Depending on which version of this you pick up, it is either called Xaviera! or The Happy Hooker – The Story of Xaviera Hollander, and it first appeared in Canada on the GRT label before being released in the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. There was also a Happy Hooker board game for adults (God, how we want to get hold of that) and a 1973 LP. The mainstream film also spawned two sequels, The Happy Hooker Goes To Washington (starring Joey Heatherton) and The Happy Hooker Goes To Hollywood (starring Martine Beswick). Three films based on one book over a two year period is impressive by any standards. A year earlier, Samantha McLaren had played Hollander in the X-rated Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander, and Hollander would play herself in the R-rated My Pleasure is My Business, also in 1975. The book was filmed as a mainstream movie in 1975, with Lynn Redgrave in the lead role. Hollander would go on to write twenty-three other books, ranging from erotic fiction to sex education to misery memoir about losing her mother, as well as a column for Penthouse that ran for thirty-five years! Her book caught the public imagination and became an instant bestseller and erotic classic. At the height of the sexual revolution, Hollander’s career choice was sensibly seen as one of power and emancipation rather than choosing to be an exploited victim and possibly a trafficking statistic (the fact that she had ‘trafficked’ herself from Holland to the USA being neither here nor there) that would be the case today. In her case, it was The Happy Hooker, an autobiographical erotic book inspired by her life as a high-class call girl in manhattan, a career she chose after quitting her job as a secretary in the Dutch consulate – she was arrested and deported from the US in 1969, but her decision to write up her experiences proved to be an inspired one.

Xaviera Hollander rose to fame in 1971, the right person at the right time with the right book. The life and times of the world’s most famous sex worker, and her curious LP.

The happy hooker by xaviera hollander