Madame Claude — who ran perhaps the world’s most legendary  prostitution  ring, which allegedly launched many “Claudettes” into the upper ranks of society — claimed her clients included JFK, Lord Mountbatten, Moammar Khadafy, the Shah of Iran and Marlon Brando, among others. And some top customers had very particular requests.

According to a new Vanity Fair profile by William Stadiem, the writer recalls meeting Claude (born Fernande Grudet)  in Los Angeles, after she’d fled Paris on tax evasion charges in 1977, to discuss working on a tell-all together. “In time she was comfortable enough to drop names for the proposal,” Stadiem writes.

“There was John Kennedy requesting a Jackie lookalike ‘but hot.’ There was Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas showing up with depraved requests that made Claude blush. There was Marc Chagall giving the girls priceless sketches of their nude selves, Gianni Agnelli taking a post-orgy group to Mass.”

But, “what Claude adamantly refused to reveal, at least until we got our advance, was the roster of women, her ‘swans,’ the ones who married big, the ones who became stars.”

Stadiem admits, “Short of secret cameras and canceled checks, corroboration was impossible,” and that Claude had a penchant for tall tales including her own highly self-mythologized past.

Alas, “for some publishers, the fact that Claude was French and foreign and not an American household name made our sought after book advance of seven figures, or even six, out of the question.”

Years later, Stadiem tries to track down Claude, now 91, by interviewing  former customers, colleagues and confidantes, as well as the French police woman who busted the madame after her return to Paris.