‘I always thought of myself as a manager, rather than a madam.’

The Management Assn. of H. R. Textron Inc., the Valencia company that makes survovalves and filters for the aerospace industry, sought a diversion last week from the usual sobriety of its monthly get-togethers.

So it hired a madame.

The club is H. R. Textron’s affiliate of the National Management Assn., which exists for the betterment of management in America.

Once a month, 200 or 300 managers of the Valencia subsidiaries of the Rhode Island conglomerate convene at the Odyssey restaurant in Granada Hills to be illuminated by a speaker who presumably has a deep or esoteric knowledge of human relations.

At recent meetings, the group has heard John Dean and Gordon Liddy, well-known experts in the field of political and security management, as well as behaviorist and motivator Jim Rohn. In May, former Atty. Gen. William French Smith will speak on the management of justice.

Thursday evening, the speaker was Norma Ashby, who may not be as famous as a Liddy or a Dean but whose activities were just as illicit.

For 20 years, until she was arrested and did a year at Sybil Brand Institute for Women, Ashby ran a string of call girls from her home in the Hollywood Hills.

This seemed like a natural for a talk on management.

“I always thought of myself as a manager, rather than a madam,” Ashby said. And, in the end, she said, it was her perfectly kept ledger books that landed her in jail.

To start the program, the association’s president, Michelle Miller, led everyone in the flag salute and noted that the hall was full for a change.

“Interesting to see what brings out the troops,” she said.

Introducing the speaker, Terry Collins, director of human resources for H. R. Textron, set a tongue-in-cheek tone.

“Our speaker tonight has been reviewing past times with so many old friends,” he said.

Everyone laughed.

“I don’t know whether I can do this,” he said, pausing dramatically. “Michelle said, ‘Don’t ever call me Madame President again.’ ”

Trying to tone down, Collins reported that Ashby has left prostitution.

“After that tainted career, she got involved in her own business,” he said, causing an unintended laugh.

“She is presently the founder and director of Catharsis, a nonprofit organization to assist women in getting out of prostitution. She’s a counselor at Children of the Night, an organization to help get children off of the streets and out of prostitution.”

Then Ashby stepped forward, a middle-aged strawberry blonde wearing a formal white suit and several circles of pearls around her neck.

“How do I follow Terry?” she asked.

She genuinely meant that.

It was quickly apparent that Ashby didn’t know how to sustain the comic mood.

“I’m scared to death,” she confessed at one point, leaning against the lectern for support. “Because I’ve been doing interviews that are on television and radio, I don’t get to see all your wonderful faces.”

She made a timid attempt to develop the management theme.

She called a model to the stage, a young woman dressed in a sloppy T-shirt and jeans.

“If Cindy entered the business of prostitution, she’d do all right,” Ashby said. “She could pay her bills. But this way, she isn’t managed.”

Then she summoned Nancy, who was wearing a provocative red suit.

“This is Nancy,” Ashby said. “She has on heels and a little more leg. She would make more money. That’s what a madam does. When she interviews the women, she simply tells them what she’d like of them, what she’d like them to dress like, what she’d like them to act like.”

It was a solid definition of management. But Ashby didn’t know where to take it from there.

She maneuvered into the subject she knows best.

She told how she became a madam when a woman who was retiring turned over her list of clients.

“I had an apartment and a little daughter,” she said. “A car payment was past due. I said, I’ll work for just six months until I could solve my money problems. And, before I knew it, it just turned into a regular business. And that was the business that I was caught at.”

She also talked about her program Catharsis. “I feel like I might have gotten out sooner if someone would have assisted me,” she said.

She told several anecdotes--one about a high school girl who saved $300,000 through prostitution, another about a girl who quit prostitution but couldn’t escape her father’s demands for sex. Finally, looking uncomfortable, she said: “I’m so embarrassed. I will be happy to answer any questions.”

It turned out that there were many.

A man asked whether she considered prostitution a victimless crime. “No,” Ashby said. “I consider the prostitute the victim.”

Another asked whether jail really reforms prostitutes. No, Ashby said. Young women learn new ways to go astray there, she said.

The questions kept coming.

A woman asked if drugs lead to prostitution. Maybe, she said, but added: “The truth is, by the time they get into prostitution they start doing drugs more, because they don’t want to be doing what they’re doing.”

The night had taken on a heavy tone. And Ashby was on a roll.