Heidi Fleiss Faces Post-Prison Life With a New Face

Her patio no longer features call girls lounging poolside. For that matter, it no longer features a pool. Except for the fact that it’s in Hollywood, nothing about the plain gray stucco house in the canyon hints that the former Hollywood Madam now lives there, except, of course, for the familiar face at the door.

“Hey.” Since no account is complete without what she is wearing, let the record show that for her first interview since her release from prison, Heidi Fleiss is in pajama bottoms, a T-shirt and fuzzy flip-flops into which her feet all but disappear. She is stick-thin, but smiling. It’s a big smile. Also swollen.

“My lips are still going down from the cosmetic surgery,” Heidi confides, still L.A.’s most candid felon. “I had a lot done: lips, ears, eyes, boobs. Being in prison with no skin care really does a number on you. You’re out in that recreation yard with the sun beating down on you? It really ages you prematurely. Write it if you want, but be sure to put in the name of my plastic surgeon, Dr. Randal Haworth, H-A-W-O-R-T-H.”

Some things even three years behind bars can’t change. With or without enhancements, Heidi Fleiss remains Heidi Fleiss. On this day--this is last week--she is particularly jaunty, having beaten back a slander suit by the former Dove Books publisher, Michael Viner. The suit dated from before her incarceration, when she told a talk-radio host that Viner had sexually exploited the prostitutes who’d co-authored Dove’s “You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again.”

Viner sued, but then had to admit on the stand that an ex-Heidi girl was, at the time, his mistress. As a coup de grace, another prostitute in the book testified that she and Viner had had sex three times.

“You have no idea what I went through, finding that girl,” Heidi sighs, flopping down on the living room couch. “When I finally tracked her down, she was completely torn up and she was living in New York with some weirdo. The main thing is that I won, though. My lawyer was Gregory W. Smith. S-M-I-T-H.”

If she can’t stop plugging, it’s because, post-incarceration, endorsements have become her currency. Even if she wanted to become a madam again--which she doesn’t--the Internet has made her redundant. “I was the last of the last,” she chuckles. “You can get anything you want now online.” Call girls don’t need madams now, just modems.

She is bankrupt. An Internet book she plans to launch on the Howard Stern show won’t ship until at least Christmas, and a licensing deal with Seth Warshavsky--the young online porn mogul who gave the world the Pamela Anderson Lee sex tapes--has been rocky since he became the focus of a federal fraud investigation. Also, she says, they had a falling out over a boutique they were to open on Melrose Avenue.

“The landlord was a very religious guy who at one point was going to be a rabbi. All he asked was that I agree not to sell sex toys, which was fine. It was going to have a velvet-roped VIP area, and we were going to do live Webcasts with celebrities--but Seth insisted, threatened to sue me, sue the landlord. It was a great concept, but it fell apart over dildos,” she sighs.

And what of confinement? Some months after her arrival at the federal prison in Dublin, she was moved from minimum security to solitary confinement for hurling a metal chair at a guard. “This sounds really ‘prison,’ ” she apologizes, “but the officer was humiliating me. For my own safety, I had to prove I wasn’t a punk.”

She says she spent 60 days in the hole, and then was moved to the main prison: “My first day, this woman who looked like Mike Tyson came up to me and said, ‘Girl, this ain’t no Hollywood and I’m gonna show you a real pimp now.’ And I’m like, ‘No, wait, stay cool, nice to meet you.’ Luckily, two girls came up and one became a good friend; when I get the money I’m calling Alan Dershowitz for her. She was in for drugs, doing 20 years because of some past DUIs.”

There were emotional moments, she says (“Tell me how humiliating this is--I had a spiritual awakening at one point watching an Oprah Winfrey video about loving yourself”), but the corrosive side of her experience, she won’t discuss. “Just put it this way, there’s a lot of sex in prison, and a lot of people who get raped. Three guards were [transferred] while I was there for inappropriate behavior, but the women also seduce the guards.”

Well, it’s a fine line between the exploiters and the exploited--it doesn’t take imprisonment to know that. Post-O.J., post-Monica, post-Charlie Sheen and Hugh Grant and “Survivor,” it’s hard to recall just what the point was in making an example of Heidi Fleiss. What’s left when the scandalousness fades from an age of celebrity scandal? Ask Heidi. That’s H-E-I-D-I.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.