Authors: Tyler Stoddard Smith
EVA PERÓN
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
First Lady of Argentina
CLAIM TO FAME:
Deemed by Argentine congress as the “Spiritual Leader of the Nation”; immortalized in the musical, then the shitty Madonna movie,
Evita
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Argentina
Love her or hate her, you have to recognize the skills of Eva Perón (or Evita, of
Evita
fame). And, her sex appeal. Born in 1919 in Los Toldos, Argentina, a small town about 200 miles from Buenos Aires, Perón was one of four siblings born to Juana Ibarguren and Juan Duarte. The problem was, Duarte had a few other families happening on the side, and he was eventually forced to choose between them and stay put. Duarte did not choose the brood he sired with Ibarguren, so Juana took Evita and her four siblings to Junín, where they all lived together in a seedy, one-room apartment.
At the age of fifteen, seized with ambition and possessed of rather flexible moral boundaries, she left Junín for Buenos Aires, determined to make it. Such ill-advised moves to the big city on the part of very young folks rarely work out for the best. There are a few exceptions, like Rimbaud, or Beethoven, or Brad Pitt, but usually, the move involves getting robbed, drinking bad wine on a roof all day, explaining to your parents that artistic inspiration cannot be rushed, being unemployed, and living in a tent fashioned out of empty Franzia boxes. Trust me. And of course, there’s the prostitution problem.
There is some ambiguity and/or disagreement about whether or not Evita was a bona fide prostitute. Some claim that story is a myth concocted by opponents to smear her name and that of her future husband Juan Perón, the president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and again (after Evita’s death) from 1973 to 1974. But the jury is still out. It’s pretty clear that Evita succumbed to the “casting couch,” in order to further her career, but a streetwalker? It depends.
Here’s the titan of Argentine letters, Jorge Luis Borges, on Evita:
[Eva] was a common prostitute. She had a brothel near Junin. I mean, if a girl is a whore in a large city that doesn’t mean too much, but in a small town in the pampas, everybody knows everybody else. And being one of the whores is like being the barber or the surgeon.
Of course, Borges’s mother and sister were both jailed under the presidency of Juan Perón, so his version of events comes with echoes of axe grinding. Even so, Evita attained a level of success as an “actress,” and at an artistic benefit for earthquake victims, she came alone and left with Perón, putting into motion one of the most controversial political alliances the world has ever known.
After his exile from Argentina and his move to Spain, Juan Perón was surprised when, after two decades, Evita’s body turned up on his doorstep, a consolation from the generals who’d ousted him and buried Evita in an unmarked grave. Preserved to near-perfection (aside from being dead), the embalmed Evita lay in an open casket on the dining room table of his villa while Juan prepared a return to power. You would think Perón’s new wife, Isabel, might have been a bit put out by this development, but you’d be wrong. Isabel is reported to have been loyal and caring toward her deceased predecessor. She lovingly combed Evita’s long blond tresses every day in a wrong kind of crazy postmortem ritual.
To some Eva was a progressive feminist and friend to the poor, a supporter of laborers’ rights and generous with her charity. To others, she was a selfish tit, a peroxided floozy who harbored fugitive Nazis and exploited her foundation for the poor to fill her and her husband’s personal coffers. She was known constantly to suck on her ornate jewelry, a habit some saw as sexual and others viewed as an effort to flaunt her wealth in front of garden-variety arrivistes.
Evita’s death in 1956 at thirty-three of uterine cancer unleashed an irrepressible crush of media attention that keeps her memory fresh in the public consciousness. The musical
Evita
, the movie
Evita
, dozens of books called
Evita
have together served to canonize her as some kind of a saint, but many folks in the know attribute her increasingly lofty status to the “miracle” of her haute Italian footwear.
Unfortunately, there is a darker, stinking underbelly to this story. The Peróns, as absolutists have a tendency to do, became intoxicated with power, eventually seizing control of the media, killing and torturing their opponents, and taking credit for all sorts of shit they didn’t do like pave the way for women’s suffrage in Argentina, something the socialists had been grinding away at for fifty years before Evita came along in her supple leather pumps, sucking on her gems.
THOMAS JANE
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Actor
CLAIM TO FAME:
Star of HBO series
Hung
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles
“OMG, isn’t it ironic that the star of a television show about prostitutes was once a prostitute?” you ask. No, it’s merely a coincidence—put away the Alanis Morissette CDs.
Hung
revolves around defeated high school hoops coach, Ray Drecker. His house has burned down, he’s lost custody of his twin daughter and son to the ever-excruciating Anne Heche, and he’s heavily in debt. Lucky for Ray, he’s also heavily in dick, a trait he puts to use as a male prostitute. It’s a pretty cool idea for a show, and Thomas Jane is particularly convincing as the down-and-out, then up-and-in (as it were) Drecker.
Well, like many actors struggling to make it in Hollywood, Jane found himself living on “dreams,” which unlike food stamps, will not provide even basic sustenance. So Jane girded up his loins and set out to supplement his income. Speaking with the
Los Angeles Times
, Jane explains:
When I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless, I didn’t have any money and I was living in my car. . . . I was 18. I wasn’t averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich. Know what I mean? Hey, you grow up as an artist in a big city, as James Dean said, “you’re going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don’t accept people’s sexual favors.”
A couple of small problems with that: (A) Why are you going down to Santa Monica Boulevard if you’re just whoring for sandwiches? This approach seems counterintuitive, as sandwiches are cheaper in East Los—more “bang for your buck,” if you know what I mean; and (B) It doesn’t appear that James Dean ever actually said that.
Look, if you’re going to own being a prostitute, you can’t go around hiding behind sandwiches and spurious James Dean quotations. It cheapens sandwiches, it cheapens prostitution, and it cheapens James Dean, although if made right, a muffuletta sandwich can be amazing. Jane also admits to busking, another shameful occupation. He admits, “I had two songs in my repertoire that I hammered to death—‘Hey Joe’ and ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’. . . . People used to pelt me with change just to shut me up.”
Hollywood finally discovered the struggling actor and put him to work standing up for once. Jane won cushy roles in
61*
(2001) and
The Punisher
(2004). His success on the silver/HD/plasma screens has made it possible for all of us to patronize sandwich shops in the Santa Monica Boulevard area without some asshole asking us where we’re going with that gun in our hand. For now.
Oh, all right, Thomas—get your sweet cheeks over here, and let us buy you a sandwich.
Chapter V
WHORES BEHAVING BADLY
“Something wicked this way comes,” and with it a few satisfied customers and a trail of blood, greed, insanity, and murder. The “hooker with the heart of gold” is a myth we’ve seen smashed up against the depictions of the tart track in movies like
Midnight Cowboy
and lesser celluloid claptrap like
Pretty Woman
, where yes, she’s a hooker and has a heart of gold, but in the end, we’re all really hoping she electrocutes herself with that Walkman while making a mockery of Prince, the Revolution, and the industry.
Still and all, Julia Roberts’s considerably obnoxious Vivian is no match for the following whores of terror. From serial-killing lunatics and felonious French Quarter floozies to a debased, coke-addled porn star whose most lethal weapon was his foot-long dong, these prostitutes stirred up a heap of trouble. Welcome to the dark side of the street.
ANDREW CUNANAN
PRO
FILE
DAY JOBS:
C. S. Lewis enthusiast; serial killer
CLAIM TO FAME:
Murdered Gianni Versace
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
South Beach, Miami
This depraved man-whore made headlines when, on the morning of July 15, 1997, he put two bullets into designer and fashion impresario Gianni Versace on the steps of Versace’s South Beach, Miami, home. During a three-month crime spree leading up to his suicide in a wealthy john’s houseboat, the dashing young Cunanan killed at least five people and became notorious as a member of the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
Hailing from San Diego, Cunanan attended UCSD where he majored in history, but he found the butt beat more alluring than the ivory tower. After a brief stint slumming it—literally—in the Philippines, Cunanan had tricked up enough cash to make it back to San Francisco, where he set up shop in the Castro district and quickly became one of the more highly regarded prostitutes in town. He had myriad sugar daddies who supplied him with cash, credit, and fancy cars. Versions of Cunanan from past acquaintances, the media, and family members conjure up images of a veritable sex chameleon. One roommate asserts that he was super freakish; “heavy into the roughage and S&M, more the tying-up-and-whips type—just the degradation, not the asphyxiation.” Meanwhile an exposé in
Vanity Fair
poo-pooed him as “just a gay gigolo down on his luck”; however, his mother offers clarification, telling us that her son was no sexual slumdog but was without a doubt a “high-class male prostitute.” Whatever one’s fetish or financial state, a stream of men and money does not always happiness make, especially when you are convinced you have AIDS (an autopsy proved he didn’t), you have turned into a psychotic killer, and you have become oddly obsessed with the writings of C. S. Lewis.
A dark entry in the prostitution log, Andrew Cunanan is a disgrace to the profession, as his fame comes in exchange for innocent lives. Alas, he is in the sexicon and worth mention, if only to serve as a sinister reminder of what can happen if you mess with people who are greedy, deranged, and have access to your house boats.
VIRGINIA HILL
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
“Bag lady” for the mafia
CLAIM TO FAME:
Mob boss Bugsy Siegel’s (along with other mafia big names) #1 gal
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Chicago; Las Vegas
During the 1950s you didn’t have squat for street cred unless you’d been with Virginia Hill, or “the Flamingo,” as she was known. Virginia was born the sixth of ten children in the rustic shit-box that was Lipscomb, Alabama, where in 2011, enterprising citizens held a hot dog sale to retire the city’s debts. That’s country living, folks.
At seventeen Virginia left the confines of Alabama for the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago to try her hand at hooking. Young Ms. Hill turned out to be precocious in this regard, and she eventually attracted the likes and loins of big-time, old-school gang bangers ranging from the Franks (Nitti and Costello) to the Joes (Adonis and Epstein) to the infamous Ben “Bugsy” Siegel.
Hill served as a “bag lady” for the mafia, which contrary to how it may sound, did not involve her pushing a rusty grocery cart around downtown, screaming the theme song from
Fat Albert
at fire hydrants. No, in this case, our bag lady was an indispensible courier for the Chicago mob, moving dirty money and narcotics in her bag. Some argue her “bag” may have actually been a “suitcase,” but that’s a mystery for another day. What is clear is that the Chicago syndicate rewarded Hill handsomely for her efforts on their behalf. Homegirl once even dropped an $11,000 cold, hard gangster knot (the equivalent of about $150,000 in 2011 money) on a new house for the kinfolk back in Alabama.
When Hill arrived in California in the early 1940s and joined pelvises with Bugsy Siegel, her stock really began to rise, but Bugsy’s hotel (named, appropriately, the Flamingo) eventually floundered and their relationship soured. Heat from the authorities and Bugsy’s sinking business venture drove Hill to Paris, where she hung out long enough for Siegel’s enemies to track him down and shoot the shit out of him. When she returned stateside and was given the news of Siegel’s murder, she fainted, then ran into the arms of an Austrian ex-Nazi and ski instructor.
Virginia Hill may have been the best cocksucker in the United States, but in 2009 “Sexy Cora,” a German porn star, gave Ms. Hill a run for her money. On bail for having sex in a public park, Sexy Cora set out to break the world record for the most oral sex, with plans to service 200 men. Things went quickly awry for Sexy Cora when, according to Britain’s the
Sun
, “she was forced to call off the bid when she collapsed after reaching her 75th man and was rushed to hospital with breathing difficulties.” Sadly, Cora died before she could give the record another go.