The idea that would become ronsangels.com–the only egg-donor Web site aimed at infertile couples who dream of raising a Playmate of the Month–came to Harris as he was casting a model for a print ad he was shooting. Harris mentioned a news story about a couple advertising for Ivy League women willing to donate–or, rather, sell–eggs for in vitro fertilization. “This model said, ‘I’d do that’,” Harris recalled. “I said, I know all these girls. This is going to be easy.”
Harris–whose business ventures have landed him in court in the past–may have regarded his new site as an adjunct to his thriving soft-core porn sites, which charged members $24.95 monthly to view a collection of naked young women. But then The New York Times–apparently unaware that Harris was the impresario of eroticboxoffice.com and sweet18.com–ran a story about his egg-vending scheme that held him up as an object of “horror and disgust” to “mainstream fertility groups.” Within a couple of days, Web-savvy journalists had dug out the truth about Harris’s long involvement with porn sites, and several suggested that the whole thing was a sham. But by then, Ron’s Angels was registering more than a million hits a day, making it a virtual gold mine. In short order Harris closed his erotic sites to new members, began giving interviews and recast himself as a philosopher and expert on human evolution. “Choosing eggs from beautiful women will profoundly increase the success of your children and your children’s children, for centuries to come,” he wrote on the Web page. More succinctly, he told Matt Lauer on “Today”: “You’re a cute guy, and that’s probably why you’re such a good anchor.”
What Harris hadn’t done, as of last week, was actually sell any eggs, nor was it clear that he ever would–although he claimed to be weighing “three or four” serious offers. Harris has a fairly rudimentary business plan. He is not connected with a doctor or a clinic, and he doesn’t investigate or guarantee anything about the models on his site. Visitors are invited to pay $24.95 a month for the right to view pictures of the models and bid on their eggs, at prices starting at $15,000. He started with eight prospective donors but, alas, after someone bid $48,000 for one last week he tried to find the woman and discovered that her phone had been disconnected. As of late last week his roster consisted of four women, ranging in age from 20 to 26, in height from 5'6" to 5'7", and in bust size from 34B to 34D. Newspaper stories referred to them, wildly erroneously, as “supermodels.” Harris says he plans to collect offers by e-mail, introduce the high bidders to the prospective donors and let them work out the details. If the deal actually goes through, and that seemed a long way off last week, he would collect a 20 percent commission.
As his main qualification for this enterprise, Harris describes himself as “an expert on beauty.” A Hollywood agent whose clients include soft-core models described Harris as an “exceptionally good photographer–one of the best.” As a businessman, though, he says of himself, “I’m an artist.” In 1991 he and several associates were sued by the accounting firm KMPG Peat Marwick, which alleged that a company Harris was associated with, Full Circle Entertainment, had forged Peat Marwick’s name on bogus financial statements to deceive lenders. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge issued an injunction prohibiting Harris and the others from the unauthorized use of the accounting firm’s name or logo. The case was subsequently settled. Harris admits the incident occurred but claims the bogus reports were prepared by an employee: “He was using me as a front,” Harris says. In 1997, he filed for personal bankruptcy, claiming debts of more than $600,000, virtually no assets and only $25,000 in income. He seems to live well enough today, though, in a mountainside Malibu home. His lifestyle comports with his personal philosophy, that the goal of life is to accumulate “genetic choices.” “As I get older and I have more money, I actually have more choices,” he says. “Girls come in here and say, ‘Oh, this is nice’.” The same benefits, he implies, will accrue to any child lucky enough to be the spawn of one of his egg donors.
But, leaving aside the question of whether that’s a feature of society worthy of being perpetuated, is his implied claim even true? “It’s a scam,” says Arthur Caplan, one of the nation’s prominent bioethicists. “A beautiful person will not necessarily beget a beautiful child.” To state the obvious, any child conceived in this way will inherit half of his or her genetic material from the father. And while certain properties, such as height or coloring, are heritable to varying degrees, “beauty” is far too subtle a quality to be captured in that way. Even reproducing the world’s most perfect nose is meaningless if it doesn’t go with the chin below. And beauty, of all the qualities you could choose for your child, is the one thing you can do something about after he’s born. You might do better to skimp on the egg-donor price and put the money toward plastic surgery later on.
None of which particularly troubled Harris, though, as he boasted about the latest addition to his roster (“world class, she looks like Bo Derek”) and prepared to branch out into sperm. He is, of course, precisely right about the value our culture places on physical beauty. He is merely tapping into what law professor Lori Andrews, author of “The Clone Age,” calls “our shopping-list mentality about babies.” A model’s cheekbones may not rank high on everyone’s shopping list. But what if you could order up, say, a kid with the DNA of a world-class model who is a junior at Wellesley and a nationally ranked tennis player? Imagine that the bidding starts at $100,000. Who doesn’t believe there would be takers?
