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

by Natalie McLennan

  Clark came by later that night. We checked out the booking sheets for the next day, closed up the office early and retired to my bedroom. We sat around talking for a while. He told me he’d sleep over so I wouldn’t be alone and come back after work the next day. Jason’s dad was picking me up at noon to go see Jason and then Paul Bergrin, Jason’s criminal lawyer.

  The next morning, I made sure my purse was empty of all things illicit. I was freaking—I’d never seen the inside of a jail before. I got into Ron Itzler’s big Mercedes, and we chatted a little about Jason. He summed up being his parent, “You have to be ready for anything when it comes to Jason. Nothing surprises me anymore.”

  Having Jason as a son must be quite the roller coaster. Ron asked me about my family, my life. I tried to stay away from talking about the agency. He was being so warm and nice to me, I didn’t want to remind him that while I was Jason’s girlfriend, I was also his star employee. As we pulled into the parking lot, Ron pulled a pill case out of his jacket pocket, opened it and popped a pill. He handed me a bottle of water and put a pill into my palm as well.

  “Klonopin,” he said. The Rolls-Royce of anti-anxiety meds. I guess it was necessary when you had a son like Jason.

  We walked into the run-down corrections building. We showed our I.D.’s and were led into a bleak waiting room with posters warning us not to try and smuggle in any drugs.

  They called out, “Visitor for Jason Itzler.” I looked at Ron. He indicated for me to go ahead. I smiled weakly and walked toward a female officer.

  “Oh no, no, no, honey. You cannot go in like that,” she waved her hand over my top half. “Your shoulders have to be covered.”

  I had a feeling I was going to screw something up. I felt something go over my shoulders. I looked behind me. It was Jason’s dad putting his suit jacket over me. He patted my cheek, and I walked down the hallway to see Jason.

  He smiled when he saw me, and I smiled, too. I felt like I had seen this scene a million times before on TV. We said the typical stuff to each other: How was he, I was happy to see him, I miss you…. But it felt weird and stilted. I just wanted him to come home. I didn’t want this life. He looked weak—his normal bravado deflated. He tried to give me some pointers about running the agency. He told me to trust Hulbert and Clark…they would make sure everything was okay. (He was half right.) I left and gave Ron his jacket. He slipped it on and went in to see Jason. He was back in less than five minutes. We drove to see Paul Bergrin, the lawyer.

  Bergrin, a hard-as-nails, former federal prosecutor, was upbeat about the situation. It turns out Jason pulled off a crazy move. Knowing he hadn’t done any coke, and the test was wrong, he took drastic action. When his parole officer informed him of the results and explained that meant he was going straight to jail, Jason fell to the floor, faking some sort of heart attack/stroke. As hard as it is for me to believe he had the acting chops to pull it off, he apparently was credible enough for them to rush him to a nearby hospital emergency room. In the ICU, he got the doctors to test his blood again. They did, and it came up negative for cocaine. Bergrin said he’d be able to get him out based on the new test, but it might take a little while.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, back at the bat cave, all hell was breaking loose. Mona was in Peru on vacation, so with the cameras rolling, I was forced to take over the operation. I can confirm the adage: Pimping is not easy. I would much rather be out working than handling all the bullshit that comes with running an office.

  It was midnight, and Scott was on the other end of the phone. He wanted to hang out. The office was really busy, so I couldn’t really leave. But he refused to see anyone else, and I really wanted to go. How could I say no to my favorite future senator?

  I made him promise to book at least three hours, and then he told me that he was at his parents’ place in Greenwich, Connecticut. This was something new. I’d partied at my friends’ parents’ houses in high school, but I’d never worked at one. He told me to start billing him from the time I left my house. I called our usual car service, gave them Scott’s credit card number and told the driver not to worry—I knew how to get to where we were going. Then I kissed Ron and Alexandra goodnight.

  We’d been filming for a few hours, but they knew I wouldn’t be back before morning. They started to reset the lights for Hulbert, and I packed my Louis Vuitton again, this time including every possible garter/fishnet combination I had. My new favorites were some sparkly Roberto Cavalli garters and some lace fishnets I’d found at Hotel Venus, Patricia Field’s store on West Broadway.

  The car ride turned out to be torturous. I popped half a Valium as soon as we pulled away from the loft, but waited until we were on the highway to do a bump. I didn’t want the driver to get pissed and leave me on a corner in the city. After about forty-five minutes, I passed out. I guess I really was that tired. I didn’t wake up until we were in what looked like another country. I thought I was dreaming. There were trees and lawns everywhere. I got the most incredible waft of freshly cut grass.

  The driver wasn’t enjoying his nature ride. He told me he’d been driving around the same block for half an hour and hadn’t been able to wake me up. We were on the right street, but he couldn’t find the address. I got on my cell to Scott right away.

  Scott explained you couldn’t see the house from the street. He told me to tell the driver to take the private driveway right after the house with the white pillars. It was all private driveways with white pillars!

  We eventually found it. I checked myself in the mirror. I had creases on my cheek from falling asleep against the seat. I began frantically rubbing my face. That never works.

  I gave the driver a twenty-percent tip and got out of the car as quickly as I could.

  Scott opened the front door and pulled me quickly inside. I guess he was a little nervous about partying at his parents’ house. Though they probably weren’t due back anytime soon, I guessed it was more the neighbors he was worried about. I followed Scott up the stairs to a sitting room that looked out over the backyard. It went on and on and on. The trees and plants and shrubs and lawn were all gorgeously manicured and sculpted. It was all very Versailles.

  Scott kissed me on the cheek and invited me downstairs. He told me he’d missed me and seemed to genuinely mean it. I’d have to be careful. I could really fall for this guy.

  With Jason in jail, the reality was sinking in, and it wasn’t pretty. Take away the money, the clothes, the lifestyle, and Jason was, well, a criminal. My boyfriend was locked up. Even though things had been going really well between us, it was still in the back of my mind (and heart) that he wasn’t paying me what I was owed. I didn’t want to abandon him in his hour of need, but seeing him sitting in that decrepit Jersey jail, it all didn’t feel like such a fairy tale anymore.

  And there, standing in front of me, was Scott— tall, handsome, well-mannered, sweet, rich-beyond-belief Scott—telling me he’d missed me. Even when he was in bad-boy, coke-sniffing, porno-watching, fucking-me-doggy-style mode, I couldn’t think of anyone more perfect for me. Throw in a little Amalfi Coast, beach houses in Malibu, the Hamptons, South Florida, a lodge in Aspen, the list went on.

  I got off on Jason’s particular brand of crazy, but Scott was like a real life Prince Charming. What girl wouldn’t fall for him?

  * * *

  Paul Bergrin got his day in court to dispute the parole office’s piss test. The judge accepted the hospital’s test results, and Jason was released after spending two weeks behind bars. But there was a catch. He had some new terms to his parole. He had a curfew. He had to be in his Hoboken apartment every night by the stroke of midnight. If he was even one minute late, he would go right back to jail.

  At Jason’s request, Mona and Clark had stepped in after the first week he was locked up and had taken the bulk of the stress off my shoulders, but after he got out, things never really went back to the way they were. Jason was different, preoccupied. I think the ease with which his free
dom was taken spooked him. He didn’t have the drive or spark he’d had before, and he was doing enough K to, well, to knock out a horse.

  So Mona and Clark became the new power couple. They made all the important decisions, collected all the money, hired the new girls. Everything.

  At least once a day, Jason would do a quick survey of the boards, check out the daily totals and get a briefing on any issues that had come up: clients not paying, girls not performing, etc. It made me smile when he overturned their decisions. He seemed to be making sure they both got a good lecture at least once a day, but he wasn’t the commander-in-chief he’d once been.

  Jason and I tried to reconnect. In spite of the ongoing head games, at the end of the day, we shared a bond that I thought couldn’t be broken. But we started to fight—a lot—screaming at each other in vicious verbal throw-downs. We could clear the loft in five minutes. Only Hulbert could handle it. He’d be upstairs in the office trying to cup his hand over the mouthpiece to prevent the client he was trying to close from getting a whiff of our ruthless insult-slinging.

  I continued to be Public Enemy Number One to Mona, and since she was now pregnant—presumably with Clark’s child, although it was everyone’s favorite rumor that it might be Jason’s—I now had her second-in-command gunning for me as well. Mona’s the type to demand her partner’s unconditional support, especially when she’s on the warpath.

  Her first move was to plant the seed in Jason’s mind that I was a drug addict and would drag him down with me if he didn’t cut me loose. Mona started the rumor that I had a secret heroin habit. The truth was, heroin was making cameo appearances at the loft, but never, ever with me. (That would come later.) She hired a batch of ex-models because she said they were every guy’s fantasy, but they were jaded, snobby, boring junkies with eating disorders who’d never quite made it in the fashion industry. They were the ones who brought in the smack.

  At the same time, things were deteriorating between Jason and me. Sometimes I felt like Jason was jealous of my relationships with my clients. Not in the typical boyfriend-who’s-your-pimp way. He was jealous that I got to hang out with them. So many of our clients belonged to the legit world. They led the glamorous status-filled lives Jason had always dreamed of. I think if he could have come along to my appointments with me, he would have. I pictured him admiring the client’s artwork and strolling from room to room while I was getting nailed silly. Then, as opposed to the usual girlfriend experience—affectionate, post-coital quality time—Jason would offer himself up, thereby getting to hang with the big boys. I even imagined him arguing that it was the perfect date: you sleep with the hottest girl, and then, instead of having to listen to her and act interested in what she has to say, you get a mini-boys’ night out: scotch, maybe a cigar and some sports/politics/ pussy talk.

  As if to prove my point, a week after he got back from jail, he got a call from Scott. When Scott let it slip that it was his birthday, Jason insisted on going to the hotel to wish him a happy birthday personally.

  I didn’t know how Scott was going to feel about my bringing a chaperone. When we got to the hotel, I did a quick look around, noticing that Scott had cleaned up, big time. There was no coke on silver trays, and the TV, which would have normally screened some cool porn or erotica, played music videos. There were no sex toys, restraints (Scott had bought some of his own after our first meeting) or garters lying around. We all sat in the living room of the suite. I offered to make us drinks. I found a bottle of Grey Goose, ice and mixers in the bedroom. I called Scott into the bedroom to help me carry the drinks. I looked at him and said quietly, “It’s 10, if he doesn’t leave by 10:15, come into the bedroom. I’ll take care of it.”

  At 10:10, Scott excused himself. I could tell he wanted Jason out of there, but Jason was blissfully sipping his drink as if he were at a swish cocktail party. My client was being cock-blocked by my pimp. Who else does this happen to?

  “So, Jason, I have imprint slips, what did you guys work out?” He told me the hourly rate, and I stood up and told Jason I would call him when I was getting ready to leave. Jason took a last sip of his drink and left. Finally, we could get the party started.

  The client issues started coming up when we were in bed, too. To be fair, I didn’t always give Jason what a boyfriend deserves—what everyone deserves—their partner’s love, body, enthusiasm, attention. It’s like he felt cheated. All these clients had the time of their lives with me…why didn’t he get that anymore? The answer was simple, but he didn’t believe it.

  I told him straight up, “Jason, when I get home, I’m drained.”

  Love? Check. Energy? Gone, spent. Body? Exhausted to the point of total disconnect—kind of a zombie feeling.

  I would profess my love to him over and over and really mean it. But he didn’t get it. He wanted me. He wanted what all the other guys got. He even went so far as to offer to pay me, kind of as a joke.

  “Natalia, maybe that’s it. You have become the world’s greatest escort, and part of that means you are a little addicted to the money. You don’t really get excited about it unless you’re getting paid.”

  I had flashbacks of Samantha sitting next to me in Jason’s Hoboken apartment, her hand on my knee, telling me with wide eyes (and a wet pussy, I’m sure) how she loved being handed a fat envelope and counting the hundreds in front of the client. Was this what I had become?

  I didn’t think so. I was just tired. I was even too tired to argue with him. I’d let him drop some hundreds on our bedside table, summon my inner-Energizer Bunny sex goddess, and then slip the hundreds back into his pocket when he wasn’t looking.

  When you combine the sex issues with the strain of Jason’s new curfew restrictions (we rarely slept in the same bed anymore), our once unbreakable love affair was in danger. Maybe he could stop booking me on so many appointments? Get the hints I hurled his way that I really loved him and was pretty much ready to retire, invest the money I’d earned that was sitting in the agency account, become a successful actress, be his girlfriend forever, and live happily ever after.

  It just got worse. In what seemed like a move designed solely to piss me off, he went on a recruiting spree, trying to turn out any beautiful young thing he could get his hands on. I couldn’t stand it. He had gotten so good at it, it was almost disturbing. He’d force me to watch. I could tell in a flash which girls were emotionally equipped for it, like Ashley, and which ones would come back from their first appointment in a glassy-eyed daze and disappear forever. This job was not for the fragile or the naïve, as I was finding out. The fact was, I was excited about the TV show, but the reality behind the reality show was that I felt more and more like his partner in crime, rather than his girlfriend.

  One night, we got into another one of our screaming matches. It was so bad I stormed out and went over to Ron’s apartment. I pulled out a bag of coke, dumped out a few huge rails and asked, “What happens to our show if Jason and I break up?” I had gone over the ramifications in my mind. There was no show without the relationship. The hook of the show was that Jason and I were in love. The pitch was both scandalous and intriguing: how could two educated, intelligent, attractive people embrace this life—and actually be proud of it?

  I already knew the answer to my question. Ron didn’t even really bother responding, except to half-laugh. Ron had dropped everything in his life and invested his own money to produce the pilot episode of the series. If we broke up before the show had even gotten off the ground, he was toast.

  * * *

  Mona—observant, cunning Mona—sensed Jason and I were on the ropes and launched her second salvo: Jason and I needed to be divided in order to be conquered. She got Clark to swipe my Treo so they could find evidence I was stealing from the agency—meaning I was seeing a client directly and cutting the agency out of the profits. According to Hulbert, who’d witnessed the theft, they were convinced I was guilty but needed to prove it. At most agencies, girls steal every client they can. It’s
the way the business works. Remember, agencies often take more than half of their girls’ fees. Agencies can’t stop the extraneous dates from happening, so most don’t bother, and besides, a majority of the clients come to an agency looking for variety. They generally don’t want to book the same girl over and over when there are so many different types of girls to choose from. That’s a huge part of what drives the industry. It’s like being a kid in a candy store.

  Me with my Dad at my grandparents’ summer pad in upstate New York. This is family vacation. the only photo I have of us together before he left when I was 11 months old. Me, age 4, so happy with my mom on a family vacaction.

  Me, age 4, with my brother, age 10, summer ‘84.

  Me, age 5, at my Mom’s house at Christmas.

  Tap dancing at 5 to my recital routine, “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Me, age 8, dolled up in my tap-dance costume for the end-of-year recital.

  Me, age 16, the night I won the Canadian National Tap Dancing Championships.

  Me, age 16, slightly star-struck after performing with Gregory Hines at Plaze des Arts.

  Beatrice Neumann , originally from Germany , is an amazing photographer I met in New York in 2000, just a few months after I moved to the city. We used to do shoots together in her East Village apartment and then later, when she moved to Los Angeles, at her friend’s Malibu mansion. When she was back in New York we would shoot at my Gramercy Park apartment.