This Europe: Back home, the Happy Hooker seeks a different kind of clientele

In the late Sixties and Seventies, she was the self-styled Happy Hooker. Now Xaviera Hollander, the Dutch madam who shocked America, has come home to Amsterdam to run a bed-and-breakfast.

Rooms in her townhouse are competitively priced at €110 (£69) a night. Guests will find Ms Hollander more than happy to discuss the lurid details of a life that took her from the Netherlands to New York, initially as a prize-winning multilingual secretary.

The young Xaviera soon tired of changing typewriter ribbons and reinvented herself as a sex worker and madam. Her ghostwritten account of those years, The Happy Hooker, helped to make her persona non grata in America for a generation.

Ms Hollander may hope that her customers treat her home differently to the way she treated ahotel in Puerto Rico in the early Seventies. The Happy Hooker describes how she had barely got through the door of the family-run Carmen's Guest House before she was entertaining clients she picked up on the beach.

Approaching 60, Ms Hollander lives a quieter life these days with a soberly dressed female companion who shares her passion for the arts and theatre. "A while ago I was still presentable from the neck up, but now it's more like from the chin up," Hollander tells me at a recent book launch. She pats a full figure covered by a billowing, floral dress. "It's good food that I really enjoy these days, you see."

As she thrusts her card into my hand, Ms Hollander – ever the businesswoman – explains that her new establishment is "perfect for a dirty weekend". "What's more," she adds, "it's very well situated for the museums".