CANNES - The Hollywood Reporter

SPECIAL FEATURE
average of $4,000 a night, to local streetwalkers, who
normally get little more than $50 or $75 an hour turning
tricks in nearby Nice, converge on Cannes for what one
Parisian hooker calls “the biggest payday of the year.”
The influx is hard not to notice, even just strolling the
Croisette. “Hookers stand out in Cannes. They’re the
ones who are well-dressed and not smoking,” tweeted
Roger Ebert in 2010.
“We all look forward to it,” says a local prostitute in
Cannes who goes by the name of Daisy on her website
but declined to give her surname. Daisy is one of many
independent escorts who have their own websites and
usually avoid going to hotels and bars — except during
the festival. “There’s a lot of competition because there
are so many girls, but the local ones have an advantage.
We know the hotel concierges.”
The local prostitutes, says Daisy, routinely drop cash
off with concierges at the town’s top hotels. In return, if
they are lucky, concierges sometimes steer clients their
way. During the 10-day festival, an estimated 100 to
200 hookers stroll in and out of the big hotels every day,
according to hotel sources.
Nahas says the money can be bigger than most people
realize. The most beautiful call girls, he says, know to
target the high-end hotels “where all the Arabs stay.”
“They can make up to $40,000 a night,” says Nahas.
“Arabs are the most generous people in the world. If they
like you, they will give you a lot of money. At Cannes,
they carry money around in wads of 10,000 euros. To
them, it’s just like paper. They don’t even like to count it.
They’ll just hand it to the girls without thinking. I know
the system.”
The serious action starts after 10 p.m., he says. Call girls
sit in the lobby, and prospective clients check them out.
“It’s all done with hand signals,” he says. “The guys
signal their room numbers with their hands and the girls
follow them.”
The Organized Rings
Some of the “luxury prostitutes” come as part of an
organized ring, the type of operation that police said
Nahas ran, and others fly in small groups on their
own, mainly from Paris, London, Venezuela, Brazil,
Morocco and Russia. Still others take advantage of the
other big event taking place on the Cote d’Azur, the
Monaco Grand Prix, and rent hotel rooms in the town of
Beausoleil, just behind Monaco, and commute between
there and Cannes, a 40-minute drive.
Nahas denies he was running a prostitution ring but
admits he arranged for women to come to Cannes during
the festival. His job, he says, was to pick them up at Nice
International Airport, bring them to the port at Cannes
and place them on small boats that took them out to
Gadhafi’s yacht, the Che Guevara, and other luxury vessels.
“I was not party to anything else,” insists Nahas. “I
don’t know what took place between any of them. I had
no part of it. They may have just been there to talk and
have fun.”
Until his 2007 arrest, Nahas was best known for
throwing a $1 million birthday party for Moatessem
Gadhafi in Marrakesh in 2004. He paid Enrique Iglesias
$500,000 to attend and flew in Carmen Electra for
$50,000, he says. Kevin Costner also attended.
“Gadhafi never touched Carmen,” says Nahas. “In
fact, she was a little angry because she felt he didn’t pay
enough attention to her. But Gadhafi was shy, believe it
“Please. There
are 30 or 40
yachts in the
bay, and every
boat has about
10 girls on it;
they are usually
models, and
they are usually
nude or half
nude. ... It’s been
going on there
for 60 years.”
ELIE NAHAS
Cannes
Loves Call Girls
in Film Too
The Mother and
the Whore
Palme d’Or nominee (1973)
Jean Eustache’s suicidally
downbeat movie about a
menage-a-trois gone sour
caused a furor, with French
newspaper Le Figaro calling it
“an insult to the nation.”
▲ Taxi Driver
Palme d’Or winner (1976)
Robert De Niro’s mad cabbie
hunts Manhattan for “whores,
skunk pussies, buggers,
queens,” and finds instead
12-year-old hooker, Iris (Jodie
Foster), who needs rescuing.
Mona Lisa
Palme d’Or nominee (1986)
Though it didn’t win the Palme,
Bob Hoskins took best actor
honors as the exasperated,
emotionally entangled chauffeur
for a standoffish call girl
(Cathy Tyson) who needs him,
but not in the way he wants.
Moulin Rouge!
Palme d’Or nominee (2001)
As courtesan Satine,
Nicole Kidman is the belle
of the Belle Epoque in Baz
Luhrmann’s musical spectacle.
Young & Beautiful
Palme d’Or nominee (2013)
Marine Vacth plays a scholarly,
shy 17-year-old who startles
her bourgeois folks by cutting
class to service men in
hotels for 300 euros a pop.
— TIM APPELO
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 34
or not. Women had to make the first move.” (A spokesperson
for Electra could not be reached for comment.)
Nahas — who was jailed for 11 months after his arrest
in France then released for lack of proof — says the
younger Gadhafi sent him $25,000 a month to live on
after his reputation was ruined in Lebanon and he no
longer could work. Since Gadhafi’s death, the money has
dried up. “I cry blood for him every day,” says Nahas.
When Nahas was arrested, police confiscated an
address book that contained dozens of names and contact
information for some of the richest princes and potentates
in the Middle East. Nahas admits that he knew them
all but denies that he procured hookers for them.
But even if he did, says Nahas, there are plenty more
like him all over Cannes during the festival.
“Please,” says Nahas. “Every year during the festival
there are 30 or 40 luxury yachts in the bay at Cannes,
and every boat belongs to a very rich person. Every boat
has about 10 girls on it; they are usually models, and
they are usually nude or half nude. It’s drugs and drink
and beautiful women. Go out on one and you’ll see. The
girls are all waiting for their envelopes at the end of the
night. It’s been going on there for 60 years.”
The Envelope, Please
A “gift” contained in an envelope, according to Nahas
and a number of veteran Cannes escort women interviewed
by THR, is how prostitutes get paid at the festival.
“It’s always a gift,” says a Russian woman who oversees
a Paris-based escort agency with branches in London
and Dubai. “Clients are told to put the money in an
envelope and write ‘gift’ on the outside of it.”
Women installed on yachts in Cannes during the film
festival are called “yacht girls,” and the line between
professional prostitutes and B- or C-list Hollywood
actresses and models who accept payment for sex with
rich older men is sometimes very blurred, explains one
film industry veteran.
“You’d definitely recognize more than a few names from
Hollywood,” he says. “These are actresses who made bad
career choices and fell off the radar. They tell themselves
what they’re doing at Cannes is OK, that they’re just on
dates with rich men, when the reality is they’re doing
what prostitutes do. But they like the money.”
Carole Raphaelle Davis — a longtime French-
American film and TV actress (2 Broke Girls, Angel) who
grew up in international circles in Paris, London and
Thailand — says few people realize that some prominent
and moneyed society women spent many years as highpriced
prostitutes.
Davis, who is married to TV comedy writer Kevin
Rooney and divides her time between France and
Beverly Hills, says she has two acquaintances who used
to work the Cannes Film Festival as well as other exotic
locales around the world. “I could never understand
how they could do what they did,” says Davis.
Davis says she has been propositioned by some of the
richest men in the world but could never imagine sleeping
with them for money.
She says the women she knew “traveled the world like
jet-setters,” and one of them eventually ended up marrying
one of the richest men in France.
“This woman didn’t even enjoy sex, she told me,” says
Davis. “But she didn’t mind it, either. She didn’t mind
sleeping with men who were repulsive. She said it never
lasted more than five minutes, so it wasn’t that bad.”