Skip Spiel, Let’s Just Get to the Juicy Part

Getting arrested isn’t always the worst thing in the world. For some, it’s a serendipitous opportunity for self-reinvention.

That’s certainly the case for Sydney Biddle Barrows, whose 1984 bust provided the world with a semi-tawdry, over-hyped New York City prostitution ring scandal. Barrows was nicknamed the “Mayflower Madam” for the capillary’s worth of blue blood contained in her middle name.

A middle-class girl from Jersey who invented herself as a sophisticated madam, she has now repositioned herself as a consultant, swimming back to her good-girl roots like a salmon trying to spawn. Did she mention she recently spoke to the Young Presidents Organization?

Yes-- at least three times!

On this evening in a Culver City hotel meeting room, though, her lecture is tailored to women: “Just Between Us Girls.” Admission: $34. No men allowed.

This should be good. We number about 40, all sharing one feeling: intense anticipation. We have come to hear Barrows dispense the secrets of call girls.

We have come to improve our sex lives.

We have come to learn--let’s face it--how to make our men scream for mercy.

But something is askew in Sydney’s World.

The woman sitting on a table at the front of the room, who kicks out a male camera crew from “Entertainment Tonight” before she gets to the “juicy parts,” doesn’t quite look the part. She is not the glammy, satin-draped blonde pictured on the “Mayflower Madam” book jacket.

Instead, she is pert and bobbed, a prudish patrician who, pardon the stereotype, looks as if she should be driving her brood to swimming lessons in a station wagon with Connecticut plates.

As one paying guest points out, there’s something unsettling about a woman promising a candid discussion of “what makes a man happy” when her anatomical vocabulary never gets more explicit than “the region down there.”

Perhaps that’s what happens when one goes legit.

Although she says several times that “charges were dropped,” she in fact plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor and $5,000 fine. By then, she was a shoo-in on the talk shows. A television movie, of course--starring Candice Bergen--followed the book.

Nowadays, Sydney’s World is the lecture circuit. When she isn’t speaking to women-only groups about prostitution and skin care, she advises corporate groups on customer service.

She looks fairly corporate herself, trying to hide 40 extra pounds under an elegant black wool tent dress. “I am not pregnant,” she says in perhaps her most honest moment of the seminar. “I’m fat.

“Men who would look at me when I weighed 125 look right through me now. I don’t even register on their scale. And believe me, it hurts.”

Who is here tonight? Curious women, mostly over 30, many dressed as if they have just come from work. One, Joan Irvine, is a hypnotherapist. Another, Christine O’keefe, is the “Beverly Hills Matchmaker.” Several, clearly, are sweet cream ladies themselves.

“Yeah,” says Barrows later, “there were a lot more call girls than usual in that audience.”

What we get, really, is a spiel. Working from a legal pad held the way a doctor holds a medical chart, Barrows reels off the items on her outline: why married men go to call girls (to be the center of attention--after all, they only spend 5 or 10 minutes in bed); what a call girl should look like (blonde, buxom, slender, under 30); how she dresses (the “Playboy nostalgia effect”: suits with garter belts underneath); how she grooms herself (shave those armpits and legs twice a week!).

The Sydney’s World view of prostitution is perhaps the rosiest ever articulated. No AIDS, no violence, no rip-offs. Among her petals of wisdom:

* Hooking “is a great job if you’re a student.”

* The co-op conversion boom of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in New York City led directly to prostitution for many women. Why? They needed down payments when their buildings went co-op.

* Some of her “girls” were hooking to pay for “big, beautiful weddings” or their brothers’ Harvard tuition.

* Married men often seek out call girls when their wives land important jobs: “Some of them really freak out. They can’t stand it if their wives have bigger jobs than they do.”

* It’s no threat to your marriage if your husband visits call girls. After all, “He just wants a little extra something. . . . When he has a girlfriend , you need to worry.”

* It’s fun to have sex for money: “The bottom line is that a good call girl has a good time.”

The lecture’s second half deals with what is wrong with relationships these days: time constraints, children, slovenly housewives. “I’m sorry,” says Barrows, “I know it’s not fair, but women do have to do all the work in relationships!”

A married woman in the audience raises her hand. She wants to know if it’s weird that her married lover wants to see her in bed with another woman.

“It’s very healthy and normal,” says Barrows.

We wait and wait for the good stuff. We learn that Barrows keeps a little French maid outfit in her closet (she only wore it once; it doesn’t fit anymore), that men love a striptease, that beautiful women have to put up with ugly men because that’s the way the balance of power works. Yawn.

There will be, as it turns out, only one true sex secret, unprintable here. It has to do with pretense, making your mate think you’ve done something you haven’t. Many women leave the seminar frustrated.

“I thought it would be juicier,” says matchmaker O’keefe.

Hypnotherapist Irvine considered asking for her money back: “She is putting on a seminar for people who want sexual hints and she acts, except for that one moment, like she has never had sex in her life!”

That’s exactly the problem. We were hoping for the skinny from a tart. What we got was a pep talk from a young exec.

When it was over, no one needed a cigarette.