Remembering the D.C. Madam

DC Madam Just a few hours ago, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the former owner of the Pamela Martin escort agency, was found dead in a shed near her mother’s house in Tampa, Florida.

The authorities said she had hanged herself. And while the news was shocking, I cannot say I was surprised. The 52-year-old, known in the press as “the D.C. Madam,” had been convicted last month of racketeering, money laundering, and two counts of using the mail for illegal purposes. She faced a potential sentence of 50 years.

I got to know Palfrey well over the past year as I followed her case for Vanity Fair. (My story will be published on VF.com in the coming days.) I know she saw herself as a lady, strange as it may seem, and a businesswoman. She had spent just over a year in prison in 1991, for prostitution, and had felt utterly out of place among her fellow inmates. She called it her “‘Nam moment”

She told me she’d returned to prostitution because she saw no alternative, but this time she was determined to do it right. She hired only educated women with day jobs who chose the work for the extra money. None of them were forced into it. This policy prevented snitching—and enabled her to justify what she was doing. The employees I met were impressively beautiful women, and they greatly respected her. They said the men they met through her were often preferable to those they encountered elsewhere.

In her presence, I used to have to remind myself that this was a former prostitute turned madam, not an executive at a law firm or an advertising agency. She was funny, feisty, and clever; she was always well-dressed, ate elegantly, and held herself bolt-upright. And she expected the same of her “gals.” I once asked who her ideal employee would be. “You, Vicky,” she replied, without batting an eyelid. A month or two later, she started probing about my personal life. When she heard I had children, she put down her napkin. “Oh, so you have a family … ” That’s when I realized she’d actually been serious!

As her case progressed, however, her competency began to desert her. She fired the lawyers given to her by the state and relied on the charming but ineffective Blair Sibley to defend her. She began to seem somewhat delusional. Livid that she’d been singled out by the government, she demanded that all the other prositution rings be outed and became convinced that someone in high office was responsible for her persecution. She became obsessed with this idea, to the point that she even thought one of her own lawyers, Preston Burton, was “too close to the government to represent her.”

Yet until the end, she remained resolved to win, to set a precedent. “I am in the fight of my life” she wrote me in February. It was hard to judge her tone. This was, after all, the woman who had told me she was no “Brandy Britton,” the college professor who had killed herself after it emerged she’d been a prostitute. Yet in the end, underneath the posture, the panache, and the bravado, she was the same in at least one tragic respect.

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Bring on the long, hot Manhattan nights

I hate to rub it in, but in New York we are on the cusp of summer. The temperature has been in the high seventies; all around me I see girls in summer dresses. The season-change generally coincides with the Tribeca Film Festival, now a staple of the social season, and, for me, the first marathon endurance test since the Christmas holiday.

The next eight nights in my diary are booked solid with screenings that start at 9pm, followed by an after-party at a nightclub or restaurant.

Part of me wants to throw up looking at this but the other part of me rejoices. For this excess, this pushing of one’s physical limits, is what separates New York from every other city in the world. (more…)

I’m ditching butch Hillary for gentle Obama

Barack Obama For me, no matter what happens in Pennsylvania, I’m done with Hillary Clinton. I have long felt that either Democratic candidate would suffice as President. Most New Yorkers (remember, this is a liberal town) have become so tired and cynical about the current administration’s screw-ups I think a frog might be welcomed as the next President – as long as it wasn’t a friend of George Bush.

Last week, however, for me things reached boiling point. And no, it wasn’t Bill Clinton’s earnings, or his shrewish outburst, or the revelation that he in fact supported free trade with Colombia while his wife was against it.

No, what got to me was this business of Hillary Clinton, yet again, pathetically, trying to win this like a man. Hence her “I almost got shot in Bosnia” lie. Come on. Last night I saw a headline on the web saying: “Hillary needs Chelsea beside her to play mother”. No joke, that. I’d much rather see Chelsea in the White House than her mother. (more…)

Gauging the Glass Ceiling

Fortune magazine is out with its annual ranking of America’s 500 biggest corporations, and only a dozen of the 500 have women at the helm. Watch the discussion here.

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War Inc.

I recently interviewed actor, writer and director of War, Inc., John Cusack for CNBC. Watch my exclusive, one-on-one interview here.

Watch the trailer for the movie here.

You can also watch this on the Huffington Post here.

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Big Apple Paper Battle

I had the pleasure of talking with Jared Kushner, owner of the NY Observer, about his possible purchase of NY Newsday and his battle over it with Rupert Murdoch. Watch my one-on-one interview here.

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If you’re famous, keep shtum around the staff

It is every celeb’s nightmare: Rob Lowe has hit the headlines with his $3 million lawsuits against a “blackmail” plot by two nannies and a former chef, allegedly seeking to extort $1.5 million from him. In response, Lowe has also accused them of wild behaviour, namely sex and drugs, in his California and London houses.

All rich people are, unquestionably, a target for financially desperate former employees. But people like Lowe do not hire people without references. In New York, certainly, you don’t have anyone in your house without a background check, performed by the agency through which you hire your staff. Even so, there can be slip-ups.

I once found myself interviewing a nanny who had previously worked for a famous model. As she was leaving, she told me she’d served some jail time a few years previously – for drugs smuggling – but now that was all over, and God was with her.

I thanked her for her honesty and shut the door.

I decided, despite God being with her, not to hire her, given that there are great nannies out there who have not been to jail. But I was intrigued that the model, who knew of the sentence, had taken her on.

If you are famous, you are likely to be so busy that the question of who you let in your door to nanny or clean can be more intuitive than anything else. You tend to override references and just go with your gut. What you have no idea of is just how this person speaks of you outside work.

Often I think celebrities may not realise how much they are deified by the people who work for them. One famous friend of mine, who is unusually self-aware, teasingly refers to staff and close friends as his “yes people”. When the relationship ends, the resentment on the employee’s part can be like that of a broken-hearted lover whose only consolation may be lashing out with a lurid tell-all. The butler to novelist Danielle Steel did it; the former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour did it in fictional form.

Recently I’ve become acquainted with someone who works for a famous actress. The assistant can barely talk about anything other than her boss. I know how many shoes the star owns, her love affairs, her mood swings. What, I thought, is the actress thinking, confiding so much to this person?

So what was Rob Lowe thinking? Probably he wasn’t.

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Chips are down for a Wall Street tyrant

This last week has seen a sorry-looking bunch of people in bars around our block. Many are Bear Stearns employees, whose life-savings just tanked. These (mostly) men are livid – mainly at 74-year-old chairman Jimmy Cayne, who could have sold the business a year ago at $200 a share instead of the measly $10 they got last week (Cayne himself cashed out last Thursday).

There have been stories of wives telling decorators to stop hanging new silk curtains. For the first time, college graduates who took jobs that don’t pay much, at magazines or auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s, don’t feel that Wall Street – where many of their peers are headed – is the place to be. Bottega Veneta, the fashion house owned by Gucci, which produces classically conservative clothes, is reported to be the place to shop now, rather than cutting-edge design houses.

The markets rise and fall and we hope the chaos means we’ve reached the bottom. We are frightenedby the market’s volatile reaction to the Fed’s intervention over Bear Stearns. There is talk of conspiracy against Bear by hedge funds: is Lehman the next victim, questions the rumourmill? But personally I just find myself wondering how Jimmy Cayne could have continued at the helm of Bear for more than 30 years. (more…)

I’m ditching Facebook friends and foes

I do not believe in Facebook. I know this sounds heretical, especially since I am a journalist and I live in America, pioneer of gizmos and wireless communications, but I can’t stand the thing.

My husband, who is a tech-fiend, put me on it – and so, to all those people who have emailed me wanting to be my “friend,” please don’t take my lack of response the wrong way. I love you all (well, most of you) but just contact me the regular way. I have no desire to see bad pictures of you or know who your friends are and spend hours examining their stated movie preferences.

Call me old-fashioned but I just think there has to be a line between cyberspace and reality. For me, Facebook is that line. Furthermore, it can cause hours of unnecessary emotional trauma. (more…)

America’s plague of precocious brats

Brat This year we ended up cancelling our Easter vacation, because I’d been away, filming in Los Angeles, and the husband had been to Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, Munich and London in the space of 14 days. He felt like he’d travelled enough. And anyway, he told me, he doesn’t have time for vacations in these turbulent markets.

I didn’t mind – but the five-year-olds did. “We want to go to Palm Beach or the Caribbean,” they chanted. “All our friends are.”

With a shock I realised that my charming children had the capacity to be two spoiled brats, who think that holidays are not luxuries but necessities to which they are entitled. Furthermore, I discovered that the nanny actually agreed with them and behind my back had booked a week for her and them – plus me – in Florida, a reservation that wasn’t entirely cost-free to undo. (more…)