June
15The Rise & Fall of Heidi Fleiss
“How did I fuck up the best job on earth?” That’s the question Heidi Fleiss asks herself in a new HBO documentary about Heidi’s life and times. The “best job,” as Heidi puts it, consisted of running the most successful ring of hookers in the history of Hollywood. Her ‘clients’ were truly the best and the brightest – and richest – in town. She owned the franchise, and she blew it, and the doc provides some fascinating insights into how and why.
Why do I care about Heidi? I was never a ‘client’ (though I knew several) nor did I attend any of her parties (I was always amazed at how many celebrities were willing to attend parties hosted by a renowned madam).
But her story is more like an opera – that‘s how Sheila Nevins, chief of HBO documentaries puts it. Here’s a once-prim Beverly Hills girl, daughter of a pediatrician and school teacher, who builds a world-class brothel, goes to jail, gets hooked on crystal meth – and then moves to Pahrump, Nevada to start yet another prostitution ring, this one designed for rich women who want to hire guys to service them
Bizarre? Definitely, and that’s why Sheila Nevins bought the rights to her “life story” and why the talented team of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato decided to make a doc about her. To be sure, half way into the project Heidi decided to end her cooperation. “She’s really Jekyll and Heidi,” says Bailey. “Her personality changes hour by hour.”
When the doc started, Heidi had just purchased 60 acres in Nevada to build her new business, only to run into a major problem. While her new neighbors were not put off by her business (brothels are legal in that part of Nevada) they denied her a permit because she did not understand the code of brothel keepers – namely, invisibility. She was too public a figure.
“The main reason Heidi messed up in Beverly Hills was that she became a celebrity,” observes one prominent Hollywood denizen (a former Heidi client). Heidi was not only dealing with power players, but some of her hookers were marrying them – and no one wanted all this to get attention.
When Heidi refused to talk to Bailey and Barbato any more, Sheila Nevins stepped in to shoot the interview and did an impressive job. There Heidi is, on camera, speaking insightfully one moment and incoherently the next, explaining her weird view of life. In one moment she is comparing herself to Alexander the Great (“I, too, conquered the world in my twenties – the sex world”), then she’s talking about her “three years in lesbian hell” (jail).
She now shares a house with dozens of rare birds (a new fetish), admits she still has a meth problem and, while she’s not been able to start her brothel for rich women, has managed to open a Laundromat in town called Dirty Laundry.
Nevins finds Heidi an empathetic figure and her story worth telling. While turning out a succession of gripping docs on serious subject (“The Recruiter” airs July 28 dealing with a high school recruiter for the military) she also is responsible for some of the colorful sexual escapades on TV (“Cathouse” is a new mainstay, and “whores are the best actresses,” says Nevins).
“The genre never gets tired,” says Nevins
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