NEW YORK — Fernande Grudet, who under the name Madame Claude operated a deluxe call-girl ring in Paris in the 1960s and '70s that attracted the patronage of world leaders, business executives, and playboys and made her a byword for sophisticated sex, died Saturday in Nice, France. She was 92.
Ms. Grudet, a woman of modest background from the Anjou region, arrived in Paris in the 1950s. After working a series of menial jobs, one of which may have been selling sex on the streets, she decided that the managerial side of the business suited her talents.
"Two things in life sell," she once said. "Food and sex. And I was not meant to be a chef."
Precisely how she built her business remains a mystery, despite two memoirs, larded with colorful and eminently uncheckable stories. But build it she did, grooming a finishing school's worth of beautiful young women, many of them foreign, from the fringes of the film and fashion worlds, with a sprinkling of students looking for extra cash and housewives looking for adventure in the manner of Catherine Deneuve in "Belle de Jour."
Ms. Grudet zeroed in on "failed models and actresses, the ones who just missed the cut," the high-society columnist Taki Theodoracopulos told William Stadiem, who spent many years interviewing Ms. Grudet for a book that never materialized but that did yield an article for Vanity Fair last year.
"But just because they failed in these impossible professions didn't mean they weren't beautiful, fabulous," Theodoracopulos said.
Ms. Grudet liked to call her charges "swans"; clients referred to them as "Claude girls." The term "prostitute," she once said, "was revolting and denigrating."
She was choosy: Only one in 20 candidates made the grade. Requirements included beauty — plastic surgery could be arranged — poise and a familiarity with history, literature, and current events. Also, talent in bed. This was assessed by Ms. Grudet's testers, male acquaintances who took candidates for a trial run and reported back to her.
Working with nothing more than a notebook and a telephone, Ms. Grudet received calls with a terse "Allô oui," made polite small talk and then got down to prices: up to 1,000 francs for a night of bliss, about $200 in 1965, or $1,500 today.
Ms. Grudet kept 25 or 30 percent (accounts vary) of the young women's earnings. Many of her "Claude girls" went on to find success in film, fashion, or business. Quite a few married rich clients.
In 1975, the French tax authorities, who had begun taking an interest in Ms. Grudet's business, estimated that she was taking in 100,000 to 140,000 francs a month. Her clients, whom she called "friends," were a catalogue of the rich and famous.
The soul of discretion in her heyday, Ms. Grudet became a heavy name-dropper when the time came to tell her life story, which she did in two memoirs: "Allô Oui, or, the Memoirs of Madame Claude" (1975), written with Jacques Quoirez, the brother of her good friend Françoise Sagan, and one of her testers; and "Madam," published in 1994 under the name Claude Grudet.
By her account the "friends" included John F. Kennedy, the shah of Iran, Moammar Gadhafi, Moshe Dayan, Marc Chagall, Rex Harrison, and King Hussein of Jordan, who, she said, once told a Claude girl: "You and I are in the same business. We have to smile even when we don't feel like it."
Kennedy came to her with a special request, Ms. Grudet told Stadiem. He wanted a lookalike of his wife, Jacqueline, "but hot."
Ms. Grudet aimed to please; breathless need on the other end of the telephone line was music to her ears.
"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," she once said.
After Valery Giscard d'Estaing came to power in 1974, the climate changed. In a pincer move, the legal authorities went after her business, accusing of her of tax evasion, and the tax authorities presented her with a bill for 11 million francs.
In 1977, she fled to the United States and ended up in Los Angeles, where she opened an unsuccessful pastry shop and, some of her friends suspected, returned to her old trade in a small way.
In the mid-1980s, she returned to France, bought a sheep farm by Cahors, near the home of Sagan, and tried to keep a low profile. She was arrested on the outstanding tax charges and sentenced to a short prison term.
Her legend inspired several films, some watchable, others not. In the mid-1970s, there were two Madame Claude films, "Madame Claude" — directed by Just Jaeckin, best known for the soft-pornography film "Emmanuelle" — and "The Pink Telephone."
Françoise Fabian, who played the title role in Jaeckin's film, got to know Ms. Grudet well. She did not like what she saw. Behind the polished image of "swans" and "friends," she said, was a cold, calculating business mind.
"She was like a slave driver in the American South," Fabian told Stadiem.
"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."