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.
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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 Flice. It starts like anything else. You know,
(00:42):
you work for a law firm, and the next thing
you know, some clients says, listen, I don't like the firm,
but I like you. So you set up your own
office and now nor the law firm. Heidi accumulated a
lot of numbers, and all of a sudden, people started
calling her up and it started van Nage. Previously on
(01:07):
Heidi World, Heidi Flice has gone from hard partying teenage
girl to twenty something madam building a high end l
a 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 beautiful women.
(01:27):
Welcome to Heidi World. Chapter four. How Heidi got Madam
Alex's Little Black Book and what she did with it
Late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties. It's nine and Madam
(01:58):
Alex is forced out of the game and put on probation,
taking her out of the Maddening business for at least
eighteen months. Her young protege, Heidi Flice, has stepped in
to take her place and take over the high end
escort business on l A's West Side. In Heidi somehow
ends up in possession of Alex's Black Book. Alex fervently
(02:19):
believes that Heidi and Van Nage have stolen her black
Book and are trying to take over her empire. Fuming
from the bed at her downsized new home, Madam Alex
starts plotting her revenge on Heidi. She is not wrong
that Heidi and Yvonne are back together after her friend
Wendy Tars murdered. Heidi is a mess and ends up
(02:39):
back in the arms of the man she despises. 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. Like the function really useless
(03:00):
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
Madam Alex's roster are half retired and half out of style.
None of them are the type of girls Heidi wants
representing her in her new solo business venture. But there
(03:24):
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 has done for and
there's a new girl running the town, Madam Heidi Flice.
When a guy tells you how which he loves you
and wants to have babies with you, he really means
(03:45):
I love having sex with you for free, free meaning
no obligations. While Heidi had never thought about going into
the sex business before meeting Alex, she has now seen
what kind of prof it and prestige such an operation
can pull in. She likes the taboo aspect of madam ing,
(04:06):
and the job involves lots of money and attention from
powerful men, two of her personal obsessions. Furthermore, Heidi feels
she can do a much better job than Madam Alex,
whose personal taste and everything has always been a tad
out of touch. Just as the uptype men in suits
of the sixties had wanted Alex to provide a taste
(04:26):
of the young hippie girls they kept hearing about. Heidi
caters to eighties men who want nineties gen x babes, young,
cool and casual about sex, and Heidi knows exactly how
to cater to their needs. I'm not a sexually oriented person.
It's sexually obsessed all the time, but somehow I just
(04:48):
know a lot about it. I'd get more enjoyment off
a successful business than often night of good sex, whereas
most people would choose a knight of great sex with somebody.
As long as there's money, I don't 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.
(05:08):
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.
One day. I thought I'll get in trouble and have
to pick something else. For her new roster of employees,
(05:29):
Heidi seeks out girls with a different style from the
fusty Beverly Hills glamour favored by Mount of 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 acumens
she'd learned from Mount of Alex, Heidi is ready to go.
(05:50):
She has a photographer, friends scout girls for her, and
word of mouth spreads through l a. Heidi understands that
there are covert networks by beautiful young women meet rich
older men. One of them is Playboy magazine. The rock
stars and actors flipped through it like it's a catalog.
(06:13):
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. 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
(06:35):
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 Hedren for the first time
in a TV commercial and calling her in for an audition.
Is it creepy? Sure? Does it happen constantly. Some of
these girls who hit the jackpot find someone at a
(06:56):
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.
Having grown up around Hollywood herself, Heidi has seen fame
firsthand and knows that it can be as corrosive as
(07:18):
it is glamorous. Being with a power player is exhausting.
It's so fleeting. 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. It's the type who has no agenda of
(07:40):
her own except to be a Hollywood wife. Even though
there are other Madam's competing to take over Madam Alex's spot,
Heidi rises immediately to the top, now being all of
the biggest fish clients for herself, producers, agents, acts in
(08:03):
the beginning, I meet thirty girls today, Maybe I would
only like one, Maybe I would like five. Heidi Fly
starts running her madaming business out of a fairy tale
cottage just off the trendy Melrose Avenue strip. Soon enough,
there are luxury cars pulling up to Heidi's house and
(08:23):
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.
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
(08:45):
John's Fred dollars a session and takes a 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. Yeah, I changed the rules. I
tell the guys you got what you pay for. You
(09:06):
can find girls for less, but they're not the best.
Mine are the best. I saw it as a way
the girls could really take advantage of men, and we
did exactly that. Every man was taken advantage of I'd
tell the girls, don't ever sell out, leave if you want.
You're the boss, You're in charge. Madam Alex is understandably pissed.
(09:32):
She feels betrayed by Heidi. What took her years to
build I built in one. It's just hard for Madam
Alex to accept her ship has sunk and she's been
forced out. When Heidi World returns, we'll take a look
(09:53):
at the day to day operations of a high end
escort service. Welcome back to Heidi World to get a
(10:22):
sense of what day to day operations were like for Heidi.
Who're going to read from Madam Alex's book, Madam Nino
two one Oh. Madam Nino to Noh is written by
Alex in the first person as an autobiography, but part
of it is written as veiled pseudo fiction, presumably for
legal reasons. Co author William Stadium uses a mix of
(10:43):
pseudonyms and real names of famous people to paint a
portrait of the high end ust coort 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 under
the name Lissa. The first section of the book is
called The Life in a Day seven and it tells
(11:04):
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 to many
stars and former wife of one, this woman was now
a high end call girl. The book calls her Lynn Armstrong.
For her compensated reunion with her ex boyfriend and his
(11:26):
new girlfriend. Lynne picks up a pizza at the top
of Mulholland Drive at a trendy Italian place off Beverly
Glen 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, Warren Beatty,
and Gary Hart, the Democratic front runner soon to be
(11:47):
disgraced in a sex scandal. She does not 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
Lascala chopped Italian salad that everybody in l A loves
(12:07):
Lynn didn't want any of the famous people, some of
whom she knew, to see her less they put it
together that she was now a pro at the age
of 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,
(12:28):
a brunette rarity in the blonde world of rock trophies.
Rock stars in the eighties are at the top of
the charts and the hearts of the girls who came
to l A to take their shot at love and fortune.
Here's a representative quote from the book. The game of
Hollywood pickup was a lot like bridge, justice, spades, beat hearts, music,
(12:48):
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 that
cheated on him with an act her who she was
now going back to for more under different circumstances. Her
friends didn't understand the appeal of the actor, who was
(13:08):
older and less cool than her. Rockstar x Lynn has
met at the door of the mansion by the famous
actor who they called Jed Revel and his new girlfriend
who they called Ellie. Jed shows off his new ed
roche painting and their new baby. Ellie's from Utah and
it's pretty, but seemingly just a beautiful mirror to reflect
Jed back to himself. Jed and Ellie are both in
(13:31):
a a, 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 main event. That's right, baby, a screening of a
VHS of the Bob Dylan movie Hearts of Fire, which
(13:53):
had bombed after the director died of a heart attack
during production. Then Jed asks Lynn what it was 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 Bob, but Bob never wanted to fuck me. You
(14:13):
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 nine eighties l a fan fiction,
(14:34):
and it 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
a k a. Lissa. Despite the rumors, there was no
literal Black Book, says Madam Alex, Alex claims the so
called black book was really just a mental rolodex in
(14:55):
her own head. Of about three hundred girls, according to Alex,
she had their phone number 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
(15:15):
the hot file into categories racehorses, which for the superstar
girls the clients loved, and discoveries newer girls she was
hoping to turn into racehorses. Alex New Hollywood was obsessed
with novelty and youth, so she made sure to constantly
bring on fresh talent. Some of these girls would try
(15:35):
working a trick or two and realized they weren't made
for the lifestyle. Others would last a month. Most girls
didn't make it a year before dispatching for other careers.
Alex maintained a rotating roster of three girls total, and
The John's never stopped calling. Alex has a not great
habit of referring to her girls as creatures. She also
(15:58):
disparages the girls of l A as long on looked
but short on class. The John's, 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 pillow ee bosom
(16:21):
in Hollywood, she says, they wanted their idea of Hollywood.
The book then brings in 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 Trap,
and while the book describes Lisa as an Italian American
girl from the Wrong side of the Tracks in Beverly Hills.
(16:43):
Some of the specific details line up too clearly with
Heidi for it to be anyone else. Alex had a
group of young, 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. I'm just
telling you what she says in the book, The job Packer,
(17:03):
described as being rich girls who loved nightclubs, Porsche's, Versacchi
and coke, mostly went to U c. L A on
and off, and wanted even more money 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 Lissa Trap, a k a. Probably Heidi Flies. Lissa Trap,
(17:29):
one of Alex's favorite girls, was a step sister of
the Jat Pack. Lissa Adoleste in a permanent state of envy,
bitterly jealous of her classmates, baby Mercedes and twenty pairs
of goucheese and five digit monthly bills that newman Marcus
and cool Moroccan Coke dealers. Her classmates were equally envious
(17:51):
of Lissa's sultry, olive skin and beauty, her hypnotic eyes.
Hers were mad crazy eyes, but in this case madness
was an aphrodisiac. Lyssa didn't care about accolades. She didn't
even care that much about boys. Although she enjoyed her
effortless power over them. Lissa took a perverse, sadistic pleasure
(18:15):
and making them act like fools for her favors. My
body is a temple, she would equip the temple of doom.
She wasnt seriously considered getting a tattoo over her mom's
veteress of the Dante line about another inferno All hope
abandoned me who enter here? But Lissa was convinced would
(18:40):
bring her true happiness had nothing to do with love
or sex. All she wanted was to be Jewish and rich,
like the Beverly Hills in the crowd. What Lyssa's parents
can give her where the cars, the clothes, the coke,
the comfort and the confidence that came with never having
to worry about my any money was all so worried about,
(19:04):
simply because she was in such blinding proximity to it.
Although she undoubtedly could have gone 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 of
(19:27):
Alex's stars. Lissa, a child of Los Angeles, was as
star struck as any gawker on Hollywood Boulevard. But Lissa
didn't worship stars because they were stars. She worshiped stars
because they were money. Then there is a dubious slash
(19:50):
highly fictionalized erotic encounter between Lissa and a famous New
York actor at the book calls Harris Fox and describes
as thus 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,
(20:11):
introspective celebrity, whose public persona was so anti l a
that he might not even turn right on a red
light on general principle, had become a major consumer of
Alex's California Girls. 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,
(20:32):
nowhere to go After eleven o'clock, hookers were the only
sign of life in this city of the dead. I
personally think Harris Fox is meant to remind us of
a director whose name rhymes with Schmoody Schmallon, or possibly
an actor whose name rhymes with Bustin Offman. Anyway, Harris
(20:57):
Fox pays Lissa to eat Reese's pieces and bread about
his smallness while he goes down on her. Whatever works.
Then Lyssa is off to her next gig, shitting on
a glass coffee table while a famous producer lays underneath watching.
Lissa was one of Alex's pets. Alex loved Lissa's sense
(21:18):
of humor, her flair for gossip, her greed. Lissa adored
making money as much as Donald Trump or Mike Milken
did as much as Alex did. That was their bond. Also,
Alex was very maternal towards the young Lissa, who had
just turned twenty and turned her back on her own mother.
(21:38):
Lissa 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 heart problems
and diabetes, rarely left her home. She relied on her
girls to tell her everything that went on with their dates.
(22:00):
No girl was a better, more vivid reporter than Lissa.
There was a true symbiosis between the two women. In
some ways, Alex and Lissa were the same woman, Alex
the brains list of the body. Their adventures were one.
In her first year with Alex, Lissa had earned nearly
(22:22):
a 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. Yeah.
Lissa had nothing left, not after her three thousand a
(22:42):
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 blow jobs, ship on
glass tables and dumb on movie stars. What was it
going to be like at thirty when she developed real
(23:02):
taste and how much more could she make as a
call girl? Most tricks were three hundred to five hundred dollars.
The one thousand dollar Harris Foxes were rare, and Alex
had never sent her on a two thousand dollar overnight,
much less a ten thousand dollar weekend. On a great
day three tricks listen, he grows undred dollars and net
(23:25):
nine hundred, but she usually had no more than two
great days a week. Some days all she could eat
out with a three hundred dollar missionary with a hundred
dollars to Alex. The remaining two hundred dollars wouldn't even
buy her the shoes she needed At Charles Jordane get it.
A hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a year, Lissa
(23:46):
was close to a call girl's peak. 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 as 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. That the
(24:10):
bags were from New and Marcus didn't make that Putrice
seem any more appealing to her. Okay, a rare moment
of personal reflection here Alex's painting Heidi as an extremely
materialistic person, but providing context, some of the other sources lack.
(24:31):
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 l a with some
of the richest kids 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 of directions for someone
(24:53):
like Heidi, and inspires a kind of envy that manifests
itself as action, a determination to law one's way up
into the comfort of the 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
(25:14):
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 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
(25:34):
young conservative character Alex P. Keaton on eight scom Family Ties,
which I've never seen. Heidi was clearly drawn to money
like a moth to 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 Heidi's about people
(25:57):
who scammed their way into the American dream, movie like
Scorsese's Goodfellas and Casino or Lorraine scafari As hustlers are
so popular because they 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. Now. The difference between Heidi Flice
(26:18):
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 workering that Heidi
Flice ran was entirely consensual, and like Alex, Heidi took
a forty cut. Working for Heidi was seemingly completely different
from working for a traditional pimp. There was no threat
(26:40):
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 with Madame Alex out of the way and
(27:02):
nobody else that's serious. In the high end escorting lane,
Heide zooms ahead of any competition, pass any lingering memories
of Madam 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 v I P Section,
(27:22):
choosing what car to drive from her stable, a Corvette,
the Bends or the nineteen sixty seven white Mustang convertible
her ex, Berning Cornfeld, gave her. 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
(27:43):
the Madame Alex of her generation. She'll never be me
when I gave it up. It took seven ladies to
do what I did, all by myself, Alex Fleming Madam.
There's an old saying in Los Angeles that you can
get into almost any party if you bring a few
(28:04):
beautiful young girls, especially if you are also a beautiful
young girl yourself. Heidi had a vision for what the
ideal Heidi girl looked like, just as Madam Alex had
a more outdated set of stiling rules for hers. Like Alex's,
heidi specifications were based on her own taste and ideals.
Heidi's dream employee was a girl who looked naturally expensive
(28:27):
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 jen X grit, a
sharp stare maybe or a dead pan wit. Her ideal
look was described as clean cut, perfect like she was
born and raised in Beverly Hills, So Heidi Flies has
(28:51):
somewhere around five hundred clean cut and perfect, but also
cool and sexy girls working for her. Words spreads among CEOs, producers, actors,
rock stars, and anyone else who can afford it that
Heide's girls are the best. Heidi charges clients about fifteen
hundred dollars a night, which is about two hundred dollars today,
(29:13):
of which she took she was soon clearing three hundred
thousand dollars a week, which would be slightly over half
a million now. The men gave huge gifts. One girl
got to apartment buildings completely paid off, no mortgage, another
income for her. She owned apartment buildings at prices like those,
(29:39):
the sex had to be unreal. As with all luxury branding,
Heidi'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 tax returns. When you are a madam,
(30:04):
you are always working. That is the way it has
to be if you want to be successful in this business.
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 of demand a sex
sell to the highest bidder. Heidi was catering specifically to
(30:27):
a subset of rich Hollywood dickheads coming off the Greed
is Good eighties and film. These were the archetypal American
psycho yuppies. They had the most expensive sound systems, the
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
(30:50):
Heidi Girls, as she called them, were in demand all
over the wealthy enclaves of l A. Instead of a
black book, she allegedly kept her client list in age
red Gucci planner. It was a lot of fun. Of course,
looking back, you see how stupid you were. It's easier
to look at all your mistakes. But I definitely say,
(31:12):
if you're going to live in l A, 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,
that is for sure. When Heidi World returns, Heidi decides
(31:37):
to buy a house in the Hills. Welcome back to
(32:01):
Heidi World. Kidi Flice is 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
(32:24):
trick she learned from Madam Alex. Clients need to be
impressed by your zip code, even if Madam Alex may
have overestimated how the clients received her army of cats
and collections of porcelain kitch. The Tower Grove Drives houses
location is perfect for Heidi. It's high enough above the
city to see the glittering lights below, but just half
(32:46):
a mile from her stomping grounds on the Sunset Boulevard.
It's remote enough to throw raucous parties without pissing 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
(33:06):
name down after being convinced by Heidi 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
(33:27):
afford it with how well she was doing. The whole
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, Madam 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 Madam Alex and lay low collecting her checks,
what does Heidi Flice do? Instead? She throws a gigantic
(34:11):
house party for Mick Jagger to Chris in her new
place in the hills. 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.
She knows major, major people, but I never asked what
was going on in that um other part of her life.
(34:33):
I figured that was her private thing. Victoria Sellers, Heidi's
best 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
(34:55):
Peppers who follows me for some reason, and asked if
he remembered anything about party at Heidi Flee's house. Flee,
who was kind enough to respond, said he'd never been
a guest of Heide'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
(35:16):
he didn't know it was Heidi's house or her party.
The last one also seems plausible, because this just sounds
like the kind of legendary ranger where nobody knew who
was throwing it, just that it was a Beverly Hills
mansion party and that Mick Jagger was there. Fleet did
also say that while he had no recollection if being
at this party, Heidie's father, Dr Paul Flice, was his
(35:37):
daughter's pediatrician, proving my theory once again that l A
is a small town especially Los Felis. Fleet 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. Someone at Columbia Pictures allegedly asks
Heidi to bring some girls to the Columbia Pictures Hall
(36:00):
a day party that year, which she allegedly does. She
allegedly supplies 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 Beverly Co owned by Jack Nicholson where the stars
hang out. Heidie and her crew also frequent a West
(36:22):
Hollywood dance club called The Roxbury, which is the club
that the s n L. Sketchen movie A Night at
the Roxbury referred to. In December, Heidie's friend Bonita Money,
an actress who appeared in Dr Dre's Let Me Ride
video and later executive produced the d MX and Jet
Lee movie Cradle to the Grave, gets in a public
shoving match outside the club with Beverly Hills nine O
(36:44):
two one oh actress Shannon Dougherty after her castmate Brian
Austin Green supposedly steps on Money's boyfriend's hose. One night,
on a double date with Victoria Sellers, Hidie ends up
hanging out at 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
(37:06):
use as her office to screen clients and host parties.
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.
(37:28):
It had a long bar on one side of the room.
It faced huge windows overlooking the action on the sunset strip.
I thought this would be the perfect setting for a nightclub. Luckily,
Victoria's stepfather, Lou Adler, owns the Roxy, so together Victorian
Heidi take over the upstairs part and start a club
(37:50):
and On the Rocks. Heidi sojourn into the nightclub industry
lasts about six months, but it helps cement her brand
amidst l a's hard partying rich clients. 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 on a certain night.
(38:13):
This cut down and all the traffic in my house.
On many nights, I'd walk in and look at the
area where I sat and there would be twenty two
thirty girls waiting to meet me. Sometimes it was uncomfortable
turning down a girl in my house, but the activity
in the nightclub that made it easier. It was a party.
(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. Like Madam 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 l a party girls they'd
(39:05):
heard so much about, and Heidi knew just what to
show them. When men came in from out of town,
they'd call me and ask where is the cool place
to go? They wanted to see the beautiful girls and
the hip people, and I tell them to go to
On the Rocks. All the different people frequenting the club
(39:25):
made the quintessential l a fantasy. I'd make sure they
were treated well, and they'd make sure I was paid well.
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
(39:48):
he regularly abuses her verbally and physically. On a break
with Yvonne, Heidi reconnects with the high school sweetheart and
thinks real romance is finally nigh, until it turns out
he just wants her help pay off an eighty thousand
dollar gambling debt. Madam 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
(40:11):
Madame Alex vacated sixteen fifty four Doheni Drive, it was
bought by Shannon Dougherty, who allegedly trashed the place and
moved out in the middle of the night with fourteen
thousand dollars in rent dow. In November, Madam Alex has
a friend get robbed for the bag of precious jewels
she had stashed at his house. She is fully convinced
(40:32):
that Heidi is responsible, although it will turn out to
be completely unrelated. When Alex's nest egg of jewels gets stolen,
she calls up the l A 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,
(40:53):
and Cardier watches in a tan Louis Vuitton bag. The
bag of jewels was stashed at the house of her friend,
producer David Niven Jr. The son of British actor David
Niven and allegedly one of Alex's own paramore's. David Niven Jr.
Tells police that two bag men showed up at his
house pretending to be ups delivery, held him at gunpoint
(41:15):
and hog tied him. Asking for Alex's bag of jewels,
he directed under the guest bathroom of his bel Air mansion,
where Alex's jewels were in the Louis Vuitton bag. They
took the bag and ran, leaving Niven to wiggle himself
free and call the police. The l A p d
wouldn't confirm Alex's story and told Hubler that Alex was
an unreliable narrator. When Alex talks to Sean Hubler. She
(41:39):
directly names Heidi Flice as the person she thinks contracted
the gunmen to steal the bag of jewels and then
give Sean Hubler Heide's number. This is where I fucked
my whole life up. Heidi not only picks up the phone,
she unwisely starts talking to on Hubler. She must have
(42:02):
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 Alex calls the Horror Wars. Furthermore, she invites
(42:22):
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 wire tapping, because she
and Van Nage are allegedly wire tapping each other and
their various enemies for future blackmail. Without naming her, Hubler
describes exactly the Heidi we have come to now in
(42:48):
the spare, elegant living room of her Benedict Canyon home,
Adam's rival denies any connection with the theft brash as
your kids sister dark haired and stick figure thin the
new Beverly Hills. Madam, If Madam is, would you can
call it to wheny something party girl in boots and
jeans sinks back into the cushions of a designer love
seat and puts on a Ferrell smile. Sean Hubler, journalist.
(43:12):
Hubler clocks Heidi's decor to a copy of Penthouse magazine
on the coffee table with a member of the brat
pack on it, probably the January 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,
(43:33):
Paul Flice, and says she'll call him back in a
little bit. Heidi tells Sean Hubler she didn't steal Alex's
nest egg. She doesn't need to her maddaming 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 Madam, ing
(43:56):
in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Heidi spends ever
fast stir than she earns, which will come to bite
her in the ass. Later in October, 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
(44:17):
shows up with a friend and spends the gift certificates,
racking up twenty dollars 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. It
was just some girl and a salesperson. They set me
(44:37):
up for some credit card fraud thing. It was really ridiculous.
I like, I'm not that type. I wear sweatpants. If
I wanted to. At one time, I could buy Porsches
and line them from my house all the way to
Nieman Marcus. All right, let's take a moment to talk
(44:57):
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. His uncle, Manny Roth, founded Greenwich
(45:20):
Villages influential beat nick folk club Cafe Wah, 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 Ludwig van Halen
and his brother, the Dutch Indonesian musical Prodigies, with whom
(45:41):
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, one of the all
time presences on the Sunset Strip, has decamped from not
(46:04):
just l A, but California entirely in the early nineties
to the city of New York. In a YouTube video
monologue from 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 to Bak.
According to David Lee Roth story, he and Charlie Sheen
(46:25):
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, where she sees
(46:47):
a client who likes his girls and schoolgirl outfits. Through
this conversation, David Lee Roth and Charlie Sheen realized they
are both seeing the same girl, a Heidi girl, most
likely some anthe Burdett, based on the description. Sometimes when
I would lie down to go to sleep at night,
(47:07):
I would think about the girls I had out there,
Sandro pay 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. Let's also talk about one alleged Heidi Girls story.
(47:40):
Before she became a Heidi Girl, there's a woman named
Brandy McClain who worked for Heidi. She was busted in
the eventual raid. More on that later and managed the
Heidi Wear store. Also more on that later. So there's
also a Brandy McClain who was involved with a famous
early skateboarding star with a crazy, fucked up story. It's
seems likely that they are the same Brandy McClain, but
(48:02):
I couldn't confirm it. Heidi's Brandy McClain 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
McClain was a seventeen year old blonde from a wealthy
Arizona family. In seven when she and her best friend
(48:23):
Jessica Bergston, another beautiful blonde, rich girl, met a pro
skateboarder named Mark Gator 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've met, to San Diego, where he lived. He
invited her to move in with him for good at
(48:44):
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 Carl's Bad, where they could spend days at the
beach and night's partying and bar hopping. We would get
(49:06):
high every night. We wouldn't do cooke every night, but
we do bong hits here. We'd go to the sand
bar at the end of his street and get fucked up.
Then we'd hang out in his decouzy junk off our
assays and go in and have wild sex all night.
Brandy McClean. Gator flew Brandy out with him to skate
(49:27):
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 skate Whear print ads. The couple also appeared together
in the music video for Tom Petty's Free fallen during
(49:49):
the skate ramp sequence. But Gator's dominance as a skater
quickly waned as he was outshone by new skaters elaborating
on the tricks he and Tony Hawk made famous for
skating like he did, was being overtaken by street skating,
leaving skaters like Gator behind in the dust. Then he
fell out of a window in Germany on tour and
(50:11):
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.
We literally had sex five times a day. We were
so in love. Then he started saying, we can't have
sex unless we get married, and I'm like, wait a minute.
(50:32):
We've been going out for four years, having met sex
for four years. We can't have sex anymore. I can't
deal with this. Later, Brandy broke up with Gator and
moved in with her mother, who also lived in San Diego.
She started dating other people, and Gator responded in a
way that didn't really go with his new saintly demeanor
(50:55):
by calling her mom's house and leaving messages saying Brandy
was a kind who would fry in hell. Brandy came
back to 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, he was still
(51:17):
so mad about the guy I was seeing. He's the
one that told me to go out and find one
of my surfer friends to party you with. So I
did now down this hot little blond 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 his voice got all deep,
(51:39):
you know, and he sounded like the devil. He says,
you know what, I should take you out of the
desert right now. I should drive you out right in
the middle of the night and beat the ship out
of you and leave you there, and I would get
away with it because everybody would know that you deserve it.
I started crying and begging him to take me home,
like right now, I'm like, my mother knows where I am.
(52:04):
And he took me back 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 McClean. He equivocated the two best friends in his head,
both tall, gorgeous, free spirited, Arizona blonde. He told the
(52:27):
police that Brandy and Jessica were of the same mold
and that he hated them both. Gator, 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 funked up part of the story,
Gator tied up and raped Jessica Bergston, beating her with
(52:47):
a steering wheel lock. He got paranoid that neighbors would
hear her screaming for help, 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
(53:09):
murdered Jessica Bergston. 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
vague I d s. She would leave me outside for
(53:30):
three hours waiting while she drank. But we were best friends.
We were very much alike. It was like, we're going
to have the very best lives, and we're going to
have them now. So if it is the same Brandy McClain,
she would have started working for Heidi a few years
after all of this horrible ship happened. There's a harmful
(53:52):
stereotype that only traumatized women get into sex work, which
is obviously not true. Something that has always stayed with
me is something that Porned director Jackie St. James said
to me defending the porn industry, which is that there
are traumatized women and domestic abuse survivors in every industry
on Earth. But there's a tendency, particularly in mainstream media,
(54:12):
to project all of the world's badness and exploitation onto
the sex industry, as if workers can't be exploited in
any industry. High paying sex work job in a safe
environment like Heidi provided is not exploitative. What is exploitative is,
let's say, forcing warehouse workers to have to piss in jars.
(54:44):
By the end of Heidi seemingly has it all, despite
many looming dark clouds, a successful business, more money 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 crushed James Kahn,
(55:05):
who is technically married. Heidi tells friends she visits James
Cohn on the Texas set of Neo Noir Flesh and Bone.
James Cohn later will deny that this ever happened. Tidy
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
(55:27):
how the money stacks up around the globe, but she sleeps.
She sends a girl for a date on the East
Coast who calls concerned about how she is supposed to
carry eighty thousand dollars in cash 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 eight dollars was for a
(55:49):
single blow job. Any time is the right time. Every
one in is the most beautiful woman on Earth. Next
(56:17):
time on Heidi World, Heide's high end escort service hits
its peak and encounter 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 Flice. It starts like anything else. You know,
(00:42):
you work for a law firm, and the next thing
you know, some clients says, listen, I don't like the firm,
but I like you. So you set up your own
office and now nor the law firm. Heidi accumulated a
lot of numbers, and all of a sudden, people started
calling her up and it started van Nage. Previously on
(01:07):
Heidi World, Heidi Flice has gone from hard partying teenage
girl to twenty something madam building a high end l
a 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 beautiful women.
(01:27):
Welcome to Heidi World. Chapter four. How Heidi got Madam
Alex's Little Black Book and what she did with it
Late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties. It's nine and Madam
(01:58):
Alex is forced out of the game and put on probation,
taking her out of the Maddening business for at least
eighteen months. Her young protege, Heidi Flice, has stepped in
to take her place and take over the high end
escort business on l A's West Side. In Heidi somehow
ends up in possession of Alex's Black Book. Alex fervently
(02:19):
believes that Heidi and Van Nage have stolen her black
Book and are trying to take over her empire. Fuming
from the bed at her downsized new home, Madam Alex
starts plotting her revenge on Heidi. She is not wrong
that Heidi and Yvonne are back together after her friend
Wendy Tars murdered. Heidi is a mess and ends up
(02:39):
back in the arms of the man she despises. 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. Like the function really useless
(03:00):
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
Madam Alex's roster are half retired and half out of style.
None of them are the type of girls Heidi wants
representing her in her new solo business venture. But there
(03:24):
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 has done for and
there's a new girl running the town, Madam Heidi Flice.
When a guy tells you how which he loves you
and wants to have babies with you, he really means
(03:45):
I love having sex with you for free, free meaning
no obligations. While Heidi had never thought about going into
the sex business before meeting Alex, she has now seen
what kind of prof it and prestige such an operation
can pull in. She likes the taboo aspect of madam ing,
(04:06):
and the job involves lots of money and attention from
powerful men, two of her personal obsessions. Furthermore, Heidi feels
she can do a much better job than Madam Alex,
whose personal taste and everything has always been a tad
out of touch. Just as the uptype men in suits
of the sixties had wanted Alex to provide a taste
(04:26):
of the young hippie girls they kept hearing about. Heidi
caters to eighties men who want nineties gen x babes, young,
cool and casual about sex, and Heidi knows exactly how
to cater to their needs. I'm not a sexually oriented person.
It's sexually obsessed all the time, but somehow I just
(04:48):
know a lot about it. I'd get more enjoyment off
a successful business than often night of good sex, whereas
most people would choose a knight of great sex with somebody.
As long as there's money, I don't 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.
(05:08):
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.
One day. I thought I'll get in trouble and have
to pick something else. For her new roster of employees,
(05:29):
Heidi seeks out girls with a different style from the
fusty Beverly Hills glamour favored by Mount of 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 acumens
she'd learned from Mount of Alex, Heidi is ready to go.
(05:50):
She has a photographer, friends scout girls for her, and
word of mouth spreads through l a. Heidi understands that
there are covert networks by beautiful young women meet rich
older men. One of them is Playboy magazine. The rock
stars and actors flipped through it like it's a catalog.
(06:13):
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. 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
(06:35):
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 Hedren for the first time
in a TV commercial and calling her in for an audition.
Is it creepy? Sure? Does it happen constantly. Some of
these girls who hit the jackpot find someone at a
(06:56):
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.
Having grown up around Hollywood herself, Heidi has seen fame
firsthand and knows that it can be as corrosive as
(07:18):
it is glamorous. Being with a power player is exhausting.
It's so fleeting. 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. It's the type who has no agenda of
(07:40):
her own except to be a Hollywood wife. Even though
there are other Madam's competing to take over Madam Alex's spot,
Heidi rises immediately to the top, now being all of
the biggest fish clients for herself, producers, agents, acts in
(08:03):
the beginning, I meet thirty girls today, Maybe I would
only like one, Maybe I would like five. Heidi Fly
starts running her madaming business out of a fairy tale
cottage just off the trendy Melrose Avenue strip. Soon enough,
there are luxury cars pulling up to Heidi's house and
(08:23):
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.
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
(08:45):
John's Fred dollars a session and takes a 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. Yeah, I changed the rules. I
tell the guys you got what you pay for. You
(09:06):
can find girls for less, but they're not the best.
Mine are the best. I saw it as a way
the girls could really take advantage of men, and we
did exactly that. Every man was taken advantage of I'd
tell the girls, don't ever sell out, leave if you want.
You're the boss, You're in charge. Madam Alex is understandably pissed.
(09:32):
She feels betrayed by Heidi. What took her years to
build I built in one. It's just hard for Madam
Alex to accept her ship has sunk and she's been
forced out. When Heidi World returns, we'll take a look
(09:53):
at the day to day operations of a high end
escort service. Welcome back to Heidi World to get a
(10:22):
sense of what day to day operations were like for Heidi.
Who're going to read from Madam Alex's book, Madam Nino
two one Oh. Madam Nino to Noh is written by
Alex in the first person as an autobiography, but part
of it is written as veiled pseudo fiction, presumably for
legal reasons. Co author William Stadium uses a mix of
(10:43):
pseudonyms and real names of famous people to paint a
portrait of the high end ust coort 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 under
the name Lissa. The first section of the book is
called The Life in a Day seven and it tells
(11:04):
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 to many
stars and former wife of one, this woman was now
a high end call girl. The book calls her Lynn Armstrong.
For her compensated reunion with her ex boyfriend and his
(11:26):
new girlfriend. Lynne picks up a pizza at the top
of Mulholland Drive at a trendy Italian place off Beverly
Glen 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, Warren Beatty,
and Gary Hart, the Democratic front runner soon to be
(11:47):
disgraced in a sex scandal. She does not 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
Lascala chopped Italian salad that everybody in l A loves
(12:07):
Lynn didn't want any of the famous people, some of
whom she knew, to see her less they put it
together that she was now a pro at the age
of 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,
(12:28):
a brunette rarity in the blonde world of rock trophies.
Rock stars in the eighties are at the top of
the charts and the hearts of the girls who came
to l A to take their shot at love and fortune.
Here's a representative quote from the book. The game of
Hollywood pickup was a lot like bridge, justice, spades, beat hearts, music,
(12:48):
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 that
cheated on him with an act her who she was
now going back to for more under different circumstances. Her
friends didn't understand the appeal of the actor, who was
(13:08):
older and less cool than her. Rockstar x Lynn has
met at the door of the mansion by the famous
actor who they called Jed Revel and his new girlfriend
who they called Ellie. Jed shows off his new ed
roche painting and their new baby. Ellie's from Utah and
it's pretty, but seemingly just a beautiful mirror to reflect
Jed back to himself. Jed and Ellie are both in
(13:31):
a a, 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 main event. That's right, baby, a screening of a
VHS of the Bob Dylan movie Hearts of Fire, which
(13:53):
had bombed after the director died of a heart attack
during production. Then Jed asks Lynn what it was 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 Bob, but Bob never wanted to fuck me. You
(14:13):
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 nine eighties l a fan fiction,
(14:34):
and it 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
a k a. Lissa. Despite the rumors, there was no
literal Black Book, says Madam Alex, Alex claims the so
called black book was really just a mental rolodex in
(14:55):
her own head. Of about three hundred girls, according to Alex,
she had their phone number 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
(15:15):
the hot file into categories racehorses, which for the superstar
girls the clients loved, and discoveries newer girls she was
hoping to turn into racehorses. Alex New Hollywood was obsessed
with novelty and youth, so she made sure to constantly
bring on fresh talent. Some of these girls would try
(15:35):
working a trick or two and realized they weren't made
for the lifestyle. Others would last a month. Most girls
didn't make it a year before dispatching for other careers.
Alex maintained a rotating roster of three girls total, and
The John's never stopped calling. Alex has a not great
habit of referring to her girls as creatures. She also
(15:58):
disparages the girls of l A as long on looked
but short on class. The John's, 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 pillow ee bosom
(16:21):
in Hollywood, she says, they wanted their idea of Hollywood.
The book then brings in 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 Trap,
and while the book describes Lisa as an Italian American
girl from the Wrong side of the Tracks in Beverly Hills.
(16:43):
Some of the specific details line up too clearly with
Heidi for it to be anyone else. Alex had a
group of young, 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. I'm just
telling you what she says in the book, The job Packer,
(17:03):
described as being rich girls who loved nightclubs, Porsche's, Versacchi
and coke, mostly went to U c. L A on
and off, and wanted even more money 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 Lissa Trap, a k a. Probably Heidi Flies. Lissa Trap,
(17:29):
one of Alex's favorite girls, was a step sister of
the Jat Pack. Lissa Adoleste in a permanent state of envy,
bitterly jealous of her classmates, baby Mercedes and twenty pairs
of goucheese and five digit monthly bills that newman Marcus
and cool Moroccan Coke dealers. Her classmates were equally envious
(17:51):
of Lissa's sultry, olive skin and beauty, her hypnotic eyes.
Hers were mad crazy eyes, but in this case madness
was an aphrodisiac. Lyssa didn't care about accolades. She didn't
even care that much about boys. Although she enjoyed her
effortless power over them. Lissa took a perverse, sadistic pleasure
(18:15):
and making them act like fools for her favors. My
body is a temple, she would equip the temple of doom.
She wasnt seriously considered getting a tattoo over her mom's
veteress of the Dante line about another inferno All hope
abandoned me who enter here? But Lissa was convinced would
(18:40):
bring her true happiness had nothing to do with love
or sex. All she wanted was to be Jewish and rich,
like the Beverly Hills in the crowd. What Lyssa's parents
can give her where the cars, the clothes, the coke,
the comfort and the confidence that came with never having
to worry about my any money was all so worried about,
(19:04):
simply because she was in such blinding proximity to it.
Although she undoubtedly could have gone 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 of
(19:27):
Alex's stars. Lissa, a child of Los Angeles, was as
star struck as any gawker on Hollywood Boulevard. But Lissa
didn't worship stars because they were stars. She worshiped stars
because they were money. Then there is a dubious slash
(19:50):
highly fictionalized erotic encounter between Lissa and a famous New
York actor at the book calls Harris Fox and describes
as thus 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,
(20:11):
introspective celebrity, whose public persona was so anti l a
that he might not even turn right on a red
light on general principle, had become a major consumer of
Alex's California Girls. 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,
(20:32):
nowhere to go After eleven o'clock, hookers were the only
sign of life in this city of the dead. I
personally think Harris Fox is meant to remind us of
a director whose name rhymes with Schmoody Schmallon, or possibly
an actor whose name rhymes with Bustin Offman. Anyway, Harris
(20:57):
Fox pays Lissa to eat Reese's pieces and bread about
his smallness while he goes down on her. Whatever works.
Then Lyssa is off to her next gig, shitting on
a glass coffee table while a famous producer lays underneath watching.
Lissa was one of Alex's pets. Alex loved Lissa's sense
(21:18):
of humor, her flair for gossip, her greed. Lissa adored
making money as much as Donald Trump or Mike Milken
did as much as Alex did. That was their bond. Also,
Alex was very maternal towards the young Lissa, who had
just turned twenty and turned her back on her own mother.
(21:38):
Lissa 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 heart problems
and diabetes, rarely left her home. She relied on her
girls to tell her everything that went on with their dates.
(22:00):
No girl was a better, more vivid reporter than Lissa.
There was a true symbiosis between the two women. In
some ways, Alex and Lissa were the same woman, Alex
the brains list of the body. Their adventures were one.
In her first year with Alex, Lissa had earned nearly
(22:22):
a 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. Yeah.
Lissa had nothing left, not after her three thousand a
(22:42):
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 blow jobs, ship on
glass tables and dumb on movie stars. What was it
going to be like at thirty when she developed real
(23:02):
taste and how much more could she make as a
call girl? Most tricks were three hundred to five hundred dollars.
The one thousand dollar Harris Foxes were rare, and Alex
had never sent her on a two thousand dollar overnight,
much less a ten thousand dollar weekend. On a great
day three tricks listen, he grows undred dollars and net
(23:25):
nine hundred, but she usually had no more than two
great days a week. Some days all she could eat
out with a three hundred dollar missionary with a hundred
dollars to Alex. The remaining two hundred dollars wouldn't even
buy her the shoes she needed At Charles Jordane get it.
A hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a year, Lissa
(23:46):
was close to a call girl's peak. 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 as 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. That the
(24:10):
bags were from New and Marcus didn't make that Putrice
seem any more appealing to her. Okay, a rare moment
of personal reflection here Alex's painting Heidi as an extremely
materialistic person, but providing context, some of the other sources lack.
(24:31):
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 l a with some
of the richest kids 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 of directions for someone
(24:53):
like Heidi, and inspires a kind of envy that manifests
itself as action, a determination to law one's way up
into the comfort of the 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
(25:14):
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 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
(25:34):
young conservative character Alex P. Keaton on eight scom Family Ties,
which I've never seen. Heidi was clearly drawn to money
like a moth to 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 Heidi's about people
(25:57):
who scammed their way into the American dream, movie like
Scorsese's Goodfellas and Casino or Lorraine scafari As hustlers are
so popular because they 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. Now. The difference between Heidi Flice
(26:18):
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 workering that Heidi
Flice ran was entirely consensual, and like Alex, Heidi took
a forty cut. Working for Heidi was seemingly completely different
from working for a traditional pimp. There was no threat
(26:40):
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 with Madame Alex out of the way and
(27:02):
nobody else that's serious. In the high end escorting lane,
Heide zooms ahead of any competition, pass any lingering memories
of Madam 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 v I P Section,
(27:22):
choosing what car to drive from her stable, a Corvette,
the Bends or the nineteen sixty seven white Mustang convertible
her ex, Berning Cornfeld, gave her. 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
(27:43):
the Madame Alex of her generation. She'll never be me
when I gave it up. It took seven ladies to
do what I did, all by myself, Alex Fleming Madam.
There's an old saying in Los Angeles that you can
get into almost any party if you bring a few
(28:04):
beautiful young girls, especially if you are also a beautiful
young girl yourself. Heidi had a vision for what the
ideal Heidi girl looked like, just as Madam Alex had
a more outdated set of stiling rules for hers. Like Alex's,
heidi specifications were based on her own taste and ideals.
Heidi's dream employee was a girl who looked naturally expensive
(28:27):
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 jen X grit, a
sharp stare maybe or a dead pan wit. Her ideal
look was described as clean cut, perfect like she was
born and raised in Beverly Hills, So Heidi Flies has
(28:51):
somewhere around five hundred clean cut and perfect, but also
cool and sexy girls working for her. Words spreads among CEOs, producers, actors,
rock stars, and anyone else who can afford it that
Heide's girls are the best. Heidi charges clients about fifteen
hundred dollars a night, which is about two hundred dollars today,
(29:13):
of which she took she was soon clearing three hundred
thousand dollars a week, which would be slightly over half
a million now. The men gave huge gifts. One girl
got to apartment buildings completely paid off, no mortgage, another
income for her. She owned apartment buildings at prices like those,
(29:39):
the sex had to be unreal. As with all luxury branding,
Heidi'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 tax returns. When you are a madam,
(30:04):
you are always working. That is the way it has
to be if you want to be successful in this business.
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 of demand a sex
sell to the highest bidder. Heidi was catering specifically to
(30:27):
a subset of rich Hollywood dickheads coming off the Greed
is Good eighties and film. These were the archetypal American
psycho yuppies. They had the most expensive sound systems, the
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
(30:50):
Heidi Girls, as she called them, were in demand all
over the wealthy enclaves of l A. Instead of a
black book, she allegedly kept her client list in age
red Gucci planner. It was a lot of fun. Of course,
looking back, you see how stupid you were. It's easier
to look at all your mistakes. But I definitely say,
(31:12):
if you're going to live in l A, 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,
that is for sure. When Heidi World returns, Heidi decides
(31:37):
to buy a house in the Hills. Welcome back to
(32:01):
Heidi World. Kidi Flice is 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
(32:24):
trick she learned from Madam Alex. Clients need to be
impressed by your zip code, even if Madam Alex may
have overestimated how the clients received her army of cats
and collections of porcelain kitch. The Tower Grove Drives houses
location is perfect for Heidi. It's high enough above the
city to see the glittering lights below, but just half
(32:46):
a mile from her stomping grounds on the Sunset Boulevard.
It's remote enough to throw raucous parties without pissing 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
(33:06):
name down after being convinced by Heidi 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
(33:27):
afford it with how well she was doing. The whole
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, Madam 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 Madam Alex and lay low collecting her checks,
what does Heidi Flice do? Instead? She throws a gigantic
(34:11):
house party for Mick Jagger to Chris in her new
place in the hills. 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.
She knows major, major people, but I never asked what
was going on in that um other part of her life.
(34:33):
I figured that was her private thing. Victoria Sellers, Heidi's
best 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
(34:55):
Peppers who follows me for some reason, and asked if
he remembered anything about party at Heidi Flee's house. Flee,
who was kind enough to respond, said he'd never been
a guest of Heide'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
(35:16):
he didn't know it was Heidi's house or her party.
The last one also seems plausible, because this just sounds
like the kind of legendary ranger where nobody knew who
was throwing it, just that it was a Beverly Hills
mansion party and that Mick Jagger was there. Fleet did
also say that while he had no recollection if being
at this party, Heidie's father, Dr Paul Flice, was his
(35:37):
daughter's pediatrician, proving my theory once again that l A
is a small town especially Los Felis. Fleet 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. Someone at Columbia Pictures allegedly asks
Heidi to bring some girls to the Columbia Pictures Hall
(36:00):
a day party that year, which she allegedly does. She
allegedly supplies 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 Beverly Co owned by Jack Nicholson where the stars
hang out. Heidie and her crew also frequent a West
(36:22):
Hollywood dance club called The Roxbury, which is the club
that the s n L. Sketchen movie A Night at
the Roxbury referred to. In December, Heidie's friend Bonita Money,
an actress who appeared in Dr Dre's Let Me Ride
video and later executive produced the d MX and Jet
Lee movie Cradle to the Grave, gets in a public
shoving match outside the club with Beverly Hills nine O
(36:44):
two one oh actress Shannon Dougherty after her castmate Brian
Austin Green supposedly steps on Money's boyfriend's hose. One night,
on a double date with Victoria Sellers, Hidie ends up
hanging out at 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
(37:06):
use as her office to screen clients and host parties.
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.
(37:28):
It had a long bar on one side of the room.
It faced huge windows overlooking the action on the sunset strip.
I thought this would be the perfect setting for a nightclub. Luckily,
Victoria's stepfather, Lou Adler, owns the Roxy, so together Victorian
Heidi take over the upstairs part and start a club
(37:50):
and On the Rocks. Heidi sojourn into the nightclub industry
lasts about six months, but it helps cement her brand
amidst l a's hard partying rich clients. 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 on a certain night.
(38:13):
This cut down and all the traffic in my house.
On many nights, I'd walk in and look at the
area where I sat and there would be twenty two
thirty girls waiting to meet me. Sometimes it was uncomfortable
turning down a girl in my house, but the activity
in the nightclub that made it easier. It was a party.
(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. Like Madam 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 l a party girls they'd
(39:05):
heard so much about, and Heidi knew just what to
show them. When men came in from out of town,
they'd call me and ask where is the cool place
to go? They wanted to see the beautiful girls and
the hip people, and I tell them to go to
On the Rocks. All the different people frequenting the club
(39:25):
made the quintessential l a fantasy. I'd make sure they
were treated well, and they'd make sure I was paid well.
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
(39:48):
he regularly abuses her verbally and physically. On a break
with Yvonne, Heidi reconnects with the high school sweetheart and
thinks real romance is finally nigh, until it turns out
he just wants her help pay off an eighty thousand
dollar gambling debt. Madam 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
(40:11):
Madame Alex vacated sixteen fifty four Doheni Drive, it was
bought by Shannon Dougherty, who allegedly trashed the place and
moved out in the middle of the night with fourteen
thousand dollars in rent dow. In November, Madam Alex has
a friend get robbed for the bag of precious jewels
she had stashed at his house. She is fully convinced
(40:32):
that Heidi is responsible, although it will turn out to
be completely unrelated. When Alex's nest egg of jewels gets stolen,
she calls up the l A 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,
(40:53):
and Cardier watches in a tan Louis Vuitton bag. The
bag of jewels was stashed at the house of her friend,
producer David Niven Jr. The son of British actor David
Niven and allegedly one of Alex's own paramore's. David Niven Jr.
Tells police that two bag men showed up at his
house pretending to be ups delivery, held him at gunpoint
(41:15):
and hog tied him. Asking for Alex's bag of jewels,
he directed under the guest bathroom of his bel Air mansion,
where Alex's jewels were in the Louis Vuitton bag. They
took the bag and ran, leaving Niven to wiggle himself
free and call the police. The l A p d
wouldn't confirm Alex's story and told Hubler that Alex was
an unreliable narrator. When Alex talks to Sean Hubler. She
(41:39):
directly names Heidi Flice as the person she thinks contracted
the gunmen to steal the bag of jewels and then
give Sean Hubler Heide's number. This is where I fucked
my whole life up. Heidi not only picks up the phone,
she unwisely starts talking to on Hubler. She must have
(42:02):
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 Alex calls the Horror Wars. Furthermore, she invites
(42:22):
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 wire tapping, because she
and Van Nage are allegedly wire tapping each other and
their various enemies for future blackmail. Without naming her, Hubler
describes exactly the Heidi we have come to now in
(42:48):
the spare, elegant living room of her Benedict Canyon home,
Adam's rival denies any connection with the theft brash as
your kids sister dark haired and stick figure thin the
new Beverly Hills. Madam, If Madam is, would you can
call it to wheny something party girl in boots and
jeans sinks back into the cushions of a designer love
seat and puts on a Ferrell smile. Sean Hubler, journalist.
(43:12):
Hubler clocks Heidi's decor to a copy of Penthouse magazine
on the coffee table with a member of the brat
pack on it, probably the January 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,
(43:33):
Paul Flice, and says she'll call him back in a
little bit. Heidi tells Sean Hubler she didn't steal Alex's
nest egg. She doesn't need to her maddaming 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 Madam, ing
(43:56):
in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Heidi spends ever
fast stir than she earns, which will come to bite
her in the ass. Later in October, 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
(44:17):
shows up with a friend and spends the gift certificates,
racking up twenty dollars 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. It
was just some girl and a salesperson. They set me
(44:37):
up for some credit card fraud thing. It was really ridiculous.
I like, I'm not that type. I wear sweatpants. If
I wanted to. At one time, I could buy Porsches
and line them from my house all the way to
Nieman Marcus. All right, let's take a moment to talk
(44:57):
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. His uncle, Manny Roth, founded Greenwich
(45:20):
Villages influential beat nick folk club Cafe Wah, 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 Ludwig van Halen
and his brother, the Dutch Indonesian musical Prodigies, with whom
(45:41):
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, one of the all
time presences on the Sunset Strip, has decamped from not
(46:04):
just l A, but California entirely in the early nineties
to the city of New York. In a YouTube video
monologue from 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 to Bak.
According to David Lee Roth story, he and Charlie Sheen
(46:25):
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, where she sees
(46:47):
a client who likes his girls and schoolgirl outfits. Through
this conversation, David Lee Roth and Charlie Sheen realized they
are both seeing the same girl, a Heidi girl, most
likely some anthe Burdett, based on the description. Sometimes when
I would lie down to go to sleep at night,
(47:07):
I would think about the girls I had out there,
Sandro pay 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. Let's also talk about one alleged Heidi Girls story.
(47:40):
Before she became a Heidi Girl, there's a woman named
Brandy McClain who worked for Heidi. She was busted in
the eventual raid. More on that later and managed the
Heidi Wear store. Also more on that later. So there's
also a Brandy McClain who was involved with a famous
early skateboarding star with a crazy, fucked up story. It's
seems likely that they are the same Brandy McClain, but
(48:02):
I couldn't confirm it. Heidi's Brandy McClain 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
McClain was a seventeen year old blonde from a wealthy
Arizona family. In seven when she and her best friend
(48:23):
Jessica Bergston, another beautiful blonde, rich girl, met a pro
skateboarder named Mark Gator 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've met, to San Diego, where he lived. He
invited her to move in with him for good at
(48:44):
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 Carl's Bad, where they could spend days at the
beach and night's partying and bar hopping. We would get
(49:06):
high every night. We wouldn't do cooke every night, but
we do bong hits here. We'd go to the sand
bar at the end of his street and get fucked up.
Then we'd hang out in his decouzy junk off our
assays and go in and have wild sex all night.
Brandy McClean. Gator flew Brandy out with him to skate
(49:27):
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 skate Whear print ads. The couple also appeared together
in the music video for Tom Petty's Free fallen during
(49:49):
the skate ramp sequence. But Gator's dominance as a skater
quickly waned as he was outshone by new skaters elaborating
on the tricks he and Tony Hawk made famous for
skating like he did, was being overtaken by street skating,
leaving skaters like Gator behind in the dust. Then he
fell out of a window in Germany on tour and
(50:11):
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.
We literally had sex five times a day. We were
so in love. Then he started saying, we can't have
sex unless we get married, and I'm like, wait a minute.
(50:32):
We've been going out for four years, having met sex
for four years. We can't have sex anymore. I can't
deal with this. Later, Brandy broke up with Gator and
moved in with her mother, who also lived in San Diego.
She started dating other people, and Gator responded in a
way that didn't really go with his new saintly demeanor
(50:55):
by calling her mom's house and leaving messages saying Brandy
was a kind who would fry in hell. Brandy came
back to 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, he was still
(51:17):
so mad about the guy I was seeing. He's the
one that told me to go out and find one
of my surfer friends to party you with. So I
did now down this hot little blond 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 his voice got all deep,
(51:39):
you know, and he sounded like the devil. He says,
you know what, I should take you out of the
desert right now. I should drive you out right in
the middle of the night and beat the ship out
of you and leave you there, and I would get
away with it because everybody would know that you deserve it.
I started crying and begging him to take me home,
like right now, I'm like, my mother knows where I am.
(52:04):
And he took me back 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 McClean. He equivocated the two best friends in his head,
both tall, gorgeous, free spirited, Arizona blonde. He told the
(52:27):
police that Brandy and Jessica were of the same mold
and that he hated them both. Gator, 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 funked up part of the story,
Gator tied up and raped Jessica Bergston, beating her with
(52:47):
a steering wheel lock. He got paranoid that neighbors would
hear her screaming for help, 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
(53:09):
murdered Jessica Bergston. 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
vague I d s. She would leave me outside for
(53:30):
three hours waiting while she drank. But we were best friends.
We were very much alike. It was like, we're going
to have the very best lives, and we're going to
have them now. So if it is the same Brandy McClain,
she would have started working for Heidi a few years
after all of this horrible ship happened. There's a harmful
(53:52):
stereotype that only traumatized women get into sex work, which
is obviously not true. Something that has always stayed with
me is something that Porned director Jackie St. James said
to me defending the porn industry, which is that there
are traumatized women and domestic abuse survivors in every industry
on Earth. But there's a tendency, particularly in mainstream media,
(54:12):
to project all of the world's badness and exploitation onto
the sex industry, as if workers can't be exploited in
any industry. High paying sex work job in a safe
environment like Heidi provided is not exploitative. What is exploitative is,
let's say, forcing warehouse workers to have to piss in jars.
(54:44):
By the end of Heidi seemingly has it all, despite
many looming dark clouds, a successful business, more money 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 crushed James Kahn,
(55:05):
who is technically married. Heidi tells friends she visits James
Cohn on the Texas set of Neo Noir Flesh and Bone.
James Cohn later will deny that this ever happened. Tidy
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
(55:27):
how the money stacks up around the globe, but she sleeps.
She sends a girl for a date on the East
Coast who calls concerned about how she is supposed to
carry eighty thousand dollars in cash 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 eight dollars was for a
(55:49):
single blow job. Any time is the right time. Every
one in is the most beautiful woman on Earth. Next
(56:17):
time on Heidi World, Heide's high end escort service hits
its peak and encounter some steep precipices and gets ever
more careless about running her mouth
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