What do you think?
Rate this book
Guess Who Is the Happiest Girl in Town?
Illustrated with over 1,000 images, Guess Who Is the Happiest Girl in Town is the first memoir by Swiss-German party girl Susi Wyss (b. 1938). The 40-year history begins in the 1970s with Wyss studying fashion design in Zurich, where at 18 years old she was initiated into the fast-moving life of the European jet set, a world revolving around the elite names in the international music and fashion scene. A regular model for Helmut Newton, the young Wyss enjoyed the company of noted celebrities ranging from Dennis Hopper and Iggy Pop to J. Paul Getty. After years of partying with rock-n-roll royalty she became one of Paris s top madams and finally, in her early 60s, a writer. This intimate autobiography / photographic diary is a fascinating record capturing a time when the world of drugs, sex, and rock and roll was at its zenith.
840 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2018
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 21, 2022
What is this!? How did this get published? Was someone drunk? It's more than eight hundred pages long, for god's sake! Eight hundred pages of memoir from someone almost nobody has heard of, published in its entirety by a respectable arty Swiss publishing house. I mean, did they even suggest any cuts? Or were they just sitting around saying, ‘Look, if we do this, let's just go fucking mental – publish the whole thing, and maybe we can write it off as some kind of performance art.’ And it's in English! Which isn't even the author's first language! Or her second language either. I'm hoping it's her third, but what can you say about someone who writes endless sex scenes using phrases like, ‘We were both caressing each other's punani as we kissed and we both came together like a rainbow’? Or ‘I swept into orgasm like an egg being burst by a chick’?
One of her many self-portrait sketches
So look. Susi Wyss was this kind of legendary party girl in Paris in the late 60s and 70s. She knew everyone. She fucked nearly everyone. She was painted by Dalí, drawn by Antonio Lopez, and photographed by Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe. She hung out with Keith Richards and Roman Polanski and Dennis Hopper and was wined and dined by Baron Rothschild and Jean Paul Getty, Jr, the latter of whom bought her her famous apartment in the 14e, where she would hold dinners staffed by her personal ‘slave’ – a German guy called Eckhart clad in just a frilly apron and heels. (She was trying to train herself to be a dominatrix – she didn't really love it, but the money was good.) Iggy Pop wrote the song ‘Girls’ for her: ‘Last weekend in Paree, I was hanging down with Susi…she turned me backwards to a new scene!’
Despite the wealth of photographic evidence in here, I did start to wonder, a couple of hundred pages in – I think it was around the time she and her sister double-teamed a stranger on a flight – whether I could believe anything I was reading. But a little research turns up scattered references to her all over the place. Joe Ambrose's biography of Iggy Pop mentions her as ‘the superb Paris minx / adventuress’ (who wouldn't want to be described like that!?), and Alicia Drake, in her history of Paris in the 70s, notes her in passing as ‘a feline beauty’. Christopher Petkanas's book about Yves Saint Laurent and Loulou de la Falaise refers to her, less romantically, as a ‘procuress and call girl’. Françoise Hardy speaks of her (affectionately?) as ‘la Cochonne’. In Brion Gysin's last novel, he calls her ‘the Open-Gate Girl’.
Photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe…
…and by Swiss artist Manon
It's always nice when someone who has long existed on the sidelines of other people's stories finally steps forward and speaks in her own voice. And if this were purely a memoir of her rock-and-roll life in Paris, then this would surely be a rave review, despite my slightly baffled reaction to Susi herself. What makes it harder to recommend it is the sheer volume of other material that's been offered up – her childhood in Zurich, months of boredom in South Africa during a failed early marriage, interminable pages of in-depth gossip centring on her friends and the variety of men and women who exist on some strange sliding scale between ‘acquaintances’ and ‘clients’.
Being painted by Dalí at his studio in Cadaqués
She was, as Petkanas says, a sometime procuress and call girl, but these were professions that evolved organically – and rather haphazardly – from her hobbies. The reason people called her up when they got to Paris was because she loved partying and having sex and surrounding herself with other pretty girls. There was no price list, but – with her keen sense of erotic capital – there was a general expectation that guys would be generous, which might mean the odd present, or a fistful of notes, or – in Getty's case – buying her a fuck-off massive apartment in central Paris.
In her pre-Getty apartment, photographed by Helmut Newton
There is little sense that she brings any hard-nosed career acumen to this lifestyle, and for most of the book she seems to be forever teetering on financial disaster: then someone will turn up who wants to fly her to London for a weekend, and suddenly everything seems all right again for a while. Occasionally her attitude makes you throw your hands up in despair. When working as a call-girl, she spends two days in Marrakesh or Riyadh or somewhere with some foreign diplomat, and only afterwards asks him for her fee, which, of course, is not forthcoming. I mean even I know you're supposed to get the money in advance.
Trying to apply feminist theory to this book would be as pointless as trying to apply quantum field theory to an episode of Button Moon. But it has to be said that Susi's binary view of the world – where women are sex objects, and men are money-machines – comes across as more depressing than perhaps she realises, despite the obvious fun she is having. The best that can be said is that she took contemporary sexual attitudes and made them work for her as hard as she could, with joy and enthusiasm. But her blithe view of things like consent – and age of consent – is sometimes pretty shocking, and the details she gives about some of the S&M scenes she was involved in (details which, and I cannot stress this enough, do not hold anything back) are likely to make modern BDSM folks turn pale behind their rubber masks.
Drawn by Antonio Lopez (after a car accident)
You really, really want to be cheering Susi on in this book, but time and again she makes it difficult. She makes decisions which no sane person could consider sensible. She is obsessed with astrology (‘I am a Capricorn’ is the opening line of the book). She treats nice people quite badly at times, and is infuriatingly tolerant of people that don't deserve a second thought. Her life's big on-off love affair, for instance, is a troubled English drug addict called Rick, who treats her incredibly badly, hits her, sexually assaults her, shouts at her son, and all the time she keeps talking about what a beautiful troubled hunk he is. As a reader you are biting your fist waiting for her to punch him in the face and expel him from her life. Fortunately, the drugs eventually finish him off, but it doesn't stop her constantly bringing him up: ‘[Creedence Clearwater's] “Proud Mary” had been playing when Rick raped me in the ass,’ she says nonchalantly, ‘and it still hurts good whenever I hear it.’
A lot of this comes back to the book's problems with tone, which may be a function of her writing in English. Occasionally, she will talk about old friends who are no longer with us, but these gestures towards poignancy always misfire. E.g., at the end of one serious retrospective: ‘Benoit died of an overdose at the age of 36. Nobody's perfect.’ Fortunately, this infelicity with phrasing comes into its own in the sex scenes, which are unintentionally hilarious. Not just because of the acrobatic activities being described (‘If I tell you that Jonathan unleashed his noble sperm seventeen times that night, you won't believe me…’), but because most of them sound like they have been produced by some kind of online Penthouse Letters generator, with a bizarre mixture of formal prose and unexpected coarseness.
…which makes it sound like their genitals met at a black-tie dinner. How do you do? Very well, thank you! I had to stop reading this in bed because I kept waking my wife up by laughing so hard.
Perhaps my favourite sentence in here:
Confusingly, she name-drops some celebrities, but not others. Keith Richards and Salvador Dalí are identified, but Iggy Pop is disguised as ‘Jimy Iguana’ – and as for his friend ‘Egon Spleen’, we learn that he was
Even I can spot David Bowie here, and she rather gives up a few pages later when she calls him her ‘thin white Duke’. Bowie was clearly a hugely meaningful relationship for her, although apparently a short one. She met him in Berlin with Iggy Pop, where they flirted; later, in Kenya, they find themselves staying in the same resort, and end up hooking up, an encounter which ends thusly:
Later, he comes to Paris for a couple of summer gigs (this would be the 1978 world tour – I checked the dates, and it adds up) and they spend two quite intense nights together. He comes back in October, and again they rekindle what is starting to sound like a serious relationship, at least on her part, albeit one that involves reflections like:
I'm sure Bowie historians will be poring over these passages with interest, though possibly few other readers will take this behemoth on. Looking back, despite the problems, I can't help feeling desperately affectionate towards Susi Wyss. What a fantastic dinner guest she would make! I want to meet her – and in fact I may already have. When I was researching her while reading this book, I found photos from news agencies showing that she'd been there at some of the gallery openings and launches that I'd covered when I was a reporter in Paris. I don't remember ever meeting her, but we may well have been in the same room at some point. This makes me happy. She has written a ludicrous and nigh-on unreadable book, but she's earned the right to say what she likes by this stage: she was the queen of Paris nightlife. Long may she reign.
With Emmanuel d'Orazzio at a concert in Paris, 2015
(Nov 2019)
One of her many self-portrait sketches
So look. Susi Wyss was this kind of legendary party girl in Paris in the late 60s and 70s. She knew everyone. She fucked nearly everyone. She was painted by Dalí, drawn by Antonio Lopez, and photographed by Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe. She hung out with Keith Richards and Roman Polanski and Dennis Hopper and was wined and dined by Baron Rothschild and Jean Paul Getty, Jr, the latter of whom bought her her famous apartment in the 14e, where she would hold dinners staffed by her personal ‘slave’ – a German guy called Eckhart clad in just a frilly apron and heels. (She was trying to train herself to be a dominatrix – she didn't really love it, but the money was good.) Iggy Pop wrote the song ‘Girls’ for her: ‘Last weekend in Paree, I was hanging down with Susi…she turned me backwards to a new scene!’
Despite the wealth of photographic evidence in here, I did start to wonder, a couple of hundred pages in – I think it was around the time she and her sister double-teamed a stranger on a flight – whether I could believe anything I was reading. But a little research turns up scattered references to her all over the place. Joe Ambrose's biography of Iggy Pop mentions her as ‘the superb Paris minx / adventuress’ (who wouldn't want to be described like that!?), and Alicia Drake, in her history of Paris in the 70s, notes her in passing as ‘a feline beauty’. Christopher Petkanas's book about Yves Saint Laurent and Loulou de la Falaise refers to her, less romantically, as a ‘procuress and call girl’. Françoise Hardy speaks of her (affectionately?) as ‘la Cochonne’. In Brion Gysin's last novel, he calls her ‘the Open-Gate Girl’.
Photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe…
…and by Swiss artist Manon
It's always nice when someone who has long existed on the sidelines of other people's stories finally steps forward and speaks in her own voice. And if this were purely a memoir of her rock-and-roll life in Paris, then this would surely be a rave review, despite my slightly baffled reaction to Susi herself. What makes it harder to recommend it is the sheer volume of other material that's been offered up – her childhood in Zurich, months of boredom in South Africa during a failed early marriage, interminable pages of in-depth gossip centring on her friends and the variety of men and women who exist on some strange sliding scale between ‘acquaintances’ and ‘clients’.
Being painted by Dalí at his studio in Cadaqués
She was, as Petkanas says, a sometime procuress and call girl, but these were professions that evolved organically – and rather haphazardly – from her hobbies. The reason people called her up when they got to Paris was because she loved partying and having sex and surrounding herself with other pretty girls. There was no price list, but – with her keen sense of erotic capital – there was a general expectation that guys would be generous, which might mean the odd present, or a fistful of notes, or – in Getty's case – buying her a fuck-off massive apartment in central Paris.
In her pre-Getty apartment, photographed by Helmut Newton
There is little sense that she brings any hard-nosed career acumen to this lifestyle, and for most of the book she seems to be forever teetering on financial disaster: then someone will turn up who wants to fly her to London for a weekend, and suddenly everything seems all right again for a while. Occasionally her attitude makes you throw your hands up in despair. When working as a call-girl, she spends two days in Marrakesh or Riyadh or somewhere with some foreign diplomat, and only afterwards asks him for her fee, which, of course, is not forthcoming. I mean even I know you're supposed to get the money in advance.
Trying to apply feminist theory to this book would be as pointless as trying to apply quantum field theory to an episode of Button Moon. But it has to be said that Susi's binary view of the world – where women are sex objects, and men are money-machines – comes across as more depressing than perhaps she realises, despite the obvious fun she is having. The best that can be said is that she took contemporary sexual attitudes and made them work for her as hard as she could, with joy and enthusiasm. But her blithe view of things like consent – and age of consent – is sometimes pretty shocking, and the details she gives about some of the S&M scenes she was involved in (details which, and I cannot stress this enough, do not hold anything back) are likely to make modern BDSM folks turn pale behind their rubber masks.
Drawn by Antonio Lopez (after a car accident)
You really, really want to be cheering Susi on in this book, but time and again she makes it difficult. She makes decisions which no sane person could consider sensible. She is obsessed with astrology (‘I am a Capricorn’ is the opening line of the book). She treats nice people quite badly at times, and is infuriatingly tolerant of people that don't deserve a second thought. Her life's big on-off love affair, for instance, is a troubled English drug addict called Rick, who treats her incredibly badly, hits her, sexually assaults her, shouts at her son, and all the time she keeps talking about what a beautiful troubled hunk he is. As a reader you are biting your fist waiting for her to punch him in the face and expel him from her life. Fortunately, the drugs eventually finish him off, but it doesn't stop her constantly bringing him up: ‘[Creedence Clearwater's] “Proud Mary” had been playing when Rick raped me in the ass,’ she says nonchalantly, ‘and it still hurts good whenever I hear it.’
A lot of this comes back to the book's problems with tone, which may be a function of her writing in English. Occasionally, she will talk about old friends who are no longer with us, but these gestures towards poignancy always misfire. E.g., at the end of one serious retrospective: ‘Benoit died of an overdose at the age of 36. Nobody's perfect.’ Fortunately, this infelicity with phrasing comes into its own in the sex scenes, which are unintentionally hilarious. Not just because of the acrobatic activities being described (‘If I tell you that Jonathan unleashed his noble sperm seventeen times that night, you won't believe me…’), but because most of them sound like they have been produced by some kind of online Penthouse Letters generator, with a bizarre mixture of formal prose and unexpected coarseness.
Despite our size difference, we managed just fine and my cunt and his cock got along perfectly.
…which makes it sound like their genitals met at a black-tie dinner. How do you do? Very well, thank you! I had to stop reading this in bed because I kept waking my wife up by laughing so hard.
When the Captain tugged on my mini-dress-matching panties, I helped him push his giant johnson into my very wet cunt.
Perhaps my favourite sentence in here:
Jeff had a very hairy hunched back and the look of a caveman, he communicated a joy of life and an energy that he graciously pumped right into me.
Confusingly, she name-drops some celebrities, but not others. Keith Richards and Salvador Dalí are identified, but Iggy Pop is disguised as ‘Jimy Iguana’ – and as for his friend ‘Egon Spleen’, we learn that he was
one of the most fascinating sex-symbols of the '70s. He had a noble, fragile face with high cheekbones. His nose was a little too thin, but he had a fine mobile mouth, pretty little ears, and the most magnificent ash blond hair with just a fleck of red. He wore it short, with a stray lock falling insolently across his forehead.
Even I can spot David Bowie here, and she rather gives up a few pages later when she calls him her ‘thin white Duke’. Bowie was clearly a hugely meaningful relationship for her, although apparently a short one. She met him in Berlin with Iggy Pop, where they flirted; later, in Kenya, they find themselves staying in the same resort, and end up hooking up, an encounter which ends thusly:
I went down on my sweetheart again for another encounter with his pounding chef d'œuvre, and it wasn't long until he fountained his ecstasy into my mouth, with a wild roar of triumph.
Later, he comes to Paris for a couple of summer gigs (this would be the 1978 world tour – I checked the dates, and it adds up) and they spend two quite intense nights together. He comes back in October, and again they rekindle what is starting to sound like a serious relationship, at least on her part, albeit one that involves reflections like:
Finally, roaring like a savage lion (to hell with the other guests), he sent his lava rushing into my royal rectum in his last and greatest tribute to the full moon.
I'm sure Bowie historians will be poring over these passages with interest, though possibly few other readers will take this behemoth on. Looking back, despite the problems, I can't help feeling desperately affectionate towards Susi Wyss. What a fantastic dinner guest she would make! I want to meet her – and in fact I may already have. When I was researching her while reading this book, I found photos from news agencies showing that she'd been there at some of the gallery openings and launches that I'd covered when I was a reporter in Paris. I don't remember ever meeting her, but we may well have been in the same room at some point. This makes me happy. She has written a ludicrous and nigh-on unreadable book, but she's earned the right to say what she likes by this stage: she was the queen of Paris nightlife. Long may she reign.
With Emmanuel d'Orazzio at a concert in Paris, 2015
(Nov 2019)
May 9, 2020
I loved and hated this book, but could not put it down. It’s a zeitgeist of 60s and 70s in the most beautiful, glamorous and libertine city in the world through experience of an underpaid artist turned courtesan eager to frolic and play with the top circles of the society.. She could be calculating Proust’s Odette of 1960s looking for a wealthy and distinguished lover. Ohh, there is lots of saucy sex with whole range of characters under pseudonyms (pictures uncover the puzzle) and some is truly disturbing (S&M); some unsettling (near incest or pedo), and some beautiful search for love. There are drugs and lots of music, stars and groupies. And all that said, Susi comes across as truly endearing, genuine and funny person. I could easily imagine her being the most entertaining and generous dinner guest. I don’t like boring and pretentious company. Neither does she. In fact, she is revealing to us bizarre obsessions and passions that some people live with and often - to their personal risk - call girls like Susi are their only solace and confidants. I love her fresh and spicy metaphors that pepper all her encounters. The chapters related to her mother and son moved me to tears. I congratulate her on writing this book, on giving us the story from the whole (under)world of characters that are often airbrushed from celebrity biographies.
March 13, 2020
Oh, Lord. Susi makes Samantha Jones seem like a virginal nun. Her story is interesting and fascinating, but she could’ve used a strong editor. The book is 800 pages. As scintillating as it seems at first, by page 500, I felt like a juror in the Rodney King trial at their 60th viewing of the videotape: desensitized and over it. I was like “sperm brings luck...” “Royal rectum” blah blah blah. So much graphic sex takes its toll. This is why it took me more than a month to finish it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews