Biography
Hollander was born Vera de Vries in Soerabaja, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), to a Dutch Jewish father and a French/German mother. She spent the first three years of her life in a Japanese internment camp.
In her early 20s, she left Amsterdam for Johannesburg, South Africa, where her stepsister lived. There she met and became engaged to John Weber, an American economist. When the engagement was broken off, she left South Africa for New York.
In 1968, she left her job as the secretary of the Dutch consulate in Manhattan to become a call girl, where she made $1,000 a night. A year later she opened her own brothel called the Vertical Whorehouse and soon became New York City's leading madam. In 1971, she was arrested for prostitution by New York police and was forced to leave the United States.
In 1971 Hollander published a memoir, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, Robin Moore co authored with her on this book and came up with the catchy title Happy Hooker while Yvonne Dunleavy wrote the book . The book was notable for its frankness by the standards of the time, and is considered a landmark of positive writing about sex. Hollander details in the book her life as a liberal and open-minded girl. She states that during the start of her career she did not ask for cash in exchange for sex, but her partners voluntarily gave her money and other presents.
Hollander has since written a number of other books and produced plays in Amsterdam. Her latest book, Child No More, is the heartfelt story of losing her mother. For 35 years, she wrote an advice column for Penthouse magazine called Call Me Madam. For several years in the 1970s, Hollander lived in Toronto, where she married a Canadian antique dealer and was a regular fixture in the downtown core.
In the early 1970s, she recorded a primarily spoken-word album titled Xaviera! for the Canadian GRT Records label (GRT 9230-1033), 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 somewhat autobiographical My Pleasure is My Business. For at least 8 years, beginning in 2005, she operated Xaviera's Happy House, a bed and breakfast within her Amsterdam home.
Hollander says she "turned gay" around 1997, establishing a long-term relationship with a Dutch poetess called Dia. In January 2007 she married a Dutch man 10 years her junior, Philip de Haan, in Amsterdam. In the meantime an entire musical about her life has been written and composed by Richard Hansom and Warren Wills. Also a documentary has been released by Robert Dunlap called Xaviera Hollander, a portrait of a sexual revolutionary. This documentary has won many awards all over the world.
Read more about this topic: Xaviera Hollander
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)