, and she and Alex are locked in a
sort of toxic duel of egos. So Heidi gets on
the phone with Sean Hubler to tell her about what
(42:18):
Alex calls the whore Wars. Furthermore, she invites Sean Hubler
to come talk to her at home on the condition
that her name not be used in the story. Heidi
is also very paranoid about wiretapping, because she and Ivondage
are allegedly wiretapping each other and their various enemies for
future blackmail. Without naming her, Hubler describes exactly the Heidi
(42:43):
we have come to.
Speaker 7 (42:44):
Know in the spare, elegant living room of her Benedict
Canyon home. Adam's rival denies any connection with the theft
brash as your kid's sister, dark haired and stick figure
thin the new Beverly Hills Madam, if madam is which
you can call, a twenty something party girl in boots
and jeans, sinks back into the cushions of a designer
(43:05):
love seat and puts on a feral smile. Sean Hubler, journalist.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Hubler clocks Heidi's decorps two a copy of Penthouse magazine
on the coffee table with a member of the brat
pack on it, probably the January nineteen ninety three issue
with Charlie Sheen on the cover. There are young, tan,
blonde women hanging out ambiently at the mansion. The phone
rings off the hook, but Heidi only picks up one
call from her father, Paul Flie, and says she'll call
(43:34):
him back in a little bit. Heidi tells Sean Hubler
she didn't steal Alex's nest egg. She doesn't need to.
Her madaming business is going great, Alex just can't deal
with the fact that she's done. This isn't the first
time Heidi makes the mistake of talking to the press,
and it won't be the last. Despite her huge profit
intake from Madaming in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,
(43:58):
Heidi spends ever fast than she earns, which will come
to bite her in the ass. Later in October nineteen
ninety two, she almost blows her cover when an unknown
woman calls a fancy Beverly Hills clothing store and buys
a bunch of gift certificates with a credit card from
a third party. Then Heidi shows up with a friend
and spends the gift certificates, racking up twenty thousand dollars
(44:22):
worth of clothes. The person whose credit card it was
noticed the charges and called the cops, who took in
Heidi on possible grand theft charges.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
It was just some girl and a salesperson. They set
me up for some credit card fraud thing. It was
really ridiculous. I like, I'm not that type. I wear sweatpants.
Speaker 5 (44:44):
If I'd wanted to.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
At one time, I could buy porsches and line them
from my house all the way to Nieman Marcus.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
All right, let's take a moment to talk about another
charismatic Jewish person deeply associated with the city of Los Angeles.
David Lee Roth, the original lead singer of the band
Van Halen. Roth, was, like Heidi Flice, a charismatic, talkative,
and funny jew who spent his formative years in the
suburbs of Los Angeles. He also came from a bohemian family.
(45:18):
His uncle, Manny Roth, founded Greenwich Village's influential beatnik folk club,
Cafe Wa, where countless acts were launched, including Bob Dylan.
David Lee Roth was born in Indiana and shuffled off
to Pasadena in his teens. At Pasadena City College, he
met Edward Ludwick van Halen and his brother, the Dutch
(45:39):
Indonesian musical prodigies, with whom he would form the band
Van Halen many years later in the early nineties. Van
Halen is one of the biggest musical acts in the world,
and their lead singer is Sammy Hagar. But David Lee
Roth is enjoying a pretty successful solo career, if not
the height of success he enjoyed with Van Halen. Roth,
(46:00):
one of the all time presences on the Sunset Strip
has decamped from not just La but California entirely in
the early nineties to the city of New York. In
a YouTube video monologue from twenty twelve called Romance, David
Lee Roth tells a story about a girl that he
met in New York at what he calls a face
place called bar Toabak. According to David Lee Roth's story,
(46:24):
he and Charlie Sheen were hanging out one night, allegedly
chopping up coke with the butt of a gun as
you do, and talking about the women in their lives.
Roth says he's seeing a corn fed girl next door
type in New York who likes to wear schoolgirl outfits,
which is not his particular kink. Despite hot for teacher.
This woman is always flying out to work in Los Angeles,
(46:46):
where she sees a client who likes his girls and
schoolgirl outfits. Through this conversation, David Lee Roth and Charlie
Sheen realize they are both seeing the same girl, a
Heidi girl, most likely some anthe Burdette based on the description.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Sometimes when I would lie down to go to sleep
at night, I would think about the girls I had
out there Santro Pey, London, Las Vegas, the Peninsula, Hotel, Acapulco,
New York, and all the money they would make and
all the money I would make, and it would make
me feel so good.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Let's also talk about one alleged Heidi Girls story. Before
she became a Heidi Girl. There's a woman named Brandy
McLain who worked for Heidi. She was busted in the
eventual raid more on that later and managed the Hidiwear store.
Also more on that later. So there's also a Brandy
McLain who was involved with a famous early skateboarding star
with a crazy fucked up story. Seems likely that they
(48:00):
are the same Brandy mclan, but I couldn't confirm it.
Heidi's Brandy McLain was a San Diego Community college student
who worked for her on weekends. Her Brandy from San
Diego seems to match up with the story of this
Brandy from San Diego. Allegedly, Brandy McLain was a seventeen
year old blonde from a wealthy Arizona family in nineteen
(48:21):
eighty seven, when she and her best friend Jessica Bergston,
another beautiful blonde, rich girl, met a pro skateboarder named
Mark gaidor Anthony, who was passing through town on a
skate tour. Gator and Brandy spent the weekend together partying,
and he started flying her out from Tucson, where they'd met,
to San Diego, where he lived. He invited her to
(48:43):
move in with him for good at his new Mountain
skate ranch, next to his friend Tony Hawk, who, along
with Gator, was one of skating's big breakthrough stars in
the eighties. Brandy didn't like being isolated at the ranch,
so they moved to a condo in the beach town
of Carlsbad, where they could spend days at the beach
and nights partying and bar hopping.
Speaker 5 (49:06):
We would get high every night.
Speaker 8 (49:08):
We wouldn't do cook every night, but we'd do bong
hit or we'd go to the sandbar at the end
of his street and get fucked up. Then we'd hang
out in his dakouzi, get drunk off our asses, and
go in and have wild sex all night.
Speaker 5 (49:20):
Brandy McClain.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
Gator flew Brandy out with him to skate competitions around
the world. He brought her two cars. Gator's friends, including
his brother Saw Brandy as a gold digger, but also
thought the couple were genuinely in love. Brandy appeared in
his skate videos and modeled with him in his Vision
skatewear print ads. The couple also appeared together in the
(49:46):
music video for Tom Petty's free Fallen during the skate
ramp sequence. But Gator's dominance as a skater quickly waned
as he was out shown by new skaters elaborating on
the tricks he and Tony Hawk made famous. Furt skating
like he did was being overtaken by street skating, leaving
skaters like Gaiter behind in the dust. Then he fell
(50:09):
out of a window in Germany on tour and became
a born again Christian, which Brandy did not care for.
He tried bringing her to church, but he also didn't
want to have sex with her anymore until they were married.
Speaker 5 (50:23):
We literally had sex five times a day. We were
so in love. Then he started saying, we can't.
Speaker 8 (50:29):
Have sex unless we get married, and I'm like, wait
a minute.
Speaker 5 (50:32):
We've been going out for four years, having mad sex
for four years. We can't have sex anymore. I can't
deal with this.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Later, Brandy broke up with Gator and moved in with
her mother, who also lived in San Diego. She started
dating other people, and Gaiter responded in a way that
didn't really go with his new saintly demeanor, by calling
her mom's house and leaving messages saying Brandy was a
cunt who would fry in hell. Brandy came back to
(51:01):
her mom's house one evening to find a window broken
into and all of Gator's gifts to her now gone.
She even tried to patch it up, but Gator was
too far gone and picked a fight with her the
moment she got in his car.
Speaker 5 (51:16):
He was still so mad about the guy I was seeing.
Speaker 8 (51:19):
He's the one that told me to go out and
find one of my surfer friends to party with.
Speaker 5 (51:22):
So I did, and.
Speaker 8 (51:24):
I found this hot, little blonde surfer guy six one,
and Mark was furious. He was driving out in the
middle of this nowhere road out where my parents live,
and he turned to me with this really scary serious
look at his eye, and then his voice got all deep,
you know, and he sounded like the devil. He says,
you know what, I should take you out of the
(51:44):
desert right now. I should drive you out right in
the middle of the night and beat the shit out
of you and leave you there, and I would get
away with it because everybody would know that you deserve it.
Speaker 5 (51:55):
I started crying and begging.
Speaker 8 (51:57):
Him to take me home, like right now, I'm like,
my mother knows where I am.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
And he took me back.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
To get back at Brandy for dumping him, Gator murdered
her best friend, Jessica Bergston, who he somehow believed bore
the responsibility for his breakup with mclan. He equivocated the
two best friends in his head, both tall, gorgeous, free
spirited Arizona blondes. He told the police that Brandy and
Jessica were of the same mold and that he hated
(52:30):
them both. Gater, increasingly fanatical about God as his career diminished,
had lost the plot heads up if you want to
skip ahead about thirty seconds through a very violent and
fucked up part of the story, Gater tied up and
raped Jessica Bergston, beating her with a steering wheel lock.
He got paranoid that neighbors would hear her screaming for help,
(52:51):
so he strangled her inside a surfboard bag. There's a
great documentary by Helen Stickler about this story called Stoked.
The Rise and Fall of Gator. Patricia Arquette also tweeted
that she once went on a date with Gator where
she got a bad feeling and gave him a fake number.
A few years later, he murdered Jessica Bergston.
Speaker 8 (53:13):
She was an incredibly intelligent, free spirited girl. She wanted
to have fun and nothing else mattered. We would go
to Mexico together and she would get so drunk that
she would leave me there if I couldn't get into
bars because we were under age and had big ideas,
she would leave me outside for three hours waiting while
she drank.
Speaker 5 (53:32):
But we were best friends. We were very much alike.
Speaker 8 (53:35):
It was like, we're going to have the very best lives,
and we're going to have them now.
Speaker 3 (53:44):
So if it is the same Brandy MacLean, she would
have started working for Heidi a few years after all
of this horrible shit happened. There's a harmful stereotype that
only traumatized women get into sex work, which is obviously
not true. Something that has always stayed with me is
something the porn to director Jackie Saint James said to
me defending the porn industry, which is that there are
(54:04):
traumatized women and domestic abuse survivors in every industry on Earth.
But there's a tendency, particularly in mainstream media, to project
all of the world's badness and exploitation onto the sex industry,
as if workers can't be exploited in any industry. A
high paying sex work job and a safe environment like
Heidi provided is not exploitative. What is exploitative is, let's say,
(54:29):
forcing warehouse workers to have to piss in jars. By
the end of nineteen ninety two, Heidi seemingly has it all,
despite many looming dark clouds, a successful business, more money
(54:54):
than she knows what to do with, and a sorority
house full of Heidi girls to party with every night.
She is even allegedly dating her movie star crush, James Khan,
who is technically married. Heidi tells friends she visits James
Kahn on the Texas set of nineteen ninety two Neo
Noir Flesh and Bone. James Kahn later will deny that
(55:15):
this ever happened. Tidi is making money almost faster than
she can spend it. She loves spending it because she
knows if she gets caught, it'll all go up and smoke.
She loves thinking about how the money stacks up around
the globe as she sleeps. She sends a girl for
a date on the East Coast who calls concerned about
how she's supposed to carry eighty thousand dollars in cash
(55:37):
that might seem suspicious to authorities. So Heidi tells her
to strap the money all over her body to get
through the airport, and she gets through fine. The eighty
thousand dollars was for a single blowjob.
Speaker 4 (55:56):
Anytime is the right time. Every woman is the most
beautiful woman on Earth.
Speaker 3 (56:17):
Next time on Heidi World, Heidi's high end escort service
hits its peak and encounters some steep precipices and gets
ever more careless about running her mouth
I was probably born with a hooker's mentality because I
do believe men should pay for everything. I think men
should pay for girls, houses, cars, diamonds. I don't think
girls should have to do anything. Girls should have fun.
That's it, Heidi flies.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
It starts like anything else. You know, you work for
a law firm, and the next thing you know, some
client says, listen, I don't like the firm, but I
like you. So you set up your own office and
now you're the law firm. Heidi accumulated a lot of numbers,
and all of a sudden, people started calling her up
and it started yvon Nage.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Poposa Previously on Heidi World, Heidi Flice has gone from
hard partying teenage girl to twenty something madam building a
high end la escort service who's smart branding, sheen of
exclusivity and good word of mouth takes it viral with
rich male clients eager to spend it all on young
(01:25):
beautiful women. Welcome to Heidi World. Chapter four. How Heidi
got Madame Alex's Little Black Book and what she did
with it late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties. It's nineteen
(01:57):
eighty nine and Madame Alex is forced out of the
game and put on probation, taking her out of the
Madaming business for at least eighteen months. Her young protege,
Heidi Flies, has stepped in to take her place and
take over the high end escort business on LA's West
Side in nineteen ninety, Heidi somehow ends up in possession
of Alex's Black Book. Alex fervently believes that Heidi and
(02:20):
Ivon Naje have stolen her Black Book and are trying
to take over her empire. Fuming from the bed at
her downsize new home, Madame Alex starts plotting her revenge
on Heidi. She is not wrong that Heidi and Yvonne
are back together after her friend Wendy Tar is murdered.
Heidi is a mess and ends up back in the
(02:40):
arms of the man she despises.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
He was the most sickest thing on earth, and I
was history. Then I had this horrible experience, and I
went back to him for a few months, and it
was the biggest mistake of my life.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Like the functionally useless black book, Alex had received herself
when she bought into the Madaming business from a customer
at her flower shop, Alex's Black Book is full of
outdated information. By the time Heidi gets full access to it.
The girls on Madame Alex's roster are half retired and
half out of style. None of them are the type
(03:19):
of girls Heidi wants representing her in her new solo
business venture. But there is some useful information in the
black Book, the numbers of a few major player customers
that Heidi immediately calls to let them know that Alex
is done for and there's a new girl running the town,
Madam Heidi Flice.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
When a guy tells you how much he loves you
and wants to have babies with you, he really means
I love having sex with you for free, free meaning
no obligations.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
While Heidi had never thought about going into the sex
business before meeting Alex, she has now seen what kind
of profit and prestige such an operation can pull in.
She likes the taboo aspect of madaming, and the job
involves lots of money and attention from powerful men, two
of her personal obsessions. Furthermore, Heidi feels she can do
(04:15):
a much better job than Madame Alex, whose personal taste
in everything has always been a tad out of touch.
Just as the uptight men in suits of the sixties
had wanted Alex to provide a taste of the young
hippie girls they kept hearing about. Heidi caters to eighties
men who want nineties gen x babes, young, cool, and
(04:35):
casual about sex, and Heidi knows exactly how to cater
to their needs.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I'm not a sexually oriented person that's sexually obsessed all
the time, but somehow I just know a lot about it.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I'd get more enjoyment.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Off of successful business than off a night of good sex,
whereas most people would choose a.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Knight of great sex with somebody.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
As long as there's money, I don't get hair, I
will do anything. I'll be really upfront about that. I
don't care about being famous. I'll go where the money is,
and if fame comes along with it, that's just fine.
If I want to be famous, I would have tried
to be an actress or sports. I would have tried
to be something else besides in an illegal business, which
I never thought I was going to get famous from.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
One day.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
I thought I'll get in trouble and have to pick
something else.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
For her new roster of employees Heidie seeks out girls
with a different style from the fusty Beverly Hills glamour
favored by Mount and Alex. She wants girls who are sleek, modern,
and sophisticated IT girls for the incoming new decade, the
nineteen nineties. With a few clients to spread the word
and the business acumen she'd learned from Mount and Malex,
(05:48):
Heidi is ready to go. She has a photographer friend
scout girls for her, and word of mouth spreads through La.
Heidi understands that there are covert networks which beautiful young
women meet rich older men. One of them is Playboy magazine.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
The rock stars and actors flip through it like it's
a catalog. They see a picture of a woman they
want to meet. It's one phone call and they can
marry her. And that's why the girls want to be
in Playboy in the first place.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
It's a two way street because the women want a
meal ticket and the men want a fantasy girlfriend up
to their exacting physical standards. Directors and other rich guys
pass along the knowledge that you can call up a
magazine and get a model's info to set up a date.
This brings to mind the story about Alfred Hitchcock seeing
Tippy Hedron for the first time in a TV commercial
(06:44):
and calling her in for an audition. Is it creepy? Sure?
Does it happen constantly.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Some of these girls who hit the jackpot find someone
at a vulnerable time in his life. It could be
that the people who handle a celebrity or telling him
it would be a good time to get married. I've
seen even screwed up gold digging women stabilize the guy
and help him.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Having grown up around Hollywood herself, Heidi has seen fame
firsthand and knows that it can be as corrosive as
it is glamorous. Being with a power player is exhausting.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
It's so fleeting.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
There's a lot of anxiety because there's always someone more
famous than you, who's making more money. It takes a
certain type of woman to handle the reality of being
with someone who's always worried about staying on top. Is
the type who has no agenda of her own except
to be a Hollywood wife.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Even though there are other Madams competing to take over
Madam Alex's spot, Heidi rises immediately to the top, nabbing
all of the biggest fish clients, for herself, producers agents act.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
In the beginning, I'd meet thirty girls a day.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Maybe I would only like one, Maybe I would like five.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Heidi Fly starts running her madaming business out of a
fairytale cottage just off the trendy Melrose Avenue strip. Soon enough,
there are luxury cars pulling up to Heidi's house in
the otherwise quiet neighborhood every single night. She also starts
throwing parties, mixers if you will. Some of them are
business oriented, but often she just parties with her friends.
(08:36):
She pays the new Heidi Girls in cash as well
as checks, some of which are made out directly to
them from real estate and movie production companies. She charges
John's fifteen hundred dollars a session and takes a forty
percent cut. She never withholds money from her girls, which
means she never saves anything herself. She is as addicted
to spending as she is to gambling.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I change the rules. I tell the guys you get
what you pay for. You can find girls for less,
but they're not the best. Mine are the best.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
I saw it as a way the girls could.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Really take advantage of men, and we did exactly that.
Every man was taken advantage of. I tell the girls
don't ever sell out. Leave if you want. You're the boss,
You're in charge.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Madame Alex is understandably pissed. She feels betrayed by Heidi.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
What took her years to build I built in one.
It's just hard for Madame Alex to accept her ship
has sunk and she's been forced out.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
When Heidi World returns, we'll take a look at the
day to day operation of a high end escort service
(10:17):
Welcome back to Heidi World, to get a sense of
what day to day operations were like for Heidi. We're
going to read from Madam Alex's book, Madam nine O
two one oh. Madam nine O two one ozer is
written by Alex in the first person as an autobiography,
but part of it is written as veiled pseudo fiction,
(10:38):
presumably for legal reasons. Co author William Stadium uses a
mix of pseudonyms and real names of famous people to
paint a portrait of the high end escort world. I
will also do my best to connect the dots of
who is being talked about when I can. Also, it
might all be totally made up. No promises, Heidi appears
(10:58):
under the name Lissa. The first section of the book
is called The Life in a Day nineteen eighty seven,
and it tells the story of an unnamed A list playboy,
now a married father, who heard one of his old
flames had started working for Alex. Described as the girlfriend
of many stars and former wife of one, this woman
was now a high end call girl. The book calls
(11:21):
her Lynn Armstrong. For her compensated reunion with her ex
boyfriend and his new girlfriend, Lynn picks up a pizza
at the top of Mulholland Drive at a trendy Italian
place off Beverly Glenn Canyon that we passed on my
Junior High bus route called Fabriccini's. Allegedly, while picking up
the pizza, Lynn says she randomly spots Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood,
(11:43):
Warren Beatty, and Gary Hart, the Democratic front runner soon
to be disgraced in a sex scandal.
Speaker 5 (11:49):
She does not.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Specify if they are together. I do believe that they
would all be there at the same time, though, because
that place has always been a total hotspot, because it's
one of the only restaurants in the canyon and the
food is really good. They have a great knockoff version
of the liscala chopped Italian salad that everybody in La loves.
Lynn didn't want any of the famous people, some of
(12:10):
whom she knew, to see her, lest they put it
together that she was now a pro at the age
of twenty eight. She wore high heels and a black
cocktail dress, which came from quote a French boutique run
by Persians in the Beverly Center. Lynn had been a
rock star wife, a brunette rarity in the blonde world
of rock trophies. Rock stars in the eighties were at
(12:33):
the top of the charts and the hearts of the
girls who came to La to take their shot at
love and fortune. Here's a representative quote from the book.
Speaker 5 (12:42):
The game of.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Hollywood pickup was a lot like bridge, just as spades
beat hearts, music beat movies. The wildest dream was not
to win an oscar, but to sing backup for Axel Rose.
So the woman they're calling Lynn had married a big
rock star, then cheated on him with an act who
she was now going back to for more under different circumstances.
(13:05):
Her friends didn't understand the appeal of the actor who
was older and less cool than her rockstar x. Lynn
is met at the door of the mansion by the
famous actor who they called Jed Revel and his new girlfriend,
who they call Ellie. Jed shows off his new ed
Ruche painting and their new baby. Ellie's from Utah and
(13:25):
it's pretty, but seemingly just a beautiful mirror to reflect
Jed back to himself. Jed and Ellie are both in AA,
so Lynn politely excuses herself to the bathroom for two
lines of coke and a valium. In the enormous kitchen,
Jed took a six pack of diet coke for the
sober crowd and a bottle of champagne for Lynn. Then
he invites them back into the screening room for the
(13:46):
main event. That's right, Baby, a screening of a VHS
of the Bob Dylan movie Hearts of Fire, which had
bombed after the director died of a heart attack during production.
Then Jed asks Lynn what it was like to fuck
Bob Dylan. She asks why he'd say that, and he
says because she loves having sex with rock stars and
Jewish intellectuals. She says, I would have loved to fuck
(14:10):
Bob but Bob never wanted to fuck me. You can
guess where things go from here. Like all people talking
about Bob Dylan, they get really horny and start having
a threesome and talking about how great everyone's tits are.
It was somewhere around this point that I began to
doubt the journalistic credentials of this part of the book,
which reads entirely like horny nineteen eighties LA fan fiction
(14:34):
and is very good if you're into that. But for
the purposes of telling the story, I'm going to skip
ahead to the relevant parts about Alex and Heidi aka Lisa.
Despite the rumors, there was no literal Black Book, says
Madame Alex, Alex claims the so called black Book was
really just a mental rolodex in her own head of
(14:56):
about three hundred girls. According to Alex, she had their
phone numbers memorized. She admits there might have been some
phone numbers on slips of paper, but nothing so organized
as an actual address book. There was, however, a hot
file of her fifty top earners. Alex sorted the hot
file into categories racehorses, which were the superstar girls the
(15:20):
clients loved, and discoveries newer girls she was hoping to
turn into racehorses. Alex knew Hollywood was obsessed with novelty
and youth, so she made sure to constantly bring on
fresh talent. Some of these girls would try working a
trick or two and realize they weren't made for the lifestyle.
Others would last a month. Most girls didn't make it
(15:42):
a year before dispatching for other careers. Alex maintained a
rotating roster of three hundred girls total, and the Johns
never stopped calling. Alex has a not great habit of
referring to her girls as creatures. She also disparages the
girls of La as long on looks but short on class.
(16:03):
The Johns, Alex says, craved sublime bimbos. They wanted Marilyn Monroe,
not the real person who's smart and complicated, but their
idea of Marilyn Monroe from movies, A soft, sweet sex
kitten with a pillowe bosom in Hollywood, she says, they
wanted their idea of Hollywood. The book then brings in
(16:28):
a character who clearly seems to be Heidi, but some
of the details are obscured or blended with other stories.
The character's name is Lisa Trapp, and while the book
describes Lisa as an Italian American girl from the wrong
side of the tracks in Beverly Hills, some of the
specific details line up too clearly with Heidi for it
to be anyone else. Alex had a group of young,
(16:50):
wealthy girls from Beverly Hills working as hookers that she dubbed,
in her usual tasteless fashion, the Jap Pack because they
were Jewish American princesses. Just telling you what she says
in the book. The job Packer described as being rich
girls who loved nightclubs, porsches, Versachi, and Coke, mostly went
to UCLA on and off, and wanted even more money
(17:13):
than their rich parents gave them. This sounds a lot
like the Beverly Hills girls that Heidi was jealous of.
Here's how they introduced Lisa Trapp aka probably Heidiflies.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Lissa trap one of Alex's favorite girls, was a stepsister
of the Jackpack. Lissa Adoleste in a permanent state of envy,
bitterly jealous of her classmates, Baby Mercedes and twenty pairs
of guccies and five digit monthly bills at Neiman Marcus
and Cool Moroccan coke dealers. Her classmates were equally envious
(17:51):
of Lissa's sultry, olive skin, beauty, her hypnotic eyes. Hers
were mad crazy eyes, but in this case, madness was
an aphrodisiac. Lisa didn't care about accolades. She didn't even
care that much about boys. Although she enjoyed her effortless
(18:11):
power over them, Lisa took a perverse, sadistic pleasure in
making them act like fools for her favors. My body
is a temple, she would equip the temple of doom.
She once seriously considered getting a tattoo over her mom's
venerous of the Dante line about another inferno. All hope
(18:33):
abandon ye who enter here, but Lisa was convinced would
bring her true happiness had nothing to do with love
or sex. All she wanted was to be Jewish and rich,
like the.
Speaker 4 (18:49):
Beverly Hills in crowd.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
What Lissa's parents can give her were the cars, the clothes,
the coke, the comfort and the confidence that came with
never having to worry about My.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
Money was all Assa worried about.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Simply because she was in such blinding proximity to it.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
Although she undoubtedly could have gone.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
To a successful white collar career. Lisa was terminally impatient.
She couldn't wait to be rich Beverly Hills rich. Lissa
was smart and conniving and managed to find Alex and
quickly became one.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Of Alex's stars.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Lissa, a child of Los Angeles, was as starstruck as any.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Gawker on Hollywood Boulevard.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
That Lissa didn't worship stars because they were stars, She
worshiped stars because they were money.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Then there is a dubious slash highly fictionalized erotic encounter
between Lissa and a famous New York actor at the
book calls Harris Fox and describes as thus.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
In the endless War between New York and Los Angeles,
Harris Fox was one of the most frequently given reasons
why New York was the better place. This short, ethnic,
introspective celebrity, whose public persona was so anti La that
he might not even turn right on a red light
on general principle, had become a major consumer.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Of Alex's California Girls.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
He claimed he came to Alex out of sheer boredom
when he was doing a studio film. There were no
streets to walk, no egg creams to drink, nowhere to
go after eleven o'clock hookers were the only sign of
life in this city of the dead.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
I personally think Harris Fox is meant to remind us
of a director whose name rhymes with Schmitdy Schmeallen, or
possibly an actor whose name rhymes with Bustin Offman. Anyway,
Harris Fox pays Lissa to eat Reese's pieces and about
his smallness while he goes down on her. Whatever works.
(21:04):
Then Lissa is off to her next gig, shitting on
a glass coffee table while a famous producer lays underneath watching.
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Lisa was one of Alex's pets.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Alex loved Lissa's sense of humor, her flair for gossip,
her greed. Lisa adored making money as much as Donald
Trump or Mike Milken did as much.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
As Alex did. That was their bond.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Also, Alex was very maternal towards the young Lissa, who
had just turned twenty and turned her back on her
own mother. Lisa had great potential, and Alex wanted her
to realize it. In return, Lissa was Alex's own truffle hound,
Alex's eyes and ears. Because Alex who was bedridden with
(21:51):
heart problems and diabetes, rarely left her home. She relied
on her girls to tell her everything that went on
with their dates. No girl was a better, more vivid
reporter than Lisa. There was a true symbiosis between the
two women. In some ways, Alex and Lissa were the
same woman, Alex the brain's Lyssa the body.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
Their adventures were won.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
In her first year with Alex, Lisa had earned nearly
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She was one of
the most highly paid twenty year old women in the world.
This was amazing for someone who had dropped out of school,
who wasn't tall enough to be a model, and couldn't sing.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Yet, Lisa had.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Nothing left, not after her three thousand a month rent
that BMW, the clothes from the Beverly Center, and of
course the drugs. There was nothing left and nothing else
to do but give blowjobs, shit on glass tables and
dumb on movie stars. What was it going to be
(23:00):
like at thirty when she developed real taste and how
much more could she make as a call girl? Most
tricks were three hundred to five hundred dollars. The one
thousand dollars. Harris Foxes were rare, and Alex had never
sent her on a two thousand dollars overnight, much less
a ten thousand dollars weekend. On a great day three tricks,
(23:23):
lyssaie grows fifteen hundred dollars and met nine hundred, but
she usually had no more than two great days a week.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
Some days, all she could eek out was a.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Three hundred dollars missionary with one hundred dollars to Alex.
The remaining two hundred dollars wouldn't even buy her the
shoes she needed at Charles Jordaane get it.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
One hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a year, Lissa
was close to a call girl's beek.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
It wasn't going to get that much better, and it
might get a lot worse. Lissa wasn't one for planning
for the future, but if she saw it ten years
from now, one hundred and fifty K wasn't going to
get her much further than being a Beverly Hills back lady.
(24:10):
That the bags were from Neiman Marcus didn't make that
future seem any more appealing to her.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Okay, a rare moment of personal reflection. Here, alex is
painting Heidi as an extremely materialistic person, but providing context
some of the other sources lack. Heidi definitely wasn't poor,
but she was not Beverly Hills rich, and she ran
with a privileged party crowd. I went to a fancy
private school in la with some of the richest kids
(24:41):
in the city who had all kinds of things they
didn't earn. And my feeling is that proximity to this
kind of insane wealth can sort of radicalize you in
a couple directions. For someone like Heidi, it inspires a
kind of envy that manifests itself as action, a determination
to law one's way up into the comfort of the
(25:02):
upper upper classes. So I think that class anxiety in
a place which is as segregated and extreme in terms
of wealth and poverty as Los Angeles crystallizes in everyone
at some point in a couple of ways, either aspirationally
or as a desire to demolish the entire system. Heidi
Flies is like a lot of children of the seventies
(25:22):
and eighties who came up in the wreckage of the
attempted leftist revolution of the sixties and took sort of
a nihilistically cynical viewpoint in reaction. The main example of
this trend is Michael J. Fox's young conservative character Alex P.
Keaton on eighty Seccomb Family Ties, which I've never seen.
Heidi was clearly drawn to money like a moth to
(25:43):
a flame from a young age. She was a born
hustler whose addictive personality matched perfectly with gambling. She gambled high,
and for a while, she won. And that's why I
think stories like Heidie's about people who scam their way
into the American dream, movie like Scorsese's Goodfellas and Casino
or Lorraine scafarre As hustlers are so popular because they
(26:06):
acknowledge that the American dream of wealth and comfort is
a scam and that the only way to achieve it
is to scam your way into it, like the gentry did.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
Now.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
The difference between Heidi Flies and someone like Jordan Belfort
from The Wolf of Wall Street or Henry Hill from
Goodfellas is that Heidi wasn't exploiting anyone or enabling violence.
The sex work ring that Heidi Flies ran was entirely consensual,
and like Alex, Heidi took a forty percent cut. Working
for Heidi was seemingly completely different from working for a
(26:38):
traditional pimp. There was no threat of violence, and the
work environment wasn't abusive. The only people being juiced were
rich men who gave it up willingly. It's now nineteen
(26:59):
ninety one, with Madame Alex out of the way, and
nobody else got serious. In the high end escorting lane,
Heidi zooms ahead of any competition, passed any lingering memories
of Madame Alex's brand into the go go nineteen nineties.
She is where she belongs now, partying with stars and players,
sacheting past velvet ropes to the VIP section, choosing what
(27:22):
car to drive from her stable, a Corvette, the Benz
or the nineteen sixty seven white Mustang convertible her ex,
Burnie Cornfeld, gave her.
Speaker 6 (27:33):
She stolen my business, my books, my girls, my guys,
and now finally she's stolen my jewels. She's told people
she wants to be the Madame Alex of her generation. Ha,
She'll never be me. When I gave it up. It
took seven ladies to do what I did, all by myself.
(27:53):
Alex Fleming Madam.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
There's an old saying in Los Angeles that you can
get into almost any party if you bring a few
beautiful young girls, especially if you are also a beautiful
young girl yourself. Heidi had a vision for what the
ideal Heidie girl looked like, just as Madame Alex had
a more outdated set of stiling rules for hers. Like Alex's,
(28:19):
Heidi's specifications were based on her own taste and ideals.
Heidie's dream employee was a girl who looked naturally expensive
the way rich girls do, groomed, styled, chic, but not
try hard, and because Heidi was who she was, the
Heidi girl had a bit of gen X grit, a
sharp stare maybe or a dead pan wit. Her ideal
(28:42):
look was described as clean cut, perfect like. She was
born and raised in Beverly Hills, So by nineteen ninety one,
Heidi Fly has somewhere around five hundred clean cut and
perfect but also cool and sexy girls working for her.
Word spreads among ce producers, actors, rock stars, and anyone
(29:03):
else who can afford it that Heidie's girls are the best.
Heidi charges clients about fifteen hundred dollars a night, which
is about two eight hundred dollars today. Of which she
took forty percent. She was soon clearing three hundred thousand
dollars a week, which would be slightly over half a
million now.
Speaker 4 (29:23):
The men gave huge gifts.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
One girl got two apartment buildings completely paid off, no mortgage.
Now their income for her. She owns apartment buildings.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
At prices like those The sex had to be unreal.
As with all luxury branding, Heidie's pricing said to customers
that they were being offered something better than what the
pleabs buying pussy on the street could get. Meanwhile, Heidi
reported an income of thirty three thousand dollars a year
and listed her job as counselor on her nineteen ninety
(29:59):
two tax returns.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
When you are a madam, you are always working. That
is the way it has to be if you want
to be successful in this business.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
The more people pay, the more they tend to believe
it is worth. And when you are dealing in a
commodity that is in as high as a demand as sex,
sell to the highest bidder. Heidi was catering specifically to
a subset of rich Hollywood dickheads coming off the greed
as Good Eighties in film. These were the archetypal American
psycho yuppies. They had the most expensive sound systems, the
(30:39):
most expensive cocaine, the most expensive glass brick mansions in
the hills. Naturally, they also wanted to buy the most
expensive sex. It worked like a charm. Heidi and her
Heidi Girls, as she called them, were in demand all
over the wealthy enclaves of La. Instead of a black book,
she allegedly kept her client list in a twenty eight
(30:59):
pece red Gucci planner.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Of course, looking back, you see how stupid you were.
It's easier to look at all your mistakes. But I
definitely say, if you're going to live in La, I
don't see how anyone can do it better than I did.
You want to go out to every nightclub, you want
to meet famous people, have sex with different people, eat
at the best places, all that kind of stuff, And
I don't see how it could have been any more fun,
(31:27):
that is for sure.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
When Heidi World returns, Heidi decides to buy a house
in the hills. Welcome back to Heidie World. Heidiflice is
(32:05):
making so much money, she decides to buy a house,
and not just any house, her dream House, an enormous
one point six million dollar mansion that was formerly owned
by Michael Douglas with a Beverly Hill zip code at
the very top of the Santa Monica Mountains on Tower
Grove Drive. This was another trick she learned from Madame Alex.
(32:26):
Clients need to be impressed by your zip code, even
if Madame Alex may have overestimated how the clients received
her army of cats and collections of porcelain kitch. The
Tower Grove Drives House's location is perfect for Heidi. It's
high enough above the city to see the glittering lights below,
but just half a mile from her stomping grounds on
(32:48):
the Sunset Boulevard. It's remote enough to throw raucous parties
without kissing off neighbors or attracting cops, but it's close
enough for clubbing. To buy such an expensive house herself
at such a young age, Heidi needs a co signer,
so her father, Paul Flice, agrees to help her out.
He puts his name down after being convinced by Heidi
(33:08):
the house is an investment property. Remember, Heidi has told
her parents she's working as a realtor like her friend's mother,
Elaine Young. It seems like her parents had no reason
not to believe her. She was making a lot of money, sure,
but high end realtors were known to She wanted to
buy an expensive house, but it seemed like she could
afford it with how well she was doing. The whole
(33:30):
family was very proud of her for finally following through
on something. Not long after Heidi and her operation are
firmly ensconced at her new mansion, Madame Alex calls Heidi
(33:51):
and says she will have her revenge. She's on probation
after a plea bargain, but her legal bills have gobbled
all her Madaming profits and the catering business she started
is not taking off. Rather than take this as a
warning shot from Madame Alex and laylow collecting her checks,
what does Heidie Flies do? Instead? She throws a gigantic
(34:11):
house party for Mick Jagger to chrisen her new place
in the hills.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
There was one party for Mick Jagger and the house
just got thrashed. There were women climbing up the side
of the hill to get in.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
She knows major, major people, but I never asked what
was going on in that other part of her life.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
I figured that was her private thing.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
Victoria Sellers, Heidi's best.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Friend, Allegedly guests at the birthday party for Mick Jagger
included Jack Nicholson, Prince Johnny Depp, and the Red Hot
Chili Peppers. Because I am an incredible journalist, I decided
to message Flee the basis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers,
who follows me for some reason, and ask if he
(34:58):
remembered anything about party at Heidie FLA's house. Flee, who
was kind enough to respond, said he'd never been a
guest of Heidie's, which means either he wasn't at this party,
but maybe some other PEPs like Anthony Keatis were, He
doesn't remember it because it was the early nineties and
he was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or he
didn't know it was Heidie's house or her party. The
(35:19):
last one also seems plausible, because this just sounds like
the kind of legendary rager where nobody knew who was
throwing it, just that it was a Beverly Hills mansion
party and that Mick Jagger was there. Flee did also
say that while he had no recollection if being at
this party. Heidie's father, doctor Paul Flies, was his daughter's pediatrician,
proving my theory once again that La is a small town,
(35:41):
especially Los Phelis. Flee also wrote a great book called
Acid for the Children that you'll like if you like
this podcast that's also about California children of the counterculture.
In nineteen ninety one, someone at Columbia Pictures allegedly asks
Heidi to bring some girls to the Columbia Pictures Hall
party that year, which she allegedly does. She allegedly supplies
(36:05):
some girls for Charlie Sheen's birthday party, and through it all,
of course, she goes out clubbing. Heidi can be found
regularly at Monkey Bar, a windowless restaurant on Beverley Co
owned by Jack Nicholson where the stars hang out. Heidi
and her crew also frequent a West Hollywood dance club
called The Roxbury, which is the club that the SNL
(36:26):
Sketchen Movie Night at the Roxbury refer to. In December
of nineteen ninety two, Heidie's friend Benita Money, an actress
who appeared in Doctor dres Let Me Ride video and
later executive produce the DMX and Jetly movie Cradle to
the Grave gets in a public shoving match outside the
club with Beverly Hills nine O two one O actress
Shannon Doherty after her castmate Brian Austin Green supposedly steps
(36:50):
on Money's boyfriend's toes. One night, on a double date
with Victoria Sellers, Heidi ends up hanging out on the Rocks,
a room on the second floor or of the Roxy
used occasionally for parties. This gives Heidi another idea, a
club that she can use as her office to screen
clients and host parties.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
As I looked around the room, I noticed it resembled
a cozy living room. It had deep, thick, comfortable couches,
unique shaped table, sexy candle lighting, and custom made area rugs.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
It had a long.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Bar on one side of the room that faced huge
windows overlooking the action on the sunset strip.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
I thought this would be the perfect setting for a nightclub.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Luckily, Victoria's stepfather, Lou Adler, owns the Roxy, so together
Victoria and Heidi take over the upstairs part and start
a club at on the Rocks. Heidi's sojourn into the
nightclub industry lasts about six months, but it helps cement
her brand amidst LA's hard partying rich clients.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
How On the Rocks made my business easier for a
few reasons. The word spread that if a girl wanted
to meet Heidi, she could go to On the Rocks
in a certain night.
Speaker 4 (38:13):
This cut down on all the traffic in my house.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
On many nights, I'd walk in and look at the
area where I sat and there would be twenty to
thirty girls waiting to meet me.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
Sometimes it was uncomfortable turning down a.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Girl in my house, but the activity in the nightclub
that made it easier.
Speaker 4 (38:36):
It was a party.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
We let in who we wanted, and a lot of
people were upset. A lot of people were jealous because
we had the key.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
Like Madame Alex before her, Heidi understood that she was
selling men a fantasy image as much as a material good.
They wanted to see the hedonistic Hollywood Babylon and the
La party girls they'd heard so much about, and Heidi
knew just what to show them.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
When men came in from out of town, they'd call
me and ask, where is the cool place to go?
Speaker 1 (39:18):
They wanted to see the beautiful girls and the hit people,
and I tell them to go to On the rocks.
All the different people frequenting the club made it the
quintessential La fantasy. I'd make sure they were treated well,
and they'd make sure I was paid well.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Heidi maybe having the greatest success of her life with
her career, but it's not translating to better odds in
her love life. She is still entangled with the disgusting
Yvonne naj in a toxic on and off relationship where
he regularly abuses her verbally and physically. On a break
with Yvonne, Heidi reconnects with the high school sweetheart and
(39:55):
thinks real romance is finally nigh, until it turns out
he just wants her help pay off an eighty thousand
dollars gambling debt. Madame Alex meanwhile, is having her own
financial woes. She had to sell as many of her
assets as she could to pay her legal bills. After
Madame Alex vacated sixteen fifty four Doheny Drive, it was
(40:15):
bought by Shannon Doherty, who allegedly trashed the place and
moved out in the middle of the night with fourteen
thousand dollars in rent due in November of nineteen ninety two,
Madame Alex has a friend get robbed for the bag
of precious jewels she had stashed at his house. She
is fully convinced that Heidi is responsible, although it will
turn out to be completely unrelated. When Alex's nest egg
(40:39):
of jewels gets stolen, she calls up The La Times
from her bed and talks to a reporter named Sean Hubler.
Alex tells Hubler that she had half a million dollars
worth of diamonds, sapphires, pearls, and Cardier watches in a
tan Louis Vuitton bag. The bag of jewels was stashed
at the house of her friend, producer David Niven Junior,
(41:02):
the son of British actor David Niven and allegedly one
of Alex's own paramours. David Niven Junior tells police that
two bag men showed up at his house pretending to
be ups delivery, held him at gunpoint and hogtied him,
Asking for Alex's bag of jewels. He directed them to
the guest bathroom of his bel Air mansion, where Alex's
(41:23):
jewels were in the Louis Vuitton bag. They took the
bag and ran, leaving Niven to wiggle himself free and
call the police. The LAPD wouldn't confirm Alex's story and
told Hubler that Alex was an unreliable narrator. When Alex
talks to Sean Hubler, she directly names Heidi Flie as
the person she thinks contracted the gunmen to steal the
(41:44):
bag of jewels and then give Sean Hubler Heidi's number.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
This is where I fucked my whole life up.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Heidi not only picks up the phone, she unwisely starts
talking to shit on Hubler. She must have known talking
to the press was a bad idea, but she can't
help herself. She wants to defend herself to clear her
own name, and she and Alex are locked in a
sort of toxic duel of egos. So Heidi gets on
the phone with Sean Hubler to tell her about what
(42:18):
Alex calls the whore Wars. Furthermore, she invites Sean Hubler
to come talk to her at home on the condition
that her name not be used in the story. Heidi
is also very paranoid about wiretapping, because she and Ivondage
are allegedly wiretapping each other and their various enemies for
future blackmail. Without naming her, Hubler describes exactly the Heidi
(42:43):
we have come to.
Speaker 7 (42:44):
Know in the spare, elegant living room of her Benedict
Canyon home. Adam's rival denies any connection with the theft
brash as your kid's sister, dark haired and stick figure
thin the new Beverly Hills Madam, if madam is which
you can call, a twenty something party girl in boots
and jeans, sinks back into the cushions of a designer
(43:05):
love seat and puts on a feral smile. Sean Hubler, journalist.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Hubler clocks Heidi's decorps two a copy of Penthouse magazine
on the coffee table with a member of the brat
pack on it, probably the January nineteen ninety three issue
with Charlie Sheen on the cover. There are young, tan,
blonde women hanging out ambiently at the mansion. The phone
rings off the hook, but Heidi only picks up one
call from her father, Paul Flie, and says she'll call
(43:34):
him back in a little bit. Heidi tells Sean Hubler
she didn't steal Alex's nest egg. She doesn't need to.
Her madaming business is going great, Alex just can't deal
with the fact that she's done. This isn't the first
time Heidi makes the mistake of talking to the press,
and it won't be the last. Despite her huge profit
intake from Madaming in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,
(43:58):
Heidi spends ever fast than she earns, which will come
to bite her in the ass. Later in October nineteen
ninety two, she almost blows her cover when an unknown
woman calls a fancy Beverly Hills clothing store and buys
a bunch of gift certificates with a credit card from
a third party. Then Heidi shows up with a friend
and spends the gift certificates, racking up twenty thousand dollars
(44:22):
worth of clothes. The person whose credit card it was
noticed the charges and called the cops, who took in
Heidi on possible grand theft charges.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
It was just some girl and a salesperson. They set
me up for some credit card fraud thing. It was
really ridiculous. I like, I'm not that type. I wear sweatpants.
Speaker 5 (44:44):
If I'd wanted to.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
At one time, I could buy porsches and line them
from my house all the way to Nieman Marcus.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
All right, let's take a moment to talk about another
charismatic Jewish person deeply associated with the city of Los Angeles.
David Lee Roth, the original lead singer of the band
Van Halen. Roth, was, like Heidi Flice, a charismatic, talkative,
and funny jew who spent his formative years in the
suburbs of Los Angeles. He also came from a bohemian family.
(45:18):
His uncle, Manny Roth, founded Greenwich Village's influential beatnik folk club,
Cafe Wa, where countless acts were launched, including Bob Dylan.
David Lee Roth was born in Indiana and shuffled off
to Pasadena in his teens. At Pasadena City College, he
met Edward Ludwick van Halen and his brother, the Dutch
(45:39):
Indonesian musical prodigies, with whom he would form the band
Van Halen many years later in the early nineties. Van
Halen is one of the biggest musical acts in the world,
and their lead singer is Sammy Hagar. But David Lee
Roth is enjoying a pretty successful solo career, if not
the height of success he enjoyed with Van Halen. Roth,
(46:00):
one of the all time presences on the Sunset Strip
has decamped from not just La but California entirely in
the early nineties to the city of New York. In
a YouTube video monologue from twenty twelve called Romance, David
Lee Roth tells a story about a girl that he
met in New York at what he calls a face
place called bar Toabak. According to David Lee Roth's story,
(46:24):
he and Charlie Sheen were hanging out one night, allegedly
chopping up coke with the butt of a gun as
you do, and talking about the women in their lives.
Roth says he's seeing a corn fed girl next door
type in New York who likes to wear schoolgirl outfits,
which is not his particular kink. Despite hot for teacher.
This woman is always flying out to work in Los Angeles,
(46:46):
where she sees a client who likes his girls and
schoolgirl outfits. Through this conversation, David Lee Roth and Charlie
Sheen realize they are both seeing the same girl, a
Heidi girl, most likely some anthe Burdette based on the description.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Sometimes when I would lie down to go to sleep
at night, I would think about the girls I had
out there Santro Pey, London, Las Vegas, the Peninsula, Hotel, Acapulco,
New York, and all the money they would make and
all the money I would make, and it would make
me feel so good.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Let's also talk about one alleged Heidi Girls story. Before
she became a Heidi Girl. There's a woman named Brandy
McLain who worked for Heidi. She was busted in the
eventual raid more on that later and managed the Hidiwear store.
Also more on that later. So there's also a Brandy
McLain who was involved with a famous early skateboarding star
with a crazy fucked up story. Seems likely that they
(48:00):
are the same Brandy mclan, but I couldn't confirm it.
Heidi's Brandy McLain was a San Diego Community college student
who worked for her on weekends. Her Brandy from San
Diego seems to match up with the story of this
Brandy from San Diego. Allegedly, Brandy McLain was a seventeen
year old blonde from a wealthy Arizona family in nineteen
(48:21):
eighty seven, when she and her best friend Jessica Bergston,
another beautiful blonde, rich girl, met a pro skateboarder named
Mark gaidor Anthony, who was passing through town on a
skate tour. Gator and Brandy spent the weekend together partying,
and he started flying her out from Tucson, where they'd met,
to San Diego, where he lived. He invited her to
(48:43):
move in with him for good at his new Mountain
skate ranch, next to his friend Tony Hawk, who, along
with Gator, was one of skating's big breakthrough stars in
the eighties. Brandy didn't like being isolated at the ranch,
so they moved to a condo in the beach town
of Carlsbad, where they could spend days at the beach
and nights partying and bar hopping.
Speaker 5 (49:06):
We would get high every night.
Speaker 8 (49:08):
We wouldn't do cook every night, but we'd do bong
hit or we'd go to the sandbar at the end
of his street and get fucked up. Then we'd hang
out in his dakouzi, get drunk off our asses, and
go in and have wild sex all night.
Speaker 5 (49:20):
Brandy McClain.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
Gator flew Brandy out with him to skate competitions around
the world. He brought her two cars. Gator's friends, including
his brother Saw Brandy as a gold digger, but also
thought the couple were genuinely in love. Brandy appeared in
his skate videos and modeled with him in his Vision
skatewear print ads. The couple also appeared together in the
(49:46):
music video for Tom Petty's free Fallen during the skate
ramp sequence. But Gator's dominance as a skater quickly waned
as he was out shown by new skaters elaborating on
the tricks he and Tony Hawk made famous. Furt skating
like he did was being overtaken by street skating, leaving
skaters like Gaiter behind in the dust. Then he fell
(50:09):
out of a window in Germany on tour and became
a born again Christian, which Brandy did not care for.
He tried bringing her to church, but he also didn't
want to have sex with her anymore until they were married.
Speaker 5 (50:23):
We literally had sex five times a day. We were
so in love. Then he started saying, we can't.
Speaker 8 (50:29):
Have sex unless we get married, and I'm like, wait
a minute.
Speaker 5 (50:32):
We've been going out for four years, having mad sex
for four years. We can't have sex anymore. I can't
deal with this.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Later, Brandy broke up with Gator and moved in with
her mother, who also lived in San Diego. She started
dating other people, and Gaiter responded in a way that
didn't really go with his new saintly demeanor, by calling
her mom's house and leaving messages saying Brandy was a
cunt who would fry in hell. Brandy came back to
(51:01):
her mom's house one evening to find a window broken
into and all of Gator's gifts to her now gone.
She even tried to patch it up, but Gator was
too far gone and picked a fight with her the
moment she got in his car.
Speaker 5 (51:16):
He was still so mad about the guy I was seeing.
Speaker 8 (51:19):
He's the one that told me to go out and
find one of my surfer friends to party with.
Speaker 5 (51:22):
So I did, and.
Speaker 8 (51:24):
I found this hot, little blonde surfer guy six one,
and Mark was furious. He was driving out in the
middle of this nowhere road out where my parents live,
and he turned to me with this really scary serious
look at his eye, and then his voice got all deep,
you know, and he sounded like the devil. He says,
you know what, I should take you out of the
(51:44):
desert right now. I should drive you out right in
the middle of the night and beat the shit out
of you and leave you there, and I would get
away with it because everybody would know that you deserve it.
Speaker 5 (51:55):
I started crying and begging.
Speaker 8 (51:57):
Him to take me home, like right now, I'm like,
my mother knows where I am.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
And he took me back.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
To get back at Brandy for dumping him, Gator murdered
her best friend, Jessica Bergston, who he somehow believed bore
the responsibility for his breakup with mclan. He equivocated the
two best friends in his head, both tall, gorgeous, free
spirited Arizona blondes. He told the police that Brandy and
Jessica were of the same mold and that he hated
(52:30):
them both. Gater, increasingly fanatical about God as his career diminished,
had lost the plot heads up if you want to
skip ahead about thirty seconds through a very violent and
fucked up part of the story, Gater tied up and
raped Jessica Bergston, beating her with a steering wheel lock.
He got paranoid that neighbors would hear her screaming for help,
(52:51):
so he strangled her inside a surfboard bag. There's a
great documentary by Helen Stickler about this story called Stoked.
The Rise and Fall of Gator. Patricia Arquette also tweeted
that she once went on a date with Gator where
she got a bad feeling and gave him a fake number.
A few years later, he murdered Jessica Bergston.
Speaker 8 (53:13):
She was an incredibly intelligent, free spirited girl. She wanted
to have fun and nothing else mattered. We would go
to Mexico together and she would get so drunk that
she would leave me there if I couldn't get into
bars because we were under age and had big ideas,
she would leave me outside for three hours waiting while
she drank.
Speaker 5 (53:32):
But we were best friends. We were very much alike.
Speaker 8 (53:35):
It was like, we're going to have the very best lives,
and we're going to have them now.
Speaker 3 (53:44):
So if it is the same Brandy MacLean, she would
have started working for Heidi a few years after all
of this horrible shit happened. There's a harmful stereotype that
only traumatized women get into sex work, which is obviously
not true. Something that has always stayed with me is
something the porn to director Jackie Saint James said to
me defending the porn industry, which is that there are
(54:04):
traumatized women and domestic abuse survivors in every industry on Earth.
But there's a tendency, particularly in mainstream media, to project
all of the world's badness and exploitation onto the sex industry,
as if workers can't be exploited in any industry. A
high paying sex work job and a safe environment like
Heidi provided is not exploitative. What is exploitative is, let's say,
(54:29):
forcing warehouse workers to have to piss in jars. By
the end of nineteen ninety two, Heidi seemingly has it all,
despite many looming dark clouds, a successful business, more money
(54:54):
than she knows what to do with, and a sorority
house full of Heidi girls to party with every night.
She is even allegedly dating her movie star crush, James Khan,
who is technically married. Heidi tells friends she visits James
Kahn on the Texas set of nineteen ninety two Neo
Noir Flesh and Bone. James Kahn later will deny that
(55:15):
this ever happened. Tidi is making money almost faster than
she can spend it. She loves spending it because she
knows if she gets caught, it'll all go up and smoke.
She loves thinking about how the money stacks up around
the globe as she sleeps. She sends a girl for
a date on the East Coast who calls concerned about
how she's supposed to carry eighty thousand dollars in cash
(55:37):
that might seem suspicious to authorities. So Heidi tells her
to strap the money all over her body to get
through the airport, and she gets through fine. The eighty
thousand dollars was for a single blowjob.
Speaker 4 (55:56):
Anytime is the right time. Every woman is the most
beautiful woman on Earth.
Speaker 3 (56:17):
Next time on Heidi World, Heidi's high end escort service
hits its peak and encounters some steep precipices and gets
ever more careless about running her mouth
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com