By: Annemarie de Jong
Happy Hooker Xaviera Hollander celebrated her 80th birthday this summer. And yes, old age comes with age. But the world-famous ex-call girl and author may be less active between the sheets, she still talks about sex all the time. Without embarrassment. "The craziest things can turn me on," she says.
Dingdong. The doorbell of the monumental villa on Stadionweg in Amsterdam-Zuid rings loud and clear. Xaviera Hollander opens the door. She has just had her siesta. "I don't sleep much at night! "
Darting around her feet is puppy Luna. "She has very sharp teeth, you know." Xaviera sits down at the long wooden table in the large living room. Portraits of the diva hang everywhere and there are erotic figurines and curiosities. "My husband is a collector." She points to a painting of a Spanish white villa. "That's where I used to live in Marbella."
Her live-in assistant Alkis brings us some tea. "A handsome young man from Greece," she says. At this table, guests of her bed and breakfast "Xaviera's Happy House," which she runs with husband Philip, are having their breakfast. "We get nines and tens on Booking.com," she says. She saw a few episodes of "B&B full of love" on TV. "That feisty lady in white bathing suit and with the most class (Marian 68, Portugal), is a fun person. But I found those old men really too boring for her."
”Turning eighty is not really a lot of fun. I am no longer in good health. I have osteoporosis and often a lot of pain in my leg and back. My next step might well be euthanasia: with such a pill. I don't want to die in a hospital, do I? Or become demented for a few more years first?"
She rarely goes outside anymore. Coincidentally, she recently went with Philip to a large shopping center at the Gelderlandplein . "A man approached me and showed a picture of me on his cell phone. 'Are you or aren't you?' He had recognized me, good for my ego.
Is sex still important to Xaviera? "Not really. When your body hurts a lot, it's killing your libido. I couldn't think about having some stud in bed right now." But it's okay like this. "I have the best man ever. Philip is a witty, erudite man and a great cook, thank God. We love each other. He is incredibly sweet, my best friend, totally trustworthy as my business partner. He also frequently gives me a wonderful massage."
Death
"The only things that really stimulate me anymore are my fantasies. Sometimes they even involve death. The craziest things can turn me on."
Xaviera also has a little tool. "A tiny vibrator that you can use in three speeds. I showed it to a girlfriend. 'That one is way too short,' she responded. I said, 'No honey, that's for on the clitoris, not inside.' That thing does it just fine. You just have to be in the right mood. I've already given four as gifts. No matter how old you are, your clitoris never stops working."
"Are you going to take another picture with your phone?" she asks suddenly. Beforehand, she emailed that she wasn't waiting for a photographer: "I'd rather see one of my own enclosed fairly recent photos in the paper.” Apparently, she has changed her mind. She puts some red lipstick on her teeth, drapes her scarf and poses routinely. "Is everything all right?"
Talking eyes, pretty mouth, cool face. What is her beauty secret? "I don't smoke or drink a drop of alcohol. Just don't like it one bit. My mother drank too much sherry." Black and white curly-haired Luna - a cross between a poodle and dachshund - snaps her fingers. "Ouch!"
The bell. "You open it," she says. They are guests for the B&B. A couple from Groningen. Having come to Amsterdam by train with bicycles. They are going to walk through De Pijp and bike to Nunspeet tomorrow.
"Sporty though. What time do you want breakfast?"
"Seven-thirty," the guest replies.
"That's too early. Eight o'clock. How did you guys get here?"
"I had typed in B&B Amsterdam."
"I'm a writer as well for your information !"
"Yes I know, from 'that' book."
Sixteen books Xaviera Hollander has to her name. On a table are copies for guests to buy. She is currently busy with a trilogy, due out soon. 'Wall Talk I The Purified Bird of Paradise,' 'II Xaviera’s Happy House ' and 'III Getting Old is not for Sissies.”
Xaviera gets all kinds of people in the house. Quite interesting, but also dead normal types, but also a few eccentrics. "I had two women from Limburg with a man on a leash as a dog. He was instructed to sit under the table and I thought, 'Oh shit, that place has not been vacuumed recently !' So I ordered him, 'Look your mistress in the eyes!' I was just giving him a lesson in humility."
Tantra massage
"For ten years a rich couple from America has been coming here. They are polyamorous so they may have an extra lover. She wanted to give Philip a tantra massage. 'What should I answer?" he whispered in my ear in Dutch. It was quarter to ten in the evening and he would rather be upstairs doing a crossword puzzle. Philip wasn't really looking forward to it, the faithful soul. So I said, "We have to pick up guests from Schiphol later’. By the way, they are still our best friends."
Another guest, an exhibitionist Belgian, liked to be photographed naked by young women. He didn't need to have sex with them. Xaviera arranged a photographer friend. "She took very nice pictures and made five hundred euros. I sat there in a rattan chair and placed my signature on his buttocks."
The phone rings. Xaviera says in English that she is in the middle of an interview. "Bye, darling." It was a friend, the Amsterdam-based sister of wealthy Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman. Father (48) and son (19) were killed in the Titan accident on June 18, en route to the wreck of the Titanic. She was devastated."
Xaviera Hollander was born Xaviera de Vries in Surabaya, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), on June 15, 1943, the daughter of a Dutch-Jewish doctor-psychiatrist and a French-German mannequin. "My father wanted a son. He would have named him François Xavier. But I was a girl. I always felt I had to prove myself. That's why I have such a dominant presence. I wanted to be like a boy."
They spent the first three years of her life in a Japanese internment camp with the most vicious sadistic camp executioner Sonei. Mother and child together, separated from father Mick de Vries. She describes this hell in her book "Kind af. (Child no more) "That is an ode to my parents." Torture is the order of the day. Women's mouths are torn open and prisoners are raped and burned alive. Her own father is put on the rack. And hung from trees at the hottest time of the day.
Xaviera nearly succumbs to dysentery. Mother Germaine manages to exchange her diamond ring with a Javanese smuggler for a packet of brown sugar. But she is caught and severely beaten by Sonei. "I had heard my mother scream as she was viciously kicked and beaten," Xaviera writes in the book. Germaine is thrown into the morgue for dead. Only after a week does she end up back in the infirmary.
"When I was released with my mother, I was three," Xaviera recounts. They get shelter with a close friend who had not been captured. "I was playing in a tree - I was a little boyish - and fell on a stump. A huge gash in my pussy. I screamed. Our babu took me to the nearest camp for medical attention. She ran to a blond doctor, but I shouted pointing at the dark moustachoed doctor, "No, I want him”. “Afterwards, that turned out to be my father. He closed the wound near my vagina."
Blonde angel
A month later, my father was also released. My mother put a shoelace in her hair and had borrowed lipstick from our hostess. We didn't have a penny to our name. When he walked up the path he didn't hug my mother first, but said, ' Oh my God I treated that little blonde angel!' From then on, there was always rivalry between me and my mother. I was a father child. Wanted to be No. 1 with him."
"But I also had a war trauma and often wet my bed." According to her child psychiatrist, there are two scenarios for war victims. "Either you become a winner or a loser. Well, I wanted to come out on top.
Xaviera Hollander, daughter of a Dutch-Jewish doctor-psychiatrist and French-German mannequin.© Photo Ella Tilgenkamp
The family settles in Amsterdam. Her father builds up a general practice. "He has been unfaithful to my mother from time to time, which has caused her a lot of misery," she says. Mother even hires a detective to catch her husband cheating.
Xaviera is "quite mischievous, but the most intelligent in the class. She attends the Barlaeus Gymnasium, later transferring to the HBS. Her mother urges her - in vain - to remain a virgin until marriage. Otherwise, a husband would consider her "a slut”. She gets a Schoevers diploma and is named "best secretary in the Netherlands" via a Manpower contest. "I was promptly interviewed by Willem Duys on the TV tube."
Writer Simon Vestdijk is a family friend. "He and my father wrote letters to each other for forty years. That was a kind of love affair, but intellectual. I was brought up with classical music and culture. Nobody could cook, we had maids for that."
Vestdijk's mistress - writer Henriëtte van Eijck - put young Xaviera on the track to become a writer. "'What do you want to be later?' she asked. I said, 'Maybe a journalist or something.' 'Child, surely you can do much better than chasing fires and thefts. Go live your own life, go on faraway trips, pull stunts and write about it'." Xaviera - she is then in her early twenties - leaves for South Africa. There she visits her father's daughter from his previous marriage to a Russian ballerina. Actually, it's an escape. She cannot bear to see her father suffer one stroke after another. He is lovingly cared for by her mother and a nurse.
In South Africa, she meets an American economist. In 1968, she leaves for his hometown of New York. "He even asked my father for my hand. Little did I know that he still had a wife somewhere. He was also stingy as hell." She goes to work as a secretary at the Dutch consulate.
As a madam, she ran a brothel © Photo Getty Images
One summer evening she tells him she is three weeks overdue. "'Sorry, but maybe I'm pregnant.' Well... he was going crazy anyway. We lived on the 25th floor. I walked naked onto the balcony. Dazed by an overdose of sleeping pills. I said, "Fuck you, I'm going to jump”. He shouted loudly, 'No don't jump! What will the neighbours think."
At that point, she decided never again to attempt to make a fool of herself in front of a man I went in, grabbed a metal hairbrush and hit him on the balls with it. Turned out he was a masochist too, he enjoyed it. Oi weh,
Gold mine
Life in The Big Apple is expensive. "I had a beer budget and a champagne taste. Loved thousand-dollar gowns from Pucci and Leonard." Xaviera turned her hobby into her job: sex. I was sitting in a bar next to a beautiful woman. She said, 'Honey, did you know you're on a gold mine? With what you give away for an orange juice, I make a lot of money."
The dollars were pouring in. "I was horney and happy, I had a huge sex drive," she laughs. "I was a 'size queen.' I'm tight-lipped, but just loved that. Size does matter." Sex also freed her from "traumatic experiences, frustrations and disappointments. A year later, she opened her own luxury brothel. But eventually the U.S. government - after several arrests and a police corruption scandal - expels her from the country.
Sexual revolution
In the early 1970s, she describes her outpourings in "The Happy Hooker," a worldwide bestseller. She appears on all kinds of talk shows. She also has the column "Call me madam" in Penthouse magazine for 36 years. Thousands of letters I have answered. I opened the sexual revolution. I didn't say 'coitus interruptus' or 'intercourse,' I just said fuck, suck, dick, lick."
The Happy Hooker became a hit © Photo Redferns
Mother Germaine was initially shocked to learn that her daughter had become "the undisputed queen of the American sex industry. " But during all my troubles, she always stood behind me with her love and loyalty. We had a symbiotic relationship." Her mother spent 20 years with a lesbian woman after the death of Xaviera's father. "She cared for her faithfully until her death and loved her very much."
Later, Xaviera lives in Toronto and marries an antique dealer. Because of her reputation, he does not want children. Against his will, she gets pregnant anyway. In the book CHILD NO MORE she writes, "But even when I felt lonely, I was comforted by the thought that a little creature, all my own, was growing inside me.”
In the fourth month, things go wrong. She is rushed to the hospital. It turns out to be an ectopic pregnancy. "That was very tough to accept”
The marriage reaches an end and she also has to leave Canada. She can no longer have children. "The whole rataplan was removed. I would have been quite happy to have a son. A daughter I would have pushed back.... too much competition if she became a teenager."
Bisexual
"I am bisexual, had a lesbian girlfriend for years," Xaviera continues. "I don't believe in monogamy. But I think a lot of people do live monogamously for fear of losing or hurting their partner."
Nevertheless, she can be jealous. "I'd rather my lover did it with ten women one night than with one woman ten nights. Because then you really have a relationship."
Initially, she falls for older, intellectual preferably Jewish men, who resemble her father. Later on women with her mother's elegance and boys who could be her son. One is even 25 years younger. "'I'll just give up hope of grandchildren,' his mother said.
Again the doorbell rings and a couple enters. Their eyes pass mesmerized by the paintings and relics from an eventful life. This living room has even hosted theatre performances, concerts, dinners and clothes giveaway parties. Xaviera switches effortlessly into French. "Bonjour! What kind of dog is that? A chihuahua? What time do you want breakfast? Half past eight. Très bien."
My grave
"Yes, I speak five languages. Walking along the beach, my father always taught me a new language and of course, my parents also took me on many vacations all over the world," Xaviera muses.
Death beckons. But first I want to publish a few more books. And a column about sex in LINDA magazine also seems like a good idea to her. "What would my sex tip be? Keep the humour in it, don't be so serious."
She takes off her red earrings. "I've always been fascinated by death. Because I'm a war child, I guess. So many times I've tried, but they've all failed."
"I don't look up to death. I don't believe there is anything after this. On my grave they may put: 'Here rests Xaviera, she lived a full life'."