Xaviera Hollander - The Happy Hooker - My Own Story

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!

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.