Ex-Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss on celibacy, meth and Steve Bing
Lifestyle

Former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss on celibacy, meth and Steve Bing

So far, Heidi Fleiss’s 2020 hasn’t exactly been a flying success.

The former Hollywood madam — during the 1990s she furnished call girls to Charlie Sheen and other A-listers — began the year worried about the ­future of her macaw sanctuary.

Since 2006, she has cared for some three dozen rescued birds at her extremely remote desert home in Pahrump, Nev., but three years ago she was allegedly fleeced out of a $400,000 inheritance that grew into a $4 million investment, leaving her penniless. Her lawsuit over that matter seemed stalled earlier this year.

Then there was the pandemic and the global lockdown. And last month, she lost a close friend of 30-plus years.

“Bing is a f–king a–hole,” Fleiss, 54, told The Post, speaking of Steve Bing, the Hollywood producer who on June 22 jumped to his death from the roof of a Los Angeles high-rise. “I’ve known Steve since I was 21 and we talked on the phone twice a day, every day. We were close. In your 20s, you’re lovers with everyone; then, in your 30s, you become friends.”

Fleiss admits to still ­using meth — “I snort meth like I’m drinking a cup of coffee. I don’t stay up all night doing rails, I have birds to feed in the morning” — and recalled, over the years, “pulling Steve out of drug dens after he shot up and began worshiping the devil.”

After her 1996 conviction on charges related to her work as a madam for high-profile figures, Fleiss (seen here, second from right, with friends in 1995) served 20 months in prison.
After her 1996 conviction on charges related to her work as a madam for high-profile figures, Fleiss (seen here, second from right, with friends in 1995) served 20 months in prison.Getty Images

She added that he was no longer a client but he could have been: “He was paying for girls, guys, trannies until the very end.”

He also was going to, perhaps, save her from her money woes.

“Steve visited me here for the first time in January. The plan was that he would set me up in Palm Springs — I’d have a sanctuary there and he would bring his friends to visit,” Fleiss explained. “People would come for lunch and watch these amazing birds, flying through the sky on pure muscle. My whole life he led me on.

“I’m really spun out about his death.”

She certainly could have used the financial help. Fleiss is in the process of suing former NY1 reporter Elizabeth Keatinge, claiming in a complaint that her onetime friend is “withholding” Fleiss’s inheritance from her father, a well-known Los Angeles pediatrician who died in 2014. Fleiss claims she gave the $400,000 to Keatinge to invest for her in cryptocurrency.

Keatinge’s attorney, Juan C. Res­trepo-Rodriguez, said: “That is not accurate.”

According to Fleiss’s attorney, Robert Hantman, the suit had stalled because Keatinge “was evading service [of a subpoena]. She hid where she was living.”

So Fleiss got creative.

“We got a private investigator to track her down. Heidi got a friend of hers to deliver flowers to Keatinge and we had a summons and complaint in the flowers,” said Hantman. “Now, hopefully. Heidi will get back her money and [can] devote her life to her macaws.”

The complaint alleges that “Keatinge and her husband have been converting” what is now a $4 million account of Fleiss’s invested cryptocurrency “for their own use.”

Fleiss said she was friends with Keatinge — whom she calls Libby — for several years before this, and that the reporter helped Fleiss write a self-published 2003 memoir, “Pandering.”

As recently as 2016, Fleiss added, she paid Keatinge to help out with tasks large and small. “With my drug addiction, I needed someone to hold my Kleenex and water bottle when I came to NYC for a PETA meeting,” said Fleiss.

Heidi recalls pulling “asshole” millionaire and former lover Steve Bing (right), who recently committed suicide, out of drug dens. She is suing Elizabeth Keatinge (left) for allegedly stealing an inheritance left to Fleiss by her father.
Heidi recalls pulling “asshole” millionaire and former lover Steve Bing (right), who recently committed suicide, out of drug dens. She is suing Elizabeth Keatinge (left) for allegedly stealing an inheritance left to Fleiss by her father.Twitter

“Libby wrote my e-mails and letters and things. So it was perfectly normal, in the context of our relationship, for her to open a cryptocurrency account in her name and to deposit my money. I trusted her.”

Fleiss had plans to invest the inheritance in an LA investment property, for which Keatinge would secure the loan because “I assumed I wouldn’t be able to get one.”

Fleiss said that Keatinge, at her request, invested the $400,000 in Bitcoin. “It was trading at around $600 per coin [in 2016] and ultimately went up to [nearly] $20,000. It turned out to be lightning in a bottle,” Fleiss said.

“Then, when I asked for my money back, [Keatinge] wouldn’t give it to me. She blocked my number from her phone. Her husband told me not to contact her again.”

Restrepo-Rodriguez said, “The allegations in the complaint are not what happened. Ultimately, it was a very sloppy joint venture between two people who are not attorneys and that sloppiness has become a significant discrepancy as to who is entitled to what.”

Fleiss, who maintains that it was not a joint venture, said it’s worse because of where the money came from:

“You want to do the right thing with money inherited from your parents. I will not disrespect my father. Look at what I already did to him. He worked hard and I was a madam.”

Fleiss’ profession went public in 1993 when she was busted for pandering and tax evasion, resulting in a three-year prison sentence. Her notoriety was such that she became the subject of “Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss,” a 2004 TV movie starring Jamie-Lynn Sigler.

“I never saw it. What would be the point?” said Fleiss. “[A producer] gave me a copy of the script ahead of time. I was driving home from our meeting and threw it out the window of my Porsche on the freeway.”

Heidi Fleiss and her birds at her home on July 1, 2020 in Pahrump, NV.
Heidi Fleiss and her birds at her home on July 1, 2020 in Pahrump, NV.Roger Kisby

Fleiss first moved to Pahrump intent on opening a legal brothel for female clients, but her so-called “stud farm” fizzled. Instead, she took over a very different operation from another local madam.

The woman — “who had Colonel Sanders as a sugar daddy,” Fleiss said — kept “a scarlet macaw caged for 20 years . . . I saw sadness in the bird’s eyes. On her deathbed she told me to take care of her birds.”

Living with the winged creatures, Fleiss has been single since Dennis Hof, briefly her fiancé and proprietor of Nevada’s famous Bunny Ranch brothel, died of a heart attack in 2018.

By that point, she said, their ­relationship was platonic. She’s been celibate for the past five years and insists that she is off the market.

“Right now I would freak out if I saw a man or woman naked in front of me,” Fleiss said. “I’m no virgin, and I don’t know why, but the thought of sex creeps me out. It would be a waste of time. I just want to take care of my birds.”