Whore Stories (20 page)

If drugs and prostitution are inexorably linked, and Courtney Love is linked inexorably to drugs, then by the transitive property of equality, Courtney Love must also be linked to prostitution. Why are we not surprised that Courtney managed to incorporate the two in a novel, albeit desperate, way. In an interview with British chat show host Alan Carr, a sober Love reflects:

I had this rock and roll trick that I would do. I’d be in . . . like Cleveland or Cologne, Germany. . . . I would call up a hooker agency and I would ask for the ugliest hooker, because the ugliest hooker would know [how to find drugs]. They would think I was a lesbian . . . and I’d be like, “No, no put [the sex toy] down, I just want to know where the drugs are.”

With Ms. Love, it’s not always choices for healthy living, but you have to give it to her—it’s always ingenious and usually rock star as hell.

MAUREEN MCCORMICK

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Author; actress

CLAIM TO FAME:
Marcia from
The Brady Bunch

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Brady household; cocaine dens around Hollywood

“Marcia! Marcia! Marcia! . . . What the
hell
happened?” asked fans who read Maureen McCormick’s 2008 memoir,
Here’s the Story
:
Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice
. Maureen, as you know, unless you spent 1969–1974 hermetically sealed in a cultural vacuum, was the oldest sister, “Marcia,” on the TV series
The Brady Bunch
. Marcia is beautiful and one of the more popular girls at Westdale High, and she has an innocent little crush on Davy Jones, lead singer of a sonic abortion called the Monkees, which some characterize as the N’Sync of the late ’60s. But according to Maureen, “Peter Tork was always my favorite Monkee. That was the difference between Marcia and me. She was predictable, a straight arrow. My taste was quirky, offbeat, and different.” Peter Tork lovers, consider your sorry selves redeemed.

On
The Brady Bunch
Marcia also has a fragile ego, is a little conceited, and she’s not particularly resourceful. This, subsequently, is in stark contrast to her real-world counterpart, the actress Maureen McCormick, who was at the time doing enough cocaine to line a baseball diamond.

You know the drill, starlets: win the Miss San Fernando Beauty Pageant; come to LA; make some inroads; get on a popular TV show and attract boyfriends, including everyone from your pimpled and randy cast mates to Steve Martin and Michael Jackson. You become a fixture at the Playboy Mansion. You’re rich. . . . You’re even richer. . . . And then you meet cocaine, which is all you’d ever hoped it would be, except for expensive and addictive as hell. In her memoir, Ms. McCormick describes a common Hollywood trajectory:

I sought refuge in seemingly glamorous cocaine dens above Hollywood. I thought I would find answers there, while in reality I was simply running farther from myself. From there, I spiraled downward on a path of self-destruction that cost me my career and very nearly my life. . . . Over the years I battled drug addiction and bulimia. I was treated in a psych ward, went in and out of rehab, and looked to God for answers.

While McCormick didn’t need to prostitute herself to become a household name, she did to afford her drug habit. “I would have sex to get the drugs,” she reiterated on NBC’s
Today Show
, confirming her sordid hooker past, a time when McCormick did so many drugs she was often called “Hoover,” a reference to her propensity to suck up pills, coke, mushrooms, and other chemical detritus. “It was my lowest point. It was awful,” she says, not unsurprisingly.

McCormick goes on to recount more tales of trading sex for drugs, of stealing handfuls of amyl nitrates or “poppers” at one of Sammy Davis Jr.’s late-night bashes, and finally of freaking out Steven Spielberg during an audition for
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. She was so tweaked after a bouncing eight-ball binge that the director offered her an orange and showed her the door. Seriously though, Marcia, you don’t take Smokey’s drugs!

Maureen, foolish but no fool, eventually recognized she had a problem, and she has been clean and sober since the late ’90s. She has also been tediously “born again,” an insidious and oftentimes dangerous drug in its own right. Thanks to reality flotsam like
Gone Country
, where wayward celebrities try to become country and western singers and season five of
Celebrity Fit Club
, where wayward celebrities try to become less fat, you can still catch glimpses of the old Marcia all grown up, a little more mature, a little wiser, and significantly chubbier. But Ms. McCormick is a fighter and ***SPOILER ALERT*** she wasn’t as portly at the end of the show as she was at the beginning. In fact, she won! C’mon everyone: “Maureen! Maureen! Maureen!”

No, you’re right, “Maureen” sounds funny. She’ll always be our little Marcia (sniff) . . . (snort).

ROSEANNE BARR

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Comedienne; actress

CLAIM TO FAME:
“Domestic Goddess”; universal nuisance

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Colorado

Did anybody catch an episode of
Roseanne’s Nuts
? In 2011 the Lifetime Channel’s reality series featured Roseanne, her son, some other people, and “celebrities” ranging from Phyllis Diller to one of Ike Turner’s former “Ikettes” living, working, and being stupid on a macadamia nut farm in Hawaii. No? You missed it? Not surprising. They only had the nuts to air a few episodes.

Well, things were different back in 1989, when Roseanne was appearing on more magazine covers than anybody in America. She broke ground first with her stand-up comedy act, opening for Julio Iglesias (yes, you read that correctly), then she was on a hit TV show,
Roseanne
(1988–1997), where she cultivated her identity as “Domestic Goddess,” a streetwise, wise-cracking tough gal with a distinctly un-Hollywood edge. Her character was believable, because it was true. Roseanne wasn’t brought up with a silver spoon in her mouth; she was brought up with a tasteless joke in her mouth.

Raised in your typical working-class Mormon/Jewish family, Roseanne did stints as a child preacher for the Mormon Church from the age of six until she turned sixteen, at which point she was hit by a car and went “nuts.” In both of her bestselling autobiographies, she describes how after the accident, she refused to sleep, went into convulsions and was briefly placed in a Utah state mental hospital, where Roseanne and her twenty-one distinct personalities lingered for nearly a year.

Upon her release, Roseanne was changed. She thumbed it to Colorado where, at twenty-six, she met her first husband, a hippie called Ed, and settled down to live in a cramped, 600-square-foot house, working as a cocktail waitress, a maid, a window dresser, and, yes, a prostitute.

In the February 1994 issue of
Vanity Fair
, Roseanne delivered a fairly philosophical perspective on her efforts to help support her family by “turning tricks in the back seats of cars in the parking lot between comedy gigs.” She adds:

I think prostitution should be legal because the way any society treats its prostitutes reflects directly on how it treats the highest, most powerful women. . . . It has always been here, and women should be able to control it and regulate it. . . . Prostitution is business.

Roseanne goes on to explain that, for her, prostitution was about being “powerful and in control,” but somewhere along the way that control went away. As success, wealth, and fame came to the comedy star, instead of sticking to her blue-collar guns, she came to symbolize just the kind of Hollywood feculence she claimed to loathe. She became the ultimate diva, and the set of
Roseanne
became well known as the most unpleasant place to work in television. She got plastic surgery, spouted new-age Kabbalah-babble, and became so outrageously self-absorbed as to think great numbers of people would stay glued to their television sets fascinated while she picked macadamia nuts in Hawaii.

We can applaud Roseanne for her success, and we can strive to make our own lives remarkable, whether earning $20 a hand job in the back seat of a car, or over $20 million a year on the set of a TV show. But watching Roseanne today, one comes to doubt her former husband and partner in mediocrity, Tom Arnold, who described the pair as “America’s worst nightmare—white trash with money.” No, America’s worst nightmare is not white trash with money; America’s worst nightmare is watching Roseanne in a tank top, straining to pick a macadamia nut and screaming at us—the American television Janes and Johns—for a gimme.

DEE DEE RAMONE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Musician; abysmal rapper

CLAIM TO FAME:
Bassist for punk trailblazers the Ramones

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Fifty-Third and Third, Manhattan, New York

The second single of the Ramones’ debut album
Ramones
is a breakneck punk assault called “53rd and 3rd.”

Yes, it’s another song about what happens on a Manhattan street corner, but this little ditty is about a
real
place, one that once radiated debauchery and ejaculated good times. There’s a Barnes & Noble at that corner now. (Are you there? Are you taking this book into the stalls to masturbate in the hope there are some lurid pictures? You’d be better served going over to the magazines and putting a
Hustler
inside a
Financial Times
, but since you’ve already fondled this one, you probably ought to go pay for it now. Not my rules, B&N’s.)

What made the corner of Fifty-Third and Third such a fine spot for a shady soiree was that in the mid-1970s, that intersection was the sexual nexus of slanging that ass, and young Dee Dee Ramone (born Douglas Colvin) wasn’t afraid to go down there and ram it in the name of punk rock, a drug habit, and habitual insolvency. According to an interview for the photography book and collection of essays
Addict out of the Dark and into the Light
, Dee Dee notes:

I would work as a mail clerk in the daytime and that didn’t give me much money because it was a low paying job, to support an apartment in Manhattan and a drug habit, a heroin habit. And at night I would go to the street corner called 53rd Street and Third in Manhattan and hustle and pick up men and go to their homes for twenty dollars and have sex with them so I could buy a couple of bags of dope. And this went on for a few years and I became a miserable full blossom drug addict. All the friends I circularized with were hustlers and addicts.

On the occasions when Dee Dee wasn’t paralyzed by drug and alcohol addiction, he managed to write such punk staples as “Chinese Rock,” “Rockaway Beach,” and “Teenage Lobotomy,” to name a few. His particular genius was the ability to merge his angst and his humor with three chords, and in the process create a scream-along catchiness.

“Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, whither they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them.”

—The LORD to Moses, in conversation

Dee Dee continued to write songs for the Ramones after he broke with them in 1989 to embark on one of the dumbest ventures the music world has ever seen: Dee Dee King, rapper. Gems like “Mashed Potato Time” and “Funky Time” failed to crack the mainstream. In the Ramones documentary
End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
, Dee Dee speculated about the reason for his caustic reviews, opining, “Maybe it was because I’m not a Negro.” When your brain is that addled, death can’t be far behind. And it wasn’t.

In 2002, Dee Dee died one of those horrible Hollywood rock star deaths—a spike in his veins, still gripped by the heroin addiction that haunted him throughout his life.

RUPERT EVERETT

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Thespian (like an actor, but British)

CLAIM TO FAME:
Token unthreatening Hollywood homosexual; that scene where he starts singing in
My Best Friend’s Wedding

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
London

You all know Rupert Everett. For a while he was the gay guy. What is that supposed to mean, “the gay guy”? Well, there was a time in Hollywood not long ago when there was only one openly gay guy allowed as a major screen presence at any given moment. Of course, closeted gay actors could play gay men or straight men—even samurais and fighter pilots. Then in
My Best Friend’s Wedding,
another one of those Julia Roberts films where she’s sad then at the end she’s happy, Rupert went and stole the show with his portrayal of George, a loveable queen with a penchant for singing. The real Rupert Everett is much more interesting.

In a 1997 interview with
Us
magazine, Everett says, “I didn’t set out to hustle, but this guy offered me such a massive amount of money, well, it was like a year-and-a-half’s pocket money,” going on to explain how he “sort of fell into” prostitution after a man solicited his services outside the London Underground. It mustn’t have been a particularly grueling decision, though, considering Everett’s noble extraction.