Paul Willetts

(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 show more 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. show less

This is a bit of genre buster. It is certainly not fiction (the research put into it by the author makes me believe wholly his assertion that nothing in the book is invented) yet it reads like a thriller in some respects. Nor is it a traditional history insofar as it lacks an analytical aspect.

I struggled to place this excellent and innovative book until I considered one of the oldest literary forms of all, the chronicle - a chronicle in this case that is carefully crafted to tell as much of show more the story as possible about a contained (limited in time and space) but important historical event.

The story weaves together the lives of the arrogant young embassy clerk Tyler Kent, the embittered and fashionable Russian exile Anna Wolkoff and the somewhat eccentric but highly competent spymaster Max Knight in a tale of wartime espionage.

But what Willetts does that is a little different is to ensure that the convergence of these personalities takes place in something like real time in very short chapters with a wealth of detail about what it must have been like to have lived in particular times and places.

Nearly all history that is written suffers from one problem - retrospective wisdom. Because we know what happened, it looks as if it was inevitable that it should have happened that way. We think those who did not ride the tide of history to be more deluded (or wicked) than they were.

Because of his methodology (which probably only works on the relatively small-scale), we see the state of things not entirely with hindsight. These people are shown to have been acting in the reasonable belief that the outcomes that they wanted were possible.

For two of these people, the outcome was a Fascist Britain. Willetts gives us a sense of how a very small group of people weakly connected to the British Establishment might have thought this possible and, politically, have moved in the direction of treachery as a result.

After all, a successful German invasion or a shift in the political balance in Parliament or a coup by a wider range of sympathisers in the military or police (we are still only two decades from a war that had its blood and soil survivors) could well have resulted in such an outcome.

In actuality, the formal history tells us that our hindsight was not all wrong. The fascist activists were small in number and divided, Churchill had the confidence of the House (notably the Labour Party) and the British Empire was resilient and secretly backed by the US.

But this was not entirely clear to people living in that mess called day-to-day life. Willetts certainly brings out the stakes for men like Max Knight (himself once a Fascist sympathiser) whose execution would undoubtedly have resulted if the Nazis had invaded.

The key point is that people were playing for very high stakes. The material the Nazi sympathisers were extracting from the US Embassy could have resulted in a serious political crisis for Roosevelt and the possible loss of his power just when he was needed by the British Empire.

In theory, history could have been changed (for the worse) by this tiny group of amateurs although my own instinct is that Ambassador Kennedy's decisive actions against Tyler Kent probably indicates that the American political machine might have defused any such crisis in practice.

But, again, no one was to know that then and, because it never happened, we cannot know that now. It is reasonable for us to fear the worst. it was reasonable for Max Knight to fear the worst.

I have concentrated on the 'story line' but this experimental book is also very well written - at least when the material allows Willetts to show his talent. Sometimes the Chronicle aspect militates against this because of his self-denying ordinance on fictionalising matters.

Where his literary skills come in relate not to the plotting (since the plot is set by history) but in recreating three personalities and their respective entourages and in allowing material facts in the wider world to give us some sense of how they approached their decision-making.

It is the many minor characters - lazy and bored young embassy officials, embittered White Russians and middle class English women and men and somewhat cypher-like but efficient security officers - that make up the story. We are presented with a world we believe in.

I cannot speak of a weakness in the book because it works entirely within its own ambitions but I have said that, if it is not fiction, it is also not entirely history (or at least not history as we have understood it since Herodotus and Thucydides).

History is an interpretative as much as it is a narrative form. The history is directed at a purpose - ideological in 'bad' history, explanatory in most history and revealing of our human condition in the best of it. This book 'tells' in preference to 'explains' (more like journalism in this respect).

Willetts seems interested in telling a story from which we can draw what we want for ourselves rather than drawing an obvious moral or providing a grand narrative for us. We can even see the author's own prejudices and interpretations without him foisting them on us as truth.

For example, because the story is contained and deliberately limited, hares are not raised about the more double-dealing aspects of the security apparat (such as the MI5 subvention to Joyce and what amounted to his calculated but politically necessary execution).

Nor does he see perhaps, as political practitioners will pick up straight away, the context of the drive to have a wide range of fascists interned. This was the security apparat seeking to extend its powers and solve its problems over the heads of the liberal values of the political class.

Even Churchill was uncomfortable with the actions of this arm of the system. We should be mindful that this apparat, in every country and at every time, has a propensity to use 'incidents' to limit our freedoms on a precautionary principle that suits its world view 'in our interest'. Hmmm!

In fact, the picture emerges of a British State that was extremely wary of using its own powers, very different in this respect from its opponent and even its allies - the US not excluded. Yet the evidence is here if you look that an arm of it is always ready to push the envelope.

Perhaps I am suspicious that Willetts was a little taken in by Max Knight but I cannot say I mind. Knight's opponents were far from pleasant people, perhaps weak and narcissistic rather than down right evil although there are hints of some truly evil types in their circle.

Over the whole story lurks a number of 'men of power' who could decide one things, one way or another, but who are not the primary subject of the story - Ambassador Kennedy, the proto-Quisling 'Jock' Ramsay and the higher up officials to whom Knight answered.

It is Ramsay about whom I want to know more. He was an outlier even within Fascist circles but I think we can take it at face value that this right-wing MP might easily have been Governor of Britain under Hitler and a nastier one than Mosley could ever be.

It is interesting to note that one of the pro-Nazi Right Club was a Labour MP. This reminds us that politics then (as now) was more complicated than the standard narrative - and should remind us that there is a militarist and liberal imperialist working class element to the Party even today.

The driver for all this - which is brought out well in the book - was a vicious antisemitism that is hard to understand in the days long before Israel started demonically pounding Gaza. The stickiness of late nineteenth and early twentieth century anti-semitism is another story.

Hitler's antisemitism, so absurd and off the wall to us today, encouraged a small coterie of British obsessives who seriously and sincerely thought that betraying the country was a greater good to save the nation and the empire from what they saw as the corrupting influence of the Jews.

So, all in all, a recommended book for those interested in espionage and in the history of pre-war and wartime Britain, with copious notes and references and one that actually reads well and is far from dry.

Many people who read this book and do not have the patience for Ian Kershaw or Angus Calder will come out of it with better understanding of early wartime Britain (and Europe) than they can ever have from relying on conventional thrillers. It certainly eases literary types into history!

One footnote: I would not be surprised to see this turned into a film. One of Willetts' books (a life of Paul Raymond) has already received this accolade but the way the book is written - as a narrative that 'chronicles' its events in segments - is already half way to a film script.

[DISCLAIMER: I know Paul Willetts and my copy is signed and personal but regular readers know that my reviews are reliable. However, I always knock off a star when I review books by people I know and like ... on principle - just in case. You can draw your own conclusions from this.] show less

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 show more 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 show less

A bizarre and unlikely story about a man who made a career (and quite a lucrative one) by pretending to be an Indian Chief at the turn of the century. Getting his start as a vaudeville performer, Edgar Laplante eventually made the transition to full time conman and began traveling around the United States and eventually Europe as well. He had a cheesy costume, wild and ever-changing stories, and an extremely smooth way of operating.

Although he was occasionally unmasked as a fraud, he just show more moved to a new town and started all over again. This act took him to fancy hotels all over the world where he would inevitably leave someone short of cash when he departed. Eventually, however, his luck ran out and even his most ardent supporters caught on to his game.

He died penniless in a pauper's hospital.

Although I love a good story of con artistry, this one wasn't as fun as I expected. Getting rich while pretending to be a persecuted race is gross. This guy wasn't a charming villain, he was just one in a long line of white men who have advantaged themselves at the expense of native peoples. Although he did steal a lot of money from mostly white people... so ... maybe it's a wash? It's really hard to say. But his schemes were pretty elementary and the story quickly became repetitive. This was, at the very least, an interesting piece of history. show less