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Hugh Hefner may have launched Playboy magazine, but Victor Lownes came up with one of the keys to its success.
Lownes, who joined Playboy in 1955 as marketing director when the Chicago-based publication was struggling to make a success out of its racy photographs of beautiful women, helped groom the magazine for wider acceptance.
Among his contributions was the long-running campaign “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?” At its peak in the early 1970s, the answer became just about every man.
But it was his idea to create the Playboy Club that launched a money-making empire.
Lownes, 88, who not only shaped the Playboy image but lived it himself, died in a London hospital Wednesday morning after suffering a heart attack New Year’s Eve, said Marilyn Cole Lownes, a former Playmate of the Year and his wife of more than 30 years.
“He was a real playboy — everybody knew it,” said Cole Lownes, 67. “All the girls that went out with him knew it. They either accepted it or they didn’t.”
Lownes was born in Buffalo, N.Y., and attended the New Mexico Military Institute, a boarding school in Roswell, N.M. He attended the University of Chicago, where he fell in love with his adopted city.
At a party the dapper Lownes threw for comedian Jonathan Winters, Lownes met Hefner. The two hit it off and in 1955 he joined the magazine. Lownes came up with the idea for the Playboy Club after the magazine ran an article in 1959 about the Gaslight Club, a membership club featuring scantily clad waitresses in Chicago.
Partnering with Chicago restaurateur Arnold Morton and Lownes, Hefner opened the first Playboy Club at 116 E. Walton St. in Chicago in 1960. At their peak, there were more than 30 Playboy Clubs around the world, but the last of the original company-owned clubs closed more than 30 years ago. A new wave of franchised Playboy Clubs launched in 2006.
Lownes moved to London to open a Playboy Club in 1964. The club featured gambling and was a financial success for the company. He was fired in 1981 over concerns about alleged gambling irregularities, which led to a rift between Lownes and Hefner that lasted nearly a decade.
Cole met Lownes in 1971 when she became a Playboy bunny in the London club. She dated him, but waited another decade before tying the knot with her former boss in 1984; it was his second marriage.
Lownes, who also produced movies, plays and music, maintained homes in London and New York, but never lost his love of Chicago, his wife said. The couple last returned to the city in 2015 to celebrate his 87th birthday at the Langham Hotel.
“He lived a very civilized life,” his wife said. “He knew how to live.”
Lownes also is survived by a son, Victor, and a daughter, Meredith Lownes, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His wife is a planning a tribute to Lownes “down the line.”
Twitter @RobertChannick