So FAR we’ve been talking about the kind of sex that can happen to you in an office—some of it lovely and shimmery (flirtation and romance with dreamskins), some of it sad and regretful (when a dreamskin turns out to be a ratcreature and troubles are heaped on your shiny, shampooed head).
There’s still another, totally different kind of sex connected with offices, however, that we haven’t dealt with. In fact, it’s an institution. You don’t actually participate in it or have dealings with the institution, but some of the men in your office may. I assume that anything which concerns them could concern you.
There’s another reason for you to know about this kind of sex and the institution which packages it. Being the sexy dreamboat you are, a boss may sometimes prod and poke you to go out with him or with clients and want you to be friendlier than you care to be. It’s lovely to pick and choose the men you want, but being pressed into service is something else again. Well, a boss doesn’t need to badger you, because there are these girls from the institution who are his for the selecting and who have no inhibitions whatever. They’re rather costly, but that’s no reason for him to economize by trying to use you.
Listen, if you’re having even a scrap of trouble with any man in the office expecting you to do things you don’t feel like doing—for him or anybody else—I suggest you put this book under his nose, opened to this chapter, so that hell know you know there’s another way out.
If some people want to stop the world and get off when they hear about amateur sex at the office, they want to float right on out to Ursa Major and homestead when somebody tells them that call girls are a business institution. I remember when Edward R. Murrow did a television documentary on the subject a few years ago, he was screeched at by one industry leader after another. “You’re not talking about us,” they all howled. Maybe he wasn’t talking about them personally, but I daresay he could have been talking about their industry and maybe their company. Apparendy men at the top can be as innocent as lambs while dark-operator underlings traffic with the girls. (I worked in a company where an expediter made book in his office from ten to four daily. Management just figured he had to use the phone a lot.) Sometimes, however, men at the top are not so innocent . . . about the girls.
One man I interviewed on the subject—he had considerable insight, what with being a procurer—said, “I don’t see how you can say any industry is totally free of involvement with call girls. I’ve fixed up guys in practically every line of work you can think of—electronics, finance, pharmaceuticals, food, government. They included the presidents of a soup company and a surgical company, not to mention a couple of science professors. Executives get the urge just like clerks. Only the prices change. There’s really no more paid-for sex in Paris or New York than there is in Decatur or Dubuque, when you consider the difference in population.”
Having told you this kind of sex does exist and explained why we’re delving into it (the men in your office may be involved; under no circumstances are you to become involved yourself), I think you should know the information you’re about to examine is authoritative. I went out into the field, notebook in hand, and interviewed the following experts:
Two “high-class” procurers (who only procure for important men in industry).
Five men who “date” call girls.
Four call girls (whom I paid their regular hourly rates while they sipped gimlets and I took notes).
An attorney whose office girls are “available” for clients.
A policeman.
These thirteen interviews may not add up to a report by Dr. Kinsey, but I do think they give a sampling. The Call Girl, by Dr. Harold Greenwald (Ballantine Books), makes good supplementary reading for anyone who wants to continue the course.
A call girl, darling, according to any definition mommy has ever heard, is a girl who can be hired to go to bed with a man. She gets the name “call girl” because most of her contacts are made by telephone. If a man wants to engage her for himself or a friend, he calls her answering service. Only the service and a few close friends have the girl’s private number. The service may put the call through to her house and let her make a date with the caller, or it may be the kind of service that only takes messages—in which case she will call in regularly. Call girls are always calling their answering services to find out what’s up. The four I interviewed—Norma, Anita, Barbara and Colleen—called their services about three times apiece during our separate interviews. I managed to get in lots of questions anyway.
There are, of course, girls other than call girls who get paid for love-making. Apart from mistresses, women who hate their husbands and girls who are sleeping their way to the top in business (dreadful!), these are:
Street walkers and B-girls who depend mosdy on personal contact to make dates.
Girls who live in “houses.” There aren’t many of these any more except in lettuce-growing areas and very poor districts of a few towns and cities.
Party girls who take paid assignments only occasionally and work the rest of the time as starlets, models, salesgirls and secretaries. (It wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on girls in your office who have two new ostrich bags in one season and never bring their lunch.)
It may surprise you to know that the call girl—occasionally referred to as a “hustler” or “hooker”—is considered the aristocrat of her trade. She makes more money and is better looking, better dressed and better educated than most of the girls just mentioned. Some people, in describing her, even say she has more “class!”
How does she operate?
A call girl usually has an apartment in which she entertains clients. Many of her assignments are also completed away from home. Since customers are often businessmen from out of town, hotels are a popular place to converge. The call girl doesn’t mind trotting off to a hotel because she can more easily control the length of the visit when she’s the one who called. (Apparently customers can overstay their welcome maddeningly in the girl’s apartment.)
In addition to her business-address apartment, the professional often maintains another house or apartment as her actual residence. This is necessary if she fives with parents, husband or children (which many call girls do). It’s also good to have two apartments, I was told, in case the girl is picked up by the police. After the arrest or questioning, she will not use the same business-apartment again but will get a new address.
Wherever she works, as soon as one assignment is completed (the very second it’s over or even before it’s over, if it’s taking too long) the girl checks with her answering service to see if there are any interesting new developments. She calls back whoever has called, and if he wants to see her immediately, she may skip to this new assignment from the one she has just finished. In sprawling cities like Los Angeles, call girls have their own cars. Otherwise, taxis are used and added to the client’s bill. The important thing is for a call girl to stay busy!
Morning business is usually light. One or two callers may drop by around noon. By mid-afternoon activity gets brisker and by evening, her schedule should be fairly full.
The four girls I talked with saw an average of five customers a day but occasionally fitted in as many as ten. All said they preferred a rapid turnover (spending not more than half an hour with each customer) to a long drawn-out assignment with one man. “Getting through cocktails, dinner, night club and finally to bed with one guy can be rough,” said Colleen.
Anita agreed. “You have to be so damned charming and interested on a date,” she said. “It wears you out!”
Because they’re accustomed to dealing with civilian girls who are always yammering at them about being taken to dinner, some customers can’t understand why the call girls wouldn’t be delighted to dine with them free. “They forget,” Norma said, “that we must be paid for our time regardless of what we’re doing. If the dinner consisted of twenty-four-karat-gold shad roe, it wouldn’t make up for the income lost from other paying customers while we’re eating.”
To these aristocrats of the trade twenty dollars is rock-bottom minimum for a single act of love (and that only for an old buddy who is broke). The minimum usually is twenty-five dollars. For this amount, the girl will spend up to an hour with a man. She prefers to get the engagement over with much sooner, however, and usually succeeds. Of that hour, usually no more than ten to twenty minutes is spent in bed. If the man should want to dally there for the entire hour, Colleen said her fee would have to be doubled to fifty dollars. “Staying in bed all that time is too exhausting,” she explained. “You aren’t fresh for the next customer.”
The girl who charges twenty-five dollars for a twenty-minute (more or less) hour would probably charge fifty dollars to go to cocktails, dinner and then to make love providing she is free by ten-thirty in the evening to book another appointment. She would charge the second man fifty dollars to go to a night club and then go home with him to bed. If her entire evening is taken up by one man, the fee would be a hundred dollars. Obviously these are not inflexible fees. If the man is terribly rich, the prices might go up a bit.
Certain girls are able to charge fifty or a hundred dollars per assignment regardless of the scanty amount of time involved. Whether a girl is a twenty-dollar girl or a hundred-dollar girl seems to depend on two things—how young she is and how beautiful. Experience does not necessarily pay off handsomely in this field. The girls are honest with themselves about their attributes and rarely have inflated egos. “No girl of thirty is going to have the unmitigated vanity to think she can charge as much as a seventeen-year-old,” said Barbara (who looks twenty-one and is now thirty-three).
A call girl of thirty who has a beautiful face, great clothes, a handsome car, a stylish apartment and great charm may charge as much as fifty per assignment (one of the rapid-turnover kind) but she is still not considered the prize that an innocent flower is. However, innocent flowers from small towns are occasionally so green, the girls say, that they may not realize their worth in the open market and may get swindled. A friend or philanthropic customer usually explains to the flower what she has going for her—youth and inexperience—and she raises her prices.
Sadistic acts—which Barbara, Norma, Colleen and Anita loathed—call for double, triple and quadruple rates. If two girls are engaged by one man, each girl receives her individual fee.
In a good week the average “successful” call girl makes from three to four hundred dollars, the girls said. She can make up to seven hundred if she hustles and has enough fifty- and hundred-dollar appointments. Anita (at twenty) claims she could probably rack up as much as one thousand a week if she were willing to work hard enough. “I’m a little lazy,” she said.
A call girl has her busy seasons and also her slumps—just like the ice-cream industry. If a big convention is in town, she needs four hands to call her answering service often enough. During Thanksgiving, Easter week and the Christmas season men stay close to home and the call girl’s life is uneventful. Colleen reported a “disastrous” January and February this year. Everybody went to Florida or California.
As you can imagine, a call girl spends a great deal of money on her clothes, her hair, her apartment, her car, hush money, bribes to the police to keep from being arrested, bigger bribes to get out when she is arrested, sizable fines if all else fails, medical bills, and tips and fees to the people who arrange dates. Some girls support husbands, children, mothers, fathers, pets and boy friends. The boy friend, contrary to popular opinion, is more of a pet than a business partner and generally does not procure for her. He is kept in every sense of the word. The better kept he is, the more respected his keeper is in her own circles. Norma and Anita were both “pirates,” refusing to support a man. In case you’re worried about how a call girl makes ends meet, it must be pointed out her income goes further than ours because she is unlikely to declare very much of it to the Internal Revenue Service.
How are financial arrangements worked out with customers? If a man has been her date before, he knows her rate and pays at the end of the evening. On a first date he pays in advance. If a stranger calls her, he must be recommended by a friend and presumably a friend with whom she has had no financial or other kind of trouble. Preferably the friend will have been in touch with her first to say, “Hank So-and-So is going to call you.”
On the phone with Hank, the girl will ask, “Did George tell you the arrangements?” Assured that he did, she usually meets her “blind date” at his hotel or a restaurant rather than having him pick her up at home. At this meeting she once again checks to be sure he understands about her fee. “What did George tell you the arrangements were?” she asks. If she is satisfied with the answer, the date proceeds.
Apparently a girl can’t be too careful. The man who wants to see her could be a policeman in plain clothes. Occasionally a man will pay the girl’s fee at the beginning of the evening, then beat her up and take back his money when the night is over. (There’s nobody she can go to for redress of grievances, but of course the chap gets a mighty bad name among her friends.)
“If I don’t like the way a guy acts while we’re having a drink and getting acquainted,” Barbara said, T just walk out. I have a reputation for being independent, however, and people rarely fix me up with creeps.”
What about the man she meets at a party or bar who doesn’t know she’s a call girl? Naturally he has to be told, so that she doesn’t waste her time. The girl might say, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave soon. My child is with a baby-sitter and I have to pay her.” Her friend would ask, “Gee, can’t you just call home and tell the baby-sitter you’ll be late?” “Well, you see, the sitter is rather expensive,” the girl will explain. “It will probably come to about fifty dollars.”
If the man chokes on his drink or crashes off across the room, the girl has been dealing with a loser (lost to her anyway). If he says gallantly, “I’ll pay the sitter,” she’s got a winner—and nature, helped along by finance, can take its course.
There are other tactful and “innocent” ways a call girl lets a man know she has a price. She might say, “Oh dear, I’ve got such a pesky problem. My rent is due tomorrow morning and I haven’t received my TV-residual check yet.” Or, “Geraldine needs four new tires and I am absolutely flat-smashed broke.” A telephone bill may be clouding the girl’s evening. “Well how much could a little old telephone bill be anyway? Why don’t I clean it up?” says her worried friend. This will just happen to be the month she made those five calls to Sydney, Australia, and the tab is a not unimpressive $112.74 including tax.
All my interviewees said men occasionally try to chisel. Some even have the audacity to request credit. Anita recalls an evening with two Saudi-Arabian princes who could speak English perfectly until the subject of her fee came up. They then resorted to their native tongue and she was unable to continue the negotiations.
Barbara told me about being one of several girls hired by a bankers’ group to be hostesses at an afternoon cocktail party. Their job was to look beautiful and circulate among the guests for two hours. (Not all call-girl assignments center on anatomy.) At the end of the party, the head banker told the girls they would be expected to entertain the bankers during the rest of the evening for no increase in price. The girls said nothing doing. The banker refused to pay them for their hostessing chores. The girls hired an attorney who called the banker on their behalf.
“I don’t know these girls,” the banker said. “They are trollops!”
“They seem to know you,” the attorney said, “and they are planning to take an ad explaining the particulars of their withheld fee.”
They were probably bluffing, but the banker decided to pay.
I am not the first person to ask a call girl, “How come a nice girl like you gets into this kind of racket?” Everybody under the sun has been asking her that for years, and about ten times out of ten the answer is that the girl fell or drifted into call-girling. Nobody goes to school to learn how.
All the call-girl histories detailed by Dr. Greenwald in his book, The Call Girl, indicate an unhappy childhood with little real love or understanding from parents. His girls were always running away from home, being abused by foster fathers, checking in and out of orphanages. My girls were too.
If I interpret Dr. Greenwald’s findings correcdy, only a girl with an unhappy childhood or unfortunate early conditioning would be likely to accept a first paid assignment, let alone tolerate the kind of life a call girl leads. The circumstances that drive a potential call girl into call-girling—no money, broken dreams, family to support—would simply drive another type of girl to find another answer.
One of the high-class procurers I interviewed doesn’t agree. “Any kind of girl can get to be a pro,” he says. “I don’t think it has anything to do with hating her father or mother or not getting enough love. I’ve seen a girl come from the nicest family . . . the parents really loved the kid and spent time with her. Pow . . . right down the drain! A lot of it is luck . . . who a girl gets mixed up with at a time when she’s down.”
My other procurer said, “A lot of girls who nearly faint dead at the thought of somebody’s being a call girl never had the opportunity, you see. They weren’t pretty enough—so nobody ever asked them. If they’d been real lookers and somebody kept offering them a hundred dollars to do what they’re already doing free, who knows how long they’d have held out?”
It’s a thought.
Whether you agree with Dr. Greenwald (and me) that a girl has to have a wretchedly low ego to take this kind of work, or whether you side with the procurers who say it could happen to any pretty girl in tough circumstances, it is apparent that being pretty makes a girl more eligible and, in some cases, more susceptible to the life. Doting parents and relatives may have given her the idea that exceptionally pretty girls don’t have to do anything . . . people always take care of them. People very often do care for them, as a matter of fact, but they demand more in return than a smile from the fabulous face or a pat on the balding head.
Many pretty girls automatically head for a career in show business without bothering to train for anything else ... or for show business either. They are only mediocre actresses, singers or dancers. When the fabulous career doesn’t materialize, rather than dig in and be waitresses, stenographers or receptionists, they choose the better-paid, presumably less-grubby life of a call girl. Or they grub a bit first and then move on to call-girling. This has been known to happen to beauty-contest winners who get into the finals but don’t win the top prizes. If they’ve landed in Hollywood, they can always get the interview with the talent agent, television or movie producer ... for a while. Everybody loves to talk to pretty girls, but the jobs don’t materialize. The disappointed may drift to call-girling.
Broken love affairs have catapulted some girls into the trade. The ing ànue gives her all to a man who discards her like an old flashlight battery. Disillusioned, the girl says, “Look what happened when I loved and trusted a man! I couldn’t be any worse off being a pro, and at least I’d make money.”
Some girls have simply been going to bed with one chap or another for several years and finally figure they might as well get paid for it.
The housewife call girls who were recently apprehended on Long Island said they joined the club out of boredom and contempt for their husbands. Other girls adore their husbands and are supplementing the family income. The husband often knows what his wife is doing on his behalf and encourages her.
Many call girls are divorcees with young children. “It’s a very satisfactory arrangement/’ Norma said. “You can be with your children all day but your evenings are free for work.”
It probably can’t be gainsaid that some girls get into call-girling because they are simply too dumb to stay out. They are ignorant children from backwoods places trying to cope with life in the big city. Some fast-talking predator gets hold of them and, as that procurer said, “It’s pow . . . right down the drain!”
Once a girl is psychologically disposed toward the profession (full of doubts about her own worth, greedy to get rich quick, disillusioned in love), she finds the machinations of becoming involved in the trade quite simple. A waitress may say to her employer, “Sarah Jane seems to be going out with this man and getting presents and money. Why can’t I do the same thing?” Her employer may know just the man, and presto—Sarah Jane’s friend is in business. If her employer doesn’t know a man, he may repeat the girl’s remark to some customers, pretending to be horrified but actually fishing. One of the customers may check back later and say, “About that girl who’s interested in presents and money.” The girl’s new life is a-borning.
A disreputable-type landlord may procure. His tenant is behind in her rent. He tells her of a friend who’ll be glad to take care of the back payments if she’ll be nice to the guy. Not-too-bright girls who share apartments with other girls and haven’t their share of the rent money are particularly vulnerable to schemes for getting it together. They don’t want to let their roommates down.
A seedy landlady can have “madaming” aspirations. She bakes a cake and takes it to the charming girl living alone on the third floor. “I see a lot of men come to take you out, honey,” she says. “I know one who’d probably just be crazy about you . . . he’d buy you things and give you money, too.” If the girl agrees to see the gentleman and things go well for him, the landlady gets a commission from the girl.
Cuckoo-sounding want-ads are a lure. A company purports to be paying up to two hundred and seventy-five dollars a week for special sales representatives . . . “no experience needed!” Applicants are screened, the unlikely ones are brushed, and the attractive hopefuls who might do well in prostitution are told in heavily adorned terms what the setup is. The susceptible succumb. The organization presumably has clients who’ll buy ... all they need is the merchandise.
A friend of mine worked as secretary (until she found out what they were doing) to a man who was supposed to be rounding up chorines for a night club in Rio de Janeiro. His ads said the girls would receive one hundred and fifty dollars a week, round-trip boat transportation to Rio and a chance to meet multimillionaire South American socialites. (Who wouldn’t be interested?) Just as with the girls who answered the special-representative ads, the doggy-answerers to this ad were discouraged from calling back (but they called anyway, Mary Jane said—the more doggy the oftener, and it was heart-rending). The creamy answerers were strung along about South America and finally taken to see the wizard. Now the wizard did not own the South American night club, although some people say he owns South America. He did and does own a controlling interest in two major American companies and is something of a legend—business-wise, personality-wise and girl-wise—in our time. (He is rarely interviewed because nobody can find him.) My friend’s boss procured for him. Every afternoon the agent took one of the dance applicants, still under the impression she was about to leave for South America any day, to see the wizard. The girl and the agent would sit in the bar of a posh hotel discussing the subtie differences between a Miami and a Rio tan while the wizard, usually wearing tennis shoes, strolled through the bar to see whether or not he liked the girl. If she appealed to him, he joined the party. If she didn’t, he stole away in his tennis shoes to await the next screening. (The agent was left to get off the hook about Rio or string the girl along for himself.) The girls whom the wizard selected never got to South America either, of course, but old gumsoles is so rich and legendary that many a girl was willing to abandon precious plans to have a whack at him. She became a call girl supàrieur . . . on call to this one man only.
Motion picture agents sometimes start a girl downhill if she has roundish heels already. Because so many girls want to get into movies and television, a constant stream of hopefuls winds through an agent’s office. If he is important enough to be able to get a girl in to see a going-concern movie or television producer, he may not be much interested in girls himself—past the age or doesn’t want the trouble—but may be able to further two careers, his and hers, by suggesting she play up to the potential employer. After the interview the agent will call the producer and say, “She really went for you, Joe . . . she’d like to see you again, maybe in the evening.” (Why should movie producers be any less susceptible to whopping lies that flatter their egos than other men?) To the girl the agent says, “If you play your cards right and are really nice when this guy takes you to dinner . . . something may come of it.”
Whichever way the evening goes, the agent is not paid off in cash, of course, and neither is the girl—usually. If she gets the part, however, her career may be started and her agent will receive commissions.
This isn’t to say that dozens of girls don’t get jobs in movies and television on the strength of their talent, charm and beauty alone. (Then could come the propositioning, because the girl is more or less the producer’s protàgà and he may feel entitled. She may feel he’s entitled, too, what with the next movie to be cast and all.) I’m also not saying that girls who are “procured” for a movie producer (or even an industrialist) don’t eventually, despite their tattered virtue, become movie stars. More girls, however, are apt to be catapulted into call-girling (or one of the variations such as party-girling) after having dined too frequently with producers without getting the part.
As to the varieties of call girls, there are all kinds—peppermint, fudge ripple, butter pecan. Some call girls are gypsies—no more able to keep appointments and be a success at call-girling than they are at anything else. Some are shrewd and efficient business women. A friend in the public relations division of an ad agency told me he nearly keeled over the other day when a pro got in to see him by presenting a fake business card. Once inside his office door, she briskly announced that she was a call girl and would like to help him in any way she could with clients. If he was thinking in terms of banquets or large meetings, there were many more like her she could recruit, she said. Phil just listened and let her do most of the talking. It’s so rare that somebody comes in off the street and offers to lift burdens from a busy man’s shoulders that I think he was genuinely touched.
I’m told the most successful calls girls, aside from the fragile young beauties, are good conversationalists, fascinating to the men who go out with them. One of my sources said it was fun and games to watch a haughty call girl out-haughty and upstage an unknowing Park Avenue hostess at whose home she was a guest. (Call girls not infrequently decorate some of the poshest parties and places.)
Another friend was accosted recently by what surely must be a new breed of call girl. Rex was driving home along the Sunset Strip late one night in a Maserati convertible. (I have three or four very chic friends!) At a stop light two girls in a Cadillac Fleetwood pulled up on his left. “Why don’t we all stop for a drink?” one of them called over to him.
“Afraid it’s too late for me,” Rex told them.
“Well at least let’s stop for a minute and get acquainted,” the girl on his side said. “We’ll give you our phone number and you can telephone some time.”
Both cars pulled to the curb at the next block, Rex wrote down the girls’ numbers and called one of them a few weeks later. She explained that she was a pro but had found him enormously attractive and would love to see him. He went to her house in Beverly Hills—or technically, her parents’ house—at eleven one morning. The “old folks” were in Palm Springs. The girl took him to her room overlooking the pool. Its walls were cluttered with college banners, corners piled with skis, tennis rackets and golf clubs and the bed innocently populated with stuffed animals. The daughter of a hideously wealthy, invincibly “stable” Beverly Hills family was a pro at the creaking age of eighteen. (I never did understand teen-agers!)
Some call girls lead multiple lives. A Los Angeles police officer, married to a friend of mine, told me of picking up a fairly famous actress in a raid at a downtown hotel. She had succeeded in business because of her acting as well as her looks (still is succeeding) but there she was with ten other party or call girls.
There’s the case of Gloria Y. At twenty-six, Gloria is a computer operator at one of America’s ten largest industrial plants. Her looks are “just passable” at work. She wears mousy skirts and blouses, flat heels and no make-up. Her salary is $79.70 a week gross. By night the mouse skirts and blouses are exchanged for veils, bangles and beads, and a spectacular figure is revealed. The scrubbed face grows heavy-lidded under bushels of make-up. Little Gloria metamorphosizes into Little Egypt, an accomplished belly dancer. Culling customers from the cabaret patrons, Gloria is also a call girl. She never mixes her daytime job with her nighttime work. The computer job is her security for the future when she’ll be too old to dance or play. The belly-dancing is her real love, but the work isn’t steady. The occasional paid date is her way of having expensive baubles.
You can’t say categorically that all call girls hate what they’re doing and want out.
Twenty-year-old Anita told me, “I was first seduced when I was twelve and I loved it. I’ve been with one man or another ever since, and I can honestly say I couldn’t live without them or what they do. Sometimes I feel like a fraud taking money for something I enjoy so much.”
That’s one point of view, although not the one most widely held.
Barbara said she felt a kind of satisfaction in being able to give pleasure to men ... in being needed so intensely. She considers her call-girl life a search for love!
Although the four girls I talked to didn’t seem particularly hostile toward men or eager to exploit them, maybe the feelings were there and I just couldn’t detect them. (I don’t admit this very often of course, but I’m really not a psychiatrist.) Apparently many call girls do hate men (Dr. Greenwald says they do) and are perpetually frigid. They also often prefer girls. The fact that men want to degrade them, not just enjoy them, might upset a girl’s usual sunny attitude toward the opposite sex.
At best a call girl probably doesn’t mind the act of love (because if she did, she wouldn’t be physically able to be in business). Barbara, who has been a pro for twelve years, said that something happened to her perhaps every sixth or eighth time. “If you tried to reach a climax each time and you’re seeing eight or ten customers a day,” she said, “you’d collapse.”
“When you meet a man you think you might fall in love with and possibly marry,” I asked, “do you try to keep him from knowing about your work?”
“It’s a temptation,” Colleen said, “but how can you bring it off? You can’t give up your income while you decide if you really were meant for each other—and he decides whether he wants to marry you. If he’s already married, he’ll be even longer deciding. You have to keep working, and that means you are busy nights and can only see him at the last minute after no business dates have come through. Any guy is going to ask questions about that kind of setup. Usually you tell him in the beginning to avoid hurting him later or avoid his being abusive when he finds out.”
Customers do fall in love with the girls occasionally, but it isn’t always desirable for the girls. What they want is a steady customer, not somebody who is going to be a pest and moon about and not want them to see anybody else. Of course, as you have probably already figured out for yourself, the professional life of a call girl can’t last forever. Her best-paid years are before she is twenty-five. Until the age of thirty-five she can do reasonably well financially if she takes care of herself. Hardly anybody lasts past forty.
Some call girls knock off occasionally, or let’s say curtail, to become kept by one man. Many of them can’t stand the monotony, however.
Call girls do get married, some as often as three and four times. The marriage may or may not take them out of the trade. Sometimes a girl makes enough money to retire, become respectable and begin a new life in another town. In that case she usually changes the color and style of her hair along with her name—and sometimes her nose, teeth and chin to go with them.
Suppose a girl has gone astray and become a call girl by virtue (if you can call it that) of associating with evil friends, wanting to make money but not having the self-respect and drive to do it some other way. How does she get a steady flow of customers?
Keeping up her gross sales, if youll pardon the expression, takes all her time. There is no central booking agency to send her on assignments. She can’t be listed in the yellow pages. She’s an independent operator who must show initiative.
Several of the girls act as madams, going out on assignments themselves as well as getting customers for friends who pay them a commission. There are also the shadowy men who procure (often working also as race-track touts, bookies and bartenders). For arranging a date, they receive up to 50 per cent of the girl’s fee. Cabdrivers, elevator operators, clerks and bellhops in hotels also get the supply and demand together, taking part of the proceeds. The procurers I talked to did not take a fee from customers or girls, because they were “high-class” businessmen whose only reward was in making people happy (they said) and in storing up good will with their customers and prospects.
At the procuring rates charged, a girl naturally likes to stay away from the procurers as much as possible and arrange her own dates. Once a pro is established, much of her business comes from referrals. A satisfied customer not only returns but also recommends her to friends. (It’s all unspeakably sharing . . . like giving your good litde dressmaker’s name to a pal, I suppose.) To get the ball rolling, a girl may say to a customer, “If your friends are as nice as you are, I’m sure I’d enjoy meeting them too. I hope you’ll have some of them call me.” If business is slow, a girl may call up customers she hasn’t seen for a while to stir up some action. Some call girls have interesting pictures of themselves on display in a local photographer’s studio, and admirers are given their phone numbers. The photographer’s fee for taking the pictures and showcasing them might be an occasional free date with the girl herself.
Unless a girl is an official madam, she doesn’t often give a girl friend’s telephone number to one of her own customers. Each girl guards her clientele jealously. Occasionally a customer may ask her to get a date for a friend, which she will do—but the girl she calls is supposed to reciprocate by including her on a double-date.
Couldn’t a call girl operate out of an office? It seems so logical that I asked that question. After all, the men are there, and she would seem so respectable as a bookkeeper or file clerk while checking out prospects.
Dumb! Norma patiendy explained the girl would work her way straight through the office in about ten days and then where would she be? Out on the street probably, men being the gossips they are. Cocktail-waitressing, she said, would be a much better arena for a call girl. Having to work like a beast in any regular job, however, would defeat some of the purposes of call-girling in the first place . . . the irregular hours, a relaxed life (!) and freedom from eyestrain bending over pesky machines.
Even if call girls don’t work out of offices, however, they certainly are—as we’ve mentioned earlier—part of the business world and therefore part of Sex and the Office.
From everything I’ve been able to glean on the subject, about as often as a supply clerk orders up carbon paper or the caterers come to service the coffee machine, somebody in an office orders the services of a call girl delivered to someone in another office. The girl is sent as a bribe, payment for a favor expected or received, or as an inducement toward getting an order or contract. Sometimes the girl is delivered as a good-will ambassadress. Of course she isn’t just wrapped up in cellophane and sent over like a bon voyage present. The recipient has to indicate that he’d like such a present and sometimes requests it (her).
Aside from the expense, if they were to foot the bill themselves, many men prefer, for psychological reasons, to have the girl be a “gift.” I guess it’s like chocolates. You wouldn’t dream of buying a pound of mocha creams for yourself, but if somebody gives you a box, you hide them in your desk and nibble greedily.
This is a business situation in which a call girl might be introduced: One food-store chain in a city does most of the business. One man in the chain places most of the orders. How is he going to decide which macaroni to give extra shelf space to and possibly promote when all macaroni is good—and if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all? If the chain-store buyer should say to a macaroni salesman, “Joe, you must know some swinging girls,” the salesman might not be inclined to spit in his eye. (Listen, I don’t mean to pick on macaroni. I’m just using it as an example. The salesman of any product that looks, acts, tastes, smells and feels a great deal like the competitor’s could find himself considering the “intrinsic” advantages of calling in a call girl.)
Here’s a similar situation: A purchasing agent lets contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars in airplane parts. (Talk about macaroni all looking alike!) The airplane parts salesman who’s able to interest the agent in a girl may possibly just endow his own airplane parts with that je ne sais quoil
A man who is in a position to request a call girl from a number of different suppliers may spread his demands around the group so that nobody is stuck with the tab more than three or four times a year.
Other possible call-girls-in-business setups are these:
A struggling independent movie company wants its pictures to be publicized favorably in national magazines. When a magazine editor comes to Hollywood, the second thing he is offered is dinner at Chasen’s.
The advertising manager of a distillery has everything to say about whether the company’s present advertising agency will be retained. If redheads and blondes around the clock would help the ad manager feel disinclined to make a change right now, he may be offered them (particularly if this is the agency’s one big account).
Sometimes a man just “falls into” a call-girl situation. A client wants a date for the evening and the fixer-upper is instructed to get a date for himself and come along. Obviously no gosling junior executive is going to be trusted with such an assignment—nor would he try to instigate such an evening. Only a seasoned pro would know how far his company would go.
One major public relations firm in New York makes it simple for the clients to indulge. It retains ten call girls, one more glamorous than the next, according to insiders, for the exclusive use of clients—no questions answered or asked. At five every afternoon the girls check in to get their assignments. By midnight all of them are hard at work. Their “salary” is part of the sizable fee the client pays to be represented by the firm in the first place.
It probably sounds by now as though I think all companies use call girls the way Santa staffs his factory at the North Pole with helpers. I’m sure nothing could be further from the truth. Most companies do without call girls very nicely. Only certain frantic firms include them as part of their regular business operation. Only certain men find the getting or the giving of a call girl necessary or even palatable.
Which businessmen do and which don’t . . . call call girls?
It’s been said that men in glamour businesses, such as movies, television, advertising or photography, aren’t so sexy-girl starved as men in heavy industry. My private survey (I’ll never reveal my sources, so relax, sources!) says this is nonsense. A man is never immune to more beautiful girls even if a flock is nesting around him already.
Some sexperts say the less adept and more ill-at-ease a man is with women, the more frequently he resorts to call girls. The sexpert—an inordinately handsome and successful man—with whom I checked this theory out was adamant. “If I’m going to make love to any woman besides my wife,” he said, “it’s going to be a professional. Fewer risks. No emotional involvement. No family troubles. The girls don’t get pregnant. They’re honest and willing and also the most beautiful in the world. Men are such jerks to insist the girls be in love with them . . . that it has to be romantic. For the most part they’re probably just too stingy to spend the fifty or hundred dollars.”
Colleen said her best customers were good family men. They were utterly loyal and devoted and wouldn’t dream of getting involved with anybody their wives might find out about or meet socially. Nevertheless, when wives sometimes become “mamas”—stop being sexy and start treating their husbands like one of the children—naturally the poor men have to do something.
There doesn’t seem to be an infallible rule for detecting what kind of man consorts with call girls. And you know what ... I don’t think it matters. All you need to comprehend is that this sort of thing goes on. (It’s possible you don’t even need to comprehend that, but I took the position that you do and now you know.)
The call girl, though enormously attractive to certain men, is not really competition for you. She’s an entirely different thing. (And since she doesn’t enjoy sex, I think he overpays horrendously for what he gets.) Regardless of the numbers of men who stray to her, there are still plenty of men left for you at the office.
Now we must move on to another group of girls who, although far removed from the last group, still do not have your advantages. They don’t get to fraternize with men all day or do any of the other pleasureable things you do, because you see, the poor darlings are stuck under their thatch, tile and mansard roofs at home.
Out of the goodness of our hearts, we are going to put ourselves into a philanthropic mood and go over there to see if we can figure out some way to get these girls to join us.