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

by Natalie McLennan

  It was the first time I felt awkward and unsexy. My confidence evaporated, and a million questions raced through my head. When I became an escort, I developed this almost overwhelming desire, a need even, to please people—my clients’ enjoyment became my entire focus. Now, I had done something to throw the agent off. By hoping to get something out of him, I had totally destroyed the mood.

  Nevertheless, that didn’t stop him from getting hard immediately and getting on top of me. As he started to pound away, I couldn’t relax. I was trying to suppress what was really going on in my head—trying not to think about the power this person had to fulfill all the dreams I had originally come to this country to pursue. I tried to pretend he was someone random to help defuse my anxiety, but that wasn’t helping, so I decided to live the fantasy. Every woman has created the fairy tale in her head at some point when having sex—This is the guy for me, he really loves me—even when she knows he’s not and probably doesn’t.

  So I shrugged it all off and started fucking him like I was Julia Roberts, and he was Richard Gere. I told myself that he was going to look down at me and decide I was the most beautiful, talented women he’d ever experienced. He’d hook me up with the best manager, get me cast in the next Leo vehicle and give me the life I had always dreamed of. I didn’t know what he was thinking about or feeling, but I was living a superstar life in L.A. as he pounded away. I came. Hard. Then I gave him a blowjob like his cock was my Academy Award.

  I hung around and tried to strike up some conversation with him. But he wasn’t buying the GFE act. In fact, he wasn’t that into me at all.

  When the hour was up, I slid out the door. He barely grunted a good-bye.

  I would always get so mad at Jason when he’d try to lure young innocent girls right in front of me, or enlist me to help him. I was like the angel on his shoulder, trying to keep him from becoming evil. Some women were dying for a shot at the money. But there were others who were just not emotionally equipped to do what we did, and they were easy to spot. All you had to do was look into their eyes. I thought I was immune, that

  I was the ultimate actress who could go into character four times a day and walk away untouched. But as I made my way down Fifth Avenue, trying to hail a cab as buses and cars zipped by, I asked myself for the first time, “Was I in over my head?”

  * * *

  A prominent British Lord called the agency one day. He said he liked to watch. He explained that he had a male escort whom he wanted me, and only me, to fuck while he watched. When I called him to coordinate the time and place, he warned me that this escort, Taylor, was so handsome that every girl who met him fell in love with him. When he told me about Taylor in his almost comical, posh English accent, he made him out to be some sort mythical hero out of X-Men.

  I told him I was up for the challenge.

  By the time I showed up, the suite at the Waldorf Astoria was already trashed: empty bottles of champagne, coke everywhere, porn on the TV. When I took the credit card imprint and read “Lord” it was only because my jaw was so clenched from the huge line of coke I’d just done that it didn’t hit the floor.

  Taylor was as beautiful as the Lord had said. He had dark hair and dark eyes—picture a smoldering Brad Pitt, but taller. He must have been six-four with long, lean muscles, like an Olympic swimmer. He could pick me up with one hand. And he did. We went straight to the bedroom. I was a little nervous, but more turned on by this new person. He knew the Lord well—they exchanged a hug. When Taylor looked around the room he said, “We’re going to have a little talk later. You can’t keep going like this. But for now,” he fixed his eyes on me and smiled this warm, genuine smile, “let’s have some fun.”

  He sat on the bed, and I sat on his lap, facing him. We started kissing—that great kissing: deep and slow, hard and in synch. I hesitated and looked toward the living room of the suite, not sure if I was behaving as per the Lord’s wishes.

  “Shh.” Taylor turned my face back to his. “You pay attention to me, I pay attention to you, and he’ll love every minute of it.”

  I smiled a little. The better our sex was, the happier our client would be.

  And we began. We went for almost two hours. I got lost in space giving him a blowjob that I think I felt and loved just as much as he did. His penis was strong and big. The only awareness I had of the Lord was our positioning, the angle of our bodies. Other than that I have no idea what he was doing besides watching.

  In his Brideshead Revisited accent, he’d make the occasional comment like, “Taylor, why don’t you turn her around? I’d like to see you fuck her from behind.” But not so often that it broke our rhythm, and his voice was so pristine I felt like Lord Olivier himself was directing us.

  He would bring a silver tray over with a bump for me every once in a while. Taylor never took any. I guessed it was because it would mess with his hard-on. He came over and over again. I was on top when I felt my mind and body connecting and a really intense orgasm starting. I made it last. He felt so good inside of me, once I’d come I thought my orgasm was over, but then it started again. I was confused but let it take over again. I think it was the closest thing to Tantric I’d ever experienced.

  Afterwards, Taylor took me out for a coffee at a nearby diner. He said he was worried about me. He told me I would never get ahead if I kept hurting myself with drugs. He said that he was living proof that you could develop a clientele and lead a wonderful, healthy life as a professional escort.

  Taylor was one of the only people who cared enough to offer me solid advice. And though I didn’t heed any of it, he and I formed a friendship that would last through my darkest moments. After our coffee, he dropped me off at the loft, and it was back to New York Confidential.

  * * *

  Taylor was the exception. At least eighty percent of the escorts I knew got high on pot, coke, heroin, ecstasy, crystal meth, Special K, Valium, Vicodin, Oxycotin, Percocet, Xanax, Ritalin, Adderall, Dexidrine… the list goes on. Many New York agencies specialize in party girls. They are in the $300-400 per hour range, and they also deal coke to the clients. There is a lot of money to be made in that racket. These bookings go on for hours, sometimes days. In theory, if you’re a girl who likes her drugs, these are dream appointments—you get paid to get high and have sex—but it can be exhausting, and it sometimes got ugly. Girls told me stories about guys freaking out as the drugs wore off because they couldn’t get it up, or the flipside, because they had a four-hour Viagra and coke hard-on and couldn’t come at all, or because they’d just blown thousands of dollars, and the party was over, and they were due at the trading desk in a couple of hours and hadn’t slept in days.

  In the first couple of months even I had a few of those types of dates. They weren’t as bad as you might think. But once our prices shot up from $800 to $1,200 an hour, everything changed. The Hyatt, W and Marriot upgraded to the St. Regis, Four Seasons and The Peninsula. Soon, almost none of the clients partied. It was a much better and healthier vibe.

  * * *

  Financially speaking, my best client was Neil. He was from old money, the CEO of his family’s company. He ran one of those unsexy, behind-the-scene businesses no one ever thinks about.

  The appointment had been booked for over a month with another girl. As the date got closer, Jason got on the phone and spoke to Neil about me, suggesting we change it up, and I go see him instead. Neil hesitated; he didn’t like last minute changes. We spoke on the phone for a few minutes, and he asked me about myself. I told him I was an actress from Canada and that I’d only been escorting for a few weeks. I asked him what he was looking for, so that we could see if we really were compatible.

  “I want someone to have a really nice evening with. I’m looking for a beautiful girl, outside and in.”

  His slow, deliberate Midwestern accent was curious to me; I hadn’t heard anything quite like it before, especially not in New York.

  I smiled and said, not to brag, but I considered myself beautiful,
but on the inside where it’s really important.

  “Although, I’ve been told I’m nice to look at, too.”

  He laughed, and I put him back on the phone with Jason. They talked for a few more minutes, and Jason gave me a thumbs-up sign.

  I was going to Chicago.

  The first time we met, Neil fell in love with me. His marriage was 100% about family. He was deeply committed to his child, but his relationship with his wife wasn’t sexual or passionate in any way. I gave him a blowjob, and then we had sex. It was really generic, but apparently as far as he was concerned I was the best thing since sliced bread. He was so satisfied I couldn’t help but feel something approaching compassion and empathy for him. He was the client I saw the most. Our first appointment was in Chicago. We spent four hours together awake, and then the next morning I flew back to New York with six thousand dollars. I kept in touch with him via email, and he booked me for the weekend. He wired $26,000 to the New York Confidential account, and we spent three days together on a private island in the Florida Keys.

  We saw each other about a dozen times over the next ten months or so. He paid $6,000 a day, and we would spend two to three days together. He wasn’t very tall, or handsome, really. He was from Ohio, thin, pasty and very conservative. He was romantic in a traditional kind of way, but if there was one client I had to act with, it was him. He would never have been into threesomes, and if I’d have introduced him to Jordan, my crazy, party girl, new best friend, I think he would have been on the next plane back to Cincinnati. But of all my clients, he cared for me the most. He always listened, and I was honest with him. Except when I wasn’t.

  Our New York “dates” were always the same. Neil and I would go out for dinner together, share a bottle of wine and go back to his hotel on Central Park South. One night, his driver had just dropped us off after an elegant dinner at Le Cirque. I had had some wine and was feeling good. I took a nice bath, removed the tags from my new floor-length, black silk La Perla robe and slipped it on. I had never felt anything else like it. I opened the bathroom door and stood in the doorway. He looked at me and sort of half smiled.

  “Do you like it?” I asked.

  I knew he did. He’d bought it for me.

  “Just don’t wear it for anyone else.”

  “Okay,” I promised, but, of course, it was a lie. It’s not like I had a closet full of $600 robes, a new one for each client. I did think of him every time I wore it, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what he had in mind.

  I walked over to him. He untied the robe and started kissing my tits and my stomach. I lay back on the enormous bed and pulled him into me. We kissed, and he asked if he could go down on me. I had to bite my tongue. I hate it when guys ask, but I smiled instead. He started to lick my pussy, and my good mood returned. It felt good, but it was hard to focus. Like a lot of clients, he could be deathly boring. And after a bottle of wine or three at dinner, I was ready to go out and have some fun. As his tongue started circling my nipples, and he worked down to my pussy, I tried not to think about my friends partying sixty blocks downtown.

  I tried to get into his vibe, his pace, to become the other half of this guy who thought I was Aphrodite reincarnated. It worked. I started to enjoy myself, my pussy got wetter, dripping down to my ass. He wasn’t so boring after all.

  I decided to reward him with a really good blowjob. I knew what he liked. Gentle and soft, but not too intense, or he would come before we had a chance to fuck.

  I pulled out a condom and put it on him. He loved being on top of me and looking into my eyes. I let him look. He fell asleep almost right after he came. I went downstairs, smoked a cigarette outside the canopied entrance to the hotel and watched the cars turn into the park. I was looking forward to the $12,000 Neil would be paying me for our two days together. God, could it really be this easy?

  When I woke up the next morning, Neil was sitting in the living room of our suite. He seemed removed and upset.

  I thought he was pissed it was eleven, and I was just rolling out of bed. He wasn’t paying me to sleep. Did he think I was doing drugs? Neil is the kind of guy who’s probably never seen a joint, let alone smoked one.

  “Don’t worry about it. I ordered breakfast, but it was getting cold so I ate it.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Natalia, I’m not happy,” he said.

  Wow, this was a first. I’d had many clients open up to me, but no one had come right out and said it so plainly. I listened, waiting for him to reveal what the source of his unhappiness was. I was kind of nervous—I wanted to be a good friend and help him in some way, but I was totally caught off guard.

  “I want more from our relationship.”

  Whoa? What did he mean?

  “I don’t see where our relationship is going,” he said.

  He said he wasn’t happy our relationship wasn’t progressing. He wanted more. He wanted me to move to Cincinnati where he’d get me an apartment. I’d become his full-time mistress.

  I was knocked off guard. Maybe I should have seen it coming, with all of the romantic dinners and gifts. I mean he lavished me with gifts: an incredible, burnt red John Galliano gown (which I’d never worn), Gucci gloves, Christian Dior boots, a couple of dresses, the black La Perla robe….

  At first, I was dumbfounded. What do you say to a guy like that? “Dude, you’ve seen Pretty Woman one too many times.”

  But I recovered and gave a flawless performance.

  “But Neil, we’ve had the best time together,” I said. “This has been amazing.”

  I told him what we had was perfect—a simple relationship with clear boundaries. I was exploring my acting career, and I needed to be in New York to do that. I knew he loved me and wanted the best for me, and wanted me to be happy.

  “You have your family in Cincinnati to think about.”

  He was crushed, and I felt horrible. As much as I wasn’t interested in him, I felt something that resembled love. I connected emotionally with all of my clients, even though that’s probably hard to understand.

  It’s incredible how much power I had over guys like Neil. I could have led them on, told them I loved them and then bled their accounts dry. Even worse, I could have blackmailed them by threatening to make that dreaded call to their house that would destroy their lives. (It happens more than you might think.) What separates escorts who manipulate and destroy men from those who don’t is a soul thing. There were women who would squeeze everything they could out of a guy without feeling even an ounce of remorse. For them, this was what you were supposed to do. This was the unwritten code of the business: get whatever you can, when you can. The hardcore escorts will probably read this and think I’m a fool. But I never took advantage of guys, and on some intuitive level, all of my clients knew that. I never lost track of who I was. That’s one reason I was the best.

  My little talk with Neil worked like a charm. He didn’t leave his wife, I didn’t move into a condo in beautiful downtown Cincinnati, and he kept wiring copious amounts of money into the agency for the pleasure of my company.

  The fact was this guy was my bread and butter. He paid my rent, kept my drug habit going and fueled my Manolo addiction. I had to help him see that the fantasy in his head could continue, if he just didn’t let reality sneak its insidious way in.

  * * *

  He is a scion of one of the richest families in North America. He has dark hair, bright cobalt blue eyes and a perfect tan. He’s six feet tall and built like a beach volleyball player. Think JFK Jr., if JFK Jr. were a coke-snorting, up-and-coming Republican who could fuck all night.

  He was my favorite client, for reasons I think will become obvious.

  He called New York Confidential out of the blue one night and asked for me by name. I was sitting right there as Jason made the booking. As he was closing, they started to haggle over the fee. Jason actually put down the phone and asked if I’d be willing to work for $1,000 an hour.

  “Depends,” I said.<
br />
  First things first: “How old is he?” I had had a run of old guys and needed some young blood.

  Jason: “Twenty-eight and hot. And he’s got a super-hot girlfriend, who will be there, too.”

  Me: “Where is he from?” Russians freaked me out.

  Jason: “He lives in California, but he’s originally from New York.”

  Me: “Where is he staying?” A cool hotel is always a good final indicator of a guy’s style.

  Jason: “The W.”

  Good enough.

  Deciding what to wear was pretty easy. Most of what I had in my closet was hot and expensive and made me look sexy, and I was going straight to their room (it was 2:00 a.m.) so I didn’t have to worry about looking too trampy for dinner at Le Bernardin. However, I did take the time to pack my Louis Vuitton duffel bag with all my favorite sex toys (double-sided dildo, restraints—you know, the basics) and was on my way.

  When the girlfriend opened the door, I blushed. She looked just like me, well not exactly, but she was hot, petite, with brown curlyish hair. Add it to my long list of sexual quirks: I’m attracted to girls that look like me. Sue me.

  She introduced herself as Amanda and showed me in. She suggested we sit down and have a glass of champagne. She was dressed like they had been out, so I asked them where they had gone. She said they were at Marquee and Pink Elephant, two super-hip spots of the moment.

  These people couldn’t be cooler, I thought to myself.

  Since she seemed particularly chatty, I asked her what she did. She told me she was an actress. She and Scott had been dating for about a year. They lived in L.A. They were visiting for most of the summer, and she was nervous because he was taking her to meet his parents the following week. I told her she was beautiful and seemed really nice and that I was sure they’d love her.

  Scott appeared out of the back room with his credit card. When I saw the name on it I had to bite my tongue. It was his dad’s; a very well-known, very, very, very rich man. That I recognized him is saying a lot—I’m not exactly a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal. It seemed a little crazy for Scott to be exposing his dad like that. I didn’t even know his real name at this point.