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According to her, a white writer, whom Beck would later only refer to as "the Professor", became interested in writing Beck's life story Beck became convinced that the man was trying to steal their idea for himself, so they cut him out of the deal and finished it without him. Betty encouraged Beck to write the story of his life as a novel, and they began sporadically writing some draft chapters. He met Betty Shue, who became his common-law wife and the mother of his three daughters, while he was working as an insecticide salesman. In 1961, Maupin moved to Los Angeles and changed his name to Robert Beck, taking the last name of the man his mother was married to at the time. In 1961, after serving 10 months of solitary confinement in a Cook County jail, Maupin decided he was too old for a life of pimping (he was 42) and was unable to compete with younger, more ruthless pimps. Throughout his pimping career, Slim, who was known as Cavanaugh Slim, was noted for being able to effectively conceal his emotions, something he said he learned from Baby Bell: "A pimp has gotta know his whores, but not let them know him he's gotta be god all the way." Writing
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Another pimp, who had gotten Slim hooked on cocaine, went by the name of "Satin" and was a major drug figure in the eastern part of the country. Slim had been connected with several other well-known pimps, one of them Albert "Baby" Bell, a man born in 1899 who had been pimping for decades and had a Duesenberg and a bejeweled pet ocelot. When verbal instruction and psychological manipulation failed to keep the women compliant, he beat them with wire hangers in his autobiography he concedes he was a ruthless, vicious man. He said he was known for his frosty temperament and for staying calm in emergencies, which, combined with his slim build, earned him the street name Iceberg Slim. The book claims that during his career he had over 400 women, both black and white, working for him. Pimp Īccording to his memoir, Pimp, Slim started pimping at 18 and continued until age 42. After his expulsion, his mother encouraged him to become a criminal lawyer so that he could make a legitimate living while continuing to work with the street people he was so fond of, but Maupin, seeing the pimps bringing women into his mother's beauty salon, was far more attracted to the lifestyle of money and control over women that pimping provided.
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Slim attended Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, but having spent time in the "street culture", he soon began bootlegging and was expelled as a result. She earned enough money working in her salon to give her son the privileges of a middle-class life such as a college education, which at that time was difficult for the average person. In his autobiography, Maupin expressed gratitude to his mother for not also abandoning him. When his mother was abandoned by his father, she established a beauty shop and worked as a domestic to support both of them in Milwaukee. He spent his childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Rockford, Illinois, until he returned to Chicago. Robert Maupin was born in Chicago, Illinois. Aug– April 30, 1992), better known as Iceberg Slim, was a former American pimp who later became a writer. Robert Beck (born Robert Lee Maupin or Robert Moppins Jr.
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