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The Real Paul Raymond

Paul Raymond in 1981 Photo By John Dee / Rex Features

In half a century as a publisher and impresario, Paul Raymond has brought pornography in Britain out of the backstreets and into the mainstream. His business has made him a multi-millionaire and a property tycoon, but never gained him social acceptance. The Real Paul Raymond examines the tangled career and the troubled personal life of Britain's foremost porn baron.

Paul Raymond was born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn in 1925. The son of a Liverpool haulage contractor, he was raised in Glossop by his mother and an aunt. He left school at 15 and left Glossop in 1942, determined to get into show business. After a series of menial jobs on the variety circuit, Raymond got his first break and his new identity in 1947, taking over a mind-reading act on Clacton Pier. He split up with his partner, Gaye Dawn, when she became pregnant; although he supported his son Derry, it was years before he actually met him.

Giving them what they want

Raymond then became a producer, touring a variety programme, the Vaudeville Express, around the country. With the variety circuit in decline, many impresarios were enlivening their bills with nude acts. A ruling by the Lord Chamberlain, the supreme theatre licensing authority, prohibited any movement by nudes on stage so the shows consisted of tableaux in which women posed, naked to the waist, for minutes at a time. In 1951 Raymond transformed his variety show into the Festival of Nudes (a nod to the contemporary Festival of Britain); his initial investment consisted of paying two dancers an extra ten shillings (50p) a week.

Raymond's nude acts rapidly became his main attraction. He put on Moving Nudes, a show where the women stood on platforms that were winched across the stage, but Raymond's audience was eager for more. While Raymond had little interest in the content of his shows, he liked to give the punters what they wanted, and he found the solution in 1957. The Lord Chamberlain's writ did not run to private clubs, so Raymond exploited this loophole by opening the Raymond Revuebar in Soho. The club offered glamorous stage shows that included female nudity – a type of entertainment then unknown in Britain.

Building an empire

In the mid-1950s Raymond had married Jean, a former dancer, and by 1957 they had two children, Howard and Debbie. However, family life came second to Raymond's career. The Revuebar was an immediate success and Raymond grew rich on club membership fees; by 1965 he had made half a million pounds.

In 1964 he launched King ('The Man's Magazine'). Modelled on Playboy, King offered a sophisticated package of high-powered writing and tasteful nudity (it wasn't until 1972 that nudes with visible pubic hair first appeared in magazines). The magazine, expensive to run and not entirely to Raymond's taste, closed after two issues.

Raymond's next target was the theatre. In the late 1960s he bought the Whitehall Theatre in London's West End and put on Pyjama Tops, a successful American farce with added nudity. Capitalising on its success, a run of plays such as What, No Pyjamas? and Yes, We Have No Pyjamas followed. Despite focussing on naked women, the plays were oddly wholesome: sex was on show but played for laughs.

A sophisticated showman

Raymond liked to present himself as a 'showman', denying that he dealt in pornography. This pose was even sustained after his return to magazine publishing in 1971, with the launch of Men Only. The new magazine – joined in 1972 by a second, Club International – was again aimed at a sophisticated audience. Their selling point, following the example of the Sunday newspapers' colour supplements, was a quota of factual and lifestyle articles, with advertising to match. Although Raymond's magazines were spurned by the main distributors, their glossy appearance enabled him to sell them through small newsagents. The 'top shelf' was born.

Raymond was now having a relationship with Fiona Richmond – a nude model and swimmer who featured in both Raymond's stage shows and his magazines – and his marriage to Jean broke up in 1974. That same year, Raymond followed his run of farces with a big-budget extravaganza: Royalty Follies. This show cost £300,000 to stage and featured, among much else, a dolphin trained to remove a swimmer's bikini. However, British audiences did not appreciate the replacement of picture postcard humour with Las Vegas gloss, and the show failed.

In 1977 Soho was convulsed by a crackdown on corruption in the Obscene Publications Squad (OPS). Several members of the 'Dirty Squad' were convicted of receiving bribes from Soho bookshop and strip club owners; 500 policemen subsequently resigned. Following the crackdown, many of Soho's semi-legal enterprises scaled down their activities or got out altogether. Raymond, however, emerged unscathed and, taking advantage of falling property prices, bought up Soho by the street.

The emperor's decline

In the early 1980s Raymond's closest colleague and personal friend, Men Only editor Tony Power, gave up work with drug-related problems and died in a house fire soon afterwards. By now Raymond's relationship with Fiona Richmond had ended, he was estranged from his son Howard, and he had met his son Derry only once. His only close relationship was with his daughter Debbie, who put herself forward – initially against her father's wishes – as his second-in-command and heir apparent. Tragically, in 1992 at the age of 36, she died from a drug overdose, leaving two daughters. Already withdrawing from public attention, Raymond now grew increasingly reclusive.

Developments in the sex trade passed him by. Pornography could now be found in daily newspapers; 'lad mags' outsold top-shelf magazines; and table and lap-dancing clubs offered a more 'personal' experience than the razzmatazz of the Revuebar.

In one respect Raymond did move with the times: his website sold 'adult entertainment' in several different forms. But the site's home page offered a mock-up of a street in Soho – or rather, Soho as it had been when Raymond opened the Revuebar. His business may have offered hardcore material over the internet, but Raymond continued to see himself as an old-school showman – right to the end: he died on 3 March 2008.

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