Episode 12
Chapter Seven
It was Mandy’s complexion that had attracted Don to her the first time he saw her. Frosted light glowed from her iridescent skin as if she were a firefly, and that glow attracted men to her as if they were mosquitos hypnotized by the scent of blood.
Don had seen black and white photographs of Amanda when she had been Mandy’s age in one of Aunt Eleanor’s albums , and, even without color, it was obvious that Amanda’s complexion has been the same as Mandy’s, which helped explain how Amanda had been the mistress of several wealthy and powerful men before she had turned 25. Amanda said she started as a Ziegfeld girl and had her pick of men. One was Sherman Billingsley, who took his fortune from bootlegging and invested it in real estate. He was the founder and owner of New York’s Stork Club.
His grandmother said that Billingsley collected showgirls like some men collected butterflies, and one thing he liked to do was name his businesses after his girls. He named one of his drugstores after Amanda, who opened her first speakeasy in the basement of the drugstore and kept a few card games going in addition to some busy beds crammed in small rooms hidden behind a false wall. She recruited streetwalkers by offering them a safer place to do business in exchange for a ten-percent cut.
Billingsley died in 1966 at 70, but, by then, Amanda was long gone. Before the end of Prohibition, she’d sold the speakeasy and moved to California, where she used the money to buy the Aphrodite. The yacht served as a floating gambling hall and whorehouse. Her trick was to sail her clients outside the three-mile legal limit before she opened the bar, card tables and girls for business.
Using what she’d learned from Billingsley, she invested her profits in undeveloped property along the Southern California coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Her first legitimate business had been a Mexican restaurant with a takeout window for hot dogs. When Billingsley died, he left her some money, and she used that to tear down the restaurant and build the Aphrodisiac Academe.
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