Xaviera Hollander


Xaviera Hollander is a Dutch former call girl, madam and author. She is best known for her best-selling memoir The Happy Hooker: My Own Story.

Early life

Hollander was born Xaviera de Vries in Surabaya, Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies, which later became part of present-day Indonesia, to a Dutch Jewish physician father and a mother of French and German descent. She spent the first years of her life in a Japanese-run internment camp. After the end of Japanese occupation the family returned to the Netherlands.
In her early twenties she left Amsterdam for Johannesburg, where her stepsister lived. There she met and became engaged to American economist John Weber. When the engagement was broken off, she left South Africa for New York City.

Career

In 1968, she resigned from her job as a secretary in the Dutch consulate in New York City to become a call girl, making up to a night. A year later, she opened her own brothel, the Vertical Whorehouse, and soon became New York City's leading madam. In 1971, she was arrested for prostitution by New York Police and forced to leave the United States.

Author

In 1971, Hollander published a memoir, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story. Robin Moore, who took Hollander's dictation of the book's contents, came up with the title, while Yvonne Dunleavy ghostwrote it. Hollander later wrote a number of other books and produced plays in Amsterdam. Her second book, Child No More, is the story of losing her mother. For 35 years she wrote an advice column for Penthouse magazine, entitled "Call Me Madam."

Other ventures

In the early 1970s, she recorded a primarily spoken-word album titled Xaviera! for the Canadian GRT Records label, on which she discussed her philosophy regarding sex and prostitution, sang a cover version of the Beatles' song "Michelle", and recorded several simulated sexual encounters, including an example of phone sex, a threesome, and a celebrity encounter with guest "vocal" by Ronnie Hawkins. Xaviera's Game, an erotic board game, was released in 1974 by Reiss Games, Inc. In 1975, she starred in the semi-autobiographical film My Pleasure Is My Business. Beginning in 2005, she operated Xaviera's Happy House, a bed-and-breakfast, in her Amsterdam home.

Personal life

For several years in the 1970s, Hollander lived in Toronto, where she married Frank Applebaum, a Canadian antique dealer, and was a regular fixture on the downtown scene. She mentioned a lover named John Drummond, with whom she partnered for many years, co-authoring two books, including Let's Get Moving about their life together: "I went there with, who for years had been the love of my life, John Drummond, a wild Scottish intellectual who, at times, liked his whisky, beer, and wines too much. We had great sex, often up to three times a day — all that and he was about 17 years older than me." During a 2018 interview, she revealed a darker side of the relationship with the man she called "the love of my life!": "The love of my life, 25 years ago, John Drummond, a brilliant and boisterous Scotsman with a 'Thatcheresque' accent had, especially under the influence of a few scotches, beers, or wine, become quite destructive towards me. He is the only one who managed to deprive me of my self-esteem or identity, temporarily. He used to say that a British man’s way of saying 'I love you' is to put his woman down." Drummond is listed as one of her husbands. Hollander claimed to have "turned gay" around 1997, establishing a long-term relationship with a Dutch poet called Dia. In January 2007, she married a Dutch man, Philip de Haan, in Amsterdam.

Other works

Hollander has been depicted in film five times:
She appears in at least two films:
  • My Pleasure Is My Business as Gabrielle
  • Xaviera Hollander, the Happy Hooker: Portrait of a Sexual Revolutionary, a 2008 documentary directed, jointly produced, photographed and edited by Robert Dunlap. Hollander made additional contributions to the script.
In 1989, Hollander made an extended appearance on British discussion programme After Dark, alongside Mary Stott, Malcolm Bennett and Hans Eysenck, among others.
A musical about her life was written and composed by Richard Hansom and Warren Wills.

Books

Non-fiction

  • Moore took Hollander's dictation, and Dunleavy transcribed the results.

  • Fiction

  • The Golden Phallus of Osiris Trilogy:
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