Authors: Tyler Stoddard Smith
It was, alas, her insatiable sexual appetite that got her killed. When Claudius learned that Valeria had not only married his political rival, Silius, but also consummated their union before a large live crowd of sex-show enthusiasts, he had no choice but to have her head removed. Silius’s, too, because
c’mon
, man.
SHAI SHAHAR
PRO
FILE
DAY JOBS:
U.S. Armed Services; struggling actor; amateur psychologist
CLAIM TO FAME:
Live sex show trailblazer
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Israel, Amsterdam
Before Shai Shahar became one of the modern era’s most famous gigolos, he was visited by the specter of his rabbi. “Never complain about your destiny until you know what it is,” said the rabbi, leading Mr. Shahar headlong into whoring himself.
Indeed, Shai Shahar has the distinction of being the first male ever to exhibit himself in one of the flesh-market window displays of Amsterdam’s famous red-light district. Innovation is the key to success, but it doesn’t hurt to keep an ear open for prescient rabbis speaking from the grave.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1954, Shai Shahar joined the United States Army for a tour of duty, then emigrated to Israel in 1980, where he found a wife, had a daughter, and did some more soldiering in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) until the aforementioned magic rabbi entreated with him to move to Holland, where his dreary destiny might float away, like panties in the wind. And, sure enough, it did.
Shahar’s career lasted over a decade, an eternity in whore years, and his clientele included royalty, housewives, politicians, starlets, and pretty much everyone in between. His fee was an impressive $1,000+ per night. In an interview with
Heeb
magazine, Shahar explained the secrets behind his amorous expertise:
I learned everything I know from reading sex magazines when I was young. I later graduated into watching porn films and practicing with girlfriends. I was 35 when I started, so I came to the job with a fair degree of life and love experience.
Sex magazines? You don’t get the strongest gigolo gig around looking at
Swank
all day. So what
was
Shahar’s trick, so to speak? How did the man have so much game? As he told it:
The game is a simple thumbnail psychology ditty that has one describe her favorite color, favorite animal, how it feels to be in water, lots of water . . . and how it feels to be in a white-room with no doors.
It seems a fool’s errand to try and recommend this technique to anyone not looking to get about-faced by a petrified “customer.” And what exactly is a psychological ditty?
Only the Good Die Jung
? We can only speculate.
A one-of-a-kind creature in the world of whoredom, Shahar got out of the gigolo game after amassing a small fortune. He reached the ne plus ultra of high-profile sex vocations when he starred as half of a livesex duo at Amsterdam’s noted Casa Rosso and Moulin Rouge Theaters—a cushy gig, almost like a Siegfried and Roy extravaganza of sex. Shahar hung up his he-whore act a number of years ago, but it seems the rabbi may be urging him on to greater things, as he explains that his fantasy is to appear on Broadway in
Guys and Dolls
.
BLANCHE DUMAS
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Sideshow attraction
CLAIM TO FAME:
“The Three-Legged Courtesan”
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Martinique; Paris
Here’s a variation on the Riddle of the Sphinx: What has three legs, four breasts, two vaginas, and a voracious sexual appetite that can only be satisfied by a Portuguese man with three legs, twenty-eight toes, three testicles, two penises, and is so randy that, according to the photographer C. D. Fredericks, the mere “sight of a female is sufficient to excite his amorous propensities,” a man who “functionates with both of the penes, finishing with one, then continu[ing] with the other”?
Answer You Probably Thought: A newspaper
Correct Answer: Blanche Dumas, the “Three-Legged Courtesan”
Blanche Dumas was born in the French colony of Martinique in 1860 to parents of “normal” physical appearance. Examined by doctors and documented in the Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, a twenty-five-year-old Blanche is described as having:
a modified duplication of the lower body. There was a third leg attached to a continuation of the processus coccygeus of the sacrum. . . . There were two vaginæ and two well-developed vulvæ, both having equally developed sensations. The sexual appetite was markedly developed, and coitus was practised in both vaginæ.
There comes a time in a person’s life when he or she must evaluate his or her assets, take stock of what really matters, and make a move. For Blanche, that move was to Paris, where she made a handsome living as a courtesan and served as a refreshing novelty for the more curious-minded sex-seeker. Unfortunately, Blanche’s sexual desires were still left unfulfilled. It was a dark and disappointing time for a three-legged, multivaginaed working girl from the colonies. But wait! Here comes Juan Baptista dos Santos, the only man on the planet capable of satisfying her rabid lust, and vice-versa. Baptista dos Santos was not as profligate with his talent (two penises, both locked, loaded, and ready to party), often turning down great sums of money to display his double trouble.
But upon hearing dos Santos was passing through Paris, Blanche made contact and the two developed a special connection, their postcoital triage no doubt resembling a garage sale of helixed genitalia and assorted anatomical oddities. In the end, Dumas and dos Santos appear to have lived happily ever after, with Dumas saying goodbye to the courtesan life and dos Santos saying hello to the kind of gnarly and bone-breaking sex life I once imagined when I ate the bad acid.
XAVIERA HOLLANDER
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Secretary, Dutch Consulate
CLAIM TO FAME:
Authoring one of the most successful memoirs in history,
The Happy Hooker
; legendary NYC madam; gave new meaning to the expression “doggy-style.”
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Manhattan
It’s a rare thing for the sex industry to produce a “fairy tale” scenario that doesn’t involve a trick towel and a hefty credit card bill. So let’s get acquainted with Xaviera Hollander, otherwise known as “The Happy Hooker.” Unlike so many unfortunate souls who’ve sold their bodies to the night, Ms. Hollander has come out of the whole affair unscathed. Rather, the ex-prostitute and madam is now a millionaire memoirist and business tycoon whose musings and advice have appeared in the
Penthouse
column “Call Me Madam” for more than thirty years.
Born Vera de Vries in 1943 in what is now Indonesia, Hollander once held the dubious distinction of being selected “Miss Tick” (better known as “Holland’s Greatest Secretary”) before moving to New York and starting one of the most successful brothels the city has ever known, “The Vertical Whorehouse.”
The “Vertical Whorehouse,” which Hollander operated from 1969 to 1971, was located in a high-rise at Seventy-Third Street and York Avenue in Manhattan, and advertised un-ironically in the
New York Times
real estate section as having “the ultimate in services and conveniences,” canine companions notwithstanding.
In a Pygmalionian career arc that took her from serving as a lowly secretary at the Dutch consulate to reigning as the Big Apple’s most sought-after madam in a matter of a few years, Hollander raised a few eyebrows, along with other assorted body parts, even among FBI agents and local law enforcement charged with bringing her down. This kind of thing doesn’t look good, so authorities came and shut down the Vertical Whorehouse for good. The Happy Hooker was promptly booted out of the country to relocate in Toronto.
But, not all Hollander’s brilliance proved to be along the
x
-axis. Her landmark 1972 memoir,
The Happy Hooker: My Own Story,
launched this prostitute into the cultural stratosphere. With a genital warts-and-all attitude toward discussing her experiences in the sex trade,
The Happy Hooker
went on to become an international bestseller and the only memoir on the list where the protagonist copulates with a German shepherd during a sojourn in South Africa. “I’d be a moral fraud if I ignored it,” she noted with no apparent sense of irony.
Today, with numerous bestsellers to her name, a client list for the ages, and a couple of quaint B&Bs in Amsterdam and Marbella, the Happy Hooker is still living the high life. . . . HEY! You still there? It’s okay—nobody blames you—we’re all still thinking about the German shepherd, too.
MADAME DE POMPADOUR
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Bourgeois loafer
CLAIM TO FAME:
Mistress of Louis XV
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Versailles, France
(eighteenth century)
Jeanne Antoinette-Poisson was born in 1721 in Paris and died forty-two years later as Madame de Pompadour, the most-favored mistress of King Louis XV and European trend-setter/courtesan extraordinaire. Upon her death, the Enlightenment bigwig, Voltaire, mourned her loss, writing, “I was indebted to her and I mourn her out of gratitude.” I’m so sure, Voltaire. Your “gratitude” no doubt comes from not having to shell out for that last fellatio fête, which must have been a frustrating disappointment since the literature indicates Madame de Pompadour wasn’t particularly adept or interesting in the sack. Novelist and public intellectual, Robertson Davies, writes:
Pompadour was not a physically ardent woman, and love-making tired her. After about eight years of their association Louis XV did not sleep with her. . . . But it was to Pompadour that he talked, and it was to Pompadour that he listened.
Even though some French snoots were disgusted with the king for taking a commoner with a new-wave hair do for his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, an intrepid self-promoter and working girl, eventually won the country over, and then she helped plunge France into the Seven Years’ War and bankruptcy.
While Louis XV was a handsome chap before smallpox transformed him into an oozing black scab in tights, it only takes a few genetic missteps before you wind up with alarming mutants like Louis’s grandson, Louis XVI, whom Lillian C. Smythe, the editor of the letters written by Comte de Mercy, Austrian ambassador to the court of Versailles, describes as a “
waddling, blinking, corpulent, bungling, incapable imbecile.
”
Join us next week for “Dueling Banjos, Dueling Bourbons: A Homely History of the French Monarchy.”
When young Jeanne was only nine, her mother took her to a fortune teller, who in a moment of uncharacteristic prescience for a soothsayer told the young Jeanne and her mother that someday Jeanne would serve as mistress to the king. Maybe you’re like me: The last time I went to a tarot reader, she told me I smelled like too much wine and gave me “predictions” about the best way to get back on the uptown express. Sure enough, I found my way back uptown, and Madame de Pompadour became a king’s mistress, but I sense that we were the lucky ones.
After the obligatory stop at a nunnery, the gorgeous Jeanne was married off at the age of nineteen to a financier named Charles-Guillame d’Étiolles. She produced a few children, but showed no signs of settling down. She hung out with royalty, networked—
owned
it. And finally, after finagling an invitation to one of the many costume balls at the Palace of Versailles (where King Louis XV came dressed as some shrubs), Jeanne and the king got to talking, and before you know it the two were appearing together frequently. I should mention that during this scandalous courtship, France was at war with Austria. It’s just like the French to embrace a leader dressed up like a red-tipped photinia and carrying on with a prostitute when there’s a war on.
Madame de Pompadour eventually became heavily involved with domestic and foreign affairs—any kind of affair one could imagine, really. She even managed to befriend that pesky nuisance, the queen. The French people seemed to have a love-hate relationship with Pompadour: They loved her fashion sense, which set the bar for many ladies of the Enlightenment era. However, as is so often the case with celebrity, fame also inspired haters. In a dirty little ditty composed by one Comte de Maurepas, the newly minted Madame de Pompadour (Louis XV procured the title for her) was said to be afflicted with “
fleurs blanches
,” or white flowers:
By your noble and free manner,
Iris, you enchant our hearts.
On our path you strew flowers.
But they are white flowers.
It doesn’t sound very vile, but if you were an even remotely tapped-in and rococo Frenchman back then, you’d have grasped the significance of the white flowers. No, the Comte is not talking about daises, but a vaginal discharge with a bouquet common to courtesans. They exiled the Comte for being an idiot and Madame de Pompadour deflected the blow, as she always did. In fact, she went on to become one of the world’s most recognized names in the fine arts of seduction, solipsism, and sex work.