James Lipton admits to pimping in Paris in the 1950s: 'It Was A Great Year'
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James Lipton is best known as the host of Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio, which airs its 250th episode tonight. However, Lipton has had a host of different job titles over his storied life in entertainment: writer, composer, actor, producer and teacher.
Apparently, "pimp" is on that illustrious resume as well.
In an with Parade magazine, the 86-year-old Lipton discussed his time working the prostitution scene in Paris in the late 1950s, saying that he was simply doing what was necessary to make ends meet during a period in his life where he wasn't exactly rolling in dough.
"It was only a few years after the war. Paris was different then, still poor," Lipton explained. "Men couldn't get jobs and, in the male chauvinist Paris of that time, the women couldn't get any work at all. It was perfectly respectable for them to go into le milieu."
Lipton goes on to clarify that, at the time, and in that part of the world, prostitution didn't carry the seedy connotation it would in later years. "[The women] were beautiful and young and extraordinary," said Lipton, adding that each lady was "inspected medically" every week.
It was one of these women, in fact, who helped Lipton break into the business, so to speak. "When I ran out of money, I said, 'I have to go home.' She said, 'No, you don't. I'll arrange it for you.' So she arranged for me to do it," he said, explaining the process by which he became a pimp. "I had to be okayed by the underworld; otherwise they would've found me floating in the Seine."
Lipton explains how he would go on to run a very successful bordello in Paris, making enough money to live off of for a year. "I did a roaring business," he boasts. "That's how I lived. I was going through my rites of passage, no question about it. It was a great year of my life."
However, Lipton ultimately doesn't endorse paying for sex. "I think if you can't earn it on your own, then you don't deserve it."
Via: Wonderwall
