The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (13 page)

A few months later, he invited me to New York for a dinner party and sat me at the place of honor, to his right. He used the word
networking
a lot, “It’s all about networking. Reaching out to people. Being accessible. And when you’re talking to the press, don’t ignore the little guy. One day the little guy is going to be the big guy, and he’s going to remember how you treated him when he was nobody.”

He was also very big on straight talk because he absolutely hated bullshit. “Don’t ever tell anyone you’re going to do something for them if you’re not going to back it up. There’s nothing worse than empty promises. If you make a commitment, no matter how small, you’ve got to follow through. This is maybe one of the most important life lessons I can teach you. If you can learn to keep your promises, people are going to love you for it, because the average asshole talks shit and has zero follow-through.”

He was generous, too. During a subsequent trip to New York, we were having dinner at a fancy restaurant, just the two of us for a change, and people kept coming by the table to pay their respects. Bankers. Politicians. Hollywood types. And he told every one of them the same thing: “This is my friend Dennis Hof. He owns the BunnyRanch. He’s going to turn that place into the most exciting, most successful brothel in the world. Dennis is the son I wish I’d had.”

He later introduced me to Larry Flynt, who ran
Hustler
, and who took a bullet for the First Amendment. That had put him in a
wheelchair, but to me he was a real hero who stood taller than almost any man I knew. “Are you going to do media for the BunnyRanch?” Flynt asked me.

I said, “Probably not. I’m doing this time-share stuff in San Diego and I don’t think people need to know that I just bought a brothel.”

Flynt barked at me, “Fuck that! If you believe in what you’re doing, you need to tell the world. You need to get out there and make noise. That’s the only way to get attention.”

That was pretty much the same message I was getting from Goldstein, so I let Flynt make some calls on my behalf and I ended up doing a segment on
Geraldo
, Geraldo Rivera’s show. I took three girls with me and the moment the cameras started rolling, Geraldo looked me in the eye and said, “Dennis Hof, owner of Dennis Hof’s World Famous Moonlite BunnyRanch, how do you get along with the church?”

I said, “You know what, Geraldo? We get along real well. Every Sunday morning, one of my stretch limos takes a bunch of my girls to the beautiful, 150-year-old church in Virginia City. And they love my girls there. They look forward to seeing them — especially the men. So while
my
relationship with God is personal, I can assure you that the BunnyRanch’s relationship with God is very good.”

After the show I joked with Geraldo, saying I wanted an apology for that God comment, and he laughed it off. Then I told him that my girls would get naked if he apologized.

When I got back to the time-share in San Diego, the management team called me on the carpet. They had seen my interview on
Geraldo
and they weren’t happy. They knew I owned a brothel, but they were worried that talking about it on national television was going to be bad for business. I had been worried about the same thing, but I’d
listened to the advice of two knowledgeable friends and had made my own decision. If I was going to blame anyone, it would be myself.

That day we got three times the usual crowd. Many of them had seen the show and they were there to meet me. I sold more time-shares in one day than I had in the whole previous week. Publicity — I fucking loved it. God bless Al Goldstein! God bless Larry Flynt! They paved the way and I stumbled along, learning the rest.

You’ve got to be available. You’ve got to be interesting, outrageous, and
fun
. You need to think about the angles because every reporter wants a fresh take on a story, but he’d rather not do the work himself. So it’s up to you to come up with those ideas.
Here’s the message, and here’s how we’re going to get it across
.

The press isn’t interested in doing you any favors. You want exposure and they need content, and they’re not going to come to you. You have to sell yourself to them (it’s always about selling!) and controversy always sells. Goldstein and Flynt were masters of the game. They knew how to be outrageous, make noise, and get people talking.

Back in those days, I relied on the media 100 percent. As I said, I couldn’t advertise, so I had to find ways to get myself noticed. Now, of course, we’ve got Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and web sites and message boards, but in those days even the expression “social media” didn’t exist, so you had to work real hard to get people to pay attention, and that’s exactly what I did. Sometimes opportunities dropped magically into my lap. The trick was to recognize them.

One such opportunity involved John Wayne Bobbitt, whose wife, Lorena, had approached him in his sleep years earlier and severed his penis with a knife. Bobbitt wasn’t even on my radar until Ron Jeremy did a movie with him,
John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut
.
(Bobbitt had had his penis reattached, and they were able to shoot it up with stuff to make it work for the film.) Shortly after the movie finished, I got a call from Ron. “You should hire John Bobbitt,” he said. “He’s a nice guy. You’d be helping him out.” Ron wasn’t even thinking of the publicity; for him it was a humanitarian gesture.

So I flew Bobbitt to Nevada and let the press know about it. Three camera crews showed up on the very night he arrived. It was quite a story: A guy who’d had his penis cut off, hanging out in a brothel, surrounded by hot pussy. The first interviewer asked him how he was feeling, and Bobbitt got choked up and said, “I really want to get back with Lorena.” He went on about how much he still loved her and how the whole thing had been a terrible misunderstanding. As the interview drew to a close, he asked the reporter if he wanted to see his reattached dick. He then whipped it out and made sure the guy saw it from every possible angle.

I wasn’t happy about this. When the reporter finally left, I took Bobbitt into the office and reamed him out. “Listen to me closely, John. Number one, this isn’t about poor John wanting to get back with his wife. This is about John getting some great pussy.
BunnyRanch
pussy. You understand what I’m telling you? This is a game, John, a game we play with the media. And another thing. Stop showing your dick to everybody. I’m not running a petting zoo.”

After that, Bobbitt got with the program. He was a nice guy and the girls liked him, but one night he sidled up to the bar and in the space of two drinks turned into a complete asshole. Then he got arrested for shoplifting and ended up running off with one of my girls, but I wasn’t upset. I was getting twenty calls a day from reporters from all over the world, and every single one of them mentioned Dennis Hof’s World Famous Moonlite BunnyRanch. And that’s what it’s all about.

AS THE BUSINESS GREW,
with new, hot girls showing up every week, my penis became increasingly restless. I made an effort to be discrete, but Stacy knew what was going on and it began to wear her down. Plus the girls kept torturing her and some of them were relentless. I tried to tell Stacy to ignore them — that that was the price she paid for being Daddy’s girl — but it was hard for her and it eventually killed our relationship. (That and the fact that I couldn’t stop fucking around.)

The irony is that things ended over an infidelity that never even happened. One of the girls I wasn’t attracted to told Stacy she’d seen me
in flagrante delicto
with one of the other girls, who I
was
attracted to, but who so far I’d managed to resist, and Stacy believed her. And while I was able to prove to her that I hadn’t been anywhere near the ranch at the time of my alleged indiscretion, the damage had been done. Maybe it was the weight of all my other infidelities that finally got to her. I’m not sure. But if there was one thing I learned from the experience, it was simply this: I should have been more honest with Stacy. I could not be monogamous. I didn’t need to flaunt my affairs, but neither should I have been forced to run around like a thief in the night. It felt duplicitous and dirty, and I was neither of those things.

The end was neither loud nor dramatic. Stacy simply told me she’d had enough. I again tried to explain that to me sex was just sex, that my emotional commitment was to her, and that I had a special connection with her that didn’t exist with any of the other girls. But it was too late.

I was pretty broken up, but I didn’t want anyone to see it. I slept with one or two different girls each day and acted cheerful and happy, but that’s all it was — an act. I had a business to run. I didn’t want the girls to know I was hurting. It’s almost like a biker mentality. You show any weakness, you’re dead.

The only one who saw how much I was hurting was Suzette. She saw it because she knew me better than anyone and because I didn’t have to act like a tough, heartless bastard around her. She knew I was in pain and she’d check up on me from time to time. “Did you get enough to eat? You need anything? What can I do to make things better?” One day I was so lost inside myself that she actually got tough with me. “Dennis, you’ve got a business to run. All this pain and negativity is getting in the way. I need you to pull yourself together.”

I believe Suzette is the only woman who has ever seen me cry.

Suzette Colette Cole

My name is Suzette, but everybody knows me as Madam Suzette. I am the general manager at the BunnyRanch. One day back in 1992 I saw a tiny ad in the local newspaper, just a couple of lines: “Manager Needed for New Business.” I drove up to the Moonlite and met with Stacy, who was Dennis’s girlfriend at the time. The place was in shambles — torn furniture, ripped carpeting, burned-out lights, a musty smell — and Stacy told me not to worry, that Dennis had just taken ownership and had big plans for the ranch.

I started at the front door as a hostess, bringing clients into the parlor to introduce them to the girls, but I was also a maid and bartender. After that I became a cashier, then assistant manager, and finally the general manager.

When I first met Dennis, I immediately fell in love with him. He has charisma and a certain aura. Over the years he became my best friend and there’s nobody in my life I’ve been closer to.

I’d never had any experience with prostitutes or brothels, and it was quite an adjustment. Back then some of the
girls were pretty rough. The Moonlite was known as the ‘”drug brothel,” and Dennis wanted to change that, but you can’t just walk in and get rid of your entire stock — we had a lot of troubled girls, and it was hard to keep them in line.

I remember one day one of the girls went off to a room to negotiate with a client. I’d usually give them five or six minutes to close the deal, but she was taking longer and her door was closed. So I opened the door and she was giving the guy a blow job without a condom, and there was money on the bed. She was so startled she bit down on the guy’s dick and blood went everywhere. I was completely traumatized.

Dennis was furious. He took her belongings, packed them into a couple of big green garbage bags, and tossed them over the fence. You could see how it affected the other girls. Dennis was telling them straight up that he wasn’t going to tolerate liars and thieves. He didn’t tolerate drugs, either, and the girls got the message pretty quick. If a girl had a drug problem, he would talk to her about it and try to help. He always wanted to give her another chance to stay at the ranch, to deal with it so she could continue to be part of the family.

But after two years I left. It was too emotionally exhausting. The girls would come to me with their problems and I became sort of a mother figure. Many of their stories made me very sad. A lot of them had no one else in the world. I would look at these girls and feel bad because they were so lost and alone. It would have been easier not to get involved, to not to listen to their stories, but in those days I still hadn’t learned how to do that.

• • •

After a business I started with my husband failed, Dennis called me and asked, “What do I have to do to get you back?”

I said, “How about a paycheck? That sounds really good right about now.” So I came back to the BunnyRanch that very week. I’d only been gone a short time and he’d already been through probably half a dozen managers.

You have to be tough to do this job. It’s not all sweetness and light. We have the best girls in the business, but they can turn on you and on each other. It’s a hard job. Every day is a party for the client, but it can be hard on the girls, both physically and psychologically. The lineup alone can be really hard on them. Client after client comes in and the new girl doesn’t get picked, and she begins to feel bad.

• • •

Dennis always talks to the girls about attitude. Everybody likes a pretty girl, but if you’re a fun girl, well, that’s even more important. Dennis came up with the line: “It’s not just sex, it’s an adventure.” And he’s right. The client is interested in sex, but he’s more interested in a girl he can talk to, a girl where it might turn into something bigger. Most of the girls have regular clients, and they develop relationships. The guys show up and it’s like they’re here for a date.