Customer Reviews

The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"How did YOU first learn about sex?" the reviews ask. Even more importantly, when? I'll confess that I learned about it in the 1970s, and that "a gleefully lusty tour guide named Xaviera Hollander" was responsible. The volume that started it all, "The Happy Hooker: My Own Story" is now titillating a new generation of readers who cut their teeth on matter-of-fact sex guides like "Savage Love" or Dr. Ruth Westheimer's preachy "Sex for Dummies." While many may wonder what all the fuss was about, the truth is that today's twenty-somethings can't begin to imagine how shocking this book was when it first appeared in February 1972, when most of us still gasped after hearing the word "damn" on TV.

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.

I recently purchased Xaviera's book and found it to be enlightening in some areas, though terribly exaggerated in other areas. As someone with experience in the sex industry, I'd have to say that some of her experiences just don't add up. That's not to say that she isn't a wonderful writer. She is indeed. But I would have been more pleased with an honest, straight-forward account of her life as a hooker and madame, versus an embellished rendition of what actually took place. All in all, it was worth purchasing used.

This book is a sexy classic. As a sex worker in New York, I found this book to be truthful and entertaining at the same time (although dated in many respects). You will find yourself liking her because she never feels sorry for herself and truly loves the business. She is street smart, funny, and feminine with no apologies. It's too bad they made such a bad movie adaption - I would love to see another one made!

As a modern twenty-something who wasn't even born when this book first came out in 1972, I enjoyed picking up what is undeniably a part of the history of American sexual culture. I tried to keep in perspective how shocking this book must have been in the 1970's, before our bookshelves and televisions were plasted with frank talk about sexual health and sexual deviance. To me, the opening lesbian girlhood fantasies and the nymphomania (of course all prostitutes love sex) seemed cliched, but I don't doubt Hollander's account of her early sexual life and introduction to the profession.

Hollander had an fascinating life growing up in Holland and moving to America. She was well-educated and very intelligent, and she eloquently explained how a girl of her breeding could become absolutely trapped and imprisioned in an abusive relationship. Her insight on that relationship alone makes this book a worthwhile read.

The book is a true page-turner as Hollander describes her sexual escapades in New York and the ways in which she earned money on her trip to Mexico. Hollander explains all the ins and outs of the high-end prositution business and the complicated formal relationship hookers have with their madam. The end of the book becomes a business treatise on the prostitution world, and it makes for compelling reading.

I read this book at a friend's house in the 1970's - so many of us high school buddies grabbed it off his bookshelf that he barely noticed. There's even an autobiography interspersed between the pages of gratuitous sex, as Ms. Hollander describes her upbringing in Holland, and her life as a prostitute and madam in New York City. Then, ofcourse, comes more descriptions of her escapades with men, women, couples, etc., in those days before most people worried about safety. This book may be less stunning in today's era of DVD and cyber-porn, but that doesn't exactly elevate it to literature. Still, it's readable style helped sell 15 million copies, leading one to surmise that trashy books have an erotic effect on more men and women than will admit it.

The kindle version of this book is rife with misspellings. It makes it difficult to read sometimes as you are trying to figure out the word rather than enjoying the story. This version also left out some content from the original that is disappointing. I hate to say it but I believe Ms. Hollander succumbed to political correctness in this version and when you make a compromise like that, it fails to deliver. I wish the original version was available instead of this.

A friend ordered this book and I laughed, then when my used bookstore recieved a copy I decided to check it out. I am glad I did.

The first few chapters are very explicit as Xaviera details her blossoming as a young nymphomaniac and describes many lurid sexual activities. Then the writing describes more or less her transformation into a prostitute high priced call girl (considering the times) and madam. Xaviera Hollander may be the happy hooker but she smashes the sterotypes by being an educated, intelligent and artitulate narrator.

This book is written with two other people, and that I confess is main reason I didn't give it five stars. While it is no doubt in Xaviera's own words reading it sub-consciously I did wonder how edited the text was. At times I felt her collaboraters did an almost too fine a job polishing the narrative much like some songs can be over-produced my over-all impression of this work was one of over-production.

That said it is a honest memoir that does not glorify the profession or gloss over life's uglier incidents and sides, in short a detailed life of a lady suited to be a madam due to her love of sex and the circumstances of life. An entertaining and yes informative book.

It's hard to believe that Xaviera Hollander's racy biography is still in print after nearly 40 years -- and it's still an interesting and provocative read. It's really a tale of high level sex and prostitution in the 1950s and 1960s before everyone and everything came out of the closet. The book is full of sex tips and techniques that will seem old hat to anyone growing up in recent decades, but all of this was very much avante garde when the book was published. On can still read it with pleasure, as I have recently done. It is also interesting as a behind the scenes commentary on life in New York City before the sexual revolution. Sadly, I don't think Xaviera is with us any longer, as I recall she passed away some years ago. Undoubtedly a great lady.

I wish there were half-star ratings, cause this is really about a 3.5. It's not that great of a book but it's not that bad. I can understand how it sent out shock waves once upon a time but in 2005 this created only the most minor ripples across my neither-prudish-nor-licentious sense of values. This autobiography doesn't stray far into eroticism but it does get graphic with unvarying frequency. It isn't obscene and not even that lurid, though the discussion is highly frank. I liked The Happy Hooker, literate and intelligent South African native Xavieria Hollander's memoir of her years as a prostitute and madam, but it ultimately ended up without much room for depth. She writes an interesting account of growing up in a strict South African home where her scholarly father made her speak a different language for each day of the week, and she tells an unapologetic version of her entrance into the world's oldest profession (she gets pre-tty candid, let me tell ya) but after that...things fizzle. Hollander stays on the game a little too long but eventually graduates to madam and momentarily the book finds its pace again with its Business 101 insights into exactly how an escort service was operated (bribes, low-key underworld connections and lots of "favors" to vice cops) but gradually it strays into nothing but a catalog of sex, sex and more sex, which contrary to what you might think, gets boring to read about after the first ten descriptions. (Ugh.) This dated, anachronistic tale of life at the height of the so-called Sexual Revolution, an era that bestowed on those of us born later a legacy of drug resistant STD's and an inferiority complex that we'll never live up to what our ancestors were getting up to, is a goofy, eye-popping but never embarrassing read.

I first read this memoir not long after it came out in 1972, when the controversy over its message and explicit content was in full swing, so to speak. Suffice it to say that it made quite an impression on my virginal self at the time.

Fast-forward 39 years. I happened upon this reissue while searching for something quite unrelated (pet treats, I think), and decided that nostalgia plus the promised "new epilogue" added up to a re-read.

The book, for those of you under 30 or who lived in a cave through the 1970s, is Ms. X's definitive autobio (there were several follow-on books in the same vein, none especially notable,) spanning her early years as a perpetually horny, bisexual girl in the Netherlands, through her coming of age in Johannesburg and elsewhere, to self-realization as a "working girl" which culminated in her becoming New York City's most notorious (and notoriously self-promoting) madam, her arrest and eventual deportation, and finally into a sort-of retirement overseas.

As you might expect, this book is chock-full of a wide variety of imaginative and imaginatively-described sex; "Kinsey, cover to cover," as Steve Martin might put it. As you might not expect, there is also a lot of surprisingly interesting material on the practical aspects of operating a business whose services are quite illegal in 49-1/2 states of the Union. One thread I found particularly fascinating concerned the trials and travails of Xaviera's fiance as he coped - sometimes successfully, often not so much - with X's intense lifestyle and profession. Suffice it to say, that was undoubtedly a very interesting (and exhausting) period in Larry's life, but I wouldn't have wanted to trade places with him.

_The Happy Hooker_ is indeed a classic. Read it, but not for the sex - what was shocking and titillating at the end of the Sixties would barely lift an eyebrow of your typical 16-year-old today - read it for a fascinating look at a profession forced underground by a culture that was amazingly hypocritical on the subject even in the midst of a "sexual revolution", and in many ways remains so today; a point underscored by the 2002 epilogue.