The little black book that has Hollywood in a spin

Seven years ago, a huge billboard poster appeared on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood announcing the imminent arrival of a new singing phenomenon called Babydol. The poster showed a woman with luxuriant blond hair and full lips against a background of children's toys and hearts with hand-drawn arrows through them.

Her song, a jaunty dance number called "Good Girls Go To Heaven, Bad Girls Go Anywhere", was released a few weeks later, but it tanked miserably. Plans for an album were hastily shelved, the billboard vanished, and Babydol's shot at fame appeared to be over almost as soon as it had started.

Except that now - all these years later - Babydol is acquiring fame of an altogether different ilk.

This morning, in a Los Angeles criminal courtroom, that same pouting face - this time under Babydol's real name of Jody Diane Gibson - will be arraigned before a judge on multiple charges of pimping and pandering.

The failed singer, according to her accusers, has been running one of the most successful high-class prostitution businesses in the country, providing escorts to an enviably prestigious list of clients that has included actors, film producers, a well-known professional athlete and the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company.

Operated out of a hotel in the San Fernando Valley - the suburban area in northern Los Angeles which also happens to be the home base of America's porn movie industry - the prostitution ring allegedly stretched out across the country and beyond, with girls regularly working in Colorado, Texas, New York, and even in Europe.

It was advertised on the Internet at a site called California Dreamin', although in keeping with its discreet working practices this was merely an advertising window for those already in the know: no address or telephone number was given, and the service was described merely as a "modelling agency".

The Los Angeles police department, which spent 10 months tracking down Babydol Gibson before ensnaring her in a sting operation, is calling her arrest the biggest catch since Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam brought to book six years ago, who has only just been released from prison.

Like Fleiss, Babydol is alleged to have had a "black book" of celebrity clients to whom she promised absolute discretion as well as a high-class service. Like Fleiss, the girls she is accused of using commanded upwards of $1,000 a night for their services. In fact, the police say, the Babydol and Fleiss knew one another, considered each other rivals, and spent considerable energy locked in mutual enmity.

But while Heidi Fleiss came across simply as a scheming, calculating businesswoman, Babydol Gibson's case has a whole different facet to it: that of the starry-eyed little girl who came to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune only to slide into its sleazy underbelly.

Babydol wanted to be singer, and indeed was pursuing a recording contract right up to the time of her arrest. For the past six months she has been working on a new album, called Right on Track, for the independent Private Eye label, owned by a man called Joseph Isgro.

Isgro, in turn, is a controversial figure who was charged but ultimately acquitted of involvement in a Mafia scandal in the Eighties, in which radio stations were said to be offered inducements, from cash to prostitutes, to play certain mob-favoured artists on the air.

Many of the girls alleged to have worked for her, meanwhile, were aspiring actresses or, in a handful of cases, established figures on the porn circuit - "stars" of a kind in their own right.

Looking back on that billboard poster on Sunset Strip, it is hard not to notice the striking resemblance between Babydol's pose and the character played by Kim Basinger in the recent film noir, LA Confidential, a resemblance that tells its own little story. Basinger's character also sought fame in Hollywood only to end up as a call-girl for an agency that specialises in movie star look-alikes.

California Dreamin', according to the police, started up nine years ago, right around the time that Babydol was preparing her big launch into the music industry.

At the time of Heidi Fleiss's arrest in 1993, Gibson's name was already being publicly linked to a prostitution racket in the valley under the pseudonym Sasha. According to another rival madam, the late Alex Adams, Fleiss had tried to get Sasha busted by complaining about her to the police.

With Fleiss out of the way, the police believe Gibson had the room she needed to move into the very forefront of her covert profession, upping her profile, her client base, and also her prices. She was supremely careful to accept new business only on the tightest of recommendations. She herself spent as little time as possible in the Los Angeles area, setting up home several hundred miles away in the small town of Palo Verde on the border between California and Arizona.

At the height of her business, police say, she had more than 100 men on her books and around 34 girls working for her. But even when she was steeped in this underworld activity, it seems she was desperately yearning to be doing something else.

Police say that among the documents found at her home was a manuscript appearing to chronicle her life in which she describes her ambition to set up a legitimate talent agency.

Among the women who came to her looking for work in the early days, the manuscript says, was none other than Heidi Fleiss.

It would be disingenuous to believe the police went after her simply because prostitution is against the law in California. After all, there is a long tradition in Hollywood of using part of the vast pool of struggling actresses to provide sexual favours, and of arranging with the LAPD to keep it all hush-hush.

In the Sixties Paul Ziffren, the Democratic Party official who introduced President Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe, was well known to the LA police for running an informal prostitution service for his friends and colleagues.

More recently, high-class prostitutes have been known to grace parties such as the Predators' Balls in the Eighties, hosted by the Los Angeles junk-bond king Michael Milken.

What attracted the LAPD to Gibson was what always attracts them in such cases: she was a relatively powerless person against whom they knew they could mount a case while reaping maximum publicity from the media.

Not only had they been following her movements for years, they were lucky enough to receive a complaint from an escort who had accused Gibson of short- changing her.

Working directly from this complaint, a female police officer went undercover to infiltrate California Dreamin' as a prospective employee, then lured Gibson to a meeting at a hotel near Los Angeles' international airport to make the arrest.

However, the case today isn't just about prostitution; it may illuminate many of the darker corners of the entertainment industry today.