![Fernande Grudet, best known by the alias of 'Madame Claude', during a live broadcast on French TV in 1986.](/web/20160212140039im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/l/x/u/r/v/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.glxuoy.png/1451684542253.jpg)
FERNANDE GRUDET
Sex vendor
6-7-1923 – 21-12-2015
By Fernande Grudet's own account, the clients at her French brothel included John F. Kennedy, the Shah of Iran, Moammar Gadhafi, Moshe Dayan, Marc Chagall, Rex Harrison, Marlon Brando and King Hussein of Jordan, who, she said, once told one of her girls: "You and I are in the same business. We have to smile even when we don't feel like it." Grudet, known professionally as Madame Claude, claimed JFK came to her with a special request – he wanted a look-alike of his wife, Jacqueline, "but hot."
"Madame Claude" operated a deluxe call-girl ring in Paris in the 1960s and '70s that attracted the patronage of world leaders, business executives and playboys and made her a byword for sophisticated sex.
A woman of modest background from the Anjou region, she arrived in Paris in the 1950s and, after working a series of menial jobs, one of which may have been selling herself on the streets, she decided that the managerial side of the sex business suited her talents. "Two things in life sell," she once declared. "Food and sex. And I was not meant to be a chef."
Precisely how she built her business remains a mystery, despite two memoirs abrim with uncheckable stories. But build it she did, grooming a finishing school's worth of beautiful young women, many of them foreign, from the fringes of the film and fashion worlds, with a sprinkling of students looking for extra cash and housewives looking for adventure, in the manner of Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour.
Grudet liked to call her charges "swans", clients referred to them as "Claude girls." The term prostitute, she once said, "was revolting and denigrating." She was choosy: Only one in 20 candidates made the grade. Requirements included beauty — plastic surgery could be arranged — poise and a familiarity with history, literature and current events. Also, talent in bed. This was assessed by Grudet's testers, male acquaintances who took candidates for a trial run and reported back to her.
Working with nothing more than a notebook and a telephone, Madame Claude received calls with a terse "Allô oui," made polite small talk and then got down to prices: up to a 1,000 francs for a night of bliss, about $200 in 1965, or $1,500 today.Grudet kept 25 or 30 percent (accounts vary) of the young women's earnings. Many of her "Claude girls" went on to find success in film, fashion or business. Quite a few married rich clients.
Fernande Grudet was born in Angers, western France. Her father, who died of cancer when she was 18, kept a café and helped make ends meet by selling sandwiches from a cart at the train station. She claimed to have worked as a salesgirl at a Parisian food market and as a door-to-door Bible saleswoman. She also claimed to have joined the Resistance and been deported to Ravensbruck, the women's concentration camp. Even friends did not know what to believe.
In 1958 she set up shop as a pimp, running a five-star operation and presented a well-maintained façade to the world. The French authorities allowed her to operate undisturbed — perhaps because she passed along information about some of her more interesting "friends" to the authorities. However the climate changed after 1974 and she was accused of tax evasion. She fled to the United States in 1977, ending up in Los Angeles, where she opened an unsuccessful pastry shop. In the mid-1980s, she returned to France, bought a sheep farm and tried to keep a low profile. She was arrested for procuring and tax evasion and sentenced to a short prison term.
After being released, she started another call-girl network — a small one with perhaps 20 "swans" — in the hope of earning a retirement nest egg. She was arrested again in 1992 and sentenced to three years in Fleury-Mérogis prison outside Paris. After serving part of her sentence and paying a fine of 1 million francs, she became, for a time, a highly visible figure, publishing her memoir and giving interviews to promote her video on the art of seduction. She spent her final years in penury in Nice.
Her legend inspired several films including The Pink Telephone and Madame Claude, directed by Just Jaeckin. The latter was released in the US as French Woman with a poster that proclaimed: "The Arab Prince, the Japanese Diplomat, the Greek Tycoon, the C.I.A. Bureau Chief — She Possessed Them All!"