Brothel keeper to the rich and famous created the high class call girl

Madame Claude realised there was a demand for high-class prostitutes. Photo / AFP

Madame Claude, (real name Fernande Grudet), who has died aged 92, was known to the international jet set as perhaps the most famous purveyor of high-class call girls in the world.

Her career in the vice trade began in Paris after World War II (in which she claimed to have worked with the Resistance). Following a brief but not particularly successful period as a call girl, she astutely realised that the saucy image of the Parisian prostitute with the enormous cleavage was out of date and that there was an unmet demand among well-heeled punters for women who combined beauty and sexual expertise with intelligence and total discretion.

Opening an establishment on the Quai des Orfevres in 1961, she recruited women from the Paris catwalks, from the best colleges, and from the show bars. She hired private tutors in art and philosophy, sent the women on trips abroad to learn languages and culture, paid for any necessary plastic surgery, and encouraged them to broaden their sexual repertoire. Her stroke of genius was to introduce a system whereby clients booked an appointment over the telephone, giving rise to the term "call girls".

Recruitment appears to have been no problem; indeed Madame Claude maintained she was over-subscribed. "About 20 girls a month would come to me, and I would choose one," she recalled. She judged them initially on "face, figure and intelligence", before subjecting them to a final hurdle - a night with one of her "essayeurs", a team of testers.

For those who passed the rewards were substantial. At her height she ran 200 "swans" with 30 to 50 favourites, many of whom could say they did not get into bed for less than US$10,000 ($14,677) a day. Madame Claude took 30 per cent of the takings. Among her recruits she claimed to have a Normandy countess, the daughter of a French Air Marshal, a university professor, a famous fashion model and the wives of several leading Paris figures. "If you walked into a room in London or Rome and saw a girl who was better-looking, better-dressed and more distinguished than the others," one client, a New York banker, was quoted as saying, "you presumed she was a girl from Claude."

According to William Stadiem (who wrote an unpublished biography of Madame Claude), her clients in the 1960s and 1970s included such figures as Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Moshe Dayan, Marlon Brando and "half the French Cabinet". The Shah of Iran had a standing order of women flown out to Tehran every Friday. The painter Marc Chagall gave the women his nude sketches of them, while the Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli once enjoyed an orgy with a group then took them all to Mass afterwards.

The more famous the client the more peculiar his tastes. John F Kennedy wanted a woman who resembled his wife, Jackie, "but hot", while Jackie's second husband, Aristotle Onassis, who arrived at the brothel accompanied by his then mistress Maria Callas, made "depraved requests that made Claude blush".

In 1976 the French tax authorities began to investigate her finances. To avoid arrest she fled to Los Angeles, where she remained for a decade. But attempts to resume her business (during which she tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Joan Collins) came to nothing, and she lost a fortune in a failed patisserie and hotel enterprise. In 1985 she returned to France believing the statute of limitations meant she was safe from prosecution. She was wrong and served a four-month prison sentence, albeit in a converted 17th-century castle, from which she emerged, unapologetic and unreformed, to revive her old business.

She moved back to Paris, ostensibly to work in a boutique, and started off again.

However, she was found guilty of pimping in 1992 and went back to prison, this time for five years.

After serving her time, she moved to Nice, where she was reported to be living quietly with several cats.

Fernande Grudet was born in Angers, western France, on July 6 1923. She reportedly married twice - for practical reasons. The actress Francoise Fabian who portrayed her in a 1977 film described her as "une femme terrible", or a terrible woman, to whom "men were wallets and women were holes".