IT TOOK a while to remember who she was, and suspecting she had something to do with sex, I hesitated slightly before repeating her name.
“Xaviera Hollander. The name is familiar,” I told my friend, who was on the line from Amsterdam telling me she’d found “an interesting B&B” for me to stay in the coming weekend.
My friend’s knowledge of Hollander was sketchy. “I think she used to be a prostitute,” she offered, allowing her voice to sound a little racy. I Googled “Xaviera Hollander” and found that neither my memory, nor my friend’s guess, had been wrong.
Three decades ago, Hollander was the resident agony aunt for sexually distressed men in the world’s top-selling men’s magazine, Penthouse. Prior to that, in 1972 to be exact, she had managed to become controversially famous by publishing an autobiographical book called The Happy Hooker, in which she described how she’d become a prostitute, had enjoyed being a prostitute, and how she had ended up running a high-class brothel in New York.
My personal memory of Hollander stemmed from the surreptitious pleasure I’d encountered as a teenager reading her almost matronly advice from battered copies of Penthouse magazines doing the rounds of our all-boys secondary school in south London.
I arrived at Hollander’s Bed & Breakfast in Amsterdam several days later. It was a warm Monday lunchtime in June and things could not have been more tranquil, in a suburban kind of way. The sun beamed down, and birdsong and rustling leaves almost hid the traffic’s distant roar as I was led through Hollander’s cluttered house into a garden, at the end of which stood the wooden shed that was to be my accommodation for the next few days.
I met Hollander that evening in her living room, and despite being rather large these days and in her late 60s, she still managed to glide into the room. As she did so, she languidly made arrangements on the phone.
“Oh hello,” she said after eventually getting off the mobile. “I thought you were a girl.”
“Thanks,” I replied, forcing a nonchalant smile to hide my feelings of emasculation. Although she was considerably shorter than me, she still somehow managed to regard me downwards, along her nose.
That was our first meeting, but we met again in her living room later that night, and this time, fortified by a little alcohol, I told Hollander of how I’d read her advice pieces in Penthouse at the age of 13. A conversation over coffee ensued, during which it was agreed that I had benefitted from “the education” I’d received from her columns, and that she’d allow me to interview her for the Cyprus Mail.
I took away a copy of The Happy Hooker and spent a day in the cafes and parks of Amsterdam reading it. I learnt that she had been born of Dutch parents in a Japanese World War II prison of war camp in what is now Malaysia, and that her father, a Jewish doctor, had suffered greatly at the hands of the Japanese. He had only survived because his captors had wanted to capitalise on his medical skills. Once back in Holland, her childhood became far less traumatic, and she grew up as a “hopelessly spoilt” only child, infatuated by her father, and in rivalry with her “madly jealous” mother. A kind of Oedipus complex in reverse. Much of The Happy Hooker focused naturally on her semi-coincidental route into the world’s oldest profession, which she quickly embraced as an honourable and highly-skilled vocation through which she performed a valuable service to society.
It is usual to assume that prostitutes, and that includes high-class call girls, are exploited women who have run out of better options for earning a living. The interesting thing about Hollander, however, is that she did not have to become a prostitute. As she says in The Happy Hooker, “Don’t think of me as a poor little girl gone astray because of a misguided or underprivileged childhood. The contrary is true. I come from a very good background and grew up in a loving family atmosphere.” These words are echoed by the impression one gets when one meets Hollander: She in no way sees herself as a victim.
Sitting in her garden on another warm day, Hollander and I are ready to begin our interview. I ask if I may take a few photos to accompany my article but she refuses, offering instead to email me some of her “professional” ones.
I ask about her early childhood in the Japanese POW camp. Both Hollander’s father and mother, she tells me, were tortured in the camp, taking a deep psychological toll on the family. “Nine tenths of those who came through World War II were crushed. I was one of the one tenth who came out stronger, a survivor, a leader,” she says.
In a strange way it was fighting back, or surviving, that led Hollander into prostitution. As described in The Happy Hooker, it was not financial destitution or exploitation at the hands of people traffickers that took her there. While being highly sexual from an early age – “I’ve always loved sex” – Hollander was also one quite able to fall madly in love, and fall she did for Carl Gordon, “a 28 year-old American economist”, who was by her accounts “every woman’s idea of the perfect catch”. To cut a two-year story short, Carl, after wooing the young Hollander and proposing marriage, then abandoned her, apparently because his mother was against the union. Hollander was devastated.
“For the first time in my well-adjusted life, I had an inferiority complex you could photograph,” she wrote in The Happy Hooker. Her response to the trauma was to seek solace in new men. Lots of them.
“Ultimately, I made money from revenge,” she says. From initially sleeping with men for solace, revenge and simple sexual pleasure, Hollander, under advice from friends, gradually began accepting gifts from the more wealthy of her sexual partners. At first, it was sugar daddies who supplemented her day job income, but later sex for money became a full-time job.
My first real question to Xaviera on the subject of prostitution is probably everyone’s would-be first question: How does a woman bear sleeping with men who they might find unattractive or even repellent?
“You switch off,” she answers, sounding like the pep talk she probably gave her novices at the Virticle Whorehouse, the brothel she ran in New York in the late sixties. Basically you have to feel nothing.
The second necessary skill is the ability to act. “Hookers are great actors,” she says with tangible pride.
But having read The Happy Hooker, it strikes me that Hollander had more than a little affection for many of her clients. The experiences and characters she describes appear to have provided her with a vast amount of knowledge on the human sexual psyche, much of which is surprisingly positive, and often humerous.
“I can tell a sado-masochist a mile off,” she tells me without the hint of a smile, and I laugh.
Her ethnically based categorisation of clients, or Johns as she calls them, is also as comical as it’s meant to be revealing. Irish-American stockbrokers, she claims, “are always horny, even if the market dips”. Italian Americans come second to the Irish-Americans, but don’t quibble about the price. American Jews are “appreciative and undemanding”, while Greeks insist on doing things the “Greek way”. The British “bring their class-consciousness to the brothel with them”, whereas the Dutch are “the world’s most unromantic and unimaginative lovers”. The list goes on, but the funniest ethnicities have to be Chinese and Australian.
“We have a saying that going to bed with an Oriental is like washing your hands: clean and simple.” As for Australians, where moneymaking is concerned, they are the worst kind of customer because they drink the bar dry and forget to sleep with the girls.
Hollander also claims that “once a John, always a John”. So if your man has been with a hooker, she’ll tell you he’ll very likely go again.
But for Hollander, prostitution shouldn’t be seen as a threat to family life, and she clams numerous sexless marriages were saved by her and her colleagues’ expert handling. Somewhere in The Happy Hooker she describes tactfully advising a Jewish client on how to improve his sexual technique after she reasoned that his wife’s disinclination to have sex probably stemmed from his “jack rabbit” style of having it. Others, she says, were cured of their impotence or their sexual hang-ups.
“I saw myself as a lay analyst,” she says deadpan.
After her brothels were closed down and she was deported from the US, Hollander looked for new ways to make a living and soon found one in writing. The Happy Hooker, which was followed over the next two decades by more than 20 more fiction and non-fiction books, was said at the time to be groundbreaking in that it pushed the barriers of what was acceptable in mainstream print. Much of it reads like porn, at least the sex scenes do, of which there are many. But the reader is also aware that what is on the page, mostly taking place in brothels, most likely happened.
It has a frank Teutonic feel, which is probably why it’s got to be one of the best insights into high-class prostitution ever written. She hides nothing; not even her feelings, which are expressed so matter-of-factly that they no longer come across as real feelings.
Facing her at her garden table I find it impossible to gauge whether she likes me or not. There is neither intimacy nor boundary, and I get the feeling that I’m not really there. Perhaps she wants to share something when she lets it pass that several years back she accidentally ran over and killed a child.
“What could I do? I was going at 180 km an hour?” she asks rhetorically. There is not a hint that she might be seeking justification. Yet, seconds later she is telling me how lucky she is: “My life is like a puzzle; all the pieces just fall into place”.
But despite her shocking ability to block out feelings, I feel both liberated and inspired by her. She has had the courage to break the rules, and she doesn’t give a damn whether anyone approves of her or not.
The wild sex is all supposed to be in the past now, and since her last book Child No More: A Memoir, published in 1992, Hollander has focused on her guesthouse and on producing serious plays, which often feature a Jewish cast and storylines centered on World War II.
Furthermore, she’s now married to her second husband Philip, to whom she is “totally faithful” – which means a lot for a woman who once confessed she could not to be true to a man for more than three months.
But I can’t help wondering whether Carl Gordon ever felt the pain Hollander sought to cause him with her “revenge” back in 1969. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
