James Lipton reveals his past as a pimp in Paris


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James Lipton, the eighty-six year old actor from the new Netflix season of 'Arrested Development,' has a racy past--one that allowed me to tag the word 'pimp' in a TVRage article for the very first time.

Distinguished host of 'Inside the Actor's Studio' for an amazing two-hundred and fifty episodes, Lipton recently revealed to Parade that during the 1950s he worked as a pimp in Paris. This would of course be the old-fashioned definition of pimp--one who provides johns with prostitute compantions--rather than the hip reclaiming of the term by recent hip hop culture.

"Men couldn't get jobs, and in the male chauvinist Paris of that time, the women couldn't get work at all," Lipton explains in the magazine interview. "It was perfectly respectable for them to go into le milieu."

He's right--prostitution did not always carry the stigma that it does in contemporary American society. Despite the fact that we often perceive the 1800s as an era of repressed sexuality, quite the opposite is true: the free-love movement of the 1960s was more of a reaction against American conservativism than against any mythical puritanical values.

When Lipton ran out of money as a young man, a friend of his at the time ? a prostitute ? convinced him to give pimping a shot. "She arranged for me to do it," he said. "I had to be okayed by the underworld, otherwise they would've found me floating in the Seine," referring to the mighty river that flows through France and Belgium.

"Young women [at that time] desperately needed money for various reasons. They were beautiful and young and extraordinary," Lipton continued. "There was no opprobrium because it was completely regulated. Every week, they had to be inspected medically. The great bordellos were still flourishing in those days." Hey, if we romanticized the experience in the feature film 'Moulin Rouge,' can we really judge Lipton for trying to get by sixty years ago?

Regardless of your feelings on the revelation, this will certainly change the public perception of the seemingly-straight-laced Lipton. The host and actor recently reprised his role as Warden/Screenwriter Stefan Gentles on 'Arrested Development.'

http://www.tvrage.com/news/6928/james-lipton-reveals-his-past-as-a-pimp-in-paris

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