MORE than 250 years ago, a book was published in France describing misfortunes which an innocent young girl after had been abused and corrupted.
Although the Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut is fiction, it was written in the form of a memoir, giving the heroine a particular poignancy. Readers were simultaneously thrilled and appalled by what they learnt about girls who fell from grace and the men responsible for their corruption.
Last January, another book appeared in the United States evoking much the same response as Manon among readers, it shows just how little has changed in the intervening period.
You can easily discover a copy of the Abbe Prevost's work in your local book shop but don't expect to come across the more recently published You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again on the shelves. Unlike the earlier work, it's fiction and libel laws on this side of the Atlantic make any appearance even of the most carefully edited extracts highly unlikely. Because You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again its title a play on film producer Julia Phillips's You'll Never Fat Lunch In This Town Again claims to be an expose of Hollywood's sexual mores it not only names names, but goes on to describe in explicit detail just what they get up to in the privacy of their homes and hotel suites.
Written by four women identified only as Robin, Liza, Linda and Tiffany three of whom are former call girls, You'll Never Make Love is as uninhibited as the men it discusses. Inevitably in the US, where the book seems to have become required reading for everyone in the entertainment industry and has already sold more than 100,000 copies in hardback, the main focus has been on the peccadillos of the girl's lovers. So the most heavily thumbed pages are those devoted to the British rock star suffering from premature ejaculation his equally well known musical compatriot who never stopped strumming a ukulele, while Liza looked after his personal needs.
Most of the men featured in the book belong to the Very Famous Indeed category but although scarcely any of them emerge from its pages with credit, none of them has yet sued You'll Never Make Love's American publishers.
Obviously there's a strong whiff of schadenfreude off a book of this kind. Here's an opportunity to see the famous quite literally with their pants down and looking none the better for it. Drugs, alcohol and what is euphemistically known as "water sports" feature repeatedly in their pursuit of pleasure. Given that highly paid publicists usually manage to control the profile of their important clients, this peek behind closed doors has widespread appeal.
Voyeurism is the spur which has driven sales had the men involved been unknown to readers, it's unlikely that the book would have achieved such phenomenal sales.
I wouldn't be entirely truthful if I told you I wasn't writing this book, at least in part, for monetary reasons," admits Liza. But she and the three other authors also seem driven by an understandable desire for revenge over the men who have abused them for so long. The appalling catalogue of behaviour described demonstrates that Lord Acton's maxim about the effects of power remains accurate. The men featured in You'll Never Make Love are so accustomed to having their every whim answered immediately that, they no longer appear capable of ordinary humanity.
Producer Don Simpson, for example, who died earlier this year (supposedly while reading of his exploits in this book) is depicted as a vicious sadist. Men such as Simpson, writes Tiffany "have the luxury of being able to do to young women things that most men would go to jail for". As Gloria Steinem comments on the back cover You'll Never Make Love movies are foisted on the world. Women hating men are making them."
"I've never met an actor who wasn't self centred," remarks Robin, while Linda adds "Of all the people I've made love with, movie stars seem to be the most egotistical." What shocks is the persistent feeling of indifference to other people exuded by the stars who turn up in You'll Never Make Love.
The world in which these call girls work is, they insist, very far involved from that of Pretty Woman. It's not just that they are often physically assaulted and some of the sado masochism described in these pages is truly horrific but they also have to tolerate dishonesty and deception. "Hollywood is a boys' club," Robin explains, "and "the dreams that get fulfilled here are mostly male fantasies."
None of the four co authors set out to become call girls (prostitution has never featured on a career options list) but, they say, casting couch rules still apply in Hollywood. Drug addiction and the necessity to earn immediate cash also played a part in deciding their choice of work.
Even if not every tale included in You'll Never Make Love is true, the book still stands as a devastating indictment of the world's most important entertainment centre and its key players. Sadly, it also shows that innocent young gigs are just a liable to be exploited as they were two and half centuries ago when Manon Lescaut first appeared.