Heidi Fleiss \nHOLLYWOOD - Heidi Fleiss may have declared bankruptcy and turned to the Internet to resurrect her life, but the former Hollywood Madam's concurrent plan to write a tell-all book has at least one of her former employees angling to beat her to the punch.
Former Fleiss girl Judy Filanov is getting ready to dish well before a Fleiss tome can come forward, according to the New York Post.
And Filanov is ready to detail just how far Hollywood has gone in a sex-as-pawn power game, the paper says, not to mention whether Fleiss had help from the mob in "getting where she was."
The 33-year-old Filanov often earned $25,000 a week while working for Fleiss, the Post says, while her clients included some of the top hitters in or around Hollywood, not to mention off-duty affairs, reportedly, with the like of Jack Nicholson, Nicolas Cage, Charlie Sheen, and Mickey Rourke.
Filanov tells the paper Nicholson was "like a fun little teddy bear to play with" and that Sheen, despite his reputation for rough stuff with the ladies and a lawsuit from two porn stars, "was a wonderful lover…nothing arrogant about him.
"He (even) paid for it the first time," she says. "I still have a copy of his check."
On the other hand, Filanov tells the Post, Nicholson had a less-than-tasteful side to him. She says the Oscar-winner had a large stable of girls could call upon and often dumped a woman in the middle of an evening if somebody else caught his fancy.
"Jack liked to have a lot of girls," she said. "He was into sex and drugs, usually cocaine and two or three girls at a time. I would get [angry] with him about it sometimes, and tell him to get rid of the other girls. Jack was fun, but he was not a person to cross."
Filanov now lives in Ottawa, Canada, with her five-year-old daughter. She moved there from Los Angeles six years ago after Fleiss, knowing the Federal government was moving in, told her to leave the country. She underwent eighteen months' treatment for drug and alcohol addiction, the Post says, but has been sober a year.
She left Ottawa when she came of age and set out to become a star, and ended up in Los Angeles after a short television stint in Vancouver and a marriage to a cocaine dealer who'd been murdered. On her first night, she was brought to a private party and was shortly brought to the Fleiss stable.
She made friends in the Hollywood community and also made some of the A-list parties, where she says she'd seen regular orgies, drugs, and a taste that "these wealthy, famous people" had anything but the restraint she'd assumed them to have.
She lived in the guesthouse of producer Robert Evans for seven months, until he learned of her husband's allegedly mob-related murder. Evans suggested Filanov call Fleiss, who often supplied the girls for his lavish parties.
In the beginning, Filanov says, life in Heidiwood was "nirvana," with the Hollywood Madam "look(ing) after her girls and ma(king) sure they only slept with the wealthiest or most famous," with the studios themselves fighting over the Fleiss girls.
"They would want us for parties and there would be bidding wars if one studio had us booked for a premiere and another one wanted us for a wrap party," she tells the Post. In these circumstances, I could make $10,000 in a single night."
The IRS is said to be probing three American film studios to see if they hid money spent on the Fleiss operation, the paper says, "as business expenses" - effectively having taxpayers subsidize prostitution. Filanov tells the paper she believes "many" film executives used "slush funds" to pay for prostitutes when they wanted to impress an investor or lure a star.
She says her total earnings by 1993 hit as high as $800,000 - and liked being treated like a lady. But she also says sex wasn't the real story for her clients - it was the ego trip. "You're what these kind of men want," she said. "They need somebody who can turn heads when they walk into a restaurant. They drive a Rolls or a Jag to impress when they drive up, and they need somebody like me for when they walk inside. It's all about making them feel there is no one more special than they are."
Filanov loved the supercharged life but didn't see she was losing herself, she tells the Post. She began feeling used when she saw her affairs with the stars had nothing to do with anything but her status as a top call girl.
"You lose who you are," she tells the paper. "You play so many faces you forget which one really belongs to you. I did not have an identity - it depended on where I was…Hollywood makes you feel that as long as you have some part of yourself in the limelight you are special. It is such a lie."
And she didn't go without at least one unpleasant breeze from her past, either - a reputed mob boss, Joseph Dente, "kind of took me under his wing," she tells the Post. Dente apparently fell in love with her, but that brought new danger - from Rourke, who asked her to tell Dente to quit sending his men over to him over jealousy, and from Fleiss, who told her that her relationship with Dente was going to make it "impossible" for her to work.
"Heidi was so arrogant about Joe Dente," Filanov tells the paper. "She would never admit this but she had a lot of help from various Mafia groups getting to where she was."
Filanov suffered a small heart attack in 1993, only to be told by Fleiss when she left the hospital that she had to leave town because the Federal government was coming after the Hollywood Madam's operations. Filanov says that caused her to leave behind everything she'd saved from her life as a call girl. She returned to Canada and became pregnant with her daughter.
She says having her daughter saved her life, forcing her to abandon the self-centered lifestyle she came to know. She now lives in a small apartment and on $800 a month as personal assistant to a former client.
