The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

5. WHAT’S A GIRL LIKE ME?

By that bleak February day in 1969 when Carl left for Brazil, my confidence in myself as a woman and a human being was at an all-time low.

I was battle-scarred from two whole years of being in love with and faithful to a man who cheated, humiliated, and finally abandoned me. And for the first time in my reasonably well-adjusted life I had an inferiority complex you could photograph. I was almost a candidate for suicide.

I desperately needed warmth and reassurance, and an obvious easy way was to hear men praise me as a lover. I had thrown Carl out of my house after showing him the letter from Indonesian Penny. He called several times to apologize but I hung up on him. His plane was to take off at 4 P.M. that same afternoon and by that time I was in bed screwing my brains out with a man I’d met in Maxwell’s Plum.

This was the first man I had been with since I first met my fiancé, and to tell you the truth, it was a dismal failure. We were both looking for something neither of us got. The baby-faced lawyer wanted a no-strings, uncomplicated roll in the feathers, and I wanted an escape from my misery. But instead of feeling elated with his loving, I burst into tears and sent him away.

Nevertheless, I decided my stolen self-esteem was in a bed somewhere in Manhattan, so for the next six months I cut a sexual swath a mile wide across the city.

After work each day I would go to the bars where the gray-flannel set hung out, like Ratazzi, P. J. Clarke’s, Ad Lib, Charley-O’s, or Maxwell’s Plum. Charley-O’s was downstairs in my building, and the junior-executive types would go there to get laid before the last train to Westport.

These men would all be full of promises about how they could introduce you to this job, or get you cut-rate travel or whatever it was they thought you might want. Meanwhile, you’d end up in bed with them, and when you’d call next day they were always out.

My roommate, Sonia, who knew me from the suffering days when I was living with Carl, took a genuine big-sisterly interest in me, but sometimes she would get angry enough to call me a nymphomaniac.

She was nine years older than me, unmarried, and disillusioned with life; her retreat from reality was the bottle, in the same way mine was sex. At night she would quietly drink herself into her happier world while I would screw myself into mine.

I would cruise the First Avenue singles bars where Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens secretaries go looking for marriage and end up settling for a night in bed. My scene was to drag home any Tom, Harry, or Dick who had a pleasant face and a tolerable manner.

I went on that way until around August, when things got so depressingly repetitive and aimless I thought I would go around the bend. As providence had it, one of the junior execs actually came through with a round-trip ticket to Miami.

It was just the break I was waiting for, and although I knew nobody there, the change of scene would help my discontent.

The long weekend was spent swimming, sunbathing, and mixing in with a happy crowd of people from Miami. I even met a nice hillbilly who was the manager of an advertising agency. Vernon, from nearby Dinner Key, owned a luxurious yacht and he soon had me as a housemate on his boat. We took trips with some of his young friends and had orgies almost every day. It was fun to go topless and shock the passing captains with their families. By Sunday night I was a much calmer, happier girl than the one who had arrived there the previous Wednesday evening.

There was only one small moment of drama in the whole trip, and that was when I was leaving. Somehow the airline had mixed up the tickets, and for a while it was uncertain whether I would be able to have my scheduled seat.

For some reason the ticket clerk was giving me a hard time, and I guessed it was because the man who was double-booked was much more influential than I. He sure looked it; he was an expensively dressed, distinguished-looking Englishman.

For ten minutes I argued furiously that I had to be back in time for work the next day, and finally won a place. However, I was surprised to see the tall Englishman – when we got off the plane at La Guardia – walking purposefully toward me.

“Hi.” He smiled. “My name is Evelyn St. John; I am English and I live in Paris and I’m here in New York for a week.” A mouthful for openers.

“I am also ashamed of myself for hoping you would get bumped off the flight because I was after your seat,” he continued. “So by way of apology, would you let me take you out on the town tonight?”

I felt immediately attracted to him. He was charming, handsome, with prematurely gray hair, and I could also see he was Jewish, which I liked as well.

“It’s about midnight now,” I said, “so what can we do?”

“Let’s start off with a drink at my hotel and take it from there.”

In the taxi on the way to the Hilton Evelyn said, “Why not check in with me tonight? Are you married or single?”

“No, I’m not married, I live with a square roommate. I like you and have nothing to lose.” As has been established, I daresay, I was never very inhibited about sex.

That night I moved in with him, and he became the first man I felt anything for in the six months since Carl had left me. We made love all through the night, and in the morning I went straight from his bed to my office, without a wink of sleep.

Love can elate you in a way that a month of early nights never can, and I confess I thought I was in love.

Evelyn was what I could only describe as a truly elegant lover. Considerate, controlled, yet very passionate. You could tell he had penetrated the best beds of Europe in the arms of the most sophisticated women.

Not that he consciously let it be known. Quite the contrary. He had the most convincing way of breathing undying love when he was on that paradise stroke. He was that perfect combination men expect only in a woman. A lady in the living room and a nymphomaniac in bed.

Evelyn was witty, urbane, generous – everything Carl and the others were not.

For the next week I spent the days dreaming about the nights. After work each day I would float across the half-block between my office and the Hilton to meet my lover for romantic dinners, movies, Broadway shows, and passion. It was a fantastic relationship, sexual and cerebral, and no wonder I was in love – or thought I was – and showed it in every way.

But Evelyn had another way of demonstrating his feeling for me. A way I have since learned is typical of people of his breeding and background, and, to my horror, he exposed me to it toward the end of the week after a romantic dawn.

I remember vividly the setting for the conversation that was to change the entire course of my straight and simple life. He was leaning back against the pillow, and I was cradled in his arms.

“Xaviera,” he began in his slow, Oxford-accented English. “I can never tell you in words just how wonderful you have made this week in New York.”

I shuddered at the reminder that today was Friday and on Sunday he would leave. “To show you what you have meant, I have something for you,” he went on.

“What is it?” I asked dreamily. I was always on a cloud after we made love.

“Here,” he said, and handed me a hundred-dollar bill.

I froze. I was shocked, hurt, and speechless with anger. At least if this was not love on his part he had no right to make it seem like prostitution.

My mother had always told me not to accept money from any man except the man I marry. “If a man friend insists on giving you something, ask for flowers or chocolates,” was her advice.

“Evelyn,” I said when the numbness wore off, “you make me feel like a whore. I don’t want your hundred dollars; here it is, please take it back.”

He was genuinely surprised, but he still persisted. “Xaviera, I know you are supporting your parents, so take it and at least give it to them.” He took an envelope from the drawer, asked me to address it to their home in Holland, put the money inside, got dressed, and went out to mail it. That made me feel better, because I did not use the money myself.

Next day Evelyn took me to Saks and bought me $800 worth of dresses, shoes, and handbags and whatever I wanted. And, this, to me, was the really tremendous gesture of a gentleman, and he was the first man who ever bought me anything of value.

During my engagement to Carl I was the one who spent half my salary to give him a birthday or Christmas present, or, when I could not afford it, spent hours writing poems for him. He gave me nothing in return. Except his insincere promises.

So Evelyn had, truly impressed me with his behavior, and he gave me some advice before he left for Paris the next day.

“A girl like you should let men spoil her,” he said. “You are worth a lot more than a dinner here and a show there. You should be kept and cared for financially.

“You have all the qualities a man should pay for. You’re attractive, intelligent, good company, happy, gay and on top of everything, you genuinely love sex.”

Previously I had met girls who had sugar daddy types in tile background, but I was always too proud to ask anyone for anything. And, even though I had been shocked when Evelyn St. John gave me the money, after he treated me so nicely it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be so bad to have this happen more often.

It would have been wonderful if Evelyn had asked me to return to Paris with him, but of course I understood why he could not. He was, after all, a married man.

But after he left, I went back to happily screwing my brains out all over town and having men take advantage of my constant horniness.

My job at the consulate was really boring me now, too, because it was routine and unchallenging.

The rare bright moments were when I met some nice man who called in for legal or some other kind of advice. One of them, a Dutchman named Dirk, called up one day to find out about getting an entry visa to my consulate’s country.

As we grooved on each other’s voices on the phone, I got the impression he was very handsome because he certainly sounded it; and after talking for about ten minutes he said, “Forget about business – why don’t we meet today for lunch?”

I met Dirk at a restaurant across from Rockefeller Center, and while he was not exactly as handsome as he somehow sounded, he was a charming, spontaneous kind of man.

At lunch we talked about his private life and his twenty-year-old marriage that now existed only in name and how he just lived for his job and his children.

I asked him bluntly what he did about his sex life. Did he have a girl friend?

“No, I just use call girls when I need them,” he said.

At that time, to show you how innocent I was in some areas, I did not exactly know what call girls were.

I knew they were not listed in the Yellow Pages, but I thought it was a service you called if you wanted a black girl with big tits or a Chinese girl with no tits, on a rental basis and not for a one-shot session. More like an employment agency.

Dirk was a man in his mid-forties, so I supposed men at that time of life did that kind of thing.

When lunch was over, he suggested we meet after work to go somewhere and be alone. I willingly agreed. After all, I had made it with half of Rockefeller Center, so why deny my own countryman?

It so happened that Sonia was away on three weeks’ leave, so I suggested my place at six P.M. He was eager, and I was looking forward to some exciting sex with a man who was a nice, humorous person.

But things weren’t to be exactly as I expected. It turned out that Dirk was utterly impotent and got his kicks freaking out on the phone with other girls in between performing cunnilingus on me.

After an hour he had to leave, but I could tell he had had a good time, and even though he was no Valentino, I enjoyed his company also.

And recent history repeated itself that night. After he got dressed, Dirk took out his wallet and handed me $150.

I was dumbfounded, but not for the same reason as with Evelyn St: John. The amount was what astounded me. Evelyn gave me $100 for a whole week of making love and Dirk gave me more for an hour of not making it!

He also gave me a similar lecture to Evelyn’s, but something even more constructive.

“Xaviera, if you are going to make money out of this, we have to help you meet the right people. And you should. Why give all that pleasure away?”

By this time I was in complete agreement. “Okay,” I said, “let’s do something about it.”

Dirk dialed a number, and a raucous female voice picked up on the other end. “Who is it?” she yelled.

“It’s Dirk here, Pearl, and I have someone I think you ought to meet.” Pearl Greenberg was a small-time madam, and Dirk was a sometime client of hers.

He told her all about me and recommended we get together for the benefit of us both.

“Sure,” she screamed into the phone in a happy voice. “Get her over here, and she can start work tonight.”

Dirk gave me an address down on the wrong part of Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, where I had to be at eight o’clock. I had one problem, though – I didn’t know what prostitutes wear to work. I didn’t want to wear what my image of them dictated: wigs, heavy makeup, tight clothes, and black stockings. “To hell with it,” I thought. “I may behave as a prostitute, but I’ll be damned if I’ll dress like one.” So I went Aura natura in the blouse and skirt I had on.

The cab dropped me off at a shabby brownstone, and I ascended five flights of dusty stairs and knocked on my first whorehouse door.

“Who is it?” Pearl’s raspy voice came through the door.

“It’s Xaviera, you were expecting me,” I called back. After a long minute of rattling of chains and shuttling of locks, the door fell open to reveal a homely big-boned girl, naked except for an Afro wig, with pendulous breasts threatening her ample waistline.

“Pleased to meetcha,” Pearl said. “Ontray voo.”

I entered this whorish place with red curtains, and ragged carpet, and very messy with scarves, wigs, shortie pajamas, and assorted lingerie all over the place, and a projector for dirty movies.

In the middle of the room, lying face up on a sheet, was a fat, ugly Jewish man naked as the proverbial jaybird. Pearl had obviously been working him up, because his equipment was pointing skyward like the Statue of Liberty.

“Okay, this is your first victim.” My hostess gestured to him. “Go ahead, baby, and fuck him.” So I took off my clothes and jumped on top and fucked my brains out, and I really enjoyed it, because he turned out to be a nice person and his cock was as hard as a cock should be.

I could see he enjoyed me, too, and Pearl was out of her mind with the excitement of discovery – as she told everyone in Manhattan on the phone in the next hour. “I’ve got this lovely Yiddishe madel from Holland who loves sex and will do anything you want,” she broadcast.

So that was the beginning of a pleasant if not too profitable relationship with Pearl. She was what we call a “mensch” in Yiddish, good-hearted, good-humored, spontaneous, and warm.

Pearl had a black pimp somewhere in the background who kept her more or less on the poverty line. Her clients were mostly men from the garment district, not the bosses, but the middle-management guys who paid only $25 or $50 tops. I remember times when I would service my clients in their workrooms after the staff had left for the day.

The men, in threes or fours, would pull two racks of dresses around to make an L-shaped screen and put some other garments on the floor and make love to me one by one.

Facilities were never the best, and one of them would always bring a toilet roll to use in lieu of towels or showers. After I stood up following one of those two-hour sessions I would have imprinted on my back impressions of zippers, hooks and eyes, buttons, and any other trimmings in their current line.

Pearl’s financial arrangement with me was forty-sixty percent, so for every $25 date I got $15. It wasn’t much, but in quantity it did make a difference to my $150 from the consulate job.

For the first three weeks I was able to take customers back to the apartment while Sonia was still out of town, but when she returned things became tough. I had to take them either to Pearl’s whory whorehouse all the way downtown, or borrow a crummy room belonging to a fag friend and buy him a shirt or a bottle of after-shave as payment now and again.

Obviously that was not a satisfactory arrangement, and I still remember standing in the street weary and cold at three A.M. trying to get a taxi after a grueling night’s work.

I had already solved the daytime transportation problem the way all Dutch people do, by buying a bicycle from my first earned money with Pearl. I would ride around to my lunchtime and early-evening assignments on this and save time and money.

When I first went into the business I was extremely naive and not very discreet, probably because I saw no harm in what I was doing. From the beginning I could justify to myself what the whole thing was about. However, the Saturday afternoon before Sonia came home I was in for a nasty experience, because I had failed to cover my tracks. Two customers had just left, and while expecting another I was cleaning and oiling my bicycle when there was a ring on the doorbell. In my naiveté I opened it without looking through the peephole, and a man in a blue uniform pushed his way in.

“I am an officer of the law,” he announced. To me he looked more like a street fighter than a policeman. His uniform was crumpled, his nose was all over his face, and his front teeth were missing.

“Call me Mac, girlie,” he said, and, uninvited, sat himself down. He opened his conversation with the accusation that I was a prostitute and there were complaints from several neighbors.

“Me, a prostitute?” I said. “All I am is a little secretary cleaning her bicycle and not bothering a soul. I work for a consulate, and you can check out my references.”

“Why don’t you pour me a Scotch on the rocks,” was his unpolicemanlike reply. This was my first brush with the law, and I was not thinking too straight, so I did as he requested.

In about five minutes I returned to the living room with his drink to find him marching around looking in closets, sorting out papers, and being generally very nosy.

Then he sat down again with his drink and started talking about nothing particularly connected with the law. Meanwhile, I had another customer due at any time, so I excused myself to go into the bedroom and change. But the fat Irish policeman followed me.

All of a sudden I noticed his fly undone, and he was reaching inside to expose himself. Then he grabbed me and threw me screaming onto the bed. Even though he was supposed to be a policeman, my involuntary cry was “Help, police, help!”

He backed off, but started a verbal attack. “I want you to know, girlie, I live in Queens and I have a wife and four kids and my wife is pregnant again. And you girls make so much easy money and I have to work like a dog for a lousy salary.”

Innocent as I was, I knew what he was leading up to.

“I think you should start paying me a certain amount of money each week, and I will give you all the protection you want.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t need protection, because I am doing nothing wrong.”

“I’ll tell you what, girlie,” he said, “I’ll leave, but think things over, and I’ll be in touch.”

Throughout the encounter I kept my composure, but was more frightened than I looked. After he went I called up my next client, a psychiatrist, and told him about the incident.

“It seems like a phony-baloney deal to me,” the shrink said. “They’re trying to use scare tactics. Be more careful in the future, and in the meantime check your house to see if anything is missing.”

After I hung up I went inside to the bedroom, and the first thing my eyes fell on was the top of the bureau. Before the “policeman” arrived, it had contained $100, my day’s income, and an expensive camera. Now it was bare.

Also missing, for some odd reason, was an envelope containing pornographic pictures taken of me in Holland that I had smuggled into the country for no other reason than their personal value for me. I chalked up the money and the camera to experience and was mad at my stupidity in leaving them around, but as for the pictures, I was soon to hear why they vanished.

When Sonia came back three days later, I told her what happened, leaving out the part about the customers, and she said I was very naive, because everyone knows a policeman has to show a search warrant. This last incident, however, put a further strain on our deteriorating relationship, and ruining my friendship with Sonia was the last thing I would like to see happen.

She was upset that I was becoming more immoral, but she did not suspect I was no longer being used by men. If I really liked a man I would still go to bed for free, but by night I was strictly a professional.

Sonia and I sat down and had a long talk and agreed that if our friendship was to survive, one of us would have to move out. As it developed, it was Sonia. By a stroke of luck she found a charming rent-controlled apartment in an elegant old building on East Fifty-third Street, which was better for her than for me because it was full of very old people all falling apart, and it looked like a geriatric home.

So I agreed to stay on uptown and was now able to afford to pay the $285 rent on my own. I was making steady money now hooking by night and working as a secretary by day, and I had built up a fairly nice clientele through word of mouth of satisfied customers.

I can claim in all modesty I did give very good service. In the last few years I had had a lot of sexual experience and had learned all the different kinds of positions and things that gave men – and women – the most pleasure.

To show you how I looked after my people, my original client, Dirk, was still a good customer and had recommended me to everybody else.

With me it wasn’t the all-American wham-bam, thank you, ma’am. I really enjoyed my work, and I loved sex. I never had to fake my pleasure and never rushed my client.

So Pearl could see everyone was pleased with me, and in time I insisted on having exclusively $50 dates, out of which I paid her $20. So my clientele became better quality, and instead of salesmen and sales representatives, I started having company presidents, stockbrokers, lawyers, real-estate men, politicians. But I was also outgrowing Pearl’s nickels-and-dimes downtown operation and knew I had to move up through the ranks to a better establishment.

Around November the change came through an introduction by one of my customers to two women who were to become very vital in my life for the next year. Their first names were Madeleine and Georgette, and they were two of the top madams in New York.

A horny guy named Jim Watney, who liked to sleep with ten girls at one time and once came with seven of them, phoned the madams and literally told them, “Xaviera is a girl you can’t do without.”

Madeleine was, over the last few years, known to be the biggest madam in New York. She inherited the title from a lesbian lady called Daphne whose brownstone on Lexington Avenue, complete with swimming pool and milk baths, was raided and closed down in June of 1968. It made Daily Nexus headlines, and that is the last thing a whorehouse needs. Councilman Carter Burden now occupies the premises for his political activities.

Madeleine’s operation almost rivaled Daphne’s for grandeur and size. Her five-bedroom house was a brownstone in the Murray Hill district and contained three floors of bedrooms with another floor for bar, relaxation, and mingling.

It was a cold night in November when I was brought to her house to make up the number of girls required for a group of rich executives wanting to be entertained after a stag dinner at Twenty-one. Jim Watney and I rang the bell and waited several minutes before all the protection locks and devices were released to open the door. We were shown inside by a butler.

Wow, I never imagined Pearl’s was a palace, but this place made her house look like an igloo.

The entrance was an elegant foyer with slate and marble tile floors and magnificent chandelier. To the right was a living room lined with smoky mirrors. A rosewood dining table and a huge gourmet kitchen were visible in the background. Inside the room were nine or ten girls, all well dressed, and it looked more like a high-class model agency than a brothel.

Then I met Madeleine. She floated across the room in her Pucci gown, a woman in her late thirties, elegant, handsome, her makeup and hair immaculate.

“Welcome to my house, Xaviera,” she said, and I was in for another surprise. That foreign accent. New York’s reigning madam was from a country where I had lived for two years, South Africa.

By way of introduction Madeleine gave me a guided tour up the staircase from the entrance hall to the first floor which had simply, but tastefully, furnished bedrooms to the left and right. The second floor was identical, differing only in colors.

The third floor was where the men would relax in between their activities. It was a beautiful big baronial room, very masculine, with beamed ceilings and heavy wooden benches. On one side there was a fully equipped bar, and on the other there was a cinema-sized movie projector set up.

The butler, Felipe, saw to it that the men were helped in and out of their coats and shown to the bar or the other public rooms.

Overseeing the bedroom activity was Madeleine’s red-haired young lesbian secretary, Cynthia, who wore a little black-and-white uniform and walked around keeping score of who went with whom and how many times. It is one of the hazards of this business that girls can claim they did more work than they did if there is not some kind of surveillance on them. On the other hand, a customer could claim he did less than he did. Either way you would be cheated out of money. So Cynthia, who has since come to work for me as a call girl, kept score, and Madeleine arranged the pairings and acted charmingly to her clients.

This was my first contact with working girls as a group, and frankly I was apprehensive about mixing at first. I always imagined hookers as a breed were tough street types or brainless little runaway girls. Not so with Madeleine’s girls. They were well groomed, attractive, and reasonably well educated.

As we waited for our customers, I wondered what does one sit around and talk about with a bunch of prostitutes. What kind of small talk can you make? Something like: What do you think of the Pentagon Papers? Or: Will the wage-and-price freeze affect prostitution? Or even: How’s tricks? I didn’t feel that it was in good taste to talk shop about money, johns, and so on, but being always curious about what makes people tick, I decided to conduct a little Harris poll of my own. Where are you from, how long have you been doing this, do you enjoy sex in general, do you enjoy professional sex? In other words, I was asking them the eternal question: “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”

Carmen, the fiery Brazilian, said, “I hate this business, but my guy beats hell out of me when I don’t bring money home.”

Crista, the German, cooed, “I am married, and my husband knows what I’m doing, and we like the extra income.”

Sunny, the American, hissed, “I hate men, I am a lesbian, this is just a living to me.”

Nobody admitted liking what they were doing except myself and one other girl, the Negro, Laura.

“Yes, I like sex, I like men. I like every bit of it as long as they don’t give me a hard time.” She laughed. Her voice was without the trace of hardness or bitterness in the other girls.

Laura and I immediately became friends, and to this day, as the only two from that gathering who have prospered on our own, we still meet on jobs and keep in touch. She became a high-class courtesan working on her own, and my own success you already know.

Finally the group of about ten or twelve slightly polluted young men, all dressed in black tie, showed up after their formal dinner, and were received by Felipe, the butler, who helped them out of their coats. Cynthia showed them to the bar, where they were given drinks and mingled with the girls until they made their choice or Madeleine made it for them.

Each man selected two girls, either separately or together, and everything went off smoothly. It was a night when business was an unmitigated pleasure.

They were all accommodated while Cynthia walked around the house dressed in her little uniform, keeping score of who went in the green room, who went in the blue room, and who went in the red room, and with whom.

Around three in the morning, when everyone was content, dressed, and sitting around the downstairs dining room drinking coffee, Madeleine decided the evening had gone so well that she would put on a special late-late show as a bonus.

She had noticed that Laura and I hit it off very well together and were enthusiastic about our work, so she felt we should do a naked swing together on the big oak dining table.

I ought to have jumped at the chance to make it with Laura. However, there were reservations – I had never been with a Negro before, and my South African background made me slightly uptight.

Laura, however, had no such inhibitions, and when she peeled the clothes off that dynamite body with those big brown breasts with nipples like ebony thimbles, I decided she would be my first black lover.

We climbed onto the table, and I started kissing her slowly, softly, on her face, her shoulders, down to the little protruding navel in her flat belly, and all the way to the springy hair on her purple pussy.

The watching girls and guests came back to life, and pretty soon everyone was tearing off his clothes. Ties, pants, and shirts were flying around the room, and men were jerking off, and jumping on or under the table with girls. Even the madam herself became too excited to keep her clothes on and did a quick peel. I must say for almost forty she looked very attractive naked, with her big boobs sticking out like rocks because of a silicone job, as she climbed on the table and helped herself to a good-looking man.

One thing I learned about Madeleine was that if she wanted a particular man, which is the privilege of the madam, and he rejected her, she would become furious and take her anger out on everyone around her. But happily that night there was no such drama, and we all ended up in a big profitable gang-bang with a harassed Cynthia running around trying to keep score of who came and who caused it.

That spontaneous swing made the house and the girls a lot of extra money, and Madeleine was justifiably happy with me the first night, because I started it all.

Before I went home she invited me to be one of her regular girls. Around the same time I also met Georgette Harcourte, who had an establishment in a multistoried apartment building on York Avenue. But I learned early that you don’t jump around from madam to madam. If you are getting good work with one, you stay with her.

I preferred Madeleine’s because she had a more sophisticated, longer-established house with a better class of clients.

Both Georgette and her reasonably large operation were less reliable than Madeleine’s. She was always moving from one place to another. Her living room was usually packed with cartons, and looked a mess. And, what’s more, she was not half the lady, nor did she have the savoir faire of Madeleine.

On being taken into Madeleine’s stable, I severed all professional relationship with Pearl, although I kept in touch with her as a friend, because I liked the girl.

Also, at the time my professional life was accelerating, my straight life was falling apart at the seams. Things were getting hot at the office. My co-workers and employer were wondering why I was always tired, always getting masses of phone calls, and dressed generally far better than some little secretary on a lower-echelon income.

It was only a matter of time before the pennies dropped and they got an open line on my activity. As would be appropriate at a consulate, my superior suggested diplomatically I would be better off working somewhere else, and even advised me of an available position at a United Nations mission, and gave me a good reference.

I took the suggestion, knowing that there was little alternative, and went through a series of multilingual typing and translating tests at the foreign mission. I was hired and started work on November 1, 1969. The job was administrative, but almost as dull as the one I had left, and it was just as well, because I wasn’t up to concentrating much effort or energy taking dictation from my boss, the horny little ambassador, after a hard night’s work.

Running my apartment was also a chore I could live without. It was too big and too much work, and besides, I used only the bedroom. So around the time I took the new job, I found a studio apartment near First Avenue in the lower Fifties, five minutes’ walk from the office.

Something happened during my move from one apartment to the other that started reinforcing my feelings that in an illicit profession like prostitution you are vulnerable to all kinds of harassment. First the phony policeman, and now a nuisance named Murray the Mover.

Murray the Mover was a big bear of a Turkish Jew who had more in mind than moving my belongings, and persisted in a conversation which I found irritating at the time, but in view of subsequent events was somewhat significant.

“I bet you’re a girl who likes fun and games, Miss Xaviera,” Murray said with an ill-concealed smirk after the last piece of furniture was out of the service elevator.

“Murray,” I replied coldly, “what I like happens to be none of your business.”

“Don’t be too upset, lady,” he went on, “because I could help a girl like you out in a lot of different ways.”

“I don’t see how I can use you except to get this furniture out of the hallway. Otherwise I can pretty well help myself.”

But Murray the Mover had more to say, and after his assistants were dismissed, he still hung around.

“This sure is a beautiful location for your line of work, miss,” he said.

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“I happen to know this is a cool building, and you can work here as a hooker as long as you like. Just make sure you take care of the doormen.”

“Okay, Murray, groovy.” I didn’t admit anything, and really wanted to get rid of him, but I was intrigued.

“You look like you’re new in the business, fresh and natural. Stay that way. Be careful you don’t get yourself into any trouble, because this can be a rough racket. But if you do, give me a call.” He handed me a square of paper with his name and number scribbled on it.

“Fine, Murray. I hope I’ll never need your help, but thanks anyway. Good-bye now, I’ve got work to do.” Murray the Mover left, and I straightened up my studio for the coming night’s business.

Life was well organized and ran smoothly for the next couple of months, although my job at the mission was even less agreeable than that at the consulate. I was made to feel like an “office foreigner,” even though I could speak their language. And sometimes they would lapse into a national dialect to exclude me from conversations. Still, the atmosphere didn’t bother me too much, as my professional night life was becoming more important, more active, and more profitable than the day job.

I could even manage to run home during lunch hours and turn a couple of tricks in my studio, or sometimes Madeleine or even Georgette would call up and ask me could I handle a midday quickie.

Madeleine especially liked me to do her freak, bondage, slaves-and-masters scenes, which is when I got into the whips. These paid more than the straight clients, but they were a lot more time-consuming, and I would ask Madeleine to try to give me advance notice so I could at least wear the appropriate clothing, such as a leather jacket or skirt, black turtleneck sweater, or something else tough- or vicious-looking, and save the time of changing in the lunch hour.

One thing I liked about doing jobs for Madeleine was the discreet way she asked me on the office phones. “Xaviera, I’ve got a Scotch meaning $50 customer] or a champagne [meaning $100]; will you be available for a drink around noon or one P.M.?’

She would often crack up because she had never known a little secretary who made a few hundred extra dollars a week in her lunch hours. The idea of running down and performing a complex slave scene amused her even more.

However, some of my customers were not so diplomatic when they called up, which is what led to the beginning of the end at my new job. My biggest problem at the mission turned out to be the aging spinster switchboard operator, who, I later learned, listened in on all my calls. And some of them weren’t what one would call very subtle. “Xaviera,” they would say, “I want to get laid at one P.M. Meet you at your house. Okay?”

The fifty-year-old spinster didn’t suspect it was for money, and started spreading the talk that Mademoiselle Xaviera was “the greatest courtisane of the mission permanente de Nations Unies. Scandale! Horrible!”

I sensed imminent disaster in the air and figured the only way to save my head was to seduce the horny little ambassador. If the heat really was on, it would help to have him on my side.

On a Friday afternoon the bespectacled little ambassador came to my place for drinks and, in his mind, a slow Continental-type love scene. But I couldn’t spare the time for romance that day because a couple of stockbrokers were expected around seven P.M.

I poured the ambassador a cognac and sat him on the sofa. “Xaviera,” he began, “how long I have dreamed of this moment.” As he launched on a tale of romance, and desire, I removed his coat, tie, shirt, and shoes, and by the time he got around to how he was going to gently kiss my hair, my ears, my throat – ad nauseum – he was clad only in his birthday suit.

I quickly made love to him, giving him my best efforts, considering the time available. He must have enjoyed it, because for the next couple of weeks, as I sat on his knee taking dictation, he would ask me, “Xaviera, are you free for an hour after work?” He would have had cardiac arrest if I told him I was rarely free these days, but I didn’t charge him, so he didn’t know the truth. “Oh, Mr. Ambassador,” I would answer, “you’re invited to my place this evening at six P.M.”

Things, however, were getting so unfriendly at the office that soon not even his intervention could help me. Certain staff members, whipped along by the narrow-minded spinster who was by now getting wise, demanded an investigation into my ability to dress so well on a secretary’s salary, and the meaning of all the “obscene” phone calls.

One morning when I breezed into work my desk had been opened and my little address books, which I stupidly kept in the office, had been commandeered. So, within three months of starting at the mission, my legitimate life as a secretary was over forever.