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?”