Peter Stringfellow Obituary
Peter Stringfellow obituary
Peter Stringfellow in New York in 1985, at the height of his success. The nightclub owner died today, aged 77
Peter Stringfellow was Britain’s most successful sex salesman. At the London nightclub that bore his name, semi-naked girls entertained not only the usual congregation of professional footballers, pop idols and TV soap stars but also City brokers, captains of industry, Olympic gold medallists and, on at least one occasion, a Nobel prize-winning scientist.
He introduced nude table dancing to Britain and oversaw the transformation of strip clubs from a seedy sub-culture into a semi-respectable activity. “I’ve singlehandedly brought the topless industry into the mainstream,” he boasted. Even Margaret Thatcher once visited his West End club for a Conservative Party fundraising event, although he spared her the sight of naked flesh by giving his dancers the night off.
His success made him not only a multi-millionaire but also a cartoon character whose preposterous lifestyle invited mockery. He wore his hair in long blond streaks (but objected strongly to its description as a “mullet”), dressed in leopardskin-print shirts and revealingly tight silk trousers worn without underwear, and allowed himself to be snapped by a paparazzo on a beach wearing a thong. He was in his sixties at the time.
Peter Stringfellow at the Bacardi London Club and Bar Awards at the London Hilton Hotel in 2001PA
He claimed to have slept with more than 2,000 women, after calculating the tally one night in his club during a bragging contest with Rod Stewart and Bill Wyman. Following a recount, the three of them concluded that the result was too close to declare a conclusive winner.
Stringfellow’s London apartment was the closest Britain came to Hugh Hefner’s infamous Playboy Mansion, furnished with erotic art and gilt mirrors on the bedroom ceilings. Having grown up without an outdoor lavatory, he paid particular attention to the bathrooms, insisting on a Jacuzzi, television and champagne on ice in each one. In his clubs the décor was either flashily contemporary black leather and chrome with pink and fluffy boudoir trimmings or fake Louis XV furniture, chandeliers and crushed velvet. “I invented nightclubs and I made them all in my own image,” he said.
For a man who by his own admission was a sitting target he enjoyed a surprisingly sympathetic press. He attributed this to his assiduous courting of journalists and pouring copious amounts of free champagne down their throats. Even when the media were mocking him it tended to be done with a gentle affection, his peccadillos dismissed with a forgiving “that’s Stringy”.
The celebrity interviewer Lucy Cavendish called him “a walking, talking anachronism” and the epithet “sleazy” was occasionally attached to his name. But scour the press cuttings and that was about as harsh as it got.
When he appeared on Have I Got News For You Paul Merton smirked that his fellow panellist’s hairstyle was older than his girlfriend. But Stringfellow had no argument with the jibe. Even as he came to rely on hearing aids and cosmetic surgery to hold the advancing years at bay, he continued to date girls less than half his age: when he was into his sixties one of his girlfriends asked him to send flowers to her mother on her 40th birthday. His explanation of why he preferred young girls to women his own age was disarming: “I take enough baggage to a relationship without going with a lady who’s got her own baggage.”
He married three of his conquests but said that the secret to monogamy was “lying”. His first marriage, to his teenage sweetheart Norma Williams, lasted five years, although by the time they married in 1960 he was already sleeping with her cousin. They had a daughter Karen, who later worked for her father’s business — in a fully-clothed capacity, it should be added. He married Coral Wright in 1967 and their son, Scott, became a racing driver. Against the odds his second attempt at wedded bliss lasted for an improbable 22 years of deceit and dissembling. The divorce, at the height of his success in the 1980s, cost him more than £1 million.
He married for a third time at the age of 68, to Bella Wright, a 26-year-old ballet dancer whom he met when she visited his club one night after performing with the English National Ballet at the Coliseum. He offered her a job dancing in his club and their romance grew. A daughter, Rosabella, was born in 2013 and a son Angelo two years later.
Never given to regrets and seemingly immune to irony, critics who accused him of sexism received his withering contempt. When he opened a lapdancing club in Dublin and it was picketed nightly by protestors holding placards that declared “Save our women and children from Peter Stringfellow” he took it as flattery. He described the pickets as “hilarious”, although the protesters had the last laugh when the club closed after only five months.
Diana, Princess of Wales, meets Peter Stringfellow at the Birthright BallTIM GRAHAM/GETTY
Peter James Stringfellow was born at the height of the Blitz in 1940, in the Sheffield suburb of Pitsmoor, which he dubbed “Pisspoor”. As a boy he shared an attic bedroom with three younger brothers, two of whom went on to work for him. His third brother studied theology and became a missionary in the Caribbean.
At school he was dyslexic and “always bottom of the class”, leaving at 15 to follow his father, James, into the steelworks. He didn’t stay long and joined the merchant navy, which allowed him to celebrate his 17th birthday in New York City. After a nine-week sea voyage he returned to Sheffield with £65 in his pocket, with which he bought a Royal Enfield motorbike.
A job as a carpet salesman ended with a spell in prison after he was caught stealing Axminsters from his employer and selling them on. “I got the stock mixed up and thought it was mine,” he said. His crocodile tears in court failed to convince the judge, who told him that he needed a short, sharp shock. The eight weeks he spent behind bars delivered a fright he never forgot. “It was horrible, nothing like those black-and-white Humphrey Bogart movies,” he said later.
Peter Stringfellow at the opening of Stringfellows in Dublin in 2006, with his future third wife, Bella, on his left. The club closed after six monthsNEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD
Finding employment difficult with a criminal record, in 1962 Stringfellow persuaded a Sheffield vicar to rent him a hall and, with the help of his father on the door and his mother Elsie taking the cash, St Aidan’s Church Hall was transformed into the Black Cat Club. He recalled that on the opening night he had sex with one of the punters in the back of his van parked outside the hall. As his business took off so did his philandering and before long he was claiming to have “deflowered five virgins” in one hectic week alone.
The club was already a success when, at the beginning of 1963, he was tipped off about an unknown band from Liverpool and called their manager, Brian Epstein. He booked the Beatles for a fee of £50 but by April, when they were schedule to play at the Black Cat, they were riding high in the charts and Stringfellow was forced to hire a larger hall. Typically he sold twice as many tickets as the venue was licensed to hold and made a net profit of £65 — considerably more than the Beatles were paid for the gig.
He was up and running and moved to larger premises, where he set up the Mojo club and booked the biggest names of the day, including The Who, Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Small Faces, Stevie Wonder and Jimi Hendrix, making his first appearance outside London.
In 1970 he moved his operation to Leeds and when he sold his club there to the Mecca chain six years later, he officially joined the ranks of Britain’s self-made millionaires. He opened the Millionaire’s Club in Manchester before deciding it was time to see if he could make his mark down in “the smoke”.
Peter Stringfellow outside his nightclub, the Hippodrome. He hosted the UK’s first gay disco at the venueNEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD
He launched Stringfellows in Covent Garden 1980 and his timing was perfect. Brash and glitzy, he became a high profile standard-bearer for the new “loadsamoney” Yuppie generation and his club became a gossip columnist’s favourite, frequented by the great and the good and the grisly. Those who partied at Stringfellows over the next 15 years — and invariably had their photo taken with the owner — included Jack Nicholson (who started pole dancing and had to be asked to desist), Robin Williams, Hugh Grant, Elton John Marvin Gaye, Prince, Rod Stewart, Tom Jones and Princess Diana.
The 1980s were boom years, “Maggie Thatcher has sorted out this country,” he announced from the back seat of his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Club hours meant that he never got up before 2pm although if pushed he would take important business calls in bed from 11 am. His shirts were only ever worn once and then thrown out with the trash.
He next bought The Hippodrome, an ailing Leicester Square music hall that had formerly operated as The Talk Of The Town, where he hosted the UK’s first gay disco night. At one of the Hippodrome’s wilder events, he hired a male lion which managed to slip its tamer’s lease. “I’ve never seen a dancefloor clear so quickly,” he said ruefully.
In the late 1980s he expanded to America where New York was a natural playground, although his attempts to pose as Peter Frampton at Manhattan’s famous Studio 54 ended with an $8,000 bill for the rock star’s drug supply. In truth he had no time for illegal substances and cited his only addictions as vodka, champagne and, of course, sex.
Peter Stringfellow in 1994TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD
His New York club was followed by ventures in Miami and Los Angeles, where he opened a club in Beverly Hills which flopped “because everyone in LA drinks mineral water and goes to bed early”. Calling a well-known movie star “Mr Clintwood” on his first visit and banning Eddie Murphy didn’t help his cause among the Hollywood glitterati. Nor did an economic recession and when his US business collapsed with losses said to have totalled lost £15m, he noted that it was “the first time in my life I’ve failed at anything”.
He returned to London to lick his wounds but America had unwittingly given him a lucrative farewell present. Before his departure a friend had taken him for a consoling night out at one of Miami’s lap-dancing clubs, where he “saw the future”. By 1996 he had relaunched his flagship Covent Garden venue as The Cabaret of Angels and transformed it into the country’s first topless table-dancing club.
Within a few years table dancing, and its more tactile offshoot lap dancing, had become so much a part of mainstream London nightlife that on some nights one-third of Stringfellows’ customers were women. One evening Professor Stephen Hawking visited the club, leading the owner to lament, “His brain is the best in the world. I wanted to talk to him about the universe but he just wanted to watch the girls.”
His success encouraged the American lap dancing chain Spearmint Rhino to muscle its way into the West End, to the chagrin of Stringfellow who dismissed his upstart rivals as “Wild West Cowboys”. Without any hint of self-parody, he complained that the world had gone “sex mad” and insisted that he was “very keen to keep up our high standards of good taste and respectability’’. He denied that he exploited his dancers, who could make £1,200 in an evening.
A million pound pay-out to the family of a client who died at the club in 2004 after being punched by a doorman was a setback; but he rode the bad publicity and a licensing battle with Westminster Council, who were concerned about drunken customers spilling out into the streets in the small hours. He told them not worry for the prices on his cocktail list were so astronomical that only those as rich as Sir Philip Green could afford to get drunk at his bar. In truth there was a plentiful supply of big spenders and at least one customer came away with a drinks tab that by closing time had topped £12,000.
In 2008 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, although he had never been a smoker. “I’ve spent more than 50 years in clubs where people smoked and that’s what caused it,” he said.
When not in London, he spent his time in Mallorca, where he kept a home and a yacht. When asked the secret of his success he replied: “Don’t let money obsess you but make sure you have plenty of it. And if you haven’t got plenty of it, pretend you have.”
Peter Stringfellow, nightclub owner, was born on October 17, 1940. He died on June 7 2018, aged 77
He introduced nude table dancing to Britain and oversaw the transformation of strip clubs from a seedy sub-culture into a semi-respectable activity. “I’ve singlehandedly brought the topless industry into the mainstream,” he boasted. Even Margaret Thatcher once visited his West End club for a Conservative Party fundraising event, although he spared her the sight of naked flesh by giving his dancers the night off.
His success made him not only a multi-millionaire but also a cartoon character whose preposterous lifestyle invited mockery. He wore his hair in long blond streaks (but objected strongly to its description as a “mullet”), dressed in leopardskin-print shirts and revealingly tight silk trousers worn without underwear, and allowed himself to be snapped by a paparazzo on a beach wearing a thong. He was in his sixties at the time.
Peter Stringfellow at the Bacardi London Club and Bar Awards at the London Hilton Hotel in 2001PAHe claimed to have slept with more than 2,000 women, after calculating the tally one night in his club during a bragging contest with Rod Stewart and Bill Wyman. Following a recount, the three of them concluded that the result was too close to declare a conclusive winner.
Stringfellow’s London apartment was the closest Britain came to Hugh Hefner’s infamous Playboy Mansion, furnished with erotic art and gilt mirrors on the bedroom ceilings. Having grown up without an outdoor lavatory, he paid particular attention to the bathrooms, insisting on a Jacuzzi, television and champagne on ice in each one. In his clubs the décor was either flashily contemporary black leather and chrome with pink and fluffy boudoir trimmings or fake Louis XV furniture, chandeliers and crushed velvet. “I invented nightclubs and I made them all in my own image,” he said.
For a man who by his own admission was a sitting target he enjoyed a surprisingly sympathetic press. He attributed this to his assiduous courting of journalists and pouring copious amounts of free champagne down their throats. Even when the media were mocking him it tended to be done with a gentle affection, his peccadillos dismissed with a forgiving “that’s Stringy”.
The celebrity interviewer Lucy Cavendish called him “a walking, talking anachronism” and the epithet “sleazy” was occasionally attached to his name. But scour the press cuttings and that was about as harsh as it got.
When he appeared on Have I Got News For You Paul Merton smirked that his fellow panellist’s hairstyle was older than his girlfriend. But Stringfellow had no argument with the jibe. Even as he came to rely on hearing aids and cosmetic surgery to hold the advancing years at bay, he continued to date girls less than half his age: when he was into his sixties one of his girlfriends asked him to send flowers to her mother on her 40th birthday. His explanation of why he preferred young girls to women his own age was disarming: “I take enough baggage to a relationship without going with a lady who’s got her own baggage.”
He married three of his conquests but said that the secret to monogamy was “lying”. His first marriage, to his teenage sweetheart Norma Williams, lasted five years, although by the time they married in 1960 he was already sleeping with her cousin. They had a daughter Karen, who later worked for her father’s business — in a fully-clothed capacity, it should be added. He married Coral Wright in 1967 and their son, Scott, became a racing driver. Against the odds his second attempt at wedded bliss lasted for an improbable 22 years of deceit and dissembling. The divorce, at the height of his success in the 1980s, cost him more than £1 million.
He married for a third time at the age of 68, to Bella Wright, a 26-year-old ballet dancer whom he met when she visited his club one night after performing with the English National Ballet at the Coliseum. He offered her a job dancing in his club and their romance grew. A daughter, Rosabella, was born in 2013 and a son Angelo two years later.
Never given to regrets and seemingly immune to irony, critics who accused him of sexism received his withering contempt. When he opened a lapdancing club in Dublin and it was picketed nightly by protestors holding placards that declared “Save our women and children from Peter Stringfellow” he took it as flattery. He described the pickets as “hilarious”, although the protesters had the last laugh when the club closed after only five months.
Diana, Princess of Wales, meets Peter Stringfellow at the Birthright BallTIM GRAHAM/GETTYPeter James Stringfellow was born at the height of the Blitz in 1940, in the Sheffield suburb of Pitsmoor, which he dubbed “Pisspoor”. As a boy he shared an attic bedroom with three younger brothers, two of whom went on to work for him. His third brother studied theology and became a missionary in the Caribbean.
At school he was dyslexic and “always bottom of the class”, leaving at 15 to follow his father, James, into the steelworks. He didn’t stay long and joined the merchant navy, which allowed him to celebrate his 17th birthday in New York City. After a nine-week sea voyage he returned to Sheffield with £65 in his pocket, with which he bought a Royal Enfield motorbike.
A job as a carpet salesman ended with a spell in prison after he was caught stealing Axminsters from his employer and selling them on. “I got the stock mixed up and thought it was mine,” he said. His crocodile tears in court failed to convince the judge, who told him that he needed a short, sharp shock. The eight weeks he spent behind bars delivered a fright he never forgot. “It was horrible, nothing like those black-and-white Humphrey Bogart movies,” he said later.
Peter Stringfellow at the opening of Stringfellows in Dublin in 2006, with his future third wife, Bella, on his left. The club closed after six monthsNEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTDFinding employment difficult with a criminal record, in 1962 Stringfellow persuaded a Sheffield vicar to rent him a hall and, with the help of his father on the door and his mother Elsie taking the cash, St Aidan’s Church Hall was transformed into the Black Cat Club. He recalled that on the opening night he had sex with one of the punters in the back of his van parked outside the hall. As his business took off so did his philandering and before long he was claiming to have “deflowered five virgins” in one hectic week alone.
The club was already a success when, at the beginning of 1963, he was tipped off about an unknown band from Liverpool and called their manager, Brian Epstein. He booked the Beatles for a fee of £50 but by April, when they were schedule to play at the Black Cat, they were riding high in the charts and Stringfellow was forced to hire a larger hall. Typically he sold twice as many tickets as the venue was licensed to hold and made a net profit of £65 — considerably more than the Beatles were paid for the gig.
He was up and running and moved to larger premises, where he set up the Mojo club and booked the biggest names of the day, including The Who, Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Small Faces, Stevie Wonder and Jimi Hendrix, making his first appearance outside London.
In 1970 he moved his operation to Leeds and when he sold his club there to the Mecca chain six years later, he officially joined the ranks of Britain’s self-made millionaires. He opened the Millionaire’s Club in Manchester before deciding it was time to see if he could make his mark down in “the smoke”.
Peter Stringfellow outside his nightclub, the Hippodrome. He hosted the UK’s first gay disco at the venueNEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTDHe launched Stringfellows in Covent Garden 1980 and his timing was perfect. Brash and glitzy, he became a high profile standard-bearer for the new “loadsamoney” Yuppie generation and his club became a gossip columnist’s favourite, frequented by the great and the good and the grisly. Those who partied at Stringfellows over the next 15 years — and invariably had their photo taken with the owner — included Jack Nicholson (who started pole dancing and had to be asked to desist), Robin Williams, Hugh Grant, Elton John Marvin Gaye, Prince, Rod Stewart, Tom Jones and Princess Diana.
The 1980s were boom years, “Maggie Thatcher has sorted out this country,” he announced from the back seat of his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Club hours meant that he never got up before 2pm although if pushed he would take important business calls in bed from 11 am. His shirts were only ever worn once and then thrown out with the trash.
He next bought The Hippodrome, an ailing Leicester Square music hall that had formerly operated as The Talk Of The Town, where he hosted the UK’s first gay disco night. At one of the Hippodrome’s wilder events, he hired a male lion which managed to slip its tamer’s lease. “I’ve never seen a dancefloor clear so quickly,” he said ruefully.
In the late 1980s he expanded to America where New York was a natural playground, although his attempts to pose as Peter Frampton at Manhattan’s famous Studio 54 ended with an $8,000 bill for the rock star’s drug supply. In truth he had no time for illegal substances and cited his only addictions as vodka, champagne and, of course, sex.
Peter Stringfellow in 1994TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTDHis New York club was followed by ventures in Miami and Los Angeles, where he opened a club in Beverly Hills which flopped “because everyone in LA drinks mineral water and goes to bed early”. Calling a well-known movie star “Mr Clintwood” on his first visit and banning Eddie Murphy didn’t help his cause among the Hollywood glitterati. Nor did an economic recession and when his US business collapsed with losses said to have totalled lost £15m, he noted that it was “the first time in my life I’ve failed at anything”.
He returned to London to lick his wounds but America had unwittingly given him a lucrative farewell present. Before his departure a friend had taken him for a consoling night out at one of Miami’s lap-dancing clubs, where he “saw the future”. By 1996 he had relaunched his flagship Covent Garden venue as The Cabaret of Angels and transformed it into the country’s first topless table-dancing club.
Within a few years table dancing, and its more tactile offshoot lap dancing, had become so much a part of mainstream London nightlife that on some nights one-third of Stringfellows’ customers were women. One evening Professor Stephen Hawking visited the club, leading the owner to lament, “His brain is the best in the world. I wanted to talk to him about the universe but he just wanted to watch the girls.”
His success encouraged the American lap dancing chain Spearmint Rhino to muscle its way into the West End, to the chagrin of Stringfellow who dismissed his upstart rivals as “Wild West Cowboys”. Without any hint of self-parody, he complained that the world had gone “sex mad” and insisted that he was “very keen to keep up our high standards of good taste and respectability’’. He denied that he exploited his dancers, who could make £1,200 in an evening.
A million pound pay-out to the family of a client who died at the club in 2004 after being punched by a doorman was a setback; but he rode the bad publicity and a licensing battle with Westminster Council, who were concerned about drunken customers spilling out into the streets in the small hours. He told them not worry for the prices on his cocktail list were so astronomical that only those as rich as Sir Philip Green could afford to get drunk at his bar. In truth there was a plentiful supply of big spenders and at least one customer came away with a drinks tab that by closing time had topped £12,000.
In 2008 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, although he had never been a smoker. “I’ve spent more than 50 years in clubs where people smoked and that’s what caused it,” he said.
When not in London, he spent his time in Mallorca, where he kept a home and a yacht. When asked the secret of his success he replied: “Don’t let money obsess you but make sure you have plenty of it. And if you haven’t got plenty of it, pretend you have.”
Peter Stringfellow, nightclub owner, was born on October 17, 1940. He died on June 7 2018, aged 77
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