THEY JUST LOVE THAT ACCENT

William Cash explains why a remarkably high proportion of

Hollywood's prostitutes are British

Hollywood GO WEST, young girl, go west. Pack your Doleis shoes, Miss Selfridge bell-bottoms and take a month-to-month lease in West Hollywood. In all the frenzy of recent cov- erage devoted to 27-year-old reputed Hol- lywood madam Heidi Fleiss and her sun-broiled stable of $1,500-a-night party girls, the British press have blithely, or deliberately, overlooked the most interest- ing aspect of the Tinseltown prostitution scandal: that a hugely disproportionate number of those working as de-luxe call- girls in LA are British, including a small army of enterprising Essex Girls and a number of down-at-heel Sloane Rangers.

The flat-chested and green-eyed Heidi Fleiss, daughter of a wealthy Beverly Hills paediatrician, was, in fact, well known for trawling such fiercely trendy LA night- spots as The Monkey Bar (owned by Jack Nicholson), Babylon and the roped-off VIP room at The Roxbury, looking for sleek young Eurotrash, especially pretty English girls, to invite to `parties' at her $1.6 million Benedict Canyon mansion. Reports say her saturnalian evenings — attended by the likes of Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson and Billy Idol — made Belshaz- zar's Feast seem about as decadent as a Ronald McDonald birthday party.

Miss Fleiss apparently considered that post-teen European girls lent some (badly needed) prestige and international class to her operation. For each trawl, Fleiss would usually go out with her close friend Victo- ria Sellers — daughter of the British actor Peter Sellers — who worked as a hostess at the private nightclub On the Rox, and was a veteran fixture on the LA party circuit. Miss Sellers was in court to support Fleiss when she pleaded not guilty last Monday to five counts of pandering and one of cocaine possession.

As an ex-protegee of the Hollywood super-madam, Madam Alex (Elizabeth Adams), Fleiss was set on exploiting the gap in the market that arose after Adams's retirement. Madam Alex, now 60, who was nearly jailed herself in 1988, had spe- cialised in providing her elite clients with a very specific type of woman: Californian beach dream girls who looked as if they

had just walked off the glossy pages of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar.

Fleiss thought the blonde Playmatey type had become somewhat declass& for Nineties LA. She wanted to create her own designer salon, an agency whose boudoir girls were not simply young, foxy and cosmopolitan but were also status symbols within the film industry. Like get- ting a table at Morton's on Monday night or being represented by the Hollywood suzerain Mike Ovitz, being a client of Heidi massaged the Tinseltown monster ego. It was a calling card stating you had arrived. British girls, she thought, with their `classy' accents, helped to serve this purpose well.

As Jackie Collins told me, 'It's no secret that a lot of up-market call-girls in LA are British. They come out here, can't get a proper job but don't want to go home. They need the money. Besides, most of these girls would fuck these stars for free. When they find they can get paid for it — who's surprised they work as hookers?'

Miss Collins, who has lived in Beverly Hills for the last ten years, notes that a give-away sign is often a young British nanny who seems to have rather too much spare cash. 'British nannies are very chic in Beverly Hills,' she said. `All the big stu- dio executives and producers have them. They get taken shopping on Rodeo Drive, they hang out at the smart tennis clubs. They get used to the life-style — but they don't have any real money. Then, on a Fri- day night, they're in a club and they are introduced to someone like Fleiss.'

Whilst it is bad enough being a struggling American model/actress in LA, if you're British it is probably ten times worse. For a start, there is the very serious problem of getting a green card. The US immigration laws have been rigorously tightened up. Unless you have a big studio or company backing your case, you cannot legally work in America. Hookers are paid in cash. Nobody asks to see your work permit.

Secondly, hardly anybody in LA actually wants to employ young British actresses or models today. There are a rapidly dimin- ishing number of Hollywood film parts written for British characters — let alone English women. Worse, an increasing num- ber of 'English' parts are now given to American actors coached in a fake English accent (i.e., Winona Ryder as Mina in Bram Stoker's Dracula). And whilst most British starlets in LA take $80-an-hour American dialect lessons, few get offered jobs.

Probably the leading authority on high- class sex-for-sale is author Bill Stadeim. By a stroke of outrageous timing, the 45-year- old former Harvard- and Oxford-educated Wall Street lawyer finished the manuscript of Madame 90210, an in-depth expose of • de-luxe proistitution in LA which he co- wrote with Madam Alex, shortly after Fleiss's arrest in June. The book, for which he interviewed 20 Hollywood madams and over 100 call-girls — many of whom were British — was originally scheduled for pub- lication next year. Random House are now feverishly trying to get the book out in October.

Madam 90210 includes an entire chapter on British call-girls in LA. There is a refer- ence to the Millfield Madame (where she went to school) who specialised in servicing the sado-masochistic wishes of Old Etoni- ans. Of the 15- to 20-odd rival madams now clawing for power since Madam Alex's abdication from the chaise-longue, at least three are British, estimates Stadeim. Not that this is anything new: Hollywood's super-madam to the stars in the Sixties was a British woman who went by the name of Annabel Charlton. In 1971, Madam Alex got started in LA after buying her client list and her stable of 25 women for £5,000. Miss Charlton went on — unsurprisingly perhaps — to become a champion dog breeder.

But Madam Alex having faded from the picture, and Fleiss and her ex-boyfriend Ivan Nagy (sometime producer of Starsky and Hutch) both under arrest, an outcome of the renewed LA `whore wars', predicts Stadeim, is that the British madams — backed by an ever-growing cohort of English call-girls — are now well placed to take a lucrative scoop of the Hollywood honeypot. Whilst Americans may laugh at Britain's puny film industry, at least one form of exported English talent is booming (or rather, bouncing) in LA. Up-market British hookers — who can earn up to $3,500 a weekend working between the executive sheets — rank among the best paid women in Hollywood.

'You have to understand,' Stadeim said over lunch at a restaurant looking out across the Santa Monica Bay, 'Hollywood are suckers for an English accent — they think it's smart. Even though most of the British girls working in LA have the sort of ghastly voices which would make the Englishmen I know run in the opposite direction, to the untutored American ear a Brit accent is. . . well, it's good for anoth- er hundred dollars. It's a status thing.'

'What sort of girls?'

'There are a lot of girls from Essex working the call-girl circuits in LA. The moguls and stars probably think they are well-bred girls whose family have lost their fortune through Lloyd's or whatever. They can't tell the difference. And the girls do very well.'

'Let me get this quite straight,' I gulped. 'You're saying that some of these major- league Hollywood stars — international sex symbols — will put in a call to their madam and actually request an Essex Girl?'

'No one requests an Essex Girl,' he said, rolling his marble-blue eyes around the crowded restaurant and suddenly lowering his voice. 'It works more like this. The madam will say, "I have this wonderful Young English girl who has just moved here, she's an Emma Thompson look-a- like, very charming, very classy." And the Hollywood mogul or star will say, "Emma Thompson! Boy, I just love those English girls — send her over."' Such brazen naIvety is quite predictable. According to LA's most famous 'Dialect Doctor' Robert Easton (who has coached everyone from Sir John Gielgud to Jane Seymour), your average American is 'com- pletely clueless' about English accents. A studio chief once confided to him that he enjoyed listening to the Beatles because he loved their 'cockney sound'. Whilst the British, he says, are used to hearing Amer- ican accents in films every day, Americans remain embarrassingly provincial in their knowledge and tastes. Alan Parker's film The Commitments, for example, was released in the United States with subti- tles.

During his year of research, Mr Stadeim says he did come across a number of 'proper' English girls. 'There's this one woman who will only see an Arab clientele and she doesn't want to run into anyone she might know socially. She's very social in LA. She had a whole bunch of Sloaney friends who dabbled in prostitution. Some- how, it doesn't seem nearly so bad in LA.'

With an estimated 400,000 British in LA, such revelations may not be especially surprising. Still, after having lunch with Bill Stadeim, I decided to launch my own investigation to confirm his scurrilous findings. Picking up a chunky copy of LA's Pacific Bell Smart Yellow Pages (August 1993), I methodically called up every list- ing under 'Escort Service'. Most numbers were answered by a Pac-Bel recorded mes- sage: 'We're sorry, but you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.' But when I dialled Midnight Ron- dezvous, a woman called `Madelaine' answered. She certainly wasn't American.

'Hi,' I said. 'I'm looking for some female company this evening.'

'Who's calling?'

'Charles — I'm a producer.'

'What sort of company would you like, Charles?'

'A British girl, preferably.'

Madelaine turned out to be from Birm- ingham. She used to work in sales for the Coca-Cola company. 'This job isn't so dif- ferent,' she assured me. 'It's all marketing, isn't it?'

She currently had three English girls — Michelle, Jane and Carol. Jane and Carol had recently arrived in LA. Michelle, from Leicester, was 24, was studying for a degree at UCLA, weighed 132 pounds, had wavy, long russet hair, played the piano and had a 'great sense of humour'. 'What are you studying?' I asked Michelle down the phone. 'Fine Art.'

'How did you get this job?'

'I was working in a bar to put myself through college. They cut my shifts to two a week.'

'How much will it cost me?'

'Three hundred and fifty dollars an hour. That includes the fifty dollars referral fee. After the first time, I'll give you my home number.'

Of the 41 listed escort services I called, only ten still seemed to be in business. Of those, three turned out to be run by British women. The other agencies all said they had British girls on their books. After talk- ing with various girls, from Dagenham to Newcastle, I made an appointment to meet 'Lisa' — originally from Manchester — at 6 p.m. in the lobby bar of the Century Plaza Hotel, near Beverly Hills — an expensive hotel frequented by Hollywood executives. I chose her Satin and Steel agency because she had tried asking me for a 'personal ref- erence'.

'I prefer to work by word of mouth,' she said.

'Then why do you have a box ad in Yel- low Pages?' I replied.

Lisa was sitting to the right of the bar sipping an orange juice. She had frizzy blonde hair, flat breasts, a slightly toothy smile, and was wearing a short red and white striped slit dress that exposed her long streakily tanned legs. The effect resembled an over-made-up Virgin Upper- Class air stewardess at the end of a long- haul flight. She was not a beautiful sight. She claimed to be 26.

We chatted for 20 minutes. She was a friend of Madelaine. They knew each other from England — and remained profession- al rivals. Lisa used to work as a sales rep for Tizer near Croydon. Now she lived in West Hollywood. Like most self-employed British hookers in LA, she never worked on 'the game' in Britain. 'I was bored of Britain, bored of men, bored of the weath- er — I heard there was good money to be made out of this business in LA. So I booked a flight two years ago and here I am.'

'So it was a successful career move?'

'It's better than selling fizzy drinks.' 'What are your rates?'

'Four hundred and fifty dollars for an hour.'

'That's a bit steep,' I said.

'Take it or leave it.'

'Can I . . . er. . . . think about it?'

`OK, love,' she replied in her clipped Mancunian accent. 'But I want fifty dollars for my time. That's what I get paid for.'

Taking out a $50 note from my wallet, I pushed it across the table. In the tradition of such reporting, I hastily made my excus- es, and fled.

William Cash's Educating William, Mem- oirs of a Hollywood Correspondent will be published by Simon & Schuster on 28 October.