THIS PIECE WAS written in June 1985, during a trip to Death Valley, while I was writing a book about Patrick Lichfield photographing nude models for the Unipart Calendar. It is interesting, bearing in mind her later fame, to note the reference to Madam Cyn at the end. Having never heard of her, I even spelt her name wrong.
Beverly Harrell is by any standards a remarkable woman. She has written a best-selling autobiography. She narrowly missed winning a place in the Nevada State Assembly. She lectures to enraptured conventions and universities all over America. But most important of all – she is the madam of the Cottontail Ranch, the most famous bordello in the Wild West.
While I was staying in Death Valley, California, recently, her Cottontail Ranch burned to the ground. Naturally it was headlines in all the papers.
Although there was a ‘full house’ at the time, happily all Beverly Harrell’s ladies and their customers escaped unhurt except for red posteriors and extremely red faces from having to charge naked into the twilight leaving their clothes to turn to ashes. Even more heart-warming to animal lovers was the fact that all the prostitutes rushed back through the flames to rescue Miss Harrell’s two poodles and a chihuahua, who were trapped in her blazing bedroom, and then risked their lives setting free the brothel’s three guard dogs, whose kennel had also caught fire.
Nor was their ordeal over. When the fire engine failed to show up from Goldfield, a town fifteen miles away, the girls and their clients fought the fire themselves. According to the Death Valley Gazette: ‘One “real” brunette was observed spraying the flames with a hose in the altogether, aided by her recent client, who was clad only in a pair of unmatched brown and black socks.’
As California is the next state to Nevada, I decided to drive over the border and visit Beverly Harrell and her brave girls. As we set out in noonday temperatures of 125 degrees in the shade, my driver pointed out a towering red rock, known as Corkscrew Peak. Appropriately, on the other side of the road, we passed a house built in 1905 entirely from 50,000 bottles consumed in one riotous night’s drinking.
Brothels were legal in Nevada, my driver explained, and were to that fun-loving, hell-raising state what gourmet food was to France. One man had even produced a Michelin Guide on the subject. Having been given a massive advance by his publishers, he visited thirty-seven brothels, sampling the wares, and star-rating the girls and amenities, which included orgy rooms, jacuzzis, dominance dungeons and even nine-hole golf courses, so the wives had something to do while their husbands were inside. The author must have enjoyed the task for the book is now in its third edition.
Nevada is obviously proud of its brothels, one of the last relics of the old Wild West. Whenever there’s a town celebration, the tarts, resplendent in satin leotards and fishnet stockings, have their own float.
Now the driver was pointing out a pretty ranch-style house with a very green, beautifully laid out garden, and a large airstrip. That was the Cottontail’s fiercest rival, he said, Fran’s Star Ranch, which sells T-shirts advertising ‘Fran’s Friendly Fornicating Facilities’ or exhorting you to ‘Have a Good Lay’ or to ‘Support Your Local Hooker’.
Back in 1978, Fran’s Ranch suffered the same fate as the Cottontail, and burnt to the ground. All the local wives promptly got together and organised a huge street party and several charity dances to raise money for Fran to rebuild the brothel.
The landscape was getting starker, dust devils swirled, Joshua trees held up their spiky branches like praying hands. ‘Business As Usual’ said a large sign as we swung off the motorway up Frontage Road. At the end, surrounded by nothing but desert, creosote bushes and a few unseen rattlesnakes and coyotes, we found the ruins of the old Cottontail, and Miss Beverly Harrell herself supervising the rebirth of the new one.
Bulldozers had already spread gravel over the charred ground, and three vast caravans had been towed in, so the girls could carry on working, plus a smaller caravan for Miss Harrell herself.
‘This little girl doesn’t sit around,’ she said in the twanging voice of a Damon Runyon hood.
I was a bit apprehensive about my welcome, but Miss Harrell, a sort of Bette Upper-Midler, was affability itself. Despite orange hair not unlike that of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, reddened eyes to match her square red glasses, and a pallor emphasised by no make-up, she could obviously look extremely handsome when done up.
Now resting from her labours, she was sitting in her caravan’s shadow, one of the only bits of shelter from the punishingly relentless sun, reading her press cuttings on the fire. On a nearby table, a kitchen pinger ticked away to indicate when time was up for a customer.
Miss Harrell said she had been off the property when the fire started. ‘I was sad when I first saw the ruins, I shed a tear, but I can’t sit around and cry when eighteen years of blood, sweat and toil go up in smoke. I’ve got too many people depending on me. The fire started because of a gas leak in the water heater. It was a very hot night, a hot wind fanned the flames. Lee, Mona Silver, Susie, Lili and Annie were all working.’
No, I couldn’t speak with any of them, she said firmly, working girls didn’t like publicity; anyway they were busy at the moment. Glancing at the three caravans, I half expected to see their sides heaving.
Susie, said Miss Harrell, now gazing meditatively at the charred remains of an aspen tree and a pile of cardboard boxes, had been particularly brave, dragging out the little poodles, Frou Frou and Socks, and the Chihuahua Tinker, who had huddled terrified under the bed. From the caravan window, three furry faces yapped in agreement.
Even braver perhaps, after the guard dogs, Hooker, Rogue and Jezebel, had been set loose, and were charging panic-stricken round the desert, were the naked clients who helped round them up. The dogs, being very vicious, might easily have had their hands – or something much worse – off.
‘The fire engine,’ said Miss Harrell scathingly, ‘could easily have made it. Their excuse’, which she plainly doesn’t believe, ‘was that two fire engines were out of order, and the only one left wasn’t insured to leave the city limits. So the girls had to watch the Cottontail burn down,’ Miss Harrell went on, turning round to check the pinger. ‘They were very shaken, they all lost fantastic wardrobes in the fire.’
Then one girl wearing only a G-string, and another a pair of pants, and the rest nude, had piled into the car with the six dogs and driven to Tonepah, fifty miles away, where they’d stayed in a motel.
Miss Harrell refused to elucidate on how her clients got home, but said that with typical Nevadan generosity, the Tonepah locals had asked all her girls out to meals, and, when they returned to the Cottontail, had provided them with clothes, tea and, most important in this heat, ice.
‘Conditions are pretty primitive at the moment,’ said Miss Harrell, who is obviously a trooper with a sense of adventure. ‘We’re back in the old 1900 days, when the girls hauled their water, and cooked on camp fires, and the red lantern marked the tent that was being used for sex in a miner’s camp.
‘At least we’ve got a freezer and a microwave on the way,’ she went on with satisfaction, and says she plans to build a bigger, ritzier Cottontail, by bringing in four massive 24 foot by 64 foot mobile homes to provide sixteen workrooms for sixteen working girls.
Although insurance will cover most of her costs, and replace the orgy room and the jacuzzi with the red lights underneath the bubbling water, what saddened Miss Harrell most was the loss in the fire of her collection of old guns, and antiques gathered over a lifetime.
‘There were armoires, that’s cupboards, sweetie,’ she explained kindly in her Brooklyn accent, ‘Tiffany lamps, Queen Anne chairs, Sheraton chairs and bordello paintings.’
She was even more upset at the loss of her library, which included works by ‘Schopenhauer and Nietzsch-ee and many books on psychology’, which were read more by her girls than the customers, because the television reception in the area was so bad.
Her customers range from local miners to city slickers and tourists who drive down from Vegas 156 miles away. Richer clients charter planes and land on the 1,000 yard air strip. Her finest hour was when an old cargo plane had engine trouble and was forced to crash land nearby. The crew had such a good time, they stayed on at the Cottontail for nearly a week.
Next moment two extremely seedy individuals in black shades drove up saying their huge and dusty black car had overheated. Could they use the hose? One jerked his head rather unenthusiastically in my direction. Out of one eye, I could see Miss Harrell frantically shaking her head and waving her palms back and forth.
What sort of girl made the best prostitute, I asked.
It wasn’t enough to have a beautiful body and face, replied Miss Harrell, beadily watching the two seedy individuals, who were now drenching the new gravel with precious water. Most beautiful girls were too imbued with their own importance, and too self-centred. A good working girl must be able to listen and be a bit of a psychologist as well.
‘The customer may have had a bad day at the office,’ she went on, as we both lifted our feet off the ground to avoid being flooded. ‘Or had a row with his wife. He wants sexual favours, but more than that, he wants someone to talk to.’
Nevada women were enlightened, she went on, her voice taking on a singsong recording machine quality, as though she was launching into one of her lectures to universities.
‘They like the idea of legal prostitution. They would rather their husband went with a working girl than partied around with his secretary, or the wife of a neighbour and broke up a marriage. Wives often drive their husbands out here. Young men of Nevada’, continued Miss Harrell, ignoring the rising tide like Canute, as her voice became positively messianic, ‘are far better sexually educated than in any other state. They are fortunate to have legal brothels where working girls can teach them. Men don’t know unless they’re instructed. Fathers bring their sons here, so they won’t go into their marriages blindly.’
Anyone would have thought she was running a sixth form college.
Bordellos in Nevada, according to the guide book, range from the vast five-star-rated Mustang Ranch, which has thirty-five girls working full-time, to Irish’s, a brothel which, despite having the best bar in the state, with wood panelling, hanging plants and a pot-bellied stove, has the ultimate Irish joke, no girls.
The Cottontail, which also has a five-star rating, is midway in size between the two. Miss Harrell, who prides herself on quality not quantity, insists on holding classes to teach new girls how to make love properly.
‘It’s not fair to the girl or the man to throw an unpolished girl on the floor,’ she said.
Did they practise on live men, I asked.
‘I hold verbal classes,’ said Miss Harrell, suddenly prim. ‘I don’t hold with Masters and Johnson.’
Happily married, but unwilling to discuss her private life, she believes her girls are happy working for her.
‘They have chosen a profession where the remuneration is far greater than that of a secretary, a dress designer or an airline stewardess. No one is held captive here. Nor do I retire people. My oldest hooker is sixty. She’s worked for me since she was sixteen.’
Any moment she’d qualify for a gold pinger.
Then, as a great honour, Miss Harrell took me over the workrooms, where I half expected to see the girls engaged in carpentry, making egg racks. Many rooms were in use, others had gold mirrors on the walls, and amber candlewick counterpanes on the beds, not unlike a Maples showroom. I had an exciting glimpse into the temporary orgy room, which had royal blue shagpile swarming over the floor and up four steps leading to the water bed, and a huge screen for porno films.
‘Now you can see what a working girl looks like when she’s not working,’ whispered Miss Harrell, as she softly opened a door. Inside, a ravishing redhead in a purple flowered bikini was not reading Schopenhauer, but lying fast asleep on her back on the bed.
On the way out, Miss Harrell introduced me to a good-looking workman called Kent, who, grinning like a small boy in a sweet shop, was building catwalks between the caravans.
‘Last night, Kent put up the vital thing to show we’re back in business,’ she said dramatically. ‘The revolving red light.’
The pinger was pinging, the seedy individuals had turned off the hose and she was plainly restless. It was time for me to go.
‘Do you know Madame Sin?’ asked Miss Harrell as she walked me to the car.’ ‘She lives in England.’
I said I hadn’t had the pleasure.
‘Madame Sin gave a party for me when I was in the UK. It was full of celebrities, everyone from schoolteachers to punk rockers. A real conglamoration.’
Had she really only lost her bid for the Nevada State Assembly by 120 votes?
‘I won,’ said Miss Harrell bitterly. ‘But they stuffed the ballot. They couldn’t bear the thought of a madam in the State Assembly.’
It seems a pity we can’t have a few people like Miss Harrell to ginger up the House of Commons, or at least Gloucestershire County Council.