Authors: Tyler Stoddard Smith
MADAME GOURDAN
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Entremetteuse
extraordinaire
CLAIM TO FAME:
Running Paris’s most notorious brothel
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Eighteenth-century Paris
If you think the sunburn, tattoo, and genital carbuncles you brought home from Spring Break Cancun 1998 constitute the zenith of good times, you’re an idiot. No matter where you vacation, it will never get as rowdy as eighteenth-century France. German philosopher Georg Hegel sums up the epoch in his weighty tome,
The
Philosophy of History
:
[
A] mad state with which, at the same time, was bound the highest depravity of morals and spirit—an empire of injustice with the growing consciousness of that state
.
You know the party got way out of hand when somebody puts things all philosophical like that. If you were up for the really juicy action, however, you came to the Château de Madame Gourdan, the most brazen
maison de tolerance
in all of France.
“So do not think of helpful whores as aberrational blots; I could not love you half so well without my practice shots.”
—James Simmons, Irish author and poet
While Gourdan initially tailored the offerings of her
château
to serve the niche markets of lesbians and those who embrace sex toys, she soon expanded, turning the place into an all-out bordello, a combination of Willie Wonka’s S&M Factory and Saw’s house. Follow along as we walk through the Château de Gourdan room-by-room with none other than Pidanzat de Mairobert, an unimportant, prerevolutionary blowhard, as he recounts what he saw on a tour given by a local official after authorities shut down the sordid château temporarily in 1779
. Allons-y?
The Piscine:
“There was ‘
Essence a l’usage des monstres
’; it’s a very strong astringent, with which Madame Gourdan treats the most tattered beauties and restores what can only be lost once.”
Ballroom:
“It’s where everyone plays masquerade, where the peasant is metamorphosed into bourgeoisie and the noble lady sometimes into a chambermaid. . . . Wives—hiding their rank and their titles . . . could receive the vigorous assaults of crude rustics selected to assuage their burning lust.”
Infirmary:
“[T]he main concern here is not venereal diseases but rather aging voluptuaries whose jaded senses need to [be] revived . . . he showed me a little ball made out of stone, called a
pomme d’amour
[a ben-wa ball, probably] . . . so effective that if a woman inserts it into her pleasure center, it will start titillating her and giving her so much enjoyment that she will have to remove it before it kills her. . . . I saw next a quantity of little black rings, that were much too big to be finger rings . . .”
Chambre de la Question:
“It’s a closet where through secret peepholes the mistress and her confidants can see and hear whatever is said and done there.”
Salon de Vulcain:
“I found nothing unusual there except an armchair, whose singular design caught my eye. ‘Sit down,’ the president told me.…. Just as soon as I threw myself there, the movement of my body tripped a counterweight. The back flipped backwards and so did I. I found myself spread-eagled, legs bound apart and arms as well, in a sort of cross . . . called the ‘trap of Fronsac’ because it was dreamed up by this Seigneur, to overcome a virgin who . . . had resisted all his seduction attempts, all his gold and his threats.”
Now, we don’t know much about Madame Gourdan’s background, but the “little countess” addressed the refinements of her depraved décor in a manner almost as obsessive as Martha Stewart. The Madame had a sense of style and a real knack for “French hospitality,” a throbbing oxymoron today, but back then, it was an accurate description of the Château de Gourdan business model. That assumes your idea of the red-carpet treatment includes masked perverts, peep holes, cock rings, orgasmically deadly apple balls, virgin juice, and being trapped in a rape chair.
Vive la Résistance
!?
ISAIAH AND CAROL REED
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Christian ministers
CLAIM TO FAME:
Rising from the dead
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Richmond, Texas
Sometimes, in order to get your ass off the street, you’ve got to get your mind on Jesus. It’s been that way for millennia, the most famous case of conversion being St. Augustine, whose
Confessions
, written around
A.D.
397, is a primer for how to cut a swath of fleshy capers and then shape up later: No harm, no foul. This seems like a cheap trick, but when we’re into the mind of God and out of our depth, it’s best to keep cosmological quandaries away from issues of prostitution. But sometimes, there’s just no helping it.
Isaiah and Carol Reed weren’t always evangelists at the Christian Vision Ministries. No, Isaiah and Carol were once, according to their website, “entwined in an international web of drugs and prostitution,” with Isaiah as a pimp to seventeen hos, including Carol, his favorite. Life was good. “I was very good at being a drug dealer and a pimp,” admits Mr. Reed in an interview with himself on the Reeds’ website, also boasting that a newspaper once called him “the most vicious pimp in the state of Hawaii.” As a prostitute, Carol was equally effective, though profligate. She could earn anywhere from $900 to $1,500 a night, but that usually went to drugs and other accoutrements necessary to maintain the sinful lifestyle. “When I bought my Rolls Royce I was so drunk drinking Courvasier [
sic
],” continues Isaiah. “I brought [the bottle] in with two prostitutes in a brown paper bag. Paid for it cash. Drove down the street drinking Courvasier [
sic
], looked at the Mercedes Benz place and bought a Benz with the change,” he adds. Dangling modifiers aside, I’m concerned about what extraction of prostitute fits two to a paper bag. And do they mint larger bills especially for pimps? It’s like Isaiah in Wonderland up in here, but that’s of minor importance.
What is important is Isaiah’s “come to Jesus” moment (Carol’s conversion, indeed her life, is glossed over in the couple’s bio, giving one the impression that prostitution and pimping may sometimes extend beyond the ho stroll to the house of the Lord). According to
www.isaiahreed.com
:
Isaiah Reed
was pronounced DOA at Denver Hospital from 2 bullet wounds and 16 stab wounds resulting from a drug deal gone bad. They did an autopsy on him and afterwards remembered they had not notified the next of kin. Once on the phone with Isaiah’s mom, she refused to accept her son’s death because of a promise God had made years back that Isaiah was going to be a preacher.
Now, I washed out of pre-med with organic chemistry, but it seems like if being killed didn’t kill you, an autopsy would. Luckily, Isaiah came out of this unfortunate
contretemps
in one piece. For three more years, Isaiah “continued to live in sin after God raised him from the dead.” Even for St. Augustine, that’s pushing it. But Isaiah didn’t get where he is without a strong woman to support him. No, sir. That’s where Carol’s story comes in! Somewhere on the website, maybe. . . . Okay, still nothing. She looks nice in the pictures, though.
The Reeds maintain a simple ethos: “To reach out and be a service to the drug addict, Prostitute, the lost and afflicted by way of 12 hour 5 days a week service with the word of God through outreach. No contribution small or large will go unnoticed. If you our [
sic
] interested please make your monthly, one time or yearly donation out to Christian Vision Ministries.” Well, at least they get to the point. And while Christian Vision Ministries is located in Richmond, Texas, if you’re interested in giving them your money, you’ll have to track them down. They continue spreading the gospel with a rigorous travel schedule, including a number of upcoming trips planned to Hawaii. Jesus wept.
JAMES LIPTON
PRO
FILE
DAY JOBS:
Writer, critic, poet, producer, professor, demi-pimp
CLAIM TO FAME:
Exquisitely pedantic host of
Inside the Actor’s Studio
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Paris; New York
If you are not by now familiar with Mr. James Lipton’s ponderous, addictive show,
Inside the Actor’s Studio
on the Bravo network, you might as well deposit your boorish head in the oven. James Lipton would want it that way, though he would probably explain it to you in Latin, maybe French. The man has become an institution, using
Inside the Actor’s Studio
to educate legions of film aficionados, celebrity gawkers, and stoned couch-blisters about the finer points of acting and film and sometimes, even
cinéma
.
Born in 1926 in Michigan, Lipton first found radio voice-over work on
The Lone Ranger
, originally broadcast on WXYZ in Detroit. He soon went on to Hollywood where he toiled as a scriptwriter for numerous soap operas, including
Guiding Light
and
Another World
. But how, one might ask, did a naïve kid from Detroit come to appreciate the melodrama of life as depicted on daytime television? Easy. He goes to Paris, learns French (not the French other people speak, but a more pretentious, Frenchier patois), he becomes enchanted by life in the City of Lights, and he finds the few extra sous he needs to live that life by working as a midlevel pimp. Lipton explains in his memoir,
Inside Inside
:
This was when I was very, very young, living in Paris, penniless, unable to get any kind of working permit. . . . I had a friend who worked in what is called the Milieu, which is that world and she suggested to me one night, ‘Look, you’ll be my meck’ . . . We would translate it perhaps . . . as pimp. We were earning our living together, this young woman and I, we made a rather good living, I must say.
The old blowhard reveals that he would also arrange sex shows and other insipid displays. He writes,
I had to accompany my clientele to the Rue Pigalle, and then I’d take them up to the room and I had to remain there because they were very nervous, they were young Americans for the most part . . . and they didn’t speak French. I offered them a full bill of fare: two women or a man and woman. A man and woman was much more costly than two women: the law of supply and demand—not to mention the law of diminishing returns; the women could perform countless times each day, the men only two or three.
Pompously put insights such as these make it nigh on to impossible to take Monsieur Lipton seriously no matter what he is talking about. Indeed, his comments here raise certain obvious questions: James, were you really just a
translator
for prostitutes? You can never tell with students of the Stanislavski School. The method to their madness is surely just Method, which makes their madness even more maddening, especially off-screen.
Today, James Lipton is looking down the barrel at his ninetieth birthday, but all indications are that this histrionic Methuselah may continue pursuing the Holy Grail of Cinema long after solar flares have consumed the rest of us. He’s no Snoop Dogg, but James Lipton and his supercilious baritone, along with his feast of insights and inanities, no doubt sent home from Paris countless young Americans with a thriving colony of Cupid’s cysts after looking for love in all the wrong plazas.
WYATT EARP
PRO
FILE
DAY JOBS:
Sheriff, boxing referee
CLAIM TO FAME:
Throwing it down at the OK Corral;
sweet moustache
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Peoria, Illinois; Tombstone, Arizona
You may think you learned everything you need to know about Wyatt Earp from
Tombstone
with Kurt Russell. That’s fair.
Tombstone
is the capstone of Wild West badassery. But know this: You were cheated.
That’s right, instead of the lurid and historically accurate brothel scenes we deserved as serious cineastes, Hollywood cooked up the usual “romance” shtick, depriving us not only of
veritas
but also of the sex and nudity we crave. In real life Wyatt Earp owned and operated a number of brothels with his equally pimpaliscious brothers, an egregious omission from the celluloid story.
How can we be so sure about this forgotten bullet point on Wyatt’s resume? For one, in February of 1872, Wyatt and his brother Morgan were arrested for “Keeping and Being Found in a House of Ill-Fame” at a bagnio in Peoria, Illinois, which Wyatt was clever enough to list as his home address. Then, three months later, the brothers were pinched again over at the McClellan brothel. This from the
Daily Transcript
of May 11, 1872:
That hotbed of inequity [
sic
], the McClellan Institute on Main Street near Water was pulled on Thursday night, and quite a number of inmates transient and otherwise were found therein. Wyat [
sic
] Earp and his brother Morgan Earp were each fined $44.55 and as they had not the money and would not work, they languished in the cold and silent calaboose.