

So he changed all of their names and descriptions. The hip-hop writer Mark Skillz wrote that when Beck began work on Pimp, "he made two promises to himself: no glamorizing his former life and no snitching." Hip hop artist Fab 5 Freddy, a friend of Beck's, gave this account of the literary technique of Pimp: "Many of Bob's friends were still alive when he wrote that book. Bentley Morris of Holloway House recognized the merit of Pimp, and it was published in 1967. According to her, a white writer, whom Beck would later only refer to as "the Professor", became interested in writing Beck's life story, and 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. I did not want to be teased, tormented and brutalized by young whores."

In an interview with the Washington Post, he said he retired, "because I was old. He believed he was too old for the life of pimping, unable to compete with younger, more ruthless pimps. In 1961, Maupin left prison after serving 10 months of solitary confinement, in a Cook County jail. Slim was noted for being able to effectively conceal his emotions throughout his pimping career, 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 Another pimp, who had gotten Slim hooked on heroin, went by the name of "Satin" and was a major drug figure in Eastern America. Slim had been involved with several other popular 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 his women in line, he beat them with wire hangers in his autobiography he fully concedes he was a ruthless, vicious man. He said he was known for his frosty temperament, and at 6'2" and 180 lbs, he was indeed slim, and he had a reputation for staying calm in sticky situations, thus earning the street name Iceberg Slim. The book claimed that during his career, he had over 400 women, both black and white, working for him. PimpingĪccording to his memoir, Pimp, Slim started pimping at 18 and continued that pursuit 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 model of money and control over women that pimping provided. Slim attended Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama (it has been stated that he attended Tuskegee University at the same time as black author Ralph Ellison), 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 abandoning him, as well. 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, an African-American, was born in Chicago, Illinois.
