“The Hollywood Madam’s former lover talks about their passionate affair and the moments she wanted to preserve because they ‘were the happiest times she had spent in her life.’”
Heide Fleiss
After Heidi Fleiss was busted in June 1993, the name Ivan Nagy, a Hungarian television and film director who is her former lover, figured prominently in all the accounts of her rise and fall as Hollywood’s most celebrated madam. She seemed to blame the hassle on her longtime feud with him, and then in August 1993, he, too, was busted on suspicion of being a pimp. Although no charges were ever brought against Nagy, his name is inextricably linked with what emerged as the underside of Tinseltown and what the Fleiss scandal revealed about the way the rich and famous live.
During the approximately three-and-a-half years that Fleiss and Nagy were together, from 1988 to 1992, they had what he describes as an “intense sexual relationship” and an often tempestuous affair. But, he adds, so much has been written about him and his role in Fleiss’s life and her current problems, he finds it necessary to tell his version of the story, even as he recalls the good times they had “fooling around,” when many of these photographs were taken.
Since Nagy is an expert photographer, the camera became an adjunct to their pleasure, and he often took candid snaps and made videotapes of their amorous adventures. “We did that throughout our relationship,” he explains. “I would shoot the pictures and would always have two copies made of them because Heidi wanted a set of her own. I took the ones of Heidi in the bath one day, probably in 1991, when she was soaking, and she looked so pretty, I wanted to have a lasting image. She didn’t object because she wanted to preserve the moments that she sometimes said were the happiest times she had spent in her life.”
The couple liked to watch the videotapes Nagy made, either as a prelude to sex or just to amuse themselves. “We would be lounging around in bed on a Sunday,” Nagy recalls, “and Heidi would say, ‘This football game’s really getting to be boring. Do you have those tapes we shot last week?’ And we would put them on and look at them and giggle about it.”
Fleiss met Nagy, a man 29 years her senior, in 1988, when she was 23. At that time he had more than 20 feature and TV movies to his credit, and a production deal in the works at Columbia Studios. He had first run into her at Helena’s club in Los Angeles. Helena Kallianiotes is Jack Nicholson’s good friend who, during the 1980s, ran a disco-restaurant on weekends that was a hangout for stars, as well as minor players who wanted to be at the center of the action. As Nagy remembers, his first impression of the young, slim, dark-haired Fleiss was that she was basically “adrift” but “high energy” and “mature for her age.” “She was living at her father’s beach house in Santa Monica, going to real estate school, and, at that point, breaking up with Bernie Cornfeld.”
Cornfeld, the international entrepreneur, had been Fleiss’s lover for several years, another decades-older man. He had taken her under his wing when she was in her late teens. Fleiss was drawn to such father surrogates, men who seemed to have wealth and power and who could introduce her to a more sophisticated world and provide the kind of fast-lane lifestyle she enjoyed. As Nagy himself conceded, Fleiss seemed to have a strong need to please her own father, a well-known Los Angeles pediatrician, and with older men like himself, she seemed “to find some kind of anchor or grounding with an established person, established in terms of age and money.”
Like Cornfeld, Nagy, too, had an interesting background and a wealth of experience beyond that of the middle-class, Jewish young woman from Los Angeles. He was born and raised in Hungary, where his parents were jewelers and upper-middle-class Jews. At 18, in 1956, he joined in the Hungarian uprising and was among those who stormed the radio station and held it until the Soviets crushed the revolutionary movement. To escape the Communist regime, he and a friend, along with thousands of other refugees, sneaked across the northern Austro-Hungarian border. With the American government vowing to help Hungarian refugees, he was able to emigrate to the United States, and with 1,600 others brought over on a U.S. naval transport, he was processed through a refugee center in New Jersey and then given a scholarship to the University of New Mexico. Having learned to speak English, he drove to Los Angeles and, in June 1957, enrolled at U.C.L.A., where he studied photography, the art in which he had been interested since he was a child. He put himself through school with his camera work and then went on from photography to directing, attaining a modicum of success in Hollywood, specializing in such television series as “CHiPs” and “Starsky and Hutch,” as well as movies of the week and a few B-level features.
Nagy was 50 and divorced when he met Fleiss on that Saturday night in 1988, and he found that “there was a very quick bonding” between them. He phoned her the next morning, and she told him that she was going to watch a football game and asked if he knew someone who could place a bet. Nagy said he didn’t, but sensing that Fleiss loved sports betting, he agreed to make a private wager with her. Fleiss’s team won, and Nagy called her back.
“Listen, whatever your thoughts are about me,” he said, “you gotta meet me, because I owe you some money.”
Fleiss laughed, and they met for lunch and then went to Marina del Rey to “hang out” on Nagy’s sailboat. The following day she left for the Bahamas to see Cornfeld, but she began phoning Nagy on an almost daily basis. Upon returning to Los Angeles, Nagy recalls, she resumed studying for her real estate license and also cared for her sister, who had been undergoing numerous operations to reconstruct the arm that had been severely injured when Heidi had flipped her Jeep. Thus, it wasn’t until December 1988 that he and Fleiss actually began to have an affair.
After Fleiss’s bust in 1993, it was alleged that Nagy himself had been responsible for pushing her into prostitution. As the story went, it was Fleiss’s love for sports betting and her gambling debts that allegedly allowed her new lover to get her to go to work for Madam Alex, Hollywood’s then premier and most notorious madam. But Nagy hotly disputes this allegation.
He had met Alex two years before, he explains, when he had confronted a previous girlfriend about her strange hours and learned that she was a call girl working for “this major Hollywood madam.” He concedes, “I was fascinated by the story, and I arranged to meet her, and I suppose you could say I became a confidant. And meanwhile, I was getting to know all these girls, and she was encouraging them to hang out with me.” But, he adds, he did not introduce Fleiss to Alex; instead, he claims that Alex herself informed him that Fleiss had been one of her girls during the previous year.
“Around Christmas 1988 I visited Alex,” Nagy continues. “I told her I’d met this girl, that we were getting along great, and that I was in love. Alex got me to tell her Heidi’s name, and then she started to cackle — ‘Ha, ha, ha, she works for me!’ ”
Nagy was surprised, although, in retrospect, he had sometimes wondered about the times Fleiss had said she was going to be out of town “traveling with Bernie.” “Working for Alex wasn’t a daily job,” says Nagy. “I knew that her girls would call her up when they needed money, or Alex would call them when she wanted somebody for a particular job. So my guess was that Heidi had probably drifted in and out with Alex. But it was at this point, too, that I also began to have a sense that Heidi was doing drugs, although she was always functional during these years.”
As he had gotten to know her, Nagy realized that Fleiss was insecure about her looks. “She always seemed to attach herself to girls who were much prettier,” he recalls, “and then go out with them to draw attention to herself. But they were never her intellectual equal, and they were always people she could control.”
During the first months of their affair, Nagy also saw that Fleiss “was extremely bright, which was probably why she appealed to older men, and to me, too. But I never analyzed our relationship or what was happening to us. I was rolling with it, having fun with her. In fact, I was having the best time of my life with her, and that’s the tragedy of what happened later.”
In retrospect, he recalls the insecurity of Fleiss, the innuendos that something “went wrong in her life around age 13, though she never spoke about it. I saw that there was a huge wound there and that she was a very damaged girl. She has the classic symptoms of an abused girl — the insecurity, the combined love and anger toward men.”
Nevertheless, he still has fond thoughts of their affair. When asked how the relationship affected him, he says that he thought it had “changed” him, for better and for worse. For better, he said, because he became more Americanized. An immigrant, his sense of always having been “an outsider” diminished while he was with Fleiss. They watched football and baseball together, they had their solitary evenings together, “withdrawing from the world outside,” since Fleiss wasn’t all that social and didn’t like to go to parties, and whenever she was out in her club social scene, it “was drug driven.” “She was also very jealous,” he adds, “so if we went out and my eyes drifted, she would become hysterical, wanting to know who I was looking at. We just had a better time staying in, when she wasn’t taking drugs.”
The downside of the affair was that Nagy began to distrust Fleiss and learned that “the operating mentality of the world of call girls and madams is lying. They basically live a lie and act a lie, so lying becomes a form of conversation.”
“I wanted us to live together,” he continues, “but she kept refusing, and periodically, I would find out that she had gone back to working for Alex, and then I was aware of all kinds of guys coming in and out of her place. So during those months, we were fighting, getting back together, making promises and concessions, then being unable to abide by them. Our conversations were constantly about the drugs and hooking. She would lie and insist that she wasn’t hooking, and she would say that she resented the accusation. The denials were punctuated by slamming the door and storming out.”
Nevertheless, they often made up and returned to an even keel, with affection on both sides. It was almost a pattern — a two-week separation, then another three months together. Fleiss still maintained her own place, but sometimes they even talked vaguely about getting married. “The routine was that she would come over to my condo between ten and midnight,” he recalls. “We would get up late, have breakfast, and by 11 in the morning, she would return to her place. Sometimes we would spend the day together, have lunch, but most of the time, she went home. Still, I was aware that hundreds of people were coming through her house each day, and she was still drifting in and out with Alex.”
Thus, Nagy insists that Fleiss’s work as a prostitute was separate from him and, indeed, was something he tried to dissuade her from. He soon realized, however, that her continuing as a call girl was a part of her drive to “make it” in the world of the rich and famous. Throughout 1990 and 1991, they continued their relationship with its volatile ups and downs, with Nagy still in love and trying to offer her advice.
Then over the next year, Nagy noticed more and more drugs in her apartment — “always a plate of coke on the coffee table.” Nagy was getting nowhere with his concern, and by then he and Fleiss were breaking up. As far as Nagy could see, Fleiss was becoming less and less functional, even as she continued her “upward mobility.” It was at that point, Nagy insists, that he broke up with her. He claims that this is the source of Fleiss’s continued animosity toward him. “She is madly in love with me, always has been,” he says. “But I had to tell her, ‘I’m history, I’m out the fucking door, because I’m having nothing to do with you while you’re on drugs.’ She couldn’t handle it and she said, ‘You cannot walk out on me. You don’t know how powerful I am. Wait till I get your fucking ass.’”
By this point Nagy felt he understood Fleiss’s psychology — a nice Jewish girl from an upper-middle-class family who had rather mundane aspirations. “Her ambition was to get to Beverly Hills,” he analyzes. “Her family lived in Los Feliz, an upper-middle-class suburb, but Beverly Hills was her dream, and she even got her parents to enroll her in Beverly Hills High. Her dream was she would meet some rich Beverly Hills boy who would marry her and put her up in a mansion. It was a very infantile nouveau-riche sensibility.”
During this time Fleiss had gone into business for herself, eventually succeeding Alex as Hollywood’s leading madam. “She became a madam because of all the hookers. She had a business mind, and she figured she would make more money by sending several girls out at night rather than going out herself,” says Nagy. “She had a lot of contacts, and at the height of her success, say 1992, she probably netted $70,000 a month, bought her own house, and went around saying she had a house in Beverly Hills, even though it was actually off of Benedict Canyon in west Los Angeles. She surrounded herself with her girls and her roommates, like Victoria Sellers, who was important to Heidi because she was Peter Sellers’s daughter and thus a name in Hollywood. She also gave Heidi a lot of referrals. The house was like a sorority, Animal House in West Hollywood, but with all her girls lying around the pool and on drugs, it was fairly boring.”
By 1993 her animosity toward Nagy had increased, and with her new sense of power and perhaps becoming more dysfunctional from drug abuse, Nagy says that Fleiss set out to exact her revenge. Whether her attacks on him grew out of her suspicion that he had somehow been responsible for her bust or whether it was because, as Nagy insists, she was still furious with him for breaking up with her is unclear.
Then Fleiss went to the police and filed a complaint against Nagy for harassment; Fleiss herself, he said, made endless threats, middle-of-the-night phone calls during which she raged, “You motherfucking scum, I’m going to get you.” She attempted random acts of revenge, what Nagy called “a baby vendetta,” like trying to get him banned from restaurants like Morton’s and the Monkey Bar. More serious, Nagy claims, a development project that he had in the works with a major studio was canceled in the wake of the scandal.
For all their discord during the past two years, however, Nagy claims to be worried about Fleiss and her welfare. She has sold her house, and “she even called me to ask if I would visit her in jail, so she’s in a depressed state,” Nagy alleges. “And when I ran into her recently, she looked terrible. Yet I know that she is a dual personality and still has all this anger at me for ‘jilting her,’ since she doesn’t recognize that it was her habits that caused the breakup.”
Looking back, he says he feels frustration, sadness, “and a lot of anger.” He realizes now that if one is not a drug user, dating someone who is becomes a no-win situation. “For a while I kept allowing her to come back to me over those months,” he says, “because I thought that if I could convince her to stay with me and rely on my strength, she might have been able to straighten herself out. But now I understand that because she was denying that there was a problem, there was no hope for us, no hope that we could have a future.” All that he has left now are the photographs that remind him of the happier moments they had together before all hell broke loose.
You know, in retrospect, maybe drugs are bad. The answers may be more complicated than what seems obvious to many of us, but this qualifies as an important area in whichto gain knowledge, just in case we need it some day. With all the pain in the world right now, being a comfort can save a life, possibly even your own. … Other than that, you probably feel as we do at this point. Hearing just one side of story always feels kind of empty. Seems odd that only one of them would be doing drugs, right?
