The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

by Xaviera Hollander

  “Mr. Brennan doesn’t seem to know you, Roberta, and he wants more detail,” the other girl, evidently a little hooker, was saying. To which Roberta replied, “Just tell him you have been referred by Madam Xaviera.”

  Not only was it my phone, in my house, but it was also one of my most regular customers. They were obviously approaching one of the names she had copied from my black book. I hit the ceiling.

  I was so angry I was shaking, and Corinne had to restrain me from going out and throwing her bodily into the street.

  “Get dressed, get out, and don’t bother to have Henri send me any yellow roses or make any attempt to contact me ever again!” was my farewell to Roberta.

  Thankfully that kind of dishonesty is unusual, and generally speaking, my girls are very loyal to me. Because of our closeness in ages, we are more like girl friends than the traditional madam-prostitute relationship.

  Whenever I can, I give the girls advice and assistance in both their professional and private lives.

  It is known that most madams are bisexual, and I am no exception. Whenever a new girl joins me, I usually take her to bed and teach her some basic tricks of the trade, like how to eat, and simple hygiene.

  Like most madams, I have my favorites and might tend to give her the pick of the customers or the best work, but each girl is dear to me, and I try always to be fair. I can also say I hardly ever cheat on my girls like some madams who tell them a customer was a $50 date, when in reality he paid $100 and she kept $75 and gave the girl only $25,

  As much as I give them guidance in their professional life, if they require it personally I am there to help, too. Sometimes, if I think it is justified, I offer advice uninvited, as in the case of Sarah, a former employee of Madeleine’s and for a while a roommate of mine.

  Sarah was a sweet-natured but lazy girl who earned the nickname “Dopey” because she was forever swallowing “up” and “down” pills. As a result, she was always half-doped and did nothing constructive with her private life. I hated to see such a waste, so I gave her the lecture: “Sarah, I would like to see you take more of an interest in life. Why don’t you pick up a book now and again and read it instead of lying around all day?”

  As head of the household, occasionally I have to be tough with the girls, and with the customers as well, if one complains about the other.

  If a customer tells me that a girl is uncooperative or crude, I call her aside and ask is something wrong. If more than one man complains, I have to caution her, and if it happens too often, I usually have to let her go.

  On the other hand, if a girl complains that a customer is rough or drunk and giving a girl a hard time, I have to handle that, too. All she has to do is slip into one of the bathrooms that adjoin the bedrooms, call me discreetly in, and tell me.

  I don’t scream or bitch the men the way Georgette would do with her drunks, or the way Madeleine would do to a man who rejected her. I knock on the bedroom door, respectfully request permission to enter, and tell him the young lady says he is treating her badly.

  If I see her complaint is justified, I ask him to dress – or have a massage first if he wants to, and a coffee – but to leave the premises as soon as possible and come back again next week when he is sober.

  The madam herself, generally speaking, is too busy to get involved in any sexual activity unless it is a complicated bondage scene that perhaps only she is qualified to do. This is especially so now that the complex call-line system has been installed and the client books have all been reorganized to correspond with each of the four different color phones.

  So if a man specifically requests to have me and is willing to pay the higher fee, I might go to bed with him, but he has to put up with the phones ringing and me jumping up to answer them. Sometimes the phone interruptions can be a beautiful tease, and I laugh it off with, “Oh, darling, at least you can’t say I’ve rushed you, because we are going to start all over again.”

  But if the coitus interruptus makes him mad and he says, “Screw the damn phones,” I give him this little talk: “Darling, you’re so nice and hard now, so cool it, cool it off a little bit, and we’ll start all over again.”

  One great privilege of being a madam as opposed to a working girl is that she can choose for herself any customer she would like to go with. If a groovy-looking guy walks in, I can snap him up for myself. The perfect situation I try to engineer is for a great-looking guy to pay for a three-way scene with me and my favorite girl of the moment. That way I get to swing with them both and make money as well.

  Being a successful madam has its liabilities as well as its rewards, as I tell any girl who wants to go into the business. One of the liabilities is that your time is no longer your own. When a working girl completes her “shift,” she is free to meet her boyfriend or husband and relax as she likes. When I was a single I took off Wednesday and Saturday, nights.

  It so happens I love the work I am doing.

  Nowadays there are few days off, but if I did not have day-long phone contact with clients and friends, I would sometimes go stir-crazy.

  When fatigue builds up and I simply have to take a break, I try to fly off to Miami, Las Vegas, or the Caribbean for a few days – provided I can find a substitute madam to take over for me.

  It is almost impossible to find a girl who is smart enough to handle the phones and the customers, sufficiently interested to see that all goes well, but not so ambitious that, in your absence, she will try to take away half the business for herself.

  Last July 4 when I wanted to go to Curaçao for the long weekend, I had the choice of the Argentine girls who work for me or the Canadian girls, who lived in but who were recent arrivals from Montreal – and I could use none of them. First of all, for some reason, customers don’t want to hear a Spanish-accented voice answer the phone. I have no personal prejudices, but to them all Spanish accents are Puerto Rican. As for the Canadian girls, I knew that their dedication to the business did not go beyond making a quick few bucks.

  The girl I finally found was Wanda, a professor of art and history at a New York university who had a good head on her shoulders, but whose only ambition in prostitution was to supplement her legitimate earnings by coming over now and again to make a quick hundred, and out.

  Wanda is also honest and hard-working, but, as I found out when I returned, not tough enough. She was not able to control the girls, and I learned that a little fist fight even broke out between a Canadian and an Argentine over whether a man had a credit rating or not.

  Also my books were all upside down and reshuffled, and I vowed that the next time I took a trip I would put in a recording of my voice over the line, although this is a thing I hate to do because I feel a responsibility to be available to my clients.

  Madeleine used to shut up shop at three A.M. and take the phones off the hook until noon, but many of my men feel my place is their second home and that I am there twenty-four hours a day. Some of them even want to come over for breakfast dates, and many who work in the neighborhood show up for luncheon meetings. Instead of going out to eat, they jump over here and have food sent up. Then I have the cocktail business, which is relatively quiet until eleven P.M. The biggest hours are eleven to four A.M., and sometimes later.

  Another thing I miss now that I am a madam is the personal touch I used to have with a man. By being in bed and making love – on the order of the madam, of course – that half-hour brought me closer to the man and his problems than anything else.

  I miss the intimacy now that I am a madam walking around in a Pucci gown, putting people in bedrooms, collecting money, sometimes having to be brusque or abrupt to keep things moving along.

  Lately I find I give away freebies every night just to feel the closeness of a man. So most nights I pick out the best-looking man, preferably in his thirties, who does not have a wife waiting for him and does not care to go back to his hotel alone. I let him wait around until I close shop, have him sleep over, because I hate to sleep alone no
matter how late it is. But being so late at night, we are usually both so exhausted that it is just a quick screw and falling asleep as the sun comes up.

  The thing I detest most about that situation is when he wakes up in the morning with a beautiful hard-on, perfect for making gentle love; he has just enough time to give me another quick screw before taking the early plane to Houston.

  Then my phone rings, and somebody wants a breakfast date, and if I am lucky, one of my roommates will do it, but if none of the girls has stayed over, I’ll do it myself, because I hate to turn one of my men down.

  You can call me mercenary, or call me madam, but, as I always tell my customers – just call me anytime!

  10. THE OLDEST PROFESSION UPDATED; OR: BEHIND OPEN DOORS

  STORY ONE: He’s twenty-nine, and he’s terrified. He has never been with a woman before, and from the way he trembles, you would think he was going to get circumcised instead of seduced.

  The shy, prematurely balding young man in clean, faded jeans has been sent to me by a respected New York City psychiatrist. He is one of the many whose sexual hang-ups I have cured.

  My method? Basically the same principle as Masters and Johnson, only they charge thousands and it’s called therapy. I charge $50 and it’s called prostitution.

  With this young man, however, I reduce the fee because I have heard he is on a tight budget. He is a recent law-school graduate, attractive, and polite, and I would like to help him make some girl a nice boyfriend.

  To put him at his ease I tell him some things about myself, among which, that I am bisexual. This breaks the ice, and he awkwardly confesses something he – has not told even his analyst after twelve years in therapy – several years ago he performed fellatio on a college mate.

  To me this is a good sign. The fact he committed the deed indicates he is the aggressor and can more easily be led into a straight life than a passive male.

  However, in order to get into his head and find out where his deep tendencies lie, I show him several books full of erotic pictures of heterosexual and homosexual lovers – male and female – as well as men and women in leather outfits with whips, manacles, and handcuffs. The last he rejects immediately, so that eliminates sado-masochism.

  “What turned you on the most, the men’s penises or the girls’ vaginas?” I asked.

  “The men,” he said. “I would feel much safer in a homosexual relationship because it doesn’t represent such a big responsibility and obligation.” But he was turned off by the gay world in general – the gay bars, the faggot-looking drag queens at gay parties, and the heavy emotional involvement, because homosexual affairs can be much more dramatic than heterosexual ones after a while.

  “Tell me,” I asked, “did you find the women repulsive?”

  He answered no.

  “Then let’s go into the bedroom, shall we?” The young man followed me like he was going to the gallows, and once inside, sat down in a chair with his hands unconsciously going to his lap to protect his threatened virtue. His knees still shook a little.

  “Why don’t you take off your tie and jacket and relax while I slip into the bathroom,” I suggested, and left the room to freshen and perfume myself with some sweet lotions. But when I returned ten minutes later, clad in a scant orange towel, he was still glued to the chair.

  The seduction would have to be mine. Softly I started kissing his neck and blowing suggestive words into his ears as I removed his jacket, shirt, and tie.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing to me,” he sort of stammered, “but I never felt this kind of feeling before.” Goose bumps came out on his chest and arms.

  I happen to get turned on by seducing young virgin boys, and my heart was really in my work. I slowly revealed my body by letting the towel drop to the floor; I lay down on the bed under the circular ceiling mirror and started stroking my body. “It looks like a wonderful movie in the mirror,” I whispered; “come over and look with me.”

  Bashfully he removed the rest of his things and lay down too. The undulating images in the golden glass so turned him on that he reached for his glasses to get a better view.

  “Please let me do that to you,” he said, and clumsily started stroking my breasts. Then he started sucking them, which was kind of funny – not at all well done, but certainly well meant. So I taught him how to caress a woman’s breasts and where to go with his tongue to give her the most pleasure. I did the same to him, and his nipples stood up erect. Dread had been replaced by desire.

  Gently I rolled the young man over, straddling his back with my knees on either side and my breasts pressed against him, and nibbled softly from his neck down to his buttocks.

  There are certain little nerves in a man or woman’s back, which, if given little chews, send an electric vibration straight to the sexual organ. When I turned my patient back over, he had a beautiful erection. I gave the same kisses to the front of his body, working down from his temple, neck, chest, and around the pubic triangle to his balls. I started kissing them, putting each in my mouth, but not for too long, because some men, especially when they are under thirty, are ticklish and will laugh and lose their erection.

  Then I took his penis like it was a delicious ice-cream cone and slid my tongue over the ice cream. Wow! That wigged him out! But I didn’t suck him for long, because I could sense the tension building in his cock, and I knew if I kept it up he would ejaculate, with the most important part of the treatment yet to come.

  The first position I chose for lovemaking was spoon fashion – me on my side and him curling around me, and I slipped him into me that way. Then, without letting his penis leave my body, I got on my knees, and we continued doggie style. That way he slipped out a few times, because it is a complicated position for a beginner.

  He was enjoying it tremendously, and after thirty minutes was still keeping up, and I was glad the phone hadn’t rung, which it usually does every ten minutes. However, I could tell the finale was near.

  In order to let him penetrate deeper and directer for the paradise stroke, I lay over on my back with a little silk pillow under my hips and my ankles over his shoulders, and that way, panting and bathed in perspiration, he climaxed.

  “I never knew making love to a woman could be so beautiful,” he said when he was dressed and ready to leave.

  “I think you are cured, and I’m glad. However, I was the aggressor today, but from now on it is up to you. Don’t be afraid of women, just try to find the type you like, and act like a man, not like a baby. And good luck.”

  STORY TWO: I strike up a conversation with a couple on the beach in Puerto Rico, and a Mrs. Katz starts telling me how nice it is, you know, to have a vacation with her husband while someone stays home in New Jersey and takes care of the kids.

  Mrs. Katz is overweight, and, to be honest, quite ugly, and she’s obviously never gone to sophisticated restaurants or the theater because she spent all her life in Cabbageville raising the kids.

  But her husband, who is a garment-district executive, sure looks like a bon vivant. I know he is a bon vivant because while she was away buying a diet soda, he put my card in the pocket of his beach jacket and said, “I can’t do anything here, but I’ll call you when I get back to New York.”

  So I touch on the subject of love and marriage with Mrs. Katz, and I am sort of doing a kind of little interview with her.

  “Mrs. Katz, if your husband needed a harmless little bit of variety once in a while and if you had the choice, would you prefer he was unfaithful with a call girl and paid her $50 or $100 and came home happy just an hour late once or twice a month? Or would you prefer he found a mistress, set her up in an expensive apartment, perhaps bought her a mink coat, even though he has never bought you one, and, instead of taking you to Jamaica or Puerto Rico, he took her? And maybe, on top of all that, one day he fell in love with her and abandoned you and the kids?”

  Now, I don’t look like a hooker, I think. I am as brown as a little peanut, and my hair is streaked
blond by the sun and combed neatly to my shoulders, and I look more like a Nordic-type family girl.

  “He’s better off with a prostitute,” Mrs. Katz said. So I smile, and she looks at me, and I think she guesses.

  STORY THREE: Robert is a handsome, rich, and very successful twenty-eight-year-old investment banker who recently married a girl he had been dating for six months. He loved her very much and really treated her like a queen.

  But after only three weeks of marriage her whole family started moving in on his money. Why don’t you buy her these stocks? Why don’t you set up this fund? Why don’t you buy her that house?

  And although he really adored her, he realized she loved only his money, and he walked out.

  Robert could not afford to be seen dating other girls around town, or his wife’s grasping family would really sock it to him financially, so he came to my house.

  “I’m not the type to be hustled for my money,” he said the first night. However, he did not quibble about the staggering tab for the several girls he had, and I am sure had I demanded it, he would have paid more. But I am not the type to put my hands around a man’s wallet and squeeze. Besides, he was so groovy that even if he were broke I would have let him go for free. He was happy to pay for his pleasure. “I would much rather spend my money on a bunch of prostitutes who are more honest than my wife,” he said.

  So a contemporary brothel must be many things to many people; and for many reasons.

  It is obvious what it is to most! A pay-for-play parlor, but believe it or not, some even use my house not to get laid!

  Still others come because a discreet prostitute is the only person to whom they dare expose the sexual hang-ups they conceal from their wives and girl friends to avoid creating a scandal.