The sex-hating brothel madame who gave JFK, Marlon Brando and Gaddafi what they wanted

MADAME Claude, the infamous, sex-hating brothel pioneer who gave JFK, Marlon Brando and Colonel Gaddafi exactly what they wanted, has died at 92.

SHE didn’t like sex, but she knew the men who did — and their every fantasy.

Aristocrats, politicians, Hollywood stars, crime bosses and captains of industry had her number. And she had the girls they were willing to pay for.

French brothel keeper Madame Claude, inventor of the “callgirl”, died this week at the age of 92.

She made her name providing prostitutes for the rich and famous and even tried to recruit film beauty Joan Collins as one of her “Claudettes”.

It didn’t matter if her clients demanded a raunchier version of their wife or crow “Cock-a-doodle-do” during sex, Claude reckoned the customer was always right.

And if they weren’t really right, at least they were rich.

In fact, French actress Françoise Fabian, who played Madame Claude in the 1977 film of the same name, reckoned the famous procuress despised people in general and saw men as “nothing more than wallets”.

Yet her client list in the 1960s and 1970s was like a Who’s Who of the jet set. It included Colonel Gaddafi, actor Marlon Brando, Lord Mountbatten, “half the French Cabinet”, and American President John F Kennedy.

When JFK visited her Paris brothel he reputedly asked Madame Claude for a girl who resembled his wife Jackie, “but hot”.

In her 1994 autobiography she wrote: “There are two things that people will always pay money for. Food and sex — and I wasn’t any good at cooking.”

... “but hot”.

JFK asked for a girl like wife Jackie ...

She wasn’t much good at sex either, but she knew a good business opportunity when she saw it.

Born Fernande Grudet in 1923 in the Loire Valley, she arrived in Paris in the early 1950s with a dubious background which, she said, included working for the wartime French Resistance and flogging Bibles.

She quickly fell in with criminal friends and turned to vice.

With her plain looks, big nose and crooked teeth she lacked clients, and she was never very good at pretending she enjoyed the sex.

Instead, with the post-war French state having closed the brothels it had previously tolerated, Claude saw a gap in the market for girls who not only looked good but, crucially, were intelligent too.

And if rich punters could show these high-class girls off in public, so much the better.

She opened her first agency above a branch of Rothschild’s bank near the Champs Elysees and got busy recruiting girls from the Paris catwalks, smart bars and the best colleges.

They had to be at least 5ft 9in and she preferred the haughty look of leggy Scandinavians. Black lingerie was banned. Only virginal white would do.

Her favourites were failed actresses or models still hungry for success. She would hire private tutors to school them in English, arts and philosophy.

A big fan of plastic surgery herself — she is said to have had everything “done” except her breasts — she would pay for her girls to have any cosmetic improvements she deemed necessary.

Madame Claude played by Francoise Fabian in ‘The French Woman’.

Madame Claude pictured in 1977.

Madame Claude was overwhelmed with willing candidates and picked one new girl, or “swan” as she called them, each month from 20 applicants. Prospective recruits first had to empty out their handbags on to the table. Any sign of dirt or clutter was fatal to their chances of being taken on, as were scuffed shoes.

They would then be tested on their general knowledge and, finally, if they passed, asked to undress.

Recruits would be encouraged to learn new sexual techniques and would also have to satisfy one of her team of male “essayeurs”, or testers, who would randomly sample the girls like sexual Michelin inspectors.

But her greatest coup was to pioneer a callgirl system where clients discreetly booked appointments with her Claudettes over the phone.

With up to 200 girls on her books in her heyday, including 50 favourites who could earn around $9,235 a day, Madame Claude did very well indeed by creaming off 30 per cent of their takings.

After a few years she enlarged her business to a small hotel, which one New York investment banker hailed as “the finest sex operation in the history of mankind”.

Paying guests included Marlon Brando and My Fair Lady star Rex Harrison, apt since Madame Claude saw herself as someone who turned rough Eliza Doolittles into polished ladies.

The Shah of Iran had a standing order for Claude’s “jeunes filles” to be flown to Tehran every Friday, and he rewarded them with jewels.

Not surprisingly, Madame Claude encouraged her swans to have a Louis Vuitton suitcase packed ready to fly abroad at a moment’s notice if a foreign client called.

Prince Charles’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, reputedly cavorted with one of her girls in a jet over Paris.

Customer ... Colonel Gaddafi used services of her girls in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The artist Marc Chagall gave the girls who entertained him nude sketches. Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli once had an orgy with a group of Claude’s girls before taking them to Mass afterwards.

And Jackie Kennedy’s second husband, Aristotle Onassis, once arrived at the brothel with his then mistress Maria Callas and made “depraved requests” that made even Claude blush.

In 1973, during the Paris Peace Accord negotiations which led to the end of the Vietnam War, the CIA used Claude’s services to “keep up the morale” of its agents.

Claude boasted that the authorities turned a blind eye to her activities not just because ministers and police officials were among her clients, but because she would also pass on the pillow talk of other clients to the French authorities.

This understanding, she said, meant police covered up an incident where she was shot by a girl she had sacked, with one bullet passing through her hand and another lodging in the padded shoulder of her jacket.

The sexual liberation of the 60s meant the demand for her paid-for services was falling, but she was able to quadruple her prices for the oil-rich Arabs who began flooding into Paris in the 70s.

By 1976 the French authorities began to investigate her tax affairs. They estimated with annual earnings of $1.23 million, she owed $3.5 million in unpaid taxes. To avoid arrest she fled to Los Angeles, where she stayed for ten years, revelling in her notoriety.

She used to join lunch guests in the posher Hollywood restaurants in trying to spot which girls would make good swans.

She once said: “It makes me laugh when I see the photographs of the ladies and countesses in the social pages of Tatler,Harpers and Vogue, and count up which ones started off by working for me.”

Madame Claude leaving the Court in Paris during her 1992 trial.

While in LA she lost a fortune on a failed patisserie and hotel business, but kept her hand in procuring girls for wealthy local clients.

She once tried to recruit Joan Collins and fellow 70s siren Evie Bricusse over lunch, reportedly telling them: “I think you could do very well.

“Your husbands don’t have to know. I believe you could make enough money to buy yourselves a few extra baubles.”

While Madame Claude herself disliked sex and thought no one over 40 should be allowed to “do it”, she briefly married a gay bartender in order to get a US green card — having previously married a Swiss man in 1972 to get a Swiss passport. In 1986 she returned to Paris, believing she would no longer be prosecuted for tax offences.

She was wrong — but after cutting a deal with prosecutors she served only a four-month prison sentence in the splendour of a converted 17th century castle.

On her release she started in business again in Paris, building a stable of a dozen $2000-a-night girls on her books. But by 1992 her legendary high standards were her undoing.

The new head of the Paris vice squad, Commissioner Martine Monteuil, was keen to make her mark by closing down Madame Claude’s latest operation.

Mile-high club ... Lord Mountbatten ‘cavorted with a girl in a jet over Paris’.

She found a willing informant in a girl who had been turned down for a job with Claude because she was exactly five kilograms overweight.

Police burst in to Claude’s third-floor flat in the Marais district to find her inspecting a new job applicant — who was stark naked — and she went back to prison for five years.

On her release, Gianni Agnelli sent her a new Fiat as a gift, but her time as a madam was over.

She lived out her days quietly in Nice, close to where a daughter she had no contact with had been brought up by her own mother.

In later years Madame Claude let slip the names of some of her more famous clients, but she was more discreet on the identities of the girls who had once worked for her and gone on to marry well.

Claude Cances, a former Paris police chief, told AFP news agency this week: “She will take many state secrets with her. She was a legend.”

Not everyone was a fan. Actress Françoise Fabian, now 83, who portrayed Madame Claude in the 1977 French film of her life, told Vanity Fair she was “une femme terrible” — a frightful woman.

Fabian said: “She despised men and women alike. 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 per cent. She would have taken more but she said the girls would have cheated if she did.”

Fabian added: “I was struck by her cynical view of sex between men and women. To her, men were nothing more than wallets. I suspected there was a secret suffering behind her words.”

This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission.