Every city-dweller has seen them, ever city-dweller could list the telltale signs: the fur, the gold, the hats, the cars. They are the original macks, the original players. They are Big City pimps--the heroes of gangsta rap. Bob Adelman and Susan Hall dive headlong into their world in the classic investigative docudrama Gentleman of Leisure: A Year in the Life of a Pimp, an in-depth exploration of the underworld figures that populate our streets at night. The first book of its kind, Gentleman of Leisure, originally published in 1972 and now reproduced in a facsimile edition, is a collection of photographs and interviews dramatically documenting the private life of a pimp and his prostitutes. The people who appear in this book are not models: they are real people with real lives. Only their names have been changed to protect the guilty, their stories are real. Armed only with a camera and a tape recorder, Adelman and Hall entered the lives of the pimp Silky and his women. What they found flew in the face of prevailing prejudices; stripped of stereotype and myth, the pimps and whores that shared their tales were complex people embroiled in romantic dramas, with a code of behavior as intricate as the Mafia's, and a defined sense of self. This stunning expose of Silky and his ladies, Lois, Linda, Kitty, Tracey, and Sandy, explains the passionate bond between a pimp and his "ho's"; why shrewd, street-smart working girls find glamour in their lives and choose to give all their money to their pimp; and why they stay with him through incarcerations, despite their jealousies, the burden of their work, and occasional beatings. You learn how a square girl is "turned out" to be a ho and a pimp's"wife." You visit the pimp's tailor and see the source of his fly applejack hats and his mink coats--the tools of his game. You spend evenings at family parties: one man and his many wives. You learn from his wives how this pimp commands such passionate devotion, and arouses
