Madame Claude by William Stadiem

Author:William Stadiem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 7

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

“If you were a woman in the 1970s, going to work for Madame Claude was like going to work for Goldman Sachs today. It meant you had it made, that you were going to get rich, unless you really screwed up. That was the dream job for a girl, provided you could handle it. Not many Americans could. But I could. I loved sex. I loved money. And I loved older men, all kinds of men. I didn’t need a rock star to make my dream come true. And I wasn’t grossed out by Arabs, who had become the ticket to ride then. As a little girl, my grandmother used to tell me stories about Rudolph Valentino, ‘The Sheik.’ Forget that he was Italian. I thought he was an Arab, and that sheikhs were cool. Whatever, it worked for me. And even though I grew up in Georgia, I was fascinated by Africa and Africans. I was going to be a missionary for my church. I read National Geographic. And I hated Lester Maddox [the ax-wielding racist governor]. That worked for me, too.”

The speaker is Holly, now in her late sixties and happily married to a Georgia construction mogul she met when she was his nurse, after she changed careers from sex to medicine in her thirties. She still looks like Audrey Hepburn, a look she has cultivated since she saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a girl—hence her nom de boudoir. She was entranced by Holly Golightly in fiction, just as she was entranced by Xaviera Hollander in nonfiction. The Happy Hooker was the bestseller that changed her life, validating and glamorizing the secret life that Holly had been leading as a prostitute since she was a teenager.

In 1973, in the midst of the Arab oil embargo, she decided to go to Paris and try to work for Madame Claude, to put some icing on a cake that had been less Gaston Lenôtre than Hostess Twinkie. Despite her self-declared fascination with the Third World, she wasn’t interested in becoming another Margaret Meade or Albert Schweitzer. Nor was she looking to become a Grace Kelly and marry a prince. She was beyond Cinderella fantasies at this stage of a tough life. She didn’t expect Claude to be her fairy godmother. She was already a working girl. She was looking to get rich.

“It was like a gold rush for hookers,” Holly said, describing her odyssey. “They all descended on London and Paris, because that’s where the money was, the big money. The money was where the Arabs were, and now that the oil crisis had made them richer than rich could be, they wanted to go somewhere to spend it, and that was London and Paris. The Arabs never liked New York, because to them New York was a Jewish town, and in the early seventies New York looked finished. President Ford to city: ‘Drop dead.’ I’ll never forget the headline. It was like Ford to hookers: Drop dead, too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.