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Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond
In the heyday of his sleaze empire, with his pencil moustache, gold jewellery and trademark fur coat, Paul Raymond was for many people the brash personification of nouveau riche vulgarity, posing proudly beside his customised Rolls Royce, a fat cigar protruding from his lips, a curvaceous showgirl on either arm. For other people, Margaret Thatcher among them, he exemplified the entrepreneurial spirit that enabled a poor boy from Depression-era Liverpool to become Britain's richest man. Right up until he died on 2 March 2008, he was a controversial figure around whom scandal swirled. Paul Willetts follows Raymond from his strictly Catholic early life to the isolation, paranoia and extreme wealth of his old age.
479 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2010
About the author
Paul Willetts
11 books13 followersPaul Willetts is the author of two previous works of non-fiction – Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia and North Soho 999. Since making his literary debut in 2003, he’s edited four much-praised collections of writing by the bohemian dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross. He has also compiled and worked as co-photographer on Teenage Flicks, a jokey celebration of Subbuteo, featuring contributions by Will Self, Graham Taylor, David Baddiel and others. His journalism has appeared in The Independent, The Times, The TLS, The Spectator, The Independent on Sunday and other publications.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 19, 2013
Paul Raymond, sultan of sleaze, crown prince of porn, the Soho-bestriding emperor of nakedness : confusingly, he came from a solid middle-class family, no oik was he, posh-toned suit-and-tie wearing rounded-voweled and Conservative to the very tip of his very member; and gifted by God with an unbreakable carapace of propriety which enabled him to wade through the oceans of filth with the bland equanimity of a drainage inspector in a municipal waterworks.
PAUL RAYMOND SPEAKS
Really, you shouldn’t listen to all this nonsense, they’ve been saying all sorts of dreadful things about me since the 1950s. You see, what I have done is to give the public what it wants, not what it thinks it should have. The female form is one of God’s most beautiful creations. It is something to be admired to the point of worship. It has been an artistic inspiration throughout civilised history. I have used that inspiration to make myself a fortune. No, my shows are not obscene, crude or pornographic. They are artistic, erotic and tasteful. Indeed, they are family entertainment. I wouldn’t put on any show which I would be unhappy bringing my wife and children to see. Or indeed your wife. Actually, my wife choreographed the striptease acts in my shows for years. And let me tell you, at least half of the patrons at the Paul Raymond Revuebar are couples, of that you may be assured. I believe my nude acts may serve to rekindle their inner lives such that when they return to their homes, intercourse may follow. I hope I have served a laudable function. We do not get enough opportunities to observe naked ladies, their grace, their perfect proportionality, and alas, this appreciation is so often regarded as a matter of shame, something furtive and nasty. But it isn’t, it is glorious! And I mean to display its glory to the world. So long as the world will pay the membership fee and be confirmed by two existing club members. May I say that I have never put on an indecent show in my life. In fact, I won’t engage a girl with a bigger than 36 inch bust because I wouldn’t like to embarrass my customers.
MIXED MESSAGES FROM GOD
At one point, Raymond’s daughter’s boyfriend’s fiancée stabbed the boyfriend in the stomach (he recovered). At another point Raymond participated in a sting to catch two crooks who had been terrorizing his family with death threats for months (they pretended to be the IRA and had demanded £15,000 – they got jail). It was like that for years.
Raymond was very close to his daughter and they were both monstrous cokeheads, boozers and smokers. He had an 80 cigarettes a day habit. So it’s just not true what they say about alcohol, tobacco and cocaine – he died peacefully at the age of 82. Oh, wait – his daughter Debbie died at the age of 36 from a drug overdose. So yeah, it is true what they say. Sometimes.
PAUL RAYMOND IN HIS POMP
His dandified get-up confirmed his reputation as that comic stereotype of yesteryear, the oldest swinger in town. He still liked to wear a long black fur coat draped round the shoulders of an expensive handmade suit, the outfit accessorised these days by a gold bracelet, plus a diamond and gold pendant worn over his tie. As if that wasn’t noticeable enough he sported a pencil moustache and a deep tan that lent him the appearance of some leathery Hollywood actor made up to play a Mexican in an old western. The darkness of his skin emphasised the whiteness of his teeth and the pallor of his ever more elaborate scrape-over hairdo. Now dyed blonde, the colour giving it a strange acrylic sheen, it was sufficiently long at the back to form a valance round his neck.
IT WASN’T ALL WALL-TO-WALL 18 YEAR OLD BLONDES (ALTHOUGH MOSTLY IT WAS)
Paul Raymond got to be one of Britain’s richest people by exhibiting female flesh (strip clubs, mainly, then also rude stage shows like Oh! Calcutta! and nude magazines) and I wondered why every other material boy of the 60s and 70s didn’t do the same, so I read this after seeing the (mildly amusing) movie, and the answer was – tenacity. He was under constant attack from three directions for almost his whole career, and only his unflappable English-to-the-core urbanity got him through.
THE COPS
Subdivided into a) bent ones who wanted a backhander; b) worse, straight ones who were raiding his club all the time. The obscenity laws were whatever the judge thought on that day, so it wasn’t easy keeping out of jail or bankruptcy. On the other hand, it seemed to be pretty easy for this slippery eel.
Magistrate Reg Seaton :
(sung to the tune of “Love Is the Sweetest Thing”)
Your establishment and others have been vying with each other to see what degree of disgustingness they can introduce to attract members from all classes who are only too ready out of curiosity or lust to see filth portrayed in the establishment. Your show can only be characterised as filthy, disgusting and beastly.
(£5000 fine plus expenses – pocket change.)
THE GANGSTERS
Running protection rackets all over Soho (as were the bent cops) and cutting up rough if you didn’t pay up (“Mr Raymond, you wouldn’t want your strippers to get broken would you?”). Raymond seemed to be something of a magician, he never got duffed over. I assume he paid whoever had to be paid. They all had names like Jack the Hat or Jack the Gangster who’ll Rip your Arm Off.
THE ANTI-PORN CAMPAIGNERS
Trying to stem the tide of filth spewing forth in the “permissive society” of the 60s, they got Paul Raymond in their sights – he was the embodiment of all that was wrong! Mostly he got in front of their panels of inquiry and investigative probes and he charmed and smarmed ‘em. He told them “I’m with you! I hate obscenity!”
SOME RANDOM QUOTES
Hidden in the small print there’s an unsavoury announcement that dispels any doubts about the habits of the show’s audience. “In the interest of public health this theatre is disinfected throughout with Jeye’s Fluid.
In the early 50s New York burlesque shows were being staged with such wonderful titles as Anatomy and Cleopatra, Julius Teaser and Panties’ Inferno.
Pyjama Tops : The joy of it was that it was completely tasteless. For no particular reason all the girls leapt into the swimming pool in their pyjama tops. And then there was the ghastliness of all these tourists in raincoats wanking in the stalls.
In 1960 Raymond told the press his income was “in the region of £2000 a week” – this was more than ten times that of the then prime minister Harold Macmillan.
In those days Soho was synonymous not just with striptease but also with hot air : the serpentine hiss of the espresso machines, the fractious shushing of steam irons, the aromatic breath from restaurant doorways, and above all, the sound of conversation.
MONOTONOUS SUCCESS
Accompanied by clouds of naked young women, in and out of court, on yachts and helicopters, backstage, front of house, suavely parlaying with gangsters, the police, the judges, the reporters, the drag queens, rock bands, porn stars, with his entire private life an extended melodramatic soap opera, even so, Paul Raymond appears to have been a bit on the dull side, his life for decades at a time filled with monotonous success, money lashing down upon him in a continual monsoon, accompanied by heavy drifts of cocaine, storm surges of bodily fluid and multiple attacks of threesomes in giant mirrored beds. He proved that, should we have been in any doubt at all, the wages of sin are frankly astronomical.
PAUL RAYMOND SPEAKS
Really, you shouldn’t listen to all this nonsense, they’ve been saying all sorts of dreadful things about me since the 1950s. You see, what I have done is to give the public what it wants, not what it thinks it should have. The female form is one of God’s most beautiful creations. It is something to be admired to the point of worship. It has been an artistic inspiration throughout civilised history. I have used that inspiration to make myself a fortune. No, my shows are not obscene, crude or pornographic. They are artistic, erotic and tasteful. Indeed, they are family entertainment. I wouldn’t put on any show which I would be unhappy bringing my wife and children to see. Or indeed your wife. Actually, my wife choreographed the striptease acts in my shows for years. And let me tell you, at least half of the patrons at the Paul Raymond Revuebar are couples, of that you may be assured. I believe my nude acts may serve to rekindle their inner lives such that when they return to their homes, intercourse may follow. I hope I have served a laudable function. We do not get enough opportunities to observe naked ladies, their grace, their perfect proportionality, and alas, this appreciation is so often regarded as a matter of shame, something furtive and nasty. But it isn’t, it is glorious! And I mean to display its glory to the world. So long as the world will pay the membership fee and be confirmed by two existing club members. May I say that I have never put on an indecent show in my life. In fact, I won’t engage a girl with a bigger than 36 inch bust because I wouldn’t like to embarrass my customers.
MIXED MESSAGES FROM GOD
At one point, Raymond’s daughter’s boyfriend’s fiancée stabbed the boyfriend in the stomach (he recovered). At another point Raymond participated in a sting to catch two crooks who had been terrorizing his family with death threats for months (they pretended to be the IRA and had demanded £15,000 – they got jail). It was like that for years.
Raymond was very close to his daughter and they were both monstrous cokeheads, boozers and smokers. He had an 80 cigarettes a day habit. So it’s just not true what they say about alcohol, tobacco and cocaine – he died peacefully at the age of 82. Oh, wait – his daughter Debbie died at the age of 36 from a drug overdose. So yeah, it is true what they say. Sometimes.
PAUL RAYMOND IN HIS POMP
His dandified get-up confirmed his reputation as that comic stereotype of yesteryear, the oldest swinger in town. He still liked to wear a long black fur coat draped round the shoulders of an expensive handmade suit, the outfit accessorised these days by a gold bracelet, plus a diamond and gold pendant worn over his tie. As if that wasn’t noticeable enough he sported a pencil moustache and a deep tan that lent him the appearance of some leathery Hollywood actor made up to play a Mexican in an old western. The darkness of his skin emphasised the whiteness of his teeth and the pallor of his ever more elaborate scrape-over hairdo. Now dyed blonde, the colour giving it a strange acrylic sheen, it was sufficiently long at the back to form a valance round his neck.
IT WASN’T ALL WALL-TO-WALL 18 YEAR OLD BLONDES (ALTHOUGH MOSTLY IT WAS)
Paul Raymond got to be one of Britain’s richest people by exhibiting female flesh (strip clubs, mainly, then also rude stage shows like Oh! Calcutta! and nude magazines) and I wondered why every other material boy of the 60s and 70s didn’t do the same, so I read this after seeing the (mildly amusing) movie, and the answer was – tenacity. He was under constant attack from three directions for almost his whole career, and only his unflappable English-to-the-core urbanity got him through.
THE COPS
Subdivided into a) bent ones who wanted a backhander; b) worse, straight ones who were raiding his club all the time. The obscenity laws were whatever the judge thought on that day, so it wasn’t easy keeping out of jail or bankruptcy. On the other hand, it seemed to be pretty easy for this slippery eel.
Magistrate Reg Seaton :
(sung to the tune of “Love Is the Sweetest Thing”)
Your establishment and others have been vying with each other to see what degree of disgustingness they can introduce to attract members from all classes who are only too ready out of curiosity or lust to see filth portrayed in the establishment. Your show can only be characterised as filthy, disgusting and beastly.
(£5000 fine plus expenses – pocket change.)
THE GANGSTERS
Running protection rackets all over Soho (as were the bent cops) and cutting up rough if you didn’t pay up (“Mr Raymond, you wouldn’t want your strippers to get broken would you?”). Raymond seemed to be something of a magician, he never got duffed over. I assume he paid whoever had to be paid. They all had names like Jack the Hat or Jack the Gangster who’ll Rip your Arm Off.
THE ANTI-PORN CAMPAIGNERS
Trying to stem the tide of filth spewing forth in the “permissive society” of the 60s, they got Paul Raymond in their sights – he was the embodiment of all that was wrong! Mostly he got in front of their panels of inquiry and investigative probes and he charmed and smarmed ‘em. He told them “I’m with you! I hate obscenity!”
SOME RANDOM QUOTES
Hidden in the small print there’s an unsavoury announcement that dispels any doubts about the habits of the show’s audience. “In the interest of public health this theatre is disinfected throughout with Jeye’s Fluid.
In the early 50s New York burlesque shows were being staged with such wonderful titles as Anatomy and Cleopatra, Julius Teaser and Panties’ Inferno.
Pyjama Tops : The joy of it was that it was completely tasteless. For no particular reason all the girls leapt into the swimming pool in their pyjama tops. And then there was the ghastliness of all these tourists in raincoats wanking in the stalls.
In 1960 Raymond told the press his income was “in the region of £2000 a week” – this was more than ten times that of the then prime minister Harold Macmillan.
In those days Soho was synonymous not just with striptease but also with hot air : the serpentine hiss of the espresso machines, the fractious shushing of steam irons, the aromatic breath from restaurant doorways, and above all, the sound of conversation.
MONOTONOUS SUCCESS
Accompanied by clouds of naked young women, in and out of court, on yachts and helicopters, backstage, front of house, suavely parlaying with gangsters, the police, the judges, the reporters, the drag queens, rock bands, porn stars, with his entire private life an extended melodramatic soap opera, even so, Paul Raymond appears to have been a bit on the dull side, his life for decades at a time filled with monotonous success, money lashing down upon him in a continual monsoon, accompanied by heavy drifts of cocaine, storm surges of bodily fluid and multiple attacks of threesomes in giant mirrored beds. He proved that, should we have been in any doubt at all, the wages of sin are frankly astronomical.
August 22, 2018
"Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond; Soho's Billionaire King of Burlesque" by Paul Willetts
I used to walk up and down Soho's Brewer Street regularly in the late 1970s, and frequently passed the Raymond Revuebar in Walker's Court, when I was a 16 year old messenger for a film company. I never went in but was always impressed by the neon signage in the evening, and the plethora of sex shops that were then a feature of the area. That said, I was more interested in the second hand record shops that also abounded in the same streets, however I always enjoyed the frisson created by the sleaze and neon. London's seventies sex industry grew up around Paul Raymond's iconic and groundbreaking bar.
Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond; Soho's Billionaire King of Burlesque was my second book by Paul Willetts (the first being the wonderful Fear And Loathing In Fitzrovia, his biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross).
As with Fear And Loathing In Fitzrovia, Paul Willetts does an entertaining and thorough job of evoking the life and times of his subject. I particularly enjoyed how Paul Raymond helped to erode the once stringent customs and laws around sex and stripping. When the Revuebar opened in 1958 the naked girls had to remain static and recreate classical tableaux. The place was regularly attended by plain clothes police trying to find a way to convict him, or in some cases extort money not to prosecute him.
His empire grew as the sixties began to swing accompanied by a wave of permissiveness. Raymond's astute business skills and opportunism helped to change Britain beyond all recognition. His legacy is now clear to see, as the sex industry has been transformed from an illicit enterprise into a vast, rapacious business that permeates and debases all aspects of modern culture. One of the book's real stars is London's Soho district. An area that has an enduring fascination for me. Raymond diversified into property in the late 1970s, acquiring numerous Soho freeholds, and it was this that ultimately made him one of Britain's wealthiest men.
The book also explores Raymond's extraordinary domestic life. His strict Catholic family, his controlling mother, his attempts at being an entertainer, doing National Service, his post-war period as a Spiv, his acrimonious divorce from his first wife, his illegitimate first son, his daughter's tragic death, an extortion attempt, familial infighting, a love of money, entrepreneurship, London, sex, drugs, tragedy, pornography, and ultimately his own rather sad and lonely demise which his vast material wealth could not alleviate.
Raymond was, in many ways, a repellent man, and yet the book exerts a strong fascination as it details the inexorable success that was so closely aligned to changing public attitudes to sex, pornography and business.
4/5
I used to walk up and down Soho's Brewer Street regularly in the late 1970s, and frequently passed the Raymond Revuebar in Walker's Court, when I was a 16 year old messenger for a film company. I never went in but was always impressed by the neon signage in the evening, and the plethora of sex shops that were then a feature of the area. That said, I was more interested in the second hand record shops that also abounded in the same streets, however I always enjoyed the frisson created by the sleaze and neon. London's seventies sex industry grew up around Paul Raymond's iconic and groundbreaking bar.
Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond; Soho's Billionaire King of Burlesque was my second book by Paul Willetts (the first being the wonderful Fear And Loathing In Fitzrovia, his biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross).
As with Fear And Loathing In Fitzrovia, Paul Willetts does an entertaining and thorough job of evoking the life and times of his subject. I particularly enjoyed how Paul Raymond helped to erode the once stringent customs and laws around sex and stripping. When the Revuebar opened in 1958 the naked girls had to remain static and recreate classical tableaux. The place was regularly attended by plain clothes police trying to find a way to convict him, or in some cases extort money not to prosecute him.
His empire grew as the sixties began to swing accompanied by a wave of permissiveness. Raymond's astute business skills and opportunism helped to change Britain beyond all recognition. His legacy is now clear to see, as the sex industry has been transformed from an illicit enterprise into a vast, rapacious business that permeates and debases all aspects of modern culture. One of the book's real stars is London's Soho district. An area that has an enduring fascination for me. Raymond diversified into property in the late 1970s, acquiring numerous Soho freeholds, and it was this that ultimately made him one of Britain's wealthiest men.
The book also explores Raymond's extraordinary domestic life. His strict Catholic family, his controlling mother, his attempts at being an entertainer, doing National Service, his post-war period as a Spiv, his acrimonious divorce from his first wife, his illegitimate first son, his daughter's tragic death, an extortion attempt, familial infighting, a love of money, entrepreneurship, London, sex, drugs, tragedy, pornography, and ultimately his own rather sad and lonely demise which his vast material wealth could not alleviate.
Raymond was, in many ways, a repellent man, and yet the book exerts a strong fascination as it details the inexorable success that was so closely aligned to changing public attitudes to sex, pornography and business.
4/5
June 22, 2015
The reason I read this book is that recently I saw the movie with Steve Coogan, where he was just a bit too Alan Partridge to really convince as the man who truly brought sex to Soho, as a porn king, as a hugely wealthy property tycoon. The film itself was entertaining in a forgettable way, but it lacked a certain depth, so I was hoping the book would rectify that.
But although there’s obviously more space and time to fill out the scurrilous and sordid life of the subject, Paul Raymond himself still remains somewhat unknowable. Friends and family queue up to attest that for all his bonhomie, for all the time they spent with him, Raymond was a deeply reticent and enigmatic individual. He never seems to have truly opened the door to anyone, even to the point that he was married to his wife for years before she realised that he had an illegitimate son he was paying maintenance to. This evasiveness means that Paul Raymond is a tricky subject for the reader to peruse, but I imagine it was even trickier for his biographer. Try as he might Paul Willetts cannot open Paul Raymond’s soul. Even his avarice, the thing which perhaps most defined the man, remains opaque with so much hidden away from the taxman or just obscured by Raymond’s own natural secrecy. It’s impossible to get a grip on how big his empire was – only that it was huge. Paul Raymond, spiv turned end of the pier performer turned strip club owner turned sex baron turned property tycoon turned billionaire.
To fill in the gaps Willetts gives us the world around Raymond, with picturesque interludes from the musky and dark streets of Soho at night. So we have spivs, dodgy geezers, bent coppers and outright villains. It’s not a bad story, although Willett’s prose style frequently let’s him down. There are a few flourishes where he clearly aims to be a poet of the sex shops and seedy side streets, but for the most part the book is plodding and pedestrian.
Yet we do have a big and yet very human story here. A driven and successful man who thought he had it all and then ran face first into tragedy. It’s impossible not to think of Shelley:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
The Soho Paul Raymond created and revered is no more, wiped away by a gentrification that he also had an inadvertent hand in. His beloved club went to the wall and the internet put paid to his publishing empire, Of course the money remains, but over time and generations that too will fritter way. All that will be left is the name and a few memories. So for all his prominence in life, future generations will doubtless ask: who was Paul Raymond and why on Earth does he matter?
But although there’s obviously more space and time to fill out the scurrilous and sordid life of the subject, Paul Raymond himself still remains somewhat unknowable. Friends and family queue up to attest that for all his bonhomie, for all the time they spent with him, Raymond was a deeply reticent and enigmatic individual. He never seems to have truly opened the door to anyone, even to the point that he was married to his wife for years before she realised that he had an illegitimate son he was paying maintenance to. This evasiveness means that Paul Raymond is a tricky subject for the reader to peruse, but I imagine it was even trickier for his biographer. Try as he might Paul Willetts cannot open Paul Raymond’s soul. Even his avarice, the thing which perhaps most defined the man, remains opaque with so much hidden away from the taxman or just obscured by Raymond’s own natural secrecy. It’s impossible to get a grip on how big his empire was – only that it was huge. Paul Raymond, spiv turned end of the pier performer turned strip club owner turned sex baron turned property tycoon turned billionaire.
To fill in the gaps Willetts gives us the world around Raymond, with picturesque interludes from the musky and dark streets of Soho at night. So we have spivs, dodgy geezers, bent coppers and outright villains. It’s not a bad story, although Willett’s prose style frequently let’s him down. There are a few flourishes where he clearly aims to be a poet of the sex shops and seedy side streets, but for the most part the book is plodding and pedestrian.
Yet we do have a big and yet very human story here. A driven and successful man who thought he had it all and then ran face first into tragedy. It’s impossible not to think of Shelley:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
The Soho Paul Raymond created and revered is no more, wiped away by a gentrification that he also had an inadvertent hand in. His beloved club went to the wall and the internet put paid to his publishing empire, Of course the money remains, but over time and generations that too will fritter way. All that will be left is the name and a few memories. So for all his prominence in life, future generations will doubtless ask: who was Paul Raymond and why on Earth does he matter?
December 3, 2010
(First a disclaimer. I know Paul Willetts and I like him. He is a natural gentleman and so I have marked him down one star so as not to show favoritism.)
This is a well written biography of a limited man but a fascinating subject - Paul Raymond and the creation of the British adult entertainment sector between the repressed 1950s and the libertarian 1980s.
But the book is not really about sex so much as it is about business and society. Considering Willetts comes from a literary background, he has made a very good fist of telling the story of a late twentieth century entrepreneur whose lack of self awareness and drive for wealth made him simultaneously a sincere Roman Catholic and the founder of an adult entertainment empire, albeit one that was merely the cash flow means to the end of becoming a property magnate.
In this respect, the book should be sitting on the business and cultural studies as well as biography shelves. Raymond enjoyed the sensual life of a louche playboy until age and the death of his daughter from a drugs overdose plunged him into reclusive misery but his motive was never sensual pleasure.
He put in long hours to build real wealth - not wealth as high-minded people would understand it, solid manufacturing say, but wealth as the free market would understand it, cash in bank and freeholds. By the time of his death he was a billionaire.
But there are not a few billionaires in the world today. Many of them are as dull as dish water just as, all things considered, was Mr. Raymond. So why invest time and (for the publisher) money in a biography that is clearly not an official account nor a vanity product?
The answer lies in his milieu. Willetts, whose prose style is crystal clear and easy to read without being at all over-simplified, knows Soho intimately even if he does not know the sex industry well and he is well aware of the depth of social change that took place between the time Raymond was little more than a spiv and his death as lord of all he surveyed.
Willetts is not imaginative in one respect. He cannot get out of his educated class in his attitude to sexuality. He still persists in seeing the adult entertainment industry through somewhat prissy eyes on occasion - with the odd crack at 'sleaze' like a latterday tabloid moralist. He perhaps does not quite get capitalism or the possibility that Raymond was providing opportunities that did not exist for men and women who wanted them so that he was (admittedly unintendedly) a force for good.
Capitalism is about meeting desires. Two sets of desires, male lust and female independence, came together in the flow of businesses that Raymond built up and then ruthlessly jettisoned when they had served his purpose - nudie revues and stripping, night clubs, nude theatre, pornographic films and porn magazines that moved from coy airbrushing to no holds-barred readers' wives over thirty years.
There are some excellent pictures in the book, although the coyness of author and publisher fails to show us the later material from Club International, Escort and Razzle. The fear of sexuality that lurks in the English middle class, especially when it is selling its wares on the basis of sexual interest, is, frankly, comical but that is the culture we have been granted and so we must, regrettably, live within it.
Raymond fought off moralists like Longford and Whitehouse (much as Russ Meyer was doing in the US, as we have already reviewed elsewhere), out-manouevred (often in a very gutsy way) corrupt coppers, politicians and very vague laws and treated feminists with perhaps the disdain they deserved.
On the other hand, he was in it for the money and was as exploitative as any other capitalist might be (though clearly a better employer on the evidence than most in his industry and many outside it). There is certainly no evidence that properly run capitalist adult entertainment is or was more exploitative than the average under late capitalism and certainly Raymond's was less exploitative than the smaller-scale quasi-criminal underworld sex industry.
To be fair to him, he started as a hoofer of sorts in the last days of a degenerate music hall and he seems to have retained his respect for the little man on the way up. Similarly, he seems to have been respectful of the women who worked for him and there is little evidence of the casting couch - on the contrary, the girlfriends seemed to be having a crack at him to get a part.
The first set of desires that made this man wealthy were simply sexual pleasures - taken at a distance - not bonking but just the pleasure a man gets from observing naked women. It is just a fact. Feminists might witter on about 'objectification' but this is absurd ideological theory. The point is simple - in the objective conditions of the time are there women who freely choose and perhaps enjoy presenting themselves to the male gaze and by what right does any churchman or matriarch or Frankfurt School ideologue tell two willing parties to the exchange that they are doing wrong? Anyone who knows women knows that women like to be observed and the Revue Bar represented merely a matter of degree in turning a profit out of the arbitrage between watching and being watched.
Unless you have some standard that relies on God or natural law (which is hard to hold in a post-existentialist world), then the ideology dictating laws against free choice looks oppressive - indeed, downright'liberal fascist' in that Swedish or American middle class progressive way that tries to bring down a libertarian hero on a split condom as we write.
The point is that sex be about free exchange and, until feminists sort out the bigger problem of the working of the free market for both men and women (since the desire to observe and to preen will always be with us), what Raymond offered was, for many women, liberation from families and small communities.
These women wanted, more than anything, to live in London, earn their own way in life, to have 'fun' and cash, not to be trapped into a provincial marriage or a dull office or retail job. Their primary asset was their beauty - much as a footballer's primary asset is his strength and skill - and only a prissy grammar school girl, resentful of 'looks', would want to deny them their short place in the sun.
All that Raymond did was to bring these two sets of desire together to the great benefit economically of himself, to the lesser and sometimes questionable but generally sound benefit of the girls and to the emotional (though not financial) benefit of the men. In short, distaste for what he was doing is merely aesthetic or neurotic. Raymond's aesthetics were certainly grim (Willetts account of his taste in furnishings would have many a fashionista reaching for their bren gun) but poor taste is not, despite the influence of Oscar Wilde, a capital crime.
He was also at the heart of a number of other minor cultural revolutions - he played a role in the cultural liberation of the homosexual community and, perhaps, wider acceptance of transvestism, he played an ambiguous role in preserving Soho from the sort of large-scale brutalist development of the 1970s, he helped open up the theatre to free bodily expression and he was in at the start of the stand-up comedy phenomenon that is now mainstream.
Compare the situation of the provincial but not very educated young beauty, the gay or the transgender person, the centre of London, the English theatre and alternative comedy in the 1960s (pace Peter Cook) with the situation thirty years later and, in each, Raymond played his philistine and unwitting but positive role.
This is why the book is almost required reading for anyone interested in how England became the free-wheeling sexual culture that it is today - albeit a half-baked one where observation is preferred to participation, where the gaze is preferred to the act. It is all about the market, stupid, and it was a market, in his case, built out of the spivvery of a disrupted post-war London. The establishment could never forgive him for presenting disruptive normal desires to them, pointing out that their restraint was, well, not really necessary and then winning acceptance for things and ideas that ruined their cosy bourgeois idyll.
Yes, Willetts occasionally struggles with a man whose private life descends by the 1970s into something only comparable with soap operas like 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty'. Gaps have to be filled with anecdote yet he has done a spectacular job in terms of research and interviews so that we get one of the best pictures I have ever seen of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. If these people had not been satellites around a remarkable business genius, they would be just another of England's council estate familes ... and such people rarely get a biography.
This book is highly recommended and the lack of that final star is nothing to do with the author. The problem is just that Raymond (rather than his times) does struggle to be interesting in himself. I hope his publishers now commission Willetts to look at a similar type of figure but one with more, shall we say, oomph to him as a personality. But Willetts makes up for all this by telling a clear story of a place (Soho), its characters and its development. If you love London, you will love this book.
This is a well written biography of a limited man but a fascinating subject - Paul Raymond and the creation of the British adult entertainment sector between the repressed 1950s and the libertarian 1980s.
But the book is not really about sex so much as it is about business and society. Considering Willetts comes from a literary background, he has made a very good fist of telling the story of a late twentieth century entrepreneur whose lack of self awareness and drive for wealth made him simultaneously a sincere Roman Catholic and the founder of an adult entertainment empire, albeit one that was merely the cash flow means to the end of becoming a property magnate.
In this respect, the book should be sitting on the business and cultural studies as well as biography shelves. Raymond enjoyed the sensual life of a louche playboy until age and the death of his daughter from a drugs overdose plunged him into reclusive misery but his motive was never sensual pleasure.
He put in long hours to build real wealth - not wealth as high-minded people would understand it, solid manufacturing say, but wealth as the free market would understand it, cash in bank and freeholds. By the time of his death he was a billionaire.
But there are not a few billionaires in the world today. Many of them are as dull as dish water just as, all things considered, was Mr. Raymond. So why invest time and (for the publisher) money in a biography that is clearly not an official account nor a vanity product?
The answer lies in his milieu. Willetts, whose prose style is crystal clear and easy to read without being at all over-simplified, knows Soho intimately even if he does not know the sex industry well and he is well aware of the depth of social change that took place between the time Raymond was little more than a spiv and his death as lord of all he surveyed.
Willetts is not imaginative in one respect. He cannot get out of his educated class in his attitude to sexuality. He still persists in seeing the adult entertainment industry through somewhat prissy eyes on occasion - with the odd crack at 'sleaze' like a latterday tabloid moralist. He perhaps does not quite get capitalism or the possibility that Raymond was providing opportunities that did not exist for men and women who wanted them so that he was (admittedly unintendedly) a force for good.
Capitalism is about meeting desires. Two sets of desires, male lust and female independence, came together in the flow of businesses that Raymond built up and then ruthlessly jettisoned when they had served his purpose - nudie revues and stripping, night clubs, nude theatre, pornographic films and porn magazines that moved from coy airbrushing to no holds-barred readers' wives over thirty years.
There are some excellent pictures in the book, although the coyness of author and publisher fails to show us the later material from Club International, Escort and Razzle. The fear of sexuality that lurks in the English middle class, especially when it is selling its wares on the basis of sexual interest, is, frankly, comical but that is the culture we have been granted and so we must, regrettably, live within it.
Raymond fought off moralists like Longford and Whitehouse (much as Russ Meyer was doing in the US, as we have already reviewed elsewhere), out-manouevred (often in a very gutsy way) corrupt coppers, politicians and very vague laws and treated feminists with perhaps the disdain they deserved.
On the other hand, he was in it for the money and was as exploitative as any other capitalist might be (though clearly a better employer on the evidence than most in his industry and many outside it). There is certainly no evidence that properly run capitalist adult entertainment is or was more exploitative than the average under late capitalism and certainly Raymond's was less exploitative than the smaller-scale quasi-criminal underworld sex industry.
To be fair to him, he started as a hoofer of sorts in the last days of a degenerate music hall and he seems to have retained his respect for the little man on the way up. Similarly, he seems to have been respectful of the women who worked for him and there is little evidence of the casting couch - on the contrary, the girlfriends seemed to be having a crack at him to get a part.
The first set of desires that made this man wealthy were simply sexual pleasures - taken at a distance - not bonking but just the pleasure a man gets from observing naked women. It is just a fact. Feminists might witter on about 'objectification' but this is absurd ideological theory. The point is simple - in the objective conditions of the time are there women who freely choose and perhaps enjoy presenting themselves to the male gaze and by what right does any churchman or matriarch or Frankfurt School ideologue tell two willing parties to the exchange that they are doing wrong? Anyone who knows women knows that women like to be observed and the Revue Bar represented merely a matter of degree in turning a profit out of the arbitrage between watching and being watched.
Unless you have some standard that relies on God or natural law (which is hard to hold in a post-existentialist world), then the ideology dictating laws against free choice looks oppressive - indeed, downright'liberal fascist' in that Swedish or American middle class progressive way that tries to bring down a libertarian hero on a split condom as we write.
The point is that sex be about free exchange and, until feminists sort out the bigger problem of the working of the free market for both men and women (since the desire to observe and to preen will always be with us), what Raymond offered was, for many women, liberation from families and small communities.
These women wanted, more than anything, to live in London, earn their own way in life, to have 'fun' and cash, not to be trapped into a provincial marriage or a dull office or retail job. Their primary asset was their beauty - much as a footballer's primary asset is his strength and skill - and only a prissy grammar school girl, resentful of 'looks', would want to deny them their short place in the sun.
All that Raymond did was to bring these two sets of desire together to the great benefit economically of himself, to the lesser and sometimes questionable but generally sound benefit of the girls and to the emotional (though not financial) benefit of the men. In short, distaste for what he was doing is merely aesthetic or neurotic. Raymond's aesthetics were certainly grim (Willetts account of his taste in furnishings would have many a fashionista reaching for their bren gun) but poor taste is not, despite the influence of Oscar Wilde, a capital crime.
He was also at the heart of a number of other minor cultural revolutions - he played a role in the cultural liberation of the homosexual community and, perhaps, wider acceptance of transvestism, he played an ambiguous role in preserving Soho from the sort of large-scale brutalist development of the 1970s, he helped open up the theatre to free bodily expression and he was in at the start of the stand-up comedy phenomenon that is now mainstream.
Compare the situation of the provincial but not very educated young beauty, the gay or the transgender person, the centre of London, the English theatre and alternative comedy in the 1960s (pace Peter Cook) with the situation thirty years later and, in each, Raymond played his philistine and unwitting but positive role.
This is why the book is almost required reading for anyone interested in how England became the free-wheeling sexual culture that it is today - albeit a half-baked one where observation is preferred to participation, where the gaze is preferred to the act. It is all about the market, stupid, and it was a market, in his case, built out of the spivvery of a disrupted post-war London. The establishment could never forgive him for presenting disruptive normal desires to them, pointing out that their restraint was, well, not really necessary and then winning acceptance for things and ideas that ruined their cosy bourgeois idyll.
Yes, Willetts occasionally struggles with a man whose private life descends by the 1970s into something only comparable with soap operas like 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty'. Gaps have to be filled with anecdote yet he has done a spectacular job in terms of research and interviews so that we get one of the best pictures I have ever seen of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. If these people had not been satellites around a remarkable business genius, they would be just another of England's council estate familes ... and such people rarely get a biography.
This book is highly recommended and the lack of that final star is nothing to do with the author. The problem is just that Raymond (rather than his times) does struggle to be interesting in himself. I hope his publishers now commission Willetts to look at a similar type of figure but one with more, shall we say, oomph to him as a personality. But Willetts makes up for all this by telling a clear story of a place (Soho), its characters and its development. If you love London, you will love this book.
Read
August 7, 2011Willetts is universally recognised as the pre-eminent expert on the history of London's Soho district, an enclave of vice, creativity and bohemian excess tucked neatly into the city's West End. His Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia documented the colourful and tragic life of novelist Julian Maclaren-Ross, immortalised as Anthony Powell's X Trapnel. This biography of Paul Raymond, another denizen of that wickedest of all square miles and once reckoned to be the UK's richest man, is a balanced, fair and tremendously well-researched effort. Raymond - spiv, pornographer, strip-club pioneer and, above all, masterful accumulator of property - is portrayed as charming, friendless and calculating: a sequestered and unhappy, if hugely successful, product of his own strict religious upbringing in a broken home. Willetts writes with great brio, exhibiting effortless mastery of both his subject and the milieu of sexual permissiveness which he did so much to shape. Buy, read and learn.
February 21, 2015
Great biography of a very unique character, who epitomised a very unique area of a very unique city. Paul Raymond was not only Soho but was detrimental in the creation and re-generation of one of the most iconic and notorious areas of a metropolis in the entire world. An area responsible for some of the most eccentric individuals London has ever seen, as well as some of the most daring, intriguing and clever cultural creations the world has ever seen. Raymond's part in all of this is pivotal and this book surely covers that and more. His personal story is one of success, sleaze, sadness, tragedy, sex, drugs and rock n'roll. Not to mention the ideal accompaniment to the excellent film of the subject's life, 'The Look of Love'. Get it read.
October 11, 2010
Brilliantly researced & extremely well written biog. of Paul Raymond.
December 23, 2017
Comprehensive, and very British, history of sex and society, as guided by the King of Soho through the permissive age.
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