A friend builds hotels. He explained that his business is all about sex. I told him “just like mine”. The movie biz, from its inception, offered nubility on screen to the masses, and in bed to the powerful. That’s just the way it was, a Regency Era of industrial promiscuity. The women (and the boys) came to bring their pigs to market, and the uses they made of their bodies were nobody’s business — save their own and that of the suits who would bed them. Hollywood controlled the press; which, just as today, would speak no ill of those who fed them. 

Were women being exploited by the Suits? Everyone was. The agents were lying both to their clients and to the Studios; nobody knew what a “manager” did. Very few artists got anything like a fair count, and the awards were generally for sale, as were the results of audience surveys. 

Many a studio Head (I will name no names) rose to the gig through training as a pimp. Those who could offer sweet young things to The Money from Back East became The Power. (See Marilyn Monroe, herself, infamously enlisted to extend birthday greetings to JFK at Madison Square Garden: “Happy Birthday, Mr President.”)

Nothing fails like success; and when the studio system’s long decay accelerated in the Eighties, sharp-eyed hustlers observed that films unencumbered by infrastructure could be made for a fraction of the studio costs. Many of these independent producers came to film through expertise in other shakedowns and hustles: arms and drug dealing, money laundering, and racketeering.

Those hep to the jive saw the incredible waste of the studio film, the lack of oversight and the resultant possibility of fraud, both in production costs, and in accounting. Film, additionally, contained the Best Present Ever; artists manipulable through appeals to their ego, many of whom would, finally, either work for nothing, or accept a promise in lieu of a payment. It was (and is) standard practice, for example, for independent producers to come to the director just before shooting and confess that the budget is short, and that the director will have to waive his fee.

The Independents also employed the traditional sexual amuse-bouches to attract or please talent and investors. Being nekulturny thugs, however, they were not averse to resorting to the not-quite-sporting. The fellow they got laid could be in their debt not only for the nice workout, but for the tapes of his unlicensed encounter. 

Now, power.

Way back then, I was friendly with various politicians in an unnamed eastern city on Boston Harbour. I have never seen such a collection of devoted whoremasters. Show business may bring out the worst in people, but politics, it seemed, turned them into randy swine. “Gimme that one, and gimme that one…” was their entertainment’s name. They were enjoying not only young companionship, but the exercise of power and the thrill of its exemptions.

It’s easy to take older guys to the cleaners. In fact, we’ll take ourselves. As men age, sexual desire and performance decreases, they’re attracted by what’s forbidden. 

The short-eyes of the lustful, aged male are drawn to the women who looked-like-that when he was young; if they excite him, must he not, then, in some sense be “young” too? His fantasy is equal to that of the woman who devotes her mature years to cosmetics, surgery, and so on. They do not make her young, but assert that she is aware of the problem, is addressing it — and must that not be worth consideration? Ageing is a bitch.

How many do we know who firebombed a home, wife, and kids, to run off with the pilates instructor? Their act of male folly seems, to them, to be not the most but the sole important thing in the world. At that time.

“How many do we know who firebombed a home, wife, and kids, to run off with the pilates instructor?”

Sadder than the spectacle of the drooling old goat with the nymphet is the upcoming butcher’s bill: not only will they have nothing to talk about in the morning, but, should he wed, in 10 years he’ll be napping, she’ll be legitimately unfulfilled, and he’ll be old, divorced, and broke. 

Which is why there used to be whorehouses. 

Our age’s most brilliant proponent of these was Hugh Hefner. His Playboy clubs were the bourgeois’ dream of a bordello. They offered good food and drink, superb entertainment, and scantily clad and pleasant young women servers. Most attractively, to the middle-aged businessman clientele, they sold the promise of sex, which the customer (deep down) knew would remain unfulfilled — for which he was grateful. He could delude himself that one of the Bunnies was going home with him; indeed, they were schooled to create that illusion. When his quest failed, he could assure himself of his manhood in that he’d “tried”, and, most importantly, go home without adultery guilt.

Louis XV had his own private whorehouse, The Deer Park, staffed by underage girls recruited throughout the land by his pimps. Just as with Hollywood. It seems that Jeffrey Epstein knew French history, or anyway human nature, and flew his powerful friends down for a bit of surf and turf offering the irresistible: protected sin; just as Hefner sold the (unstated) protection of continence. 

Were Epstein’s guests aware of the possibility of blackmail? Perhaps they were, but the old Yiddish proverb has it, when the putz rises the brains bury themselves in mud. Men are stupid. Each, myself included, is foolish about this or that, and all are foolish about sex.

Epstein was shooting fish in a barrel — exploiting contacts who had relied upon him for cooze, and shaking down those who were more exploitable as victims than as debtors. 

Did he kill himself? If ever there was one begging to be offed it was he. If we assume the powerful whose lives Epstein could ruin by videotape would do anything on earth to retain their position short of killing him, we need to get out more.

Alternatively, perhaps Epstein could not face decades of (well-deserved) incarceration for sex trafficking. My cop friends inform me that he’d made several previous suicide attempts, and that conditions in the lockup were so wretched that the conjunction of various lapses in oversight was not only probable, but by-the-book laxity. Perhaps.

Will we ever know?

The Trump DOJ assures us that all the info on the Kennedy Assassinations, and on that of Martin Luther King will be forthcoming. They do not, however, define forthcoming, leaving us to supply our own definitions. This is called a “cliffhanger”. 

I love a mystery; you, dear reader, do too. 

We saw it during the Biden jollity. Those astounded by various government conspiracies were denounced as “conspiracy theorists”. But those conspiracies existed: the Russian collusion hoax; the fraudulent FISA warrants; the ginned-up impeachments, the placement of Candidate Trump on the Spot. They were no less conspiracies because those decrying them were dismissed as “theorists”.

All governments are potential conspiracies against the governed. Those in power may now oppose and now collude with warring groups for momentary leverage over the governed (us saps).

Our Constitution exists solely to address this human tropism. Might we, the governed hope for complete transparency from any government? Yes. Will we receive it? Likely not. Even if we did, our legitimate love of salacious gossip would induce us to discount any “final” revelation. If we accepted it, after all, wouldn’t we just have ruined a good mystery?

Epstein’s death — however caused — creates a well-deserved entertainment. All men are fools for sex, and our various inducements (legitimate and otherwise) and our transgressions have always existed simultaneously with our exploitability by both the badger game, and political and social shakedowns. 

Human nature is a bitch. Were it not, we’d be spending our evening reading Jane Austen rather than watching the news, for the thrill of decrying the sick savagery of both our political opponents and our neighbours.