You never knew who might be behind the hotel door. Once, she was summoned to a guy's room, told only that he was a famous, championship athlete. "I'm not a big sports fan, but I recognized him, the quarterback. He turned out to be very laid-back. He mostly wanted to make me happy. In the middle, he looks up and says,'Well, you know me, I'm more of a giver than a receiver.' "
What no one could have predicted, least of all Natalia, was how driven she would be. "I knew she was talented," Jason says. "But once she started going, she was unstoppable, like the Terminator."
A glance at Natalia's booking sheets raises an eyebrow. Annotated with Jason's exhortatory commentary ("Awesome guy!-$5200, wants to be a regular!" "Big Wall Street guy!" "Software king." "Hedge fund heavy! Says he will give investment lessons!"), the records of Natalia's bookings through June and July of 2004 reveal a workload exceeding 250 hours, or nearly a normal nine-to-five, at an average of $1,000 per hour, not counting little presents like fancy $350 underwear from La Perla.
" Victoria 's Secret is all right," Natalia says. "But you know you have a good client when you get La Perla. "
Some weeks were particularly frenetic. From July 29 to August 1, she had a four-day date in the Florida Keys for which Itzler charged $29,000.The very next day was a four-hour appointment. August 3 was filled with a ten-hour appointment and another two-hour job.August 4, three hours.August 5, a three-hour followed by another four-hour. August 6, two hours. August 7, one four-hour job and a two-hour.August 8, she was off. But August 9 was another ten-hour day, followed by a pair of two-hour jobs on August 10.
"It was like a dream," Natalia says. "I never got tired."
Asked if the work affected her relationship with Itzler, Natalia says, "Sometimes he'd say, 'Everyone gets a chance to spend time with you except me.' I'd say, 'You're the one booking me.' "As for Jason, he says,"If she ever did it with anyone for free, it would have broken my heart."
Moving from Fifty-fourth Street following a nasty fallout with partner Bruce Glasser (each party claimed the other had taken out a contract on his life), Itzler ran NY Confidential out of his parolee apartment in Hoboken. One visitor describes the scene:"The place was full of naked women and underwear. It was a rain forest of underwear. In the middle on the couch is Jason with all these telephones, one in either ear, the other one ringing on the coffee table."
Seventy-nine Worth Street, with its twenty-foot ceilings and mezzanine balconies, where Jason and Natalia would move to in the summer of 2004, was a whole other thing. "Right away, we knew this was it," says Natalia. "The loft felt like home." As per usual, Jason would take much of the cost of the lease from Natalia's bookings-money she would never receive. But money was never an issue with Natalia. If Cheryl, Jason's first superstar, experienced "a rush of power when the guy handed me the envelope," for Natalia, collecting the "donation," while essential, had a faintly unseemly feel.
"Maybe it sounds crazy," she says, "but I never felt I was in it for the money."
For Jason, the loft was an opportunity to make real his most cherished theories of existence. "To me, the higher percentage of your life you are happy, the more successful you are," says Jason, who came upon his philosophy while reading Ayn Rand. "I was really into the 'Who is John Galt?' Atlas Shrugged thing. I thought I could save the world if I could bring together the truly elite people, the most beautiful women with the most perfect bodies, best faces, and intelligence, and the elite men, the captains of industry, lawyers, and senators. This would bring about the most happiness, to the best people, who most deserved to be happy."
Years before, Jason wrote out the precepts of what he called "The Happiness Movement." Assuming his findings to be big news, Itzler packed up the manifesto, a copy of his half-finished autobiography, and a naked centerfold picture of Elisa Bridges, his girlfriend at the time, and mailed it to Bob Woodward."I stuck it in this three-thousand-dollar Bottega Veneta briefcase so he'd notice it. He said I was a nut job and to leave him alone. I was so bummed I told him to keep the stupid briefcase."
On Worth Street, however, Jason (who says "the best thing about bipolarity is how much you accomplish in the manic phase") saw the chance to manifest his ideal. One of his first acts was to approach painter Hulbert Waldroup. Waldroup, a self-proclaimed "artist with attitude" who has been collected by Whoopi Goldberg and once appeared on the cover of Newsday along with his epic memorial to Amadou Diallo, was selling his work on the West Broadway sidewalk. "You're the greatest painter I've ever seen," Jason said.When Waldroup heard Itzler wanted to commission a ten-foot-by-ten-foot canvas of a "hot-looking" woman, he said the picture would never get in the door. No problem, Itzler said, Waldroup could do the painting inside the loft.
Waldroup soon had a job working the phones. "It was like I went in there and never came out," says Waldroup, now on Rikers Island, where he resides a couple of buildings away from Jason.
Seventy-nine Worth Street became a well-oiled machine, with various calendars posted on the wall to keep track of appointments. The current day's schedule was denoted on a separate chart called "the action board." But what mattered most to Jason was "the vibe… the vibe of the NY Confidential brand" (there was franchising talk about a Philadelphia Confidential and a Vegas Confidential). To describe what he was going for, Jason quotes from a favorite book, The Art of Seduction, a creepily fascinating tome of social Machiavellianism, by Robert Greene.
Discussing "seductive place and time," Greene notes that "certain kinds of visual stimuli signal that you are not in the real world. Avoid images that have depth, which might provoke thought, or guilt… The more artificial, the better… Luxury-the sense that money has been spent or even wasted-adds to the feeling that the real world of duty and morality has been banished. Call it the brothel effect."
Accentuated by the fog machine at Seventy-nine Worth Street, people seemed to come out of the shadows, float by, be gone again. "It was full of these familiar faces… like a soap-opera star, a politician you might have seen on NY1, a guy whose photo's in the Times financial pages," says one regular. In addition to Sinatra, music was supplied by the building's super, a concert pianist in his native Russia, who appeared in a tuxedo to play on a rented Baldwin grand piano.
"It was like having my own clubhouse," says Jason now, relishing the evenings he presided as esteemed host and pleasure master. He remembers discussing what he called a "crisis in Judaism" with a top official of a leading Jewish-American lobby group. Jewish women were often thought of as dowdy, Jason said. If the American Jew was ever going to rise above the prejudice of the goyishe mainstream, creativity would be needed. A start would be to get Madonna, the Kabbalist, to become the head of Hadassah.The official said he'd look into it.
Seventy-nine Worth Street was supposed to be Jason and Natalia's home, where they would live happily ever after. They had their own bedroom, off-limits to everyone else. "We were actually trying to live a semi-normal life, carry on a real relationship," says Natalia. "Jason felt abandoned after his mother died; my father left when I was very young.We sort of completed each other."