American Gigolo

From the jacket: "I made love to women for money, some of them old enough to be my mother. But that isn't why I'd ended up in prison. The truth is very much stranger and a lot more embarrassing. I did something I'd always considered myself incapable o f doing. Something a gigolo is never meant to do . . . the one thing which no one will believe possible of someone with my profession. I fell in love." That's the voice of Julian Cole, the arrogant, ambitious, but appealing "Beverly Hills Casanova" ... a man whose own illusions about his life make him dangerously vulnerable to the rich, ruthless dolce vita world that uses him, bribes him, and eventually frames him for murder. Julian Cole knows a lot about women-the rich ones, the hungry ones, the kinky ones, the lonely ones. But nothing in his past has prepared him for the one woman whose love turns his own sensual weapons against him. American Gigolo moves from the sordid after-midnight world of motels and gay bars to the depths of the criminal underworld-and the highest echelons of California politics. It is the story of an unforgettable man and his fascinating and disturbing life-style-capturing with diamond-hard brilliance an American time and place where sex is legal tender . . . and love a shortcut to bankruptcy.