“When they grounded me, well, it was no big deal. I had over a thousand dollars set aside. It seemed I couldn’t spend the money as fast as I could make it, so I had plenty of money. And I also knew what I would do. I wasn’t at loose ends. I had another career just waiting for me, and I went right into it.
“Just like that.”
• • •
GILLIAN: As far as my combining two careers was concerned, I don’t suppose that sort of thing happens very often. I just don’t think it can for any length of time. In my own case, I know I would have quit before long if I hadn’t been grounded. I was making money in two different ways, and one of them took up almost all of my time and a tremendous amount of concentration. You need a certain kind of dedication to function as a stewardess. I never really had it, which may explain why I was never a great stew to begin with, but when tricking started to take up time and energy, I just couldn’t make it as a stewardess any longer.
But you have to remember that I was a pro hooker almost from the first time. You might say that I was an amateur when I conned the nice guy out of two hundred bucks. Maybe. But after that I was strictly business, and I wasn’t just turning an occasional trick to make ends meet. I was doing it on a regular basis several times a week.
Now I know damned well that there are stewardesses around who are what you might call amateur whores. They would hate the label if you tried to pin it on them, but that’s what they are.
JWW: How do you mean that?
GILLIAN: In the usual way. They screw for money.
JWW: What makes them amateurs?
GILLIAN: Partly their own attitude, I suppose. And partly the fact that they don’t do it more than a couple of times a month, if that often. And they don’t exactly ask for money, and they don’t exactly get it on a businesslike basis. It’s more a matter of getting cab fare from the guy, except the cab fare is generally a twenty and sometimes a fifty, or else the cab fare is small and there’s a messenger who shows up the next day with a piece of jewelry that can be hocked for twenty or thirty dollars. They can tell themselves that all the get are presents and favors, but who’s kidding who? They put out and they get paid for it.
JWW: That sort of amateur prostitution isn’t limited to stewardesses.
GILLIAN: Oh, of course not. There’s probably a lot less of it among stews than in other lines of work, as far as that goes. Among the girls I know in the life, quite a few have said that they started out as amateurs in about the way I described. Party girls, I guess some people like to call them. They may have had jobs as models or secretaries or clerks, and now and then they would take a date with a guy, and some money would change hands in the most refined sort of way. The girls I know are ones who ultimately decided to stop kidding themselves and turn pro, but they all will say that they have friends who did the same thing and never did turn pro and are now married with kids and a house out on the Island, and if anybody ever intimated that they were once the next thing to a prostitute, why, they would scratch your eyes out for saying so . . .
I’ll tell you, it’s such a funny world, such a funny life, and the older I get and the more I learn about life and about myself, the funnier it all seems. I do learn about myself and think about such things, although I would prefer to come on brassy and slick. But I’m sure from the things I’ve said you know me well enough to get past the surface.
JWW: Yes, I would say so.
GILLIAN: I think about how I got into this business, and for all that it’s the usual question that the worst kind of John asks, it’s also the question every prostitute asks herself a hundred times a day. Even if we consider ourselves born whores, still, it’s never something we set out to be early in life. It’s more along the lines of something that happened to us, and it’s hard to say where or when or how or why.
JWW: For the most part, you seem pretty well satisfied with the way things worked out.
GILLIAN: Do you really think so?
JWW: Yes, by and large. You question things, but it wouldn’t be healthy if you didn’t. But it seems to me that you aren’t really unhappy to be doing what you’re doing.
GILLIAN: I suppose you’re right. Actually I suppose you are right. It isn’t a bad life. The work is easy and the money is good, and both of those things are important. They aren’t everything, John, but we can’t kid ourselves. They are important, and the older you get the more important they become.
JWW: Amen to that.
GILLIAN: Also, you know, this feels right for me. This way of living. You talk about identity and it’s just a fashionable word, but maybe it means something. This is where I am. For the time being, anyway. I don’t know that I’ll do this forever. But for the time being.
That’s another way that hooking is like being a stew, I guess. There’s no future in it, really. Not in the long run. But sometimes there’s a good present.
Kim—The Autograph Hound
“I remember the first time I went to New York, I was a kid in high school at the time. There was this world premiere of a movie on Broadway and a crowd of us stood there in the rain for hours until the celebrities started to arrive. It took so long that I thought no one would ever show up, but then they started coming, and it was just one limousine after another pulling up in front of the theater and everybody who got out, everybody was somebody! It was the most fantastic feeling. I felt—well, I don’t know how to say it except that I felt as though I was in a movie myself with all of these stars playing opposite me.”
She manages an uncertain smile. She is a pixie of a girl with bright dark eyes and a trim figure. Just twenty-two, she has been a stewardess for a little over a year. Her home base is New York, and she flies primarily to and from Los Angeles.
“I don’t know why it is, but I’ve always had this thing for celebrities. People in the public eye. By this I don’t necessarily mean people in show business, although when you hear the word celebrity you naturally think first and foremost of show business. At least I do. But anyone prominent, really. Anybody who is somebody. I’ve always divided the world up into two classes of people, the ones you’ve heard of and the nobodies.
“When I was a kid I was a real nut. I was particularly crazy about musicians. You know, rock musicians, singers. That whole scene. I collected records and I belonged to it must have been a dozen fan clubs and I went to the concerts and screamed my head off for this group or that group. I was the typical teenybopper fan. I had pictures of all the different stars.
“A lot of girls go through this but outgrow it. I did and at the same time I didn’t. I outgrew being a teenybopper, for example. Now there are girls who make the groupie scene in their late teens and go through the screaming bit and even chase around after the musicians, but I was past that by the time I was, oh, fourteen or fifteen. It just seemed childish in a way that I couldn’t accept any more. I’m glad of that, too, because when I see these groupie girls nowadays I just think they’re pathetic. And the musicians, I’ve been on a lot of flights with these rock musicians, they’re always flying to one concert or another, and I’ve gotten to know some of them, and honestly, they have nothing but contempt for these girls, the groupies. They may use them, you know, sexually, but even so it’s a very contemptuous thing, they just use them without having the slightest feeling or respect for them, and actually they mock them, that’s what it comes to. I’ve worked flights where we would have a rock group on board and a contingent of fans would meet the plane, all of those yelling, screaming girls, and some of them as old as I am, really, and I look at them and try to imagine what it would have been like if I had wound up like that, and it gives me the chills. Because I got completely away from this years ago, you know, but if I hadn’t, well, I might have wound up like those poor pathetic girls.”
But while Kim outgrew the teenybopper stage, she did not cease to be fascinated by celebrities. Instead, she merely continued her fascination on a more sophisticated level. She got away from the herd aspect of groupie behavior along wit
h its juvenile connotations, but prominent persons remained her main area of interest—and, specifically, her sexual fixation. It was her interest in celebrities which led Kim to become a stewardess.
“I went into it for the glamour,” she said frankly. “I think a lot of girls do, although they may not admit it in those terms. For some of them the glamour means travel and new faces and associating with pilots. It’s the same with some girls who become nurses—they think doctors are glamorous or they may find the whole idea of life and death very dramatic. I’m not saying that this is what makes every girl become a nurse or a stewardess, but I think it plays a part in a lot of cases.
“For me, I wanted to be somebody, and yet I knew I didn’t have the talent or drive to do anything distinguished on my own. If you haven’t got it, why try? I figured that the closest I could come to being someone significant was by associating with significant people, as if some of their glamour would rub off on me.
“Or to put it another way, I wanted to get into that feeling of excitement I first got outside that movie theater on Broadway. At that premiere. I really felt alive that day in a very special way.”
• • •
Girls with Kim’s particular orientation have received a certain amount of attention in the past year or so, and a term has been coined to describe them. They are known, quite succinctly, as “Celebrity Fuckers.” The term could hardly be clearer in meaning. Kim and girls like her find their ultimate satisfaction in having sexual relations with prominent persons. These sexual partners are valued not for their looks, personalities, poise, or even sexual ability, but in direct proportion to their prominence in the public eye. One might say that the Celebrity Fucker has carried the old hobby of autograph collecting to its logical extreme.
The basic appeal of this mode of behavior is not too difficult to comprehend. On the one hand, the Celebrity Fucker manages to achieve, if only in her own eyes, a sort of associate prominence, as if sleeping with a star is the closest possible thing to being a star. In addition, there is a definite game aspect to the whole performance; Celebrity Fuckers are apt to compare notes with one another, to brag about particular conquests, and to brandish past lovers, either publicly or to themselves, as a sportsman displays trophies of the hunt.
In Kim’s case, another consideration is certainly highly relevant: she finds sexual relations exciting only when her partner is famous to one degree or another, and she is otherwise incapable of getting any kick out of sex.
• • •
KIM: I know that this all started taking shape a long ways back, like when I was caught up in the teenybopper scene with the fan clubs and screaming at concerts and all. Not that I ever had any personal contact with any of those musicians or anything like that. I didn’t. I never got sexually close to any of them. But when I was twelve and thirteen and fourteen and just beginning to be really aware of sex and of my own body, this was also the time that I was completely hung up on these musicians.
JWW: And they served as sex symbols for you?
KIM: Oh, completely. I would say completely. This is what they do. The average teenybopper doesn’t know anything about music. At those concerts, well, you can’t even hear the music in the first place, not with all the screaming that goes on there. It’s all a sexual thing. You scream and shout and carry on, and you get completely caught up with the whole crowd in the rhythm and all, and you look at those boys and imagine doing things with them, and that’s how teenyboppers get their cookies.
JWW: You actually had climaxes this way?
KIM: Are you serious? Well, I suppose people don’t realize this. I suppose they don’t. I guess if they did parents would never let their little daughters trip off to those concerts. My God, yes, of course I used to come that way. That’s what the entire teenybopper groupie scene is about. It’s sex, pure and simple. You know those revival meetings they have in the South, where the women roll around on the floor and scream and shout? Well, they have orgasms that way. They come.
JWW: Sometimes they do, yes. But in most cases I don’t think they think of it in those terms. It’s a religious experience, and if it’s basically sexual in nature, I don’t think most participants see it that way.
KIM: Maybe teenies don’t at first, either. Because the first time it happens you don’t know what it is. I had my first climax at a concert. I didn’t know what it was. I had never had one before, so how could I know? Then I talked about it later with a girlfriend of mine, and she told me what it was, and showed me how to have the same feeling happen whenever I wanted it to.
JWW: By masturbating, you mean?
KIM: Yes. I got so I used to do that all the time. Rubbing myself with my finger. I could come easily that way, but it was never anywhere near as powerful a sensation as what I used to experience at a concert. Masturbating was just doing it to myself, you know, and I was in control of it, and you can’t blow your mind that way. It was all too self-centered. But at a concert with all the girls around me going ape and the music and the boys on stage, it was much bigger and more explosive. Instead of my doing it, I was there and I couldn’t even keep it from happening. It was like, oh, getting carried away on a wave. That’s a good description of it. Getting picked up by a wave of feeling and just carried out to sea.
JWW: Did you try to duplicate the environment when you masturbated?
KIM: You mean by inviting a crowd of girls over? I don’t think—
JWW: No, I don’t mean that—
KIM: Oh, I see. I didn’t understand you at first. Yes, I guess I did try to get the same kind of thing started. I would play rock music, for instance. It’s amazing that I have eardrums left when you consider the volume I used to play that stuff at. I’m lucky I’m not deaf . . . I would play the records and look at pictures of different musicians while I touched myself, or sometimes I would close my eyes and imagine that a certain musician was doing various things to me. That we were having intercourse. I used to have certain pictures of this one star with very tight pants so that you could see the outline of his penis and I would think about that, you know, and do things like kissing the picture. Crazy kid things. You look at the average girl that age and you think how cute and nuts and kooky she is, and actually she has sex fantasies like this. And I was pretty tame compared to some of the girls in that bag. I never managed to get next to the stars, see. But the real dyed-in-the-wool groupies will find ways to get to the boys’ dressing rooms or their hotel rooms, and they’ll have sex with them. These are girls as young as thirteen or fourteen who are doing this, and there are more of them than you would think. They’ll even bribe other men in order to get to the musicians. For example they may have sex with a bellhop in order to get upstairs in the hotel. Just young kids, and here they have all these ways of using sex which are too old for them and which are also not normal and can’t lead them to a normal attitude toward sex.
JWW: Aside from your experiences at concerts and in autoeroticism, did you have any direct experiences with sex during those ears?
KIM: Not until I was done with the teenybopper thing. But as I said, I outgrew that fairly early, at fifteen or so. I had been pretty ugly before then, flat-chested and kind of pimply, and at fifteen I started to blossom. I didn’t go and turn into Miss America, but my complexion cleared up and my figure filled out, and boys started to take an interest in me.
JWW: Perhaps that was why you began to get away from the rock music scene.
KIM: Oh, probably. But also it was a matter of outgrowing it and feeling too old for it.
JWW: I see.
KIM: But the dating I did, it didn’t really take the place of what I had had before. That’s why I don’t think you could say that being popular was the reason for my getting away from the teenybopper scene. As far as sex was concerned, I did get involved to a degree with the boys I dated, but it never really meant anything to me. I couldn’t feel it.
JWW: You didn’t become excited?
KIM: Excited, yes. But not really excited. D
o you know what I mean?
JWW: I don’t think so.
KIM: Well, it was the same as the difference between what I felt at the concerts and what I could make myself feel by playing with myself. When I went out with a boy and we necked or petted, I would get sexually excited, but I was never really transported. I might even have an orgasm, but it was the kind of orgasm that I could make myself have by masturbating. It wasn’t a moving experience. It was an orgasm, but just a little sort of tickle, not a big moment.
JWW: I see.
KIM: That’s probably why I never really did that much with the boys I dated. I would park with a boy if I sort of liked him and if he really wanted to, and we would run through the things that kids do. Feeling each other and handling each other and so on. And eventually I did have intercourse a few times. I guess I must have done it with three boys before I started as a stew.
JWW: And it, too, was not particularly satisfying?
KIM: That’s about it. It wasn’t a bad experience the way it was for some kids, but it wasn’t terrific, either. I figured maybe that was as much as sex could be. What I had experienced at the concerts, well, I began to think that maybe that had only been going on in my imagination. That it was part of getting caught up in what all the other girls were feeling and that it wasn’t exclusively sexual at all, and that what I was getting with these boys was all there was to it.
But at the same time, oh, I had the feeling that there was something more, and every now and then I would get a little bit of a hint of it. I don’t know how to put this into words exactly, but I thought, oh, that I was like wasting my time with these boys.
JWW: That you should have been doing something else?
KIM: No, see, I put it wrong. Because what else was there for me to do? No, maybe not that I was wasting my time but that I was sort of marking time. Sort of like running in place and waiting until it was time for me to do whatever it was that I was going to do.
Sex and the Stewardess (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 14