Desert Crystal.('Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal')(Television program review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Joan Juliet Buck watches Heidi Fleiss in Nevada and is uplifted by the candor of The Black List.

H eidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, on HBO, is a boldly original, beautifully made documentary. What you see is Heidi Fleiss at 40, convicted felon, madam to the stars, as she tries to open a "stud farm" for women in Crystal, Nevada. What you get is, astonishingly, the portrait of a soul. After serving three years for money laundering and tax evasion, the Hollywood Madam remade herself to face the future. She tells the interviewer, "I have fake lips; I have fake tits; I had my ears done and my eyelids."

"What'd you look like before?"

Heidi smiles. "A monster."

Heidi, candid, grandiose, and ultimately touching, takes a little house in the nearby town of Pahrump. Her one employee is a homeless man named Michael, who doesn't last. Rocks are big business in Nevada; Heidi, with a felon's logic, takes Michael out into the desert at night to collect her own rocks, and he loses the flashlight.

Next door, in a house full of exotic birds, is Marianne, a bedridden former madam. Heidi befriends her: She needs help with permits, advice.