Get Happily Hooked on Xaviera Hollander: The Happy Hooker!

Every generation, it happens. One lascivious book makes its way into the mainstream and is picked up by even the most staid and uptight of people. And then one day, their children, casually browsing Mom and Dad’s bookshelf, come across the book, with its creased and worn spine, and pick it up for a quick thumb-through. And immediately the pimply pubescents are ushered into a magical new world filled with thoughts of flesh and boners.

For people of a certain age, that book was The Happy Hooker, a 1971 tell-all written by Dutch treat Xaviera Hollander, an unabashed and unashamed exploration of her rise to the top of the brothel biz in the Big Apple. One look at the cover of Hooker, with its shocking pink cover featuring a snap of ice-blonde, statuesque Xaviera fixing the reader with a half-lidded come-on stare, and these folks are instantly transported back to the day they discovered the well-worn bio . . . and due to the contents within, discovered many, many other things.

Born Xaviera deVries in Indonesia on June 15, 1943, Xaviera Hollander (Picture-1-2) spent the first tender years of her life in a Japanese prison camp alongside her parents. "But for a bag of sugar, I wouldn't be alive," Xaviera once commented on her life as an imprisoned infant. "The war had already started, and against the wishes of my father, I was born. Mother loved me almost to death, literally.” Xaviera’s mother smuggled a diamond inside her vagina, which she traded for a bag of sugar to save the life of her ailing child. “She was caught and almost killed,” Hollander continues. “All that for me, to keep me alive."

It would be a while longer before Xaviera earned fame and fortune happily smuggling other objects inside her vagina, however. After the deVries family was released from the camp, they fled to Holland, where young Xie took a secretarial course and in 1964 was named Amsterdam’s secretary of the year. Now a willowy looker in her early twenties, she developed a seemingly unquenchable sexual appetite along with her typing skills, and after a young adulthood filled with affairs with men, women, and both at the same time, she departed for Johannesburg, South Africa, to take a position as an executive secretary. She also took a position underneath her half-sister’s husband!

In 1968 Xaviera and her new fiancé, Carl Gordon, headed to New York City, where X took a job working as the secretary for the Dutch consul and Belgian ambassador. After their engagement ended, she became a bride of the boudoir professionally. To make figurative ends meet, she made literal ends meet, joining up with an upscale house of ill repute to spin her nympho nature into gold.

Once she found her carnal calling, Xaviera left secretarial work behind forever. No longer taking dictation, she took dick-tation with a smile for a grand a night and became so popular with her clients and her madam alike that she was able to purchase the house’s “black book” after the madam decided to retire.

Under Xav’s watchful eye and no-holes-barred attitude, the brothel flourished, and Hollander became the proprietress of the most suck-sex-ful house in the entire city of New York. But there’s a downside to that type of notoriety, and in 1971 she was arrested on charges of prostitution and was forced to shut down the business she’d built.

But out of those succulent, squeezable lemons came the sweetest lemonade: The Happy Hooker: My Own Story. Upon her memoir’s release in 1971, it became a runaway breast-seller, a cultural touchstone, and was hailed as an important landmark in sex writing.

Although retired from the boudoir biz, Xaviera was still a “workaholic” on her own time when it came to getting it on, and she detailed her never-ending sexploits with a smile in over a dozen other books, such as Xaviera! (1974), Xaviera on the Best Part of a Man (1975), Xaviera Meets Marilyn Chambers (1976), and Child No More: A Memoir (2002) as well as penning the sex help column “Call Me Madam” for Penthouse mag beginning in 1972.

In addition to her contributions to the literary world, Xaviera has gifted us was her story—as well as her unparalleled face and figure—in several films.

My Pleasure is My Business (1974)
“My Pleasure is my Business was more fun [than the Happy Hooker adaptation], as I played the leading role in it and it was written specially for me. It was more of a sexual comedy and not meant to be pornographic,” Xaviera divulged. In this, her first screen appearance, X starred as XXX star Gabrielle, who, after being deported from America, settles in the fictional country of Gestalt. Its president aims to improve the country’s popularity. Oh, she becomes popular all right. She populars out all over the place!

The Happy Hooker (1975)
For the celluloid adaptation of her twenty-million-seller, Xaviera was played by respected veteran actress Lynn Redgrave. Although the beautiful Redgrave wowed with her acting skills (not to mention appearing in lacy lingerie and other barely there get-ups), her portrayal of the world’s most skinfamous scarlet lady draws jeers from Mr. Skin because she didn’t get naked! “I thought the Happy Hooker film was so tame that you could either take your grandmother to it OR your granddaughter! The call girls were made to look too trashy and whorish and not at all elegant like they used to be,” Hollander herself said. The only flashes of flesh that appeared were courtesy of her house hookers, including curly-topped cutie Anita Morris (Picture-1) wearing nothing more than whipped cream.

The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977)
Producers righted this grave injustice two years later with the film’s unofficial sequel, The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977). Although the incredible icon Joey Heatherton took over the role of Xaviera, she pulled a Redgrave and refused to strip. To make up for it, the film sported a lovely array of beautiful babes all shades of bare. As the screen Xaviera headed to the nation’s capital to testify before Congress, starlets such as Marilyn Joi (Picture-1), Dawn Clark (Picture-1), and Raven De La Croix (Picture-1) engaged in sexual congress. Consider your own Washington monument erected.

The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (1980)
Finally, the Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (1980) gives us Bond babe Martine Beswicke (Picture-1-2)as Xaviera. And Martine, bless her soul, was the first and only Xaviera to wear the true costume of a madam, i.e., nothing at all. Tinseltown provides the perv-fect backdrop for the amorous adventures of the Happy Hooker, and alongside Beswicke’s boobs and pubes, we get skin from heavenly harlots Tanya Boyd (Picture-1), Susan Lynn Kiger (Picture-1), and K.C. Winkler (Picture-1). Hollywood? Who Hollywouldn’t?

At long last, the latter three flicks were recently reissued on DVD as a set called The Happy Hooker Trilogy. Now that’s a box set that delivers the box!

Hollander is presently overseeing her website, www.xavierahollander.com, working on another book to be titled either Wall Talk or Xaviera: Still Happy. Now married to fellow Dutchman Philip de Haan, Xaviera says she’s exploring monogamy, but when it comes to her professional life, she’s still entertaining a rotating cast of randoms in her home for cash. Legally! She operates a secret hideaway/bed and breakfast out of her home in Amsterdam called the Happy House, as well as running the Happy Villa in Marbella, Spain. In addition, Hollander is the subject of the brain-and-lap-arousing new documentary directed by Robert Dunlap, The Happy Hooker: Portrait of a Sexual Revolutionary, which has nabbed first prize awards at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival and at the West Hollywood International Film Festival. And her first work, The Happy Hooker, is still breaking new ground even today: it’s being turned into a musical slated to hit the stage in 2009. Whether on the page, on the screen, or in song, Xaviera Hollander will forever be known for blazing a trail . . . of tail.