Who's Madame Claude? Brothel-owner to the stars once got request from John F Kennedy for ‘Jackie lookalike but hot’
She hated the word “prostitution” but was the head of a French network of call girls for the rich and famous. The infamous Madame Claude's life will be splashed in a new Parisian period film that promises to outline her dark side. “Things were far from wonderful in her universe,” Sylvie Verheyde, director of 'Madame Claude', told Daily Mail. “To believe that a prostitute, even in this setting, takes pleasure in her job is the same sort of hypocrisy as imagining a cleaning lady being in love with cleaning.”
Verheyde’s film drama sketches out how the 1960s brothel madame — who came from poverty — was a tough woman. Per the outlet, the filmmaker said Claude’s big idea “was to create a fantasy world that allowed her clients to forget they were paying for sex — that this wasn’t prostitution.” The feature also highlights a scene from the film — and it's not clear whether it is fact or fiction — where “three 40-something men pay handsomely to rain punches on a young ‘Claudette’ in a sumptuous mansion in the South of France, leaving her shocked and covered in bruises.”
Co-written by Verheyde and Patrick Rocher, 'Madame Claude' reinvents the codes of prostitution in her thriving brothel of late 1960s Paris, as per the official bio. The cast and crew wrapped the film's seven-week shoot at the end of June 2019. Earlier, a 1977 French drama film ‘The French Woman’ directed by Just Jaeckin and starring Françoise Fabian was inspired by her life. With all the conversation around the movie, here's a slice of her early life and controversies.
Who was Madam Claude?
Born as Fernande Grudet on July 6, 1923, she was the second daughter in a modest family from Angers, France. Little is known about her early years but some sketchy and unverified tales like her to having served in the French Resistance during World War II. Many unconfirmed narratives spell out how she was held in a concentration camp and one myth even goes on to chronicle how she might have been a fallen aristocrat who once sold Bibles door to door.
In her autobiography first published in the 1970s, she famously said, “There are two things that people will always pay money for. Food and sex, and I wasn’t any good at cooking.” After the war, she worked as a prostitute but claimed she “was never pretty enough” and decided to try her luck with management. By early 1961, she had set up one of the top prostitution networks in the expensive 16th arrondissement of Paris.
Interestingly, she selected women or “Claudettes,” as they were often called, after subjecting them to “ferocious” scrutiny. A Washington Post report details how she quizzed them on history and cultural matters. It reads: “They had to stand naked before her examining eye and, perhaps even more revealing, show her the contents of their handbags. They were hired only after passing a closed-door tryout with one of Ms. Grudet’s male friends.”
After a grooming session that included tutoring, plastic surgery and dental work, she called them “swans,” and her job — in her own words — was to “make vice pretty.” In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1987, she said she liked tall, slender women who spoke several languages and were comfortable “in front of a king, three princes, four ministers and five ambassadors at an official dinner.”
Demands from world's richest men
William Stadiem, a Vanity Fair writer, who met her to follow her trail, revealed many fascinating stories filled with her clientele between 1955 and 1977. It's not a surprise that the 20th century’s most celebrated brothel-keeper had kings, presidents, film stars, captains of industry, and dictators among her patrons. Did you know former US president John F Kennedy, actor Marlon Brando, popular comedian Groucho Marx, actor Rex Harrison, singer Frank Sinatra, Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi were on the list too?
Stadiem goes on to reveal, “There was John Kennedy requesting a Jackie look-alike ‘but hot.’ There were Aristotle Onassis [Greek shipping magnate] and Maria Callas [Greek soprano] showing up with depraved requests that made Claude blush. There was Marc Chagall [Russian-French artist] giving the girls priceless sketches of their nude selves, Gianni Agnelli [Fiat king] taking a post-orgy group to Mass, the Shah [of Iran] and his gifts of jewels.”
If that was not all, he also says, “There were such disparate bedfellows on the client list as Moshe Dayan and Muammar Qaddafi, Marlon Brando and Rex Harrison. There was even a story about how the CIA hired Claude’s charges to help keep up the morale during the Paris peace talks.” In another notorious incident, banker Elie de Rothschild and his friend Lord Mountbatten flew with some of Claude’s “jeune filles” in the skies above Paris. Grudet once confessed, “It was so exciting to hear a millionaire or a head of state ask, in a little boy’s voice, for the one thing that only you could provide.”
An escape route to Los Angeles and death
Françoise Fabian, the actress who played Claude in the 1977 film, spent time with Grudet, and later spilled the beans calling her “une femme terrible.” She said, “She despised men and women alike. Men were wallets. Women were holes ... She was like a slave driver on a plantation in the American South. Once she took a girl on, the makeover put the girl in debt, because Claude paid all the bills, to Dior, Vuitton, to the hairdressers, to the doctors, and the girls had to work to pay them off. It was sexual indentured servitude. Claude took 30 percent. She would have taken more, but she said the girls would have cheated if she did.”
Although Claude was resolute that those requests for “call girls” were discreet, it was later found out that the French intelligence was getting all the information on her clients’ sexual proclivities. She was then forced to relocate to Los Angeles in 1977 after French authorities began pursuing her for tax evasion. It was judge Jean-Louis Bruguière who first took to dismantle her organization and looked into unpaid taxes amounting to 11 million francs (around $6.3 million).
When she returned to France in 1986, she was asked to serve a four-month jail sentence. Post her release, her attempts to revive her operation went in vain and she spent her last few years with little money in Nice. In 1992, Claude produced a video titled 'How to Seduce by Madame Claude' where she advised: “Never have sex on the first date.” At 92, she died on December 19, 2015, after living as a recluse on the French Riviera and drew just six mourners to her funeral.