Playboy Exec Behind Magazine's Clubs and Bunnies, Victor Lownes, Dies at 88 Lownes helped open the 1st Playboy Club in Chicago in 1960.

Victor Lownes, the Playboy marketing executive who helped build the magazine's chain of nightclubs and create the bunny-style look of their hostesses, died Wednesday in a London hospital, where he had been since suffering from a heart attack New Year's Eve. He was 88.

At Playboy for almost thirty years from the 1950s to early '80s, Lownes worked with Hugh Hefner, the magazine's founder, to establish the publication's sophisticated, sexually permissive image, an image that the native of Buffalo, New York, also adhered to in life, according to The Times of London. His free-wheeling lifestyle, reputation for dating Playboy Playmates and notorious, celebrity-attended parties earned him the nickname "Victor Disgusting" by British magazine Private Eye, the report adds.

"He was a real playboy — everybody knew it," Lownes' former Playmate wife, Marilyn Cole Lownes, 67, told the Chicago Tribune. "All the girls that went out with him knew it. They either accepted it or they didn't."

The Playboy Club stands as Lownes' signature accomplishment at the magazine, which he joined in 1955 after meeting Hefner at a party in Chicago the previous year. He came up with idea of establishing the nightclubs after reading about Chicago's exclusive Gaslight Club in the publication he worked for in 1959, the Tribune reports.

Lownes took the Gaslight's approach — a membership club with a staff of provocatively clad waitresses — and gave it a Playboy spin, which included hostesses dressed as bunnies, the magazine's mascot, the report stated. The first Playboy Club, 116 E. Walton St., opened in Chicago in 1960, and the chain eventually included more than 30 locations around the world before shutting down in 1991.

The Playboy Club concept was revived in the early 21st century, with four clubs being opened internationally between 2006 and 2014. Only a club in Los Angeles exists today.

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