Cash com sex

With Heide Fleiss in jail and no A-list madam to take her place. Hollywood high rollers are getting their kicks at private--very private--lap-dance parties

AT FIRST GLANCE, it seemed like just another night at the trendy Westside restaurant. The art-filled bar was two deep with the usual suspects, as usual dressed in Armani: agents, studio execs, entertainment lawyers and that rapidly growing species, personal managers. There were some unusual suspects as well--cool twentysomething Swingers types, stiffer fifty-something doctor types. Everyone looked rich.

The distaff side of the bar scene was remarkably attractive, even for this everyone-is-beautiful dining room. The group was equally divided into sunny SoCal blondes, sophisticated Eurofemmes and sleek PacRimmers. In ail, it was a stellar mix, very upscale, very chic--a flaunting of the style, energy and diversity that spell glamour in this metropolis.

But at second glance, things didn't seem quite like just another night after all. there was a miasma of cigar smoke. The restaurant smelled like a humidor, way beyond a mere wink at the no-smoking law. Second, no one was eating, which was highly unusual in this minor I but notable temple of gastronomy, a place where food rather than movie stars generally takes center stage. The bar is normally a cornucopia of foie gras, tuna tartare, tricked-up calamari tentacles, California tapas, but tonight there wasn't an appetizer in sight. In fact, a stroll beyond the bar revealed that the main dining room was pitch-black. Dinner was not being served.

That was when third glance turned into third-degree blush. The dining room wasn't open, but it wasn't empty. As eyes adjusted to the murky light, spectral outlines of backs, long limbs and shimmering blond hair began to emerge. Eventually the spectral bodies came into focus. Five naked women were writhing over five suited men in plush banquettes where Hawaiian ono and New Zealand baby lamb are regularly devoured by local gourmands.

Back at the bar, the sea of tipplers parted. The torsos of the female patrons were revealed, clad not in the expected little black cocktail dresses but instead in very, very naughty lingerie. These outfits weren't the underwear-as-outerwear that Madonna once popularized as a fashion statement. This was boudoir-only stuff--plunging nightgowns, micro G-strings, see-through teddies. Actionwear.

Every few minutes a couple would pair up and repair to the stygian banquettes for a no-holds-barred lap dance, to the sounds of softly pumping techno-pop. Each dance lasted about three minutes, for a fee of $40. Pricey, perhaps, but unlike lap dances in highly regulated strip clubs, which cost $10 to $20 and are strictly hands-off voyeuristic experiences, these dances were totally interactive. Furthermore, once the dances were done and accounts were settled, business cards or numbers were often exchanged. In some cases, there was the beginning of a beautiful friendship; in others, the seed of a call girl/client relationship had been firmly planted. Even without the foie gras, the entire evening could hardly have been more sybaritically decadent.

"Forget about the strip clubs, forget about Bare Elegance and Crazy Girls," exulted one of the revelers, a stylish, thirtyish married producer who, like all participants in these bacchanals, insisted on remaining unnamed. Like others of his ilk, he has been known to close deals at some of the city's celebrity-intensive body shops. "They're all about frustration. This is the full monty. This is the future." And so it may be. The high-end private lap-dance party is definitely an exploding phenomenon. It's happening in a number of other fancy restaurants, not only on the Westside but in Pasadena and Newport Beach as well. And it's happening in private mansions in Bel-Air and Brentwood, usually at properties that are on the market and whose owners are gone. Los Angeles has always been a party town, but this is a new twist.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF a totally respectable Beverly Hills-adjacent restaurant on its off night into a wild sex club that operates as a mixer for rich men to meet party girls is a vivid testament to the changing facade of commercial sex in the city that gave us Heidi Fleiss. * Ironically, it is precisely because this city took away Heidi Fleiss that the sex business has deviated from its traditional madam-dominated modus operandi. For the first time in the history of Hollywood, a great madam has become incredibly hard to find. "There is no one worth calling. The whole situation fell apart after they got Heidi," laments a studio honcho who was a prominent entry in Ms. Fleiss's infamous black book.

This current drought was created by two factors. One was the 1995 conviction and incarceration of Ms. Fleiss (who is currently completing her pandering sentence in federal prison in Northern California). The other was the death that same year of Fleiss's mentor Alex Adams, who had reigned as "Madam to the Stars" since the early '70s. So there is currently a madam void in the upper strata of the Bev Hills/Malibu glitz axis. No new major madam has emerged, which explains to some degree the twin scandals of Hugh Grant and Eddie Murphy both being stopped by the LAPD with street prostitutes in the same sordid Hollywood neighborhood.

The mere fact that such superstars would take to the streets may say something about the disarray of deluxe prostitution in the absence of a "supermadam," an individual who always served as something of a watchdog in keeping the sexual diversions of the rich and famous under the veil of discretion. Boys will be boys, or even girls, goes the Hollywood apologia, as long as they keep it secret. Discretion was what they were paying for.

But now Hollywood, along with its fellow pleasure seekers, doesn't know whom to pay. "One of the reasons Don was so depressed was that he didn't have Madam Alex to call," says a big-bucks screenwriter about late bad-boy producer Don Simpson, who in his heyday used to hire van loads of the madam's "creatures," as she called her $300-an-hour charges. "I'm depressed, too," the scribe adds. "There's no one around. The Arabs ruined everything."

What the screenwriter is referring to is the post-Heidi phenomenon of royalty from oil-rich nations in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere creating entire harems of Hollywood creatures. At the time of Fleiss's arrest in 1993, about two dozen other women were operating as minor madams on the fringes of 90210 turf. Once the oil potentates entered the picture, however, their minions in Los Angeles contacted all of these lesser sex brokers and hired them on an exclusive basis to recruit. These madams were, in one fell swoop, taken out of circulation and upgraded to "agents."

Their new job was to assemble harems for the potentates back home in the Gulf, which would usually encompass 50 to 100 starlets--women like "Heather," an erstwhile Heidi girl who had been a bit player on a prime-time series and had made a quarter-page appearance in Playboy. "That made me a star there, a total star," says Heather. That stardom was worth $800,000 in offshore cash and jewelry, no taxes declared, for six months in one of these harems. It was enough for Heather never again to have to turn the occasional trick to pay the rent. "It was always so embarrassing, worrying that the same guy you were seeing that night was the same one you were supposed to read for the morning after," Heather recalls. Thus a new class of millionaire madams was created by petrodollars, leaving the would-be customers in L.A. out in the cold. All the top girls were taken off the market.

"Three hundred dollars for a quickie isn't exactly chump change," laments one director who used to be a Heidi client. "But I couldn't give it away. The girls were all buying condos. The madams were lunching at Spago. I was stuck with the L.A. X-Press [sex weekly]." Would-be johns also began to turn to the Internet, with websites such as LA-Exotics.com. providing photos, bios and personality profiles. "It takes too much time," the director complains. "One out of 20 might be decent. The rest is bait advertising."

Wading through thousands of self-comparisons to Tyra Banks, Pamela Anderson and Sharon Stone can be as exhausting as reading scripts that don't deliver, and sex is something agents and executives can't send their assistants out to cover. Enter the "party planners," as the organizers of the current sex mixers are known. "I got the idea in Bangkok," says Mario, the Italian entrepreneur who put together the lap-dance fest at the trendy restaurant. He describes lavish Thai sex palaces with jazz bands, karaoke rooms, black-tie waiters, hostesses in evening gowns; an update of New York's famed El Morocco with a payoff. "I want it to be civilized. I want it to be human."