Chapter 9: Reality Television: How Heidi Invented Reality Star Fame And Her Cousin Mike Fleiss Invented The Bachelor (late 90s/early 2000s)

Chapter 9: Reality Television: How Heidi Invented Reality Star Fame And Her Cousin Mike Fleiss Invented The Bachelor (late 90s/early 2000s)

Heidi Fleiss gets sentenced and goes to jail, doing 37 months in Dublin, California. Meanwhile, her second cousin Mike Fleiss climbs the ranks of early 2000s reality television and invents huge hit The Bachelor. And Don Simpson has one last box office mega-hit and then vanishes from the mortal plane forever.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M the l a p D. Is deeply involved with
this world. They all knew me and often drove me home.
But because I wouldn't make girls sleep with them for

(00:20):
free like Alex did, they decided to make an example
of me. Heidi Flice. Previously on Heidi World, Heidi Flice
has been dragged through the mud by the press in
front of the entire world, but emerged as always with
a shrug, a smile, and a good sense of humor

(00:41):
about the whole thing. Welcome to Heidi World, Chapter nine,
Reality Television, How Heidi invented Real Lity star of fame
and her cousin Mike Plice invented the Bachelor Late nineties

(01:05):
early two thousand's Welcome back to Heidi World. I'm your
host Molly Lambert and the year is now. Heidi Flice
is still out on bail after getting convicted in both

(01:25):
of her trials for pandering and lying to the I
R S. But she's traded in the escort game for
the streetwear game, and she's running her new empire from
the Heidiwear Store on the Third Street Promenade, an open
air mall in Santa Monica. At the Hidiwear Store they
sell baby teas, long sleep shirts, bathrobes, and the signature

(01:48):
hidiwear boxers with a condom pocket, a nod to the
safe sex movement of the AIDS activism era. Meanwhile, in
the O J. Simpson trial, o J says he kicked
in a door or at his ex wife, Nicole Simpson
Brown's house during an argument in because he was upset
that she was associating with drug users and sex workers.

(02:09):
He says Nicole's friends included a Heidi Flice girl and
that he was upset that Nicole had brought what he
thought of his low lifes around their kids. I was
talking about high flies and hookahs and drug people. Some
people who are on drugs are still on drugs, and
who will hookers will hang around the house at that time?

(02:31):
O J. Simpson Football Star, February. I need to come
up for air, Charlie Sheen. After five months of marriage,
Charlie Sheen gets divorced from Donna Peal. Michael Gross, the

(02:55):
dad from Family Ties, plays Dr Paul Flice in a
CBS made for TV movie produced by Dick Clark called
The Good Doctor. The Paul Fly Story co starring My
Boy George Siegel, as his best friend. Quote LEO, who
I Am just going to go ahead and assume is
meant to be Paul Flye's best friend George DiCaprio on

(03:17):
There's finally some good news for Heidi. A state appeals
court panel overturns the pandering conviction on the grounds of
ger misconduct and vote trading and orders a new trial.
Thirty year old Heidi has started attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
She has elated that the conviction has been overturned and
the court panel has seen reason. You don't know what

(03:41):
this means to me. I'm relieved that the momentum at
ly seems to be going forward. Hopefully it will continue
that way. Jerry four woman Sheila Matrowski is also thrilled.
She now believes that Heidi Flics was set up for
entrapment by the cops and should never have been tried.

(04:04):
Mitrowski also now sees the sexism in Heidi's treatment and
how confused most of the jurors, including herself, actually were
about the case during the trial. I can't tell you
how delighted I am by this. Justice was not served
in the case. Three years in prison for what she

(04:24):
did give me a break. That's outrageous, to be honest
with you. A few of the male jurors decided she
was guilty before we even began deliberating, and others were
simply confused by the entrapment law. Sheila Mitrowski, Heidi's lawyer,
Anthony Brooklyer, wants authorities to drop the case entirely rather

(04:48):
than retry Heidi. This is a question of priorities. She's
run the gauntlet once. When you strip away the hoopla,
is this really that important a case? I mean, no
matter how you shake it, we're talking about consensual sex.
Anthony Brooklyer. Heidi Flice's defense attorney, District Attorney Gil Garcetti,

(05:14):
also wants the whole thing to just go away, but
for his own reasons. Garcetti thinks the media circus around
the Heidi trial makes Los Angeles look frivolous and superficial.
But maybe he also doesn't like how much police corruption
it dredges up, or how it shows off the special
relationships between the powers that be in l A and
the cops. June Madam Alex's former lap D connection detective

(05:42):
Mike Brambles, is charged with a sting of robberies and
one rape committed in Wow, a cop who's also a
criminal and a rapist? Can you imagine? Mike Bramble's allegedly
robbed a bunch of dry cleaners, restaurants, and stores with
a thirty eight caliber pistol. He wore a denim jacket

(06:02):
in a baseball cap for the stickups, which began shortly
after he took leave from the lap D and moved
to Las Vegas to surveill Heide's girls dates there as
a spy for Madam Alex. Bramble's defense is that he
is being framed by police superiors who want to retaliate
against him for stitching on a fellow cop who took
an illegal home video while working a private security job

(06:24):
for Bruce Springsteen also Bruce Man Come on a cap. Mr.
State Trooper Detective Mike Rambles was a teenage surfer who
graduated from the police academy in one He met Madam
Alex while working in the l a p d S
Child Pornography Unit and arranged to deal with her where
the cops will leave her alone as long as she

(06:46):
ferried back any important information she overheard from Powerful John's
in Detective Brambles was accused of coaching a witness as
part of a rigged lineup. Agreed up that site it
was I didn't set out to make a crusading film
for Heidi, but all of us who worked on the

(07:09):
film really liked her, and I think she comes across
in it as likable. I think you see that she's
not an evil, machiavellian person, and that she spent most
of the time when she was supposedly on top of
the world, being bounced between her mentor and her nemesis,
Nick Broomfield. In July, a documentary made by director Nick

(07:32):
Broomfield comes out called Heidi Flice Hollywood Madam. Nick Broomfield
is a charismatic, check Jewish British filmmaker about twenty years
her senior. In other words, he is also Heidi's type
of guy. Broomfield is very sympathetic to her cause and
had made a pro sex work documentary called Chicken Ranch

(07:55):
about illegal brothel in Pa Rump, Nevada. The people in
Heide's world didn't do anything particularly wrong. These are, after all,
consenting adults. What struck me as infinitely more sinister was
the hypocrisy of the l a p D. The corruption

(08:18):
that operates there, the building of files on people, and
use of information against people to control the city. Many
police departments do these things, but the l a p
D took it to a new limit. They were like
the FBI and the way they operated against people. Nick

(08:39):
Broomfield's Heidi Fly's documentary is being released directly to video
rental stores in a new tactic that aims to get
movie viewers hooked on non fiction narratives. The Broomfield Heidi
Dock is being released directly to video by BMG Video,
alongside a doc about Grateful dead fans. Everyone is excited
about narrative documentaries because of the surprise hit success of

(09:02):
Hoop Dreams, documentary about two high school basketball players that
was also my brother's favorite movies, so much that he
had a Hoop Dreams poster on his wall. If the
wider implications of this case had been fought head on,
Heidi probably wouldn't have the problems she's got now. She's

(09:23):
the only instance of a madam all pimp being prosecuted federally.
Why Ivan gets away with things because he's always had
a madam fronts for him and Madame Alex was an
old pro who did what professional criminals do. She collaborated
with the police. Heidi wasn't a professional, and she broke

(09:43):
all the rules on both sides of the fence, and
that's why she came crashing down. Moreover, because the DA
has been so unsuccessful in getting any high profile convictions,
Heidie's case is taken on a significance it doesn't deserve.
Nonfiction narrative books are also selling big, like Nancy Griffin

(10:07):
and Kim Master's book Hit and Run, How John Peters
and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood.
People are increasingly interested in real stories told as entertainment.
Hit and Run is filled with behind the scenes gossip
about the Sony Corporation's disastrous takeover of Columbia Pictures and
TriStar that ended up costing them billions. Griffin and Masters

(10:31):
deflate the myth of the Hollywood power player to show
these people for what they are Charlatan's hustlers, who like Heidi,
understand how to work a room and more specifically, how
to charm people out of their money. Peter Goober and
John Peters traded off the success of their biggest hits.
As producers both critical Darling's like Guerrillas in the Mist

(10:54):
and box office bangers like Tim Burton, Batman, Peter Goober
and John Peters are men of the seventies and eighties.
They expect the blockbuster gravy train to continue chugging along forever.
They are ill prepared for the nineteen nineties, when the
major studio model will be up ended yet again by

(11:15):
the success of countercultural independent films like Richard Linklater Slacker
and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. By the time Miramax gets
bought by Disney in three, the long baroque eighties are
finally coming to an end in Hollywood as the cool
grunge nineties arrive. The most influential film of UR is

(11:38):
not a big, expensive movie at all, but weird, almost
impossibly discursive, lurid and cheap pulp fiction. It is the
first Mirrormax movie put out by Disney, and possibly the
dirtiest movie put out by the Disney Corporation since Pretty Woman,
made for eight and a half million dollars and marketed

(11:58):
for another ten pulp fixed and ends up making over
two hundred and thirteen million dollars worldwide and wins the
palm door. It can new Hollywood is back and the
writing is on the wall for Hollywood's aging eighties, men,
Peter Goober and John Peters have a classic good cop
bad cop dynamic on sets. John Peters is the loud,

(12:20):
confrontational one and Peter Goober is quietly passive aggressive. John
Peters at least would scream and yell and you knew
what he was thinking. Goober, you never knew what was
going on with him. I mean he just smile. Share
actress singer Goddess mad Max director George Miller calls John

(12:45):
Peters quote genuinely thought disordered, and the book described joint
therapy sessions with Goober and Peters were the formerly tight
but now as strange business partners hold hands and say
I Love you to each other just after Goober as
Peter's dumped from the company. Couples therapy for creative platonic
couples is not uncommon in Hollywood, and I have now

(13:08):
also known podcasting teams who had to go to platonic
couples therapy. Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas were ordered to
couples therapy by the studio during the making of Spartacus,
where the psychotherapists gave Kubrick a book to read called
Tromp Novelle Dream Novel, which he would adapt decades later
into Eyes Wide Shut. Heidi Flice appears briefly in Hit

(13:29):
and Run, although it doesn't delve very deeply into her
relationships with men at the studios other than Michael Nathanson.
Although the book centers on John Peters, his personal relationship
with Heidi Flice is left to the cutting floor. In
September of Heidi fails a drug test. She is arrested
at the Heidi Ware store on the Santa Monica Third

(13:50):
Street Promenade after a drug test indicates she's been using meth,
which violates her bail terms. A judge orders her back
to a treatment center immediately. In October, the other most
famous woman in the world, Madonna, gives birth to her
daughter lordis Maria Chicone Leon. The doctor who makes the
announcement outside the hospital is none other than Dr Paul Flice. Well,

(14:14):
he didn't deliver the baby himself. Dr Paul Flye says
Madonna asked him personally for help with the process of
her first pregnancy, which also fits if you remember that
Madonna was going deep into her New Age phase around
this time, and that Paul Flies had a reputation as
the new Age pediatrician for celebrities. When Heidi World returns,

(14:39):
we catch up with producer Don Simpson. Welcome back to

(15:06):
Heidi World. December, Heidi turns thirty one, Charlie Sheen is
arrested for assaulting a young woman at his house. By
the long eighties are long over. Most of the besuited
power players Heidi Delt two are barely hanging on in Hollywood,

(15:28):
or at least have long passed their peak. But producer
Don Simpson, the eighties man of all eighties men, is
having a big career come back. After wabbling through a
few years at Disney, Simpson has a massive hit with
Bad Boys, the Martin Lawrence and Will Smith buddy cop
comedy directed by a young, upstart director named Michael Bay.

(15:53):
Michael Bay isn't connected to the story enough for me
to do a deep dive here, but let's just say
do an Internet search for Michael Bay, John Frank and
Hi Timers Secret Son and see where you go. I
will say that Michael Bay is like John Peters and
also myself, another striver from the San Fernando Valley, determined
to claw his way over into the Hollywood Hills, probably

(16:14):
because his father is Sei really John Frankenheimer, although he
passed at DNA tests. Even though he is once again
bankable at the box office, which is all anyone cares about,
John Simpson's cocaine use is still so bad in the
mid nineties that his pals David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg
have to stage an intervention on him. Sent Anon, the

(16:35):
l A rehab, which opened in nineteen fifty eight and
forged ties to the Human Potential movement, then became a
cult called the Church of Sinnon, disbanded in the eighties
under scrutiny for tax evasion impossible deaths, although there's still
a sent Anon branch in Germany. Sent Anon may have
pioneered the idea of beach front rehab with a New
Age bent, but they have sold their building on the

(16:58):
now wildly expensive Santama on a co strand, where it
is now a luxury hotel called the Casa del Mar,
right next to shutters on the beach. In the people
of Means in l A go to up high end
beachside rehabs like the influential Promises in Malibu, founded in
starting a trend of rehabs using what promises called quote

(17:20):
the Malibu model, where patients are given much more freedom
than in traditional rehab, and group therapy is skipped entirely
in favor of treatment focused on the individual. Promises costs
for dollars a month and plays into the same mindset
that worked on Heidi's rich customers for everything else. If

(17:40):
it's the most expensive, it must be the very best.
Promises may have a different visual aesthetic from Synanon, but
as treatments are also somewhat questionable, and the entire field
of rehab for profit is a grift. But Doohn Simpson
won't go to rehab, even a ritzy rehab on the
Malibu coast, to signed around the tastes of guys just

(18:01):
like him. He promises his friends will get help for
his addiction issues in his own way. So Don Simpson
hires a doctor named doctor Ammerman, who is himself a
former addict and not surprisingly a total quack. Dr Amerman
put Simpson on a doctor feel good detox of morphine
for his cocaine withdrawals. Dr Ammerman is then found dead

(18:24):
in Don Simpson's poolhouse from a cocktail of morphine, volume cocaine,
and ven lafoxine whatever that is. Don Simpson's drug abuse
remains so out of control that Jerry Bruckheimer terminates their
production partnership, which finishes out with The Rock. At age
fifty two, in his bel Air home, Don Simpson drops

(18:47):
dead from heart failure after mixing twenty one different prescription
drugs and cocaine. The Rock, a huge hit, is dedicated
to his memory. Don was not just a customer, he
was a close friend. I loved him dearly. Well, Don

(19:10):
Simpson was just a bad guy, a bum. That was
the kind of guy who was taken over the studios.
And this is a big plus to our industry that
he's not here anymore. I'm only sorry that he didn't
live longer and suffer more. Robert Altman, director, Today, even

(19:36):
in death, Don Simpson still lives. He may not have
an official credit on the Top Gun sequel, Top Gun Maverick.
It is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Films, which is the
production company that Bruckheimer started after cutting ties with Simpson
and their shared production company that produced the original Top Gun,
but Don Simpson's imprint on the American entertainment industry, the

(19:56):
Big eighties, big fucking jets, cool looking stuff, openly working
with the military to make pro American propaganda, even the
franchise replacing Kelly McGillis sixty four with Jennifer Connelly fifty
one as the love interest for Tom Cruise. All of
this is the Don Simpson touch, and I will be

(20:18):
their opening night. There have been a lot of really
bad faith arguments about ethics and movie making lately, mostly online,
and I think, as a person who contains multitudes, that
it's possible to know that Don Simpson was a pedophile
who abused sex workers, and that Robert Altman was totally
right about him. Don Simpson can completely rotten hell and

(20:40):
still also want to see Tom Cruise fly around in
his little plane. If there's any takeaway from this podcast,
it should be that basically everyone producing in Hollywood is
a full fledged criminal in some way, just like anyone
who has a lot of mysterious money is. There's no
ethical consumption under capitalism, so you might as well take
it to the danger zone. Own It's now the year,

(21:17):
Boogie Nights comes out. If this podcast were Boogie Nights,
this part would be the New Year's Eve party. Heidi
appeals to the judge in her federal court with an
apology letter. I was young and stupid and wrong. I
will be paying for the crimes I have committed for

(21:39):
the rest of my life. It is to no avail.
Heidi gets sentenced to thirty seven months in prison for
tax evasion and money laundering. She has relieved because the
maximum is seven months, but she is also frail, wearing
her prison uniform from the Metropolitan Detention Center and no makeup,

(22:00):
a far cry from the glamorous Heidi and Dulce and
Gabana from the trial. She weeps through her sentencing. I
wish her new words to tell you how sorry I am.
I'm a different person now. I was young and I'd

(22:24):
made terrible choices. It stays that I would I've never made.
The pandering sentence comes down the next month. She gets
eighteen months for pandering that she can serve concurrently with
the thirty seven months from the federal trial. Michael Nathanson,
the Columbia Pictures guy who put out a denial that

(22:46):
he knew Heidi, but was fired from Columbia Anyway is
named head of MGM. That's right, everyone. Heidi goes to
jail and the one guy who was actually named from
a studio gets a brand new studio head job. After
leaving m BIA, Nathanson went to Arnond Milchon's company New Regency,
where he was poached by MGM. Everything really worked out

(23:07):
great for all the men. Meanwhile, Heidi gets a slander
suit filed against her by Detective Samu Lee the Second,
his father Samuelee the First, and a police officer named
Patricia Corso for remarks she made on the k Rock
radio show love Line in six where she called the
mal homosexuals. Love Line is k Rock sex and relationship

(23:28):
advice radio call in show hosted by Adam Carolla and
the absolutely disgusting Dr Drew. I found out only recently
that all of the phone calls on Loveline were staged.
The slander trial eventually guests tossed out of court. Judah Alsa,
better known as j J the King of Beepers, sues
Nick Broomfield and loses the case because the court says

(23:50):
JJ the King of Beepers and by that token, Judah
Alsa is a public figure due to his very public
JJ King of Beeper's ad campaigns. Your act really legally
allowed to make art about somebody if they're a public figure,
which is why this podcast is barely legal. Victoria Sellers
is laid so low. She's working retail and not even

(24:12):
at the Heidi wear store. She is embarrassed when Sean Hubler,
who covered the Heidi case extensively for The l A Times,
randomly spots her working at a clothing boutique on Melrose.
I'm Victoria, Victoria Sellers. We met when I was covering
Heide Flyss. I'm also doing some stand up comedy. Please

(24:34):
don't think less of me. The writer Dominic Done puts
out a new book called Another City Not My Own.
It's a novel that is semi fictionalized narrative nonfiction about
his experience covering the O. J. Simpson trial. Dominic Dunne
is the older brother of John Gregory Dunn, another writer
who was married to Joan Didion. Dominic's daughter, whose name

(24:58):
was Dominique Done, was horrifically murdered, at which point he
started writing about wealth, crime and the judicial system, mostly
for Vanity Fair. Much like Heidi. Dominic Dunn knows absolutely
everyone in l A on both the high and low
ends of the spectrum. In another city, not my own,
Dominic Dunne casually writes that allegedly he introduced Heidi Flights

(25:22):
to former First Lady Nancy Reagan at the bel Air Hotel.
He was at lunch with Heidi, spotted Nancy Reagan with
her friend Betsy Bloomingdale, and decided to introduce them because
he thought it would be funny. According to Donne, here's
how Heidi reacted. I can't believe what has happened. Yes,

(25:44):
it should be funny that Nancy Reagan, the throat goat,
met Heidi Flights, the Hollywood Madam. However, I have to
be a Debbie Downer here and say that when Nancy
Reagan was giving head to everyone in Hollywood, it was
because it was wamp wamp coer. The stuff they made
starlets do while under contracts for old school studios was

(26:05):
essentially pimping. The forties and fifties in Hollywood were even
worse for women than the nineteen eighties. And if you
don't believe me, check out Karina long Worth podcast. You
must remember this. Nick Broomfield's new documentary Kurta and Courtney
is banned from Sundance after Courtney Love threatens to sue
because the documentary sort of implies she may have been

(26:27):
responsible for the murder of her husband, Kurt Cobain. The
doc being banned from Sundance just makes people more curious,
almost like controversy is good publicity for a documentary that
basically endorses a conspiracy theory. I wonder if that will
have any effect on American culture in the twenty first century.
Who can say. After thirty years, Alyssa ash Flies lists

(26:51):
the family home in Los Felis where the Flies clan
all grew up for one point three million dollars. Heidi's lawyer,
Anthony Reclaire, gets stuck with a tax bill from the
I R S for failing to file his taxes. He
pleads guilty in court. It comes out he actually didn't
pay or file taxes for ten years, intentionally deciding that

(27:14):
he just didn't feel like it. He gets off with
a slap on the wrists and probation. My failure to
file was a mistake which I am taking very seriously
and for which I take full responsibility. I am doing
all I can to resolve the problem. Thirty two year

(27:35):
old Charlie Sheen overdoses at his house in the West Valley,
enclaim of a gora and his hospitalized. Now you may
wonder why we are still following Charlie Sheen and this story.
And it's not just because making this podcast made me
realize that seeing Charlie Sheen for the first time in
the Rambo parody Hotshots part was probably the moment I
hit puberty. It's because I think it's instructive to see

(27:58):
how Charlie Sheen's career recovers in the wake of the scandal.
He's the perfect example of the way there's a system
in place to give straight white guy second chances after
scandals that would be career ending for anyone else. But
I also think Charlie Sheen is a tragic figure because
he gets trapped in the sort of bad boy image
that made him a star. There's a whole system of

(28:21):
social cues around masculinity that say that what he's doing
lots of drugs and having sex with a million different
women all the time is cool and idealizable, even if
it's clear that it's probably killing him and at the
very least puts his sexual partners in extreme harm's way.
We live in a deeply misogynist world, and part of
that is the refusal to acknowledge that masculinity is also

(28:44):
a prison November, Heidi has been in federal prison in Dublin, California,
for twenty one month. She is released from prison and
moved to a halfway house after three days. She says

(29:05):
she actually hates the halfway house so much she'd rather
go back to prison, and while in prison, she has
a lot of time to think, she finds herself getting
oddly sentimental. The strange part about everything is when I
was in prison, I I thought back on my life
and all the people I've met. I really missed Madam Alex.

(29:28):
I knew she would have done what she could to
make my prison sentence easier, even though she helped put
me there. I love and miss her. The cops bust
another l a madam at one year old woman named
Jody Diane Baby Doll Gibson, also known as Sasha of
the Valley. Gibson is originally from Westchester County, New York,

(29:52):
and comes from an East Coast entertainment family of Russian Jews.
Her father was a radio announcer for CBS in the
nineteen forties, and her mother there was a talent manager
who takes full credit for being the first talent scout
to discover a young actor in New York fresh off
the bus from Kentucky named William Mapethur, who would later
become known as Tom Cruise. See I brought it back

(30:13):
to top. Gun Gibson's aunt was a jazz singer whose
stage name was Georgia Gibbs born freeda lipshitz who achieved
minor success with whitewashed covers of black artists songs, most
notably a cover of Etta James the Wallflower retitled Dance
with Me Henry. Baby Doll says her aunt inspired her
to pursue singing, so Baby Doll Gibson moved from Manhattan

(30:36):
to l A to pursue modeling in music. She was
occasionally featured on the USA Network show Up All Night.
Singing wasn't panning out, so in she started a modeling
agency that turned into an escort business. She eventually used
her money from madam ing to finance a vanity pop
star career. I found a video on YouTube of Baby

(30:57):
Doll in giving a tour of l A with Robert
Evans by her side, where she shows off the new
billboard on Sunset Boulevard for her freestyle song which will Flop.
While she was also known for running the Valley with
Heidi locked up, Baby Doll was able to start running
escorts to the West Side. Gibson was also more under

(31:19):
the radar than Heidi. She ran her business out of
a hotel in the valley through a website called California
dream In that showcased photos of twenty to thirty models
and build itself as a modeling agency. Sasha's roster included
some adult film performers as well as some mainstream actresses.
Some of Sasha's girls were former Heidi girls who made
the jump to Sasha when Heidi went down. One of

(31:42):
Baby Doll Gibson's girls also rats on her to the cops,
who conducted staying out of a West l A hotel
to show that they are also coming for Heidi's successors,
Sasha and the Valley. She used to leave threatening messages
on the answering machine or find out what hotel we
were using a call. She once threatened to have the
I R s come after me in a twist that

(32:07):
should not be too shocking. At this point, Baby Doll
Gibson ak Madam Sasha ak Sasha of the Valley says
she was having an affair with one of the cops
investigating her escort business, who in turn protected her from
the cops. When she ended the relationship with the cop,
she lost the cops protection. Baby It all just passed
away recently, and Susan Orlean wrote a short ott bit

(32:29):
of her for The New Yorker. Baby Doll herself wrote
a great tell all called Secrets of a Hollywood super Madam.
September twenty two, Heidi Flice is released from federal prison
after serving her sentence of three years. She is now
thirty three years old. She files for protection from bankruptcy.

(32:51):
She owes legal fees to affirm background for the Heidi
World store in Santa Monica and money for unsold Heidiwear inventory.
But if you were concerned and Heidi wouldn't immediately think
of a plan to drum up some money, you haven't
been listening to this show. At the end of Just
in Time for y t K, Heidi announces that she
is launching a website with Internet Entertainment group who put

(33:15):
out the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape. Heidi
plans to launch the site with an advice column, media
featuring some brand new Heidi girls and emerged section of
Heidi ware lingerie. Jodie Baby Doll Gibson's case goes to trial,
once again targeting the madam but ignoring the John's. Gibson's

(33:36):
black book is a Rolodex card index of four names
of alleged customers. Some of these customers are major financial
supporters of gil Garcetti, who's the d A on the case.
The lead investigator on the Baby Doll case, Detective ras
critin Ian, also draws criticism for allegedly having had sex
with Gibson's girls multiple times during his ten months long

(33:58):
undercover investigating sankritin Ian cops to being naked around prostitutes,
but denies having had sex with them. Gibson calls out
the police for their hypocrisy. She suggests that prostitution should
be legalized in Los Angeles, with a one percent tax
going to pay for housing for the homeless. In a
court in Van DUIs, Baby it All is sentenced to

(34:21):
three years in prison for her high priced call girl ring.
Heidi sues E Entertainment Television for their Hollywood True Story
episode about her, which she said made her look like
a police informant a k a. A snitch, therefore putting
her life in danger while she was in jail. She
also ends up launching her site at heidi ware dot Net,

(34:42):
selling ceramic coffee cups she made in jail. The auction
prices for the cup started fift dollars, and there's also
a message board. Actor Robert Downey Jr. Is making art
in prison too, doing paintings while serving a three year
sentence in Corkoran for violating his drug probation. While Heidi
is in prison, the sex game is changing yet again.

(35:04):
The phone is no longer the cutting edge in sexual arrangement.
Now there's the Internet, which bypasses the need for a
madam to arrange sexual transactions. The Internet itself is the madam.
I was the last of the last. You can get
anything you want now online. At the dawn of the

(35:30):
twenty one century, Heidi reunites with Sean Hubler. After prison,
Heidi has moved into a new place, still in the
canyons of Hollywood, although much less expensive than her old
Tower Grove estate. She has also gotten a post prison
plastic surgery makeover. Hey, my lips are still going down

(35:51):
from the cosmetic surgery. I had a lot done lips, eyes, boobs.
Being in prison with no skin care really doesn't number
on you. You're in that recreation yard, but the sun
beating down you it really ages you. Prematurely write it
if you want, but be sure to put in the
name of my plastic surgeon, Dr Randall Hayworth. Heidi has

(36:14):
come back out of prison to a different world. She
no longer wants to be a madam, even if she could.
She makes an investment deal with Seth Warshowsky, the shady
Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson sex tape distributor who runs
internet entertainment group. He agrees to give her money to
open a new Heidi wear store, this time on Melrose.

(36:36):
Seth war Chovsky is also a character in Huls Pam
and Tommy and yet another interesting huckster. He started in
phone sex and moved on to running one of the
very first cam girl operations, a website called club love
dot Com. Warschowsky purposely courted controversy first by distributing the
Pam and Tommy sex tape against the couple's wishes, but

(36:58):
also by threatening to distribute a Kelsey Grammer sex tape
and putting up a hoax website called Our First Time
that purported to show two virgins having sex for the
first time live on a webcam. Honestly, the Fraser sex
tape sounds worse than a snuff film. The post court
TV culture of twenty four hour content and coverage driven

(37:18):
by morbid curiosity has spread to its final host, the Internet,
where it takes its final form of social media and clickbait.
But the deal between Seth Warshowski and Heidi goes up
in flames when they get in a fight with a
rabbi landlord with one stipulation. Warshofsky is also being investigated
for fraud at the exact moment Heidi is trying to

(37:41):
open another store with his investment. The landlord was a
very religious guy who at one point was going to
be a rabbi. All he asked was that I agree
not to sell sex toys, which was fine. It was
going to have a velvet robed v I P area,
We're going to do live webcast was seberties that Seth insisted.

(38:02):
He threatened to sue me through the landlord. He was
a great concept, but it fell apart over dildos. Heidi
tells Sean Hubler that in jail, she was once put
in solitary confinement for throwing a metal chair at a guard.
I know this sounds really prison, but the officer was

(38:22):
humiliating me for my own safety. I had to prove
I wasn't a punk. Going to prison has also changed
Tidy in the same way it changes most people. It
has hardened her. Let's just put it this way. There's
a lot of sex in prison and a lot of
people who get raped. Three guards were transferred while I

(38:46):
was there for inappropriate behavior, but the women also seduced
the guards. But in her unique fashion, Heidi still always
tries to find the silver lining in her situation with
a shrub and a smile. Prison gave her time to
reflect on her own issues addiction and self hatred. I

(39:09):
had a spiritual awakening at one point watching an Oprah
Winfrey video about loving yourself. Charlie Sheen makes a comeback
in the mainstream media, taking over from Michael J. Fox
on the hit ABC sitcom Spin City when Fox's Parkinson's
disease symptoms advance. Much like Robert Downey Jr's post jail

(39:31):
stunt on Ally McBeal, the Spin City gig is a
way for people with addiction scandals to prove that they
are reliable and can be employed again without becoming an
insurance liability for big entertainment companies. Remember Jacob Cookie or Gad,
the ecstasy dealer who went from working with j J.
The Beeper King, to being Heidi's enforcer. Cookie or Gad

(39:57):
now forty four heads to trial for conspiracy. See you
to import and distribute to legal drugs. Even the special
agents are impressed at the scope and skillfulness of Organs
ecstasy operation. The ring had been operating for two years
when customs officers at l a X caught two couriers
coming from Paris carrying a hundred and forty thousand ecstasy
pills and their luggage. The Dutch chemists who made the

(40:20):
ecstasy goes on the lamb all at all six hundred
and fifty thousand tablets of ecstasy with a value of
twenty million dollars r c s. The Los Angeles avant
garde artist Paul McCarthy makes a series of paintings and
video art about Heidi where he conflates Heidi Flie with
the German children's story of Heidi. Heidi has a series

(40:44):
of themes I'm interested in. It's a kind of moral
story with the purpose of, you know, conditioning children to
good and pure things. For me, Heidi flics represent this
kind of Heidi in this land, uh, with sort of
strange innocence to her. Really, and so this piece is
a way of deconstructing media culture like you know, People,
magazine or whatever. Within the theme of Heidi, it's really

(41:08):
about consumption, consumerism. It's a lot about that, the use
of fantasy figures and how that kind of permeates our
culture as a spectacle or a conditioner. Uh. And I
point that out through the use of these characters such
as Heidi. They're they're almost fabrications. They're the culturalization of innocence,

(41:28):
which is generational passes down, it becomes you. You are
in culturalized into absurdity. Uh. And I'm in it too,
Paul McCarthy artist, And what about ginger Lynn Allen, the
adult star and former girlfriend of Charlie Sheen. Gingerly and

(41:52):
Allen returns to adult films. In two thousand, she stars
in new Wave Hooker six to Say, installment in the
franchise she originated. Alan makes a few more adult films
in the late nineties and early two thousands, like Sunset Stripped,
My First Sex Teacher seventeen Ginger Loves Girls, and a

(42:13):
hardcore porn parody of Saw. She also starts hosting a
serious satellite radio show for Playboy called I Swear to God.
I did not know this until right now Night Calls Radio.
When Heidi World returns, Heidi gets a new boyfriend, actor

(42:36):
Tom Sizemore. Welcome Back to Heidi World. Two thousand one,

(43:06):
Tidy violates her parole by testing positive from meth amphetamans.
While under house arrest for violating probation, she moonlights writing
a column for a website called laugh dot Com. Paul
Flice and George DiCaprio, still best friends, take a walk
together every morning around those fields. They are inspired by
a neighbor's son who's doing a sit in at Harvard

(43:28):
for a living wage, and decided to throw a benefit
fundraiser together for a nonprofit group dedicated to raising wages.
The fundraiser gets covered in the local newspaper as a
positive local civilc event, suggesting that Dr Paul Flice's reputation
at least has been somewhat redeemed. Meanwhile, his daughter Heidi
is trying to hustle a one woman show, an instructional DVD,

(43:51):
and a book profiling call girls that she wants to
call a hooker book. She also has a new boyfriend,
actor Tom Size, more known for playing Detectives and True
Romance and Natural Born Killers and also appearing in movies
like Strange Days and Heat. The couple move in together
after dating for a year. How's it going so far?

(44:15):
So good? Relationships are more difficult than dieting? You know,
one doesn't pick or they fall in love with Tom Sizemore.
Actor Heidi and Tom Sizemore agree to auction off a
dinner date with them as a couple for a Catholic

(44:35):
high school. When the previous year's celebrity guests, local news
legend Kuelhauser declines to repeat. There is an immediate backlash
from parents, and the magical Night with Heidie and Tom
has taken off the auction block for the Catholic school fundraiser.
I can't believe this. I didn't know I was in
such demand. I guess that was the rejection that created

(44:56):
a bit of a buzz. Two thousand two, Heidi and
Tom size more breakup. Love is a sickness, a disease.
Our behavior is completely different. We get vulnerable, obsessed, delusional.

(45:17):
Charlie Sheen wins a Golden Globe for his work on
Spin City. Somewhere after Night eleven, the media landscape shifts
completely yet again, to become more uptight and racist than ever,
but also increasingly raunchy, in tandem with the twin phenomenons
of a new wave of reality television and the success

(45:37):
of amateur internet pornography. Joe Francis is amateur flashing at
spring break series Girls Gone Wild, which began in is
peaking in sales in the early two thousand's. At the
same time, a writer's strike leads the television industry to
invest heavily in the burgeoning form of reality television. While
MTV is The Real World was the first its social

(45:59):
issue whose format was not what these network shows chose
to copy about it, and by its early two thousands
Las Vegas season, even the Real World was slipping into
titilating hot tub territory. The early two thousand's wave of
reality shows our network shows like Competition, game show Survivor.
The industry likes these shows because they are cheap to

(46:20):
make and easy to evade traditional union protections, with viewers
like them because they are long and tawdry. The American
shows are a step down in toddrenus and length from
the European ones, which can show nudity and shows like
twenty four hour surveillance camp show Big Brother. Sometimes the
tawdre nous goes over the line from fun to watch

(46:41):
into exploitation, and the viewer must contend with whether they
are complicit in America's new favorite fast time humiliating real
people on TV. How does this relate back to Heidi Flice, Well,
the Heidi Trial in many ways at the template for
the sort of public stoning on camera that reality television
made its bread and butter on on. But the connection

(47:01):
between the Flics clan and reality television goes even deeper,
all the way out to Fullerton, California, where Heidi has
a second cousin named Mike Flice. I like to take
a topic that someone says, you can't put that on TV,
and then I put it on TV. I want to

(47:22):
feel a little bit dangerous, a tiny bit irresponsible probably,
and it usually equals some controversy, and that's sort of
my stock and trade. Mike Flice, reality television producer Mike
Flice's mother is a nurse and his father owns a
Baskin Robbin's franchise in nearby La Habra. Much like his
cousin Heidi, Mike Flice doesn't totally fit in with the

(47:43):
other easy going California kids. At Fullerton's Sunny Hills High
the girls were unbelievably hot, but I was the alienated
parking lot stoner man. Nevertheless, he becomes class president. He
also starts dating a girl that he meets at local
theme park, Notsberry Farm. Then he goes to UC Berkeley,

(48:06):
where he studies journalism. He writes for the college paper
there and wants to become a sportswriter. He works at
the Sacramento Union, then the Santa Rosa Press for about
three hundred bucks a week, but he spends all this
time at the office writing television spec scripts and watching
reruns of Married with Children. The name Flice in German

(48:27):
means industrious and hard working, and Mike has the same
genetics that I have. Mike Flice's bolt of inspiration comes
when he sees a sketch on the syndicated TV version
of Howard Stern's radio show. It was something called the
Lesbian Dating Game, and I thought, damn, they had complete

(48:48):
creative freedom, and I was being restricted by the facts
all the time. I felt like if I sat there
with a bunch of old men, I'd become one of them.
I flipped my editor of the Bird and I told
him to fucking fire me, motherfucker. His editor remembers it differently.
He says he fired a shocked Mike Flice for spending
all of his time at the office watching syndicated reruns

(49:09):
of Married with Children and not doing work. After getting
laid off from the paper, Mike fls sends out his
television spec scripts, which go nowhere. Then he gets his
wife pregnant. I would kill a human being for this opportunity.
After being unemployed for a year with a baby on

(49:31):
the way, Mike Flice's big break comes when he wins
an audition to write for a Fox show called Totally
Hidden Video. He writes forty bits in one night and
gets the job. Finding out he's hired while his wife
is giving birth to their son, who they name Aaron Flice,
after the legendary television producer Aaron Spelling, who produced, among
other things, Melrose Place. Totally Hidden video gets canceled almost immediately,

(49:55):
but Mike Flace has gotten his foot in the door
of a gold mine. During the old rush that is
reality TV in the early two thousand's, next, Mike Flice
links up with two prolific reality show producers named Bruce
Nash and Mike Darnell. Mike Darnell's specialty is making shows
that he compares favorably to violent car crashes you Can't

(50:16):
look away from. Their new writer, Mike Flice, is tasked
with writing a script for a Fox special called Breaking
the Magician's Code, Magic's Biggest Secrets Revealed. The special features
a mass magician explaining how tricks work. It's a huge
hit and leads to five sequelized Magicians Code specials, a
bunch of lawsuits, and a lot of very angry magicians.

(50:40):
I wanted to do a show called the World's Meanest
People Caught on Tape and you have a bunch of
people doing me and stuff. But we had a clip
of a bartender this one time, and he was stirring
a martini with his penis. The Fox network, known for
scraping the gutter even for reality, buys the World's Meanest
book called on Tape Idea. It airs under the new

(51:03):
title Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape And so Mike Flies
charges into the wild West of reality shows, demonstrating that
the Fly's family jeans for hustling work and good money
out of thin air are indeed very strong. Mike Flies
produces shows with titles like World Scariest Police Shootouts. In
two thousand, he produces a Fox reality special called Who

(51:26):
Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire, where fifty women compete in
a beauty contest to win marriage to a rich man.
They don't get to see the rich guy until they
win during the televised marriage ceremony. This kind of they
can't do this on camera? Can they? Reality show format
lives on even today, primarily on Netflix. Who Wants to

(51:47):
Marry a Multimillionaire is a controversy before it even airs,
attracting criticism from both conservative Christian groups and the national
organization for women. It's Mike's idea to further court the
controversy by staging the show like a beauty pageant. Imagine
what kind of self respecting multi millionaire would want to
marry a woman's sight on scene. I mean thank you

(52:09):
for Rick Rockwell. It's quite possible he was the only
person on the planet who was willing to do it.
And our backup millionaire, he's trying to get me to
buy him a Mercedes five free and clear. Rick Rockwell,
the show's titular multimillionaire, is revealed to have lied about
his net worth. It turns out he didn't even have
one million dollars, let alone several. The winner of the

(52:32):
show is a pretty blonde Air Force veteran named Darvic Conger,
whose mother was the minor nine fifties actress Susan Harrison,
best known for Sweet Smell of Success, a movie about
how corrosive and a moral the media industries can be.
Conger asks for an immediate annulment of the on screen nuptials.
She does a press tour where she says she and

(52:54):
Rockwell had not consummated the marriage and that she regrets
doing the show. She poses for play Boy later that year,
and fights former Soviet Olympic gymnast Olga Corbette on an
episode of Celebrity Boxing in two thousand two. Then she
gives up on fame and moves to northern California, where
she's worked as a nurse and estheesist ever since. Rick

(53:14):
Rockwell claimed the show ruined his life, but shortly afterwards
a smoking gun dot com story came out about how
he had allegedly assaulted and threatened to former fiancee, who
filed a restraining order on him. In response to the scandal,
the Fox Network canceled some planned upcoming boundary pushing reality
shows like Plastic Surgery, Nightmares, and Jumbo Jet Crash The

(53:36):
Ultimate Safety Test. Fox purposely has been courting this kind
of controversy in the early two thousand's, right up until
it starts to backfire, airing shows whose outreach value right
there in the titles drew viewers in. Fox aired reality
shows like two thousand fours Horrific The Swan, where a
bunch of normal women get plastic surgery makeovers and then

(53:57):
compete in a beauty contest. The swa on ran for
two seasons and is to this day the most fucked
up thing I've ever seen on TV. The late nineties
content cycle has met the two thousand's, an era where
a little bit of fame and controversy can potentially be
parlayed into a slightly larger amount of fame. Anyone could

(54:18):
become a professional delist or for at least a brief
amount of time. Despite the Rick rock Ball scandal, Mike
Flice gets back on the reality television horse, selling a
show called Battle of the Child Geniuses. He gets a
new deal with C A A and become showrunner of
an NBC hidden camera show called Spy TV. He lands

(54:38):
a seven figure deal to develop new shows for Warner Brothers.
Here's Mailer a Bride's which is an idea I think
someone is doing now. Intervention called Turkey is about people
trying to give up addictions. Spot your former lover, get
a room full of people. You slept with one of
these people, and now you've got to find that person.
Social Climbers, that's the title, kind of like and ruin

(55:02):
your Life. That's pretty good. Uh, what does ruin your
Life about? I only remember what's about. After running through
his first batch of insane ideas, inspiration comes first. He
invents a high school reunion reality show, and then it
comes to him like a bolt from the blue. The

(55:25):
Bachelor dating show where you watch your relationship evolved. I
mean within fifteen minutes, I'd the whole thing in my head,
the roses, the house, I mean everything. I swear to God,
it was like it hit me in one flash. The
Bachelor is Mike Flice has turned towards I guess respectability.

(55:49):
At least it's a step away from the car crash
videos he made his name on. The Bachelor also draws
obvious comparisons to his cousin, Heide's former business. It's a
show about men choosing one beautiful woman out of a
lineup of beautiful women. The Bachelor is strangely chased for
a show that is so blatantly about sexual competition. But

(56:12):
by the time The Bachelor arrives there is an entire
class of actor who would settle for reality show fame.
Is it really exploitative if everyone involved has agreed to
be degraded on television consentually. I don't know. When I
announced that the name of this podcast was Heidi World,
some people asked if it was a podcast about Heidi Montag,

(56:34):
the Star of the Hills, who got a bunch of
intense plastic surgery procedures very close together for attention and
publicity in the two thousands. I guess I'm trying to
say the answer is sort of also yes. Anthony Pellicano
is arrested for possessing heavy explosives and Charlie Sheen gets

(56:58):
married for a second time. I'm to actress Denise Richards
Tom Sizemore's relationship with Heidi and so badly that Heidi
ends up the last place she would ever want to
be again, a courtroom. In May of two thousand three,

(57:19):
Heidi files charges against Tom Sizemore for domestic violence and
intimidating witnesses. Sizemore is ordered to stay away from her
Tom Sizemore's lawyer claims Heidi is just trying to get
revenge on his client for ending their relationship. In recent months,
I've permitted my personal demons to take over my life.

(57:41):
I don't want to make excuses, but I'm convinced that
if that not been under the influence of drugs, I
would control my behavior. I believe I can beat this scourage.
It's afflicted me and become a better man and better citizen.
I remind you of the Bard's praise of justice tempered
with mercy, or she benefits those who receive it and

(58:02):
those who give it. Tom Sizemore is already being charged
in another trial with domestic violence and intimidating witnesses by
a different ex girlfriend. In phone messages played for the jury,
Size More allegedly tells Heidi that no one will believe
her because he is a famous Hollywood actor and she
is quote a convicted felon and garbage horror end quote.

(58:25):
Size Moore pleads not guilty in this Heidi trial, but
he is convicted and sentenced to six months in jail.
I'd like to put this behind me now and do
what I've always loved doing, which is to make movies.
Heidi sells her life story to Paramount Pictures for a
movie that will supposedly star Nicole Kidman. The movie doesn't

(58:48):
get made, probably just development hell, but the studios also
just want the scandal to disappear. They may have even
bought the rights in order to bury the story and
stop it from resurfacing, which well, too bad for them.
They didn't predict podcasts. No relationship is easy. They are
constantly a work in progress. And because of my life's

(59:10):
experiences and my years running the sex business, I know
more about the dynamics of male and female behavior and
the complexities of relationships than someone who has spent years
in a classroom reading self help books. You're going to
a therapist. My advice may not follow society standards, but
it is right. Heidi writes and publishes two books. One

(59:36):
is a dating guide called The Player's Handbook. In the
Player's Handbook, she gives advice about how to date like
a powerful man that feels very in stopped with the
third wave feminism of the late nineties and early two thousand's.
The casual sex that came out of the nineteen sixties
sexual revolution had merged with eighties and nineties corporatism that
happened to be right on brand for Heidi Flace. Be

(59:59):
the best, most beautiful object you can be, Then use
your brain to make men pay for your extravagant lifestyle.
Don't deny your past. Your past is part of the
woman he loves. So if you were a stripper hooker,
you fucked half the football team in high school, don't
deny what you have done and who you are. See

(01:00:22):
your past with humor. If your man finds out, laugh
it off. It's also very much about Heidi's own specific taste.
There's an illustration of the ideal bachelorette pad where she
describes what a girl's apartment should look like. A player's
home should have, soft ambience, beautiful mood lighting, home feeder

(01:00:48):
complete with all the classic player flicks. Immaculate bathroom complete
with all types of hygiene products from men and women.
Abundance of special presence for each date, candles, pajamas, glass
animals that are all one of a kind except for
the extra fifty in the basement, fully loaded bar, personal

(01:01:09):
touches of player wisdom like rejection, breeds, session, overall uber pimp,
super slick furniture, art, and ambience. Heidi's other book is
an autobiography called Pandering. Pandering is a yearbook sized coffee
table book that's basically a scrap book of Heidi's exploits.

(01:01:29):
As we learned, the girls were all really into scrap
booking and kept careful records with ticket stubs, diaries, and
physical photos. Heidi seemingly kept everything Pandering in the Player's Handbook.
Both have some really wild graphic design in this early
Internet college maximalist style. Meanwhile, Charlie Sheen gets another starring

(01:01:52):
role as an aging bachelor in a TV show called
Two and a Half Man. It's a huge hit, providing
Sheen with a mainstream career comeback as a sitcom star
after he soft launched on Spin City, and also providing
him with absolutely ungodly amounts of network television sitcom money
while he cultivates his new image as a loving husband

(01:02:13):
and father married to America's sweetheart Denise Richards. Heidi Flice
completes her probation. Somehow she has finally come out of
her ordeal for good and she is a free woman.
But she has changed in the years since she first
took on the city of Los Angeles, and the city
of Los Angeles has changed in those years too, And

(01:02:35):
somehow Heidi has to figure out yet again how to
make a viable living. While she may no longer be
able or even interested in selling sex, she can still
sell notoriety. And where do notorious people go for a
second wind in their career alongside washed up famous people?
Why Reality TV? Of course. Next time on Heidi World.

(01:03:14):
Heidi moved to the Nevada desert with a dream to
open a broadle for women called Heidi sub Farm in Parham,
where prostitution is legal