My Adventures In The Oldest Profession

“High School Honor Student By Day. Hollywood Hooker By Night.” 

My parents’ worst nightmare. My greatest fantasy.

I have always loved movies about prostitutes, and have always related to them in ways that made little sense to others. Maybe it’s because I wanted to please everyone and didn’t feel that I’d done a good job unless I left a room smiling. Perhaps it’s because I felt I had to play so many different roles with so many different people in order to achieve such a goal. Whatever the reason, I definitely loved that tagline from Robert Vincent O'Neill's Angel every time I passed it in the video store. It would not be until the 2003 DVD release that I finally saw the movie and loved it. But by then I’d already formed a fantasy, based on the concept, and on the cover, and on Roger Ebert’s oft-reprinted original review. The movie lived up to that fantasy. I myself could not.

In 2000, I was working at a store that sold rare laserdiscs and DVDs. Before throwing out a batch of semi-defective laserdiscs, the owner asked me if I had ever seen the film pressed onto all of the slightly marred copies: Ken Russel’s Crimes of Passion. Then and now, I am ashamed to say I had not. It was yet another film that I had formed a video store fantasy around, and even my own version of the movie in my head that starred Andie MacDowell and Madonna and had absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the actual movie. I didn’t even know that it was about a career woman who shields herself from heartbreak by masquerading as a streetwalker named “China Blue” and engaging in outrageous encounters.  Seeing the movie was a turning point, not least of all because I better understood where my desire to be a streetwalker came from: I wanted to be wanted, but didn't want to need that.

I don’t remember when I first wanted to be a prostitute, but I do remember when I first put up an ad for myself online. I had been reading about the escort industry and looking into reviews of some of New York’s more popular male sex workers. I even befriended one through a chat room, a nurse from Maine who I could have seen myself falling in love with at the time. I was flagrantly open with friends and even family about my sex industry ambitions because I found nothing about them dishonorable. In my school of thought, being a whore is nowhere near as sinful as being a freeloader. I also felt that it would be an invaluable insight for my writing, a means of understanding some of the “fallen women” in film who had most inspired me and to get a view of life from the other side of privilege. Of course, such an endeavor has since become a stereotype for naïve young college students and overambitious journalists. I could have lost my life. I could also have gotten arrested. Between the two, I would have taken the former: death scares me way less than cops. 

The closest I came to being a male escort was the closest I came to being arrested, and so that’s why I ultimately closed up shop right before the grand opening. I put up an ad online—ahem, on an “AOL Personal Homepage” no less—and included pictures I’d taken of myself looking pouty and sweet. I don’t remember much about my description, but I do remember that my rate was $100/hr. At that time, in 2002, the going rate for male escorts was around $300/hr, so I thought that I might have a shot at establishing a good customer base thanks to being twenty years old and relatively low-priced. I was insecure about being overweight, but even so, I thought I was a bargain. After all, I ALWAYS aim to be fair. 

Rob '02: Trying to sell myself on AOL as a precocious boy next door. 

I was so proud of myself for thinking of my customers that I failed to remember prostitution is illegal in this particular country. I remembered that reality vividly when an “interested customer” called me up and seemed a little too interested in the details of my one-man business operation. So I told him I’d decided to give up being a male escort and, at that moment, I did.

Bette Davis played my favorite screen prostitute of all.

I often regretted not being brave enough to do what I wanted to do in spite of the warnings of everyone in my life and, indeed, the state and federal government of the United States of America. I can admit now that they were right and I was wrong—not because it’s bad to be a prostitute, but rather because I would have been bad at it. I had never even met a sex worker until a visit to Amsterdam in 2006 lead me to one of the most popular male brothels in the city: Singel 21. There I met one of the most interesting fellows I have ever encountered, and the one who made me realize that prostitution was not nearly as appropriate a line of work for me as I hoped it would be.

His name was Zortak, or that’s what it sounded like. Something Hungarian. He was thirty seven and a twenty seven year old Dutchman, the youngest of the employees, was shocked that I wasn’t going off with him. But I didn’t know that I had a choice. Zortak spotted me first, and I thought that it was only right that I should go with him, despite the fact that the twenty-seven year old was beautiful enough to remain in my dreams forever. 

As we enjoyed mixed drinks in the lounge together, I told Zortak that I had such tremendous respect for his profession, and that it had in fact been my dream to be a sex worker. He looked at me in stunned disbelief. I could see that he was at once confused and insulted, so I just smiled and looked at the twinkling city of Amsterdam outside. I had dreamed of being a sex doctor to beautiful male patients. But Zortak's reality was entirely scripted and rooted in money, not sexual adventure. He and his co-workers were all laughing and joking with one another in Dutch while we waited for the room to be free, and I was convinced they were making fun of me. It bothered me because I wanted to be viewed as an ally, not a john, and also because I really wished I’d learned to speak the language before I left America. For a wannabe sex worker like me, nothing could be worse than rejection by Dutch prostitutes. However, a year later, one of my friends said they were probably laughing over the only twenty-four year old in the establishment being a client.

From the moment I walked into the room and until the time I walked out of the place, I put on a show. I got to be Marilyn Chambers, and I got to give back to an experienced sex worker all of the attention and affection that he had given to countless men before me. But that was the problem, too. I was throwing off the whole transaction by playing the part of “desirable one”, and upon realizing this I had to switch gears. That’s where the guilt came in.

Spending time with a sex worker is like getting a massage or a pedicure: you can feel guilty about it, or you can enjoy it. My experience with a prostitute was a combination of the two. After our intimate encounter, we somehow got into a discussion of AIDS minutes before I left. I forget the full context, but I believe that the man who owned the brothel had inherited it from his partner, who had died of AIDS. It was an awkward intrusion of reality, one which instantly burst the fantasy bubble moments before the fantasy was complete. 

As I walked down the steps, I somehow managed to accidentally make a call on my cell phone. I looked and realized someone was on the other line, and it was my best friend’s father. My best friend, I might add, was also my first love. We had broken up six months earlier, but remained as close as ever. With that having been said, I had no intention of calling he or his parents after my evening with a sex worker. All this came about only hours after I had arrived in Amsterdam, so between jet lag, White Widow, and afterglow, my mind wasn’t absorbent enough of the details for me to recall whether my phone got an answering machine or if I actually spoke to his father that night. I’m still convinced that that gorgeous young Dutchman, who took my politeness to Zortak as a rejection, cast a spell to cause the snafu. He could only be a witch, for as I walked back to the hotel that night, his was the spell I was under. 

Birth Of An Angelo: The de Vries Side Of Me

I write films that are violent, romantic, and rooted in my fascination with sex and cinema. I think it’s ridiculous to ascribe artistic traits with an ethnicity, yet I cannot deny that I link being Italian with the passions that shape my work.

"Ik ben Angelo".

“Angelo de Vries” is the the name I use as a screenwriter. It is the purest side of myself, the constant essence of who I am, and it is only visible to people through my writing. I don’t want to suggest that I “created” Angelo to take some share of the load in a semi-schizophrenic, Stephen King’s The Dark Half kind of a way. It has more to do with presenting the sides of myself that won’t immediately come off to people unless they meet me through my work.

I first conceived of the idea for a new name after a humiliating experience that I had brought upon myself while living in Miami. After allowing myself to become romantically attached to someone whom I barely knew at all, someone who disappeared from my life with lots of my money and all of my self-respect, I felt like a different person. So different, in fact, that I wanted to separate myself from my lifelong identity by giving birth to a new one.

I created "Angelo de Vries" in Miami in August 2008. My birth name never felt like my own to begin with, but rather a gift which I inherited as the grandson of Robert Emerson Jeffrey. My father’s father was a fine man whose passing in 1976 left a gaping hole in my father’s family, one that I certainly could never fill. I’ve always felt a very literal closeness with my grandfather, whom I consider to be a guiding light in my life, but I’ve always felt a great insecurity about the fact that my name is really his name. I think that that must be part of why I have always felt such a need to be perfect—by “perfect”, I mean always able to make people feel happy, regardless of who they are or where they come from or how I feel around them. Robert Emerson Jeffrey is who I am, but it’s also a sort of post-modern riff on what I assume my expectations are. Coming up with a new name felt natural because I felt that there was a name out there which could describe "the real me"—I just had to find it.

When I was a child in the 80s, we spent summers on Cape Cod and frequented a grocery store that many will fondly recall: “Angelo’s”. Best known for their baked goods, I knew Angelo’s for their video section. That was the wonderful era when video stores thrived so much that supermarkets got in on the action. I still recall the now-classic films I could once only fantasize about as a child wandering down the 'Horror' aisle: The Company of Wolves, Demons, A Nightmare on Elm Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2, Creepshow, Piranha, Eaten Alive. But above all other videos, I most vividly remember the Media VHS for Creepers, an infamous New Line Cinema re-edit of Dario Argento’s Phenomena. The cover art, of a beautiful girl with half of her face taken off by flying insects, stuck out to me at every video store I frequented in my youth. But those images stood out most within the wholesome, brightly-lit, air-conditioned little universe of Angelo's Supermarket.

My childhood introduction to my future favorite filmmaker in the horror aisle of Angelo’s Grocery Store was half the reason I decided upon "my other first name". The other half was based on a lifelong insecurity about my ethnic identity.  My ancestry is predominantly Irish-Scotch and Italian. My inherited face speaks to the former. But nothing about me physically speaks to the latter. So I chose the name “Angelo,  because it is a distinctly Italian word for “angel”. I believe in angels, I’m a huge Buffy/Angel fan, and writing “Angelo” flows more naturally than my own name does. What I did not realize at the time was that the full name of my father's maternal grandfather, an Italian immigrant, was Angelo Callandrella. I had unconsciously gone from being named after my grandfather to naming myself after his father-in-law.

My paternal grandfather, after whom I was named, and my paternal grandmother, 

whose father was also an 'Angelo'.

Sadly, there is no Dutch blood running through my veins, but the affinity I feel with The Netherlands and Dutch people goes much deeper than the flesh anyway. What I most connect with in the Dutch is the love of freedom, of tolerance, of embracing humanity and learning to flow with it, not against it.  As such, I adopted “de Vries”, an extremely common Dutch surname, which translates to “the free”. I also chose this name after Xaviera de Vries (aka Xaviera Hollander), one of my heroes and author of one of my favorite books of all time, The Happy Hooker.

Madame Xaviera: AGELESS! 

On April 12th, 2010, my favorite Dutchman of all almost literally Christened my creation at my favorite movie theater in the world. I attended a Q&A/screening at The Brattle Theater when my second favorite filmmaker, Paul Verhoeven, brilliantly paired a discussion of his book Jesus of Nazareth with one of the many Christian parables that define his film career: Robocop. I bought a copy of his book after a fascinating discussion and I asked him to sign it to “Angelo”.  It was the first time I publicly identified as Angelo and the first time that name had been written in relation to me—and in a book about Jesus, no less! This photo, taken by my friend Danielle, captures how truly delighted I was that Paul Verhoeven got to meet "Angelo de Vries".

4/12/10: When I met Mr. Verhoeven, I wore my "Marilyn Chambers For President" 

button in memory of a most beloved icon, one year after her passing.

Paul Verhoeven is a magnificent artist and a beautiful human being who has been a huge influence on my creative development since I was ten years old. But he is “my second favorite filmmaker" because I can only have one favorite. That person, my idol and my “artistic father”, is Dario Argento.

I should note that my pride in being Italian and my connection to Italian cinema is very Dario-centric. All of my favorite Italian filmmakers worked in either Argento’s giallo oeuvre or some other subgenre of Italian horror. And I can’t say I loved any of their works until high school, when I gained a truly life-changing appreciation of Argento. My desire to appeal to an Italian audience is largely a tribute to the auteur from whom I have learned the most. Thus, when I read that Dario Argento would be at the 2010 Weekend of Horrors in Los Angeles, I flew across the country to meet him. I stayed in LA for months, trying to launch a writing career, before going home disillusioned and broke in the grand tradition of failed East Coast transplants. But all the time and money were worth it to meet the man of my cinematic dreams.

5/23/10: From left to right, it's my sister, my idol, 

my muse, and me! :)

My sister Jennifer joined me in meeting Dario. She generously had him sign my copy of Opera, the film that most influenced my writing, “To Robert”. I am forever grateful to Jen for that, for it gave me the opportunity to have my copy of Phenomena, aka Creepers, signed from Argento “To Angelo”. That signature insures that I--as in Robert AND Angelo--will die with a smile on my face.

30 Before 30: Random Revelations About Robert

It recently occurred to me that I never properly introduced myself to anyone who might be reading. In thirty days, I’ll be thirty years old, so I have come up with thirty seemingly random yet thoroughly revealing facts about me that I thought many of you might enjoy being made aware of.

1.)  My favorite movie is Adrian Lyne's Flashdance, but I consider Irving Rapper's Now, Voyager to be the best movie ever made.

2.)  My favorite singer is Madonna, and among many other favorite musical acts are Diana Ross, ABBA, Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Laura Branigan, Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Def Leppard, Olivia Newton-John, Rachel Sweet, The Ramones, and Yoko Ono.  

3.)  My favorite actors are Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Montgomery Clift, Mickey Rourke, and Madonna. 

4.)  My favorite directors are Dario Argento, Paul Verhoeven, and Adrian Lyne, and among my MANY other favorites are Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, John Hughes, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Radley Metzger, David Lynch, and Jodie Foster. 

5.)  The star with whom I most identify is Marilyn Chambers.

6.) The last movie I ever saw on the big screen in the 20th century was The Talented Mr. Ripley, at Regal South Beach Stadium in MIAMI!

7.) The first movie I ever saw on the big screen in the 21st century was Scream 3, at the Loews Liberty Tree Mall Theater in Danvers, Massachusetts....formerly known as "Salem Village"! 

8.)  The first movie I EVER saw in a movie theater was Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer, at the General Cinema in Framingham, Massachusetts, when I was four years old. I loved it, but only watched it once since, in 2005, so as to keep whatever faint memories linger from that day alive in my mind forever. 

9.) The first Madonna video that I ever saw was "Burning Up", in Autumn 1983, while staying at my Godmother’s house during the time my Mom and Dad were in the hospital welcoming my younger sister into the world. Thank God for my cousins’ memories of how mesmerized I was, for I don’t recall it. I can only imagine how fascinated I must have been when she looked into the camera and said “Unlike the others, I’ll do ANYTHING!” . 

10.) My proper love affair with Madonna began in the Summer of 1990 when my Dad took me to see Dick Tracy as an eight year old. When Dick Tracy asked her whose side she was on, Breathless Mahoney answered with “the same side I’m always on: mine”. I loved both Breathless Mahoney and Madonna Ciccone from that moment on. When I rented “The Immaculate Collection” on video in April 1991, the deal was officially sealed: Madonna became the dominant artistic force in my life from that day forward. 

11.) I am in a rare demographic: it was Madonna’s acting, in Dick Tracy and in her first decade of music videos, that made me a lifelong fan. I think the whole “Madonna can’t act” thing was media-created to begin with, but the release of Swept Away made me realize how effective the media has been in turning the mainstream public against her big-screen efforts. I bought tickets to two different shows of Swept Away on opening night in Boston, in a vain attempt to help both sell out. After leaving the one I actually attended, I tried to give my tickets to the next screening to a homeless man outside of the Loews Boston Common Theater on a chilly night in October 2002...and he turned down the offer! Oh well. I still think it’s a damn good performance.

12.)  I first saw Madonna live on August 7th, 2001, when The Drowned World Tour brought Madonna to the Boston Garden for her first show ever at that venue. Ten years later, I have seen her a total of nine times on four tours. 

13.) Before his death in 1998, I am honored to say that I saw Frank Sinatra four times in concert, including his last-ever Boston performance, at "The Harbor Lights" (now The Bank of America Pavilion) in early September 1994. 

14.) In June, 1981, my Sinatra-loving father made my non-fan mother see every performance by Ol’ Blue Eyes in both Atlantic City and Boston while on tour that year. Factor in those shows and I’ve "seen" Frank Sinatra in concert more times than I've seen Madonna!

15.) When I was seven, my parents took my sister and I to see Frank Sinatra perform with Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli. As a child, Liza Minnelli was the entertainer I enjoyed most on that legendary triple-bill.  

16.) Showgirls opened two days after I turned fourteen, and I used my birthday boy clout to convince my parents to go in my place see the Midnight show of the NC-17 film on its opening night at the Lincoln Center Cinema in Manhattan. They did. They even liked it: I got a full run-down of the storyline from my Mom the next day, and I distinctly recall that my Dad thought it was a better film-viewing experience than Atom Egoyan’s Exotica! I have loved Showgirls ever since, and I loved my parents even more after the massive coolness points that that night earned them in my book.  

17.) My favorite Dario Argento movie is The Stendhal Syndrome. When I met Il Maestro in May 2010, I nonetheless asked him to sign my copies of Opera and Phenomena, because A.) those two come pretty damn close to being my favorites a well and B.) all three have been equally influential on my development as a screenwriter.  

18.) The first time I was ever left home alone was in December 1991, when I watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The trailer for Basic Instinct appeared at the beginning of the tape. I was ten, and my parents were at a school conference, where their well-behaved son was being acclaimed for his solid conduct and academic performance. I know I liked seeing T2 that night, but my viewing was tainted by that trailer. I was positively overwhelmed by those few minutes of spliced gazes, beautiful faces, and old-fashioned dialogue against pounding, hypnotic music. It was another three years before I’d built up the bravado to sneak in a viewing of the full-length film against my parents’ wishes, but in the interim, I became positively obsessed with it. Suffice to say, it remains among the most influential films on my entire writing career. 

19.)  A guy once said to me "you need to come out” after I told him, at the age of 24, that I had never gone clubbing. It was odd since I’d been totally out to the world for many years. Funny, but I thought that the fact that we were about to sleep together made it pretty apparent that I wasn’t hiding from who I really was.

20.)  I once put out a cigarette on the back of my hand in a drunken state of self-despair following a failed summer romance. I was totally embarrassed by the act the next day, but I’ve comforted myself when I look at the scar by acknowledging that it might impress Mickey Rourke. 

21.) I LOVE theatrical trailers, particularly those from the early-‘70s through the late-‘90s, and my favorite of all time is the trailer for Adrian Lyne’s 9 ½ Weeks.  

22.) I have always felt an affinity with prostitutes in movies. My favorite onscreen prostitute of all is Bette Davis in Marked Woman. 

23.) The affinity I share with prostitutes in movies was best understood by one of my favorite screenwriters, Barry Sandler, and one of my favorite actresses, Kathleen Turner, in my favorite Ken Russell film: Crimes of Passion! 

24.) In April of 1994, my entire sixth grade class went to see the Red Sox play at Fenway Park, along with the entire sixth grade class of two neighboring towns. In the 7th grade, all three groups of students would go on to a regional junior high together, and that was the night we all got to “meet”. I, however, did not attend. I nixed the night at Fenway to instead go see Serial Mom with MY Mom on opening night!  I know my Mom would have enjoyed it as much as I did if the little old ladies in attendance at the 5 PM show weren’t so upset by all the violence in the new Kathleen Turner movie, thereby making her feel unnecessarily guilty for giving in to my pleas to see it. I convinced my Dad to take me to a second screening, a few weeks later, where he enjoyed it as much as the dozens of bikers who filled the theater that raucous Saturday night in Boston. 

25.) I am very close with both of my parents, as well as my one and only sister. Sometimes I prefer to think of them as friends, rather than family, because I aim to be cool, and I’m not sure how cool someone who gets along as well with his family as I do would be if I were on the outside looking in! 

26.) My favorite film genres are horror and romance. I can’t explain why, but I’m positive it has to do with my being Italian and Irish and raised in New England. 

27.) I was introduced to Bette Davis as a child by way of The Watcher in the Woods and late-night TV talk show appearances that my Dad would tape and show to me the next day; he always got a big kick out of how entertained I was by her! I was in a station wagon with a carphone when  my Dad called my Mom to deliver to me the sad news that Bette Davis had died. It was a monumental loss, but also a special moment that I shall never forget. 

28.) I have loved Diana Ross since childhood, and when I finally got to see her live on June 9th, 2010, she looked right into my eyes as she sang several of the lines from “THE BOSS”!

29.)  Like many of my idols, favorite topic could very well be sex.  Due to my prolonged romantic attachments, I’m never been quite as promiscuous as I have always wanted to be, but I still encourage the rest of the world to make as much love as humanly possible—SAFELY, of course! 

30.)  I have had and loved many pets in my lifetime. Their respective and collective impacts on my life are at the root of my belief in immortality.