Robert "Iceberg Slim" Beck: When The Blood Runs Cold

If there's any truth to the supposition that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, it may not be far fetched to assume that the vocation of the pimp came in at a close second.

An antihero of the criminal world; the pimp's primary objective is to provide guidance, protection and occasional amenities to aspiring ladies of the night who are willing to share their earnings.

The pimp's smokescreen is his air of glamour and extravagance. He's a fast talking conman, a dream merchant with a feigned love offering in one hand and a balled fist of rage in the other. Add the unpredictability of a climate rife with drug abuse and potentially dangerous clients, and a street-walking sex worker's long-term survival is nothing short of sheer luck.

Today, however, the quintessential pimp of the past is all but extinct. With the advent of the internet, those involved in the sex trade are no longer relegated to pounding the pavement of local city streets, risking life and limb.

The flesh peddlers of today now have options, which range from live webcam "shows" to taking on the ambiguous legal loophole of escorting or marketing themselves to a clientele of their choosing within their local area or worldwide.

With the accessibility and convenience of modern technology, the game has indeed changed.

Before the days of rap music, and long before the term pimp peppered the slang and idioms of every other middle-class millennial, there was a name that was synonymous with pimping in the true sense of the term, on the streets and later in literature -- Iceberg Slim.

Author Robert Beck was born in the inner city of Chicago, Ill. in 1918. He is known as one of the most celebrated names in the genres coined as "street lit" or “black experience novels,” melding his tumultuous experiences as a career criminal and panderer with an uncanny ability to recount some of the most horrific and sorrowful scenes of urban street life and transform them into beautiful gems of literary expressionism.

Described by many as elusive and anti-social, Beck chose to let his eclectic personality and clever wit shine through his work.

He authored seven popular autobiographical works between 1967 and 1985 and the books were lauded by every aspiring panderer and playboy of their time, later serving as the template for the Blaxploitation films of the ‘70s and the pimp folklore, which would emerge in rap music, 20-25 years later.

The poetic prose with which he eloquently detailed the realities of the criminal underworld artfully illustrates the potential glamour and highlife of the sex trade, while simultaneously making the reader feel the piercing bite of the consequences of the game.

Within the pages of Beck's work, you're confronted with the confused, damaged women beneath the diamonds and furs, and the dapper, yet dangerous, psychotic personalities of the smooth talking "macks" behind the Cadillac doors.

You won't find the sexist slant of the female characters being painted as meek and vulnerable victims, "trafficked" and exploited against their will. Male or female, the characters eat or get eaten.

There was no preachy black or white or good vs. bad in Slim's world, just the clouded cycle of uncertainty that any mixed bag of criminally-minded personalities in a predatory urban climate have to offer.

The Beginning

Beck's earliest memory, and one of the first accounts he vividly describes in his literary debut, "Pimp", was being left at the mercy of a sexually abusive female babysitter, beginning at the age of 3.

The poignance with which he describes this experience, along with the fact that it's our introduction to the happenstance that molded Robert into who he became, is very telling.

Beck would lament the fact that he did not have the opportunity to "settle that b*tches unpaid account" even years later, as he imagined his abuser as a frail, gray-haired old woman.

Soon after the break up of his parents, Beck’s mother began soliciting her hairstyling services door-to-door for 50 cents a pop, often with Robert wrapped in a blanket. He recalled his mother telling him the act elicited sympathy from prospective customers and, more often than not, resulted in a job.

Beck recalls his mother as dedicated and loving to a fault when it came to him: Even when money was scarce, she pampered and spoiled him rotten, a mode of living he claimed help hone his expensive tastes.

While sparing no moment to fawn over her only son, Beck's mother was manipulative and vindictive in her intimate relationships with men. After luring a respectable, generous and naïve dry cleaner into her clutches, she used him for all she could, talking him into funding her own beauty salon.

Financially and emotionally, things began looking up for Beck, as a semblance of a somewhat traditional family life began to take shape.

Most of the beauty shop's patrons were pimps and whores. Beck would study the pimp's clothes, their mannerisms, carefree personas and overall commanding presence. He wasn't yet exposed to the realities of the lifestyle, but liked what he saw, nonetheless.

All that came to an end, however, when a street hustler, who was a regular at the salon, talked his mother into leaving town with him.

The hustler, Steve, had alluded to knowing the whereabouts of Beck's biological father. The two then hatched a plan to reunite and cozy up to him, before they and gang of cohorts literally emptied his house of all its contents.

For the next three years, Beck and his mother would live under the tyranny and abuse of this man, Steve.

Beck hated Steve, he hated that his mom did not see just who -- and what -- Steve was. It wasn't until Steve had beaten his mother within an inch of her life that she resolved to take her son and leave. Nonetheless, the damage had been done.

Beck would later note a common underlying trait that most career pimps carried within them: a genuine hatred or resentment of their mothers.

Most pimps were neglected as children and horribly abused, if not by their mothers, by the company their mothers kept.

Some started off their first hours on Earth abandoned in dumpsters or left at the mercy of cruel individuals by the very people who should've cherished them the most, these self centered, vile women--their mothers.

The love/hate relationship Beck had with his mother, and the steady influx of abusive father figures she kept around him, was one of the main ingredients of what he referred to as the "street poison" that made his blood run cold -- like ice.

The Game

In the 1930s, the streets of "The Big Windy" (Chicago) were crawling with organized crime families, drug pushers, number runners and pimps.

Tailored suits, furs, gaudy jewelry and Stacy Adams were in vogue, and the bigger and shinier the Cadillac, the better.

The figures who held the titles and sported the look of the aforementioned were the heroes to many of the inner city. For better or worse, a kid who's born and raised in this environment sees the street game as an attainable level of success. On face value, in the depression era and milieu of segregation, this was the American dream to many impoverished urban youth.

Becoming a legitimate success was only but a dream, and an even a further reality. On the other hand, partying with the flamboyant in-crowd and doing the "boogie-woogie," while looking as sharp as Billy Eckstine -- that was the life!

The crime was simply the means to the end, a status symbol or two to show your peers you've made it.

For the time being, it appeared as if Beck was on the road to success. At the age of 15, Beck graduated high school with a near-perfect 98.1 grade point average, and attained an alumni scholarship to Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, attending at the same time as renowned African American writer Ralph Ellison.

Beck was a bright and promising student, taking up agriculture as his field of study, however, later found himself expelled after being caught bootlegging alcohol. Soon after expulsion, he began what would become a long string of jail/prison stints for everything from burglary, drugs, strong-armed robbery and pandering.

Slowly but surely becoming evermore fascinated with the street game, and drawn to the prospect of fast money, Beck found himself under the tutelage of a host of unsavory characters.

One such "mentor" was the eccentric Albert Bell, a notorious gambler and alleged killer, infamous for his "Asian stable" of working women and pet ocelot that was led by a gold leash chained to a diamond collar.

Beck decided that pimping was his niche. A charming, impeccable dresser with the power of persuasion and insatiable predatory drive, he rechristens himself "Cavanaugh Slim".

For the next 25 years, in between stays of incarceration and drug binges, Beck drifted like a stray cat, taking his hustles to the streets of Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit, Indiana and back to Chicago, with "product" in every city he set foot in.

In 1947, while serving time in Cook County, Chicago, he managed to escape. He remained on the run until the late 1950s, when he was identified during a run-in with the law and was sent back to the pen, where he served 10 months in solitary confinement.

The sights, sounds and living conditions behind bars began to take their toll on Beck. Now, in his 40s, he no longer had the will to keep up with the fast life of the streets.

Rock piles and cement walls were no place for a pimp. The lifestyle that afforded the manicured hands and satin sheets now earned him nothing but callused palms and a filthy cage.

Feeling his sanity slowly slipping, Beck turned to writing, if only to distract himself from one day to the next.

With news of longtime friends dropping like flies and a sick and ailing mother in the free world, Beck took a bit of self-inventory and resolved to go straight.

Pimping is a young man's game. It's time to "square up".

Beck had been presented with the possibility of having more time tacked onto his sentence. Upon learning this, in desperation, he spilled his heart out onto paper in a note to the warden, in hopes of securing his original day of release.

Later, Beck would credit the "steel casket" (prison) as the turning point of his life, a change for the better.

In 1960, "Cavanaugh Slim" was released from prison, and began life as Robert Beck.

The Reform

In 1961, while Beck was residing in Los Angeles to help care for his ill mother, Betty Shue, an attractive, self professed redneck from Austin, met Beck at a hamburger stand.

Assuming this refined, charming gentleman was a doctor or bank president, she was impressed with Beck almost immediately.

Weeks later, Beck took Betty on their first date, presenting her with an elegant black dress and picking her up in a Chrysler with a record player installed in the back seat.

During the first months of their courtship, Beck’s mother persistently threw vague warnings at Betty, insisting that she not trust him, and begging her to end their relationship, for fear of her son falling back into his old ways and turning Betty onto "tricking".

Betty ultimately confronted Beck about his past, and learned that the dapper gentleman she'd fallen for had just finished a 10-month stretch in Illinois one year before.

Without looking back, Beck and Betty forge ahead and start a family, having three girls and one boy.

Beck takes on his first genuine attempt at a legitimate job as a door-to-door exterminator, frequently using his persuasive skills to sell his services to roachless households.

After work, Beck and Betty talked about the old days. Fascinated with the wild tales of Beck's previous life, Betty suggests that they search out a way to get these stories in print to those who'd be interesting in reading them.

At 47 years old, Beck began work on his first book, an autobiographical work simply titled "Pimp: The Story of My Life". For the work he chose the pseudonym that would cement his presence in pop culture: "Iceberg Slim".

A publishing company named Holloway House had recently ran a newspaper advertisement putting out a call to prospective black authors.

Holloway House was strictly paperback, and famous for its "books from the black experience" by an already impressive roster of writers. The books were sold in bookstands and drugstores, with little to no promotion. You heard of Holloway publications by word of mouth, or discovered them yourself.

Betty persuaded Beck to answer the ad; she then typed up the first 100 pages of the work, and together, she and Beck delivered the sample to Holloway's CEO, Bentley Morris.

Immediately taken with the piece, the concept and most of all, Robert Beck, Morris wrote the couple a $5,000 check as an advance to what would begin Beck's literary career.

At the request of Morris, Robert added a glossary of much of the slang and phrases that may have gone over many reader's heads.

The glossary was the first introduction of popular, inner city terminology to mainstream America.

In 1967, Robert Beck was 49 and an ex-con with a record dating back to the early ‘30s. He had a growing family to feed, the very meager earnings of a door-to-door exterminator and very little education to impress any potential employers. That year, "Pimp" hit the shelves, and it couldn't have come soon enough.

Betty described the many instances after Beck began writing regularly: he'd stare at the ceiling  for extended periods of time, piecing together his stories within his mind, sometimes jotting down his ideas on paper plates or the edge of newspapers -- a habit she assumed could've only been acquired within in the confines of prison walls.

In 12 years Beck authored seven books, which have been translated into half a dozen different languages, and have sold well over six million copies, to date.

The most notable works that followed "Pimp", are "The Naked Soul Of Iceberg Slim" and "Trick Baby". The former is a collection of heartfelt essays on various topics, the latter, a tale based on a true story about a mixed race Chicago pimp, told in the first person point of view of the lead character, known as "Whitefolks".

"Trick Baby", published in 1967, was picked up by Universal Pictures in 1972 and adapted into the Blaxploitation film of the same name.

In 1976, the spoken word album Relfections was released. The recording is 6 tracks of poetry, recited by Beck, with the funky musical stylings of The Red Holloway Quartet.

Beck, Betty and their family enjoyed the steady success of his work, however, after the difficulties of diabetes began taking their toll on Beck his pen all but dried up.

To add insult to injury, disputes with Holloway House over royalties, Betty's escalating drinking habits and a failing marriage soon followed.

Beck and Betty split up.

On dialysis and in seclusion, Beck now resided in a one room apartment with faulty plumbing, situated in a gang infested neighborhood.

His diabetes had taken a turn for the worst, his eyesight was deteriorating, his liver was failing and soon, gangrene developed in one of his legs.

Sadly, on April 30, 1992, the once-celebrated, seemingly untouchable Robert Beck died alone in Los Angeles at age 74.

Due to the L.A. riots which were under way at the time, Beck's passing went virtually unnoticed, with not so much as a nod to his life and works until weeks later.

The Legacy

Robert Beck's life is a true testament of sheer will and the drive for success.

Albeit he initially chose a road that was paved with self-destructive impulses and counterproductive behavior, he somehow managed to channel a lifetime of poor choices into a short, but lucrative career, shedding light on a very dark world by way of poetic brilliance.

Beck never made excuses for his misdeeds, nor advocated or recommended the street lifestyle to anyone. In fact, in the preface of "Pimp", he admitted that his straight forward, blunt and often profane words would indeed offend many, but if this was the honesty and realism that could potentially serve as a warning against such a lifestyle, it was all worth it.

Most players within the criminal world will fall and never find the fortitude or strength to pick themselves up and begin anew.

There are very few elderly pimps, gangsters or drug dealers. Most suffer untimely deaths or are languishing, forgotten, in a cell somewhere.

It takes tenacity to play the game, and a miracle to get out alive. To pick up the shambles of a shattered existence and piece together an opulent mosaic is nothing short of phenomenal.