Guess Who is the happiest girl in town

Judging from old photographs, you’d think Susi Wyss (b. 1938) was an angel in satin, but the look in her dark-ringed eyes tells a different story. Susi’s richly illustrated memoirs, ‘Guess Who Is the Happiest Girl in Town’, are the stuff that other girls’ dreams might be made of.

After studying fashion design in Zürich, Susi met an aristocratic couple in Saint-Tropez who initiated her into the world of the European jet set. All the hype and hoopla around the “high life” may seem tasteless and insipid nowadays, but the way Susi sashayed through it back in the day was so exciting and outrageous that artists like the Swiss Manon and photographers like June (alias Alice Springs) and Helmut Newton immortalized her in books and magazines as a feminist spearhead of sexual liberation.

Spanning the first forty years of Susi Wyss’s life, ‘Guess Who Is the Happiest Girl in Town’ also reveals the darker side of her life story: the loss of youth, the deaths of near and dear ones, and the tipping point at which drugs and alcohol ceased to be merely fun. At forty, however, she quit her call-girl career and began writing about her life. If the Dutch “Happy Hooker” / Manhattan madam Xaviera Hollander “could make money with a book about sex,” she figured, “why can’t I?” So when Susi’s sensually slapstick stories don’t strum your heartstrings, they strike much lower, below the belt.