Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the girl who escorted Eliot Spitzer to his downfall, is now gainfully employed. She writes an advice column for the New York Post. Hey, a girl’s gotta make a living. The Post, by the way, is the same publication that splashed a full page photo of the nude but modest-handed Ashley across its cover shortly after the scandal broke, accompanied by the giant headline, “BAD GIRL.”
“Ask me anything about love, sex, and relationships,” says a bespectacled Ashley in the Post’s promotional video for the column. “Take it from me – someone who could have used a little advice in the past.”
If it sounds like I'm being snarky, I'm not. Honestly, I don’t begrudge Ashley the opportunity one little bit. She’s just another in a long line of professional girls left swirling in the muddy wake of the rich and powerful. The real bad guy at the center of the Eliot Spitzer scandal was – well – Eliot Spitzer. The married guy. The powerful guy. The guy with kids. The guy who stood for law and order. The guy who had, in fact, as attorney general of his state, demanded a crackdown on the escorting industry in New York City. And now, in the aftermath of his scandal, he teaches a course on law and public policy as an adjunct faculty member at the City College of New York. He landed on his feet. Why not Ashley?
My insight into the Ashley and Eliot show is informed by Damien Decker, my writing partner on The Act, a forthcoming memoir about his life as a high-paid Manhattan escort. Damien never met Ashley, but he knew her, which is to say he knew lots of girls like her. He was way ahead of the media when the story broke. He knew that Ashley aspired to be a model or something in the performing arts. It turned out she was trying to get a singing career going. He knew she was likely from an upper-middleclass background, as he and many of his female colleagures were, and we watched as, a couple of days into the story, reporters scratched their heads while showing pictures of the million-dollar house she’d lived in before moving to New York. He knew she was using cocaine, the drug that fuels the escorting industry. We waited three days or more for the press to pick up on that detail. When the media reported, its collective brow furrowed in puzzlement, that despite her high fees, Ashley had been homeless for a time, Damien and I were not surprised. He himself had been homeless at the height of his career.
And, by the way, that vice crackdown orchestrated by Spitzer? Damien knew about that ahead of time too. One of his female colleagues had been tipped by a client of hers inside the Spitzer organization.
Escorting ain’t pretty. It’s an industry orbited by drug dealers, bad cops, sexually violent Johns, and, yes, corrupt politicians. It’s a tough business under the best of circumstances. Ashely had to face the worst of it – life under the media microscope, bad jokes by talk show hosts, cruel reviews of her music by talentless DJs, ridicule dressed up as insisive questions by out-of-touch, millionaire “journalists.”
I have a piece of advice for the New York Post’s new advice columnist: You go, Ashley.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The Years Without Ross
A kind, anonymous reader of this blog reminded me that the James Thurber piece I referred to in my November 21 post was “Preface to a Life,” which is the preface to a collection of his entitled My Life and Hard Times. I read it again after that reminder and loved it just as much as I had when I was a teenager. I recommend it.
My favorite Thurber piece is not an essay, but his memoir, The Years with Ross. It’s about the time he spent working at The New Yorker under the direction of Harold Ross, the magazine’s founding editor. I recall reading that S. J. Perelman, another hero of mine and a New Yorker colleague of Thurber’s, didn’t much care for the book. He said it made the staff of the magazine look like a bunch of amateurs playing at journalism. Oh well. I still loved it. And didn’t everything seem like a bit of a lark at the end of Thurber’s pen? What did Perelman expect?
I’m sure I read the book because my dad had liked it. And I suppose it was after reading it that I became a fan of The New Yorker. I imagined I was reading Harold Ross’s magazine, the same one Thurber and Perelman had worked for. And E. B. White and Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. To me there was a quaintness in its pages that made that easy to believe.
At college I read it religiously in the current periodicals room of the library and tried not to laugh out loud. In those pages I learned some things about writing and marveled at a great many writers. I wondered how Mavis Gallant could be so damned prolific (she seemed to be in every third issue). I found Mark Strand, Donald Barthelme, and, just before Tina Brown took the magazine’s helm, Ralph Lombreglia.
When Brown stepped in I lost some of my interest in The New Yorker. There was a lot of noise about how she was going to revamp the thing I loved to make it current – appeal to modern magazine readers – and I didn’t much care for the sound of it. What did I know about the monumental task of keeping a magazine in the black ink, even in those days? What did I know about The New Yorker, for that matter? Not much, as it turns out.
As I took a Google-assisted look back at the magazine, Harold Ross, and James Thurber, I stumbled upon a Time article from 1960. It pointed out that while The New Yorker had tried to continue to be Ross’s, in the nine years since his death it had changed. William Shawn was a different kind of editor who edited a different kind of magazine.
Shawn seems to have been the sort who didn’t want to offend writers by tinkering too much with their material, while Ross had insisted that writers not offend him by blundering around with his vision of The New Yorker, of journalism, of that restless animal called English.
The Time article talks about the importance of The New Yorker’s ad pages in 1960. They’d become as classy and artistic as the editorial content. They brought in money. Under Tina Brown, the magazine became less quaint, more hip, more marketable. Maybe I was too hard on Ms. Brown. And maybe I romanticized Ross and Thurber too much. If the black ink doesn’t flow, magazines die. And, what the heck, if I squint real hard I can still see Harold Ross and his staff in its pages.
My favorite Thurber piece is not an essay, but his memoir, The Years with Ross. It’s about the time he spent working at The New Yorker under the direction of Harold Ross, the magazine’s founding editor. I recall reading that S. J. Perelman, another hero of mine and a New Yorker colleague of Thurber’s, didn’t much care for the book. He said it made the staff of the magazine look like a bunch of amateurs playing at journalism. Oh well. I still loved it. And didn’t everything seem like a bit of a lark at the end of Thurber’s pen? What did Perelman expect?
I’m sure I read the book because my dad had liked it. And I suppose it was after reading it that I became a fan of The New Yorker. I imagined I was reading Harold Ross’s magazine, the same one Thurber and Perelman had worked for. And E. B. White and Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. To me there was a quaintness in its pages that made that easy to believe.
At college I read it religiously in the current periodicals room of the library and tried not to laugh out loud. In those pages I learned some things about writing and marveled at a great many writers. I wondered how Mavis Gallant could be so damned prolific (she seemed to be in every third issue). I found Mark Strand, Donald Barthelme, and, just before Tina Brown took the magazine’s helm, Ralph Lombreglia.
When Brown stepped in I lost some of my interest in The New Yorker. There was a lot of noise about how she was going to revamp the thing I loved to make it current – appeal to modern magazine readers – and I didn’t much care for the sound of it. What did I know about the monumental task of keeping a magazine in the black ink, even in those days? What did I know about The New Yorker, for that matter? Not much, as it turns out.
As I took a Google-assisted look back at the magazine, Harold Ross, and James Thurber, I stumbled upon a Time article from 1960. It pointed out that while The New Yorker had tried to continue to be Ross’s, in the nine years since his death it had changed. William Shawn was a different kind of editor who edited a different kind of magazine.
Shawn seems to have been the sort who didn’t want to offend writers by tinkering too much with their material, while Ross had insisted that writers not offend him by blundering around with his vision of The New Yorker, of journalism, of that restless animal called English.
The Time article talks about the importance of The New Yorker’s ad pages in 1960. They’d become as classy and artistic as the editorial content. They brought in money. Under Tina Brown, the magazine became less quaint, more hip, more marketable. Maybe I was too hard on Ms. Brown. And maybe I romanticized Ross and Thurber too much. If the black ink doesn’t flow, magazines die. And, what the heck, if I squint real hard I can still see Harold Ross and his staff in its pages.
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