With her hair primly pulled back with barrettes, Barrows looks more like a Brownie troop leader than a former madam. She talks about organizing an escort service as though it were a sorority tea. She advises her “young ladies’ to read NEWSWEEK or Time and watch “60 Minutes” so they can carry on a conversation over a bottle of wine. Briefcases are de rigueur on hotel visits to make security guards think you’re between board meetings. And, with typical WASP reserve, Barrows instructs her pupils to wait until the end of the evening to demand payment.
She advises would-be entrepreneurs to target their market:top-of-the-line execs )“Most women would pay a dating service to be fixed up with these guys”), high volume (“Think of Macy’s”) and cash-only street trade, where keeping up with current events is not required. Barrows prefers stressed-out single Yuppies and CEOs seeking conjugal relief. Contrary to the movie “Pretty Woman,” pay-for-sex shouldn’t lead to a Meaningful Relationship-at the end of the evening, the woman should go home. “That’s the best part of it,” says Barrows. “He doesn’t have to hear any feminist rhetoric or muttering about the biological clock ticking.”
Barrows doesn’t like to dwell on downside risks. She brushes aside questions about the threat of AIDs with a school-marmish suggestion to distribute safe-sex pamphlets (“Otherwise, you’re going to feel very guilty sending your ladies out”). Legal complications? She suggests hiring a former vice-squad cop who knows the ropes, along with “your basic down-and-dirty criminal attorney.” She also proposes “seeding the books” with prominent names, even when they are nonclients. She credits the number of well-known businessmen in her ledgers with the leniency of her sentence: a $5,000 fine for a misdemeanor. She recalls running an escort firm as “the best job I ever had” and claims five-year earnings in the mid six figures.
Some 50 men and women turned up recently for her Washington seminar. Most claimed only to be curious, but none gave names. And they were skeptical about Barrows’s insistence that the chance of getting caught is “one in a billion.” At least two students with previous experience had stories about run-ins with the police. Still, they paid $24 for the privilege of hearing the Mayflower Madam’s advice-far less than the $200 her old Finesse service charged per hour. Presumably Barrows is following her own advice: “Thank Macy’s” and make it up in volume.
