Project Shows Hookers a Way Out : Magdalene House in Reseda Plans Branch for Orange County

When she was taking the bus or walking to a job interview, sometimes she would get angry thinking about how she had bought her “old man” a Cadillac Eldorado.

But Vicki didn’t think about going back to her old life as a prostitute. She had been trying to stop for years, and she knew the Mary Magdalene Project was her way out.

The Mary Magdalene Project provides shelter, job training and therapy for adult female prostitutes who want to change their life styles. The project, based in Reseda, is gearing up to open a house in Orange County that will accommodate five women and a director, according to Jerri Rodewald, president of the project’s board of directors.

Vicki, 37, talked about her experience with the project Sunday during a brunch at the Huntington Harbour Bay and Racquet Club that raised more than $3,000 for the Orange County house, which is expected to open early next year.

“I don’t like going around telling people about being an ex-prostitute,” said Vicki. But, she added, she does want to tell others about the project that helped her accomplish what she couldn’t do on her own.

Vicki, who asked that her last name not be used, “was beat up a lot” and “went to jail a lot” during the 15 years she was a prostitute. She came from a home where she was emotionally abused and started hooking at 19, she said.

“When I started, I was making $3,000 a week. I was making it, but I wasn’t keeping it,” she said. “I gave it to my pimp. All of it.”

Earning $100 an Hour

Vicki usually made $100 an hour working in nightclubs or going to men’s hotel rooms, “but there were times I jumped in cars on Sunset Boulevard for anything I could get,” she said. “If I was with a pimp and he didn’t have any connections in the town, he’d drop me on the street and tell me to start walking.”

Vicki is a recovered alcoholic, and she used to get drunk to turn a trick, she said. “I carried a bottle of Asti Spumante in my purse, or I called the customer and asked him to order room service.”

She said she felt degraded, ashamed and hated her life, but “I didn’t know how to change.” She said she often thought she could stop “if I had a strong figure in my life, someone to guide me in some way.”

She found that guidance at the Mary Magdalene Project two years ago, she said. When she moved into the shelter in Reseda, she stopped hooking and found a job working as a travel agent in a hotel.

“Right now I’m making $5 an hour, but I feel that I can improve myself in the job arena,” she said. “I feel like I’m the best person I’ve ever been.”

85% Success Rate

The project’s success rate--the percentage of women who report they haven’t returned to prostitution--is 85% for the 49 women who have lived in the Reseda house in the past five years and 100% for the 32 among them who completed the six-month program, said Rodewald.

Rodewald said the Orange County house would be the second such operation in the nation. A search committee is currently looking for a house and an executive director. The project has raised $45,000 toward the 1986 budget of $123,000, she said.

The need for such a program is underscored by statistics on prostitution in Orange County, Rodewald said. In the first 10 months of 1984, there were 397 arrests for prostitution in Anaheim, 254 in Santa Ana and 115 in Garden Grove, she said.

The Orange County project can open as soon as a house and a director are found and the director completes a three-month training session at the house in Reseda. The current board of directors will continue to oversee the operation, said Rodewald, who lives in Huntington Beach.

The Orange County project’s search committee has not determined where the house will be, but it must be a four-bedroom home near bus transportation in an area “where rent is affordable” and “there is not a high rate of prostitution,” Rodewald said.

The director will receive a salary of $20,000 to $23,000 a year, as well as room and board, and will be required to live at the house five days and five nights a week.

The operation is free for the women who live at the house because most do not have any money when they get there, Rodewald said. The women must work and save at least 80% of their wages so they can rent an apartment when they move out.

Funds are provided by the Presbyterian Church in West Hollywood, which founded the original house, as well as individual donors and fund-raisers. But money is difficult to get, Rodewald said, because the project works with only 10 to 12 women a year. “We’re not cost-effective because we don’t aim to be. We aim to be successful,” she said.

Norma Brandel Gibbs, chairwoman of the project’s Orange County task force and a former mayor of both Huntington Beach and Seal Beach, said the size of the project allows the women to get individual counseling so they can find jobs in areas that interest them.

“We’ll give them support so they can go to school and find a job,” she said. “This is not a moralistic thing. . . . If they want to change, we’ll help them.”

At 31, four years before she went to the Reseda house, Vicki wanted to change.

She started going to therapy because “I decided I didn’t want to turn my life over to a pimp anymore,” she said. “I wanted to stand on my own two feet instead of standing on my old man’s feet.”

She got away from the pimp, but not from prostitution. Her low self-esteem prevented her from getting a “straight job,” she said. “I felt ‘who would want to hire me?’ I felt I was unemployable.”

Soon after she left her pimp, she started going to Alcoholics Anonymous. She was able to stop drinking, but “that just made the hooking harder,” she said. Instead of making $3,000 a week, she made about $200 because without the liquor she couldn’t do it. Many times, she said, “I’d give the money back, and walk out.”

It was during that time that she read about the Mary Magdalene Project in a newspaper. When she found out she could live in the house while she worked and not pay rent so she could save money for her own apartment, she moved right in.

“I knew it was the right place to be,” Vicki said. She liked having a job, she said, and liked waking up in the morning and having a place to go. “The structure was what I needed.”

She said she also received a lot of emotional support from the project.

“You come home from work, and there’s a nice home-cooked meal,” Vicki said. “If I had a problem, I could talk to someone. I never had that in my life.”.

“It was a very supportive, nurturing atmosphere,” Vicki said. Although “it wasn’t ‘The Waltons,’ ” she said, the house providing something like a family.

“We tend to be the family they never had,” said Ann Hayman, director of the Reseda project. “I am convinced that prostitution is the result of dysfunctional families.”

Hayman said all 49 women who have lived at the house have been victims of child abuse or neglect, and 70% to 85% have been victims of incest. Most of the women had started hooking while they were teen-agers and, on the average, had dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

“I’m working with women (prostitutes) in their late 20s or 30s, and they want to get out,” Hayman said. The house has been full since it opened, she added.

When interviewing prostitutes who want to join the project, Hayman looks for three things: age, burnout and the number of times they have tried to stop on their own.

“Burnout is my biggest success factor,” she said. If a prostitute has tried and failed to change her life style herself, she’ll be better prepared for the house, Hayman said.

The women in the project go to school because most have no marketable job skills. “There is nothing about prostitution that lends itself to the straight world,” Hayman said.

House rules include no drugs, no alcohol, no involvement in prostitution, no pimps, she said. “They have to be working or going to school. They have to be going to therapy.” Women must commit themselves to staying at the house for six months but can stay longer, she said.

Vicki lived at the Reseda house for more than a year. She said she still goes back to visit and get advice from Hayman from time to time. And she has spoken at three fund-raisers for the project. She said she speaks because she wants other prostitutes to know that “happy endings are possible.”