When Page Six recently reported a spotting of Sydney Biddle Barrows at the Metropolitan Gallery, her name was a jolt from the past — one most New Yorkers hadn’t thought of in decades.
“My reaction was that I really should stay home,” Barrows told The Post with a laugh.
Back in 1984 — the year she was labeled the “Mayflower Madam” after being busted as the head of an upscale prostitution ring — the Manhattan blue blood’s business brought in $1 million a year (about $2.7 million today).
Now, almost 40 years on, the reformed offender is applying her transactional skills that she once used for hiring out call girls to teaching professionals how to build profits.
“I’m still in the ‘helping people business,’” Barrows, who calls herself “a facilitator,” told The Post. “My previous clients had dreams of being with pretty girls. Now my clients have dreams of making more money.”
A prime example of the latter, she says, is the boss of a construction company whose annual income has rocketed from $300,000 to $8 million over the last six years.
“He wrote a testimonial for the home page of my website,” added Barrows, 69, who claims to perform “clearings” of the subconscious mind so individuals can replace “negative” energies with “empowering” ones.
“Like most of my clients, he was willing to push the envelope and try something he’d never heard of before.”
Barrows, the descendant of four Pilgrims who escaped England for America aboard the Mayflower in 1620, knows all about career risks.
Her first big gamble was the 1979 launch of the personal escort agency Cachet — a bespoke service catering to influential, wealthy men including high-profile lawyers, foreign diplomats and Arab oil sheiks — who paid as much as $250 an hour (now about $660) to have sex with high-class prostitutes.
The underground venture went like gangbusters for five years, but came to a screeching halt with a sting by the NYPD vice squad. “They used to be known as the ‘p–sy posse,’” Barrows told The Post.
She claims on her website: “Unfortunately New York’s Finest shut it [the agency] down (Ok, we were busted) only to eventually concede it was the most honest and professionally-run business of its kind ever operated in New York City.”
While the source of the endorsement is unclear, the former madam fondly looks back on her time as a sex broker. “[It’s] the best job I ever had,” she recalls in her online bio.
Barrows, who was raised with her brother in Rumson, NJ, said her bloodline from the 17th-century Puritans is through her mother, Jeanette Ballantine, who developed a long friendship with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy at the tony Miss Porter’s girls’ school.
Meanwhile, her father, Donald Byers Barrows Jr., was a business executive at the publishing company Time Life. His daughter was paraded as a debutante at a 1970 ball held by The Mayflower Society, but the patriarch poured scorn on her ambition to further her education after Barrows was expelled from Stoneleigh-Burnham boarding school in Massachusetts for playing hooky with a boyfriend.
“He said: ‘You’re a pretty girl who’ll [soon] get married, so why should I send you to college?’” Barrows recalled.
Undeterred, she completed a two-year course at the Fashion Institute of Technology and was hired as a buyer at the Brooklyn department store Abraham & Strauss. “I had a female boss who taught me what a good boss was like,” she recalled. “I learned a lot about running a business.”
Nonetheless, Barrows was fired for refusing to work Sundays. A miserable spell of unemployment led to her 1977 move into the shady world of prostitution.
It happened after she visited the apartment of a friend who was busy “unpacking a brand new stereo,” Barrows said. “She didn’t have any more money than I did, so I asked her where she got it from. She uncharacteristically wouldn’t give the answer but finally broke down and said: ‘I answer the phones for an escort service.’
“I said: ‘Oh, what’s an escort service?’ and, when she told me what it was, the first thing that popped into my head was prostitutes. My reaction was, ‘Oh my God!’ and I was horrified that someone I knew was involved in such a thing.”
But the lure of a $50-a-night salary — vastly higher than a whole week’s unemployment benefit — proved too tempting. Barrows began working as a receptionist as soon as an opening came up at the agency.
She said she quickly realized that she was smarter and had more business acumen than the guys who ran the show.
“They liked ‘hot chicks’ — girls you’d call ‘trashy-looking’ — and figured everybody else would too,” Barrows recalled. “But the men I spoke to on the phone sounded just like my male relatives and the fathers of my girlfriends. I knew they’d be horrified by some hoochie mama prancing through their door.
“I realized there was an entire market that was not being served.”
Two years later, she and her pal quit the agency and set up Cachet. Its unique selling point was supplying rich clients with beautiful, classy and well-spoken girls.
“Other ads, in places like Screw magazine and Back Page, showed grainy pictures of a woman with her legs in a Y-shape with the headline: ‘See you in my valley,’” she said. “But we designed this very spare, elegant-looking ad saying, ‘New York’s Most Trusted Service.’”
The bucks rolled in as the call girls swanned into ritzy hotels like The Plaza and Pierre. To avoid detection in the lobby, Barrows said, the women “dressed in business suits from Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and carried briefcases.”
Unlike other agencies, which did a 50/50 split of the takings, the escorts pocketed 60 percent of the profits while Cachet banked the rest. Barrows, who later ran the business alone, insists the prostitutes — who started out charging $100 an hour — were never “coerced” into the industry.
The madam, who went by the alias Sheila Devin, went on to seize another financial opportunity by meeting the increasing demand from affluent clients for “even prettier, blonder, bustier girls.” Suddenly, she could charge $250 an hour with a two-hour minimum. An overnight cost $1,000.
More than 40 years after she founded the illegal enterprise, Barrows feels no remorse. “The guy was hurting his wife, not me,” she told The Post of a typical customer. “It was all him. If he wanted to choose my agency to cheat on his wife with a lie, that was his business, not mine.”
She was collared in October 1984 after a “drop-dead gorgeous” girl “who was lacking in the brains department” made the mistake of giving a price to an undercover cop for oral sex.
“In New York, all you have to do to commit prostitution is to agree to commit a sexual act for money,” explained Barrows.
There was no trial, as her legal team negotiated a plea deal with prosecutors. Barrows — whose ancestry led The Post to crown her the “Mayflower Madam” — was fined $5,000 and received no jail time or community service. One attorney remarked that the lightweight punishment was merely a “kiss on the wrist.”
Barrows was photographed outside Manhattan Central Booking in a chic gray wool suit that played on her image as, she said, “a high-falutin’ broad,” noting, “I never went in for flashy clothes. That was never my style.”
She admits she benefited from her portrayal in the press as a cut above: “My trust fund didn’t exist and I was by no means a socialite, but it diverted people’s attention from anything [they might consider] sleazy.”
It didn’t take long for her name to became an answer on “Jeopardy.”
“I mean, let’s face it, it gave everyone something fun to talk about around the Thanksgiving table,” she said. “I guess it was fun because it wasn’t their daughter or anyone related to them.”
As for Barrows’ own family, her mother’s side was “more accommodating” than her father’s. Her paternal grandmother felt particularly “humiliated” after reading about the bust in the paper — turns out, the two share the same name.
But eventually that rift was healed. Barrows wrote her bestselling autobiography “Mayflower Madam: The Secret Life of Sydney Barrows” and, in 1987, she was portrayed by actress Candice Bergen in a made-for-TV movie.
“I had my more than 15 minutes in the sun,” Barrows said, revealing that it was “nice to get a good table at a restaurant” as a consequence of her infamy. “Was it nice to get a little extra special treatment? Hell yeah!” she added. “But, as the spotlight faded away, I was okay with that.”
The Upper West Sider, a divorcée with no children, lives in the same one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment as she did in 1984.
The forthright way she reflects on her scandalous past appears to have endeared her to the “entrepreneurs and ‘solopreneurs’” who fork over $2,200 for four 90-minute phone sessions with the guru. She offers a 100 percent money-back guarantee if clients spot no change in their fortunes.
Barrows even claims that, beyond commercial interests, her “energy work” has performed miracles on people’s personal lives. One overweight man lost more than 200 pounds by following her “internal motivation” program.
Meanwhile, she often harks back to the business model of her escort agency as a recipe for success.
“You have to figure out what the customer wants,” Barrows said, referring to the ’80s johns who paid top dollar for their liaisons with “classy” girls. “It’s all the same. There’s nothing special about it.”
