Call Her Madam

LEON WIESELTIER

LEON WIESELTIER on the Mayflower Madam's economic policy

The Mind's Eve

A mong the many tricks that Reaganism has played on the American mind, the confusion of the entrepreneur with the manager deserves pride of place. As the decade began, the entrepreneur was the new American hero: the man who threw caution to the winds and consecrated his life to productivity and profits. But alas, the baroque organization of American business doesn't allow for the running of world-historical risks. Corporations are creatures of caution. Thus it was that the manager, and not the entrepreneur, came to enjoy Reaganomic prestige. The most egregious example was Lee Iacocca, who has installed himself in American folklore as the Indiana Jones of capitalism, when in fact his derring-do was the result of a federal fix, in the form of several hundred million dollars in guaranteed loans.

Down, then, with Iacocca. I have found a more perfect representative of the spirit of the age. She is Sydney Biddle Barrows. I move that her name be placed in nomination for Miss Morning in America. She is an entrepreneur and a manager, having created a company that set new standards of quality for its service and of prosperity for its proprietor. She is a descendant of the minister who arrived on the Mayflower. She is a distinguished former debutante. And she is the author of a classic work on management, a book that combines shrewd practical advice with the higher theory of marketing.

The book, of course, is Mayflower Madam (written with William Novak, the Edgar Bergen of American publishing, who also wrote Iacocca). It has hit the best-seller list, but many of its readers must be crushingly disappointed. They are looking for Xaviera Hollander, but they have found Peter Drucker. There is not a page, not a paragraph, not a sentence, in Barrows's painstaking account of her high-class escort service that can be considered a turn-on. She has produced merely the history of a company.

But wait. Do we not live in a time when the history of a company is a turn-on? Perhaps I have it backward. Perhaps it is Peter Drucker, and not Xaviera Hollander, who arouses. Peter Drucker, and Thomas Peters, and John Naisbitt, and Lee Iacocca, and all the other wise men of management who are together furnishing a generation of Americans with their ideal of life. The energy with which the young, pinstriped masses daily attack the challenge of wealth can only be called erotic. Which means that Sydney Biddle Barrows, with her book about the money in sex that gives you the feeling of the sex in money, may have broken new ground in American writing. (Well, in American dictating.) Mayflower Madam may be, strictly speaking, the first work of yuppie pornography.

¶3 arrows's flat, disarming, and even13 tually enchanting book begins as the memoir of a blue blood, but it is not long before said blue blood finds herself in need of the rent. Drawing upon her training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, and, more important, upon the intuitions developed at Abraham and Straus in Brooklyn, where she moved meteorically from junior lingerie to the bath shop, Barrows discovers that there may be solvency in sex. "If the clients were restricted to men who could afford to pay $125 an hour," she observes, "perhaps it wasn't as sleazy as I thought." Poor Sydney; she appears to think that when you add zeros you subtract ugliness. Still, the fact remains that there was nothing lurid about her fascination with the ladies of the night. It was business from beginning to end. The pimp as C.E.O.

"Done right," she concludes from the poorly run escort service at which she found temporary employment, "the management side of the business might be an interesting way to make a living." Before you know it Sydney is "top management" at her own shop, called Cachet. The name was used not least because "you had to be reasonably civilized to know how to pronounce it, which might intimidate some of the less desirable callers." And there were many such undesirables. Cachet was "a very conservative operation." As Barrows recalls the company's glory days of the early eighties, "We had been doing everything possible to give our business a certain image, and every detail of the operation—including our advertising, our telephone style, the kind of girls we hired, and the way they dressed—was part of our marketing effort." The effort was to summon to the bosoms of her personnel the sort of man that Barrows likes to call "nice." Nice meant rich. Cachet's girls turned up in stockings, garters, and with Port-A-Prints; all you needed to find comfort in their company was a Visa or MasterCard.

Barrows tells her story with an appalling absence of irony. Still, for somebody of "conservative" sexual temperament, she turns out to be rather wise about the dark side of human desire. In her fifth chapter she reproduces the substance of the "mini-training program" she gave to new girls, a lecture of twenty pages that deserves to be counted among the most accomplished managerial writing of the age. Moreover, it is delivered with impressive human understanding, as befitted an executive whose product was flesh and fantasy. Here was a really exemplary employer. And there was even humor in the Mayflower Madam's principles of organization. For example: "As you all know, you can be arrested merely for agreeing to have sex for money, so never give any indication that you're going to accept a payment. If he tries to offer you money. . .say, 'Oh, no, put that away.' In the event that he has a tape recorder going, you can always tell the judge that the client was exposing himself."

In the event, he did have a tape recorder going—or, to put it more precisely, this captain of capitalism was busted. The rest is history of a rather petty kind. Now Sydney speculates to reporters that she might try her hand at being "a syndicated columnist or a TV talk show hostess." Who knows? This is a woman of resources. But before she fades into obscurity and the Kips Bay Boys' Club, Barrows deserves tribute for more than her economic behavior. She has, in passing, helped to refute the romance of prostitution, the common illusion of exhausted middle-class men that those ladies lingering in heels beneath the streetlight, or staring past their Kir royal at the bar, possess some secret knowledge about the human heart and its depredations.

Forget it, friends. They are watching the clock and counting the cash. Business was all that Sydney's business could ever have been about. The executive approach to easy virtue appears to abound in Manhattan. New York magazine reports hookers with smart business suits on Central Park South: the Alcott & Andrews harlots. And a few years back the Village Voice published a letter from a group of indignant prostitutes that began: "As members of the sexual-services industry..." The expense of spirit in a waste of shame? Not exactly. The spirit of expense and a shame of waste is more like it. □