Whore Stories (18 page)

So what is to be done? Pacino took whatever money he’d saved, moved back to America, and ground it out in the off-Broadway trenches until his breakthrough role in 1968 in Israel Horovitz’s
The Indian Wants the Bronx
. In the end, Al Pacino ended up becoming Al Pacino, and the rest is just nostalgic whorestory. Hoo-ah!

NANCY REAGAN

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
First Lady of the United States

CLAIM TO FAME:
Just Say No; “The Blowjob Queen of Hollywood”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Hollywood, Washington, D.C.

If the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal taught us anything as a nation, it’s the importance of maintaining a healthy oral sex life within one’s marriage. Failure to heed this message can lead to a stain on our nation, not to mention on your best blue dress. Well, there’s one president who never scandalized the country by hauling some intern into the oval office for a face full of pubes, and that’s Ronald Reagan.

Sure, there was Iran/Contra, where Ronnie hooked up with some dubious drugs and arms deals. Okay, and maybe he wrecked the environment, sodomized the economy, threw the mentally ill out on the streets, and pushed us to the brink of nuclear war. At least he knew that ketchup was a “vegetable.” That is, of course, until his own near-vegetative state began to kick in somewhere in the nascent moments of his second term.

But it’s Nancy Reagan (née Davis) we have to thank for keeping our kids on drugs and the president with some degree of compos mentis. Why was he happy? Because Nancy Reagan was at one time known as the blowjob queen of Hollywood.

In Kitty Kelley’s biography of the former First Lady,
Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography
, Kelly writes that the young Nancy Davis “was renowned in Hollywood for performing oral sex.” That’s right, patriots. Our First Lady of the United States was allegedly quite the First Lady of Fellatio back in the day. Eager to make it in the Machiavellian world of starletry/harlotry, young Nancy “performed that act [blowjobbing] not only in the evening but in offices. That was one of the reasons that she got a contract and that was one of the reasons that she was very popular on the MGM lot.”

Being pillars of 1980s conservatism who did their best to promote paranoid misconceptions about sex, religion, and moral values, it’s curious that both Nancy and Ronnie had such sordid skeletons in their closet. “Now, hey,” you’re assuredly asking, again, “this is unauthorized information we’re talking about here. You don’t have
film
of Nancy Reagan sucking off Peter Lawford and his buddies on a road trip to visit Nancy’s parents; you’re going by Lawford’s wife’s steamy, vengeful biography, which asserted Nancy was ‘known for giving the best head in Hollywood.’” You’re damned right I am.

No, it’s not on YouTube, and you can’t find it on Twitter. Once upon a time, we had to rely on something called “the rumor mill” for our gossip, and if there’s one thing experience taught us, it’s that rumors and gossip are probably true. Moreover, the more outrageous they are, the more likely they are to be true. So give it a rest, children of the new millennium, with your iThings and your e-shit.

If we didn’t know better, we’d call the paragons of conservatism and family values, Ronald and Nancy Regan, a couple of hypocritical charlatans, with deceit (and other protein-rich unmentionables) dripping from their chiseled, Hollywood chins.

BOB DYLAN

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Musician

CLAIM TO FAME:
Voice of a generation; American rock icon

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Greenwich Village, New York

Believe it or not, Bob Dylan once claimed to have prostituted himself when he first arrived in the Big Apple. This story seems extraordinarily unlikely, as it’s hard to imagine anybody paying to have sex with a famous Bob Dylan, much less a dead-broke Bob Dylan. Fame has its charms, but an out-of-control fro and a grill like a jaundiced gnu could not have been the tremendous draw that Dylan would have us believe. “Sometimes we would make one hundred a night, really, from four in the afternoon until three or four in the morning,” Dylan said in a 1966
New York Times
interview. “Cats would pick us up and chicks would pick us up. And we would do anything you wanted, as long as it was paid. . . . I almost got killed. . . . I didn’t come down to the Village until two months later. Nobody knew that I had been hustling uptown.”

One gets the impression that this is utter horseshit. Bob Dylan has offered so much disparate, unverifiable, and bogus information to interviewers that it’s a wonder anyone even tries anymore. That’s the problem with being the voice of a generation: People listen to you. Of course, it is entirely possible that Dylan really did wear the pink pants while boning up on his clientele and his songwriting skills. The lore or the whore, which is it? If Dylan has his way, which he normally does, we’ll never know.

A tuning fork’s nightmare, celebrity chameleon, and grizzled old troubadour who is no doubt still reeling from getting stoned and seduced by the infuriatingly mellifluous voice of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan deserves mention only as a minor whore in the canon of the flesh trade, but for his lyrics and poetry (
not
his fiction; if you’re looking for a fast-working emetic, give his “prose poem”
Tarantula
a read), he is a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but let’s hope the Swedish Academy skips over passages like this sentence, from the aforementioned
Tarantula
: “Now’s not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns.” In the 2003
Spin
magazine piece, “The Top Five Unintelligible Sentences from Books Written by Rock Stars,” Dylan won the blue ribbon for that obscenely indecipherable brain fart. But hey, Bob Dylan is only human, despite his Martian appearance.

CARY GRANT

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Actor

CLAIM TO FAME:
Tinsel Town “everyman”; Academy Award winner

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Hollywood; New York; North by Northwest

Cary Grant wasn’t known for playing diverse roles in the course of his long and storied film career. In fact, he never once played a villain, and his only Oscar was one of those honorary “Lifetime Achievement” statues given out to people who are semiconscious and sure to crumble a hip in the next few years if they haven’t already. However, the life of Cary Grant (born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England in 1904) was far from one-dimensional.

An ardent supporter of the Allied war effort in World War II (donating his salaries from both
Arsenic and Old Lace
and
The Philadelphia Story
to fight fascism), a vocal proponent of gun control, a dexterous former acrobat, an outspoken fan of LSD, and later in life a staunch Republican, Grant was one of those larger-than-life figures who spent many of his early years in New York as a struggling actor and doing a little whoring on the side.

Cary Grant may never have won an Oscar, but plenty of other actors took home the Oscar for their turns as prostitutes. Take a look at these Oscar winners and their respective performances:

• Janet Gaynor in
  Street Angel
  (1928)
  

• Helen Hayes in
  The Sin of Madelon Claudet
  (1931)
  

• Anne Baxter in
  The Razor’s Edge
  (1946)
  

• Donna Reed in
  From Here to Eternity
  (1953)
  

• Susan Hayward in
  I Want to Live!
  (1958)
  

• Melina Mercouri in
  Never on Sunday
  (1960)
  

• Shirley Jones in
  Elmer Gantry
  (1960)
  

• Jo Van Fleet in
  East of Eden
  (1955)
  

• Elizabeth Taylor in
  Butterfield
  8
  (1960)
  

• Jane Fonda in
  Klute
  (1971)
  

• Mira Sorvino in
  Mighty Aphrodite
  (1995)
  

• Kim Basinger in
  L.A. Confidential
  (1997)
  

• Charlize Theron in
  Monster
  (2003)
  

“Archie was rapidly gaining a name as the number one gigolo in town,” notes Grant biographer Marc Eliot, adding that “His good looks had made him quite popular among the wealthy women around town, and it was an open secret among them that the ‘social services’ of this handsome young actor could be acquired for an entire evening at quite a reasonable cost.” I never saw Cary Grant coming off as a cheap date, but that’s acting for you.

Worried that his burgeoning escort career was interfering with his dead-in-the-water acting career, young Archie took a series of “legitimate” jobs, one of which included standing in the middle of the street wearing a sign that advertised a Chinese restaurant located across from Macy’s in Herald Square. The destitute Archie would soon morph into the leading-man Cary, but for a long time, the master thespian maintained that during this period when he was supposed to be prostituting himself in New York, he’d actually been in London.

Hollywood’s likeable “everyman” certainly had a few bones in the closet, as they say. But at the end of the day, Grant is revealed to be truly a man of many talents and an inspiration not only to whores everywhere, but also to those who see a well-rounded life and a chin-dimple as the key to enduring happiness. The legend himself once said, “I’ve often been accused by critics of being myself on-screen. But being oneself is more difficult than you’d suppose.” It all makes sense now.

MALCOLM X

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Hustler; activist

CLAIM TO FAME:
Pioneer in civil rights; controversial Muslim radical

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Boston; New York

It is often history’s job to ruin all the fun, and so here it is: Malcolm X was once a whore. This doesn’t mean he wasn’t other things. It is not the intention here to judge the character of Malcolm X, or to opine about his political, personal, or political legacy. That’s for academic prostitutes on the History Channel, airing their opinions to basic cable in the hope that a TV appearance will somehow count with the tenure committee as a publication.

No, here we’re just interested in Malcolm X’s legacy as a paid lothario. If we’ve learned anything by now, it’s that prostitutes are relentless multitaskers and capable of so much more than just hocking ass. During his days in Michigan, Malcolm Little was a jack-of-all illegal trades: dope dealer, pimp, thief, and well-known hustler. But, according to the record, Malcolm Little even managed to supplement his income with pecuniary payments for services rendered as a party boy.

Little evidently managed to stay current on his rent by charging a more venal kind of fee to a moneyed tyrant on the other side of town. Then, upon his move to New York, the misguided youth occasionally stopped by the local YMCA, where he administered blowjobs to the local gym gentry, making the lyrics to the Village People’s classic anthem inspire us even more than usual.

In 1978 when disco sensations and gay icons, the Village People had a number-one hit worldwide with “Y.M.C.A.,” they garnered praise from mainstream America and the Y.M.C.A organization itself (who later adopted the tune as their official song). The Christian organization seemed oblivious to the seedier undertones of the song, not realizing that Y.M.C.A.s were popular cruising and trolling locales for the gay community. The next year the Village People pressed their luck and recorded a clarion call to arms, legs, and military man-love with “In the Navy.” The Navy planned to use the number in a recruitment video, but for some reason, all that leather made the admirals suspicious.

And in a decidedly tame (yet lurid in their vividness) series of encounters in Boston, author Manning Marabel, in his controversial
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
, allows that Little’s services were often solicited to sprinkle talcum powder over one particular john until the man reached orgasm. Surely this is the easiest money ever made by a rent-boy.

Malcolm X made a few more false starts in his life, but by the time he was murdered in 1965 at the age of thirty-nine, the man had reached iconic status. Even today, his religious teachings and his civil rights activism continue to inspire. But, whatever your thoughts on Malcolm X the man, Malcolm Little the panderer is an indispensible inclusion in the canon of flesh-peddlers.