A Lady of the Afternoon

It is not unusual for a journalist to be called upon to listen to someone’s sins. But it is unusual to be alerted to them by a public relations agency.

I speak today of Cheri Woods, a self-confessed former call girl and madam, who has hired a PR firm to tell the world just exactly what she did and how she did it.

The effort has been so successful that she has already appeared on three national television talk shows and may have a book and movie deal.

All this is possible because of little Heidi Fleiss, the so-called madam to the stars, whose mere presence puts the media in a state of excitement that is almost orgasmic.

Guilty or not, Heidi has done for commercial sex what Babe Ruth did for baseball, reviving interest in an activity that until then had seen better days.

And while Woods is cashing in on the notoriety, she is less than impressed with Heidi, whose alleged clients she says she entertained long before the skinny little brunette ever appeared on the scene.

She dismisses Heidi as a loudmouth, even though Woods is less than mute about her former profession. Shrinking violets do not hire publicists.

There’s a difference, however. Woods can speak freely about her past because she did four years in prison atoning for it and has no intention of going back into the business.

In fact, at the moment, she is studying for a real estate license which, some may argue, is a long way from what she did before.

She is going from being a lady of the night to being a lady of the afternoon, showing houses that can be purchased for a low down payment and reasonable monthly remittances.

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Woods’ public relations agency sent out a packet that proclaimed her “the most important madam in Hollywood” for 15 years. She supposedly had 185 girls working for her and a list of 2,000 clients that included sheiks, billionaire businessmen and celebrities.

Because I had never been hustled by a PR man for an ex-hooker before, I visited Woods in her tiny Van Nuys apartment, just down the street from the First Presbyterian Church.

A plumpish 44, she appeared wearing wild red lipstick, dangling silver earrings and a pantsuit whose ability to stretch defied all known mathematics. She spoke from prepared notes.

Her story is the classic tale of a pretty girl who starts at the top and . . . well . . . works her way down. A native of St. Paul, Minn., she was very young when, as a model, she established her own modeling agency.

Later, she turned it into something called Date-a-Model, which was not only legitimate but which won her the title of Twin Cities Businesswoman of the Year in the early 1970s.

Her world fell apart, as Cheri tells it, when her fiance died in a fire. She decided to begin all over again in L.A., where she worked as a taxi dancer for $25 a night, including tips.

It was as a dime-a-dancer (actually 14 cents a minute) that she discovered men were willing to pay $100 to sleep with her. Since the work was less trying and a lot better paying, Minnesota’s Businesswoman of the Year became a prostitute. It happens.

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Eventually, she formed her own modeling agency again, which was really an escort service. What the girls did for the men they dated was up to them as consenting adults, Cheri says . . . so long as she got 40% of the take.

The going rate at the time was $200, although very rich men liked to express their gratitude with considerably more.

It was a good life while it lasted, but like all good things, it had to end. Cheri was busted for pandering and for failure to build a retaining wall. Of all things, it was a policewoman who nailed her.

The retaining wall had nothing to do with her business, by the way. Cheri still bristles at the injustice. The city ordered her to build it to protect the public from work being done at rental property she owned. But she was not about to spend $40,000 for a wall.

When she was arrested by the vice squad, the D.A. threw in the retaining wall charge too.

As it turned out, the wall didn’t matter. Cheri went to prison for pandering, wherein she wrote the aforementioned book about her life and is now trying to finalize a publishing deal.

I see nothing wrong with that since writing is a form of prostitution in itself, but I do find it strange and somewhat vexing that immorality is such a good seller.

Cheri Woods will no doubt make a bundle on having been a whore, while I am still plugging away at 60 cents a word. I wish now I had considered my options more carefully when I still had the physical ability to do so. I could’ve been champ.

As it is now, I’ll probably end up selling real estate.