The cold-hearted king of clubland

She was once one of the most photographed women in London. Jean Raymond had a racy glamour that suited perfectly the zeitgeist of the dawning age of permissiveness.

Her brilliant smile and saucy poses made her a darling of the tabloids, and, as the wife of a rising tycoon, she led a life that revolved around fine houses, expensive cars and glittering parties.

Her funeral, by contrast, was a rather bleak affair. It was conducted on a chill day against the backdrop of a dreary northern town, a world away from the neon and spotlights Jean had adored.

Far away, too, was the tycoon - now among the wealthiest individuals in the land. Paul Raymond, Jean's former husband, paid his respects by sending an employee.

Jean was with Paul Raymond for more than 20 years and helped build the pornography and property empire valued on a recently published rich list at £520 million, a £50 million increase in one year.

Her naked cavorting with a circus lion was a defining moment in Paul's early career as a striptease impresario. At the end Jean was close to poverty, living on a tiny pension in a terraced cottage in a Nottinghamshire village, still hurting from a rebuff she had received from Paul Raymond. It was something that shocked her friends, but then they knew nothing of his extraordinary capacity for rejection.

Jean knew, and suffered from it. But more painful by far, she said, was the way he treated his own flesh and blood.

He is 76 now and spends his days in the isolated opulence of his home at the top of a building next to the Ritz hotel. From here he can see much of the 60 acres of Soho he owns, a domain that is beginning to stretch into Hampstead, Kensington and Chelsea. Paul Raymond once said that money was very important to him, and he is known to sit in the fastness of his fabulous penthouse leafing fondly through his vast portfolio. But, as the twilight of his life darkens, he finds himself stalked by tragedy. There are those who say the money in which he takes so much comfort is, in fact, a curse.

There is something of the King Lear about Paul Raymond. He has agonised over who in his family should benefit from his wealth, and the way he shares it - or refuses to share it - baffled Jean Raymond and others close to him, including his first child, Derry McCarthy.

Mr McCarthy is now 51, an affable, bridge-playing extrovert who lives with his mother in Stretford, Manchester. It was there, in 1949, that Noreen O'Horan answered an advert placed by a variety performer seeking a girl partner. His name was Geoffrey Quinn. He had long blond hair, a slight stutter and exceptional charm. He had just bought a mindreading act from a clown called Ravel and he wanted a glamorous foil to his telepathy turn.

And Noreen was exceptionally glamorous. In the neat lounge of her home, a framed black-and-white photograph bears testament to a rare beauty. Geoffrey Quinn signed her up immediately, re-named her Gay Dawn and called himself Paul Raymond. She was 17.

"It was like the beginning of a great adventure," Gay recalled. "But rehearsals soon led to other things."

As they travelled with their act, selling fanciful horoscopes at a shilling a time, they became lovers. But the mind-reading act died and Paul Raymond set out to seek his fortune in London. Shortly afterwards, Gay discovered she was pregnant.

She said: "I decided I'd rather go it alone." She turned her act into a solo performance and - as Gay Dawn, Telepathic Venus - had a successful stage career in the early Fifties.

Gay is almost 70 now and seems youthful, with a shock of wavy Titiancoloured hair. But, when she gets up from the sofa, she grips the back hard and moves painfully. She has arthritis and walks with difficulty, a legacy of a lifetime of hard work, she says.

Things have not been easy for her. She chuckles recalling taking Paul Raymond to court to increase the maintenance he was paying for Derry from £1 a week to 30 shillings.

When her stage career ended she took various jobs and managed to buy her own home. It's half a home now. A few years ago the man she was with took on debts she couldn't pay, she said. To clear them she split her house down the middle. The other half is now a funeral parlour.

She has known hard times, and so has Derry. A few years ago he desperately needed around £2,000 to cover a pressing debt. Ironically, the person who was best placed to help him, his father - one of the wealthiest men in Britain - was the one person he could not approach. Paul Raymond made maintenance payments of £3,100 over 21 years and, as Derry learned, he made it clear he did not want to give any more.

At the age of 25 Derry asked his father for a meeting. An invitation followed and he was entertained to dinner in the penthouse, where the new chatelaine was topless model and porn writer Fiona Richmond, successor to Jean Raymond.

For Derry it was a magical evening and he returned to Manchester with the exhilarating sensation that he had found his father at last. He never heard from him again. He said: "I have had a long time to think about it. The fact is, he is the way he is and that really is an end to it.

"If you ask me would I have liked to have had a father as someone on the beach at Blackpool with a bucket and spade - or teaching me to ride a bike, or just being there to talk to me - then I have to say, yes, I would have loved that. But no-one has a God-given right to it and it didn't work out that way.

"My father is an exceptional man who has achieved an enormous amount. That, in its way, is a barrier. I would have liked to have kept in touch but I never wanted to raise the suspicion - least of all in his mind - that I wanted a handout."

Derry makes the point that, while he misses that relationship, it is something he has never known.

It must be worse, he says, for his half-brother Howard. Paul and Jean Raymond had two children: Debbie and Howard. In 1992 Debbie was Paul Raymond's heir apparent. She was taking an increasing role in running the business and was expected to take over the burgeoning property and porn empire.

Debbie was a complex woman, plagued by insecurity and mood swings. At 36 she had two failed marriages behind her, drank a bottle of vodka most days and consumed frightening quantities of drugs, especially cocaine.

Many people, including at least one ex-husband, found her impossible to deal with, but the one person with whom she was always sweet and gentle was her father, Paul Raymond. He adored her and made no secret of the fact. Debbie was the partner with whom, at last, he could stage a successful double act. Under their joint stewardship the business grew.

But, on 5 November 1992, Debbie was rushed to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead after collapsing at a boyfriend's flat.

She never regained consciousness and the subsequent inquest heard she had consumed her customary bottle of vodka, anti-depressants and cocaine and had then moved on to heroin - the level found in her blood was 25 per cent more than the lethal dose.

Paul Raymond wept behind his dark glasses as the coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death. He walked out of the inquest, it was said, like a zombie - ignoring Jean Raymond, Debbie's mother. From that moment there was a discernible darkening of the shadows surrounding the house of Raymond.

It might be thought that Paul Raymond would channel his extraordinary-paternal love for his daughter into his other children, or at least his legitimate son Howard. The opposite seems to have been the case.

Today Paul Raymond and his son speak only occasionally and meet rarely. Howard, 42, works in property but not on a scale that would suggest he is the scion of a family that ranks among the great landowners of England.

He lives in a tiny flat in Fulham, uses his late mother's Ford Ka and is trying to sell her house for £71,950. He has been known, in times of hardship, to reflect bitterly on the family wealth that eludes him.

"Maybe it's better that way," he said. "It's meant I've had to try hard and earn my success. My father isn't irrational as some people have said. You hear stories of him living like a reclusive Howard Hughes, with long hair and fingernails. It's nonsense. He's in fine fettle. But he's always been quite aloof. I'm doing OK and we are in touch. We're not the kind of people who sit around a table once a week. All right, six months might go by ... we talk on the phone."

So which members of Raymond's family do benefit from his enormous wealth?

John Warden, one of Raymond's most trusted lieutenants and financial controller of the Paul Raymond Group, revealed that the company is primarily run for the benefit of 19 trusts. The main beneficiaries of these trusts are Raymond's grandchildren, Debbie's daughters.

The two girls - Fawn, 16 and India Rose, 12 - are with Debbie's former husband John James, who runs the property arm of the organisation.

Mr Warden disclosed that the children receive around £1 million a year to live on and can look forward to proceeds from the Soho properties. One of Paul Raymond's favourite sayings as he checks his portfolio is: "This is all going to the grandchildren."

The question Jean Raymond posed often was: which grandchildren?

Howard has a daughter, 18-year-old Cheyenne, by his ex-wife Maria. He also has a 16-year-old son, Boston, with former partner Rebecca Taylor.

Paul Raymond, a lifelong Catholic, frowned upon this union and, apparently forgetting his own history, condemned Howard for fathering a son out of wedlock.

Ms Taylor and Boston currently live in a housing association flat in Soho. She declined to discuss her part in the Raymond family saga.

Cheyenne, the third granddaughter, lives most of the time with her mother. Like Paul Raymond, they have a top-floor flat. But, unlike him, they occupy a cramped pre-war council flat in a shabby building in Shepherd's Bush.

Maria and Cheyenne have known poverty and, although they refuse to speak about it, their current circumstances - and Paul Raymond's professed love for his grandchildren - seem to be at odds.

Cheyenne wanted to work in television but managed only to secure a job as a runner for a small production company.

A friend said: "She really was trying to make it from the very bottom of the ladder."

The TV company recently tried to secure new finance. Cheyenne's friend said: "She wanted her grandfather to help but the answer that came back was 'no way'."

The company closed and Cheyenne lost her job. Her father, Howard, said: "She, like me, is going to have to make it on her own."

It may appear strange that Paul Raymond adopts different approaches to those in his immediate family. On the one hand his daughter's children have everything his copious resources can buy; others struggle. Jean Raymond said before her death that there was a simple answer to this: her ex-husband had a heart of stone.

"She never got over the fact that he snubbed her at Debbie's funeral," Jean's great friend Margaret Bacon said. Mrs Bacon had known Jean since childhood in their hometown, Retford, Nottinghamshire.

When Jean returned there 10 years ago, Mrs Bacon recalled, she called together all the women who had been at the local dancing school with her as schoolgirls.

"She said: 'We are going to dance again!' We were flabbergasted. But she organised us into a proper dancing troupe."

They called their act Groovy Grannies - all were in their sixties - and for several years they toured northern towns raising tens of thousands of pounds for cancer charities.

Mrs Bacon said: "Jean was bitter about the way Paul Raymond treated Howard, Cheyenne and Boston. She saw the way he lived, with his Rolls-Royce and everything, and saw how they scrimped and saved just to get by and it hurt her."

At the height of their fame as Groovy Grannies, Jean Raymond organised a major campaign to raise money for a scanner for cancer patients. Mrs Bacon said: "She was so keen to get as much as possible she rang Paul Raymond and asked if he'd contribute. Apparently he said 'No, you never know where something like that can lead'."

Jean Raymond didn't know it when she danced with the Groovy Grannies, but she was also nursing a hidden cancer. A few months ago she complained of feeling unwell and was taken to hospital. She died within three weeks.

The funeral in Retford was attended by Jean's many friends, Howard and his children. The old church at Ordsaw was piled high with flowers. Sadly, Margaret Bacon said, she could not recall seeing any from Paul Raymond.