Daring (19 page)
Authors: Gail Sheehy
These were the most awkward, unromantic, nickel-and-dime conversations I'd ever heard. Listening, Brother Bernie blushed.
I also interviewed police commanders and assistant district attorneys and followed the fraternity of prostitution lawyers from criminal court to their favorite hangouts. But the best sources were the eyes on the street: all-night countermen, news hawks, and hotel staffers.
The main contribution of the New Journalism was conveying factual information in vivid scenes. Here is one scene from my story “Redpants and Sugarman.”
“This is a rough street now,” Bobbie tells me. He is the night guard on the Lexington Avenue door of the Waldorf-Astoria. “These new girls comin' from outta town are pullin' knives and drivin' around in rented cars, bustin' heads. Say around four o'clock in the morning, if a guy comes up the street, five or six of them together will tear his clothes off and rob him blind.”
He points up Lex to a tacky white Chevrolet illegally parked just outside the Waldorf garage. The horn is blaring. “Two girls got a retired Florida detective pinned inside,” Bobbie grouses. “One's probably gettin' him hot while the other's pickin' his pocket. I tell these dumb johns but they won't listen.” He is sure the detective is leaning on the horn for all he is worth.
“Here come the poh-leece,” Bobbie says. A sense signal passes from corner to corner. Well before an actual siren answers the car horn, the foot girls start sprinting from all corners to their hideaway in the Waldorf garage. One of the car girls darts through the back lobby of the Waldorf. Without missing a beat, poised to whirl through the brass-trimmed door onto Lexington, she kicks off her Gucci shoes at Bobbie the guard's feet.
“Redpants, that you?” His voice leaps.
“Hold my shoes!”
A younger girl flees past Bobbie and drops something black. Traveler's checks. As he bends to retrieve them, a man's arm sheathed in chocolate net scoops under his nose and grabs the checkbook. It's Sugarman, Redpants's pimp. Then the pimp is gone too.
By now police are swarming through the garage. They smoke out all the wrong girls, any streetwalker they see. A prostitution van is filling up on Lexington. One face turns and through the rear window she catches the guard's worried eye. Redpants blows a kiss.
Bobbie the guard stoops for the shoes she kicked off. He runs his hands over the pitted soles, shakes his head. “She was the prettiest brown-skinned girl I ever seen on the street . . . She used to be tall as a tree and she had a shape and she was beautiful. Bought everybody presents too. I mean Redpants, she was makin' so much money she didn't know what to do with it.”
A relief man arriving for the night shift says she didn't look so good tonight.
“You wouldn't either!” Bobbie snaps. “After two years on the street, runnin' from the cops, climbin' these stairs, livin' on hot dogs, they decline. Pimp took alla Redpants's money. Now she's thirty. She ain't got no money, she ain't got no looks, she ain't got no shape, so she's just out there a scavenger. She's done.”
Bobbie rolls up Redpants's shoes in the
Daily News
and tucks them under his arm. “What're you bothering with her shoes for?” the relief man asks. “They locked her up.”
“She'll be back,” Bobbie says. “They always come back.”
The real reason Bobbie the Guard served as my best resource was because he cared; in particular, he cared about Redpants. He knew her whole story. I observed Redpants until finally, through Bobbie's efforts, she agreed to see me. Before our appointment, word passed like brushfire on the street: the other girls would cut her up if she talked. Then she disappeared. Word came to Bobbie that she had been banished to the Holland Tunnel for holding out on her pimp. Bobbie the Guard knew how most of these stories ended, and he found two other streetwalkers who knew Redpants and were willing to talk to me.
Saturation reporting requires re-creating the characters' pasts: Where did these girls come from and why? What had happened to generate this violent new breed? Did they ever fulfill the fantasy, make it off the street with enough money to buy their own swanky house and start a legitimate business with their pimp? I had prefaced the Redpants narrative with a long reportorial article: “The New Breed,” published in July 1971.
But for the story of “Redpants and Sugarman”âwhich took up nine thousand words in the same issueâI wanted to convey in a dramatic narrative the whole arc of a streetwalker's life. In order to pull together my weeks of reporting into a unified narrative, I used the literary device of a composite character. Drawing on transcripts of exact quotes from other streetwalkers and a “retired” pimp, as well as other eyes on the street that had watched the short, brutal life cycle of prostitutes from their teenage heyday to their accelerated middle age at thirty, I fleshed out the Redpants story to the bitter end.
The cover artâa pair of women's red shorts held up by a bullet belt and, opposite, the rakish brim of a pimp's hatâcreated a sensation. Tom Wolfe sent me a handwritten fan note. “You made us see and care and run with these girlsâremarkable enough! But your piece wasn't only an eyewitness account of the trade; you always gave us an analysis of prostitutes as a status group with six distinct social gradations. Thank you for being the hooker's Boswell!”
We were riding high on the great buzz created by the piece. Much laterâand I don't remember the sourceâthe
New York Post'
s Page Six? or the
Washington Post
âthe backlash began. I was ripped for making up the character of Redpants. I was shocked. At some point I called the
Washington Post
's executive editor, Benjamin Bradlee. I told him that Redpants was a real person. She had been a notorious streetwalker, known by many in her world whom I interviewed. After she was banished to the tunnels, I couldn't get her to agree to more interviews for an obvious reason: her pimp would have killed her. So I filled in the latter part of the life cycle of a streetwalker from accounts of Redpants's cohorts. I had explained my technique in the third paragraph. Every description and quote came from a real person. Bradlee was sympathetic. He asked me how I had phrased the paragraph.
I looked again at the magazine as published. My God! Where was that paragraph of explanation? Missing! In a panic, I called my
New York
magazine editor on the piece, Jack Nessel. How could the explanation have been left out? He didn't know either. I went to the office and asked everyone what had happened. No one would admit to removing it. I was sick. The controversy would give ammunition to the increasingly vocal critics of the New Journalism.
Using the literary devices of scene setting, dialogue, and the expression of a person's inner thoughts was new and startling at that time. Today, it is expected. It's in the leads of the
New York Times
, for heaven's sake, and liberally used by such respected practitioners of biography as David Maraniss in his book about Barack Obama. It all started with Gay Talese's famous profile for
Esquire
, “Sinatra Has a Cold.” Unable to talk to Sinatra, Talese spent weeks doing saturation reportingâhe called it a “writearound”âwith people who knew and often saw Sinatra. Then the journalist used literary techniques to create scenes showing Sinatra in action. The resulting story is the holy grail of journalism, taught in colleges and universities to this day.
Under attack for months, I was tormented by my conflicted feelings. I was proud of my work, I felt it was one of the best pieces I'd ever written, and I knew that I had provided an explanation that had mysteriously landed on the cutting-room floor. But I was ashamed that my work was being used to cast doubt on the veracity of New Journalism. One night, months later, Clay found me sobbing over my typewriter.
“What on earth is wrong?” It took me a long time to give him the answer.
“I can't write anymore.”
“Don't be ridiculous. You're the most prolific journalist I know.”
“Anything I write is going to be picked apart. Clay, I can't write if I have to take the life out of the story!”
“That's why I took out your explanation of techniqueâit would have slowed down the story.”
“You! You took out the paragraph?” I wanted to slug him. He muttered excuses, looking guilty, reaching back into the history of journalism for a rationale. “Hell,
The New Yorker
is famous for stories by writers who used composite characters. Joseph Mitchell's character sketches.”
I was struck dumb. How could he have done this without asking me? It felt like the most intimate betrayal. He was contrite. He promised to call the
Columbia Journalism Review
and other editors to take the blame. It was too late to undo the damage to my reputation and left a blot on the magazine. In Clay's defense, newspapers and magazines at that time did not offer explanations of a journalist's methods or disclose much about sources. The use of anonymous sources peaked in the 1970s during the “golden age” of journalism. In more recent decades, journalists almost always explain why they grant anonymity and give their reason for protecting a source.
What defused the chill in our personal relationship was our redoubled commitment to continue the exposé of prostitution's impact on the city. I went on to write five vividly detailed articles for
New York
about the spread of a violent sexual subculture. The crime wave to which pimps and prostitutes contributed was killing business around luxury hotels and in the theater district. A blue-ribbon commission had been named to find out the cause. I pored over city real estate records to uncover the real identities of the prostitution hotel and massage parlor owners. Late one night, under poor light, I began finding the names of so-called respectable real estate moguls who sat on the cleanup commission. The final cover story, “The Landlords of Hell's Bedroom,” exposed the men who were profiting handsomely from the very blight they appeared to condemn. That article set Fun City on a serious cleanup operation.
Mayor John Lindsay lambasted his watchdogs, telling them to “get off your tails and get to work.” Investigations and prosecutions were pursued and within a few years, Eighth and Ninth Avenues were virtually free of prostitution hotels. Inspector Charles Peterson, the police commander of the bedroom district with whom I had worked closely, gave me a patronizing compliment in
Newsweek:
“She showed what a little girl with a lot of drive can do.”
I was thirty-five but still seen as “a little girl.” It felt much better to read in a print interview that Mayor Lindsay called me “a natural resource.” The series won me another New York Newswomen's Front Page award.
The best defense was to write another bookâthis was becoming a habit!
Hustling
was my fourth book. A contract from Delacorte gave me six months to follow the subculture of prostitution from the street up through the status ladder to call girl and ultimately courtesan. ABC Entertainment was then pioneering “long-form” TV movies. President Brandon Stoddard bought the Redpants and Sugarman story and a hunt began for who could play the charismatic hooker.
When Lee Remick accepted the role of the journalist (me), she used up most of the budget. Jill Clayburgh was an eager pup of an actress in 1972 when she snagged the part of Redpants. She woke me at 7
A.M.
in the Beverly Hills Hotel to insist we have breakfast so I could teach her all about the world of streetwalkers on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Jill was a dog with a bone. She walked Forty-Second Street day after day, practicing her skills at catching tricks. She couldn't wait to show off her Oscar-worthy performance. I watched her stop a tall black dude with a brimmed hat and chains. When their dialogue stalled, I strolled over to catch the drift. The dude was smiling.
“Wassa matter with you, sugah? Ah'm a pimp!”
Jill came back to me. “Well, sugah, guess you better teach me saturation reporting.” Ultimately, her performance as a spent streetwalker was raw and heartbreaking.
Secret of Grey Gardens
THE REST OF THAT SUMMER
of '71 was a schizoid mix of slogging my way through the gritty subculture of prostitutes and pimps and repairing to the Hamptons for weekends of bodysurfing and tending tomato plants. Clay and I had rented a tumbledown house on West End Avenue in East Hampton. It overlooked the gentle swells of Georgica Pond and, beyond, a bucolic farm dimpled with orange-and-white cows. We loved sitting at the window at sunset and watching the pond, landing pad for hundreds of Canada geese that practiced their graceful migratory maneuvers. All was well until another storyâthis one truly loonyâfound me. Somebody should have stopped me before I started writing again.
This time what made me take notes was a gothic tale of greed and lunacy within an exclusive precinct of East Hampton. “The Secret of Grey Gardens” was the first story to reveal the bizarre lives of Big and Little Edie Beale, the reclusive relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and her sister, Lee Radziwill. I stumbled upon the mystery quite innocently.
Maura had found a box of abandoned kittens in our driveway and had come running to me to say, “Can't we take them home?” I told her they would never survive the train ride back to New York. She suggested we take them across the street to what she called the “Witch House.” With all their cats, she said, the owners must like animals. We ducked under ropes of bittersweet hanging from a pair of twisted catalpa trees and tiptoed between the humps of cats, too many cats to count, crouched in the tangled grasses, rattling in their throats, mean and wild. Suddenly, we found ourselves at the tippy porch steps of an Arts and Crafts house. Refuse littered the porch. A hand-lettered sign hung from the door:
DO NOT TRESPASS, POLICE ON THE PLACE
.