James Lipton is known for his Bravo show Inside the Actor’s Studio, but in a revealing interview ahead of the 250th episode, he reveals a former life he had that involved prostitution.
Lipton told Parade magazine he used to be a pimp in Paris, France.
“It was only a few years after the war,” he said about being a pimp in the 1950s. “Paris was different then, still poor. Men couldn’t get jobs and, in the male chauvinist Paris of that time, the women couldn’t get work at all. It was perfectly respectable for them to go into le milieu.”
He went on to explain, “Young women desperately needed money for various reasons. They were beautiful and young and extraordinary. There was no opprobrium because it was completely regulated. Every week they had to be inspected medically. The great bordellos were still flourishing in those days before the sheriff of Paris, a woman, closed them down. It was a different time.”
Lipton went on to say about those times, “I did a roaring business, and I was able to live for a year. The French mecs didn’t exploit women. They represented them, like agents.”
The New York Daily News reports that in Lipton’s book Inside Inside, he talked about a woman introducing him to the lifestyle.
He said he mostly represented her, and he “had to be okayed by the underworld; otherwise they would’ve found me floating in the Seine.”
image: NBC