The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

9. CALL ME MADAM

For two months after returning from Puerto Rico I operated as an independent call girl, or loner, as they are known, until it struck me that this was an unsatisfactory way to earn a living.

Loners make a maximum of $200 from an average of four customers a night, and their income depends on pleasing a loyal but limited clientele which does not demand too much in the way of variety.

However, in order to give a client an occasional change of face, they form into tight little groups and exchange dates among themselves. For example, Gloria will send a customer to Sandy, who will send one back to her. But if Sandy cannot reciprocate, she must pay Gloria a madam’s fee of usually 40 percent of what the client paid her.

Working this way, the girls protect themselves to a certain extent from the competition, but it’s only a matter of time before some pretty young newcomer squeezes in to the circle and seduces away their business.

I recognized this john-swapping activity as bringing in a lot of new faces but no extra money, and that in the end, loners could only be losers. More to the point, I believed I had the qualities it takes to be a successful madam: aggressive leadership, a head for figures, and a matchless stamina. I can get by on four or five hours’ sleep a night for an entire year if necessary.

But above all I had what I call the “madam instinct”: the ability to know when to be bitchy or soft, the diplomacy to handle difficult clients, good hostess skills, and a sense of humor.

And ever since I left the straight life behind, I’d wanted to become a star in this business. So in the summer of 1970 I decided to become not just a madam – but the biggest in New York.

The first thing I had to do was to find a good location to open up shop. Working as a loner is one thing, and it’s a rare Manhattan building that does not have at least one discreet house hooker, but finding a place to open a lively brothel was a different story.

The ideal building, first of all, has to have the proper climate: cool. This means that the management and staff will tolerate, cooperate, and even protect you as long as you cross their palms with silver.

However, this can go too far, and there is one luxury high-rise in the East Fifties with such an army of cooperative doormen and lobby staff that it was costing Georgette Harcourte almost $500 each month, before rent, when she operated there.

There are several buildings in Manhattan’s smart East Side which are known to tolerate active brothels, one of which harbors so many it is called the “vertical whorehouse.” This building, located on York Avenue in the Seventies, advertises in the real-estate columns of The New York Times as having “the ultimate in services and conveniences.” Another building riddled with brothels is on Sutton Place, but as far as I could see, these addresses were no longer cool – they were red hot, with the police watching them like hawks.

It took some searching, but eventually I found the perfect place, a one-bedroom apartment in the East Fifties on a commercial floor of a semicommercial building – which meant there would be no neighbors to worry about after office hours. Initially I wanted a modest apartment which would keep my overhead down. I knew that I could utilize the living room as well as the bedroom for entertaining my customers.

The next step was to recruit staff, and believe it or not, honest, hard-working hookers are hard to find. There were girls around who worked the cheap houses, but they were mostly hardened creatures, and I would not then, nor will I now, ever use a girl who has no class. I don’t want street hookers, because their mentality is too cheap. I have a classy clientele who pay high prices for class. If a man would never pick up a girl in the street, why should I expect him to go with a street hooker?

At one point I hired a girl who had worked in a cheap house, and as a result, got exactly what I should have expected. Cheap behavior. In this case I relaxed my policy because the girl, Misty, was outwardly attractive. But when she undressed, there were stretch marks all over her body from children she gave birth to when she was fourteen and fifteen. At nineteen, when she came to me, she was already used up. And I soon found out her niceness was a very thin veneer.

As is my practice with new girls, I gave Misty a pleasant, attractive man as her first customer. The man, a stockbroker, was slightly drunk, but the easy-to-handle type.

Misty retired to the bedroom with him, but within five minutes dramatically reappeared, charging stark naked into the living room, cursing and swearing.

So I went inside and walked into a screaming match between the customer and Misty. “Listen,” I cried, taking the customer’s side, “you’re not working in a twenty-five-dollar whorehouse, so don’t behave like a whore.”

“Goddamnit!” she screamed. “I’ve already taken care of that bastard, and now he wants some more.”

It is my philosophy that a man is entitled to more than five minutes of a girl’s time, and even if he climaxes quickly, he can expect to be treated warmly and even babied and washed up, if that’s what he wants.

Misty quieted down and promised to cooperate, but her background was too strong, and twice next day I had complaints that she was a hard, cold bitch. So I had to dismiss her.

The others who were not attached to madams already usually had pimps behind them, and pimps are bad news because sooner or later they try to move in on your business.

In the beginning I did hire some girls who had pimps, and only one of them, a lovely-looking blond named Leonora, worked out well. I met Leonora through an old white pimp named Tony Roland who was known to handle the best-looking “working” girls in New York, and he saw that they were punctual and reliable. However, this particular girl had aspirations higher than hooking, and through a customer of mine, landed herself a television commercial, and her face is now splashed across the home screen.

The exceptional thing about this story is not that a prostitute achieved legitimate fame, because some major celebrities we all know began that way, but that her pimp let her get out of the business. But I suppose she is making more money now as a minor celebrity, arid in his way, Tony is still her pimp.

An unhappy case of one pimp refusing to let go of his bread-and-butter body was Greta, a small-time madam who operated from the York Avenue building and was managed by a “connected” Italian type who took care of payoffs and made sure she never got busted. But the pimp himself got sent away for armed robbery. This did not make him surrender his suffocating hold on the girl, and even from prison he managed her via two of his lieutenants, who kept her under a twenty-four-hour surveillance, even when she went out to visit her mother in Queens.

Different madams have different methods of finding girls to work for them, and on a couple of occasions I tried to follow their examples.

A lesbian madam named Janet cruises the gay-girl bars like Cookies, the Three, and Harry’s Back East to find working girls. She finds some little dyke, seduces her, invites her to live in her apartment for a few days, then persuades her to go into the game. This isn’t too difficult with lesbians, because basically they hate men and enjoy taking their money in exchange for sex.

I tried Janet’s approach one night in Maxwell’s Plum. I struck up a conversation with a gorgeous little gray-eyed straight girl in the powder room.

“You’re a very lovely-looking girl,” I said. “Are you by any chance a model?”

The girl stopped applying her lipstick. “Oh, no, I’m a legal secretary,” she said.

“How come you dress so beautifully on a secretary’s salary?” I asked. “Do you have a rich fiancé?”

“Heavens, no,” she laughed. “I wish I did, then I wouldn’t have to spend every cent I earn on clothes.”

“A girl like you should not have to work, you should have men spending money on you,” I told her. She was so delicious I would have liked to make love to her myself.

“Where can I find that?” she asked, showing casual but genuine interest.

“I know lots of rich men who would like to spoil you. Are you interested?”

“Oh, sure, I’m interested,” she said earnestly. “As long as there’s no sex involved.”

I met a cute little girl named Jenny at a gay bar, and although my intention was not exactly recruitment, it developed that way.

Jenny was twenty, looked fourteen, with short-gamin hair, and she told me she was a butch.

“It’s impossible to be butch when you are a virgin,” I explained. “You become one gradually after having sex. You might look a little tomboyish with your short hair, but you’re feminine – so let me be the butch.”

Jenny had a beautiful body, with silky pubic hair, and she turned me on tremendously. However, she wasn’t clean and fresh down there, and I had to teach her all about washing up, because she couldn’t douche, being a virgin, with her little hymen still in place.

We’d sit in a tub together, and I would play with her little titties and suck them and go down on her. I adored her so much I became protective, like a lover, toward her.

Poor little Jenny was slightly chaotic in her private life. She couldn’t keep a job, she was always broke, and at one point didn’t even have a place to stay. So I let her move in with me for a little while, but it was no atmosphere for a virgin. So I decided she had to get enough money to take care of herself and I suggested earning it from my customers.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve got a couple of johns coming up tonight. You can earn a quick fifty, and you don’t have to fuck, just blow.”

She’d never blown in her life, so I taught her on a banana, and she seemed, timidly, to get the hang of it.

That night when the two customers came up, I had decided to entertain them in the bathtub, because some men love to watch girls performing their ablutions, among other things, especially if one of them is like a little baby. But these two horny bastards got so excited seeing us in the bath, they took off their pants immediately and stuck their cocks into our mouths. All of a sudden I felt afraid for Jenny. At least these guys were Jewish and circumcised, but hers was so carried away he was being very rough.

Jenny was holding on to me like a little kitten, and she was making little choking sounds, and her neck was convulsing because he was penetrating too far. Then this bastard came down her throat, and the poor little mouse vomited and started to cry. Clearly, sweet little Jenny was not cut out for this calling.

Somehow, short of advertising in The New York Times I felt there had to be a source of enthusiastic amateurs who could be turned into gifted professionals. Quite by accident I came upon a virtual De Beers diamond field of untapped talent when a friend named Norman took me one late summer weekend to a nudist camp.

This was my first experience of en-masse nudism, and although I certainly was not inhibited, it was a case of not quite knowing where to put one’s hands, figuratively as well as literally. However, it wasn’t long before I was given my direction.

As I sat by the edge of the pool just taking in the scene, my eyes fell on a rather enchanting sight. Sitting a few yards away from me, in the middle of a group of people, was a woman with stunning red hair and a silky pubic triangle to match. As I watched, this inviting flame sparkled at me, and she moved her legs so that I could have a closer look, almost inside her vagina. And I must say that had I been a man then, my anatomy would have betrayed my mentality. As I wondered what to do next, I caught sight of the suntanned lifeguard, who had been watching the silent exchange and now gave me a wink and a beckoning look.

I walked over to where he sat, and before I spoke he said, “I can tell you how to join in with that interesting group if you want to.”

“I’d like very much to meet them,” I said.

“Very well,” he said, “they are a sort of a club, and all you need is the right introductory passwords.

“They call themselves tulips and they are French or something like that, so give it a try.”

I walked straight over to the “flame’s” circle and said, “Bonjour, madame, je m’appelle Xaviera, et je suis une tulipe de la Hollande.” “Good day, Madame. My name is Xaviera, and I am a tulip from Holland.” Little did they know how accurate that was.

A pleasant laughter went through the group, there were introductions all around, and before I could say “Adam and Eve” they invited me for a drink inside their cabana.

Six of us crowded into the small room, which contained two single beds and little else, and without too much need for formality I was soon eating my way through my flaming redhead’s pussy. She was in her forties, I guessed, but she had a nice firm body, flat stomach, and strong breasts. Her inviting vagina was warm and exciting, and my tongue darted through her curly red hair as I was stretched out between her legs. I licked and sucked her clitoris with my vibrating tongue until it was hard and erect.

Meanwhile the “flame’s” husband was standing with his face very close to the action to see exactly what it was I was doing to make his wife moan, writhe, and have multiple climaxes. Each time she was exhausted, but I would work her up into a new orgasm with my tongue, which never seemed to tire. She tasted delicious, and my face was wet, and by this time I had made her climax three times.

As I finally stopped eating her, her husband, who had been waiting, all turned on, with a big erection, put his cock into the now soaking-wet vagina of the “flame” and it was a pleasure to watch them make love.

Her whole body was perspiring, and the squishy-squashy noises turned everybody else on. Only then did I become aware of all the other people, because I was concentrating only on my “flame.” But my hunger for pussy was not yet sated and several other girls who had been turned on and were going crazy at the ecstatic pleasure the “flame” was enjoying wanted me to eat them up too.

Afterward I was exhausted, and the orgy I had started was going strong, but some of the girls and guys went for a swim to freshen up and cool off, and there I ran into my companion, Norman.

“Go inside that cabana,” I told him, “and you will have a fantastic experience.” I didn’t see Norman again for another two hours, but while I was sitting around with some of the naked females, I found it easy to convince them that their generous-spirited talents could be gainfully employed, and they agreed to become working girls at my house.

As I expected, these girls turned out to be great professionals, because they were uninhibited in their approach, yet decent types of girls.

One of my first and most successful girls was a stewardess from El Al airlines, who was very popular until she got rerouted and we lost her. Stewardesses often drift easily into the professional life as a supplemental income, starting out with having flings with married men from the first-class cabin, then asking themselves why do this for free. After a while they do regular stints in houses from Hong Kong to Helsinki, and London to Los Angeles.

Among my early girls was also a young Englishwoman, a former stewardess, recently separated from her violent American husband and just wanting to make enough money to support herself and pay for her divorce action.

How many times I wished my business were legal so I could, indeed, advertise in the employment columns of the newspapers: good pay, flexible hours, opportunity to meet lots of men.

Another madam I knew recruited her staff entirely from among bored Westchester housewives, and her house flourishes in Manhattan on a modest scale to this day. Inés was a Cuban girl who married an American, went to live in Westchester, and spent her days sitting around with other neglected wives listening to them talk about how they screwed the window’ washer, the gardener, the delivery man, and anything moving slower than three miles an hour.

“Listen,” she said to them, “if you like screwing so much, why don’t you come down to Manhattan with me and make money out of it?”

Inés herself got divorced and devoted her time to running the brothel in a midtown apartment, and the girls worked for her in rotating shifts. But she had her staff problems, too, because married women are always taking time off to go on vacation with their husbands or to have babies and hysterectomies.

I started hiring girls who had daytime jobs as secretaries and salesgirls and wanted to make some money on the side. I found they were less jaded and more enthusiastic than a “working” girl who’s been screwing her brains out ten times a day in another house. Many high-class call girls, on the other hand, are also known to be cold and businesslike.

The next step was promotion. A high-class house advertises strictly by word of mouth of satisfied customers, and never goes out soliciting.

Other areas of prostitution go to any lengths to solicit business, like the semilegit massage parlors that even put cute little girls on Lexington Avenue these days posing as poll-takers. The only answers they want are the man’s opinion of “special massage,” his name, and office telephone number.

Others, as we all know, openly harass people in the streets and hotels and even sometimes savagely attack them.

An operation like mine never approaches people, but waits for the customers to come because they’re interested. In other words, it’s a supply situation strictly catering to a demand. And as long as there is such a thing as male libido, the ostrich-attitude law notwithstanding, there will always be a demand for a high-class brothel.

For me business opened with a bang, so to speak, because I had a very good reputation in the profession as a quantity as well as quality girl.

Word spread around, and within a month or two of my opening there was almost too much business to handle in a one-bedroom apartment.

Some nights were so packed that there would be two couples using the king-sized bed at the same time, another couple in the living room using the queen-sized Castro convertible, and yet another pair in the collapsible camp bed set up in the corner.

Still others would be in the kitchen boozing and queuing up for their turn, and those who were impatient or in a hurry would sometimes settle for a blow-job in the bathroom.

By the end of the year business was so fantastically successful that I had to look for a bigger apartment. I was so happy at the way things were going that I sent out Christmas cards to my clients to let them know I was moving and that I had a “new stable” for them to look over, and the card listed my new phone number.

This move got me into a little hot water when one customer called up and said his wife had received the card and demanded to know who was Madam Xaviera and what was her stable.

“You have to get me out of the hole now,” he ranted. “I know she intends calling you up, so you’d better make sure you tell her you are a horse trainer.”

The new apartment I found was a three-bedroom place in the East Sixties in an entirely residential building, but with a cooperative door staff.

The week I signed the lease I had a phone call from my former madam and chief competitor, Madeleine, whom I had not spoken to for almost a year, since she had stopped using me. Some drunk had left my card lying around, and she found it and I can’t say I blame her for being mad at me.

However, I was not surprised to hear from her now. Through the infallible grapevine I knew that she was getting out of the business to get married for the fourth time, and her attempts to put someone in the house on a managerial basis had been disasters.

The first girl she tried was Anita, a sweet young thing who would make a perfect courtesan, but who lacked the madam instinct.

The second choice was even more naive. I never thought of Madeleine as a gullible girl, but she really goofed choosing Linda. Linda was a junkie, and the one thing you cannot tolerate in a house is drugs, because if the police find them you haven’t a leg to stand on. Blind Freddie, one of her butlers, could see that the bandages on that girl’s hands covered up the needle marks, but for some reason Madeleine didn’t.

As well as being a hard-core user, Linda was entirely chaotic in her personal life and had no idea of how to handle finances. But worse than all that, she failed the acid test – to get along with the scheming butler, Felipe. Felipe worked by day in a brokerage house in Wall Street and by night functioned as a sort of general factotum, taking hats and coats, ferrying girls to and from dates, and arranging payoffs. But I never liked or trusted the man. In my opinion he had a double tongue as well as a double life, but he had a lot of influence with Madeleine.

Felipe also was a snoop, and one day while poking around Linda’s bathroom he found her needles and other equipment and informed Madeleine, who had to let her go.

So here she was calling me up and inviting me over for coffee that same afternoon to discuss a matter “of some extreme urgency.”

There was a little sadness in me when I arrived at the elegant brownstone on East Twenty-seventh Street, to realize that one of New York’s more exciting institutions was, despite the fact it was a rival establishment, closing down.

Madeleine, immaculate and elegant as usual, answered the door, ushered me into her private sitting room, and without beating about the bush began. “I think you know why I have asked you here,” she said in her South African English.

“I have heard some talk about your retiring,” I said.

“I just got married and I am pregnant already, and I need somebody who is able to take over my operation,” she said.

“Why did you call me?” I asked.

“I’ll be quite honest and admit that I didn’t give you first offer, but after a couple of failures to keep the house operating, I have realized you are the only person in New York who can run it.

“I’ve watched how you built yourself up from a little secretary who used to do scenes in her lunch hour to become one of the best madams in town in less than a year, and I admire you for it. I think you are ready to take over my business, and the only question now is, do you want it?”

Madeleine’s was known to be the biggest business in town. So by acquiring it I would become New York’s reigning madam.

However, I was not interested in Felipe, whom I never trusted, or the five-story brownstone. I much preferred the relaxed atmosphere of walking from room to room to supervise, instead of climbing all those flights of stairs.

“How much do you want for your black book and your telephone lines?” I asked.

Madeleine wanted a down payment of $5,000 and the balance to be paid when the phone lines were installed in my house. Hers was an incoming business, which is why they are known as call girls.

Having taken over Madeleine’s business, the first thing I had to do was reorganize her black book to conform with my own listing system. Her book had hundreds of listings of clients, their price, credit rating, erotic preferences or aberrations, and sometimes even their dimensions. Most of the men, naturally, had aliases or were given them by Madeleine.

Some men were listed by their preference in liquor, such as Red Label, Mr. Cutty, or Mr. Sark. Some invented their own aliases, like Marco Polo, Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, and the more ordinary Mr. White, Mr. Black, Mr. Brown, Mr. Green.

Some of the names these aliases disguised were very famous indeed. The book was such a celebrity-packed register it could make the society columns look like a truck driver’s time sheet.

While I had come to be regarded as madam to the Jewish community, Madeleine was more or less known as madam to the WASP, so when I took over her business I became a force for religious brotherhood.

Her book was basically made up of “live ones” – which meant men who still actively patronized a brothel, and not some old fuddy-duddies who could no longer get it up. There were exceptions, however, as I found when I called up to advise her clients of the change of management, and I had one or two embarrassing moments.

One man, Mr. Isaacson, did not answer his phone, but the creaky old voice that did said: “This is Mrs. Isaacson speaking, Mr. Isaacson has been dead for four years.”

A Mr. Morriss said: “You should have called me up ten years ago. I’m almost seventy-five now, and I can’t get it up anymore.”

Another man didn’t have an age problem, but didn’t thank me for calling. “My dear madam,” Mr. Purgavie icily informed me, “that number dates back to the days when I was a wild bachelor around town. These days I, am a respectable and happily married man, so don’t ever call me at my home again… but here’s my office number.”

To those who were receptive to my call I would speak as follows: “Hi, I’m Xaviera Hollander, I’m from Holland, I’m twenty-five years of age [I’d lie a couple of years], I live in a beautiful three-bedroom apartment in midtown, and I have taken over the management of Madeleine’s’ business because she has retired to have a baby.

“Why don’t you drop over for coffee and a chat with us and see if you like the atmosphere, and if you do, we would be glad to have you as a guest occasionally.”

With Madeleine’s names and my enterprise, I made back my original investment in two months.

The book was such a little gold mine that it should have been locked in Fort Knox, but because it was required by the phone at all times to check out a customer’s credentials, I could not give it the protection it deserved.

As an indication of how important it is to take care of a book like this, I had a bad experience shortly after I acquired it – because I hired a girl who was managed by a black pimp.

The reason I acted against my better judgment was basically because Roberta was a college graduate, which I found was an interesting attribute for a hooker; she was also clean, pleasant, and attractive in a “Miss Cornfed U.S.A.” way.

A week after Roberta started working for me I had the opportunity to go out for a leisurely dinner, which is a rare luxury when you become a madam. However, this was a Friday night in the summer, and business was relatively quiet. In charge I left my trustworthy roommate, a working girl named Corinne.

I was gone no more than a couple of hours, but when I returned to the house it was an agitated Corinne who greeted me.

“Come into your room,” she whispered: “I have something important to tell you.”

She was worried about the honesty of Roberta. “I needed the black book to check out a caller, and discovered it and Roberta were both missing. Your bathroom door was locked for about an hour, and when Roberta reappeared, so did the book,” she told me.

I called Roberta in and accused her point-blank of copying names from my book, which she hastily denied.

“Then how did the book get in the bathroom; did it grow legs and walk?”

Roberta gave me some unsatisfactory explanation. “I cannot tolerate disloyalty to the house or to the madam,” I said, “so I will have to ask you to leave.”

Four times the next day her black pimp, Henri, phoned up begging me to take her back. He also sent me two bunches of yellow roses. He realized my house was the best in town, and nowhere else would she make a certain $150-$200 a night.

Again, against my better judgment; I agreed to give her another chance on the condition that she tighten up her game and not try any further deceit.

A few days later, as I was sitting in my bedroom going over accounts, I could hear the extension phone in the living room being repeatedly used. Normally I would never snoop on my girls, but Roberta was around, and I was no longer sure of her. Besides, it was my business phone she was tying up. As I lifted the receiver I heard her talking with another girl.

“Mr. Brennan doesn’t seem to know you, Roberta, and he wants more detail,” the other girl, evidently a little hooker, was saying. To which Roberta replied, “Just tell him you have been referred by Madam Xaviera.”

Not only was it my phone, in my house, but it was also one of my most regular customers. They were obviously approaching one of the names she had copied from my black book. I hit the ceiling.

I was so angry I was shaking, and Corinne had to restrain me from going out and throwing her bodily into the street.

“Get dressed, get out, and don’t bother to have Henri send me any yellow roses or make any attempt to contact me ever again!” was my farewell to Roberta.

Thankfully that kind of dishonesty is unusual, and generally speaking, my girls are very loyal to me. Because of our closeness in ages, we are more like girl friends than the traditional madam-prostitute relationship.

Whenever I can, I give the girls advice and assistance in both their professional and private lives.

It is known that most madams are bisexual, and I am no exception. Whenever a new girl joins me, I usually take her to bed and teach her some basic tricks of the trade, like how to eat, and simple hygiene.

Like most madams, I have my favorites and might tend to give her the pick of the customers or the best work, but each girl is dear to me, and I try always to be fair. I can also say I hardly ever cheat on my girls like some madams who tell them a customer was a $50 date, when in reality he paid $100 and she kept $75 and gave the girl only $25,

As much as I give them guidance in their professional life, if they require it personally I am there to help, too. Sometimes, if I think it is justified, I offer advice uninvited, as in the case of Sarah, a former employee of Madeleine’s and for a while a roommate of mine.

Sarah was a sweet-natured but lazy girl who earned the nickname “Dopey” because she was forever swallowing “up” and “down” pills. As a result, she was always half-doped and did nothing constructive with her private life. I hated to see such a waste, so I gave her the lecture: “Sarah, I would like to see you take more of an interest in life. Why don’t you pick up a book now and again and read it instead of lying around all day?”

As head of the household, occasionally I have to be tough with the girls, and with the customers as well, if one complains about the other.

If a customer tells me that a girl is uncooperative or crude, I call her aside and ask is something wrong. If more than one man complains, I have to caution her, and if it happens too often, I usually have to let her go.

On the other hand, if a girl complains that a customer is rough or drunk and giving a girl a hard time, I have to handle that, too. All she has to do is slip into one of the bathrooms that adjoin the bedrooms, call me discreetly in, and tell me.

I don’t scream or bitch the men the way Georgette would do with her drunks, or the way Madeleine would do to a man who rejected her. I knock on the bedroom door, respectfully request permission to enter, and tell him the young lady says he is treating her badly.

If I see her complaint is justified, I ask him to dress – or have a massage first if he wants to, and a coffee – but to leave the premises as soon as possible and come back again next week when he is sober.

The madam herself, generally speaking, is too busy to get involved in any sexual activity unless it is a complicated bondage scene that perhaps only she is qualified to do. This is especially so now that the complex call-line system has been installed and the client books have all been reorganized to correspond with each of the four different color phones.

So if a man specifically requests to have me and is willing to pay the higher fee, I might go to bed with him, but he has to put up with the phones ringing and me jumping up to answer them. Sometimes the phone interruptions can be a beautiful tease, and I laugh it off with, “Oh, darling, at least you can’t say I’ve rushed you, because we are going to start all over again.”

But if the coitus interruptus makes him mad and he says, “Screw the damn phones,” I give him this little talk: “Darling, you’re so nice and hard now, so cool it, cool it off a little bit, and we’ll start all over again.”

One great privilege of being a madam as opposed to a working girl is that she can choose for herself any customer she would like to go with. If a groovy-looking guy walks in, I can snap him up for myself. The perfect situation I try to engineer is for a great-looking guy to pay for a three-way scene with me and my favorite girl of the moment. That way I get to swing with them both and make money as well.

Being a successful madam has its liabilities as well as its rewards, as I tell any girl who wants to go into the business. One of the liabilities is that your time is no longer your own. When a working girl completes her “shift,” she is free to meet her boyfriend or husband and relax as she likes. When I was a single I took off Wednesday and Saturday, nights.

It so happens I love the work I am doing.

Nowadays there are few days off, but if I did not have day-long phone contact with clients and friends, I would sometimes go stir-crazy.

When fatigue builds up and I simply have to take a break, I try to fly off to Miami, Las Vegas, or the Caribbean for a few days – provided I can find a substitute madam to take over for me.

It is almost impossible to find a girl who is smart enough to handle the phones and the customers, sufficiently interested to see that all goes well, but not so ambitious that, in your absence, she will try to take away half the business for herself.

Last July 4 when I wanted to go to Curaçao for the long weekend, I had the choice of the Argentine girls who work for me or the Canadian girls, who lived in but who were recent arrivals from Montreal – and I could use none of them. First of all, for some reason, customers don’t want to hear a Spanish-accented voice answer the phone. I have no personal prejudices, but to them all Spanish accents are Puerto Rican. As for the Canadian girls, I knew that their dedication to the business did not go beyond making a quick few bucks.

The girl I finally found was Wanda, a professor of art and history at a New York university who had a good head on her shoulders, but whose only ambition in prostitution was to supplement her legitimate earnings by coming over now and again to make a quick hundred, and out.

Wanda is also honest and hard-working, but, as I found out when I returned, not tough enough. She was not able to control the girls, and I learned that a little fist fight even broke out between a Canadian and an Argentine over whether a man had a credit rating or not.

Also my books were all upside down and reshuffled, and I vowed that the next time I took a trip I would put in a recording of my voice over the line, although this is a thing I hate to do because I feel a responsibility to be available to my clients.

Madeleine used to shut up shop at three A.M. and take the phones off the hook until noon, but many of my men feel my place is their second home and that I am there twenty-four hours a day. Some of them even want to come over for breakfast dates, and many who work in the neighborhood show up for luncheon meetings. Instead of going out to eat, they jump over here and have food sent up. Then I have the cocktail business, which is relatively quiet until eleven P.M. The biggest hours are eleven to four A.M., and sometimes later.

Another thing I miss now that I am a madam is the personal touch I used to have with a man. By being in bed and making love – on the order of the madam, of course – that half-hour brought me closer to the man and his problems than anything else.

I miss the intimacy now that I am a madam walking around in a Pucci gown, putting people in bedrooms, collecting money, sometimes having to be brusque or abrupt to keep things moving along.

Lately I find I give away freebies every night just to feel the closeness of a man. So most nights I pick out the best-looking man, preferably in his thirties, who does not have a wife waiting for him and does not care to go back to his hotel alone. I let him wait around until I close shop, have him sleep over, because I hate to sleep alone no matter how late it is. But being so late at night, we are usually both so exhausted that it is just a quick screw and falling asleep as the sun comes up.

The thing I detest most about that situation is when he wakes up in the morning with a beautiful hard-on, perfect for making gentle love; he has just enough time to give me another quick screw before taking the early plane to Houston.

Then my phone rings, and somebody wants a breakfast date, and if I am lucky, one of my roommates will do it, but if none of the girls has stayed over, I’ll do it myself, because I hate to turn one of my men down.

You can call me mercenary, or call me madam, but, as I always tell my customers – just call me anytime!