Whore Stories (8 page)

“If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.”

—D. H. Lawrence, British author of the controversial
Sons and Lovers
and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover

In 1973 trouble eventually found Edna, Sheriff Flournoy, and the girls of the Chicken Ranch, when a local reporter out of Houston, Marvin Zindler, went and ruined things for everyone. Marvin was an odious and officious presence on the Houston news. He was also an ugly man, a plastic surgeon’s dream, whose nipped-and-ripped-within-an-inch-of-its-life visage made this lunatic resemble nothing so much as a constipated orc. Marvin and his local news team arranged a sting, and the Chicken Ranch was forced to shut its doors. The ghost of Miss Jessie Williams, a host of happy johns, and a legion of innocent chickens pecked a hole in the sky that day. Even then-governor of Texas, Dolph Briscoe, resisted closing the ranch, but Zindler made such a stink on air about it, that Governor Briscoe’s hands were tied—and not in the good way. Edna stayed behind and tried to go legit, but with little success. She eventually gave up and moved to East Texas.

Zindler, positively orgasmic over his newfound fame, did a
follow-up report eighteen months later, in which a hopping mad Sheriff Flournoy grabbed Zindler and then ripped off the newsman’s wig. With cameras still rolling the sheriff galloped down the street in circles waving the hairpiece over his head in imitation of a Native American warrior flaunting a freshly cut scalp. It was poetic justice for Zindler, and mighty fine comedy all the way around.

For early ’70s nostalgia and/or more information on the Chicken Ranch, put on ZZ Top’s “La Grange” and rock out.

SNOOP DOGG

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Youth League basketball coach; Crip

CLAIM TO FAME:
Multiplatinum rap artist; porno entrepreneur

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
The LBC and beyond

The S-N-Double-O-P D-O-Double-G’s tales of pimpin’ and hos and the gangsta lifestyle all figure prominently in his lyrics, but is he for real? Was Snoop
really
a pimp? Here it is straight from the hustla’s mouth on FUSE TV in an interview with music journalist Touré:

Yeah, I’m talking like really going in and getting girls to bring you back money for their services…. And I was running with real pimps and getting the understanding of pimpin’. ’Cause I don’t do things for fake, I do it for real.

Snoop began to cotton to his new profession. He tells
Rolling Stone
magazine that shortly after his entrée into the pimp hustle, he was delighted to discover, “That shit was my natural calling and once I got involved with it, it became fun. It was like shootin’ layups for me. I was makin’ ’em every time.” Snoop Doggy Dogg—just making ho buckets.

In 1971 Calvin Broadus Jr. was born in Long Beach, California, and he grew up to be a man of many talents. Over the years he has proven himself to be remarkably skilled as a petty thief, a drug dealer, an actor, a marijuana legalization activist, a rap star, and host of
Doggy Fizzle Televizzle
, a sketch comedy show that ran from 2002 to 2003, on which Snoop played characters such as Cap’n Pimp. The central message of his show revolved around the notion that pimping is a viable career option. Moreover, children who had the gumption to develop proficiency in this line of work could presumably grow up to live in a world of bright colors, money, and hos. However, after the show fizzizled, the pretend Cap’n Pimp felt compelled to take on pimping for real from 2003 to 2004 while working on a series of porn videos and simultaneously coaching his son’s Pop Warner football team.

While much of Snoop’s musical oeuvre is an homage to the gangster life—shooting people, dealing drugs, driving around, clockin’ hos, and being rich (
see
“Who Am I [What’s My Name?],” “Snoop’s Upside Your Head,” and “Serial Killer,”)—his later work shows a kind of maturity as Snoop the family man made a concerted effort to shed the guns-thugs-and-drugs stereotype and whole-heartedly embrace his true calling, that of a pimp and pornographer.

If you’ve ever been involved in a philosophical debate, you’ve undoubtedly found the conversation winding back to the ageless question: Who would make a better prostitute? Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera? In that case, you need the Doggfather. With his storied eloquence, Snoop resolves the question, asserting that “Britney would make a better prostitute than Christina,” because “She’s thicker.” So, big propers to the Doggfather for settling yet another existential quandary.

With
Snoop Dogg’s Hustlaz: Diary of a Pimp
erotic video series and other “Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle Productions,” Snoop made tremendous inroads into the porn industry, with
Diary of a Pimp
eventually becoming the bestselling erotic video of 2003. In
Diary of a Pimp
, Snoop, dressed like a parody of a pimp, goes around enlisting women, many of whom are hip-hop journalists, to join his crew of hos. All forty seem persuaded by the Doggfather and then, well, you know how these things unfold. And so it goes, and so it went.

Today, Snoop still supports youth football and family, and he seems contented to sit around counting money and blowing blunts, making the occasional appearance as a guest host on WWE Raw or endorsing “Chronic Candy,” a line of sweet treats that taste like marijuana.

Snoop eventually had to give up the pimp lifestyle. As Ice Cube asserts, “pimpin’ ain’t easy,” and Snoop concurs. Sometimes the whole pimping endeavor can be just too much trouble—the government red tape, the Feds, health insurance, Roth IRAs, etc.—who can maintain a music/youth football/pimp/actor schedule and stay sane? We can’t blame Snoop for getting out of the game. Reminiscing about his time as a pimp, Snoop was often faced with what Kierkegaard might have called a “pimpological suspension of the ethical,” with regard to slapping hos. Correction: “Bitches.”

I made sure my bitch would never talk shit to me. She always got all the money upfront, she never looked in another pimp’s eyes, she kept her head down. But I wasn’t a gorilla pimp where I was beatin’ the girls up. I was more finesse with it, just givin’ you a comfort zone and providing you with opportunity ’cause I know so many motherfuckers who like buyin’ it, so if you come fuck with me, it’s not as much of a risk as bein’ with a gorilla pimp. He gon’ be hard on you and rush you, as opposed to a nigga like me who’s gonna relax and let you go get it. And if you don’t go get it you just gon’ be replaced.

Way to keep it classy, Calvin.

LULU WHITE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Owner and operator of the famous Mahogany Hall brothel

CLAIM TO FAME:
“Queen of the demimonde”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Storyville, New Orleans

Ladies and gentleman, I’ve worked in advertising and “branding” long enough to know compelling ad copy when I see it. I’ve also suffered countless “focus groups,” typically a collection of confused, half-drunk people trying to say nice things about a shitty product. The resulting brainfart typically yields a pamphlet or brochure that makes
Silas Marner
look like a page-turner.

“Storyville” was the official name for the red-light district of New Orleans from 1897 to 1917. The area is named for Big Easy alderman Sidney Story, who, taking a cue from Dutch and German prostitution ports in Europe, set up a special district where prostitution could be regulated and given a measure of oversight. Storyville was a thorough operation, where folk could get an idea of Storyville’s services—
including maps, recommendations, and available ladies—by perusing one of the handy “blue books” given to visitors and tourists and printed by the local government. These blue books gave critical information about individual houses of ill repute and their attendant employees. Think of it as a kind of hard copy
adultfriendfinder.com
with a fancy logo. Emblazoned on these blue books was an oath:
Honi soit qui mal y pense
, or “Evil be to him who evil thinks,” or, in today’s parlance, “Y’all can be freaky people, just don’t be
nasty
people.”

Every once in a while, however, I come face-to-face with an advertising campaign that inspires me and renews my faith in creativity
and
commerce. It would behoove advertising students and business owners alike to take a lesson from Ms. Lulu White: procuress, madam, queen of bling, and for the early years of the twentieth century, the owner of Mahogany Hall bordello in Storyville, New Orleans. Here’s an excerpt from the Mahogany Hall ad campaign:

The New Mahogany Hall . . . was erected specially for Miss Lulu White at a cost of $40,000. . . . The entire house is steam heated and is the handsomest house of its kind. It is the only one where you can get three shots for your money:

The shot upstairs,
The shot downstairs,
And the shot in the room.

Eschewing convention, Lulu doesn’t even add an exclamation point after the word “room.” Daring! Although, who the hell wants to spend valuable time traipsing up and down a bunch of stairs on the way to a romp in the hay? Of course, the denizens of Storyville at the turn of the twentieth century had no HDTV, Angry Birds, art crawls, or faith that on the street they wouldn’t be shanked with an ice pick before lunch, so they had far fewer distractions and probably only a mild sense of urgency about gaining a little carnal knowledge.

Continuing on with her brochure, the alarmingly straightforward ad agency gives us a pretty good picture of Miss Lulu and her lair:

This famous West Indian octoroon first saw the light of day thirty-one years ago. Arriving in this country at a rather tender age, and having been fortunately gifted with a good education it did not take long for her to find out what the other sex were in search of. In describing Miss Lulu, as she is most familiarly called, it would not be amiss to say that besides possessing an elegant form she has beautiful black hair and blue eyes, which have justly gained for her the title of the “Queen of the Demimonde.”

Her establishment, which is situated in the central part of the city, is unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New Orleans, and without a doubt one of the most elegant places in this or any other country. She has made a feature of boarding none but the fairest of girls, those gifted with nature’s best charms, and would, under no circumstances, have any but that class in her house.

Unfortunately, Lulu had a voracious appetite for diamonds, which she wore in such abundance that her promotional pamphlet described them as “like the lights of the St. Louis Exposition.” Such extravagance eventually took a toll on her bankroll. Moreover, Lulu was a reckless investor; she lost over $150,000 on shady investment schemes. Lulu was destitute when she fled New Orleans in 1917 after the permanent closing of Mahogany Hall.

While Lulu and the Mahogany Hall brothel will be celebrated forever in Louis Armstrong’s “Mahogany Hall Stomp” and the various representations of Storyville in film, art, and literature, the end of Lulu’s life and career—very much like the “art” of advertising—is a depressing mystery, and one for someone else to probe.

HEIDI FLEISS

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Laundry operator; reality TV presence

CLAIM TO FAME:
Madam to the stars

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Los Angeles

To some, she is a venerable feminist who took back the night. To others, she’s nothing but a common trollop who stayed afloat mostly thanks to Charlie Sheen’s insatiable penis. But to most of America, and maybe the world, Heidi Fleiss endures as
the
face of upscale prostitution in the latter half of the twentieth century, despite a face that some say resembles an albino jack-o-lantern with fjord teeth.

Born in California in 1965, Fleiss learned her craft from a covey of top-notch L.A. madams before striking out on her own in 1990. She made her first million only four months into her career as a madam. Heidi’s long list of famous clients is rumored to include: Charlie Sheen. That’s right, out of all the heads of state, royals, and celebrities that counted themselves part of her clientele, only Charlie Sheen got pinched, and this is why we love him. There is something endearing about such carelessness.

Alas, it was carelessness along with jealousy on the part of less successful pimp-hooker-madam types in Southern California that put Heidi away. In 1993, she fell victim to a sting operation and was finally prosecuted for money laundering, attempted pandering, and tax evasion. Fleiss served twenty-one months in jail, where she spent much of her time playing chess and throwing chairs at fellow inmates as well as prison guards who were not easy to keep at bay. The pandering charges were eventually dropped, and Heidi came back strong.

A true whorrior, these days Heidi Fleiss is fighting addiction on numerous reality shows, including appearances on such gems as
Celebrity Big Brother
,
E! True Hollywood Story: Charlie Sheen
, and the Dr. Drew apocalypse,
Sober House
. Today, Fleiss lives in Nevada, where she keeps a pandemonium of twenty exotic macaws for her current show,
Heidi Fleiss: From Prostitutes to Parrots
on Animal Planet after an ill-advised attempt to open an all-male-staffed “Stud Farm,” which was exactly what it sounded like. Heidi has also set up a coin-operated dry cleaners called “Dirty Laundry” on the outskirts of Sin City. Who knows what’s in store for Heidi Fleiss—a natural-born grifter, we’ve not heard the last of her. Wait. Just found her again. According to
TMZ.com
, Heidi was recently evicted from her “Dirty Dog Laundry” business space for turning the place into a “dungheap.” Luckily, she’s also in the works with “Pimpmaster General” Dennis Hof (don’t worry; he has his own entry) to open a sci-fi-themed whorehouse next to Area 51 to be christened, the “Alien Cathouse.” Space whores for nerds. Genius.