But, unlike Rose, Diane is an out-and-out hustler. Once upon a time, they say, she was a good-looker. But her main trouble seemed to be that she liked her work too much to commercialize it.
We spoke to a man in his late 30’s who remembered her when he was a school boy. He said the kids used to pick her up because she would take “small change.” Now some of her old customers, matured and prosperous men of the world, occasionally drive by her corner to stake her to a hand-out.
All she can get now are colored men, “winos” and dregs. But she refuses to retire.
We picked up a girl by the name of Doris who had just been discharged from the Federal Hospital for narcotic addicts in Lexington, Kentucky. The story she told us illustrates how girls are recruited for prostitution in the District.
Doris said she lived in a small town in West Virginia. She and a girl high-school mate occasionally did a little free-lance whoring on Saturday nights, on call of a bell-boy in the local hotel. Once he sent them to a room occupied by two men. One, whose name was Grigsby, tried to sell the girls on coming to Washington. He said he’d put them in a swell house. The teenagers were afraid of the big city. Grigsby told them the landlady of the house was in the next room and called her in. She was a motherly sort. They consented to come with her.
They found themselves in the house of a madame named Billie Cooper, on 7th St., in the 1000 block. Doris told us she was an instantaneous success in the Cooper menage. She was only 17, fresh, buxom and bucolic. Madame Cooper’s clients were charmed. After she’d been in the house a few weeks, the madame asked Doris if she’d like to get a “kick.” She produced a hypodermic needle and gave the child a shot in the arm. Doris liked the sensation, wanted more. This went on for several weeks, Doris said, and every day Billie Cooper increased the frequency of the shots.
One day Doris woke up, nauseated and ill.
Billie Cooper exclaimed, “You’re hooked!”
She informed Doris she had become a dope fiend, that henceforth Doris must pay for the shots.
The girl went into debt, though she was taking in up to $50 a day and, no matter how much she made, the dope always cost more. She knew no one else who sold it. She was truly hooked, which was Billie Cooper’s original purpose, to keep the young girl in her joint and take her money away from her.