The hedonist who brought Playboy to Britain
(and ‘auditioned’ every Bunny Girl he could lay his hands on!)
WITH his five-a-day Playboy bunny habit, celebrity-laden lifestyle and penchant for ludicrously lavish parties, Victor Lownes proudly practised what Playboy preached. He was good-looking, dashing, sexy and rich. He could fly a plane, ski and gamble like James Bond, ride to hounds like a country squire and owned homes in Belgravia, Hertfordshire, Manhattan, Spain and Colorado.
He was also the brains behind Hugh Hefner’s bunny girl brand. He helped Hefner build his magazine empire, came up with the idea to open Playboy Clubs staffed by bunnies and ran all the group’s British clubs and casinos in the Sixties and Seventies, transforming a sepia-tinted Britain’s sexual landscape in the process.
But Lownes, who has died of a heart attack aged 88, was most famous ( or, perhaps, infamous) for his parties.
They were frequent, legendary and outrageous, drawing celebrities in droves, among them Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Tony Curtis, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Tom Stoppard, Michael Caine, Judy Garland and The Beatles.
Most went on all night. One ‘Lownes spectacular’ held at Stocks, his 42-room country pile, in July 1979 to mark the 25th anniversary of Playboy magazine, was attended by more than 2,000 guests and went on for 25 hours.
Diversions included a fairground, aerobatic displays, 8,000 bottles of champagne, 500 bottles of whisky, hot-air balloon rides, vials of amyl nitrite in every room (known as poppers, said to enhance sexual pleasure), naked romps in the bushes and hundreds of Playboy Bunnies and Playmates as garnish.
(For those not in the know, a Playmate is a model in the magazine, while a Bunny is a hostess in a Playboy club).
But the bulk of the action centred on Europe’s biggest hot tub — the size of a swimming pool and heated to tropical levels, big enough to accommodate dozens and with violently powerful jets designed to thrill in all the right places.
The writer Auberon Waugh — son of author Evelyn — was one of the 2,000-plus guests.
‘I think the party must have been quite happy,’ he once said. ‘But if you asked me where I spent the night, I have absolutely no idea.’
Stocks also doubled as the Playboy Bunnies’ UK training camp, a sort of boarding school where aspiring Bunnies spent six weeks learning the correct way to walk, dress and smile.
They were also instructed into how to squeeze themselves into magically uplifting corsets, brush up their mental arithmetic (vital for bob-tailed croupiers) and, more often than not, grabbed the opportunity to hook up with Lownes for some ‘ special Victor time’.
Lownes’s lifestyle was every promiscuous bachelor’s fantasy — something he was fully aware of and utterly delighted by.
As he once put it himself, rather ungallantly: ‘ Power is an aphrodisiac. In the Bunnies’ world, I was No 1. It was a feather in their cap to go out with me.’
Even the relentlessly priapic Hefner reportedly envied Lownes’s set-up.
Victor Aubrey Lownes III was born in 1928 in Buffalo, New York, the eldest son of heirs to the Yale locks fortune and great-grandson to the patriarch of the U.S. Tobacco Company.
But his golden childhood came to an abrupt halt when he was 14, borrowed a .22 rifle for a hunting trip in the Everglades and accidentally shot dead a schoolfriend.
Shamed and ostracised, he was packed off to the Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico, then to the University of Chicago for his undergraduate and MBA degrees.
It was in Chicago that he met and, aged just 18, married Judith Downs, a saxophoneplaying, part Cherokee daughter of a wealthy rice farmer from Arkansas.
They married in 1946, had two children — Val and Meredith — and lived in a big, sprawling house.
But safe, solid suburban life wasn’t for Victor.
After seven years of happy families, he was off. He moved back to Chicago to start a new chapter as a louche playboy.
He met Hefner at a party and they hit it off immediately, discovering a mutual passion for girls, money, sex, power and self-indulgence.
Hefner had just created Playboy magazine. Victor wrote a few articles for him and a year later became Playboy’s promotions director.
He was a natural. He dreamt up Playboy Clubs (with bunny girl hostesses), hired Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin and a string of other big-name acts to sing in them, began the long- running ad campaign ‘ What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?’ and bought 25 per cent of the business for just $400 from Hefner.
In 1963, he moved in London, ready to take advantage of the recent change in the law legalising gambling.
He arrived with an extravagant splash, placing an advertisement in the personal columns of The Times that read: ‘Millionaire seeks a flat in the most fashionable part of London. Rent up to £100 a week.’
He settled on a house in Montpelier Square, opposite Harrods, which immediately became a mecca for A-list celebrities such as Peter Sellers, Tony Curtis, Telly Savalas and Shirley MacLaine.
Three years later, on July 1, 1966, he opened the first British Playboy and Casino Club at 44 Park Lane. Everyone who was anyone was at the opening night, including feminist protesters in the street outside.
It was seven storeys high, nicknamed ‘the hutch on the park’ and included restaurants, a nightclub and apartments and suites available to rent by the day, week or month to Playboy members.
Lownes dismissed criticism of the bunny outfits as ‘idiotic’, saying: ‘The girls liked their costumes because they showed off their bodies.’
It was an immediate success. Similar ventures followed in Manchester and Portsmouth.
While his business life went from strength to strength, his private life was complex, busy and, some might say, consciously eccentric.
He had a pet monkey called Dulcie and a bush baby (which was not house-trained) that perched on the picture rail in his bedroom. He would hold
‘Privately and commercially, sex is good’
court from that bedroom sporting a deep tan, hairy chest, gold chain and little else, dictating letters to a string of secretaries.
And, of course, there were the girls. endless girls.
Like his club members, he liked all sorts and, he once admitted, all sorts of breasts, too — big, small, perky or pleasingly overblown. but he always insisted that while bedding girls was one of his twin passions (along with money), it was not his main activity.
‘It was my hobby, a sport,’ he would say.
So there were models, party girls, scores of Playmates and bunnies and the occasional illegitimate child. A moral existence it certainly was not.
Asked how his behaviour chimed with the club’s strict rule about not cavorting with the bunnies, he once said: ‘Members cannot touch the bunnies, but there is nothing to say the proprietor can’t.’
When Private eye nicknamed him Victor Disgusting Lownes, he claimed to be surprised. but he adored Playboy and everything it stood for.
‘Privately, publicly and commercially, I think sex is good,’ he said.
When he wasn’t having sex or selling sex, he was partying with his celebrity friends, in particular, his close friend Roman Polanski, the film director.
When Polanski married the actress Sharon Tate ( who was later murdered by members of charles Manson’s ‘family’) in 1968, Lownes not only threw a stag night party, but a huge wedding night bash the next day.
Polanski thanked him with a solid gold 22- carat statue of a penis, which Lownes proudly displayed d in a glass cabinet, ceremoniously y unveiled at yet another partyy thrown in the statue’s honour.
by the mid-Seventies he seemed d unassailable. Publishing and d gambling were the most lucrative e businesses around.
he was the highest- paidd executive in britain — his £250,00000 salary even making it into the he Guinness book of Records — with th a valuable erotic art collection and a string of properties.
Stocks, which he bought in 1972, had 19 bedrooms, four cottages, gold-plated taps, monogrammed wallpaper in the loos, waterbeds, four-poster beds, a huge ‘bunny fridge’ filled with champagne and 40 resident trainee bunnies.
It had previously been a girls’ boarding school. ‘unfortunately, they moved the girls before I could get there,’ he used to joke.
It was a remark in poor taste, some might say, given that his departure from chicago to London had been accelerated by the fallout from his relationship with an underaged TV star.t b but tL Lownes wasn’t the sort to care.
he was deeply immodest, with a vast ego and an insatiable appetite for attention, obsessively studying his Press clippings and berating his PR girl for not getting him more exposure.
There were also fallouts with his friends, including a vicious row when, after producing the Monty Python film And Now For Something completely Different, he insisted on an enormous credit.
When Polanski ran over budget on Macbeth (a film that Lownes had persuaded hugh hefner to bankroll), then badmouthed him in an interview, the infamous gold pen penis was sent back to the dire director in a rage. Fi Finally, in 1981, he and hefner fell out when Lownes was sacked amid cla claims of gambling irregularities — but perhaps more likely for ste stealing hefner’s girlfriend, Ma Marilyn ‘boobs’ cole. F For decades, afraid of what he sa saw as the misery of suburban do domesticity, Lownes had no wish to remarry. ‘I tried to avoid saying “I love yo you”. I didn’t want anybody to ha have any illusions,’ he said. u until, that is, he met Marilyn, from Po Portsmouth, a former Playmate of the Year and the magazine’s fir first full-frontal centrefold. Though she was 21 years his ju junior, they had an on/ off re relationship for years and in 1984 th they married. They have been to together ever since. After his business split from hefn hefner, things quietened down. L Lownes turned Stocks into a country club and conference centre, ran a club of the same name on the King’s Road in chelsea, then receded into the shadows. his last few years were lived quietly, apart from a brief unsuccessful venture into ten-pin bowling. Lord knows if he was faithful, but the marriage endured to the end, mainly, I suspect, because of Marilyn’s tolerance levels. As she put it: ‘I loved and respected him as he was, an alpha male, like James bond. I didn’t try to change him and wasn’t demanding.’ That was, of course, just how Victor ‘Disgusting’ Lownes liked his women.
His stately home had 40 resident trainee Bunnies