Hanging up the phone after yet another call from a bill collector, aspiring actress Sephe Haven wondered whether she would ever be out of debt.
It was 1989 and her nine years’ worth of unpaid student loans, uninsured medical bills and credit card charges amounted to nearly $100,000.
The then-26-year-old didn’t know which way to turn — until an advertisement in the Village Voice caught her eye.
“GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! Earn $1K a week! Escorts Wanted. No sex involved,” it screamed.
“Even though I knew that sex would more than likely be part of the deal, I was tempted,” the Juilliard-trained Haven tells The Post. “I thought, if I worked hard enough, I would earn enough to get rid of most of my debt and start the theater company I’d always dreamed about.”
She called the number and, after an in-person interview in which she was sized up by a madam who told Haven to ditch her cheap, secondhand clothes for designer wear, her life as a prostitute in Manhattan began.
Now, more than 30 years later, the actress-turned-writer has written the first in a series of memoirs, “My Whorizontal Life: An Escort’s Tale” (Redwood Publishing). It follows her initial six months in a career that lasted more than a decade.
In it, she makes no apologies for her illegal employment, claiming she provided an important service that was “a beautiful thing” to her clients — and that many of them craved company and intimacy more than intercourse.
“The sex was only a tiny part,” says Haven, who uses a pen name and now lives in Los Angeles. “There was actually magic and love in a business not known for that.”
She was on call for 12 hours a day, usually between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., and the encounters generally took place in hotel rooms or the men’s homes. The madam set Haven’s rates at $200 to $300 per hour, and took 50 percent of her earnings.
One of her more glamorous assignments was meeting a pair of old-money bankers for dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant along with another escort, Vivian — a stunning ice-queen type.
Haven was convinced the clients would both want to go home with Vivian and she’d be the consolation prize. To her surprise, they ended up fighting over her.
“I like you, you’re funny. You’re warm. I like talking to you. You’re very sexy,” the client who “won” Haven told her after they’d had sex.
Other encounters were comical, like one with a drugged-up man she nicknamed “the diver” after he tried to pay her with a scuba tank and fishing rods instead of cash.
Then there was the time she met Hunt, a fabulously wealthy heir with unattractive false teeth and sleep apnea.
Haven was paid $3,000 to spend the weekend aboard his yacht. However, she spent most of one night constructing a Lego farm for his young son’s birthday.
“It was an interesting insight into the way rich people think,” says Haven, who was instructed to glue the Lego bricks in place. “Hunt didn’t want to give his son a kit [to build himself] — he wanted the gift fully assembled.”
After two months on the job, however, she was temporarily fired because she broke one of the golden rules: She neglected to call her extremely protective madam upon arriving at a client’s apartment.
Unable once again to pay her debts, she wound up at a sleazy brothel near Greenwich Village where the girls were paraded in front of johns like cattle at auction. Before any form of sex was allowed to take place, the men’s pubic hair was combed under a bright light to check for lice.
She was paid $50 per client and, after each session, had to strip the sheets and make up the bed for the next paying customer.
Once she returned to her original job, she was able to pay off a chunk of her debt and rent a larger apartment in Murray Hill. Eventually, she started her own small theater company. She also appeared in some Shakespeare plays in Washington, DC.
Haven says that the most stressful part of her profession was hiding it from her middle-class parents back in the suburbs of Chicago.
“I told them I worked for a delivery service bringing dry cleaning and food to people,” says Haven.
She kept her work secret from her friends, but, after investing in a nose job, did confide in one male pal. He took the news badly.
“He said it was debasing,” recalls Haven. “But [working as a prostitute] was the least debased I’d ever felt. I chose to be there, nobody forced me into anything. Like me, a lot of women I worked with had a lot of talent for intimacy and making people feel good.
“Decades ago, there was a time when this business [prostitution] was actually an art form.”