The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (34 page)

BY THIS TIME,
we had started filming
Cathouse: The Musical
, and it turned out to be the most fun of all the shows. We rented Piper’s Opera House, a beautiful, historic building in Virginia City — six U.S. presidents have attended performances there — and Brooke just nailed it. She’s an amazing performer and a wonderful singer. One of the producers was floored. “Dennis,” he told me. “On a typical song you’re going to find yourself doing ten, twenty takes. But Brooke is nailing it the first time every time. That girl has a gift.”

And I said, “She’s got more than one gift.”

The show was directed by Patti Kaplan, who had directed all the previous seasons, and she was joined by two amazing talents: Fred Barton, who supervised the music and oversaw the arrangements, and Scott Thompson, who staged the musical numbers. I was introduced to my new favorite type of music: Cole Porter, Jimmy McHugh, Charles Strouse, Dorothy Fields, Harry Warren, Al Dubin,
etc.
If you’ve never heard of those guys, you should get acquainted with them pronto. You’ll thank me for it.

I also did a wonderful duet with Brooke, “You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me.” Her part was wonderful, anyway; I was told to keep my day job — even after having struggled through
months
of
singing and dancing lessons! And we did a version of “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love,” a song made famous by Frank Sinatra: “Oh my heart is beating wildly and it’s all because you’re here / When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near.” But we fudged the lyrics a bit: “When I’m not
in
the girl I love, I love the girl I’m in.”

In the middle of production, Brooke’s mother came to visit. We put her in the show and she loved it, but after she left I detected a small change in Brooke. In fact, during the filming, there was a sequence where the girls were asked to run around with small cameras and film anything they wanted and Brooke decided to film me. In the middle of it she started crying, and I could see that we were slipping into familiar territory. No matter how much I loved Brooke, it wasn’t enough. She wanted more.

We got past it just like most people get past their issues, by ignoring them, and not long after I got a call from Tucker Carlson, the TV personality. “I’m traveling for NBC with Ron Paul,” he said. “Would you want to meet me at the press conference in Las Vegas tomorrow?” I said I’d be delighted — I’m a media whore — and I told him I’d bring a couple of girls with me.

In the morning, early, I left for the Lawlor Events Center in Las Vegas, with Brooke and Air Force Amy, and I told them a story about Tucker. His family on his mother’s side was in the turkey business. One year they didn’t sell enough turkeys and they were very upset. They were wondering what the hell they were going to do with thousands and thousands of turkeys, and one of them came up with the idea of cutting them up and selling them, frozen, in little aluminum containers. And presto! That’s how the Swanson’s TV dinner was invented. Later, I found out that the whole story was bogus. Someone had added that to Tucker’s Wikipedia page as a joke. They also said he was on the 1998 Olympic Ping-Pong Team.

Anyway, we got to the press conference and there were maybe two or three dozen reporters there, cameras rolling, shouting questions at Ron Paul. In the middle of it, Tucker signaled to me, and I took the girls and joined him. Several reporters noticed us and they were curious, but they waited until Ron Paul was done before turning their attention to us. It was
instant
. The moment Ron Paul left the podium, every reporter turned to look at Tucker, at me, and at my two hot girls. One of them asked Tucker if we were with him and he said yes, and I introduced the reporters to Brooke and Amy.

A reporter near the front said, “Brooke, are you going to be voting for Ron Paul?”

Brooke is of course a very smart girl, and by this time, thanks to
Cathouse
, she was pretty camera-savvy. So she took a beat and said, “I need to think about it. I need more information. But I must say, I like what I see.”

Then they asked me, “Mr. Hof, are you voting for Ron Paul?”

I looked right into the camera and said, “Yes. I’m supporting Ron Paul. The BunnyRanch is supporting Ron Paul, In fact, as of right now, anyone who walks into the BunnyRanch just has to say, ‘I’m pimping for Paul,’ and they get two bunnies for the price of one.” The reporters ate it up. My comments went national. Everyone in the country wanted to interview me.

I must have done fifty interviews in the days that followed, but the one I remember best is the one I did with my (nervous) friend Mancow, the Chicago shock-jock. He had Ron Paul on the show and patched me through. “Well, Mr. Paul,” he said. “I’ve got a special guest on the line right now, a good friend of the show and a good friend of mine, and that man is Dennis Hof. You know who Mr. Hof is, don’t you?”

Ron Paul said, “Yes, I do.”

“And are you aware that he’s supporting you in your bid for the presidency? Or, as Dennis likes to put it, he’s ‘pimping for Paul.’ ”

Ron Paul said, “Yes, I’d heard that.”

And Mancow said, “And how do you feel about that, Mr. Paul?”

Ron Paul said, “If he has the same beliefs as I do, if he believes in state’s rights, like I do, then I want his support and yes, I look forward to the BunnyRanch supporting me in my 2008 campaign.”

I’ve got to tell you, I have always had great respect for Ron Paul — I happen to be a libertarian myself — but that day my admiration for him went through the roof. This was a man who had gone on record as saying what no other candidate had the courage to say — specifically, that he recognized a state’s right to legalize prostitution, even if he personally disagreed with the practice. His position was both clear and courageous. You can object to prostitution on a personal level, even on a moral level, but you are not really a true libertarian if you don’t recognize a state’s right to create its own laws. Unfortunately, much as I admire Ron Paul, I know this much: He is too damn honest to ever have a shot at the Presidency of the United States.

Tucker Carlson

I’ve had Dennis on many of my shows, going back to my days at MSNBC. He’s a thoroughly charming guy — one of the great American salesmen, a consummate showman. (In fact, a few days after that very first show, as a thank-you present, he sent vibrators to all the girls on my staff.) Dennis’s mind is always turning and he’s always looking for new ways to promote his business. And while I’m not sure I support the business 100 percent, he is a totally self-made guy — something I really respect.

• • •

In 2007, I was following Ron Paul around, covering him for the
New Republic
, and I thought that Dennis — a self-described libertarian — might get a kick out of meeting us in Reno.

The next morning he showed up at the news conference with two of his girls, Brooke Taylor and Air Force Amy. Ron Paul did his conference, then went off to do interviews with local TV reporters, at which point Dennis and the girls
approached the podium and had their pictures taken under the Ron Paul sign. Air Force Amy really hammed it up and her 36DDs got a lot of attention, but she was actually very excited about being there and told me she desperately wanted to get her picture taken with Ron Paul. I was going to explain that I wasn’t affiliated with Ron Paul, but she seemed so genuine that I led her and Dennis and Brooke into the back room where he was conducting interviews. So we approached Paul’s campaign manager, Lew Moore, with our request. “He is not going to have his picture taken with a hooker,” Moore snapped. Dennis then went to bat for Amy, but Moore wouldn’t budge.

Amy looked so crushed I was afraid she was going to burst into tears. We left the news conference, got into Dennis’s limo, and went to a downtown casino for pancakes. Amy remained fragile during the meal, but she said she wasn’t going to take it personally: “It was the manager’s decision, not his. Ron Paul still has my full support.”

• • •

Some years ago I had dinner with Dennis and Ron Jeremy and a few other people at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, and a good-looking girl came up to the table and asked Ron, “Are you Ron Jeremy?”

“Yes,” he said.

And she said, “Oh, I love your work!”

And he said, “Do you want to fuck in the bathroom?”

And she lit up and said, “Yeah!” And off they went.

Moments like that have made me realize that Dennis has a unique vantage point on humanity. It’s almost as if, by default, given his business and the type of people he
associates with, he is doing a longitudinal study on human desire. I remember asking him once, “Dennis, what have you learned about men and women from more than two decades in the brothel industry?” Well, I’m sorry to say that his answer was so vulgar and so over-the-top that I can’t possibly repeat it, but he assured me that people’s desires are much darker than most of us can even imagine, and that if the average man knew what the average woman wanted, he wouldn’t just be horrified, he’d feel grossly inadequate.

AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCE,
I brought Brooke home with me and we fucked like we hadn’t fucked in a long time. I don’t know what it was exactly, but maybe all the attention worked on us like an aphrodisiac. For the next few months, we coasted along and I thought our problems were behind us, but suddenly Brooke began to complain about life at the ranch, and, specifically, about the way the other girls treated her. “Honey, that goes with the territory,” I explained, just as I’d explained to a dozen girls before her. “You’re Daddy’s girl. You’re Daddy’s favorite. You get to travel with Daddy. You go on TV with Daddy. Daddy buys you nice things for no reason except that he loves his little girl. The other girls are going to resent you for it. Don’t let it bother you.”

The irony is that Brooke was very well liked. She was charming and funny and wise and the new girls always turned to her for advice, and I began to feel that she was creating problems that didn’t exist, as if maybe she was looking for a reason to hate the way her life was turning out. And in fact she did begin to hate it. Every fucking day would begin with complaints: This girl did this, this
other girl said that, her schedule sucked, her room was too small, and on and on, yada yada yada. But I see now that she only had one complaint and I’d heard it countless times before: I didn’t love her enough. If I really loved her, I’d make the ultimate commitment.

Before long, every day would be a litany of complaints about life at the ranch, but in fact she was really only complaining about me. And because she was making my life so unpleasant, I began to spend more time with other girls.

The hard part was that I still loved Brooke, but I was pulling away and she knew it, and the arguments got louder and more frequent. Now, I must tell you: I am not a fan of confrontation, particularly
loud
confrontation. A woman raises her voice to me and I think of my mother. My mother meant well; she wanted me to be a gentleman. But she was also very controlling and I definitely do not respond well to control.

Brooke wanted commitment. She wanted monogamy. Hell, for all I know she wanted me to get out of the prostitution business altogether, set up house with her far from Nevada, and raise a few rug rats. I didn’t want any of that. The only thing I wanted was Brooke and I thought that was enough, but she had her own needs. It was a very bad time for both of us. We were still together, but it was over, and neither of us had the heart to end it.

OUR RELATIONSHIP
wasn’t the only thing that was in trouble. In 2008 the economy tanked and everyone though the end was near. Not me, though. I was a graduate of the Dale Carnegie School of Positive Thinking. I took the girls aside and told them, “Hey, maybe the world is coming to an end, maybe not, but I’m not going to worry about it and neither should you.” I told them to stop watching Fox News, to stay positive, and I told them what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had told my parents’ generation at a time when
things had been a lot worse: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

I promised them that we would get through it and I believed it, and every day I hammered home the same message: “Take good care of the clients and the future will take care of itself.”