Paul Raymond

Paul Raymond, king of the Soho strip clubs and soft-porn magazine trade for more than 40 years, has died aged 82. A self-confessed spiv who once sold nylons and hairnets from a stall and was part of a mind-reading act, he prospered by accurately gauging the public's mood - and libido - in the early postwar years, when ancient pruderies and restrictive laws were increasingly being questioned.

He did so with such success that by 1992 he had ousted the Duke of Westminster as Britain's richest man, with an estimated fortune of more than £1.5bn. In 2004, he featured at No 62 in the Sunday Times Rich List, which reported he was worth £600m - although sceptics believe this was a fraction of his wealth. He boasted that throughout his life he had never read an entire book.

The key to Raymond's success was that he realised the live body beautiful could do better business at the box office if it was taken out of dark sweaty cellars, where clients were clipped for cheap champagne, and put into the plush world of theatres, where a gentleman could even take his lady. He also saw that the lord chamberlain's restrictions on staged nudity could be bypassed by turning theatres into private clubs.

These two factors, and his early refusal to have partners or a board of directors, led to his Paul Raymond Organisation of theatres and magazines, together with around 400 properties (including high-class restaurants and clubs) in the Soho area, becoming a commercial giant that dwarfed other theatre managements.

In recent years, however, his fortunes had begun to wane because of competition from both raunchier sex magazines and those that had expanded their coverage to lend intellectual credence to their pornographic content.

Raymond was born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn (Paul Raymond was an early stage name) to a Roman Catholic family in Liverpool. His mother, who refused to have the News of the World in the house, wanted him to have a safe job as a railway ticket office clerk, and never fully accepted his chosen career.

His father, a haulage contractor, disappeared from his life when he was five. It left the shy, stammering child with the uncomfortable sense that he would have to look after himself first and foremost, an attitude that was to characterise his life.

His first ambition was to be a drummer boy, but he was not good enough. Such showbusiness taste as he had was frustrated until, much later, he did his mind-reading act and then, later still, presented risqué sex shows such as Yes, We Have No Pyjamas, Come Into My Bed and Let's Get Laid.

Educated partly by Jesuits, he left school at 15 and worked as an office boy for the Manchester ship canal, practising percussion in his spare time. Under wartime direction of labour laws, he went down a mine as a Bevin Boy – but for one day only. The police brought him back. He went into the RAF and wangled his way into theatricals.

Once he got out of the RAF legitimately, it was a logical step to become a theatrical agent in Liverpool and a theatrical impresario in a small way in Manchester, casting his eyes further south when he hired a Clacton-on-Sea clairvoyant act. Changing his name, he went back up north with his mind-reading act. The manager of a theatre said he would allow Raymond and his two female colleagues on to his stage only if the females went on nude.

When the girls agreed, Raymond started on the route that would make him the richest man in a changing Britain. He offered each of the two strippers an extra 10s (50p) a week, which they accepted.

Within a comparatively short time he had taken over the old Doric Ballroom in London for his Revuebar, incidentally acquiring the lease of other properties in the vicinity that were to make him a multimillionaire and then a billionaire when property values rocketed. It was not long before the chairman of the London Sessions, before whom he was appearing for allegedly keeping a disorderly house at the Revuebar, called his show "filthy, disgusting and beastly", and fined him £5,000 in 1961.

The show included a snake charmer called Julie Mendez and the Dong Dong Girl. The publicity for both, and for Raymond, was worth many times £5,000. Raymond became a British institution. He may not have been favoured in 1996 by the then home secretary, Michael Howard, who was caustic after touring the sexpots of Soho, but the money kept rolling from his sex shows.

Raymond's usual formula, which he continued when he took over the Whitehall and the Windmill theatres, was to provide nudity without actionable crudity. He also applied it to such magazines as Men Only. In the late 1980s, profits from this and his West End theatres, nightclubs and girlie mags totalled more than £6m year; they continued to rise.

But he was singularly ill-equipped to enjoy or constructively employ such wealth. He remained shy and stammered in company. Alhough he protested that he was neither a pornographer nor a crook, he was dismissed by the more august sections of the media as a deluxe wide boy. He had no interests apart from his cabin cruiser, his gold-plated Rolls Royce and drink.

He was invited to Downing Street by Margaret Thatcher as an exemplary entrepreneur, but his social life tended to be confined to escorting strippers from other girlie clubs. His wife, Joan, divorced him in 1974 after 23 years of marriage and received a £250,000 settlement after his admitted adultery with Fiona Richmond, the well-exposed star of some of his shows, who once rubbed salt in Raymond's wounds by saying publicly she doubted whether he actually slept with the girls he went out with.

He and Joan were barely on speaking terms. Relations with his son Howard, who was his presumed heir, were better until Howard's drug problems. In 1992, the year Raymond became Britain's richest man, his daughter, Debbie, who had helped him run his businesses, died of a drugs overdose. Raymond confined himself to his penthouse next door to the Ritz hotel, discouraging callers.

Financially, it was a story of progress. When in 1994 the receiver accepted Raymond's £15m offer for the Café de Paris, the Rialto cinema site and shops and offices in Rupert Street and Coventry Street in Soho, Raymond recalled: "Years ago I queued up across the road at five in the morning at the kitchen entrance of Joe Lyons to work as a washer-up in the kitchen for ten shillings (50p) a morning." Two years later he bought the Queen's House leisure complex in Leicester Square for £12m.

By 1994, rumours of cancer had begun and he appointed Joe Daniel, a Barclays banker, as his managing director. In 1997, he sold the name and the business of his Revuebar, and a 20-year lease on its buildings, to Gerard Simi, a former Marseilles Ballet dancer, who for 21 years had been his chief choreographer. At around the same time he unsuccessfully applied to a court for a reduction in the £108 a week he paid for the upkeep of a son by a former lover, reinforcing the negative side of his reputation.

He began progressively diluting his connection with his organisation, while insisting he was still in charge. In 2000, his brother, Dr Philip Quinn, became a director of the Paul Raymond Organisation and of the property development company Ilona House Securities. Quinn's son Mark had worked for Raymond since 1980.