Gentleman of Leisure: A Year in the Life of a Pimp

Every city-dweller has seen them, ever city-dweller could list the telltale signs: the fur, the gold, the hats, the cars. They are the original macks, the original players. They are Big City pimps--the heroes of gangsta rap. Bob Adelman and Susan Hall dive headlong into their world in the classic investigative docudrama Gentleman of Leisure: A Year in the Life of a Pimp, an in-depth exploration of the underworld figures that populate our streets at night. The first book of its kind, Gentleman of Leisure, originally published in 1972 and now reproduced in a facsimile edition, is a collection of photographs and interviews dramatically documenting the private life of a pimp and his prostitutes. The people who appear in this book are not models: they are real people with real lives. Only their names have been changed to protect the guilty, their stories are real. Armed only with a camera and a tape recorder, Adelman and Hall entered the lives of the pimp Silky and his women. What they found flew in the face of prevailing prejudices; stripped of stereotype and myth, the pimps and whores that shared their tales were complex people embroiled in romantic dramas, with a code of behavior as intricate as the Mafia's, and a defined sense of self. This stunning expose of Silky and his ladies, Lois, Linda, Kitty, Tracey, and Sandy, explains the passionate bond between a pimp and his "ho's"; why shrewd, street-smart working girls find glamour in their lives and choose to give all their money to their pimp; and why they stay with him through incarcerations, despite their jealousies, the burden of their work, and occasional beatings. You learn how a square girl is "turned out" to be a ho and a pimp's"wife." You visit the pimp's tailor and see the source of his fly applejack hats and his mink coats--the tools of his game. You spend evenings at family parties: one man and his many wives. You learn from his wives how this pimp commands such passionate devotion, and arouses

"'The term is pimp, but I don't use it...I'm a professional gentleman of leisure.' So begins the introduction to Silky, a self-made buyer, owner and seller of women who, when these interviews took place in 1972, claimed to 'make more money than the President of the United States.' He, along with fellow pimp Dandy and 'prosses' Sandy, Kitty, Linda, Tracey and Lois, are the subjects of this offbeat guide to a 'Family's' life on the 'Stroll.' Award-winning photographer Adelman and film producer/writer Hall relay the down and dirty of the crew's day-to-day, dealing hepped-out philosophical musings ('The game is deep. In being a mack, you're supposedly the supreme being of man. Man rules woman. In being a mack, you acknowledge this fact.'), spats between the girls and their pimps and candid photographs ranging from hokey Christmas portraits to the suggestively lewd to the overtly sexual. Much of the dialogue revolves around the politics of orgasms, emotional rants concerning the ever-possessive and disarmingly virile Silky, or the 69 different ways of getting off-all of which is titillating at first, but can be tiresome when consumed in too large a dose. Photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)