But above all I had what I call the “madam instinct”: the ability to know when to be bitchy or soft, the diplomacy to handle difficult clients, good hostess skills, and a sense of humor.

And ever since I left the straight life behind, I’d wanted to become a star in this business. So in the summer of 1970 I decided to become not just a madam – but the biggest in New York.

The first thing I had to do was to find a good location to open up shop. Working as a loner is one thing, and it’s a rare Manhattan building that does not have at least one discreet house hooker, but finding a place to open a lively brothel was a different story.

The ideal building, first of all, has to have the proper climate: cool. This means that the management and staff will tolerate, cooperate, and even protect you as long as you cross their palms with silver.

However, this can go too far, and there is one luxury high-rise in the East Fifties with such an army of cooperative doormen and lobby staff that it was costing Georgette Harcourte almost $500 each month, before rent, when she operated there.

There are several buildings in Manhattan’s smart East Side which are known to tolerate active brothels, one of which harbors so many it is called the “vertical whorehouse.” This building, located on York Avenue in the Seventies, advertises in the real-estate columns of The New York Times as having “the ultimate in services and conveniences.” Another building riddled with brothels is on Sutton Place, but as far as I could see, these addresses were no longer cool – they were red hot, with the police watching them like hawks.

It took some searching, but eventually I found the perfect place, a one-bedroom apartment in the East Fifties on a commercial floor of a semicommercial building – which meant there would be no neighbors to worry about after office hours. Initially I wanted a modest apartment which would keep my overhead down. I knew that I could utilize the living room as well as the bedroom for entertaining my customers.

The next step was to recruit staff, and believe it or not, honest, hard-working hookers are hard to find. There were girls around who worked the cheap houses, but they were mostly hardened creatures, and I would not then, nor will I now, ever use a girl who has no class. I don’t want street hookers, because their mentality is too cheap. I have a classy clientele who pay high prices for class. If a man would never pick up a girl in the street, why should I expect him to go with a street hooker?

At one point I hired a girl who had worked in a cheap house, and as a result, got exactly what I should have expected. Cheap behavior. In this case I relaxed my policy because the girl, Misty, was outwardly attractive. But when she undressed, there were stretch marks all over her body from children she gave birth to when she was fourteen and fifteen. At nineteen, when she came to me, she was already used up. And I soon found out her niceness was a very thin veneer.

As is my practice with new girls, I gave Misty a pleasant, attractive man as her first customer. The man, a stockbroker, was slightly drunk, but the easy-to-handle type.

Misty retired to the bedroom with him, but within five minutes dramatically reappeared, charging stark naked into the living room, cursing and swearing.

So I went inside and walked into a screaming match between the customer and Misty. “Listen,” I cried, taking the customer’s side, “you’re not working in a twenty-five-dollar whorehouse, so don’t behave like a whore.”

“Goddamnit!” she screamed. “I’ve already taken care of that bastard, and now he wants some more.”

It is my philosophy that a man is entitled to more than five minutes of a girl’s time, and even if he climaxes quickly, he can expect to be treated warmly and even babied and washed up, if that’s what he wants.

Misty quieted down and promised to cooperate, but her background was too strong, and twice next day I had complaints that she was a hard, cold bitch. So I had to dismiss her.

The others who were not attached to madams already usually had pimps behind them, and pimps are bad news because sooner or later they try to move in on your business.

In the beginning I did hire some girls who had pimps, and only one of them, a lovely-looking blond named Leonora, worked out well. I met Leonora through an old white pimp named Tony Roland who was known to handle the best-looking “working” girls in New York, and he saw that they were punctual and reliable. However, this particular girl had aspirations higher than hooking, and through a customer of mine, landed herself a television commercial, and her face is now splashed across the home screen.

The exceptional thing about this story is not that a prostitute achieved legitimate fame, because some major celebrities we all know began that way, but that her pimp let her get out of the business. But I suppose she is making more money now as a minor celebrity, arid in his way, Tony is still her pimp.

An unhappy case of one pimp refusing to let go of his bread-and-butter body was Greta, a small-time madam who operated from the York Avenue building and was managed by a “connected” Italian type who took care of payoffs and made sure she never got busted. But the pimp himself got sent away for armed robbery. This did not make him surrender his suffocating hold on the girl, and even from prison he managed her via two of his lieutenants, who kept her under a twenty-four-hour surveillance, even when she went out to visit her mother in Queens.

Different madams have different methods of finding girls to work for them, and on a couple of occasions I tried to follow their examples.

A lesbian madam named Janet cruises the gay-girl bars like Cookies, the Three, and Harry’s Back East to find working girls. She finds some little dyke, seduces her, invites her to live in her apartment for a few days, then persuades her to go into the game. This isn’t too difficult with lesbians, because basically they hate men and enjoy taking their money in exchange for sex.

I tried Janet’s approach one night in Maxwell’s Plum. I struck up a conversation with a gorgeous little gray-eyed straight girl in the powder room.

“You’re a very lovely-looking girl,” I said. “Are you by any chance a model?”

The girl stopped applying her lipstick. “Oh, no, I’m a legal secretary,” she said.

“How come you dress so beautifully on a secretary’s salary?” I asked. “Do you have a rich fiancé?”

“Heavens, no,” she laughed. “I wish I did, then I wouldn’t have to spend every cent I earn on clothes.”

“A girl like you should not have to work, you should have men spending money on you,” I told her. She was so delicious I would have liked to make love to her myself.

“Where can I find that?” she asked, showing casual but genuine interest.

“I know lots of rich men who would like to spoil you. Are you interested?”

“Oh, sure, I’m interested,” she said earnestly. “As long as there’s no sex involved.”

I met a cute little girl named Jenny at a gay bar, and although my intention was not exactly recruitment, it developed that way.

Jenny was twenty, looked fourteen, with short-gamin hair, and she told me she was a butch.

“It’s impossible to be butch when you are a virgin,” I explained. “You become one gradually after having sex. You might look a little tomboyish with your short hair, but you’re feminine – so let me be the butch.”

Jenny had a beautiful body, with silky pubic hair, and she turned me on tremendously. However, she wasn’t clean and fresh down there, and I had to teach her all about washing up, because she couldn’t douche, being a virgin, with her little hymen still in place.

We’d sit in a tub together, and I would play with her little titties and suck them and go down on her. I adored her so much I became protective, like a lover, toward her.