The Happy Hooker: My Own Story [Paperback]

Reared in the liberal Netherlands, the author discovers early on that she is bisexual -- and ultimately, it seems, sexually insatiable as well. Relating her own personal experiences in vivid detail, Xaviera chronicles how the sexual revolution of the 1960s hit full stride at the beginning of the 1970s. In the days before AIDS, she would regularly meet people of either sex, engage in small talk with them, and take them to bed before the night was over. Many ships pass in the night this way throughout the book, yet the author's first sexual encounter with a man is strangely given short shrift. Presumably it wasn't as memorable as her many other adventures and escapades. Entering adulthood, she migrates to South Africa at a time when apartheid and other repressive laws are still in force. Bored within a matter of days, she seduces her brother-in-law and spices up his previously boring marriage to her half-sister before moving on to the staid Johannesburg club scene, where she promptly makes a name for herself. In no time she meets an American globetrotter who seems to bring her the satisfaction she craves, and he proposes marriage to her. She accepts, and he invites her to New York, where tension breaks out almost immediately between her and his youth-obsessed, and possibly alcoholic, mother. While subtly exposing the sexual hypocrisy that was part and parcel of our society at the time, Xaviera nonetheless tries to make her relationship with her fiancé work. Secret affairs on both their parts, however, hers always with women, eventually drive them apart.

Frustrated, Xaviera begins sleeping her way across Manhattan and is initially shocked when she is first offered money in exchange for what she thought was just good clean fun. Never the type to say no, she quickly quashes her misgivings and, in what some critics see as a parody of the traditional American work ethic, begins working her way up from meeting her clients in seedy tenements in Greenwich Village to setting her own hours at more chic "houses of pleasure" in the fashionable East Fifties. She climbs the proverbial ladder of success by working for two competing madams and then, in spite of police harassment, setting up a service of her own when one of her former bosses retires to get married. Along the way we're introduced to a gallery of eccentrics, some harmless, many menacing, who populate the demimonde of prostitution, a profession society at large still condemns as a crime that warrants punishment. You'll learn, among other things, why Greek men are her favorite lovers, and why she left Swinging Amsterdam during its heyday.

This "30th Anniversary Edition" actually tones down a lot of the material found in the original. Xaviera's former "fag" friends, whom she sometimes patronizes, are now "gay," for instance, and her encounter with a German shepherd in South Africa, of which she once wrote, "I'd be a moral fraud if I ignored it," is eliminated completely. One chapter, originally entitled "Biff-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am," has been completely rewritten as "Whipped (S)cream," with its seamier elements considerably softened. Almost ten pages of material have been snipped in all, including much of the moralizing the author once did to justify her lifestyle, which, owing to the occupational hazards she describes in detail, she quickly abandoned after her book became a bestseller. Translated into a dozen languages, "The Happy Hooker" may indeed have changed the way the world regards prostitutes and their trade, and maybe even sex in general, but this expurgated edition proves that our present attitudes toward the subject aren't as liberal as they might have been. The book is thus a window on the past, reframed with modern-day sensibilities. If you can find it, read the original first, to gauge for yourself how far we've come in three decades.