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James Lipton, best known for hosting Inside the Actor’s Studio on Bravo and for recurring on Arrested Development Season 4 as a prison warden, formerly worked as a pimp.

No, really. An actual pimp. He reveals as much in the latest issue of Parade.

After talking about how he’s always loved acting and how he grew up poor in Detroit, Lipton tells the magazine that he took on this unusual occupation in the 1950s in Paris.

“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.”

 

Into prostitution, Lipton means?

“Young women desperately needed money for various reasons. They were beautiful and young and extraordinary. 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 before the sheriff of Paris, a woman, closed them down. It was a different time.”

Lipton adds that he got into the business via a friend and that he doesn’t believe folks should pay for sex nowadays.

“I think if you can’t earn it on your own, then you don’t deserve it.”

So there you have it. A reasonable explanation and a… WAIT A MINUTE! JAMES LIPTON WORKED AS A PIMP?!?!?!?