The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

by Xaviera Hollander

  “I am an officer of the law,” he announced. To me he looked more like a street fighter than a policeman. His uniform was crumpled, his nose was all over his face, and his front teeth were missing.

  “Call me Mac, girlie,” he said, and, uninvited, sat himself down. He opened his conversation with the accusation that I was a prostitute and there were complaints from several neighbors.

  “Me, a prostitute?” I said. “All I am is a little secretary cleaning her bicycle and not bothering a soul. I work for a consulate, and you can check out my references.”

  “Why don’t you pour me a Scotch on the rocks,” was his unpolicemanlike reply. This was my first brush with the law, and I was not thinking too straight, so I did as he requested.

  In about five minutes I returned to the living room with his drink to find him marching around looking in closets, sorting out papers, and being generally very nosy.

  Then he sat down again with his drink and started talking about nothing particularly connected with the law. Meanwhile, I had another customer due at any time, so I excused myself to go into the bedroom and change. But the fat Irish policeman followed me.

  All of a sudden I noticed his fly undone, and he was reaching inside to expose himself. Then he grabbed me and threw me screaming onto the bed. Even though he was supposed to be a policeman, my involuntary cry was “Help, police, help!”

  He backed off, but started a verbal attack. “I want you to know, girlie, I live in Queens and I have a wife and four kids and my wife is pregnant again. And you girls make so much easy money and I have to work like a dog for a lousy salary.”

  Innocent as I was, I knew what he was leading up to.

  “I think you should start paying me a certain amount of money each week, and I will give you all the protection you want.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t need protection, because I am doing nothing wrong.”

  “I’ll tell you what, girlie,” he said, “I’ll leave, but think things over, and I’ll be in touch.”

  Throughout the encounter I kept my composure, but was more frightened than I looked. After he went I called up my next client, a psychiatrist, and told him about the incident.

  “It seems like a phony-baloney deal to me,” the shrink said. “They’re trying to use scare tactics. Be more careful in the future, and in the meantime check your house to see if anything is missing.”

  After I hung up I went inside to the bedroom, and the first thing my eyes fell on was the top of the bureau. Before the “policeman” arrived, it had contained $100, my day’s income, and an expensive camera. Now it was bare.

  Also missing, for some odd reason, was an envelope containing pornographic pictures taken of me in Holland that I had smuggled into the country for no other reason than their personal value for me. I chalked up the money and the camera to experience and was mad at my stupidity in leaving them around, but as for the pictures, I was soon to hear why they vanished.

  When Sonia came back three days later, I told her what happened, leaving out the part about the customers, and she said I was very naive, because everyone knows a policeman has to show a search warrant. This last incident, however, put a further strain on our deteriorating relationship, and ruining my friendship with Sonia was the last thing I would like to see happen.

  She was upset that I was becoming more immoral, but she did not suspect I was no longer being used by men. If I really liked a man I would still go to bed for free, but by night I was strictly a professional.

  Sonia and I sat down and had a long talk and agreed that if our friendship was to survive, one of us would have to move out. As it developed, it was Sonia. By a stroke of luck she found a charming rent-controlled apartment in an elegant old building on East Fifty-third Street, which was better for her than for me because it was full of very old people all falling apart, and it looked like a geriatric home.

  So I agreed to stay on uptown and was now able to afford to pay the $285 rent on my own. I was making steady money now hooking by night and working as a secretary by day, and I had built up a fairly nice clientele through word of mouth of satisfied customers.

  I can claim in all modesty I did give very good service. In the last few years I had had a lot of sexual experience and had learned all the different kinds of positions and things that gave men – and women – the most pleasure.

  To show you how I looked after my people, my original client, Dirk, was still a good customer and had recommended me to everybody else.

  With me it wasn’t the all-American wham-bam, thank you, ma’am. I really enjoyed my work, and I loved sex. I never had to fake my pleasure and never rushed my client.

  So Pearl could see everyone was pleased with me, and in time I insisted on having exclusively $50 dates, out of which I paid her $20. So my clientele became better quality, and instead of salesmen and sales representatives, I started having company presidents, stockbrokers, lawyers, real-estate men, politicians. But I was also outgrowing Pearl’s nickels-and-dimes downtown operation and knew I had to move up through the ranks to a better establishment.

  Around November the change came through an introduction by one of my customers to two women who were to become very vital in my life for the next year. Their first names were Madeleine and Georgette, and they were two of the top madams in New York.

  A horny guy named Jim Watney, who liked to sleep with ten girls at one time and once came with seven of them, phoned the madams and literally told them, “Xaviera is a girl you can’t do without.”

  Madeleine was, over the last few years, known to be the biggest madam in New York. She inherited the title from a lesbian lady called Daphne whose brownstone on Lexington Avenue, complete with swimming pool and milk baths, was raided and closed down in June of 1968. It made Daily Nexus headlines, and that is the last thing a whorehouse needs. Councilman Carter Burden now occupies the premises for his political activities.

  Madeleine’s operation almost rivaled Daphne’s for grandeur and size. Her five-bedroom house was a brownstone in the Murray Hill district and contained three floors of bedrooms with another floor for bar, relaxation, and mingling.

  It was a cold night in November when I was brought to her house to make up the number of girls required for a group of rich executives wanting to be entertained after a stag dinner at Twenty-one. Jim Watney and I rang the bell and waited several minutes before all the protection locks and devices were released to open the door. We were shown inside by a butler.

  Wow, I never imagined Pearl’s was a palace, but this place made her house look like an igloo.

  The entrance was an elegant foyer with slate and marble tile floors and magnificent chandelier. To the right was a living room lined with smoky mirrors. A rosewood dining table and a huge gourmet kitchen were visible in the background. Inside the room were nine or ten girls, all well dressed, and it looked more like a high-class model agency than a brothel.

  Then I met Madeleine. She floated across the room in her Pucci gown, a woman in her late thirties, elegant, handsome, her makeup and hair immaculate.

  “Welcome to my house, Xaviera,” she said, and I was in for another surprise. That foreign accent. New York’s reigning madam was from a country where I had lived for two years, South Africa.

  By way of introduction Madeleine gave me a guided tour up the staircase from the entrance hall to the first floor which had simply, but tastefully, furnished bedrooms to the left and right. The second floor was identical, differing only in colors.

  The third floor was where the men would relax in between their activities. It was a beautiful big baronial room, very masculine, with beamed ceilings and heavy wooden benches. On one side there was a fully equipped bar, and on the other there was a cinema-sized movie projector set up.

  The butler, Felipe, saw to it that the men were helped in and out of their coats and shown to the bar or the other public rooms.

  Overseeing the bedroom activity was Madeleine’s red-haired young lesbian secretary, Cynthia
, who wore a little black-and-white uniform and walked around keeping score of who went with whom and how many times. It is one of the hazards of this business that girls can claim they did more work than they did if there is not some kind of surveillance on them. On the other hand, a customer could claim he did less than he did. Either way you would be cheated out of money. So Cynthia, who has since come to work for me as a call girl, kept score, and Madeleine arranged the pairings and acted charmingly to her clients.

  This was my first contact with working girls as a group, and frankly I was apprehensive about mixing at first. I always imagined hookers as a breed were tough street types or brainless little runaway girls. Not so with Madeleine’s girls. They were well groomed, attractive, and reasonably well educated.

  As we waited for our customers, I wondered what does one sit around and talk about with a bunch of prostitutes. What kind of small talk can you make? Something like: What do you think of the Pentagon Papers? Or: Will the wage-and-price freeze affect prostitution? Or even: How’s tricks? I didn’t feel that it was in good taste to talk shop about money, johns, and so on, but being always curious about what makes people tick, I decided to conduct a little Harris poll of my own. Where are you from, how long have you been doing this, do you enjoy sex in general, do you enjoy professional sex? In other words, I was asking them the eternal question: “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  Carmen, the fiery Brazilian, said, “I hate this business, but my guy beats hell out of me when I don’t bring money home.”

  Crista, the German, cooed, “I am married, and my husband knows what I’m doing, and we like the extra income.”

  Sunny, the American, hissed, “I hate men, I am a lesbian, this is just a living to me.”

  Nobody admitted liking what they were doing except myself and one other girl, the Negro, Laura.

  “Yes, I like sex, I like men. I like every bit of it as long as they don’t give me a hard time.” She laughed. Her voice was without the trace of hardness or bitterness in the other girls.

  Laura and I immediately became friends, and to this day, as the only two from that gathering who have prospered on our own, we still meet on jobs and keep in touch. She became a high-class courtesan working on her own, and my own success you already know.

  Finally the group of about ten or twelve slightly polluted young men, all dressed in black tie, showed up after their formal dinner, and were received by Felipe, the butler, who helped them out of their coats. Cynthia showed them to the bar, where they were given drinks and mingled with the girls until they made their choice or Madeleine made it for them.

  Each man selected two girls, either separately or together, and everything went off smoothly. It was a night when business was an unmitigated pleasure.

  They were all accommodated while Cynthia walked around the house dressed in her little uniform, keeping score of who went in the green room, who went in the blue room, and who went in the red room, and with whom.

  Around three in the morning, when everyone was content, dressed, and sitting around the downstairs dining room drinking coffee, Madeleine decided the evening had gone so well that she would put on a special late-late show as a bonus.

  She had noticed that Laura and I hit it off very well together and were enthusiastic about our work, so she felt we should do a naked swing together on the big oak dining table.

  I ought to have jumped at the chance to make it with Laura. However, there were reservations – I had never been with a Negro before, and my South African background made me slightly uptight.

  Laura, however, had no such inhibitions, and when she peeled the clothes off that dynamite body with those big brown breasts with nipples like ebony thimbles, I decided she would be my first black lover.

  We climbed onto the table, and I started kissing her slowly, softly, on her face, her shoulders, down to the little protruding navel in her flat belly, and all the way to the springy hair on her purple pussy.

  The watching girls and guests came back to life, and pretty soon everyone was tearing off his clothes. Ties, pants, and shirts were flying around the room, and men were jerking off, and jumping on or under the table with girls. Even the madam herself became too excited to keep her clothes on and did a quick peel. I must say for almost forty she looked very attractive naked, with her big boobs sticking out like rocks because of a silicone job, as she climbed on the table and helped herself to a good-looking man.

  One thing I learned about Madeleine was that if she wanted a particular man, which is the privilege of the madam, and he rejected her, she would become furious and take her anger out on everyone around her. But happily that night there was no such drama, and we all ended up in a big profitable gang-bang with a harassed Cynthia running around trying to keep score of who came and who caused it.

  That spontaneous swing made the house and the girls a lot of extra money, and Madeleine was justifiably happy with me the first night, because I started it all.

  Before I went home she invited me to be one of her regular girls. Around the same time I also met Georgette Harcourte, who had an establishment in a multistoried apartment building on York Avenue. But I learned early that you don’t jump around from madam to madam. If you are getting good work with one, you stay with her.

  I preferred Madeleine’s because she had a more sophisticated, longer-established house with a better class of clients.

  Both Georgette and her reasonably large operation were less reliable than Madeleine’s. She was always moving from one place to another. Her living room was usually packed with cartons, and looked a mess. And, what’s more, she was not half the lady, nor did she have the savoir faire of Madeleine.

  On being taken into Madeleine’s stable, I severed all professional relationship with Pearl, although I kept in touch with her as a friend, because I liked the girl.

  Also, at the time my professional life was accelerating, my straight life was falling apart at the seams. Things were getting hot at the office. My co-workers and employer were wondering why I was always tired, always getting masses of phone calls, and dressed generally far better than some little secretary on a lower-echelon income.

  It was only a matter of time before the pennies dropped and they got an open line on my activity. As would be appropriate at a consulate, my superior suggested diplomatically I would be better off working somewhere else, and even advised me of an available position at a United Nations mission, and gave me a good reference.

  I took the suggestion, knowing that there was little alternative, and went through a series of multilingual typing and translating tests at the foreign mission. I was hired and started work on November 1, 1969. The job was administrative, but almost as dull as the one I had left, and it was just as well, because I wasn’t up to concentrating much effort or energy taking dictation from my boss, the horny little ambassador, after a hard night’s work.

  Running my apartment was also a chore I could live without. It was too big and too much work, and besides, I used only the bedroom. So around the time I took the new job, I found a studio apartment near First Avenue in the lower Fifties, five minutes’ walk from the office.

  Something happened during my move from one apartment to the other that started reinforcing my feelings that in an illicit profession like prostitution you are vulnerable to all kinds of harassment. First the phony policeman, and now a nuisance named Murray the Mover.

  Murray the Mover was a big bear of a Turkish Jew who had more in mind than moving my belongings, and persisted in a conversation which I found irritating at the time, but in view of subsequent events was somewhat significant.

  “I bet you’re a girl who likes fun and games, Miss Xaviera,” Murray said with an ill-concealed smirk after the last piece of furniture was out of the service elevator.

  “Murray,” I replied coldly, “what I like happens to be none of your business.”

  “Don’t be too upset, lady,” he went on, “because I could help a girl like you out
in a lot of different ways.”

  “I don’t see how I can use you except to get this furniture out of the hallway. Otherwise I can pretty well help myself.”

  But Murray the Mover had more to say, and after his assistants were dismissed, he still hung around.

  “This sure is a beautiful location for your line of work, miss,” he said.

  “Just what do you mean by that?”

  “I happen to know this is a cool building, and you can work here as a hooker as long as you like. Just make sure you take care of the doormen.”

  “Okay, Murray, groovy.” I didn’t admit anything, and really wanted to get rid of him, but I was intrigued.

  “You look like you’re new in the business, fresh and natural. Stay that way. Be careful you don’t get yourself into any trouble, because this can be a rough racket. But if you do, give me a call.” He handed me a square of paper with his name and number scribbled on it.

  “Fine, Murray. I hope I’ll never need your help, but thanks anyway. Good-bye now, I’ve got work to do.” Murray the Mover left, and I straightened up my studio for the coming night’s business.

  Life was well organized and ran smoothly for the next couple of months, although my job at the mission was even less agreeable than that at the consulate. I was made to feel like an “office foreigner,” even though I could speak their language. And sometimes they would lapse into a national dialect to exclude me from conversations. Still, the atmosphere didn’t bother me too much, as my professional night life was becoming more important, more active, and more profitable than the day job.

  I could even manage to run home during lunch hours and turn a couple of tricks in my studio, or sometimes Madeleine or even Georgette would call up and ask me could I handle a midday quickie.

  Madeleine especially liked me to do her freak, bondage, slaves-and-masters scenes, which is when I got into the whips. These paid more than the straight clients, but they were a lot more time-consuming, and I would ask Madeleine to try to give me advance notice so I could at least wear the appropriate clothing, such as a leather jacket or skirt, black turtleneck sweater, or something else tough- or vicious-looking, and save the time of changing in the lunch hour.