The Price: My Rise and Fall As Natalia, New York's #1 Escort

by Natalie McLennan

  At my mom’s insistence, I kept tap dancing, and kept winning.

  The tap competitions weren’t quite JonBenét-land, but whenever there’s a stage full of young girls in leotards eager to please older men, there’s going to be a creepy factor—especially if the girls have started to blossom. I had woken up one morning and found that I had gone from being a cute and pure pre-teen to a brown-haired young Britney. If you think teenage boys are obsessed with sex, you’ve never met a girl who’s hit her sexuality early. It hits us hard. I wanted it bad, all of the time. By the time I was sixteen, my hormones were raging out of control. I could never tell my mom, but part of why I kept doing those competitions was that I liked all the other little girls’ fathers imagining my naked body under my tights. It turned me on.

  My coup de grâce came when I won the Canadian Nationals. I was proud of the accomplishment, but I would have been happier if I had been the best at something I actually cared about.

  A year later, I graduated from high school and finally had enough of tap dancing. I was a national champ. I had even gotten the chance to dance with Gregory Hines at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Where else could it take me? I retired my tap shoes and got accepted to Montreal’s Dome Theatre School, second only to the National Theatre School of Canada.

  I fell in love with acting. At the Dome, I didn’t smoke, drink or do any drugs for three years. I didn’t need to. I was so consumed by what I was studying, I had no interest in anything else.

  * * *

  After I graduated from the Dome, I stayed in Montreal, while my actor boyfriend at the time left for New York to try and conquer America. Despite the obvious odds stacked against me and every other aspiring Kim Cattrall (yes, she’s Canadian), I thought I’d have a better shot as a big fish in a small (albeit often frozen) pond. I was the only actor in my class to have an agent a year before graduation—and not just any agent. He represented another Canadian, Elisha Cuthbert, Jack Bauer’s hottie daughter on 24.

  Six months later, my boyfriend called me to tell me he’d finally scored his first part. He invited me down to New York to see him in action. After the show, a musical in which he ended up naked on stage, I went outside to wait for him to get dressed. I was sitting on the stoop when a middle-aged woman dressed in a flowy dress, lots of scarves and lots of bangles walked up to me.

  “Excuse me, are you an actor?” she asked in an upper-class English accent that screamed thespian.

  I was sitting on the steps of an acting school.

  I answered, “Yes,” and let her continue.

  “Would you like to audition for a play? I’m directing a Shakespeare.”

  Without thinking, I replied, “Uh, thanks. But I’m just here on vacation. I actually live in Montreal.”

  “Right,” she said. “Well, cheers, good luck.”

  And then she walked into the theater.

  I sat there for about thirty seconds, and then jumped up. What the hell was I thinking? How many people get offered an audition for a play in New York while sitting on a stoop? It was right out of some kind of showbiz fairy tale. I ran after her.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” I yelped. “Actually, I would be interested in that part!”

  I auditioned for her on the spot, wowing her with my repertoire of contemporary and classical monologues, including a Lady Macbeth.

  * * *

  My mom wasn’t thrilled when I told her about my latest role. As much as she was my biggest fan, allowing me to move to New York on the drop of a dime was not her idea of responsible parenting. However, I wasn’t her little girl anymore, and she knew it.

  So I landed in Manhattan with no plan whatsoever. I crashed on the couch of two Canadian girls who lived in Spanish Harlem and got a job answering phones at a snobby Upper East Side hair salon.

  I figured out quickly why the lady in the wispy dress and jangling jewels was recruiting off the street. The company was a mess. The actors had huge egos and no talent, and despite her impressive accent she didn’t know her Bard from her butt.

  But it was a break. A random, non-paying minor role in a crappy off-off-Broadway production of The Tempest, but I had made it out of Canada.

  After the play wrapped, I got my own place and a regular gig with another small theater. I even went on to perform at Juilliard, playing Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  * * *

  Fast-forward three years to 2003. The fairy tale was over. My actor boyfriend was long gone and for the last two years I had been seeing a native New Yorker named Paul. He was an MIT graduate and during our honeymoon period, he had embodied the loving, supportive boyfriend persona every girl dreams of. He had helped me overcome the daunting obstacles newcomers face when confronted by the harsh reality of New York, doing things like getting me a cell phone when I didn’t have credit history and taking trips home to Canada with me at Christmas time.

  More recently, he had begun to drink like Falstaff. I was barely making rent busting my ass as a bartender, and I wasn’t getting any decent auditions, let alone good roles. The only parts I did get were in obscure experimental productions in crappy black-box theaters above delis. I was actually in a play called, Platonov! Platonov! Platonov! or the Case of a Very Angry Duck—and I didn’t even play the duck.

  About once a day, I’d get this cramping knot in my stomach that pierced my whole body. I was a ball of panic, anxiety and frustrated creative energy ready to explode.

  Paul and I began fighting—a lot. His temper got more and more unpredictable. As we drifted apart, I delved deeper and deeper into the dark underbelly of the city’s nightlife demimonde, losing myself in harder and harder drugs. After I got off work at the bar, I’d hit the clubs and then the after-hours scene. I had a cell phone full of fake friends I could call any night of the week and instantly tap into a well of seemingly limitless debauchery.

  It was like I had been recruited. I quickly became a crowd favorite of the city’s elite hardcore party people—club promoters, bankers, rock stars, real estate developers, and trust fund kids—who all loved to have as many girls around as possible. I was happy, pretty, liked to dance, get high, kiss girls, and best of all, I was drama free. I was always on the list at the clubs, and when they closed, I always got the 4:30 a.m. call or text when they needed more girls to keep the night interesting.

  My first after-hours marathon was at the Tribeca loft of Edward Albee, the playwright and legend of American theater. His protégé hosted an extended bender while Albee was out of town. Wearing only sunglasses and undies, I rolled around on the gorgeous hardwood floor for three days, giggling in disbelief that I was tripping my 32B tits off on mushrooms and ecstasy at Edward Albee’s house. And so it went. One night I would find myself in a penthouse looking out over all of downtown Manhattan sharing lines with an heir to a banking fortune, a Jamaican drug dealer, a semi-famous actor and a pouty model from Estonia who had just done the cover of French Vogue. The next, I’d end up in a fifth-floor walkup in the East Village freebasing with a girl named Billy.

  It was like a secret club where the instant intimacy evaporated into thin air the moment the sun came up or the drugs ran out—whichever came first.

  So I’d try to trick time. I’d attempt to will a wormhole to that magical place where my buzz would never fade, and the sun would never rise. Inevitably, no matter how hard I tried, the night would morph from the orange glow of the streetlight, to the gray of dawn, to that unholy white blast of day that shoots through the blinds no matter what lengths you go to block it out. With the sun’s cue, I’d gather up my stuff, check my nose in the mirror by the elevator and try to steady myself for the urban machine that had kicked into gear below. Cursing my one mistake, I’d ask myself: Why didn’t I bring my sunglasses? If only I had sunglasses, I’d be able to face the fact that my life was going nowhere.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MY FIRST TIME

  When I got the chance to try out for the lead in a play about the late great Andy Warholista Edi
e Sedgwick, one of my childhood heroes, I jumped at the opportunity.

  My callback for Andy and Edie was in a dingy basement performance space on the Lower East Side. I had heard that the playwright, a writer for Women’s Wear Daily, had a reputation as a troubled genius. So I brought him a present—a shell casing from a 9mm. I knew I had to do something to get his attention if I were going to be considered for the part of the skinny, blonde Edie. Bearing curves and curly dark-brown hair, I’m more or less her physical opposite. I did my monologue, handed the director the bullet, and walked out the door. I can tell in a second when I have guys in the palm of my hand. This guy was smitten.

  Plus, it was January 30th—my birthday.

  I needed a drink, so I headed to a bar nearby where one of my favorite people in New York was waiting for me with a group of my friends. Who better to celebrate my twenty-fourth year on planet Earth than with a guy who had seen most of it?

  The blue-blooded grandson of a railroad tycoon, Peter Beard is a bon vivant who loves beautiful women, animals, art and anthropology. He discovered the supermodel Iman in an African village; he’s been gored by a rhino; he’s notorious in the nightlife underworld for having the stamina of an elephant and famous in the art world for his gigantic photomontage paintings.

  He’d invited me into his inner circle of models, artists and, well, mostly models. We’d been spending a lot of time together, stoned, making collages on the floor of his loft in Tribeca. (I still have one collage of me and two other naked girls sprawled on his floor. After everything went down, it was the only asset of any real value I owned.)

  After a couple of shots of Patron, Peter said, “Come on, Nat, I have to go see someone,” and he whisked me out the door of my own party.

  We arrived at a second-floor walkup apartment above the Manolo Blahnik store on West 54th Street, between 5th and 6th. It had been crudely converted into a sort of 50s noir workspace, complete with flickering fluorescent lighting and red pleather couches. There was a huge blowup of Frank Sinatra’s mug shot in the entryway. It was dingy and gritty in a cool, old-school way. There were a few people lounging around conspiratorially in the shadows. Peter told me it used to be hipster magician David Blaine’s office, which made total sense.

  I wasn’t quite clear on what kind of business was being conducted by the current occupants, but it didn’t feel legal. We immediately made ourselves comfortable on the floor, where Peter sits whenever possible.

  The boss of whatever it was that was going on sat down beside us. Peter introduced me, “Jason, you have to meet Nat. She’s just the most amazing girl in New York right now.”

  Peter knows how to make a girl feel special.

  I smiled at Jason and gave him my hand. He sat down right next to me on the floor and kissed my cheek.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  He grabbed a plate of coke from some random guy next to us and cut big lines for the two of us. He handed me the straw, “Ladies first?”

  I hesitated. I never felt comfortable partying in front of new people. But then I remembered I was with Peter Beard. He’s like the James Bond of the nightlife world. He has a license to do anything. And if you’re rolling with him, so do you.

  Jason was thrilled to see Peter and seemed completely uninterested in me: “Peter, we have to talk about pictures. Have you seen our Web site? I need you to shoot my girls.”

  Peter chuckled and mumbled something about how the space might make a great backdrop, but he never committed.

  “Come on, Peter,” Jason said. “I need you, man.”

  I pegged Jason as just another New York rich kid party guy. People in New York have a certain vibe about them when they don’t have to work at a day job for their money. He only sat with us for a few minutes before he was called away, but not before he made me put his number in my phone. He told me to give him a call if I ever wanted to make people happy and make lots of money doing it. I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about. But as he walked off, Peter mumbled something about “escorts” and shook his head in an aloof, disapproving way.

  It was all coming together now.

  For fun, Peter and I did a series of photo shoots in Jason’s office over the course of the next three nights. Me standing in front of the Sinatra mug shot; me standing in the grungy stairwell; me crawling on the floor like a horny hyena. While all around us an endless stream of hot young things came and went. Peter might have had a haughty attitude about their line of work, but he sure didn’t seem to mind hanging out and partying with them.

  Jason was never around, but the office manager introduced herself to me as Mona. She looked like a princess out of Lord of the Rings: five-ten, long brown hair, blue eyes and the most beautiful doll face I had ever seen. But I never saw her smile. On the third night, Peter had left, and I was sitting around doing a last line when Mona came over to me and said, “Are you going to hang out here or are you going to work?”

  I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I still didn’t fully grasp what being an “escort” was all about. Did you have sex? Or did you just “escort” a guy on a date and then decide if you wanted to fuck him? I may have been a wild child in high school, but when it came to sex I was really just a theater geek. I had only recently seen porn, and I had never cheated on Paul.

  But I was high, broke, and open to new ideas. I asked her what I could expect to make.

  She broke it down like this, “The rate is $700 an hour. You take home forty-five percent. I have a client ready to go. The appointment is for one hour. He’s an Asian guy. One of our regulars. Totally harmless. He’s waiting to come over and pick you up. If you want to do it, I need to tell him now.”

  Whoa, this was happening fast. I calculated my cut. In one hour I could make as much as I was making over two nights slaving behind the bar serving drunk assholes.

  Fuck it, I thought. I’ll try it. If it’s a nightmare, I’ll never do it again.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to sound confident and upbeat. “That sounds cool.”

  I asked, “Do I need condoms?” trying to get more of a hint of exactly what was expected of me.

  She replied, coldly, “I’m sorry. I can’t talk about that with you.”

  I was totally confused.

  You’re about to send me out on a $700-an-hour job, but you can’t tell me what I’m supposed to do?

  “Mona, is Jason here?” I was desperate for a familiar face—someone who would at least offer me some words of encouragement as this was, after all, my first ever client. I felt sixteen again, like when I was about to have sex for the first time.

  She turned her back on me and picked up the phone to call the client. Luckily, there was another girl lounging around on the couch smoking and doing lines. Desperate for details, I told her it was my first time and asked if she had any advice. She told me to relax. I had nothing to worry about. She’d seen this client before, and he was all about new girls—he’d love me. He was a nice Asian guy, totally harmless.

  I already knew that! But what was I supposed to do exactly?

  The buzzer rang. It was my date. I was out the door before I could think about it too much more.

  He had a slick, modern apartment with an amazing view of the Chrysler Building. He was skinny, not too tall, about forty years old, dressed in an expensive lightweight gray suit. He made me a drink. I asked if he was going to join me he said no, he didn’t drink. I sipped a Grey Goose and cranberry, wishing I was a little less jittery and a little more drunk. The coke I’d been doing all night was making me feel anxious, but I was too timid to down the vodka like a shot and ask for another one. He excused himself for a minute, and I took the opportunity to knock one back and pour another. He returned, took my hand, and led me to the bedroom. He asked me again if this was really my first time, and I told him yes. He seemed to believe me.

  Once we were in bed together, something took over, and I was able to be myself. He came and was happy. He laughed a little and said I would do real
ly well in the business.

  The girls were right. He was totally harmless. Super polite and pretty lackluster in bed. It was the easiest money I had ever made. My conscience felt clear. Paul and I were over anyway. And if we weren’t before, we were now. I was free to do and be whatever I wanted.

  I was back at the office in less than two hours. Mona didn’t ask how it went. She didn’t even say hi. She just wrote me out a check for $310. I had to ask her to leave the name-field blank because I didn’t have an American bank account.

  It was five-thirty in the morning when I finally got home to Paul. He was passed out drunk on the couch.

  * * *

  My brilliant audition for the Edie play (and the ammo, apparently) scored me the role of Ingrid Superstar, the mysterious factory girl who disappeared in 1987 and was never seen again. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. At each rehearsal, the director became more and more obsessed with me. He would shower me with praise in stalker-esque phone messages, citing my “unending dedication to the theater” and my “intrinsic work ethic and creative vibe.”After the twentieth time he tried to get in my pants, I finally told him to fuck off and quit the production. He was one of the most irritating people I have ever met.

  His name is Peter Braunstein. Two years later on Halloween, he dressed up like a fireman, broke into the apartment of a woman he worked with at a fashion magazine and sexually tortured her for sixteen hours in some kind of bizarre revenge fantasy. The attack was a huge tabloid cover story in the city, and when he fled, the cable news networks ate it up. After a multi-state manhunt he was eventually caught in Memphis, Tennessee, convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to eighteen years to life in a New York State prison.

  I can pick ‘em, can’t I?