“Listen,” she said to them, “if you like screwing so much, why don’t you come down to Manhattan with me and make money out of it?”
Inés herself got divorced and devoted her time to running the brothel in a midtown apartment, and the girls worked for her in rotating shifts. But she had her staff problems, too, because married women are always taking time off to go on vacation with their husbands or to have babies and hysterectomies.
I started hiring girls who had daytime jobs as secretaries and salesgirls and wanted to make some money on the side. I found they were less jaded and more enthusiastic than a “working” girl who’s been screwing her brains out ten times a day in another house. Many high-class call girls, on the other hand, are also known to be cold and businesslike.
The next step was promotion. A high-class house advertises strictly by word of mouth of satisfied customers, and never goes out soliciting.
Other areas of prostitution go to any lengths to solicit business, like the semilegit massage parlors that even put cute little girls on Lexington Avenue these days posing as poll-takers. The only answers they want are the man’s opinion of “special massage,” his name, and office telephone number.
Others, as we all know, openly harass people in the streets and hotels and even sometimes savagely attack them.
An operation like mine never approaches people, but waits for the customers to come because they’re interested. In other words, it’s a supply situation strictly catering to a demand. And as long as there is such a thing as male libido, the ostrich-attitude law notwithstanding, there will always be a demand for a high-class brothel.
For me business opened with a bang, so to speak, because I had a very good reputation in the profession as a quantity as well as quality girl.
Word spread around, and within a month or two of my opening there was almost too much business to handle in a one-bedroom apartment.
Some nights were so packed that there would be two couples using the king-sized bed at the same time, another couple in the living room using the queen-sized Castro convertible, and yet another pair in the collapsible camp bed set up in the corner.
Still others would be in the kitchen boozing and queuing up for their turn, and those who were impatient or in a hurry would sometimes settle for a blow-job in the bathroom.
By the end of the year business was so fantastically successful that I had to look for a bigger apartment. I was so happy at the way things were going that I sent out Christmas cards to my clients to let them know I was moving and that I had a “new stable” for them to look over, and the card listed my new phone number.
This move got me into a little hot water when one customer called up and said his wife had received the card and demanded to know who was Madam Xaviera and what was her stable.
“You have to get me out of the hole now,” he ranted. “I know she intends calling you up, so you’d better make sure you tell her you are a horse trainer.”
The new apartment I found was a three-bedroom place in the East Sixties in an entirely residential building, but with a cooperative door staff.
The week I signed the lease I had a phone call from my former madam and chief competitor, Madeleine, whom I had not spoken to for almost a year, since she had stopped using me. Some drunk had left my card lying around, and she found it and I can’t say I blame her for being mad at me.
However, I was not surprised to hear from her now. Through the infallible grapevine I knew that she was getting out of the business to get married for the fourth time, and her attempts to put someone in the house on a managerial basis had been disasters.
The first girl she tried was Anita, a sweet young thing who would make a perfect courtesan, but who lacked the madam instinct.
The second choice was even more naive. I never thought of Madeleine as a gullible girl, but she really goofed choosing Linda. Linda was a junkie, and the one thing you cannot tolerate in a house is drugs, because if the police find them you haven’t a leg to stand on. Blind Freddie, one of her butlers, could see that the bandages on that girl’s hands covered up the needle marks, but for some reason Madeleine didn’t.
As well as being a hard-core user, Linda was entirely chaotic in her personal life and had no idea of how to handle finances. But worse than all that, she failed the acid test – to get along with the scheming butler, Felipe. Felipe worked by day in a brokerage house in Wall Street and by night functioned as a sort of general factotum, taking hats and coats, ferrying girls to and from dates, and arranging payoffs. But I never liked or trusted the man. In my opinion he had a double tongue as well as a double life, but he had a lot of influence with Madeleine.
Felipe also was a snoop, and one day while poking around Linda’s bathroom he found her needles and other equipment and informed Madeleine, who had to let her go.
So here she was calling me up and inviting me over for coffee that same afternoon to discuss a matter “of some extreme urgency.”
There was a little sadness in me when I arrived at the elegant brownstone on East Twenty-seventh Street, to realize that one of New York’s more exciting institutions was, despite the fact it was a rival establishment, closing down.
Madeleine, immaculate and elegant as usual, answered the door, ushered me into her private sitting room, and without beating about the bush began. “I think you know why I have asked you here,” she said in her South African English.
“I have heard some talk about your retiring,” I said.
“I just got married and I am pregnant already, and I need somebody who is able to take over my operation,” she said.
“Why did you call me?” I asked.
“I’ll be quite honest and admit that I didn’t give you first offer, but after a couple of failures to keep the house operating, I have realized you are the only person in New York who can run it.
“I’ve watched how you built yourself up from a little secretary who used to do scenes in her lunch hour to become one of the best madams in town in less than a year, and I admire you for it. I think you are ready to take over my business, and the only question now is, do you want it?”
Madeleine’s was known to be the biggest business in town. So by acquiring it I would become New York’s reigning madam.
However, I was not interested in Felipe, whom I never trusted, or the five-story brownstone. I much preferred the relaxed atmosphere of walking from room to room to supervise, instead of climbing all those flights of stairs.
“How much do you want for your black book and your telephone lines?” I asked.
Madeleine wanted a down payment of $5,000 and the balance to be paid when the phone lines were installed in my house. Hers was an incoming business, which is why they are known as call girls.
Having taken over Madeleine’s business, the first thing I had to do was reorganize her black book to conform with my own listing system. Her book had hundreds of listings of clients, their price, credit rating, erotic preferences or aberrations, and sometimes even their dimensions. Most of the men, naturally, had aliases or were given them by Madeleine.
Some men were listed by their preference in liquor, such as Red Label, Mr. Cutty, or Mr. Sark. Some invented their own aliases, like Marco Polo, Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, and the more ordinary Mr. White, Mr. Black, Mr. Brown, Mr. Green.
Some of the names these aliases disguised were very famous indeed. The book was such a celebrity-packed register it could make the society columns look like a truck driver’s time sheet.