Iceberg Slim

His Career

Pimp (a manager of prostitutes), c. 1937-62; insecticide salesman, mid-1960s; published Pimp: The Story of My Life, c. 1967 (according to most sources); novelist and lecturer, 1967-1980s.

His Life's Work

Robert Beck was born on August 4, 1918, in Chicago, Illinois. In his books he praised his mother for not leaving him in a dumpster when he was an infant. Beck was abandoned by his father. Somehow, he and his mother managed to survive, moving frequently around the Midwest. Beck spent most of his childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Rockfort, Illinois. His mother worked as a maid and operated a beauty shop. She was exploited by a series of men who drifted in and out of her life. Still, it seems she was able to provide Beck with some semblance of luxury; he once said that his mother helped pave the way for his life as a pimp by pampering him.

Beck returned to the rough South Side of Chicago as a teenager. The only people with money in his circle were pimps. His mother wanted him to become a lawyer. "But," he told Answer Me!, "the environment poisoned me, street-poisoned me at an early age." For Beck, these affluent pimps had everything; they were fashionable, smooth- talking, dripping with gold and diamonds, and they drove El Dorado's. They would come for manicures at his mother's beauty shop. "They seemed so glamorous  and so worldly and so polished and sophisticated. So this is what molded my thinking, and I wanted to be a pimp. I used to just dream about being a pimp and having all those sexy women givin' me money."

Beck attended Alabama's prestigious Tuskegee Institute for a time in the 1930s--he was there at the same time as writer Ralph Ellison--but he did not earn a degree. Prison officials once measured Beck's IQ at 175--an extremely high score. His innate intelligence notwithstanding, by 19 Beck was getting his start as a pimp on the streets of the South Side. There he met a hustler named Party Time who showed him the ropes. Clever and keen, Beck was nonetheless naive and was arrested when his first prostitute was servicing her second client. In jail Beck met a man named Sweet Jones, an older pimp of some renown who taught him the real tricks of the trade.

In Pimp Beck quotes some of Sweet's advice: "A good pimp is always alone. You gotta always be a puzzle, a mystery to them. That's how you hold a whore." Beck was clever and well spoken; he quickly rose through the ranks toward his goal of being "Pimp of all Pimps." Pimp chronicles his years in "the life." During his career he had over 400 women, both black and white, working for him. He was known for his frosty  temperament, and and at six feet, three inches tall and 180 pounds, he was indeed slim. He also had a reputation for icy calm in sticky situations. He thus earned the street name Iceberg Slim. When verbal instruction and psychological manipulation failed to keep his women in line, he beat them with wire hangers; his autobiography makes no bones about his being a ruthless, vicious man.

As such, Iceberg Slim ascended to the top of his game. He made sure his girls gave him all the money they earned. He doled their cuts out in rations as he saw fit. Payment often took the form of drugs, on which many of his prostitutes were hooked. This helped keep him in control. He was a heroin addict himself, though apparently few knew it. Slim concentrated most of his efforts in the Chicago area, but he worked women throughout the Midwest. He served a total of seven years in jail for various offences--including time at the Leavenworth federal penitentiary  in Kansas, the Cook County (Illinois) House of Corrections, and Waupan State Prison in Wisconsin.

During his second to last incarceration Slim was able to escape. He just disappeared like a wisp of smoke, as he often liked to say. He pimped for 13 more years before he was recaptured in 1960 and placed in solitary confinement at Cook County. For nearly a year he lived in a cell no more than eight feet deep and four feet wide; he described it as a steel casket. The food was often infested  with worms, but he ate it anyway, deeming the pests protein after much self-persuasion.

Slim did a lot of soul-searching in that metal box. He decided he was getting too old to pimp. He was 43 and there were younger,tougher pimps on the street. In Pimp he wrote, "I got out of it because I was old. I did not want to be teased, tormented and brutalized by young whores." The National Observer's Monroe Anderson quoted him as saying, "I realized I had been stupid. I was elderly and tired. I had the revelation that pimping, after all, was not the most magnificent profession. I had a feeling that I had wasted myself."

On his release from prison Slim retired from street life and moved to Los Angeles, California, where he attempted to reconcile with his mother. He spent a heart-wrenching six months at her oxygen- tent-covered beside, where she lay slowly dying of complications from diabetes. Her death was a great blow; it proved to be what he needed to quit heroin, which he did cold turkey, completely and abruptly.

By 1962 Slim was seeking work anywhere he could. He finally got a job selling insecticide for $75 a week. He had been a natural salesman all of his life. He also met and married a women named Catherine who was 20 years his junior. By all accounts, though, Slim often seemed and looked half his age. When Sepia's Bob Moore asked how he could marry after having so hard-heartedly exploited the 400 women that he had "managed," Slim replied: "I got married because I found a woman who obviously has a lot of common sense and who understands the kinds of changes that I was going through, and who is highly intelligent and extremely lovable, and who just seems to understand--has a sixth sense about what I had gone through." He also admitted that he needed a little taking care of, that marriage was an important positive step, and that he thought children would be good for him.

For four years Slim sold insecticide. While making a pitch to a college professor, he mentioned that he had been a pimp. The professor offered to collaborate with Slim on an autobiography, but after the interviews had been taped, Slim discovered that he would only receive a minimal percentage of the book's royalties. Spurred on by the need to beat the professor before he stole his life story, Slim wrote his own book, Pimp: The Story of My Life, in three months. He insisted that real creativity had not been a factor, that all he had done was remember, but The Nation dismissed this notion, reporting, "There were perception and introspection, ... in the book Beck bares his mind and the pimp psychology to the reader while writing in the argot of the ghetto with descriptions to match."

Bentley Morriss of Holloway House publishers in Los Angeles recognized Slim's talent and worked with him on publishing all of his subsequent novels. Pimp was published in 1967 (though sources vary on this). It shocked the public and sold like hotcakes. And despite Slim's efforts to dissuade young men from going into "the life," the book reportedly had the opposite effect on some, who figured they'd be slicker than Iceberg Slim.

Reviews of Pimp were mixed, but no one denied the importance of the book. In a piece on pulp fiction in The Source, Ronin Ro gave credit where credit was due: "The original storytellers from the 'hood weren't today's rap artists, but the prolific black `pulp fiction' novelists such as Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, who created worlds of pimps, whores, druggies, stooges, lay persons and ghetto heroes." He points to director Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction, for which the film-maker won best screenplay honors, as a contemporary work influenced by these writers. Several rap stars--Ice T, Ice Cube, and Vanilla Ice-- adopted stage names that owed an obvious debt to Iceberg Slim. Ice T readily admitted he "borrowed" part of Slim's name in order to reinforce his reputation as a cold-blooded player on the scene. Slim appears again and again as the source for words and phrases in dictionaries of slang and books on black English. Indeed, his books were published with glossaries.

"Instead of the million dollar mansions where white crime novel types like Sam Spade met employers," Ro continued, "[the black novelists] took readers to the dilapidated tenements, where [their] employees lived." In the San Jose Mercury-News Fred Dickey wrote that Slim "has been places that shouldn't be allowed to exist and he's done things that people shouldn't be allowed to do, but because they do and he did, his telling us about them fulfills an important literary function."

After Pimp, Slim published Trick Baby, a book of essays called The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim, Mama Black Widow, and Death Wish. "Though his writing voice grew angrier, his characters started to seem like far-fetched jive turkeys," Ro asserted. "Trick Baby was a preposterous `blue-eyed, light-haired, white-skinned Negro.' Mama Black Widow's Otis Tilson was a Black homosexual living in the  Deep South who battled sadistic pimps and white sheriffs. Death Wish's Don Jimmy Collucci was an Italian hitman `who wants nothing less than to rule the "Honored Society.'" His corny plots, however, didn't stop Hollywood from filming Trick Baby and buying the rights to Pimp."

In the early 1970s Slim became acquainted with the militant Black Panthers, whom he admired very much. The Panthers, however, were not as enthralled by Slim, who they felt had exploited his people. Slim stopped writing after meeting the Panthers, instead spending a great deal of time on the lecture circuit, trying to keep black youths from going astray.

The retired pimp was by then largely a changed man. He still dressed immaculately and conversed in an articulate, often compelling, manner, but except for a still slightly sexist attitude evident in interviews, he had completely reformed his old ways. He lived with his wife and their four children in the black community of South Central Los Angeles. He resided in the ghetto by choice; he couldn't imagine continuing in his work to educate young black people without living among them. He wanted constant reminders of where he had been.

Iceberg Slim died on April 28, 1992, just as Holloway House was issuing a silver-bound twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Pimp. During the last year of his life sales of his books increased as interest in all forms of black literature continued to grow. African American Studies courses began teaching his works more widely, but as Phil Patton wrote in Esquire, "they should be taught elsewhere as well." To be sure, Iceberg Slim and his contemporaries are often overlooked when it comes to acknowledgement and acclaim from the black community, mostly because their milieu was so ugly. But their work is inextricable from the black experience; it records history and pain and its very existence represents a triumph over adversity.

Iceberg Slim said as much in Answer Me!: "The truth is, I feel so triumphant that ... I've survived, 'cause I've got news for you, rhetorically: If a nigger, if a male nigger is able to survive in this society to be almost 72, friend, he has accomplished one hell of a miracle. Believe me. Believe me."