James Lipton Used To Be A Pimp--Literally, Or, Ahem, An "Agent" Who "Managed A "Bordello"

James Lipton was a pimp in France after WWII.

Yes, really.

Lipton, host of Bravo's Inside the Actors' Studio, recently admitted that he became a pimp in France when work was hard to come by after WWII. Women, particularly, had a tough time...so they did what women always have and turned to the "oldest profession".

James Lipton "befriended" a prostitute (wonder how that happened?!), then, one thing led to another. Before long, he managed a whole bordello of ladies of the night.

"It was only a few years after the war. Paris was different then, still poor. Men couldn't get jobs and, in the male chauvinist Paris of that time, the women couldn't get work at all. It was perfectly respectable for them to go into le milieu," Lipton told Parade Magazine.

Unfortunately, whorehouses became decidedly less respectable after the sheriff rode into town and shut them all down.

Yes, really.

The Inside the Actors' Studio host, whose signature voice and deadpan style have been the subject of frequent Saturday Night Live sketches, is evidently not such a stick in the mud after all. Apparently, he was kind of scrappy, or at least had a good game face-"I had to be okayed by the underworld, otherwise they would've found me floating in the Seine," he said.

Lipton did pretty well, too. "The great bordellos were still flourishing in those days ... I did a roaring business." And James wasn't a pimp-pimp, apparently- he was just, um, representing the ladies.

"The French mecs didn't exploit women. They represented them, like agents. And they took a cut. That's how I lived."

Right. That's what they all say. Someone needs a long fur coat, a gold cane, and some chains, STAT.

Now, however, he doesn't think paying for sex is OK. "I think if you can't earn it on your own, then you don't deserve it," Lipton said.