HAPPY HOOKER Musical in the Works for Broadway?

By: Apr. 12, 2011
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According to the Daily News, THE HAPPY HOOKER, a best-selling 1971 book by Xaviera Hollander, is being turned into a musical. Writer Richard Hansom and composer Warren Wills are currently working on the project, which held a New York Preview last Wednesday for interested producers. 

Co-author Yvonne Dunleavy described the show, which follows the same arc as the memoir, as a: "merry little romp with an insouciant young lady. It's as contemporary as sex."

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In 1968, Hollander left her job as the 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 called the Vertical Whorehouse and soon became New York City's leading madam. In 1971, she was arrested for prostitution by New York police and was forced to leave the U.S.

In 1971 Hollander published a memoir, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, that she co-authored with Robin Moore and Yvonne Dunleavy. The book was notable for its frankness by the standards of the time, and is considered a landmark of positive writing about sex. Hollander details in the book her life as a liberal and open-minded girl. She states that during the start of her career she did not ask for cash in exchange for sex, but her partners voluntarily gave her money and other presents.
Hollander has since written a number of other books and produced plays in Amsterdam. Her latest book, Child No More, is the heartfelt story of losing her mother. For 35 years she wrote an advice column for Penthouse magazine called Call Me Madam. For several years in the 1970s Hollander lived in Toronto, where she married a Canadian antique dealer and was a regular fixture in the downtown core.



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