Heidi Does Hollywood

By Jesse Birnbaum

According to her own statement, Heidi Fleiss ran the best little whorehouse in Hollywood: satisfaction guaranteed, discretion assured, classy girls, no group sex, nothing too kinky, condoms absolutely required -- all for $1,500 a popsy in cash or checks. No doubt about it, if a body would meet a bawdy, Heidi could fix it.

SCENE: A suite last June in the Beverly Hilton Hotel. HEIDI arrives in response to a phone call from Hawaiian businessman SAMMY LEE, who explains that he wants to provide entertainment for some associates.

Heidi: O.K., let me just tell you how I do it . . . In the history of this business, in one year, no one has ever been able to do what I do. I know 1% of the wealthiest people and the nicest people in the entire world, or maybe 1/ 2%. Every girl I select has some quality or value about her that I think is different from the rest.

Lee: Right.

Heidi: I just have a fixed price, and no one is hustled, and no one is, like, crude and, or, you know, where someone is spending all this money, and Heidi's going to find some drugged-out freak coming in with her fingernails all dirty, and I can't afford stuff like that 'cause of all the people I deal with.

She dealt with the best. Madam to the stars and moguls, foreign and domestic, Heidi prospered for three heady years, reaping 40% of her girls' earnings. A slim and attractive 27, she hung out in the best joints, was seen with the likes of Billy Idol, Sliver producer Robert Evans, and Victoria Sellers, Peter's daughter. She lived in a $1.6 million Benedict Canyon mansion (Hollywoodese for house), whose previous occupant was Michael Douglas and whose current owner is her father, Los Angeles pediatrician Paul Fleiss. She threw a smashing party there for none other than Mick Jagger. Jack Nicholson showed up, and so did Prince and a couple of Red Hot Chili Peppers. Life was a glorious movie.

Now it's a wrap. Heidi is out of business, charged with "pimping, pandering and sale of narcotics." Her notebooks, audiotapes, pictures, cellular telephone, passports, credit cards, bank statements, checkbooks, cash and 13 g of cocaine have been confiscated as evidence.

And is Heidi in a snit! To begin with, she says the police raid on her house was ridiculous. She was taking out the garbage with a friend, when eight cops, mind you, accompanied by a drug-sniffing dog, suddenly leaped out of the bushes and yelled, "L.A.P.D.! Which one of you is Heidi Fleiss?" As if they had to ask! Worse, Heidi was certain she was brought down by any number of envious, low-rent madams who run tacky $200 and $300 doxies -- "like they send their maid out on a job or something."

Lee: What are we talking about as far as costs?

Heidi: It'll be $1,500.

Lee: A person?

Heidi: Per person.

Lee: And for $1,500, what are we talking?

Heidi: We're talking everyone's gonna have a good time But, like, oh, I'm not, like, into this group sex and swapping and things like that, and I tell people that I think condoms. I am a firm believer in condoms, but what girls do and guys do, I'm not in the room. I can't oversee everything. And if you're not happy with someone in the first 15 minutes, if she offends you in any way, or something about her strikes you wrong or something, $100 and go.

That was the kind of class that endeared Heidi to her clientele. Now, of course, the customers, said to be mainly show-biz celebrities and executives, are apoplectic with worry. Press agents last week were telling reporters that, oh sure, their clients have "met" Heidi but know nothing else about her. In a statement faxed to the press, Idol proclaimed, "I have never used ((Heidi's)) professional services, and, God knows, I don't need to. Fortunately, I've never had to pay for sex." The Los Angeles Times wrote that Heidi was sometimes paid for her services with corporate checks, which were written off as production expenses. Her phone has been jangling with calls from nervous actors and producers, some of whom have offered to pay her legal fees.

A lawyer for Columbia Pictures production boss Michael Nathanson wanted it known that Nathanson "never did business with Heidi on any level. Personally, or company-wise," and Heidi herself declared that Nathanson had never been her client. "This is driving people's imaginations to the max," said Anthony Pellicano, a private detective whom Nathanson hired to sort out the facts. "People are scared to death of being exposed. I'm getting phone calls from a lot of people who want me to represent them."

They will need all the help they can get. According to Ivan Nagy, a burly Hungarian emigre and shady, fringe-TV director (Starsky and Hutch), Heidi has the goods on all her clients: names, dates, phone tapes, encounters. Nagy, who had a turbulent affair with Heidi, recalls that the two were in bed on one occasion when Heidi delightedly waved a $10,000 corporate check in his face and cooed, "I'd like to see you get a check like this!"

As for the identities of Heidi's johns, Nagy says, "anybody who ever called in the past 18 months is on tape. Every one of her four phone lines had a voice-activated recorder on it. She had a fetish about tape recording. She figured if a guy didn't pay her or a check bounced, she'd play a bit of the tape on his answering machine and he'd pay up unless he wanted his wife to hear the rest of the message."

Meanwhile, agents and writers are hustling to sign Heidi to movie and television contracts. Connie Chung and Barbara Walters rushed to book the Heidi story for their TV newsmagazine shows this week. Heidi announced that she was prepared to write a tell-all book for any publisher who will pay her $1 million, the equivalent of 666 2/3 hooker engagements. It is also possible that any number of Hollywood figures and studios would pay her more than that to keep her mouth shut.

Lee: O.K., so the arrangement is basically straight sex Basically nothing bizarre. I don't want to see a llama coming through the house

Heidi: No, no, no, nothing bizarre.

Heidi is so proud of her notoriety that it might be impossible for her to remain silent. After all, she worked hard to reach her eminence. A high school dropout, she was 19 when she met big spender Bernie Cornfeld, the financial impresario who in the 1970s was accused and then acquitted of fraud when his $2 billion mutual-fund empire collapsed. Bernie and Heidi were just good friends, so to speak, living it up, jetting around Europe. After they split, Heidi met Nagy, who introduced her to Hollywood brothel-keeper Elizabeth ("Madam Alex") Adams. Heidi said she was merely Madam Alex's assistant; Madam Alex, now retired, begs to differ. So does Nagy.

Once she had received her on-the-job training from Madam Alex, Heidi struck out on her own. She started small, operating out of a modest little house in Los Angeles' bohemian Melrose district. She was a familiar sight at On the Rox, a swanky Hollywood nightclub, where her friend Victoria Sellers served as a hostess. "Heidi would be with a group of girls in the corner," recalls an observer. "You'd see her get up and talk to a guy by the bar, then she'd go back and get a girl, and then the girl would go over and sit on the guy's lap while he ran his hand under her clothes." Soon the word got about that Heidi had the best girls in town. Business blossomed. Melrose faded. Benedict Canyon loomed.

Heidi: And you know, some guys like two girls to be together.

Lee: Yeah. Can that be arranged?

Heidi: Yeah. That's a normal man thing.

Lee: Yeah, kind of a boy thing.

Heidi: It's a boy thing.

Lee: Cash O.K.?

Heidi: Cash. Cool.

Lee: No yen.

Heidi: No yen.

After a few more pleasantries, HEIDI agrees to send over one of her girls -- a trial run, as it were. When HEIDI departs, DETECTIVE LEE of the Beverly Hills police department turns off the hidden tape recorders and video camera. Three hours later, Heidi's hooker, "SAMANTHA," arrives, whereupon LEE $ receives a "prostitution violation" (solicitation) and duly arrests her. Next day the cops and their dogs come to call in Benedict Canyon.

A few days before Heidi was scheduled to appear in court this week, Los Angeles police arrested Nagy for pandering and running a call-girl ring all his own -- and just when he was about to conclude a deal to sell his life story. "I'm the story," he had bragged. "Heidi's the background. It's the story of an abused man." Heidi might now well wonder whether it was Nagy who blew the whistle. It's, like, they were, you know, made for each other. Maybe that will be the title of the movie.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles