Xaviera Hollander - The Happy Hooker - My Own Story

One travel agent who did indeed send me customers used to come around and want a girl for free. I have never been tempted to give it away free to someone just because he sends me customers. If you once start that, everybody is wanting it free for bringing in new customers, and it starts to snowball, and soon you’re screwing everybody for free. The travel agent tried to be businesslike. He pointed out that for every ten tickets he sold to Europe he got one for himself free. I told him I was very sorry, but I could not compete with the airline’s incentive program.

Nevertheless, at Christmastime, when some of my really big spenders call me, I give them a freebie myself as a sort of holiday celebration. And last Christmas I thought it was an appropriate time to send out a tasteful Christmas card to my customers and at the same time remind them of my existence and give them my latest address. After Christmas I received quite a few ‘phone calls from men who thanked me for letting them know my new number and where I was.

So this, then, is the story of my inCOME and outLAY as New York’s biggest madam. I think it proves that if my business could be made legal, the way off-track betting is in New York, I and women like me could make a big contribution to what Mayor Lindsay calls “Fun City,” and the city and state could derive the money in taxes and licensing fees that I pay off to crooked cops and political figures. Since the beginning of time no government has ever stopped prostitution, because men want it. The proof of this is that my best clients represent the highest echelon of government and business circles and keep me in business no matter how often I am harassed by the police and have to change addresses.

The coarse, thieving, aggressive street hookers are something else, I realize, but those of us who stay home quietly and merely take calls without soliciting on the street or in hotels should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to carry on our business in the delicate, hygienic, genteel manner in which I conduct mine.

The old saying “Never mix business with pleasure” does not always apply to the business of pleasure.

If I didn’t have my heart literally in my work, or sometimes fall in love, I would go crazy. For example, I was in Miami that lonely Christmas after Carl left me, as the house guest of a swinging New York socialite, Dennis Tanner, and his bitchy Swedish wife. After she fell asleep at night, he would come to my room and make love to me till dawn. However, I wanted somebody for myself, to share the holiday fun with, a man to escort me around the parties and private clubs.

One evening a group of us went to a place called the Palm Bay Club, which was rather stuffy, but quite good fun. Even though my hosts made a point of including me in the conversation and the dancing, I was feeling acutely lonely. Once in a while I would do a little reconnaissance trip around the room, but the attractive men were all attached.

Toward the end of the evening, as I stood near the bar alone, my famous orange juice in my hand, the reveling crowd around me parted like the Sea of Galilee and out walked one of the most gorgeous men I had seen in Miami – alone.

He was so stunningly glamorous, he looked like the classic Cosmopolitan fiction illustration of the lover. His immaculate white suit accentuated his even suntan, and his face was crowned with black hair cut in Roman-boy style and rakishly long. I guessed him to be in his late thirties. He had, I hoped, a stranger’s lost look in his eyes.

As the man walked closer to me, our eyes embraced, and something compelled us to touch each other’s arm. I spoke first. “Are you as lonely as I am?” I asked.

“I guess I am,” he replied, to my utter joy, “and I could use some charming feminine company.” With zero resistance from me, he took my arm and steered me from the Palm Bay Club, into a taxi, and on to a more swinging discotheque called the Penthouse where we laughed and danced and talked German together until around three in the morning.

His name was Paul Lindfeld, and he was a famous New York jewelry designer of German Jewish extraction, recently divorced. When the evening wound up he took me to the Jockey Club, where he was staying, and without too many words we slipped into his bed and made love.

We turned on to each other’s bodies so intensely and became so passionate that the people in the next room started complaining and knocking on the wall. But we just ignored them and continued our lovemaking.

Before we fell asleep exhausted I felt this was a man I could really seriously fall in love with, and before the relationship went any further I would have to tell him the truth about who I was and what I did.

I didn’t think he would take the news too badly, since he was a sophisticated kind of man. I felt he could accept my professional status for what it was.

“Paul, there is something I think you ought to know about me,” I said.

“I know already,” he said sleepily. “You’re wonderful in bed.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” I said, “but the matter is slightly more serious than that. You see, if I weren’t good in bed I would be out of business, if you know what I mean.”

“What exactly do you mean?” he asked, wide-awake now.

“I am trying to tell you that I am not exactly what you believe I am – the little interior designer on her annual vacation. I am actually a professional woman – a call girl.”

He sat bolt upright and backed off.

Before he could speak, I continued, “Please don’t think I am going to ask you to pay me, or anything like that. I wasn’t working tonight. With you it was true desire.”

And in order to soften the blow, I added: “I just do it to help support my parents.”

Paul was visibly jolted by the revelation, but talked about it a little more, and he accepted it unconditionally.

The next morning I moved out of the Tanners’ house and in with Paul, and we spent every moment of the next few days together falling in love. It was the first time I had felt like this in ages, despite all my experiences. Forget about Evelyn St. John – this was much deeper. We went everywhere together, and he was so gorgeous that I wore him on my sleeve like a croix de guerre.

Back in New York, after a long, depressing period of not hearing from Paul, I finally did get a call from him explaining how busy he’d been, and we took over from where we left off in Miami. Paul lived on the twenty-fifth floor of an apartment on Central Park South, and the winter panorama outside across the snow-covered park was pure Grandma Moses and terribly romantic. The apartment was elegant, expensive, and tastefully decorated with expensive antiques. The bedroom had an oval-shaped window from which I loved to blow my mind on the view.

Paul was nicely shaped, precious but not too big, and he was basically a square lover. But we didn’t need gimmicks of any kind. Variations are there usually if you’re getting slightly bored with the normal position. However, when it’s love, the normal position is as exciting as standing on your head and doing it.

The feelings I had at that moment for Paul were almost as deep as those I had had for Carl. I guess this was the first time since Carl I had felt this way, because I had been hurt so badly that I didn’t want to give myself any more pain. In a way, I had grown up, matured. And maturity comes with suffering, and experience in life, I believe.

I had a second telephone installed in my apartment exclusively for his calls, and his ego was flattered by that. I was working as a single then, so I could easily take nights off. Sometimes we would go to the theater and dinner, and always we would return to his apartment.