James Lipton isn’t ashamed that he was once a pimp, said Dotson Rader in Parade. When the host of TV’s Inside the Actors Studio was a young man, hemoved to Paris, and found the French capital brimming with prostitutes. “It was only a few years after the war. Paris was different then, still poor,” says Lipton, 86. “The women couldn’t get work at all. It was perfectly respectable for them to go into le milieu [prostitution].” He struck up a platonic friendship with a young prostitute called Regine, and one day told her that he had to return to the U.S. “She said, ‘You’re broke, aren’t ya?’ And I said yes. And she said, ‘The problem is solved. You’re going to be my mec.’” Mec is French slang for pimp. Lipton decided to give it a try, approaching tourists and asking them if they’d “like a personal tour, a sexual exhibition.” He proved to be good at the job, and ended up representing a whole bordello. “I did a roaring business, and was able to live for a year [in Paris].” Despite that success, Lipton admits he still looks down on people who pay for sex. “I think if you can’t earn it on your own, then you don’t deserve it.”
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