The Unhappy Hooker

My longread on Xaviera Hollander, who inspired the term 'happy hooker', for Compact Magazine (subscribe for only $9 a month, cancel anytime) https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-unhappy-hooker/

My cab pulls up on a quiet, residential street in the Beethovenstraat area of north Amsterdam. Known for its boutique stores and high-end restaurants, the neighborhood is sometimes called the “Beverly Hills of the Netherlands.” I am here to see Xaviera Hollander, owner of Happy House B&B, where I will be staying for the night. Hollander is the woman who inspired the term “Happy Hooker.” She scaled the heights of the American sex industry, rising from a self-described “independent call girl” to run New York’s best-connected brothel. In 1971, her ghostwritten autobiography, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, became an instant success. It was adapted into a 1975 film starring Lynn Redgrave, and has also been performed as a play and an opera.

Hollander’s time in the sex trade was relatively brief. After her short stint as a prostitute, she bought a brothel in 1969 from a contact and ran it until she was thrown out of the Unites States, following the Knapp Commission on police corruption in 1972 (“I paid them off, we all did” she tells me, “I would sometimes let them fuck me.”) However, she has managed to live off prostitution, albeit indirectly, to this day.

This is the third time I have made the journey to the Happy House. A condition she imposed when I asked her for an interview was that I come to stay the night at her B&B. The wooden sign at the bottom of the front garden is in red 1970s font, the same red as the front door, and also the shade of light that emanates from the guest room windows after sundown.

The door is opened by Hollander’s husband, Philip de Haan, who waves me inside towards the dimly lit hallway, into a cluttered living room. Books written by Hollander are displayed along one side of the room. Sitting in a large armchair, her legs raised on a footstool and covered in a blanket, sits the Happy Hooker herself. She is wearing her trademark multi-colored kaftan, and a red and gold silk scarf.

Hollander, now eighty-two, wears dramatic eye makeup, red, glossy lipstick, her short, silver hair swept across her forehead.

After handing over the $180 tucked in my purse (“bring cash,” Hollander told me when I made the booking), I am shown to my room, past dozens of paintings and photographs of her in her heyday. It is the same shabby double I have occupied previously, complete with ghetto blaster, ancient hairdryer, and lumpy pillows.

You can access the rest of this 4000+ word article here.