Among the many distinctive characteristics of the state of Nevada is a strong commitment to the rights of cattle. If you happen to be driving on a Nevada highway and a cow steps into your path, totalling your vehicle and sending you to the hospital, it will be you who is liable to the rancher for the cost of his lost livestock. The open-range law is one of the customs of Nevada that exemplify the state's independent spirit, just as its fantastical casinos and drive-through wedding chapels are instances of a quirky dismissal of the rules and manners that prevail elsewhere in the United States.

Nevada has long been the place where Americans go to do things they can't do at home. Gambling was legalized in Nevada in 1869, only five years after the territory became a state. By 1910, merchants in Reno were catering to a divorce colony of rich Easterners who had come to live out the six-month residency period required for a divorce; in the nineteen-thirties, Nevada competed with the increasingly liberal divorce laws in other states by reducing the waiting period for getting "Reno-vated" to just six weeks.

The state's evolution as a family-values-free zone can be explained, historians say, by its origins as a mining state, populated largely by single men. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there were three men for every woman, and a significant number of those women were using the gender disparity to their economic advantage. Nevada, unlike its neighbor Oregon, was not settled by small farmers agitating for moral reform; instead, it remained a saloon society, dominated by cowboys and hustlers. Its inhabitants realized a long time ago that handsome profits could be made by inviting the rest of America into those saloons.

Many residents of contemporary Nevada, particularly those who have moved there in recent years from less louche environs, are embarrassed by their state's historical investment in the nexus of cash and sin. Dennis Hof, of Carson City, however, aspires to update the tradition, and to apply modern marketing principles to the commodity in which he deals, which is sex. "Guys know what they think sex is worth," says Hof, who is the owner of the Moonlite Bunnyranch, one of about thirty legal brothels in Nevada. "But they don't know what it is worth to dress up in women's underwear."

Hof spent fifteen years in the real-estate business, developing time-share communities in San Diego, before buying the Bunnyranch nine years ago; he believes that the techniques of his former business can be profitably applied to the world's oldest profession. Indeed, he likes to say that prostitution is a kind of time-share business, since the property in question is being occupied for a short length of time rather than owned outright. As a real-estate entrepreneur, Hof used all sorts of ruses to lure potential customers to his developments. One favorite tactic was to go to an auto show, ask people to enter a competition to win a Rolls-Royce, call them a few weeks later to tell them that they were finalists, then have them come to a real-estate development and sit through a ninety-minute presentation on time-shares before a winner was announced.

Such sales techniques, Hof says, are the kind of thing he tries to teach his employees at the Bunnyranch--women like Air Force Amy, one of his top earners, who can bring in thirty or forty thousand dollars a month. Amy has been a legal prostitute in Nevada for ten years; she has white-blond hair and blue-white teeth and wears a D cup; she is thirty-five, though parts of her appear to be of more recent vintage. The genius of prostitutes like Amy, Hof explains, is to create the perception of value. "The younger prostitutes think it's all about the sex," Hof says. "Amy realizes it's about giving the guy a party, doing things that he wouldn't think of doing."

One man, for example, spent four thousand dollars for an evening's entertainment with Amy that included being required to whimper and bark like a mastiff, being paper-trained, and being made to crouch in a kennel. "At the millennium, sex is more about fantasy and role play than it is about penetration," Hof says. "We push that at the ranch. Our motto is `Not Just Sex--An Adventure.' We want to create that adventure."

Dennis Hof likes to call himself America's Pimpmaster General. More precisely, what he likes is to tell people that Larry Flynt calls him America's Pimpmaster General, Flynt being a friend and mentor to Hof, and one whose name Hof, who is fifty-four, often finds it useful to invoke. Hof is a big, burly man--over six feet tall and two hundred and fifty pounds--with bright-blue eyes, sparse gray hair, a large grin, and a tanning-bed glow to his skin, which is startlingly even in color except for a couple of white creases on his ample neck. He dreams of turning his brothel, which he calls "the finest sexual establishment in the Western world," into the heart of a Bunnyranch empire. Inspired by the Hustler and Playboy brands, he imagines Bunnyclubs and Bunnyboutiques, Bunnyranch porno movies and porno magazines featuring Bunnyranch girls; and though none of these ventures are as yet very far off the ground, Hof exhibits the marketing man's conviction that promotion will eventually be followed by product.

To that end, Hof has engaged in all kinds of outlandish stunts, including hiring John Wayne Bobbitt to work as a driver and getting into a highly publicized spat with Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, who was turned into an unwilling celebrity endorser of the ranch after he made a reference in his autobiography to having visited it in his youth. "I'm the Colonel Parker of prostitution," Hof told me, not long after he had also told me that he was the Colonel Sanders of prostitution and not long before he announced that he was the Bill Gates of prostitution.

In order to visit the finest sexual establishment in the Western world, you fly to Reno and then drive to the eastern outskirts of Carson City (population fifty-two thousand), a dismal area zoned for commerce and industry. Just outside the city limits, you turn left onto a street that would easily be missed were it not for a sign adorned with lights, which reads, "Moonlight Road Commercial Business. Benny's Auto Painting. Tussey's Gun." You drive past the Jacob's Ladder Christian Day Care Center and the West Coast Shot factory, and pull into a driveway marked with a sign that reads, "Warning: Hot & Nasty Wild Sex 300 Yards Ahead." At the end of the driveway is an unprepossessing single-story white building, surrounded by a high chain-link fence and accessible only through a locked gate.

But for the fortifications, the Bunnyranch looks like the kind of prefabricated office space that might house a community health clinic or a Social Security claims office. Inside, it has the atmosphere of an insalubrious night club. The "parlor"--the room that patrons enter after being buzzed through the gate--is small and smoky, with black-painted ceilings, tinted mirrors on the wall, and the kind of black lighting that makes a white baby-doll T-shirt or a pair of fluorescent hot pants appear to glow. There's a gas-fuelled fake-log fireplace, an essential workplace provision when the staff wears next to nothing while sitting around waiting until the next customer opens the door, bringing in another gust of cold mountain air. At the back of the parlor is a bar, an A.T.M., and a men's room. Radiating from the parlor are two narrow corridors lined with doorways, each bearing the name--not the real name, of course--of its current occupant: "Miss Dynamite" or "Miss Tia" or "Miss Sinsation."

Brothels gained legal recognition in certain Nevada counties in the early nineteen-seventies, and were tolerated for decades before that. Until Dennis Hof rode into town, Nevada's most notorious brothel owner had been Joe Conforte, the owner of the Mustang Ranch, near Reno, who dominated the prostitution business from the nineteen-fifties until the early nineties. In the early days, Conforte would keep the trailer that housed his working girls at the intersection of three counties, wheeling it from one jurisdiction to the next whenever the respective local authorities threatened to turn up the heat on him. Extortion and tax evasion are some of the pursuits with which Conforte's name is associated, and since the early nineties he has been living in South America, out of the reach of the I.R.S., whose agents would still very much like to have a word with him.

When their owners are not evading taxes, brothels serve as a useful source of income for some of Nevada's rural counties, which can charge as much as seventy-two thousand dollars a year for a brothel license and also collect property taxes from the owners.The economic contribution of brothels is one of the reasons that support for them endures. George Flint, a retired minister and a lobbyist for the industry, offered another defense when I met him for coffee at the state legislative building in Carson City. "See that gentleman standing there--the tall one with the big, bulbous nose?" Flint asked, pointing at a man who turned out to be a representative from the A.A.R.P. "Where does he go to enjoy the sexual relationship of a pretty woman? Where does the gentleman who lost half his face in the Vietnam War go for sexual satisfaction? Where does the paraplegic go?"

Dennis Hof, however, does not emphasize the public-service aspect of the industry; instead, he sells prostitution as recreation. Just as Nevada's gaming industry has undergone a makeover, the corrupt casinos of old having been replaced by shiny family-entertainment emporia, Hof believes that the prostitution business is ripe for reinvention. "Adult entertainment isn't just sexual," he says. "I want to make the ranch fun for guys who don't even want sex. In another two years, it will be an adult Disneyland."

Hof's primary business innovation at the Bunnyranch has been to hire porn stars as prostitutes and to promote their presence as a Triple X Fantasy Camp, modelled on baseball fantasy camps that allow a bank manager to play on the same field with Cal Ripken, Jr. When a porn star agrees to work at the ranch for a spell, Hof also tries to arrange for her to appear on Howard Stern's show or in an adult magazine such as Spectator, thereby promoting her movies and his brand simultaneously. He is also attempting to turn his regular prostitutes into porn stars. The porn actor Ron Jeremy, a close friend of Hof's, recently directed a video featuring several of Hof's girls, "Lesbian Ho' Down at the Bunnyranch."

Among the porn stars who can sometimes be found at the ranch are Holly Landers, whose film credits include "Big Boob Bangeroo #14"; Annie Ander Sinn, billed as the tallest woman in porn (she is six-two and, not surprisingly, has twice been named Miss Nude Tall World International); and Bridget Powerz, otherwise known as Bridget the Midget, who is three-ten and whom Hof described to me as "a very prominent midget." Hof has developed promotional materials for his porn stars; each has her own flyer, which gives her vital statistics and describes her professional accomplishments ("Seen in over 700+ movies"). These flyers are mailed out to potential customers who call the ranch's toll-free number.

In order to develop his porn-star trade, Hof has loosened the lockdown rules by which most Nevada brothels operate. In past decades, brothels required girls to be in residence for three weeks at a time, to insure that a full-time staff was always available and that the girls did not abandon the safe-sex practices that the brothels enforce or make deals with customers on their own time. (The girls are supposed to split their earnings fifty-fifty with the house.) Instead of locking his prostitutes down, Hof allows them to fly in from Los Angeles or New York for a weekend or ten days. He maintains that his brothel has become the resort of choice for celebrities, including Gavin Rossdale from the band Bush, and Hof's close friend Joey Buttafuoco. (Both, however, insist that they have visited only the ranch's bar.) Just inside the Bunnyranch's main gate is a patch of concrete signposted "Helipad," but one of Hof's maintenance workers told me that she had never seen it used, and that the piece of ground was once the site of a septic tank.

"Porn star" is a somewhat loose appellation, one to which any girl who has ever appeared in an adult movie can lay claim. Air Force Amy, for example, boasts on her flyer that she has appeared in "too many XXX films to count," although she jokes that she can only count up to three. (Her flyer also makes the claim "Over 1,000,000 Sex Acts Sold.") Amy got her start in prostitution early, she explained to me one evening at the ranch. "My brother sold me for a half a pack of cigarettes when I was only ten, and it was on from there," she said. "I left home at an early age, and I started doing blow jobs in truck stops just to get around. Then I joined the military, and that made me realize that I could do anything I wanted to do." Amy says that she worked on an Air Force base, where her responsibilities included speaking to groups about anti-terrorism techniques. She says that her military experience has served her in her current line of work. "A lot of guys like me because they have been in the military themselves, and they think that if the military took me I can't be that bad," she said.

Amy has been working at the Bunnyranch for about a year, and, because she is among the most effective members of Hof's sales force, she has earned the right to work out of one of the very best of the Bunnyranch's three dozen bedrooms. Girls at the Bunnyranch work twelve-hour shifts, and there are anywhere from twelve to twenty girls on duty at any given time. Amy's room looks like something a bed-and-breakfast proprietor might advertise as a cozy retreat, except for the elaborate black leather bondage tackle that hangs on the back of the door. Most of the space is taken up by a double bed piled with a floral-print comforter and lots of throw pillows. Amy's work clothes--tight Lycra minidresses that she, like the other girls, buys from a travelling salesman who visits the ranch every few weeks--hang in a closet. Amy has her own bathroom, complete with a Jacuzzi tub, but most of the other girls must share bathrooms. (Bunnyranch prostitutes are instructed to tell customers who ask to use the Jacuzzi and the domination suites that they are "undergoing renovation.")

As Amy has become more experienced, she has refined her working methods. "I used to do a volume business, but I don't do a volume business anymore," she said. Instead of taking on several different clients for quick transactions, Amy would rather snare one customer for a long, elaborate engagement that might cost two or three thousand dollars. As a sales incentive, she often shows a potential customer Polaroids of previously satisfied clients, including one of an elderly man wearing only a dog collar, and a youngish, good-looking guy lounging in a bubble bath.

"A thousand bucks is a hell of a lot of money," she said. "But half of what you spend here has nothing to do with sex. It goes to the house for providing a nice, safe environment. No one here is going to take your wallet; the police aren't going to come and raid the place; your name is not going in the paper. I am not calling you in the morning saying, `I thought you loved me, I think I'm pregnant.' " Amy smiled sweetly. "And I also tell them that they are not restricted to cash." The Bunnyranch accepts most major credit cards, discreetly billing its customers for a cash advance.

Like every adult-industry employer, Hof enjoys telling stories of girls who are putting themselves through college with prostitution--he says that three girls from Wellesley worked for him one summer--and, if higher education has not been a primary concern for most of the women in his brothel, it is true that Lyon County subjects them to strict regulation. Any girl who has been convicted of a felony in the past five years, or of a misdemeanor within the past year, is turned down. Sid Smith, the Lyon County sheriff, told me, "I could have an individual as a police officer who wouldn't qualify as a prostitute."

Because Hof cannot advertise effectively for prostitutes, he does considerable hands-on networking. I recently joined him and Air Force Amy in Tampa, where they were attending an adult-industry conference. We went from topless bar to nude club to what are known in the vernacular as "whack shacks"--small establishments, properly known as "lingerie shops," where men can pay to enjoy a one-on-one underwear-modelling session. Hof was scouting for potential employees--"How many cc's are those?" he asked one whack-shack girl about her breast implants. Everywhere we went, Hof handed out Bunnyranch business cards, urging likely recruits to call Madam Suzette, his business manager.

Suzette is a pretty, tough woman in her mid-forties, and she functions as Hof's chief operating officer. Although many madams are former prostitutes, Suzette had no experience in the sex industry before joining Hof, and she appears to have a squeamish streak. Suzette was along for the Tampa trip, and she tut-tutted that these girls were showing things she'd never even shown her ex-husband during seventeen years of marriage. She said, "The only person who's seeing my snatch is the gynecologist."

Back in Carson City, most of Hof's employees are female; but there's a male bartender, male drivers, and two male cooks, who work in a small kitchen and dining room, just off the parlor. The prostitutes are provided with three hearty meals a day; I saw a cook slicing thick tranches of sirloin roast one day for the girls' supper, which they eat in the late afternoon, in order for their digestive systems to recover before the evening trade picks up. There is also a small salad bar. Snacks are available around the clock, and many Bunnyranch girls resort to them during their quieter hours; weight gain is a perennial ranch problem.

Madam Suzette's domain is the Bunnyranch office, the hub of the business operation, which is adjacent to the parlor. When I visited, the office was messy: notice boards were crammed with scrawled messages reminding the staff which girls wanted to be awakened when, and which girls needed the services of a driver to take them into town to shop. A black bra hung from a peg on the wall.

Any would-be Bunnyranch girl applies to Madam Suzette, who tries to weed out the street prostitutes and the drug users. New Bunnyranch girls fly to Reno, paying their own way, as do returning prostitutes; they are picked up at the airport by one of the ranch's drivers, who are known as runners. Hof's girls usually arrive in Carson City on Thursdays and, like all of Nevada's legal prostitutes, they are sent to a doctor to be tested for gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and H.I.V.; thereafter, they are tested for gonorrhea and chlamydia once a week, and for syphilis and H.I.V. once a month. Girls talk about expiring--as in "I expire on Tuesdays"--to refer to the day when they must undergo their weekly checkup. Every Thursday, a doctor comes to the Bunnyranch and performs exams on the premises, for which the girls are charged out of their own pockets. Each new girl at the Bunnyranch is required to learn the house rules, which are enumerated in a thick black ring binder. Hof encourages the older employees to train the younger girls in negotiating, and he tries to impart some of his own sales wisdom to them, too.

"You have got to learn to box them and close them," he told me one afternoon. "It is really no different than a time-share sales team. Some girls are doing things for a hundred dollars that other girls are doing for a thousand. It is all about being able to create the value, and get the money out of them, and still have satisfied customers. It is not like you are trying to overcharge them; you are trying to upscale them."

Hof expects a certain degree of productivity from his workers: if a girl makes less than eight hundred dollars a night during the week, or less than a thousand on a Friday or Saturday, she is required to pay nineteen dollars for that day's room and board. Sometimes, Hof says, he finds it necessary to take a girl aside for a pep talk. "A lot of times, the girls aren't working for the money; they are working to have fun," he said. "That can be a problem for us. A girl can achieve her goals without the company achieving its goals."

It disappoints Hof to see that, for the most part, the girls lack professional drive. "The potential is there for them to make a quarter million, but most of them just make as much as they need," he told me. They don't save their earnings as assiduously as he would like, either; though their tendency toward profligacy does benefit Hof, who pays the girls daily in cash. "If we give the girls cash, they will spend it," he explained. "And if they spend it, they will make more. They can make more; it is just creating that desire to make it." One of Hof's favorite books is "How to Win Friends & Influence People," and he believes in Dale Carnegie's message of encouraging rather than browbeating one's employees into productivity. To motivate the girls, Hof gives gifts--photo frames or CD cases--to the top producers.

One day at the ranch, I sat in on a training session that Tia, a twenty-two-year-old Hawaiian prostitute whose hair hung down to her coccyx, was conducting with Joy, a very slender, pretty, somewhat vacant-looking twenty-two-year-old black woman from Los Angeles, who had been sent to the ranch by a porn photographer with whom Hof is friendly. Earlier in the day, Joy had been putting in some time in the parlor practicing her pole-dancing: grabbing the pole with her hands and twitching her buttocks with an impressive rapidity, all the while staring at herself in the mirror with the studiousness of a Juilliard student.

Joy had been at the brothel for a few days, so she knew how the lineup worked. When a customer arrives at the outer gate, the woman stationed at the brothel door presses a button that rings a bell throughout the Bunnyranch, summoning the girls to the parlor. They line up and are introduced by name to the customer, who is usually blinking and daunted at the sight of two dozen women dressed in G-strings and push-up bras, each smiling invitingly at him. The customer may choose a girl immediately, or he may dive past the lineup to the bar, where the girls will approach him one by one and ask to take him on a "tour," which involves going to a bedroom and trying to negotiate a price. When brothel-staff members arrive at the front gate, they push the buzzer twice, so the girls won't line up unnecessarily.

As they sat on Joy's bed, Tia explained the forbidden practice of "dirty hustling"--approaching a man at the bar when he is still speaking to another prostitute, or acting lewdly during the lineup by exposing a nipple. She said that the girls were forbidden to discuss their boyfriends or their kids while sitting in the parlor, in case a customer should overhear. She informed Joy that she was responsible for buying her own condoms, which she must use with every sex act. Food was free, but Tia explained that all the girls had to pay the ranch's maids to do their personal laundry, the runners for driving them into town, and for any time they spend on the house tanning-bed, which costs four dollars for twenty minutes. There were other recommended expenditures, too: Joy needed to buy an adult movie, and to have it playing at all times on the TV (which was affixed to her wall, as in a hospital room), and she was advised to buy some sex toys. They were on sale in a glass cabinet by the bar: among other novelty items was a ten-dollar "pecker leash," a small leather contraption that an innocent mind might imagine using to take a hamster for a walk.

Joy looked shocked when Tia suggested an accountant. "People pay taxes here?" she asked. Prostitutes are independent contractors, and each girl sets her own price. Prices at the Bunnyranch might start at one or two hundred dollars (for manual relief), rise to five hundred for a half-and-half (half oral, half intercourse), and can go into four figures for "fantasy parties" involving such specialties as bondage or parties involving more than one girl. Hof tells of one customer, known as Food Dude, who comes to the ranch loaded down with Twinkies and Ring Dings and other confectioneries, engages the services of a couple of girls, and takes over the guest trailer for an extended erotic food fight, for which, Hof says, he pays twenty thousand dollars or more.

Tia advised Joy not to spend more than fifteen or twenty minutes on a negotiation; if she didn't close the deal, she was to bring the customer back to the bar. "Never escort a customer to the door. Escort him to the bar," Tia said. If Joy did come to terms with a customer, she should conduct a "dick check" to insure that he has no visible signs of disease. "Make sure you do the dick check before he pays," Tia said; that way, Joy wouldn't have to give a refund if she found any intimate ailment.

One night, I sat in the office with Glenda, the night-shift manager. She is in her sixties, with jet-black hair that she wears in a tumbling, curly style, and she looked businesslike yet feminine in black heels, narrow black pants, and a white blouse with a decorative frill at her ample, jutting bosom. It wasn't a particularly busy night: there were long lulls between customers. Most of the customers were sheepish men in their twenties to forties, usually in groups, their edges somewhat blurred by alcohol and their conversation-making abilities apparently compromised by the unusual surroundings. One man asked Annie Ander Sinn if she was "really that tall." Annie replied, "No, it's an optical illusion." Another customer was asked to leave after repeatedly grabbing Barely Legal Mel's barely covered buttocks as she walked past the bar. There were no female customers that evening, although they do sometimes come in, either with men or alone. Traditionally, women have been barred from Nevada's brothels--it was always assumed that they were looking for their errant husbands--but Hof views couples as a new market segment he is trying to open up. Glenda does not approve. "I think it should be like a gentlemen's club," she told me, sniffily.

At intervals, Megan, a nineteen-year-old maid who was working the front door, came to the office and announced that one of the girls was on tour. When a girl went on tour, Glenda would press a button on a primitive intercom and listen, with half an ear, to the negotiations taking place in her room. A primary function of miking the girls' rooms is to prevent them from telling the customer one price and reporting a lower price to the office. To an untrained ear, the negotiations were largely inaudible, with only occasional phrases in male voices--"Well, what do I get for three hundred?" and "I've never done this before"--emerging through the static.

Every time a girl conducted a successful tour, she returned to the office with her client so that Glenda could fill out the paperwork. Each girl has a card, rather like an oversized library card or a punch-clock card, which is kept in a rack on the wall. When a girl brings her customer to the office door, Glenda removes her card from the rack and writes down the amount of money that the customer has agreed to pay, then takes his cash or credit card. The girl discreetly tells Glenda how much time she intends to give the customer--say, twenty minutes for three hundred dollars--and Glenda writes that down, too. After Glenda has filled out the card, the girl initials it, and Glenda hands her a clean "party sheet," which she will place on top of the bedspread in her room, all transactions being conducted on the bed, not in it. (Changing a full set of sheets is too time-consuming.)

When the girl leaves the office, Glenda places her filled-out card face down on a counter and takes one of about a dozen small kitchen timers that are kept in the office, sets it to go off after the agreed-upon number of minutes, and places the timer on top of the card. If the girl is still in her room when the timer rings, Glenda will pick up the intercom and say, "Time to re-party." Re-partying means that if the customer wants the session to continue, a new fee must be negotiated. I asked Glenda what happened if the customer had not finished in the prearranged time. She formed a loose fist with her right hand and gestured up and down briskly, saying, "They finish themselves off."

Hof lives in a handsome new house fifteen minutes from the ranch, nestled in the foothills of the mountains and overlooking a lake. There are stables for twenty-one horses, although Hof has only nine; there are garages for his vehicles, which he says include four Mercedes-Benzes, a BMW, a Jaguar, two four-wheel-drives, four motorcycles, and two boats. Inside, there are oatmeal-colored thick-pile carpets, marble bathrooms, and a brushed-steel kitchen. Hof says that he has spent two million dollars on the place and will spend another million before it is completed. Above the fireplace in the living room hangs a gaudy painting of a nineteenth-century New Orleans bordello.

This year, Hof expects the Bunnyranch to gross seven million dollars, and last year, he says, it grossed six million. To make such an amount, the ranch would have needed to bring in an average of sixteen thousand four hundred dollars a day, and, although I did not see revenues of that sort during my stay, I was not there when Food Dude was in the house. Hof encourages his employees to think strategically about their careers, and he believes that a girl should come to the ranch for the shortest possible amount of time, make as much money as she can, and get out to spend time with her children or on the beach or making porn films or doing whatever else she pleases. "These girls are my friends, and they are my business partners," he said. "I want everyone's experience at the Bunnyranch to better their lives." A number of the prostitutes told me that Hof was helping them build careers outside the ranch. Amy, for example, said that he was encouraging her to attend school to become a Realtor.

Hof likes his girls to think of him as a father figure--albeit a "Who's your daddy?" kind of father figure, since he disregards the conventional wisdom that it is ill-advised for brothel owners to mix business with pleasure. In the few days that I was in Hof's company, he spent the night--or, in one case, the afternoon--with at least five different girls, including Barely Legal Mel, a skinny nineteen-year-old whom Hof fondly refers to as "a pedophile's dream." In his house, there is a "girlfriend room" near the master bedroom, to prevent feminine clutter in his own domain. Hof is divorced, and has two daughters in their thirties, from whom he is estranged. He is bitter about his marital history. "I ended up getting a girl pregnant, ended up getting married, ending up having a second child--all because I wanted to have sex," he said.

I met one of Hof's former girlfriends, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Krystyn Konrad, who now works at the Bunnyranch. They'd lived together for a year, and remain on good terms. Hof has porn-star ambitions for Krystyn, who has bottle-blond hair, an hourglass figure, and slightly crooked teeth; she has appeared in Hustler, and he would like her to make movies. "She could do television," he said. "I could take her on Howard Stern, and she could become a national name overnight." Hof is clearly still fond of Krystyn. "If I thought I wouldn't run into the emotional baggage, I would think about getting back together with her, because I like the look of her, and I love having sex with her," he told me.

Krystyn has a less sentimental view of things. One day, as she and Hof and I were driving around in his car, Krystyn explained that her job often required her to be an actress, and that maintaining a relationship while working as a prostitute was difficult. "It is very hard for me to enjoy sex in my personal life," she said.

"It's hard for you to enjoy sex in your personal life?" Hof asked, puzzled.

"It's kind of a chore," she went on. "I enjoy the hugging and the intimacy part, but as far as the actual sex, there really hasn't been that many men I can stay in that intimacy role with. It's kind of like, `O.K., get off, so that we can go to bed.' "

"I think we have a very good sex life," Hof said, sounding hurt.

"You and I do," Krystyn said quickly. "But that's because I love you."

There was silence in the car. Then Hof fixed me in the rearview mirror and said, "She doesn't have any trouble having sex with me."

I am a big part of the sex industry in America," Hof told me one day.

"I am one of the most high-profile people in America. I am right there with Hefner and Guccione and Flynt. Who else is there?" We were in Los Angeles, driving to a casino owned by Larry Flynt. It is not quite true that Hof has the name recognition of those other sex-industry players--when, one evening, we met half a dozen of Hof's friends at Spago, it turned out that his personal assistant had, for expediency's sake, used the name of Hof's onetime friend Al Goldstein when making the reservation--but his aspirations are as large as his appetites. Hof was eager to show Flynt a mockup of a magazine that he intended to produce, called Bordello Confidential. It was to feature pictures of Hof's girls, and he hoped that Flynt could be persuaded to become his partner.

We met Flynt for lunch at the restaurant of his casino. Flynt has been paralyzed from the waist down since an assassination attempt in 1978, and his wheelchair was rolled up to the head of a long table. In front of him was a plate of eggs; a linen napkin was tucked under his chin, and his attentive wife, Liz, sat to his right. Hof greeted the Flynts effusively, then sat down, ordered some sushi, and brought out what was to be the first Bordello Confidential cover. It showed a girl named Mila, Queen of Nasty, in a provocative rear view.

Flynt eyed the cover. "There could be a good market for this if it's good quality," he said. "There are over a hundred adult titles out there, but only four or five that are of any quality." When Hof suggested that Flynt might want to get involved, Flynt looked dubious. "We wouldn't be able to do that much for you," he said. "You could advertise on our Web site."

"Or put it under the Hustler flagship, if it works out right," Hof said, undeterred. Not long afterward, Flynt excused himself and rolled away to join a poker game, and Hof and I took a tour of the casino. It was a huge, gleaming, lofty palace: the Beverly Hills Hotel to Hof's Motel 6. "Beautiful, isn't it?" Hof said admiringly. We walked over to the poker table, where Flynt, surrounded by high rollers, was gambling serious money. Hof hovered for a while, until a security guard came over and asked him to step away. "We just had lunch with Larry," Hof explained. "He's a friend."

The Bunnyranch's dining room has nothing comparable to the linen napkins and sushi chef at Flynt's casino; it is equipped with two Formica tables, a ripped leather couch, and an exercise bicycle that seems to serve primarily as a place for the cook to hang his coat. And yet, in these modest surroundings, Hof makes grandiose plans. Recently, he was the proud host of Dan Paulson, a theatre and TV-miniseries producer, and Ernest Thompson, who nineteen years ago won an Oscar for the screenplay adaptation of his play "On Golden Pond." In anticipation of their arrival, Hof had told me that his visitors from Hollywood wanted to make a movie about his ranch, although Paulson and Thompson turned out to have more modest ambitions, being interested in developing a cable-television series about a brothel--a "Sex and the City" kind of thing, only without the city and with more sex.

Paulson and Thompson were sleeker than the Bunnyranch's usual clientele: they wore good haircuts instead of baseball caps, and they both had on expensive-looking sweaters. They hung out for an evening and chatted with the girls, trying to strike up a home-town conversation with Joy about Los Angeles. Thompson mentioned that he was staying in Pacific Palisades; Paulson said he lived in Beverly Hills. Where did she live? "South-Central," Joy replied.

Hof invited the men from Hollywood to have a seat in his dining room, which was thick with the smell of gravy. He said, "People think of prostitution and they think of a ratty mattress and a candle, but it's not that. This is a business." He explained how much money the girls are capable of earning. "If a girl needs five thousand dollars, she can come here and make it in two days," he said. He told them about Food Dude. He said that when Viagra appeared, his business went up twenty per cent. "It's like turbocharging," he said. He told them that he won't tolerate anyone calling his girls "sluts" or "bitches," although he admitted to using those terms himself in moments of passion, including one such moment the previous night. "We tell the customers who come here to treat it as a singles bar, just one where the odds are real good," he said, grinning.

Then Hof led Paulson and Thompson down the hall to Air Force Amy's room, and she and Barely Legal Mel sat on the bed while Paulson and Thompson asked about the details of their professional lives. Someone had put a copy of "Lesbian Ho' Down at the Bunnyranch" in the VCR, and Amy cast occasional, uninterested glances at the X-rated images of herself on the screen: the bitten lip, the closed eyes. The previous evening, Amy had mentioned to me, as she hobbled in her heels to stand in yet another lineup, that she wanted to get out of the prostitution business within a year--that it was taking a toll on her body, that her joints ached liked a football player's. "I'll be too old for this next year," she said. "I hope I'll be too rich for this next year." This evening, though, her bedroom crowded with riveted guests, Amy was the picture of an enthusiastic professional. She sat on the bed, smoothing her skin-tight silver dress. "I love men and I love sex and I love money," she said, and Hof smiled with satisfaction at the sight of his top girl making another sale.