The Prostitution of Prostitution

THE OLDEST PROFESION in the wold has finally began so painted, padded and well-packaged by Hollywood that it's been sold into respectability. Prostitution is still illegal, sure, but like other professions that used to be morally reprehensible, it begins to lose its shame when it becomes big business. Men who were "in trade" used to be socially blighted. Acting, as long as actors were poor, was considered a dishonorable occupation for centuries--until mass audiences and later the silver screen turned actors into billionaires. When Xaviera Hollander announced that she had struck it rich, she was asking the world to take a new, mostly false look at prostitution. Her book took the profession out of the underworld and executive suites People may have groaned and snickered, but they read the book.

In this respect the film version of The Happy Hooker is faithful to the book and then some. Director Nick Sgarro kept the American Dream theme going, in an age when everyone is wondering wistfully whatever happened to the self-made man, by presenting Xavier as the epitome of the self-made woman. The scenario is almost too complete: She arrives in the U.S. as a poor immigrant, a good girl, and gets a bad deal from her fiance (the only man she knows here). With no training and no capital, she makes do with what she has and goes into business for herself. With brains and ingenuity she a soon the biggest madame in New York. She is the original entrepreneur--the heroine of an American success story.

What's more, if you can believe it, she's still a good girl. Lynn Redgrave as Xaviera a is properly blonde, well-built and fun-loving, but Mary Tyler Moore would have been more in keeping with the director's intentions; the film is as close to a family sit-com as he could get without completely disguising the subject matter. Xaviera first becomes interested in hooking through a man who tells her. "The most satisfying work, and the most difficult, is when you work to make other people happy." And her eyes light up. She loves to make people happy. And what's wrong with that?, the film seems to ask. There are plenty of shots of Xaviera bicycling along the city streets in the little tam-o'-shanter, plaid skirts, knee socks, of Xaviera leading her girls in a morning jog through Central Park; of Xaviera making everyone happy by giving her girls elegant clothes and indulging her men in their secret fantasies. This portrait goes beyond the whore with the heart of gold. It even outdoes the traditional apology for prostitution--that hookers serve a valid social function by providing sexual and emotional services to men who can't find them anywhere else. Director Sgarro, in his offhand way, is suggesting that prostitution is a joyful business, marred only by those occasional raids by those mean, harrow-minded policemen who spoil all the fun. He's not remotely interested in the thousands of women who have turned tricks on 42nd Street for 5 bucks a shot, who have been beaten by the cops, their pimps, their johns, their boyfriends, and who will always be poor, Xaviera, always dressed in white, is the girl next door.

THE FILM makes no big statements and doesn't pretend to. Its little statements are abundant, and its little morals are taken from the traditional lore of a capitalist society, Xaviera finally builds up a large, bustling establishment and becomes so caught up in running the business that I lost touch with my customers." We see her wandering forlornly through her crowded parlor, where no one has time to talk to her, trailing listlessly upstairs, and falling asleep at her desk, 'too tired to join my own Christmas party." Just in case anyone out in the audience is beginning to get cynical about all this good luck and jollyness, we are shown that Xaviera, who has pulled herself up ny her own garter straps, finds success to be lonely.

The movie is so much cleaner than the book that it sacrifices any erotic appeal. No matter that the book was rumored to have been ghost-written and that Hollander probably never did half the stuff that she claimed. It was fun to read about her doing it with a dog. And a lot of people, if they remember nothing else about the book, will remember her earnest assertion that you can always tell the size of a man's sexual organ's by the length of his fingers. The I've been there and back narrative of the real Xaviera may have been inane, but the movie is so clean it's almost godly--and Doris Day could have played this whore and not batted a sanctimonious eyelash.

This story about how a nice girl becomes a nice girl who is also a hooker is not one-sidedly sexist. it casually shortchanges both sexes. The only men in the film are Xavier's one-time fiance, an incurable mama's boy who cured her of marriage forever, and her clients, who ask to be whipped, stroked, licked, played with, or just listened to. However normal they may be at work and at home, they bring their neuroses and loneliness to Xaviera. She and her girls minister to their needs while passing knowing smiles to each other behind the men's backs. Secure in their aloofness and a sense of superiority, the women dispense maternal care in its oddest forms, and the men go home happy. One client makes elaborate banana splits on a naked woman's stomach while munching on a banana. A man from Georgia comes to watch a white woman do erotic dances with a black woman. A finance mogul pays Xaviera to huskily recite the Dow Jones averaged while she strips on his conference table. A preppie comes in to talk to his woman about the problems of yachting, and his face lights up when she murmurs wonderingly, "You don't say!" Everyone seems to have forgotten about sex. The point is apotheosized at the end of the film when a little boy pinches Xaviera on the street, and a near-by grocer apologizes, "Excuse him, he's just a boy." Xaviera smiles understandingly, looks straight in the man's eyes, and says softly, "I know, you're all boys. "The grocer melts in dog-like gratitude.

XAVIERA DOESN'T escape with the image of Florence Nightengale and Mother Earth, She may like to make people happy, but it's clear that she also got into prostitution because she loves money, glamor, pretty clothes, and her own good bone structure. Far from saying anything specific about women, or about women prostitutes, the film is ambiguous enough to leave something for almost everyone. Traditionalists can see the movie as proof that, yeah, they really do like it, and that prostitutes are just typical women who want more money to spend on clothes. Others can see it as proof that a woman can make it on her own in the business world today; here she is, handling major policy decisions in the areas of personnel, marketing, overhead, cash flow, and consumer complaints, and she did it all without going to business school.

Most reactions to the movie per se would be beside the point, because it demonstrates nothing about prostitution in general. Its story of good times in fancy bedrooms may be accurate for a few lucky hookers. But the unjust realities of the profession itself have been prostituted in order to sell the movie. It is in exactly this way that societies often abdicate responsibility for certain enslaved segments of the population, by deciding that these people are really happiest the way they are. This movie doesn't claim to present a serious statement about either the pros or the cons of prostitution, and that is precisely why it is so irresponsible. The Happy Hooker is a social palliative, and there's something immoral about making a prostitute's life into good family fun.