Another brothel-keeper with prominent clientele has died. Fernande Grudet became Madame Claude and a household name in the 1970s, providing “high class” young women to rich and powerful men from her home in Paris – including John F Kennedy, the Shah of Iran, Giovanni Agnelli, the Fiat tycoon, Muammar Gaddafi and Marlon Brando. An acquaintance said, ‘I think she hated men. She used them strictly to make money and saw them as nothing more than wallets.’
One of her girls likened her to a ‘slave driver on a plantation in the American South.’ But she hired private tutors to teach them art and philosophy, sent them abroad to learn languages and culture, paid for any necessary plastic surgery. Her clients booked an appointment over the telephone, giving rise to the term “call girls”.
Born 6 July 1923 9am Angers, France, she was much tougher and nastier than scatter-brained Cynthia Payne (see previous post). Claude had a Sun Pluto in Cancer on the focal point of a T Square to an Aries Moon opposition Saturn – ego-centric, dominating, cold, hard.
Her Sun Pluto was also in a self-protective Water Grand Trine to Jupiter in money-making Scorpio trine Uranus, formed into a Kite with Uranus (on cusp of 8th house of sexuality) opposition the Virgo North Node – so definitely out of step with the conventional morals of the society. She also had Mars in Cancer trine Uranus.
Quite a scary woman and a fantasist from all accounts which is another Water Grand Trine trait.
The Sun Pluto conjunction in Cancer also occurs in the charts of the late Greville Janner and Cyril Smith, two former UK MPs, born within two weeks of each other in 1928, both of whom were accused of child abuse.
I’ve always found Pluto in Cancer an uncomfortable energy when heavily marked in a chart. It was around 1913 to 1939 and oversaw tremendous changes out in society in WW1 and the Depression; and in the break up (in the West) of the old family structure. But it seems to represent, in one of its aspects, the Terrible Mother or the negative feminine – over-controlling, uninsightful and emotionally contaminated.