Pandering [Hardcover]

Heidi Fleiss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2003

In a stunningly candid and courageous memoir, the notorious Hollywood Madam tells her own story for the first time. From a lucrative babysitting empire at the age of 13 to a global network of call girls and customers that stretched from Los Angeles to Kuwait, Heidi Fleiss built and ran the most glamorous and obscenely successful sex business in history. Her spectacular rise and fall captivated the country in the early 90’s, even as it terrified Hollywood’s power elite. Featuring original text, wiretap transcripts, court documents, news clippings, diary excerpts, interviews with hookers, and fantastic original artwork, Heidi tells her story with a fierce regard for the truth. At turns political, passionate, poignant, funny, sexy, angry, outrageous, and wise, Pandering is arguably the bravest and most provocative visual memoir ever published — a book that will make headlines all over again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pretty much everything but the contents of that little black book makes an appearance in this painfully personal memoir-cum-photo-album from Hollywood Madame Fleiss. Court records, wiretap transcripts, facsimiles of seemingly any article that mentions her and incident reports from her two-year prison stint: by rifling through her past as one of America's oddball pseudo-celebrities, Fleiss attempts, as she asserts in a brief introduction, to create a book about "memory, style, culture, and politics, as much as anything else." The copious news clippings are intended to "provide the context, so that the truth of those times can live on," and there's a revealing fascination on Fleiss's part with the endless coverage about her. But the most intriguing documents are the ones that weren't public until this book's release-images and descriptions of Fleiss's fellow inmates, the tug of war Fleiss enacted with prison officials in order to be transferred to a federal boot camp program so she could get out of prison more quickly, the overcrowded halfway house she entered after prison. Fleiss also includes plenty of unrevealing musings ("they say there is nothing like a woman scorned...well nothing compares to the ego of a man"), justifications and recriminations (one section of the book is titled "Jealous and Angry Hookers") in a hodgepodge of commentary that's complemented by the book's cluttered design. With its promise of tell-all titillation, curious celeb-hounds won't be deterred by this media scrapbook's shortcomings.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: One Hour Entertainment Llc (January 31, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972016406
• ISBN-13: 978-0972016407
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 10.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #377,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real-Life Look Inside, February 21, 2003

By 

K. Johnson (US/Asia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pandering (Hardcover)

Many details are told and supported by Fleiss' story, court transcripts and various interviews. This world of wealth, drug use, celebrities, powerful people, LAPD, lies, conniving, deception, world travel and kinky sex, is a real-life look into the debaucherous world of Hollywood that piques the interest.

The constant bickering among Madame Alex (died in '95), Ivan Nagy, and Heidi open the doors to this world of raggedy, back-stabbing, shallow people who have the propensity to lie about what they eat for dinner. But then again, this is L.A.

This book is interesting and describes the workings and personalities of this world. She did make it in her heyday. From her good family and upbringing in Los Feliz which is in the Hollywood/LA scene to her 1.5 million dollar home she purchased from Michael Douglas in Beverly Hills. She did it. Should means justify ends?

What brought her down was her flamboyance, flaunting, and high profile. She talked too much, and in this industry one must be discreet. The police don't care about Madames who "pander," as long as they keep quiet, and provide information as informants. Heidi wasn't quiet, and her info. to the police was often incorrect and/or useless.

Now that she has fallen, she can try to sell the experience of this past, because the present for her (like her past) only has old-bags of wind with deep pockets who'll be her meal-ticket. And today (2003)she's out of her prime even for them. As Madame Alex said, "she wasn't even a 4.5 on a scale of 10," and she sure hasn't improved today. Mentally, she's still a 16 yr. old who's still selling her a** because that's all she's got--besides this book. Kudos to Heidi for putting it out.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This Book Takes Work, September 5, 2003

By 

Travelista (Newport Beach, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pandering (Hardcover)

To set your expectation, this is not a novel. Its a yearbook. If you are a fan of thesmokinggun.com and prefer to read 10 pages of telephone transcripts, rather than having a writer recreate the story for you, then you'll love this book. This is clip art and color copying at its best -- she includes copies of her own notes and address books, questionnaires from her girls and logs and logs of court documents and phone taps.

I would have preferred to hear the story as told to an author, rather than this peek into her photo album.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Misleading, February 7, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pandering (Hardcover)

I like Heidi Fleiss and think she's very intelligent, but this book was such a disappointment for me. First off, it looks like a photo album, and has pictures and newspaper clippings of all her stuff, and every couple of pages their is some of her writing, but not much. It's more about a book of pictures with summaries. No thanks, I have my own photo albums to look thru.