Hollywood Harlots

Chris Lee and Matt Donnelly at the Los Angeles Times had a long story on "club girls", who are young, somehow attractive women who freelance for tabloid/entertainment "news" media, often while and by partying at the clubs where the celebrities hang out.

"I always say, it's living like a call girl without the sex," former club girl Suzy McCoppin said.

Well, not exactly.

A onetime Playboy pinup who worked as a nightclub reporter for Star magazine for three years before getting "banned from every club in the city," McCoppin said she once sold a story describing a weekend tryst with British pop star Robbie Williams to the London tabloid News of the World for $40,000. She embodies the kind of club girl who goes beyond reporting the story to becoming the story.

"A lot of club girls want to be famous," said Evan Matthew, a former senior reporter for Star magazine who also recruited nightclub reporters for four years. "The hope is, being a club girl will get them closer to the celebrities. And they'll become an actress. Or they'll start dating a celebrity."

This explains a lot about where new stars-of-the-moment come from.

McCoppin, who said she parlayed her club girl days into a series of affairs with athletes and actors, a column in Playboy magazine and an as-yet-unpublished memoir, makes no apologies for her less-than-conventional reporting techniques. She recalled that her first reaction when her editor suggested she could turn her relationship with Williams into a tabloid payday was "absolutely not. This is tacky."

When she discovered the amount of money involved, however, she produced a detailed account of her affair that included explicit descriptions of "total rock star sex." "Tacky aside, I will look tacky for $40,000!" she said.

There's nothing like selling your body and soul.

Most tabloid magazines do not have an explicit policy forbidding alcohol consumption and almost all that hire club girls will allow them to buy expense drinks for themselves and friends.

As opposed to snookering some guy they have no intention of dating into buying them.

But after a few years on the club circuit, the hard-partying lifestyle can take a steep toll. Matthew recalled a reporter who started out "bright eyed and bushy tailed" but eventually let certain temptations overtake her life.

"She started off doing a good job but got in so deep after five years, she hung around with all these major celebrities and didn't know who anybody was because she was on drugs," he said. "She started missing stories and she'd come home with nothing. She became a full-time prostitute and had a couple of different celebrity clients. For those club girls, there's no return."

Famous guys have women throwing themselves at them. They hire prostitutes for one, both, or all of three reasons: 1) They have extreme/unusual tastes and don't want to go through the trouble of finding someone else who will accommodate that for free; 2) They're paying for the women to leave after the sex, not for the sex. 3) For guys in their entourage or at their parties who have no game.

The comments I saw on the paper's website where interesting.

One person wrote:

SO let me get this straight, you have women who are using their looks, and maybe their body to get ahead. Then complain when men only view women as sex objects, then use the very sexism to make a living!?! Sounds like most women are a bunch of hypocrites to me!

A second person wrote:

What a sad, silly superficial town this is... Anyone who gives a rat's behind about what Britney Spears is doing should be culled from the population immediately

A third person wrote:

You make "club girl" sound like another name for hooker. They do, too.

Yup. Starf-----s and attention whores, and some are just plain whores. If you had to guess, how many of them do you think have good relationships with their fathers?