Les Telefilles

Ever since the brothels of France were closed by law after the war, amorous Frenchmen and tourists have had to make do with the makeshift arrangement of picking up a prostitute in a bar or on the street, and then retiring to the sort of small hostelry often referred to as a hotel de vingt minutes.

The system was much too crude to be Parisian, and Gabrielle Gaucher, 48, decided that the simplest solution was to introduce the call girl to France. Renting an office on Rue Laugier, not far from the Etoile, Gabrielle and a bookkeeper assistant soon assembled a list of some 400 personable girls. As the French once adopted the word "weekend," they borrowed "call girl," though some preferred to Frenchify it to telefilles. When the clients came calling, Gabrielle had ready an album containing pictures of her telefilles, and a brief paragraph that stated whether the girl was blonde, brunette or redheaded--and succinctly described other attributes. Sometimes Gabrielle would interview a client in depth before offering expert advice. On payment of a fee, varying from $20 to $60, the client received the telephone number of the Fifi or Gigi most suited to his taste.

The Spenders. Gabrielle usually divided the fee fifty-fifty with her girls, and had she confined her operations to supplying Paris with attractive telefilles, she might never have run afoul of the law.

But Gabrielle was greedy and sent some of her girls into service overseas in Casablanca, Dakar and Damascus, thus qualifying as a white-slave trafficker. Last week plump, double-chinned Gabrielle Gaucher was fined $3,600 and deprived of civil rights for ten years. Her husband Marcel, a gay boulevardier who had lived a happy, dronelike existence on his wife's earnings, could not stand the publicity, and killed himself.

Frenchmen, who delight in intellectualizing sex as much as they do politics, noted that the principal difference between the old-style poule de luxe and the new telefilles was the elimination of the pimp, who has traditionally dominated Parisian prostitutes and exacted a brutal tribute from their earnings. In the opinion of Judge Marcel Sacotte, who has written a modest but informative monograph on the subject, the call girl is better educated than ordinary prostitutes. Gabrielle had insisted that each of her girls supply proof of her education, discretion and relatively amateur standing, and her list included teachers, artists, manicurists, models, a dentist, and a few young girls referred to as "starlets." An estimated 75% were divorcees. 20% unmarried, and only 5% wandering wives.

In Judge Sacotte's opinion, the call girls "have one feature in common: an extraordinary facility in spending money. As a consequence, their legitimate profession --if they have one--never earns them enough. Hence the necessity to obtain extra money through a partner of the moment, announced by telephone and furnished with discretion." The Tolerance. Sacotte also finds that call girls often drop out of the business and then take it up again when in need of extra income. Thus, reasons the judge, there is more hope of eventually winning a call girl back to respectable life than is the case with common prostitutes, and more tolerance for the call girl from police and magistrates. In concluding his essay, Judge Sacotte gave generous and unstinted credit for this advance in "de luxe prostitution, perfected and modernized by the employment of the telephone," not to Gabrielle Gaucher but to its true innovator, the U.S.

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