While having dinner at the Playboy Club on London’s Old Park Lane recently, my wife and I struck up a conversation with a British couple that were over in the UK from their home in Dubai.
“Oh, then you’ll know all about these,” the gentleman said, once I’d explained what it is I do for a living. With that, he reached into his wallet and began fanning out half a dozen or so casino membership cards in his hands. They included a decent cross-section of Mayfair’s more up-market casinos; the Palm Beach, he explained, was a personal favourite. Among them, though, was a lifetime membership card for the original Playboy Casino on Park Lane that had opened to great fanfare by Hugh Hefner (pictured) in 1966 but closed its doors in 1981.
Back then, the club had been a haven for visiting businessmen and it was because of his clients’ fondness for the Playboy experience – bunny girls, gambling and fine dining – that he’d been presented with his membership. Though he was by no means a high-roller himself, he nonetheless attained VIP status.
He spoke with great affection for those days, remarking that while the bunny girls would giggle and flirt harmlessly with patrons, the club never crossed the line to anything more risqué than that. Legend has it that it was a vibrant, exciting place where international business figures rubbed shoulders with leading celebrities of the day, no doubt something the operator of the new club, LCI, hopes to recapture.
Sadly for those lifetime members, the new Playboy Club is an altogether different enterprise and, it seems, their membership ran out with the old casino’s gaming licence several decades ago. The new club is very much a modern casino and, I suspect from what I’m told, quite different in character.
The food, though, was excellent.
