The return of the Happy Hooker

Xaviera Hollander is making a comeback. Actually, she has never really been away. In fact, she says she’s as busy as ever. But, thirty years after the first publication of ‘The Happy Hooker’, it is once again in print.

The Happy Hooker tells the story of a girl who discovered sex early in life and made her hobby a career. Already by her early twenties Hollander’s sexual partners were legion. She had experimented with her best girlfriend at school, her uncle, cousin, brother-in-law, …in short anything on two (and not just, but we’ll stop there.) She seduced a former teacher, made love 30,000 feet in the air to a stranger on a plane, and persuaded a bent cop who wanted to arrest her to settle on an oral warning. And so, by the time she became a Madame in Manhattan, she was well versed in her subject matter. "I made more money horizontally than most women ever make vertically’, she quips.

"The happy Hooker", says Hollander, "is not merely a sex book; it is also a fun biography of a woman who dared to call the beastly thing by its real name. No more medical Latin terms, but day-to-day expressions for our family jewels and the things to do with them."

In the intervening years, since its publication in 1972, little has changed. The blond hair has become silver, the thin waistline has become …erm… rounder, the voluptuous eyes are now bespectacled, but the style remains unchanged. At 60, Xaviera still looks the part. She has retained her seductive charm, still exercises her controlling personality and continues to parade like a Madame among servants. Her rich pool of metaphors for human genitalia and her variants for the verb ‘to copulate’ are impressive; her flare for story telling, which consigns little to the imagination, is still evident; and her fascination with sex has not diminished.

Hollander has no qualms discussing issues such as incest or pedophilia; nothing shocks her or is taboo. She has seen and heard (if not done) it all. And as a columnist in ‘Penthouse’ (a post she still holds) she has read it all. She recalls one particular letter she received many years ago. "It was from an elderly lady who wrote to tell me that shortly after her mother died, when she was a young adolescent, she and her father had an incestuous relationship. A few years later, her father remarried and their sexual relationship stopped. This woman went on to marry and had four grown-up children, but throughout this time she has never experienced an orgasm with her husband. The only time she had an orgasm during sex was with her father. So, what’s wrong with that?"

The reprint of The Happy Hooker coincides with the publication of Hollander’s new autobiographical book, ‘Child No More’, which she describes as ‘an ode’ to Germaine, her mother. It is a memoir about her childhood; a childhood which began in Surabaja, Indonesia, as the daughter of a Jewish psychiatrist, director of a hospital at the time the Second World War.
"The Japanese invaded Indonesia and locked up all Dutch people. The German officers who occasionally came to visit the Japanese in Surabaja indoctrinated the Japanese officers and they told them to lock up the ‘schweinhund Jews’ in special Jewish camps and treat them worse than the other Dutch people. So they did." Xaviera and her mother were confined in a prison camp while her father was imprisoned in a different camp.

The book charts her father’s long and tragic end, triggered by a stroke, and the transformation of the relationship between daughter and mother, after his death. Hollander describes her numerous suicide attempts, her marriage (to a man), her ectopic pregnancy and her failed relationships. Yet at the bottom of it all is the unresolved drama with her mother. Jealousy, anger, love and sacrifice laced this very complex relationship, which hounded them both until 1999, when Germaine died, aged 83.

Anyone who has read The Happy Hooker and its sequels (14 in number) with their lurid descriptions of sexual escapades, graphic details of anatomies, and the numerous tried-and-tested permutations of roles and positions, may find it rather hard to reconcile them with the sober tone of this tome. The association of Hollander with the rip-roaring nymphomaniac is too strong.

Nowadays Hollander, spends most of her time in Amsterdam, although she also has a base in Marbella, Spain. Her Amsterdam house is something of a curiosity. Two randy dogs, a number of elegant cats, two men and a female lover, are dwellers of the house. The walls are an artistic riot, aligned with paintings and photographs, mostly of herself. One wall is dominated by an enormous painting of female breasts. "Ah yes, this one was painted by a friend of mine who f**ed her brother for five years before she became a lesbian," she mentions casually. Every few months the large living room transforms into a fifty-seat theatre, where she hosts English-language performances, scouting her artists at the Edinburgh International Festival. "From the Happy Hooker, I have become a Happy Booker" she says.

She thrives on fame and, by her own admission, loves to be the center of attention and subject of adulation. "I was once a guest speaker at a conference for sex workers. A huge crowd of hysteria stricken young women – call girls, prostitutes, sexologists…you name it – wanted to throw themselves at me. I was their icon and living legend," she says, abandoning any attempt at modesty.

A large part of her day is taken up with sending regular updates and news reports to friends and admirers, as well as replying to e-mails from fans. They come from all over the world, and she loves getting them (once she received 800 emails) – so do send her one. Her address is: xaviera@xavierahollander.com Her website, www.xavierahollander.com, is a virtual shrine replete with hyperlinks and devoted to her favourite subject: herself. Read about her exhausting ‘whirlwind tour of the queen of sensuality from coast to coast in America’, or the rave reviews she got in the papers. Want a T-Shirt of Xaviera? Or perhaps, a book or other memorabilia personally signed and dedicated to you by her? Click on the ‘Xaviera Hollander Collection’ where you can purchase on line a variety of products associated with Xaviera and her life.

Indeed, salesmanship seems to be at the root of everything Hollander does. Maybe that too, hasn’t changed. Already back in the 70s, she knew how to make a Buck or two, selling her assets. But it seems a bit of a climb down from her halcyon days when she was a superstar and didn’t need to sell herself so fiercely to so many people. In the space of one hour she tried to sell me her books, her bed and breakfast and a booking at her next theatre production. Nothing else, I hasten to add, was on offer, thankfully.

Xaviera Hollander, is an entertaining woman with a voracious appetite for sex, acumen for business, a talent for writing and an inflated ego. She longs to be loved, admired and revered, if possible, by everyone. She claims that she is a ‘Child No more’, but I wasn’t convinced.

($13.95) and Child No More ($23.95) are out now from Regan Books.