Socialite, CIA agent and pimp to the stars: the true story behind Netflix's Madame Claude
In a quiet street called Rue de Maignon, and later in a modest, 12-room hotel on Rue de Boulanville, waited an elegant blonde women, dressed in grey cashmere and pearls, ready to serve cognac, make polite small-talk, and then quietly and tastefully sell you sex. Before the contraceptive pill made casual sex ubiquitous, late-1960s Paris was full of powerful men with desires to fulfill and the money to pay for it. For those with the right connections, there was only one person to call. What links JFK, Charles de Gaulle and the Shah of Iran? Madame Claude, of course.
Long an object of public fascination, and now the subject of Netflix’s first original French film, written and directed by Sylvie Verheyde, and starring Karole Rocher, the woman whose birth name was Fernande Grudet is generally considered the most powerful and exclusive pimp the world has ever seen.
“Claude’s girls” were famed for their beauty and sophistication, their ability to blend into the most elite social circles without anyone suspecting that they were paid to be there or why. At the fashionable Maxim’s restaurant, at the nightclubs Jimmy’z in Montparnasse, or Castel’s in the Rue Princesse: wherever the rich and famous wined, dined and wiled away their idle hours, there too, you could be sure, would be a smattering of prostitutes. Not that you could pick them out from the duchesses if you tried.
Madame Claude’s speciality was taking girls who came from nothing – one who went on to become a house favourite was reportedly scouted while selling Herald Tribunes outside a chemist on the Champs-élysées – and turning them, via her own rigorous personal tutelage, into women who would go on not just to bed with the upper crust, but marry them too. “I played a little the role of the Pygmalion,” she told Vanity Fair in a 1985 profile. The same piece quotes a New York investment banker, and former client (although Madame Claude preferred the terms “friend” or “family”), who says of her business that “It was, without doubt, the finest sex operation ever run in the history of mankind.”
How did one diminutive French woman (or “tantine” – French for auntie – to her girls) become at once the toast of fashionable Paris and its most notorious pimp? Madame Claude’s personal history is tastefully, and no doubt deliberately, shrouded. “Some even doubt I exist,” she notes drily in the film.
In her 1994 memoir, she writes that she was born into a genteel family in the Loire Valley in 1923, educated at a Convent school, and later sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis for her heroics with the French Resistance. But a 2010 French documentary about her life challenged each of these claims: her father peddled a snack cart at the Angers train station, and she had no involvement in either resisting the Nazis or suffering their punishments.
Which is the true account? In another Vanity Fair profile, in 2014, Patrick Terrail, the owner of a popular Los Angeles restaurant that Madame Claude frequented in later life, contended that he had seen a camp number tattooed on her wrist. Another of her former clients concurred, but thought she had been interred not for being part of the Resistance, but because she was Jewish.
Whatever the truth of her early life and wartime experiences, Madame Claude surfaced in Paris some years later, and went about climbing the social ranks as best she could. “There are two things that people will always pay for, food and sex… I wasn’t any good at cooking,” she is famously supposed to have said.
Interviewed in the 1970s, she told journalists that she herself worked as a prostitute during this period, a claim which the film repeats but she later denied. According to a former friend Sylvette Balland, her appearance also changed dramatically, with the help of the plastic surgery. She had a daughter, who she sent back to Loire to be raised by her mother. The film suggests that she moved them both to Paris once her business had taken off but in real life, it seems, they never established much of a relationship.
Instead, Madame Claude set her sights on cultivating “friends” and recruiting suitable women to make a success of her notorious business. Part of the myth of these women was there were origins; they were believed to be failed actresses, Christian Dior models, or impoverished aristocrats.
The truth was perhaps closer to the Herald Tribune story. Her interview process was notoriously gruelling – conscious of the need for her girls to hold their own in rooms full of politicians, financiers and creative types, she would quiz them on the wife of Louis XIV, the chemical formula of water and the longest rivers in Europe. Then she would examine the contents of their handbag, inspect their teeth and tell them to undress. Some bodies, she said, were perfect; others, unsalvageable. In the film, she even asks to be shown how the girls clean their private parts.
When it came to their aptitude for the work she would be employing them for, Madame Claude delegated. She had a number of “essayeurs” – trusted men friends, including, supposedly, the screenwriter Jacques Quorizer, the editor Guy Schoeller, and the notoriously ugly actor Michael Simon – who, for a consideration, would test out her latest wares and report back. “A whirlwind,” says one in the film, in a tone of serious appreciation, after a night spent with Madame’s latest girl.
Once a girl had passed her initial entry requirements, she laid on an intensive course of “self-improvement”. There would be hair cuts, appointments with expensive dressmakers, an inspection of her apartment and sometimes subsequently a change of address, lessons in English, politics, and deportment. The work they were expected to do notwithstanding, such careful investment in these young women sounds like the sort of opportunity many would leap at. Yet one former Claude’s girl told Vanity Fair that the arrangement was more like “sexual indentured service”. Apparently, the girls were expected to work off the bills Madame Claude accumulated while making them over, plus the 30 per cent commission she took on all of their future work.
By the early 1970s, Madame Claude’s roster of girls had grown to over 200, with a core list of 20 to 30 favourites working full time. Her client list allegedly spanned kings, presidents, government ministers, ambassadors, and leaders of industry, while the famous names associated with her continued to grow: Rex Harrison, Georges Pompidou, Gianna Agnelli, a Rothschild or two.
Kennedy, she told Vanity Fair, asked for “Jackie, but hot”; Marc Chagall was known to gift the girls priceless sketches of their naked bodies. “Hurry up, Marlon Brando arrives in 15 minutes!” she hollers at the girls in the film. The prices matched the clientele: by 1977, she is supposed to have charged 1,500 francs (then $300) for an afternoon, 3,000 francs ($600) for an evening, and 5,000 francs ($1,000) for a day. For comparison, a few years earlier a girl on the street could be picked up for 40 francs.
Among the husbands her girls were rumoured to have found were international arms dealers, a fantastically wealthy wine seller, a renowned art expert, more than one Marquess, and a Portugese Duke. But of course, the identities of these Pretty Woman figures were not something Madame gossiped about – except, she told Vanity Fair, in deciding who she would kiss on entering a room, Judas-like.
Sometimes it was a dangerous life. One “troublesome” girl who was fired for drug use and witholding sex from clients turned up at Madame Claude’s office with a gun (an incident loosely dramatised in the film). She got lucky: one bullet lodged in her oversized 1980s shoulder pads, while another struck two of her fingers, which she never recovered feeling in. “It’s most useful for removing bottle tops,” she said.
The high point of Madame Claude’s career was when the service she ran became almost an extension of the French state, something the film plays up. She and the Paris police are seen frequently scratching each others’ backs. During the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War, her girls were allegedly hired by the CIA to keep up morale.
But gradually, her power and status waned. She later maintained that it was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, President of France from 1974, who decided to crack down on the kind of luxury prostitution that at the time was rife within the French state, and Madame Claude’s specialty. The government began to pursue her for the tax evasion it had long turned a blind eye too – she told Vanity Fair that she refused to pay taxes given the French government would not dignify her business with legal status.
She was forced to leave Paris in late 1977, relocating to Los Angeles where she became a stalwart of the glitziest haunts, but was never happy. She returned to the City of Lights in 1985, but soon gave it up for a farmhouse outside of Cahors, on the Lot river. She spent four months in prison for the tax offences, but the prison turned out to be a 17th century chateau, complete with a maid, hairdresser and food sent up from the best restaurants in the town. Apparently, Madame still had friends in high places.
In 1992 she was arrested again, this time for taking a commission on the earnings of prostitutes (prostitution itself is not illegal in France) but didn’t serve time, despite being found guilty. The tip-off came from a girl who went to be interviewed by her and was rejected for being too fat. She moved to Nice in the late 1990s, close to the daughter who still she hardly spoke to. She died in a nursing home, on December 15, 2015, taking with her the secrets of high society’s sordid underbelly.
Madame Claude is on Netflix now