This is one book that will never be on any high school students’ reading list. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from reading it. It isn’t meant to be an educational book either, at least not in the commonly accepted sense of the word. But The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander strives to be some kind of combination of the informative and the titillating. Actually, it was probably just written to make money, but somehow beneath the commercial facade of this Sexual Revolution-era best seller, there is a hint of sincerity and authenticity that makes it stand out where other kinds of pulp erotica would be little more than disposable and forgettable trash best suited for time spent while sitting on the toilet.
Hollander’s story begins in Indonesia. Her family was Dutch with a German mother and a Jewish father. Born in the city of Surabaya, the second biggest city on the island of Jawa, she spent her first two years of life in a concentration camp. World War II had just begun and the Japanese invaders took her family away to prison. After the war, they brought her to Holland where, contrary to the stereotype of sex workers and promiscuous women, she had a healthy relationship with her family. This bit of information does lead to an open question. I’m suggesting that just because she had a good relationship with her parents, that doesn’t mean she didn’t suffer some form of abuse outside her nuclear family. Hollander does mention that she had two incestuous relationships during later adolescence with her mother’s cousins. There is also the entire society around her to consider and who know what happened to her while living in the concentration camp. This is all speculation of course, but there is a pregnant silence that hangs over her account of her childhood. In any case, she is precociously sexually active and gets involved with the swinger lifestyle during her teenage years.
Hollander moves on to South Africa to work as a secretary and becomes so lonely that she...I won’t put a spoiler here, but I will say she did something that gives new meaning to the saying that every dog has his day. She then follows a man to New York City, gets work as a secretary for the United Nations and an unnamed embassy. Her fiance turns out to be a creep, then she discovers she can make good money, and have a lot more fun, through self-employment as a prostitute. Before you know it, her career gets catapulted astronomically and she lands a job as the madame of the highest ranking bordello in Manhattan. All this happens before reaching the age of thirty. From the time she leaves her fiancee and quits her secretarial career, this book follows two basic themes: one is the day to day mechanics of the prostitution business, the other is explicit descriptions of what she does in the bedroom.
The former of those two categories is what makes The Happy Hooker interesting. The business of running a high-class cathouse gets described from top to bottom. The fine details of everything, from bookkeeping to advertising to the kinds of houses that are used to how to treat johns, are revealed. You learn about who gets paid off, how to handle the police, how to handle obnoxious customers, how to manage prostitutes, and how to manage the profits. While these parts are primarily descriptive, there are some interesting bits of psychological insight, mostly in relation to the customers. One interesting observation that Hollander makes is that about half the customers are not actually interested in sex; they are only using sex as a way of getting close to women for a feeling of emotional intimacy, even if it is illusory. What she means is that loneliness in the male population has reached an epidemic proportion and as long as it persists, prostitution will survive as well. Other interesting insights are given about the kinds of customers she condescendingly calls “freaks”, These are the men who pay to be dominated, tied up, beaten up, verbally abused, and humiliated. Some of them pay good money to have fantasies acted out. Some of these are powerful businessmen or politicians who find relief from stress in this way while others are married and secretly gay, being unable to express themselves sexually due to the burdens that a heterosexual society places on them to conform to gender norms. Others seek out prostitutes to help them cope with childhood traumas. In contrast, Hollander has a certain amount of admiration for most of her johns, albeit tempered by professional distance. She believes in treating her clients with dignity, especially when they show a modicum of respect towards the prostitutes who work for her.
With these points in mind, Xaviera Hollander comes across as a charming woman with a generous personality. Her charm isn’t just sensual, it is brainy and sometimes kindhearted as well. As an ambitious career-minded woman, she saw the world of living as a secretary in New York as being personally and professionally unfulfilling. As a prostitute, she could manage her own life and as a madame she could be the successful businesswoman she aspired to be. She achieved a type of independence that wasn’t available to women in the more traditional sense of labor. The culture of work in America at that time, one in which women were denied the same opportunities for economic and social advancement as men, put her in a position to capitalize off the restrictive, short-comings of society. Sometimes you can’t entirely blame a criminal for their crimes; there are circumstances in the surrounding society that make some criminal behaviors inevitable and it can be said that often societies get the kind of criminals they deserve. But from a practical, or possibly even a moral point of view, there is no reason why Hollander’s profession should be considered a criminal offense.
Still, you have to wonder about the “happy” part of being a hooker. Let the book speak for itself. Xaviera Hollander’s work as a prostitute and madame were not always easy going. She gets raped, robbed, exploited by the mafia and police, arrested, harassed, beaten up by a drunk john, and witnesses a murder. Her romantic relationships are not satisfying and she comes across as being emotionally detached, sometimes even emotionally dead, to the people she works with. Later in the book she admits that prostitution is inherently distressing. When reading this book, there were a lot of times I wondered just how happy she actually was.
Then there is the explicit sex. In the beginning of the book, some of these passages were somewhat exciting, maybe because they were more erotic than pornographic. By that I mean descriptions were brief and written without excessive detail, leaving a lot up to the imagination. Hollander’s trip to Puerto Rico was attention-grabbing, especially the part where she did mescaline with a bunch of guys who gangbanged her on the beach. It was even more memorable because three strangers approached them and started masturbating while watching the action, then hurled coconuts at them while the orgy continued. After that the sexual descriptions get to be dull and banal. If you already know what people do when they do it, you aren’t going to get aroused, entertained, or informed by hese passages. A couple of the freak scenes were amusing, but the generic descriptions of S&M don’t go far if you’ve already been around the block a few times. And I’m certainly not prudent myself, but after reading page after page after page of Hollander talking about all the men she’s fucked, I really did feel like taking a good long bath. By the end it starts to feel a little bit gross.
Fortunately, the interesting parts of the book balance out with the disposable parts. But Xaviera Hollander and her ghost writers are not writers of the highest caliber. This isn’t Henry Miller or Anais Nin. It isn’t even Sacher-Masoch who was certainly a bad writer. It is the insights you pick up that make this worth reading once, providing you are interested in the culture of sex workers. For cultural historians, it is also an interesting document from the Sexual Revolution. Written at a turning point when sexual promiscuity and experimentation were spilling out of the hippie counter-culture and into the mainstream, the fact that this was a cash-cow of a bestseller in its day, going into multiple printings and spawning a whole series of follow ups, a vinyl LP, Hollywood movies, television appearances, and tours around the lecture circuit, it serves as a legitimate artifact carrying information about where the mindset of middle-America was at the beginning of the 1970s.
The Happy Hooker isn’t a great work of literature, but part of what makes it interesting is the way it speaks outside of itself. Its inherent value is not limited to the words on the page. In fact, judging it by that standard would diminish whatever importance it has. It was obviously written for commercial purposes, but while Hollander was in the limelight she took the opportunity to advocate for an outlawed lifestyle that she felt should be legal and hassle free. She used her voice to vindicate sex workers, a class of people who still haven’t found mainstream acceptance even though the commercial end of sex work has obviously infiltrated the mainstream. Sex work as a whole is an occupation that is both consumed and condemned simultaneously, sometimes even supported by the same people who denounce it. What really stands out to me, though, is that this book, even though ghost-written, proves to the world that Madame Xaviera is a damn smart businesswoman. In the business of whorehouses, she knew how to find out what men wanted and made money by giving it to them without shame. She has done the same thing with her memoirs; she found out what middle America, at that time, meaning mostly middle class and middle aged men, wanted to read and delivered them the product. She has been riding this gravy train of her own making ever since. This is the sign of a clever woman with direction, ambition and determination. You could even say she is a good role model for independent women. It makes you wonder how many other sex workers there are who could rise above their present situation and potentially be good at business too.
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