A new documentary examines how doctor's daughter Heidi Fleiss ended up becoming the Hollywood Madam'.
HEIDI FLEISS, THE NOtorious former "Madam to the Stars" who supplied call girls to Hollywood honchos and other high-rollers, says she is astonished that for all the media attention she has attracted, no one has ever cared to examine the purely Jewish dimensions of her story. Already sentenced to three years for pandering, she now faces the likelihood of additional prison time for tax evasion, fraud and money laundering.
"I don't know about comparing myself to Jonathan Pollard," she says, interviewed at her Santa Monica boutique, Heidi Wear. "But I certainly see myself as a victim of police and government anti-Semitism. I suppose a better comparison would be to the Rosenbergs. They could just as easily have gone after (actor and ex-client) Charlie Sheen and put him through what they put me through. But they said, No, let's go get that little Jewish girl on the hill. Let's take every penny that Jewish girl has made, let's go after her father and destroy her whole family.'"
If Heidi Fleiss is playing the anti-Semitism card in the hope of mustering Jewish communal support for her plight in a bid to soften the blow of a second round of sentencing in April, she had better resign herself to spending at least the next few years behind bars.
"I think it is rather preposterous that she would try to connect herself up to people who have been seen by many as victims of anti-Semitism and as political prisoners," responds Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, regional director of the American Jewish Committee and a former member of a Los Angeles police department oversight commission. "It shows a high level of chutzpah on her part," he adds, although, like many others, he believes her sentence unfairly harsh.
But the very fact that Fleiss can conceive of herself as a sort of modern-day Dreyfus shows that she was no ordinary lady-of-the-night. Now a new movie by British documentarian Nicholas Broomfield, titled "Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam," produced for the BBC and currently in U.S. theatrical release, charts her tragicomic trajectory from doctor's daughter to hubristic queen of the hooker heap.
Heidi Fleiss was born 30 years ago, one of the six children of Paul Fleiss, a respected Los Angeles pediatrician, and his wife Elissa, a teacher. She describes her father as having been a "hippie," a "liberal 60s Jewish intellectual." Although she attended preschool at the Los Feliz Jewish Community Center, Jewishness and Judaism per se did not figure in her home. Her parents did not keep a tight rein on their children spiritually or in any other sense, says Fleiss, not that it would have made much difference, as she "was quite a rebel." The results of this upbringing, notes Broomfield, were obviously mixed.
"A couple of the kids became doctors," he said in an interview with The Jerusalem Report. "But on the other hand, there is Heidi, who never finished high school, and at least one sister who is a heroin addict. Obviously something was not quite right there."
Broomfield is a 48-year-old former British barrister of Czech-Jewish descent who was educated as a Quaker. A prolific and critically acclaimed nonfiction filmmaker during the last two decades, he has dealt with prostitution before in his film "Chicken Ranch," which looked at Nevada's state-licensed legal whorehouse.
Broomfield says he never really stopped to consider the Jewish aspect of the Heidi Fleiss story. But viewers of "Hollywood Madam" will surely be struck by the fact that so many of the key players in her decadent drama share her background.
At the age of 19, having left school and home and then haunting the local club scene, Fleiss became mistress to Bernie Cornfeld, a fabulously wealthy Canadian-Jewish financier with a shady reputation who died last year in Tel Aviv. Fleiss says Cornfeld, the leading player in the OSS investment scandal of the 1970s, not only gave her a Rolls Royce Corniche and $ 1 million for her 21st birthday, but she credits him with giving her a greater appreciation of her own Jewish heritage.
"He used to give a lot of money to Chabad," she recounts. "We honored the holidays, had Seders at his house, lit candles on Friday evening, all of that stuff. I'm glad I had the opportunity to see all that."
After breaking up with Cornfeld, whom she says was maintaining a harem of other mistresses when they were together, Fleiss started seeing Ivan Nagy, a former TV director and Hungarian Holocaust survivor. Heidi says that Nagy - whom she describes as her life nemesis, the "true monster in all this" - started her on drugs and beat her regularly. According to Broomfield's movie, he eventually "sold" Fleiss for $ 450 to another infamous Los Angeles flesh-peddler called Madam Alex.
"She was a raggedy-assed little groupie," Madam Alex said in front of Broomfield's camera, shortly before her own death last year. "On a scale of one to 10, I wouldn't have rated her a five." But she was more attractive than her pictures, and could be engaging and personable.
"Men liked her," said Alex, who claimed she employed Fleiss as a call girl for 18 months until, at Nagy's behind-the-scenes prompting, Heidi learned enough to begin chiseling away at her business. This act of betrayal prompts the non-Jewish Madam Alex to call Ivan Nagy a "Jewish pig" who should go "blow a shofar."
Fleiss would eventually boast that she provided women to some of the most powerful people in show biz. There were rumors that she was on the payroll of Columbia Pictures, and the possibility that she might divulge the names of the clients shudders through Hollywood. Eventually, Fleiss appears to have begun cutting Nagy himself out of the action, leading him to begin planning her downfall. At first he enlisted the aid of a tough guy by the name of Jacob "Cookie" Orgad, whom Madam Alex claims is a former Mossad agent-turned-Israeli Mafia enforcer. Orgad eventually switched sides and joined Fleiss, who describes him as simply "a nice Jewish boy with a weakness for women."
Broomfield says he only caught up with Orgad, whom he recalled as "charming but jittery," after completing his movie. Broomfield says he realized he was risking a potshot to the head staking out Orgad's home for several days, and was not entirely sorry that the Israeli managed to evade him until after the movie was made.
Nagy eventually did Fleiss in by acting as a police informant and key witness against her. Her father was also charged with laundering the undeclared profits from Fleiss's business, and sentenced last September to three years' probation, fined $ 50,000, and ordered to complete 650 hours of community service. According to Joe Domanic, the author of an award-winning book about the LAPD, "Fleiss was brought down because the district attorney was desperate to win a high-profile case. And unlike Madam Alex and Ivan Nagy, Heidi wouldn't become a police informant or let her girls service the cops."
Fleiss now says she is filled with remorse, although one senses she is most sorry that she was caught up in an out-of-control situation and now faces dire consequences. "I was sucked into this real evil world," she says. "As disgusting as Madam Alex and Ivan are, I was fascinated by their creepiness. I saw their faults and thought, Hmm, I could do this in a good way, in a way that's proper and human, and treat people with respect and dignity.' They treated a girl like she was garbage. I feel I humanized a lot of people, brought respect and dignity into their lives, and made them feel loved."
Broomfield recently testified on her behalf to her probation officer that Fleiss has been working conscientiously to better herself. Her boutique is thriving, and she works hard at marketing her brand-name clothing. Offered "tons of money" by the media to name clients, Fleiss has resisted temptation - although two of her former employees do name names in a new book titled "You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again." She has instead offset her defense costs - which she estimates at over half a million dollars - by engaging in phone sex and hosting a soft-core cable TV bikini program.
Clearly, says Broomfield, who wonders how she can do such things just two months before her sentencing, Heidi still seems to be making some questionable choices. Fleiss acknowledges this; she says she hopes to complete her schooling in prison, and may even wish to further explore her Jewish roots. It looks like she has a lot to learn and will have plenty of time to study.