Lottie Da says every woman’s fantasy is to be either a nun or a slut. “I always wanted to be a prostitute. That was my fantasy life. But I never was–because I didn’t need to be,” she concludes.
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Lottie Da, the former Lottie Jo Meyers, a graduate of South Shore High School and the University of Illinois at Chicago (when it was still called Circle), says her interest in prostitutes and other “bad girl” characters in the movies began in her teens in the 60s, when she spent time living in the Playboy mansion. She was bored on the south side, and during excursions to Rush Street and the beach she met some Lake View High School girls who knew Hugh Hefner. One day Hef’s assistant Bobbie Arnstein called Lottie and invited her to a party. “Hef told me after that that if I bought my own cigarettes and food, I could stay with him as long as I wanted.”
Da says she never had sex with him. “I was a virgin. I was a voyeur. Seeing all these gorgeous and glamorous girls with these older men, and Hefner’s attitude toward some bunnies that ‘If you don’t do it, you’re out,’ led to my interest in [women having] sex for gain–not for love, but for gain,” she says.
Eventually she met Peter Whigham, a professor of British literature who had written 18 books of poetry. They married and he took the name “Da” as well. Their literary circle in Marin County, California, included Alan Watts. One night Margo St. James, who founded Coyote, a prostitutes’ rights group, came to dinner and asked Lottie to work for her.
In other words, her work was cut out for her. The book, written with Jan Alexander and graced with a picture of Marlene Dietrich, was published by Carroll & Graf in late 1989 and is selling well, particularly in Europe.
“When I lecture about this, it becomes a revelation for people. Women nod because they know what I’m talking about. But men don’t know why they equate things like red lipstick and long red fingernails with a ‘loose’ impression and expectations when they meet a woman at a bar. They shake their heads, and they say, ‘Gee, I never thought of that before.’…It’s men’s idea to separate good women from bad women, you know.”
