James Lipton used to be a pimp. Today, he’s a buttoned-up host of Bravo’s acclaimed Inside the Actors Studio series; asking Hollywood’s biggest stars to share their favorite curse words, but before all that jumped off, he was pimpin.’
Lipton detailed his past in an interview with Parade.com. The now 86-year-old once dabbled in the world’s oldest profession while living in Paris, back in the 1950s. “Paris was different then, still poor,” he explained. “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 get into [prostitution].”
One of the hookers became a friend of Lipton’s and encouraged him to get into the business. “When I ran out of money, I said ‘I have to go home.’ She said, ‘No you don’t. I’ll arrange for you.’ So she arranged for me to do it. I had to be okayed by the underworld; otherwise they would’ve found me floating in the Siene [river].”
Remarking that he merely “represented” the women, Lipton was pretty successful. “I did roaring business, and I was able to live for a year.” Unlike some American pimp-to-prostitute relationships, things were classy over in Europe. “The French macs [pimps] didn’t exploit women. They represented them, like agents. And they took a cut. That’s how I lived. I was gouging through my rites of passage, no question about it. It was a great year of my life.”
We bet.
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Photo: Bravo/NBC Universal
