B-Girl

Chapter Four: B-Girl
"BUY ME A DRINK, HONEY?"

That is the typical approach, or pitch, a B-girl uses on the unescorted male who falls into the lair. The words are more a statement of fact than a question. For it is a strong-willed man, indeed, who can elude these female leeches before he has been separated from a large chunk of his ready cash. The approach is usually made to the accompaniment of a caressing hand on the back of the neck or a suggestive squeeze of the arm. If trade is slack on that particular night, and the quarry shows signs of demurring, the accomplished B-girl really goes into her act.

If the man is seated, he is, literally, a sitting duck. The girl will squeeze in beside him and signal the waiter or waitress. Before "the mark" knows what's happening, two glasses of colored liquid will be on the table along with a tab for all the traffic will bear. This usually is followed by the girl imparting to her male companion in a husky-voiced whisper, "I like you, honey. How about ordering a bottle of champagne just for us?"

The successful B-girl must be a good judge of human nature— especially of the male nature. She can tell within a few minutes:

1 . How much money her companion has.

2. How drunk he is.

3. Just how far she has to go to separate him from the maximum amount of his money.

When you have seen one B-girl operate, you have seen them all. Except for slight variations in technique, they are alike as pebbles on a beach. The approach that will work for them on East Baltimore Street, in Baltimore, or in the French Quarter in New Orleans, will work on Miami Beach or in Phenix City. Whatever the approach, its essence is the subtle, or brazen, promise of sex. This may be conveyed by word or by body movements most calculated to arouse the male interest. It may be in the sweep of false eyelashes or in the brush of a kiss on the ear lobe from carmine lips. It all spells out just one thing: Mister, I'm after your money.

There were literally hundreds of B-girls in the pleasure palaces of Phenix.

Every man who has followed his natural curiosity and found himself in a joint specializing in strip-and-clip, can add his own familiar B-girl lines. While the man takes his bourbon at a dollar a shot, his new-found companion will be lifting a Coke disguised with ice cubes, or sipping tea. To add the necessary deception and impart the smell of liquor to her drink, the bar tender will pour bourbon into the glass, slosh it around and then pour in hot Coke. In that manner a B-girl may take forty to fifty drinks in an evening without being affected. And these drinks are costing her sucker a buck a throw.

To add spice and encourage more business, some times a girl will suggest that the man put a dollar bill inside her bra or her panties. In addition to the fifty-fifty cut she gets on the drinks, she keeps all the cash she picks up in the manner described.

As her "date" gets drunker and bolder, the B-girl goes into another of her well rehearsed acts. She may promise to meet him after hours for a party in her apartment or his hotel room, but he must first give her the ten or twenty dollars she charges for such entertainment.

Occasionally she may actually keep the date, if she likes his looks or thinks she may be able to bleed him for even more cash. Most of the time, however, he will spend the night alone, wondering how he could have been so foolish.

Sometimes the boy friend won't be so willing to forget and will return the next night in an ugly mood. that's when the bouncers work out on him. Pal M. Daniel, the police chief of Phenix City until his ouster following the Patterson murder, said more trouble was brewed from the broken promises of B-girls than any other one cause.

Girls who work in places that feature the strip-tease may use the promise of a "special show after we close," and collect the price of the promised show from the date then and there. The show, of course, is never held and the sucker finds himself hustled out the door at closing time by the housemen who protest that they never heard of any late show, "and who do you think you're kidding, bud?*'

Meanwhile, the girl who collected the admission price ha disappeared through the back door with all the sucker money she has collected.

B-girls are not always prostitutes, though many of them do drift into the profession. In Phenix City it was considered a sort of training ground for the girls who wanted to better their financial position by offering their love on the open market. But not all of them chose to do so. One B-girl, interviewed by this writer, insisted heatedly that she was a virgin. She resented, she said, the implication that all B-girls went to bed with men.

Later, under questioning by investigators, this nineteen year-old brunette admitted that she had been intimate with one or two men, but protested that it was not on a commercial basis.

The working life of a B-girl in the better-class places was no more than six to ten years, before she grew coarse and dissipated and lost her looks. She then had the choice of becoming a waitress, a bar-girl in one of the lower class establishment, or a second-rate prostitute.

A few of the B-girls followed a normal feminine course and became the wives of soldiers. Some left the racket without ever taking the final step into prostitution. Occasionally one of the smarter ones would step up into the management end of the business, or become a recruiter for the operators of the B-girl establishments. But, like the prostitutes, most of them wound up as dope addicts, jail birds, or in the gutters of sin-soaked Phenix or Columbus.

Few B-girls started out in the business deliberately. Most of them were lured into Phenix by other girls who told them of the glamor and money that would be theirs in the wide-open city. They left their homes on the farms of Alabama and Georgia, or their modest dwellings in small cities, to seek their fortunes amid the bright lights of the nation's wickedest city. They came as waitresses or curb girls, but if they showed promise, they were soon approached with the proposition of becoming a B-girl in one of the spots along Highway 241 or Fourteenth Street. A waitress in Phenix could expect thirty five dollars a week with little hope of improvement in her field. A B-girl, on the other hand, was limited only by her own ability to cadge drinks or cash from the soldiers and pleasure-seeking civilians who frequented the dives where the girls worked.

Some of the waitresses stepped directly from the cafes into the bedrooms of some bordello. But B-girls provided the most fertile field for recruiting by the big prostitution houses. Often the girl who caught the eye of one of the house operators found that she had little or no choice in the matter of becoming a prostitute.

If she couldn't be recruited by offers, she would find herself in jail on some trumped up charge. Unable to meet the bail set, the girl would be in a receptive mood when approached by some house operator who offered to square her with the law in exchange for work. If the girl demurred, she often would find herself with a police record, charged with the very acts she refused to perform. She would then be told that her record would be made known in her home-town unless she agreed to work for a specified time. This form of blackmail was common in Phenix.

The term "B-girl" is a contraction of "bar-girl," and she is associated with bars or drinking establishments. But often the B-girl was also a shill, or come-on, for gambling or even prostitution. Along the wicked strip known as Fourteenth Street, in Phenix City, the girls shilled for dice games, poker games, slot machines or even the ten-cents-per-game bowling machines. They were paid a commission of the sucker's losses. This usually amounted to five per cent for dice and poker, and a higher percentage on mechanical games or gambling devices.

Another sweet racket operated by the B-girls with the help of bartenders, was the old pawn racket. When the girl felt she had a live "mark,'* she would give hun the hard luck story about having had to pawn her wrist watch to the bartender for five or ten dollars to help pay her room rent. The gallant swain, flushed from the cheap whiskey and dulcet promises, most often would volunteer to get the watch out of hock to show the girl that he was a "right guy." The money, of course, was split between the girl and the barkeep.

In Phenix, the B-girls spoke a language all their own. When two or more of them began jabbering in something resembling pig latin, only another B-girl could understand.

The language was formed by raking the second syllable of each word and putting it first. They used this jargon to pass information to each other about certain customers; whether he was a "live one'* or a dud. They also used it to tip each other on persons they suspected of being members of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. These CID men, in civilian clothes, made frequent visits to the various joints, trying to prevent the rolling or beating of soldiers whenever possible.

In statements to investigators after the beginning of the cleanup, scores of B-girls admitted rolling soldiers after getting them drunk and, in some cases, of feeding them knockout drops in their drinks to hurry the process to oblivion. When a B-girl rook a soldier's wallet, it would be passed quickly to the bartender or proprietor under a napkin. Sometimes the money would be removed and the purse returned. If this was too risky, the wallet would be tossed away or destroyed so that it could not serve as evidence.

The girl got half of the money for her trouble and artistry. The division was made by the bartender or proprietor before the girl left work for the night.

The operators frowned upon private enterprise by the girls. If one planned to meet a customer after hours, the boss wanted to know about it and get his cut, which was usually fifty per cent. After that he had little interest in whether the girl kept her date or left the sucker waiting. The rolling of soldiers was also considered company business, and the girl who was caught trying to hold out a wallet she had lifted could get into so much trouble she wouldn't forget it for a long time.

One baby-faced B-girl, barely turned nineteen, wept bitterly as she told investigators about how she started in the racket and finally stepped over into prostitution soon after the Phenix City cleanup got underway. She left the doomed town as the neon lights began going out under the pressure of the anti-vice crusade. She wound up in a trailer camp in Aiken, S. C, entertaining male customers. She was a frail, pathetically beautiful girl, with elfin features. At first she protested that she was a virgin, but under questioning she broke down and related a sordid story which started when she was sixteen, with her own father getting her employment as a Phenix City B-girl in the dive where he worked as a bartender.

Most of the B-girls had fairly good educations, though this reporter found only one who had attended college. Several of them were graduates of high schools, and nearly all of them had attended high school and made average to good grades. They came from small towns and rural communities in most cases. Lured by the promise of the gay life, fine clothes and good pay, they found, instead, the gaudy, ill-smelling dives, permeated with the filth and lust they attracted. The girls found hard-bitten bosses in the gamblers and pimps who thrived on the activity of the sinful city. Those who chose it, or could be lured or forced into prostitution, found a ready market for their charms in the thousands of soldiers whose military pay supported the racket-ridden enterprises of the town.

Just as the B-girls enjoyed a social caste different from the prostitutes, yet sometime competed for the same trade, so did the strippers and show-girls differ from the B-girls.

The show-girls were paid for entertaining as strippers, singers or dancers. The competent show-girls received about $200 weekly for performing their chores. All of them supplemented their incomes by acting as B-girls between acts and cadging drinks from admirers.

Some of the show-girls were considered the private property of certain gangsters, and it could be most unhealthy for the average customer to become too playful around one of these. Other show-girls were available for private parties and many of them could be had for a substantial price. Most of them were beautiful, and some had a degree of talent.

One beautiful, blonde stripper confided to the authors of this book that she had never taken a dollar from a man for any of her after-hour favors. When she worked one of the clubs, she made about $350 per week in salary and commissions from drinks. She never rolled drunks, she said, and her story was substantiated by the investigators.

"If I see a man I would like to be with," she said. "I let him know it, and I don't wait to feel the heft of his purse. I'm not chaste but no one can ever say I am a prostitute."

Here it is disclosed for the first time that one B-girl volunteered her services to state investigators and helped to obtain information that led to more than a hundred indictments. She was on the state's payroll as an investigator and received $56 a week for her services. The state got more for its money there than for any like amount spent for investigators and informers. Working from inside the rackets, she was able to obtain the low-down on prostitution, muggings, dope, abortion rackets, gambling and assorted criminal activities. Her identity must still remain a secret for her own protection.

Apparently learning the state had employed a B-girl, another one put the information to excellent advantage— for her. She strutted into a beauty parlor, ordered the works and sat back to enjoy it. When the job was done, the girl haughtily strode from the parlor, telling the owner she was an undercover agent for Military Chief General Hanna and to charge it to him.

Many of the B-girls, prostitutes and show girls were tattooed about the arms and body, but those who worked at The Blue Bonnet Cafe had a special brand. These girls were marked inside their lower lips with the artist's needle. Investigators found many girls who sported their initials in purple ink inside the lip. When a girl started to change jobs, her prospective employer often would ask to see the inside of her lip, so he would know he was not pirating an employee from the outfit run by Frank Gullatt, who was considered something of a political power in the town, being the nephew of City Commissioner A, L. Gullatt.

The tattooing was done by a little hunchback in The Blue Bonnet. Even on the lips, it was said to be painless and no ill effects ever came to public notice. The price of his work depended on the size of the tattoo desired and the length of time it would take.

Even the city itself levied a direct tax on the waitresses and B-girls. The Phenix City official code provided for payment of a two-dollar fee by the girl before she was allowed to change jobs. Records of each of the girls were kept in a file at Police Headquarters. These records showed not only their places of employment, but any other record for vagrancy, prostitution or law violations. These records were used more as a form of blackmail over the girls than for any legitimate law enforcement purposes.

In addition to the payoffs which public officials and law enforcement officers received from illegal activities of every kind, the girls were made to contribute. This was done through periodic "fines" imposed upon them after being arrested on a trumped up charge. The arrest racket was part of the grand scheme used in forcing reluctant girls into the houses of prostitution. Despite the lure of fun, fame and fortune which attracted the girls to Phenix City, very few ever grew wealthy working as B-girls or prostitutes. They were commodities marketed for the benefit of the big shots.

Even if all the women weren't brazen in the beginning, the cops were. In February, 1954, Assistant Chief Willis M (Buddy) Jowers and a sidekick stopped a car in which two girls were riding with two boys. Although the girls didn't know it at the time, the masterminds had decided it was time to switch the B-girls to prostitution. The two officers took the girls to jail.

"Buddy told us that they would have to search us and for us to take our clothes off," one of the girls said. "When we refused. Buddy and the other cop tried to get fresh and told us that if we would go back into a cell with them for an hour, they would let us out. Upon our refusal they left and about fifteen minutes later, they sent Ernest and Glenn Youngblood to see us. Ernest and Glenn told us that they would get us out and buy us new clothes and get us a place to stay if we would go to work for them. They wanted us to work either at the 431 Club or Uchee Fish Camp."

The girl said they refused the offer. She said she finally was freed when a police sergeant turned her loose and put her in a cab for home. If this was true, then she was lucky, Such kind police sergeants were rare. She had been told it would cost her $51.50 to be released, unless she worked it out in trade with Jowers or the Youngbloods. Few men in Phenix City were letting $51.50 in female merchandise escape for free.

The Youngblood brothers operated the bail bond business as well as having interest in several B-girl establishments and in the prostitution game. Once a girl was hooked in this set-up, she seldom left the profession until she was too old and broken in body and spirit to be of further use.

The average B-girl would do practically anything for money. She'd steal it from the table when her date turned his head. She'd knock over his drink or dump it on the floor when he went to the men's room. In the nightly routine, the girls became accustomed to the routine of the men.

"Most men," said one, "just wanted me to go out and spend the night with them, but others wanted to take me for a ride in a jet plane, or sail to Havana and a lot of others said they wanted me to go up East and meet their folks."

Besides the B-girls, there was a category of human in Phenix City known as the B-boy, or female impersonator. Some of these latter worked as dancers and used such names as Barbara LeMay, Lisa Del Mar, LaVem Martin, and Hedy Jo Starr. The B-boys wore falsies, lipstick, rouge, long hair, and exotic perfume. They would cuddle up to men and, for a price, would offer spurious sex gratification. But this was not common. Mostly, women were the bait.

The crime kings of Phenix City recognized how essential women were in attracting business from Fort Benning. Even those not engaged in the prostitution racket used feminine charms as the come-on for gambling or other activities.

The story of Phenix City could well be written in the terms of the thousands of women who provided its gaudy glamor, its spicy reputation and principal commodity— sex.