Netflix has followed up the unexpected successes of French-made hits Call My Agent and Lupin with a biopic about Fernande Grudet — possibly the world’s most renowned brothel keeper.
In the 1960s the house of Madame Claude as she was known — which was actually a rambling apartment just off the Champs-Élysées — was where rich and famous men went for transactional sex. However, the facts of the host’s life prior to her career (she died in 2015 at the age of 92) are not exactly cast in stone.
Her own account says she was descended from aristocrats, educated in a convent and a Resistance fighter who was sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis. Another version holds that Claude’s father ran a snack bar in her home town of Angers; that his daughter never set foot in a convent and that the story about the concentration camp was an example of Claude self-mythologising.
Yet there are those, such as The Spectator’s High Life columnist Taki Theodoracopulos who are on record as saying they saw a concentration camp tattoo on her arm. What does not seem in doubt is that Claude’s clients amounted to an eye-wateringly influential list of the great and good of the time. The names attached to the goings and comings that occurred at chez Claude include John Kennedy, de Gaulle, Aristotle Onassis, more than one Rothschild, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Moshe Dayan and Muammar Gaddafi.
