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The Hollywood Madam Who Just Wanted to Sing - The New Yorker

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The Hollywood Madam Who Just Wanted to Sing

The multifarious career of Jody Gibson, a.k.a. Babydol.
Illustration of Jody Gibson
Illustration by Dadu Shin

There are several versions of the story of how Jody Gibson (1957-2022) came to be known as Babydol. One is that her mother loved the Elia Kazan movie “Baby Doll,” from 1956, so Gibson chose her nickname with that in mind. Another is that she was inspired by a different, and quite unlikely, movie, “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” In her memoir, “Secrets of a Hollywood Super Madam,” Gibson offers another version, writing, “People had nicknamed me ‘Babydoll’ since they said that’s how I looked. A light bulb went off in my head! I decided to use the spelling Babydol. It seemed a bit more unusual that way.”

Babydol was not Gibson’s only sobriquet either. In the late eighties, when she established what would become one of the largest escort services in Los Angeles—which prosecutors later successfully argued was, in fact, a prostitution ring—she didn’t think Babydol sounded quite appropriate as a nom de madam. Maybe it seemed too soft? Too diminutive? In any case, she was hoping to break out as a pop star, and wanted to reserve Babydol for that. She eventually settled on Sasha, to use in connection with the escort service; she thought the name “seemed rather exotic.” In time, she had one more opportunity to mint an alias for herself. When her escort business was peaking—she was said to employ some three hundred women and have more than a thousand clients—she needed a secretary, but she worried about bringing anyone into the business who might rat her out or steal her clients. She decided to pose as her own secretary, and began using the name Sherry when answering phones or interviewing prospective workers. The dual identity was so convincing that when Gibson was arrested, in 1999, she was charged not only with multiple felony counts of pimping and pandering but with conspiracy, too. According to Gibson, the charge hinged on the idea that she—Sasha or Babydol or Jody or whoever—had colluded with her secretary, Sherry, to run a criminal enterprise. When Gibson’s lawyer revealed that Sasha and Sherry were one and the same, Gibson wrote, the conspiracy charge had to be dropped.

Gibson grew up in a well-to-do family in Westchester County, New York, that had its fingers in the entertainment world. Her father was a successful businessman who had previously worked as a radio vocalist. Her mother was an agent for child actors, and is credited with having discovered Tom Cruise. An aunt, Frieda Lipschitz, who performed as Georgia Gibbs, had a No. 1 hit on the pop charts in 1955, a version of a song called “Dance with Me, Henry.” Gibson’s sister Amy had roles on “The Young and the Restless” and “General Hospital.” Perhaps inspired by her Aunt Frieda, Gibson longed to be a singer. Her memoir recounts a million near-misses with musical stardom, and she sprinkles the story of her life as a madam with wishful, aching comments, such as “I was certain that soon I would make the transition from Super Madam to Super Pop Star and leave all this behind me.”

Gibson describes herself as “basically soft spirited with a gentle nature,” although she laments that, when she was a teen-ager, other girls were jealous of her, and she got kicked out of a private high school for having sex on the school grounds. It rankled her that her mother and sister were famous and she was not. After high school, she spent some time in Europe, she writes, and ended up hanging out with celebrities and partying “on Donald Trump’s yacht, then owned by a wealthy Arab arms dealer named Adnan Khashoggi” then made her way to Los Angeles to pursue a singing career. Along the way, she got married a few times and collected more than fifty rescue animals—dogs, cats, rabbits, and a miniature pot-bellied pig. She poked around a little in the acting world—she had a part in “ Evil Laugh,” a bargain-basement slasher film—but she needed a steady income and a way to pay for her demo tapes. She knew a little about talent management from her mother, so she decided to set up a modelling agency. It was percolating along as a legitimate business until she began noticing that her models were getting lavish gifts from agency clients. In another of her many light-bulb moments (her memoir owes a debt of gratitude to Thomas Edison), she realized that, even though she “introduced people to each other out of the goodness of my heart,” she could have a nice little business if she started providing and charging for more intimate introductions.

She had the idea, new at the time, of listing her escorts on a Web site, labelled California Dreamin’. (Leaving off the last letter of a name seems to have been a Gibson signature.) The business took off. She ran a tight ship, handing out a printed set of rules to her workers that included “Bring your own condoms,” “Don’t be late,” and “Bra & panties should match.” She boasted that she had sixteen offices across the United States and in Europe, and entertained clients that included a wide swath of Hollywood. When she was arrested, her “black book” was entered into evidence, with the names redacted. When some of the court records were later unsealed, most everyone listed in them denied knowing her, but the Sex Pistols’s guitarist, Steve Jones, told the Los Angeles Times that it was quite possible that he had hired escorts through her, adding, “If I remember right, she wanted to be a singer in a band.”

She really did want to be a singer in a band, more than anything. In her most public gesture to advertise that desire, she spent thirty-five thousand dollars on a twenty-five-foot-high billboard near the Chateau Marmont, which featured a huge head shot and the slogan “BABYDOL . . . COMING SOON.” But it was not to be, neither soon nor late. She thought she had finally found a musical mentor in Joe Isgro, a record promoter (and an alleged soldier in the Gambino crime family, although he has denied any connections, and a 2014 case against him ended up as a misdemeanor, for which he paid a thousand-dollar fine). But, when she was arrested, she writes, Isgro told her that the record company decided not to release her long-gestating CD. The irony was rich; she had started the escort service to subsidize her recording career, and, in the end, it was the service that finally derailed it for good.

After her arrest, Gibson hired the attorney Gerald V. Scotti. A well-known defense expert, Scotti had testified on behalf of the automotive magnate John DeLorean, helping him get acquitted of drug charges, in 1984. (Just a few years after handling Gibson’s case, however, Scotti murdered a friend who appeared to have been embezzling from him, and then killed himself, writing in a note found in his car that he would not live in a “cage” for “having done away with that piece of junk.”) For Gibson, Scotti managed to whittle a nine-count charge down to three, but the evidence was overwhelming, and she was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. She served twenty-two months in the state women’s facility at Chowchilla (or, as some inmates called it, Chowkilla), which houses prisoners of all security levels, including any women in the state on death row. In prison, Gibson wrote, she contracted pneumonia and wasted away to eighty-five pounds. After her release, she left Los Angeles and moved to Yucca Valley, a small town two hours away. Over the next period of time, she launched a clothing line and wrote several books in addition to her memoir, including “Sex on the Internet: Super Madam Volume II” and “Seduced: Diary of a Double Dealing Spy.” But she never did make her mark as a singer. “I wished for fame and fortune and I got it,” she writes, at the end of her memoir, “but not at all in the way I expected it.”

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