THE HAPPY HOOKER: Portrait of a Sexual Revolutionary

ichannel premiere Dec. 13: Award-winning documentary looks at the life and times of Seventies icon Xaviera Hollander

It was the book that everybody read – even if nobody wanted to admit to it.

Published in 1971, Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker was one of the landmarks of the sexual revolution. Along with Deep Throat, Last Tango in Paris and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, this best-selling memoir helped to push the frank discussion of sex out of the bedroom and into the cultural mainstream.

On Monday, Dec. 13 at 9 pm ET/PT, Canada’s ichannel presents the documentary Xaviera Hollander: The Happy Hooker: Portrait of a Sexual Revolutionary.

Directed by Robert Dunlap and co-written by Hollander, this 90-minute account of her life and times reveals how the young woman who once earned the prize for best secretary in the Netherlands became a $1,000-a-night call girl, and eventually one of the great cultural icons of the Seventies.

Born Xaviera de Vries in the Dutch East Indies during the Second World War, Hollander spent the first two years of her life in a Japanese internment camp. In 1964, she moved to New York City, where she became a secretary at the Dutch consulate. But in time she found a more lucrative line of work: prostitution.

By the dawn of the 1970s, Hollander had established herself as Manhattan’s best known, most glamorous and most successful madam. Legal troubles forced her to leave the U.S. in 1971, but the publication of The Happy Hooker in that year brought enduring fame and fortune.

Shockingly explicit for its time, The Happy Hooker has sold more than 15 million copies. The primary appeal was titillation, of course: the book is chock-a-block with tales of lesbianism and fetishism from the New York swingers’ scene. But Hollander’s self-portrayal as a confident, independent woman fully in control of her own sexual fulfillment was in tune with the emerging feminist movement, and has given The Happy Hooker a lasting significance. You can make the case that Carrie and Samantha from Sex and the City are Hollander’s spiritual descendants.

Since then, Hollander has enjoyed a successful career as an author, publishing nearly 20 different works of fiction and non-fiction – from good-sex guides to a moving memoir of her mother’s life and death – and contributing a column to Penthouse for more than 30 years. These days she divides her time between Spain and the Netherlands, produces theatre and runs a popular bed and breakfast (“Xaviera’s Happy House”) in Amsterdam.

Canadians, incidentally, may recall that Xaviera Hollander lived in Toronto during the 1970s. She was a fixture of the city’s downtown scene for several years, and starred in a big-screen sex farce, My Pleasure Is My Business, directed by the King of Kensington himself, Al Waxman.

Visit the Happy Hooker online at www.xavierahollander.com

Xaviera Hollander, The Happy Hooker: Portrait of a Sexual Revolutionary has screened at film festivals worldwide, and earned a number of awards, including Best Feature Documentary at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. To learn more, visit www.thehappyhookerdocumentary.com.