Xaviera Hollander - The Happy Hooker - My Own Story

The next few days, Nick and Abe put their heads together with the lawyer, Jarmen, to discuss the “fixing” of Larry’s case. Abe came back and told me that he would need $10,000 to “take care” of my boyfriend’s case. I told him that I did not have that kind of money, since I had just been arrested and had a steep lawyer’s bill myself. Also I’d just laid out a lot of money in my own case.

Besides all this, my business was rather slow at that time, what with my publicized arrest and the summer months coming up, when most people leave town. And why should I let Abe and Nick bleed me to death anyway? To cooperate with a crime committee – well, fine! But to what extent? How could I trust this crazy situation?

Abe then became very “moral” and insinuated that my money was ill-gotten anyway. “Easy come, easy go.” So why shouldn’t I lend Larry, who had been my steady boyfriend for the past year, the $10,000 to make the payoff to the bagman? “You don’t want your boyfriend to get in trouble, do you?” he asked sarcastically. In other words, Abe put the knife to my throat, threatening me again with deportation and arrest. Still $10,000 to me was not exactly peanuts, although my monthly $1,100 was not petty cash either.

Being very persuasive, Abe swore that I would get all the money back later, although the crime commission did not have sufficient funds available just then. Finally it was agreed that Larry and I would split the $10,000 and each put $5,000 up. Larry spent a lot of time on taking down the serial numbers from the $100 bills that we gave Abe, who assured us that he would be able to trace our money both by the serial numbers and additional unseen markings that he would put on himself.

Larry went with Abe to Jarmen’s office, where discussions took place as to how to pay off the judge.

Two weeks later Nick came dashing up to my apartment. He was yelling-screaming mad about “that bastard Abe.” He ranted: “I always did wonder about him and his neat suits and ties, carrying his attaché case in the middle of this hot summer weather.”

What happened was that after every payment Abe made for me at P. J. Clarke’s, he would lead Nick into talking about who the payoffs were going to and who on the police force was taking bribes. When Abe went to meet Jarmen with Nick, he was as usual immaculately dressed, with his suit buttoned and carrying, as ever, his briefcase.

Nick had noticed how Abe nonchalantly waved his briefcase around when he was talking in the lawyer’s office. He became suspicious when Abe made Ed Jarmen repeat the name of the prominent judge several times. Nick had suddenly grabbed Abe from behind, pulled his coat off, and found the man was completely wired. Everything that was said had gone into the little microphone Abe wore. I now recalled that Abe had confessed to me once that his little black attaché case was equipped with cameras, and the lens shutter worked by moving the handle up and down. Without opening the case he could shoot as many pictures as he wanted.

According to Nick’s story, Ed Jarmen was so outraged that he pulled a gun from his drawer and threatened Abe with it. Just then two men came bursting into the office. They identified themselves as agents from the Knapp Commission. Obviously the two agents came just in time to prevent harm to anyone, and now came the moment of revelation. All this time Abe had not been representing Senator Hughes’ Committee on Crime in Albany, but rather the Knapp Commission. Even though I lost several thousand dollars, I couldn’t help laughing at myself for having been actually financing Mayor Lindsay’s crime commission in one of their biggest investigations.

Meanwhile, Nick accused me of knowing all about Abe’s working with the Knapp Commission, and I had to keep denying it in the worst way, since I really had not been aware of it. So, willingly or unwillingly, I suppose I have been of quite some help to the Knapp Commission.

Great was our surprise when several months later the newspaper headlines broke, painting Larry and me as the bribers of the corrupt policemen while Abe was the one that had forced us to do so. People started calling me and accusing Larry of being my pimp, because that was definitely what it looked like in the papers. The reality is that Larry has never taken money from me other than the payoffs. The contrary is true. Whenever we go somewhere, whether it is Miami, Las Vegas, Puerto Rico, or anyplace else, it is always my friendly forty-three-year-old silver fox, Larry, who picks up the tabs and even gives me gambling money in the casinos. He is the one who ends up paying the high bills for clothing and dinners, so herewith I would like to correct the statements in the papers.

As far as I myself am concerned, I was highly surprised to read the other day that Abe had accused me of having blackmailed, bribed, and extorted money from my customers, and even of being involved with drugs. This is all untrue, and there is a possibility that Abe himself will be indicted for his activities. In the meantime, heavy investigations are continuing, and I am called in daily to the New York district attorney’s office for what information I can provide.

Meanwhile, Abe, whose house has been raided by the New York district attorney, is left helpless without his gadgets and tape recordings, his decoder and descrambler, his burning-off device, and the other tools of his nefarious trade. At the same time, my girls are being harassed with obscene telephone calls, and I know Abe photostated my address books. It may be their imagination, but some of my girls say they recognized his voice from hearing him on a television interview recently.

It is now December, 1971, as this book has come to an end, and so may my career as one of New York’s most celebrated madams. In any case, I will be happy if I can continue to work in my business and as long as wealthy, prominent, influential, and famous men want to see me and have me arrange their dates, I will continue to stay in the profession, and serve them, and teach others what I have learned.

I am a twenty-eight-year-old woman. I have traveled a lot and have seen men and women in their states of happiness and sadness, their ups and downs. In my own way, I feel, I have tried to help them – and myself – by adding a little pleasure to their lives. Somehow there is so much misery around us. People alone, lonely, miserable.

A good friend once told me: “Try to find your happiness in your solitude.” And I have tried, but… happy I was not in my solitude.

Okay, lately I have “sinned” by selling my body to men, by trading the bodies of my girls to more men. But it hasn’t been strictly commerce. I have tried to give some happiness to those men, even though they paid for it. I have been honest with them and filled a lost hour of loneliness by giving them a warm smile, a cold drink, soft music in the background, and then a warm and young body to hold, to press, to kiss, to make love to. Is that indeed a sin? The man was satisfied, and for the time he was in my house, at least, he was no longer lonely and miserable. He didn’t have to get drunk somewhere in the corner of a bar. His ego was flattered. So was his masculinity. Honestly, should you refuse this happiness to anybody?

Since I began writing this book, I have accepted the offer of several universities to give lectures on the subject “Myth and Reality of Prostitution.” I am now preparing my lectures and will do my utmost to explain to our young people how to make each other happy and avoid the problems most men have come to me with. I might not be a psychiatrist, but I am convinced that sex is not as important as we tend to make it. First there is that little feeling, that little red flame, called love. Blow on the flame and make it get bigger like a fire, don’t blow it out like a candle.