The takeover

* Grit.
Hollywood loves to portray call-girls as traumatised/victimised/stressed out.
This is the polar opposite of reality. Anyone emotionally frail wouldn't have got to first base with the agency. It couldn't risk hiring anyone who might "lose it" under pressure. The stakes were altogether too high.

What it wanted was tough-minded, level-headed types; girls who could cope with any kind of crisis without embarassing themselves or the agency.
Apart from which, the day-to-day demands of the work demanded we be cool, grounded people. Practical. Gritty.

* Sexual Maturity.
High School boys get obsessed with football; Troy Aikman, John Elway and Brett Favre don't. They don't because they can't afford to. It's not an obsession for them...it's a job. Which means they need to approach it cooly and professionally...not in a state of hyper-ventilation.
It's the same for a call-girl. We don't obsess about sex. We can't. It's our job, and we have to be cool and professional about it...as well as very good.
(Note, again, how this rules nymphomaniacs out of the business.)

So, when the agency recruits, it is looking for girls confident in their sexuality. They'll be experienced certainly. Probably fairly promiscuous; but selectively so. The type willing and able - in college, say - to pick the guys she wants and to go get them; the type that has already instinctively learnt how to use her sexual wiles.
The agency will take those instincts and skills and build on them. Experience does the rest.

* Ambition.
At the lower and middle ends of the sexual services industry, I imagine you do get girls entering the profession out of desperation: to escape hardship or abuse, or to feed a habit. At the top end though, it's very different.
Simply put, it's a matter of ambitious girls taking a rational career decision.

Working for an agency with an "in" to the wealthy is as guaranteed a way to be rich at a young age as there is. Plus it's fairly safe. Plus you get to live a champagne lifestyle: the best hotels, the best restaurants. Et cetera. Et cetera.
I'm not saying this to "sell" the job. I don't have to, and nor did the agency. If a girl is ambitious, and the chance comes her way, she will jump at it.
I did. And candidly it's the best decision I ever made.

The Myth: It's all role-playing and bizarre fantasies and kinky sex.

I don't normally recommend the "yellow pages" agencies. Why should I? After all, they masquerade as being what my agency actually was: high-class and exclusive. In reality, they are mostly fast-buck merchants who provide essentially the same service as the girls on the street for a 500% mark-up. However, if it is something kinky you're after they may be the place to look. Most perversions have their niche and, if you're in a big city, there's probably at least one place listed that will be happy to cater to it.

Such services are NOT, however, what the high-class agency provides.

I say this over and over in these pages, but it bears repetition again. The elite agency's unique selling-point is quality. The quality of the girl: her looks, her presentation, her conversation. And the quality of her love-making: her body, her energy, her technique. My former agency's girls didn't get into perversions and dressing-up because they didn't have to. They were more than capable of satisfying their clientele without any of that.

I'll spell it out directly. Scat, watersports, Greek and anything involving bondage or physical injury was out. Period.

So what did we offer?

Well, first and foremost, the best oral and vaginal sex going.

I know that reads as quite a claim but, among ourselves, the girls at the agency spoke freely, and we were all able to cite dozens of unsolicited testimonials about us being their "best ever". Clients actions speak even louder than their words though, and the fact that they kept coming back to us probably says even more. There were other agencies out there, after all, but few left us for them. The traffic, in my experience, was all the other way.

How did we get to be such good sexual athletes?

Much the same way people get to be good at anything else; a mix of natural ability, mental application, physical training and practice.

The agency was very careful about who it hired; but even those who made it through the selection process were not regarded as in any way the finished article. Specifically, the agency made a point of tutoring its new recruits in advanced sexual techniques. And although the girls - myself included - were all already a lot more experienced and adept than the average (we wouldn't have been hired if we weren't), I think we would all admit to having learnt a lot.

Remember, the agency's owners were themselves former top-dollar call-girls. They were experts. They knew that there is a world of difference between the "charge by the hour" girl and the top call-girl who is entertaining the guy for the night. The quick, impersonal bang is not an option. It's the difference between a rock song and an orchestral symphony; and to conduct the symphony right needs skill and application.

Again though, I don't want to give the impresson these were some great dark secrets that were being passed to us. We weren't learning by rote the more obscure chapters of the Kama Sutra or anything. Rather we were just learning ways to control the male body: to simmer it slowly and steadily, and to only let it boil at the exact moment we wanted.

Just as importantly though, they taught us that sex is only a part - albeit the central part - of the quality escort's service. You're giving him attention. You're making him feel good about himself. You're helping him unwind. That's why the agency wanted bright, empathetic personalities, capable of conversation and genuinely pleasant to be around.

And, of course, there was the actual escorting too.

(The euphemistic term "escort" is sort of a bluff within a bluff. Of course, when we're talking "escorting" we're really talking about paid sex. And yet, at the top level, genuine escorting work can often be a big part of the service.)

We were trained for this too. Dress. Presentation. Crash courses in theatre/opera/ballet appreciation. The whole nine yards, though some of us were a lot more comfortable with it than others.

(The agency actually made a point of asking clients how much of this side of the service they would want and, if there was likely to be a lot, the agency usually recommended me and one or two others who were the best educated and most socially adept of their girls.)

So...the best sex; good company; quality escorting; and all wrapped up in complete discretion.

That, baldly stated, was what we offered. Like I say: nothing very kinky or bizarre. But still a service which - performed the way we performed it - that kept the clients coming back time and again, and paying top dollar to do so.

I've noticed something about fictional representations of the money to be made in the business. They proceed on the basis that any big, round impressive-sounding figure will do. So, once they decided some years back that their former favorite line - "The stiff was a thousand buck a night hooker, Lieutenant" - didn't sound impressive enough any more, they switched to two thousand. Or five thousand. Or ten. Just so long as it sounded snappy, the accuracy of the figure really didn't seem to matter to them.

Given which, it's hardly surprising there are some pretty weird theories out there as to what a top escort earns.

The reality is that prices are set the same way they are in any other market: by the interaction of supply and demand. And, though demand for the top-end product is considerable, the availability of suitably talented girls is (unfortunately, from the agency's point of view) sufficient to prevent prices from skyrocketing to the areas imagined by some.

So to specifics.

A girl starting out at my former agency would be charging $1400-1600 a night. Usually it was $1500, but the priority for a new girl is to get customers even if she has to go down to $1400 a night for a while.

There are two reasons for this.

(i) The agency wants her working, both to prove she can do it - initially she's on a kind of probation - and to acquire the experience that will make her a lot better at her work. About ninety per cent of what you learn on the job, I think, you learn in the first three/six months.

(ii) The whole drive of the agency is to establish clients as regulars. Naturally, this suits the agency: regulars don't have to be checked out each time the way newcomers do. It is even more important to the girl though. Aside from the fact that familiarity always makes things easier - with any new client you never know quite what you're going to get -, turning a guy into a regular customer who will pay to see you again and again is the basis for pushing on towards the really big bucks.

Why?

Well initially, in order to pass your "probation" with the agency. If you're not good enough to get a guy coming back for more when you're charging him $1,400 a night, you're not going to be able to do it at $2,000 or $2,500 a night.

Once you've proved you can get your hooks into the guys though, the drive is on to start filling your diary; and being able to pencil in five or six regulars at the start of each month gets you there a lot quicker than waiting for passing custom to come your way.

Bookings for a hundred nights a year is your target at the start. Once you're on track for hitting the three digits, the agency will start hiking your price to newcomers. Make a few of these into regulars and the agency will okay you to hike the prices of your older regulars; because if one or two won't pay up, you can get along without them now. (This is rare though. If you play it right, you can sell them the extra $$s.)

In this way, as your diary fills - as demand for your services increase, in economic terms - so your price starts to inflate. And, once started, that inflation can be gratifyingly fast and steep.

Take me. I was lucky in that I was particularly good at the public escorting side of the business, and that niche got me extra custom. (A single guy who needed an impressive "girlfriend" for social occasions. A company director who wanted someone smart and pretty around for the social side of major contract negotiations.) As a consequence, I was hitting my hundred nights after only about a year, by which time most of my diary was made up of regulars. From that base, I was able to push my price up so fast that, by the end of my second year, I was costing newcomers $2,500 a night.

Two and a half thousand a night is the semi-official target the girls are shooting for. (It's usually about the limit the market will bear. Though, once you're established at $2,500 a night and have a full diary, you can pitch prospective newcomers the "only for $3,000" ball and see if they swing at it. A few do, but at that level you really are at the edge of the market's tolerance; no matter how talented you are.) Not all the girls ever get there though, and I think most of them hit their personal ceiling somewhere between $2,000 and $2,500 a night.

I've used the phrase "full diary". Let me stress I don't mean this literally. No girl works every night or anything close to it. I think one of my contemporaries was pushing towards working every other night - taken over the course of a year - and the rest of us thought she was pushing it way too hard. As a general rule, we regarded a full diary as being around a hundred and twenty nights a year - i.e. working one night in three - and, after my first year of building up my personal client base, that was pretty much what I worked.

Obviously though, this isn't a simple "one night on, two nights off" business.

For one thing, there's the matter of travelling to the city where you're meeting the guy. He, of course, picks up the tab for your expenses, but you've still got to make the actual trip. Which takes time.

Most importantly though, not every date is a simple "one night" affair. A lot of guys like weekends. Others might want you for the duration of some conference or convention. Others still like you to vacation with them. (One guy took me for a week on Maui three years in a row.)

So a lot of those hundred and twenty or so nights will come in blocks...which is good, because it gives you bigger breaks the rest of the year.

Two important points I haven't covered so far.

(i) I've spoken of "nights".
By this I mean: meet up with the guy in the evening, go to a restaurant/whatever with him, then it's back to his hotel through to breakfast. In other words, we're giving the client a proper date; his money's worth, expensive though we are.
We do not, repeat not, charge by the hour. Not ever. That's the preserve of the street-corner girls and their near neighbors, the agencies in the yellow pages.

(ii) The Agency's Cut.
It's 20-30%, or some four hundred to six hundred dollars per night. As your per night charge rises, its cut rises in cash terms but drops as a percentage.

In conclusion, and by way of a public service, I'll save you the trouble of doing the maths for a top girl's per annum earnings. I'll do it myself.

120 nights X ($2,500 a night - $550 agency cut at this rate) = $234,000

Just fallen off your chair?

Obviously, this is a rough number, but it's not far off. If anything, it might be a slight underestimate, because "block bookings" - weekends, vacations, etc. - earned us more as we were around for days as well as nights.

In your first couple of years, while you're building up your client-list, you make less, of course; but you're not exactly in poverty. I wasn't far off hitting six figures my first year...and believe me, making that kind of money in your early twenties sure beats going to law school.

Is the recruiter a specialist searching for a likely candidate, or was recruitment a chance occurrence, befriending a working girl or something?