I met Madame Claude in her Los Angeles exile in She had relocated to L. I was hoping to cheer her up with a pot of gold in the form of a seven-figure book advance for a tell-all we would write together.
We had been introduced by a rising young filmmaker, a member of the post-Shah Persian diaspora whose family included a Claude regular in Paris, where the madam claimed to have assembled a dazzling client list of the rich, powerful, and famous, whose names seemed to be public secrets: de Gaulle, Pompidou, Kennedy, Agnelli, Rothschild, the Shah of Iran.
She was more like a bankerβtiny, blonde, perfectly coiffed, and Chanel-clad, vastly more tasteful than the in-your-face bejeweled and big-haired Hollywood wives lunching around us. All eyes were on her. Word was out. Despite my discordant North Carolina high-school French, when I talked the book money my New York agents had deemed realistic, Madame Claude was all ears.
We spent a month of lunches together. She told me little about her past, other than the fact that she had gotten her start in business by selling Bibles door-to-door. In time she was comfortable enough to drop names for the proposal. There was the airborne joyride of Elie de Rothschild and Lord Mountbatten in the Rothschild jet, cavorting with Claudettes in the skies above Paris. There was Marc Chagall giving the girls priceless sketches of their nude selves, Gianni Agnelli taking a post-orgy group to Mass, the Shah and his gifts of jewels.
There was even a story about how the C. They were paying for an experience. As my mind reeled at her revelations, I could not help but wonder how many of them were true. Short of secret cameras and canceled checks, corroboration was impossible. But while she was singing for what we hoped would be a very expensive supper, she was anything but a self-promoter.
