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FRONT FLAP:
The fact that my father was a man who exuded charm, and attracted women effortlessly, must have affected me long before I was conscious of his sexuality. But as far back as I can remember, my infant adulation was tinged with a precocious sensuality. I wanted to be near him-nearer than my mother, whom I would have ousted from his affection if I had had the means.
In the early 1970s-between the dawn of the sexual revolution and the disillusion of Watergate-a young Dutch woman named Xaviera de Vries was transformed overnight into an international celebrity and sex symbol as the author of The Happy Hooker, her racy chronicle of life as a high-class New York madam. As Xaviera Hollander, she became the voice of that era's new sexual freedoms-even as her book was banned and she herself was deported to Amsterdam in the wake of the scandal. Yet sexual escapades form only a small part of this woman's remarkable life story-a story she reveals for the first time in this thoughtful and involving memoir.
It was a life that begun in terror. Two months after her birth she was confined in a women's prison camp during the WWII Japanese occupation of Indonesia; her father, a doctor, was also imprisoned nearby. By some met the horrors of their treatment-and the precious nature of their bond were imprinted forever on her psyche. from her childhood forward, Hollander traces it was shaped by the example of her parents: her father a dapper and witty Jewish psychologist and intellectual, her mother the gorgeous daughter of conventional German parents.
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