from www.dailymail.co.uk – Over two pages of a glossy society magazine, a lissom young woman, sleek with wealth, is pictured in various central London locations. A gushing text informs readers that she is Fawn James who, with her half-sister India, owns all the streets she surveys.

The headline proclaims her The Girl Who Got Soho. The story enlightens us: Fawn, 24, and 18-year-old India have inherited 60 acres of prime real estate from their grandfather Paul Raymond, who died two years ago.

Raymond was known as the ‘King of Porn’ after mining vast riches from a business founded on sex. He launched the country’s first topless dancing club, the Raymond Revuebar (where, notoriously, the girls had to stand perfectly still to get around censorship legislation) and introduced top-shelf magazines to the UK.

The Revuebar was described by one judge as ‘filthy, disgusting and beastly’. The public outrage only fuelled its profits.

Along the way, Raymond also acquired the freeholds on almost two-thirds of Soho’s properties, building up an empire estimated to be worth around £650 million.

Now, the story continues, his two fortunate granddaughters have assumed his title — and acquired all the dosh that goes with it. A fairytale? Actually, it is. Because the story perpetuates a fiction: it enforces the myth that Paul Raymond — the father of two legitimate children — favoured his late daughter, Deborah, and her offspring, Fawn and India, over his ‘estranged’ son, Howard [pictured], and his two children, Cheyenne, 26, and 25-year-old Boston.

More than that, it implies that Fawn and India are the sole beneficiaries of the old man’s will. But today it is 50-year-old Howard — the son Raymond Sr is supposed to have despised — who leaps to his father’s defence.

‘I can only say that the story which is being bandied about is nothing more than that,’ he says. ‘It’s a fairytale that couldn’t have been bettered by Hans Christian Andersen.

Fawn and India have inherited a share of their grandfather’s estate, but I have also benefited and so have my kids. No one wants to hear about me, though. It’s not interesting to read “old fogey inherits shedload of money”.’

Fawn and India are £75 million richer, thanks to their grandfather’s legacy. Quite how much Howard and his children have gained is less clear. ‘Let’s just say we didn’t fall out of the trees yesterday,’ says Howard, enigmatically.

‘Years of tax planning went into my father’s will. However, I can tell you I’d have difficulty spending the amount he left me. My son and daughter have inherited in equal measure. We are all very happy with the sums involved.’

So it seems that Howard’s fiery sister,Deborah, who died aged 36 from a heroin overdose in 1992 — when her younger daughter, India, was only a baby — was not favoured at the expense of her quieter, far more compliant younger brother.

The myth of the ‘disinherited son’ is one of many that swirl around the Raymond family. Scores of them will be reiterated in an unauthorised biography of Paul Raymond by Paul Willetts, published next week. Howard decries the book succinctly as ‘c**p’.

And now he has opted to correct some of the misapprehensions that its author has chosen to perpetuate.

‘One of the classic stories is that my father handed over the reins of the family business to Deborah. It was an invention. The image was a glamorous one — the Press particularly liked the idea of my father following Hugh Hefner (the Playboy magnate), whose daughter had taken over his empire, but Deborah was not remotely business-oriented. Neither was she capable of running a vast, multi-million-pound business.’

A picture emerges of a young woman beset by personal demons, whose temperament ran the gamut from charming to foul. ‘Deborah had a twin brother who’d died at birth, and we used to joke that she’d killed him and taken on his character traits as well as her own. She had a split personality: she could be very sweet, but she also had the most horrific tantrums. And she’d turn just like that. (He clicks his fingers.)

‘She was extremely volatile and if she didn’t get her own way, life wasn’t worth living. She was my sister, but she wasn’t my friend. I can’t pretend I liked her.’

It seems Paul Raymond was complicit in creating the monster she became: ‘The trouble was, my father indulged her. He was quite a mild-tempered man who hated a scene — and Deborah could create a punch-up in an empty room. She hated the word “no”, and even as a little girl she would scream and shout until she got her own way — which she always did, because Dad wanted a quiet life.’

Deborah, moreover, was palpably jealous when Howard was born when she was four. ‘Mum would tell us how Deborah used to dress up in her stilettos and grind the heel into my hands,’ he smiles wanly.
Precious memories: Howard and Deborah with their parents. Just a few years later Deborah would start to take drugs and her life would begin to spiral out of control.

Deborah’s extravagance and acquisitiveness was also evident early; Howard, in contrast, was neither greedy nor materialistic.

‘We used to go to a toy shop to spend our pocket money,’ he recalls.

‘Deborah would choose the most expensive doll and, though it cost much more than our allowance, she’d get it because Dad didn’t want a scene. The next week she’d want another doll and she’d be indulged again. I never asked for more than some caps for my toy gun, which cost about thruppence.’

A pattern was quickly established: what Deborah wanted she always got. ‘When her car — a Capri sports model — broke down, Dad immediately bought her a new Lotus. He knew she’d throw a tantrum if she had to wait while the old car was mended.’

Did Paul Raymond’s indulgence of his only daughter provoke her spiral into chronic — and ultimately fatal — drug dependency? Certainly the tycoon’s wife Jean, who was long divorced from Raymond when their daughter died, believed so.

‘Mum and Dad were quite amicably divorced until Deborah died,’ recalls Howard. ‘But after her death they hated each other. Mum turned on Dad: she thought he was responsible for letting Deborah get out of control and should have stopped her. She blamed him outright for killing her: he didn’t blow her head off, but he had handed her the loaded gun.’

Howard discloses that his sister’s drug abuse began early. She attended the prestigious Oriel Girls’ School in Cheltenham — not the Ladies’ College, as is often wrongly reported — and it was there that she first took LSD. (Unsurprisingly,she was later expelled.)

‘Mum and Dad were quite amicably divorced until Deborah died. But after her death they hated each other. Mum turned on Dad, she thought he was responsible’

‘She was about 13 when she suffered a burst appendix,’ recalls Howard. ‘It was then that she told me she’d taken the drug for the first time — but it could easily have been the umpteenth time, for all I know.’ He shrugs.

No one, of course, knows the extent of Deborah’s drug use in the ensuing years, but Howard has evidence that it was excessive. ‘I remember her snorting cocaine in the car while the traffic lights were changing colour. And four days before she died she came to visit me in hospital, where I was recovering from complications after an operation. She only stayed an hour, but in that time she tooted a line of coke in the loo.’

Deborah was estranged from her second husband John James, who is managing director of the family firm Soho Estates, when she died at the home of a casual boyfriend.

It was a tragically early demise. But Howard, too, had his own lapse into drug dependency. For four or five years in his 20s, he took industrial quantities of cocaine.

‘When I think about how much I ingested, I cringe,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe I’m still alive. At my worst, I was snorting seven grammes a day — but my use was modest compared with Deborah’s.’

There was a crucial difference in their father’s response, too. While Paul Raymond turned a blind eye to his daughter’s self-destructive behaviour,
he exerted a tough line on Howard which might — if applied to Deborah — have saved her life.

‘I was working for the family business when Dad discovered I was taking
cocaine,’ Howard recalls. ‘He called me into his office and told me I couldn’t work for him while I was abusing drugs. He cut me off without a penny.

‘And yes, I was banished — but not for years and years, as has so often been said. We had a falling out for about a year. We weren’t estranged for long, and I certainly wasn’t disinherited.’

Through a supreme effort of will, Howard kicked cocaine — he has been clean for 25 years — but he admits his marriage to Maria, the mother of his daughter Cheyenne, disappeared in a ‘blizzard of white powder’.
Playboy: Raymond with some of his bunny girls. He started the country’s first topless dancing club, the Revubar and also introduced top shelf magazines to the UK.

He was unfaithful, too, and his son, Boston, was the product of his relationship with actress Rebecca Taylor.

But the fact that the mothers of both his children remain firm friends with him — he is due to dine with Rebecca and their son on the evening we meet — testifies to his fundamental decency.

Howard’s home is a spacious, but far from palatial £800,000 flat in Fulham,
West London, and he drives a three-year-old Fiat 500.

Privately educated at Shiplake College, Henley-on-Thames — until he was ‘invited’ to leave because of his persistent absences at night clubs — he retains the old-fashioned courtesy invested by a public school education.

His suit is bespoke and his shirt from Turnbull and Asser, but he eschews the flashy style of his father, whose signature look was a floor-length fur coat, bouffant hair and a permanent fake tan.

His son has a degree in sports science and intends to join the family business after a gap-year tour of South America. His daughter is a make-up artist in New York.

Howard sees nieces Fawn and India only occasionally: their worlds, it seems, do not collide, although Howard plays an active part in the family business. The clan met, of course, at Paul Raymond’s funeral, where conspicuously absent — though invited — was Raymond Snr’s illegitimate son Derry McCarthy, from a relationship before his marriage to Jean.
‘Yes, I was banished — but not for years and years, as has so often been said. We had a falling out for about a year. We weren’t estranged for long, and I certainly wasn’t disinherited.’

Howard has never met his half-brother, although he did proffer the hand of friendship: ‘Derry made a song and dance about coming to the funeral, so I invited him. But he didn’t turn up.’ Neither did Raymond remember Derry in his will.

Paul Raymond was once said to be Britain’s richest man. He could also, his son confirms, be studiously mean: although he spent thousands laying Astro Turf on the roof garden of his penthouse flat in Mayfair, he begrudged the £3 his housekeeper spent on pansies for plant pots.

And was the King of Porn, as the many affairs he is alleged to have had would suggest, a man of legendary sexual appetites? Here again, Howard is doubtful. ‘Towards the end, I think his marriage to my mother was sexless. I don’t think that’s uncommon: they had been together 25 years.’

The catalyst for his parents’ divorce was Raymond’s affair with glamour model Fiona Richmond. But his affairs, Howard believes, were not legion.

‘I don’t believe he was actually that promiscuous. He liked to party, and the photos of him with scantily clad women draped over him, published in every newspaper, of course upset my mother. But I think she was more bothered by his absence night after night at his club.’

There is one final myth that Howard wants to allay: the abiding one of his father dying a lonely recluse in his luxury flat near the Ritz Hotel, overcome with grief following Deborah’s death.

Raymond was, like any parent, heartbroken when his cherished daughter’s life was so cruelly cut short. But the reason the old chap incarcerated himself in his flat was, in fact, a prosaic one.

‘He was getting on a bit,’ says Howard. ‘He’d just got tired of partying
round the clock, six nights a week, and he wanted a rest. He went out for the evening occasionally, but actually he’d dropped out of the Soho social scene some years before Deborah died.

‘He swapped the life of a party animal for a nice, quiet retirement. What he enjoyed was staying in at night and watching TV in his pyjamas. It’s what most pensioners do, though, isn’t it?’