Xaviera Hollander

Xaviera Hollander (born 15 June 1943) is a former call girl, madam, and author. She came to be best known for her best-selling memoir The Happy Hooker: My Own Story. 2Early life Hollander was born Xaviera "Vera" de Vries in Soerabaja, Dutch East Indies, which later became part of present-day Indonesia, to a Dutch Jewish physician father and a mother of French and German descent. She spent the first three years of her life in a Japanese internment camp. In her early 20s, she left Amsterdam for Johannesburg, 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. 2Career In 1968 she resigned from her job as 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, the Vertical Whorehouse, and soon became New York City's leading madam. In 1971 she was arrested for prostitution by New York police and forced to leave the United State