Smoothing the black satin sheets and checking her makeup in the reflection of her mirrored headboard, Sandra Bates, 22, was lying naked on her bed waiting for the arrival of actor Warren Beatty, her pretender for the evening .
They had never met, but Beatty, who was then 30 and had just finished filming the film Bonnie And Clyde with Faye Dunaway, had spotted the gorgeous redhead working at the Mayfair Playboy Club in London and asked a friend to transmit his number.
When she called, he suggested that she visit her in the apartment she rented near the club, and the order to wear no clothes was just one of the very specific instructions given that evening. 1967.
Sandra Bates in her bunny uniform at Playboy. Excerpt from the book: How to be a guarded woman
Sandra also had to leave her front door unlocked and keep her eyes closed when he entered her room, as well as throughout their romantic lovemaking.
Most important of all, she said, she was pretending that she didn’t know who he was, referring to him only as “The Phantom”.
It was all pretty bizarre, but Beatty may have registered her most unexpected request for the moment their privacy was over.
“He sat down and put his feet on the ground. I feared he hadn’t had fun, ”recalls Sandra.
“Ghost,” I said, continuing the act. ‘Is everything alright?’
“Everything is fine, but can you do something for me?” He asked.
“Anything,” I said.
“Make me a cup of tea,” he replied. “Two sugars.”
This banal end of their erotically charged evening is one of the many chamber scenes described in How To Be A Kept Woman, the autobiography written by the so-called “Lady” Sandra Bates.
It has been 60 years this month that Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago. And times have certainly changed a lot since then.
American actor Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow on the set of the police drama “Bonnie and Clyde”, 1967. Sandra Bates had an affair with Beatty after spotting her at the Playboy club
Sandra with George Best, who is on the list of men with whom she has had romantic relationships
As recently as yesterday, Playboy announced that it was disconnecting the print edition of its magazine. Aficionados should read it online.
And last week, we learned that Playboy magazine was going to abandon its Playmate of the Year concept in favor of Playmates of the Year.
In the age of “awakenings”, it is considered difficult to raise a busty beauty above others. So, for the sake of diversity, the 12 girls in monthly coverage should be celebrated for their “unique contribution to the brand”.
But Sandra Bates’ memories take us back to a more politically incorrect time. With its glamorous hostesses in “bunny suits” of low-cut leotards with a stuffed bunny, bow ties and rabbit ears, the first Playboy Club was an instant success and a multitude of others followed in the cities of the States – United and the world.
Frank Sinatra was also one of the adventures of Sandra that she reveals in the new book on her experiences
At its peak, the Playboy chain claimed to have 750,000 members in 30 clubs, and none is more successful than the London outpost, which opened in 1966.
But what was it like to work there? If Sandra’s experience is anything, she has involved many X rated encounters. The list of famous men she has flirted with includes Sean Connery, George Best, Telly Savalas and even Frank Sinatra.
Now in her 70s, she spares no detail of these brushes with the wealthy and famous. Connery, for example, was “a pretty straight lover. No extras. He has a powerful but slim body and a beautiful hairy chest. Of course you have seen it too, but it is a wonderful view from below. “
Sandra Bates is certainly not a “Lady” from birth. In fact, his father GI had already returned to the United States when he was born in December 1945. #
Her mother Alma, who was only 20 at the time, married briefly and had two sons, but she clearly felt the restrictions her offspring placed on her freedom.
Sandra has fond memories of her childhood in a council apartment in north London, but when she was 12 years old, her mother sent her with her two half-brothers to a children’s home in Wales.
Sandra remembers that her mother visited them there, arriving in a Jaguar and wearing a leopard fur coat, courtesy of one of her many male friends.
Her daughter’s ambition was always to become an actress. But although Sandra was initially recognized as a beauty queen – crowned Miss Wales in 1962 – her dreams of succeeding in show business were, she says, hampered by her generous chest.
“The casting directors didn’t seem to be able to get past my big breasts, which were 38 inches tall with a C cup,” she said.
Fortunately, these assets were not a barrier to becoming a rabbit. At 20, Sandra was working on the jewelry counter at London’s Fenwick department store when she learned that Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine, was opening the last of her chain of spin-off casinos and nightclubs on Park Lane.
Hutch on the Park rabbits, as we have learned, could earn £ 35 a week at a time when the average kid in London was earning £ 10.
But Sandra maintains that the real draw was the chance to mingle with celebrities who could help “put me on the path to glory”.
After having gone through the selection process, which consisted of being interviewed in a swimsuit and then in a cocktail dress, she put on her ears and her rabbit tail and slipped into the tailored basque that was part of the uniform .
“To say that our breasts were lifted and separated by these costumes is a huge understatement,” she recalls. “I don’t know how no one was blinded.”
While some of the rabbits were croupiers and other waitresses, Sandra worked in the Playboy gift shop, and that’s where she says she caught Sean Connery’s attention shortly after the club opened in 1966 .
Still playing James Bond, he was married at the time to Australian actress Diane Cilento, but Sandra claims he wasted no time asking for his phone number.
“It was against the rules for a Playboy Bunny to give anyone their number,” she said. “However, it was against my religion not to give my number to Sean Connery when he asked for it.
“We are not really allowed,” I said when he leaned over the counter and whispered his request in my ear. “I’m not really allowed either,” he replied, raising his left eyebrow. “But that’s what makes it fun.”
They met at noon the next day and returned to Sandra’s apartment in London for the first of several connections in the coming months.
Since there was no cell phone at the time, she would sometimes call him at home, only to have his wife answer and ask “if I took good care of Sean”. Sandra adds, “The 60s were so much fun. Everyone shared partners and no one seemed to really care. “
“Sir Sean, as he is now, is an exceptional actor in every way, apart from the sexual charisma that he exuded on the screen,” she wrote. “It wasn’t comedy – it was all him.”
Sandra’s meetings with the legendary Lothario Warren Beatty – then in a relationship with Julie Christie – followed shortly after. She considers him “a very, very good lover. Some men are better than others, and he had such an imagination. “
But it is Telly Savalas, star of the long TV detective program Kojak, who seems to have captivated her the most at first sight.
She remembers that they met while drinking with a friend at the Colony Club, one of Playboy’s competitors, but at first she was distracted by the presence of another big star of that time.
“Roger Moore was also there that evening and he recently finished his television series The Saint.
“I was just thinking of ways to turn him into a sinner when my friend dug my ribs and pointed out Telly, who was playing nearby roulette. I watched casually until I saw his attention. Then I smiled and lowered my lashes. A bottle of champagne was at our table in a few minutes, then he went to the bar and motioned for me to join him there.
“I don’t think a woman can say that she lived until she was invited by Telly Savalas. There is something playful about this man. He just looks mean. “
Although he and his wife, Marilyn, rented their own apartment in London, Savalas was such a high player that the colony offered him free use of their own luxury apartment a few doors from the club. And there Sandra says that she has been installed by Savalas for the next six months, taking delivery of the sumptuous gifts he bought for her each time he had left for work or with his wife.
Almost every day, she received white lilies, but once, he sent her a Cartier bracelet. On another, she opened a dark green box of Harrods to discover that it contained a full-length coat of sand.
She wore it to the Colony Club that night. And when she hinted that she had little below, Savalas led her to a phone booth in a hallway downstairs. “I opened my coat and Telly whistled.
“Thanks for the fur,” I said.
“To hell with the fur,” he replied. We made love quickly and I went up the stairs to the Colony Club and went home to get a dress.
“It was always unusual places with Telly. For example, he wanted to make love on the bathroom floor, ”she recalls.
Aside from her love life, it was now becoming clear that, even if she did meet countless celebrities, the acting roles that Sandra hoped for did not materialize.
“My career was on the road to becoming a mistress,” she says. “It slipped me without my realizing it. Not that I was unhappy with it – I like being a mistress. We’re taking you to dinner. You get company and company. You get jewelry and furs. I recommend to be kept. “
The rewards have never been more important than when she first started seeing the divorced retail mogul, Sir Charles Clore, who was 41 and owned Selfridges among many other well-known names on British High Street. .
They met in 1969 at the Tramp nightclub, and within 24 hours Sandra had decided that “I felt a love for this man unlike any other love I had felt before. I decided that I wanted to make him happy. “
Fortunately for her, what made Clore happy seemed to send her two cases of champagne a week and pay her a regular allowance, not to mention giving her a six-carat diamond ring and financing a house in Mayfair, as if it weren’t ‘was nothing more than a square on a monopoly board’.
In return, she agreed to leave the Playboy club because Clore, who was knighted in 1971, found it inappropriate to be associated with a rabbit. But if he hoped to infuse Sandra with a new sense of respectability, he must have been disappointed.
There was a near accident when a friend who was dating singer Engelbert Humperdinck invited her to Las Vegas to see one of his concerts. Then they met the singer behind the scenes.
“Engelbert suggested that the three of us go back to his suite for fun,” she writes. “I have heard good things about you rabbits,” he said.
“He was an extraordinarily large man with sexy black hair and extremely attractive lips,” recalls Sandra.
“I could see the call, but my friend didn’t need me to get involved. I left the two lovebirds, but I often wonder what it would have been like to add “The Hump” to my list of celebrity lovers. “
The temptation was more difficult to resist when, in the early 1970s, Frank Sinatra asked for rabbits to attend a party he was hosting in London.
To accommodate her former employer, Sandra accepted the role of chaperone of the rabbits, and ended up in bed with Sinatra in her penthouse that evening.
“In the morning, he slept with his hands behind his head,” she says. “Maybe he was paranoid about the fall of his wig.”
Although she remained close to Sir Charles Clore until her death in 1979, Sandra married twice: first to the wealthy London businessman Tony Levy in 1972, with whom she had a daughter , Jessica, in 1975, and another, Charlotte, two years later.
She again married a man named James Bates, a builder Tony had used to renovate their house, but who – should we really be surprised with? – she had an affair.
Sandra gave birth to another daughter, Camilla, with her second husband, but she admits having seen fewer and fewer of her children after becoming director of Blondes, a new Mayfair nightclub owned by football legend George Best.
Surprise, surprise, Best has become another notch on its bed post.
“It was inevitable that George and I would get together,” she says. “He was irresistibly beautiful and as attractive as I was.”
It is perhaps not surprising that her second marriage ended in 1988, and she joined her current “gentleman friend”, the art investor Frank Gregory. They live separately – she in St John’s Wood, north London, and he in Essex.
Now 74, Sandra insists that she wouldn’t change anything about her shady past.
“You can’t go to bed with just anyone these days. It wasn’t the 60s, and I don’t know how I got out of it then. But I am very happy to have done it. “