NEWSLETTER AND PRESS RELEASE FOR FRANKFURTER BOOK FAIR MID OCTOBER 2017
I am so sorry for not having written one more newsletter since my last message from this spring. I have simply been too busy preparing at last the final manuscript for not one, but even two massive books about my life over the last 45 years which I will call XAVIERA… STILL HAPPY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS!
But in the meantime I can briefly inform you of a spectacular stay of 3 weeks Philip and I had in gorgeous, warm and even dry Edinburgh, mostly to enjoy seeing some of my old friends as well as watching a few terrific and unforgettable theater plays during the Fringe festival. I have been visiting this festival over the last 35 years but helas when all prices for a modest location downtown went up sky high we decided to give my favorite summer pastime a miss. Until… a dear girlfriend I had met there 4 years ago informed us that she and her husband finally had decided to rent out their lovely house or rather enormous apartment about 15 minutes drive out of the center of town.
So within seconds of knowing her “palatial mansion” in what used to be an infirmary a.o. for the insane 40 years ago.. she enthusiastically offered her place to us for a super duper inexpensive price for the entire stay, while she really only wanted to rent it for weekends . We have since become great friends and together with her husband we enjoyed a few fine meals and a drive in the gorgeous country near Edinburgh. We met up with friends like the librarian Ian and his wife Della, both highly entertaining and brilliant minded people who always cooked me delightful meals; Chris Malcolm, a computer wizard specialized in robots and his wife Herzmark who have lived in a glorious big old house and also entertained a lot of performers in their summer bed and breakfast location, came to visit us for a meal and admired the choice of our apartment. Helas my yearlong friend and co founder of the Edinburgh festival Jim Haynes, from Paris, for the first time since I know him had NOT been able to make it to the festival due to severe health issues.
Stephanie Borer and I also go back about 20 years as she was the right hand friend and help of my old friend Erik Kohn who she looked after until he died just a few years ago. It’s always great to have her over for a chat and a meal.
One of the musical highlights of the main festival was a concert of Berlioz : the damnation of Faust and we were glad to get two free tickets from one of the choir members Peter Hillier, handsome mature bald headed tenor singer I had met a few years ago. It was a long concert and the chairs were not as great as I had remembered or maybe my attention span for lengthy concerts is a lot shorter than when I was younger.
Now in short one of the reasons why I love going to these yearly festivals (* 70th anniversary it was this time) are the two following terrific plays we enjoyed enormously...
The first one was called ADAM. This is a journey from female to male, and from Egypt to Glasgow. It is performed on stage not just by Kashmiry but also by Neshla Caplan as the female element of Adam. This duality works brilliantly, showing up the absurdity of the gender binary model and making manifest the male in the female and the female in the male. The two become constantly shifting overlaying images of each other as Adam is caught in a system where he cannot access help from a gender clinic until he is given asylum and cannot get asylum until he can prove that he really is transgender. Adam Kashmiry and Neshla Caplan in Adam at the Traverse theater.
His desperation is depicted in violent detail, but essentially this is a happy-ever- after fairytale.His desperation is depicted in violent detail, but essentially this is a happy-ever- after fairytale.
Director Cora Bissett piles on the imagery (a knife raised to cut off a breast, a foot that will nolonger fit into a female shoe) and employs Jocelyn Pook’s score, performed by the Adam WorldChoir – a global digital community of transgender and non-binary people – to glorious and oftenjoyous effect.
Well. If this amazing play Adam was impressive and dramatic we were in for an even bigger surprise when we visited THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK about the colorful life of the great painter Marc Chagall and his tiny but feisty Jewish wife who turned out to be a great writer of Jewish children's books and poetess.
Head over heels in love: Marc and Bella Chagall's spectacular romance
It may have been Chagall who painted the couple as flying lovers, but day to day it was Bella who kept them airborne. The tension between a personal life and the artist’s life, where one stops and the other begins, is constantly examined in this deceptively simple and yet complex show.
Full of clownish melancholy and threaded through with Ian Ross’s exquisite songs – played by an onstage band – that capture the vibrancy of Jewish culture and a changing 20th-century Europe lurching from war to war, this is also a show about loss. Bella died aged 56, and it was only after her death that her vivid Yiddish memoir of a childhood in Vitebsk was published; Chagall’s own work is not just a celebration of a lost Jewish culture but also a memorial of a vanished world and a people – many of whose names remain unknown – who disappeared. The Jewish population of Vitebsk before the second world war was 180,000. When Russian forces liberated the city in 1944 only 180 remained.
From the moment they fell for each other in 1909, Marc Chagall and his wife, Bella, seemed to share a particular way of seeing the world. Bella was a talented writer and her description of their first encounter is like a Chagall painting in words: “When you did catch a glimpse of his eyes, they were as blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky. They were strange eyes… long, almond-shaped… and each seemed to sail along by itself, like a little boat.”
Bella swiftly became Marc’s muse and continued to visit his canvases for the rest of his life. Famously, he often depicted himself and Bella flying together, as if their shared joy had such physical force it countermanded the law of gravity itself. There can be few more vivid evocations in art of how it feels to be in love.
The Chagalls’ story is also remarkable because they experienced so much 20th-century history first-hand. In 1911, leaving Bella in Russia, Marc made it to Paris, then the center of the modernist movement happening in western art. He soon added something revolutionary. “Under his influence, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” André Breton, who credited Chagall as the father of surrealism, later said.
PRESS RELEASE – OCTOBER 2017
Xaviera, The Happy Hooker and Dear Madame Penthouse columnist, to appear at Frankfurt’s International Book Fair 2017
Xaviera Hollander The most famous Madame of the world's oldest profession, author, Penthouse columnist, legend, performer, raconteur and theatrical entrepreneur will be in Frankfurt promoting her new memoirs at the 11-14 October Book Fair.
Xaviera Hollander is the author of 17 books, of which the 1971 “The Happy Hooker” was a worldwide bestseller with over 16 million copies sold. She was born, Xaviera de Vries, in Surabaya, Indonesia where she and her parents spent most of the first 4 years of her life in various horrid Japanese internment camps. They returned to The Netherlands but after graduating Xaviera first won an award as the best and youngest secretary of Holland with employment agency Manpower then she left for New York where she worked at the Dutch consulate in Manhattan as a secretary. She left this position to become a luxurious call girl, a decision that eventually resulted in her universal infamy or veneration.
Xaviera’s memoir: The Happy Hooker was remarkable for its frankness by the standards of the time and is considered a landmark of positive writing about prostitution and sex. Unfortunately for Xaviera, the popularity of the book led to her being arrested and deported to Holland Xaviera has since become an avid and very happy world traveller in the process of promoting her books, her films, her music, and her theatre productions. This new memoire, the latest of her writings, is a collection of her adventures, her loves, and her achievements of her past 40 years. Nowadays she lives in the south of Amsterdam, on the so- called Gold coast, together with her Dutch husband Philip, where they run a lovely bed and breakfast in a beautiful upscale and quiet part of the city.
“I am excited about my visit to Germany, the birthplace of my dear mother. I do speak German and have still got a few friends and family members, who I hope to see during my stay. My latest book, the memoirs of my life, has been in the making for quite a few years and I am ecstatic that I am able to first introduce it in Germany.”
Xaviera’s adventures in this memoir run through long-term lovers like John Drummond, a much older British bright macho man and set designer for movies, but also sculptor and writer. Well, he sure loved his whiskey later in the day, and that while Xaviera has still never touched a drop of alcohol!! Then there was Roberto her charming lifelong lover: a Transylvanian Jewish movie maker, who lived in Mexico for many years and who she met in Acapulco 35 years ago. Clyde, an American creative somewhat conservative teacher of English literature, who kept Xaviera’s interest going throughout the many months he was in the US and she in Holland with his eloquent emails and poetry... Then there is Didi, her ex-lover and best friend from Amsterdam, who is a poet, Buddhist and swimming coach. Not to forget Xaviera remains close friends with Ko, a most emotional masochistic transvestite heterosexual architect with whom she had a year-long bonding. Pamela, an attractive extremely feminine lesbian admirer of Xaviera who is most original and creative as a comedy writer and/or comedian, but her extreme jealousy kind of killed their affair. Rom, a handy sexy Dutch carpenter 20 years Xaviera's junior helped her through a difficult period when she underwent a total hysterectomy at the age of 50. Lately there is Lotus her current mysterious 40 year young exotic woman who loves to just be close to Xaviera who she simply adores.
WELL the most important man in Xaviera’s life is PHILIP, the man she decided to marry 12 years ago. He is born in Israel but was brought up in Amsterdam and he is definitely the final love of her life. This handsome sweetheart, 10 years her junior and Dutch jewelry designer, accountant, antique collector, sometimes private detective has even though he is younger than his wife real paternal characteristics for Xaviera and loves to spoil her silly. Whenever he sees something lovely like new earrings or rings. He knows her taste and buys it for her.
Xaviera is available for interviews upon request.
CONTACT:
Xaviera Hollander
Email:
Phone: 00 31 206.733.934
Cell: 00 31 614.665.744
Website: http://xavierahollander.com
Twitter Page: https://twitter.com/xavierahollande
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Xaviera.Hollander
Press Photos: https://www.xavierahollander.com/photos/press-photos.html
Address: Stadionweg 17, Amsterdam, Noord Holland - 1077RV, The Netherlands
