( The Daily Telegraph ) Victor Lownes, who died on the 11th January at the aged of 88, was the original business partner of the American Playboy supremo Hugh Hefner and ran its lucrative British enterprises, from the mid 1960s until 1981.
A fast-living swashbuckler from Chicago, Lownes was famous for being the highest paid executive in Britain, and for the lothario lifestyle he enjoyed at Stocks, a 42-room Georgian pile in Hertfordshire, where he ran a “training school” for Playboy bunnies, threw swinging parties by night and rode furiously to hounds by day.
