UK- As Britain’s porn king, billionaire Paul Raymond enjoyed remarkable business success but suffered devastating personal tragedy.

Raymond died Monday at the age of 82. He was the 891st wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune of $1.0 billion when we valued his worth early last year–an unlikely achievement for a Liverpool high school dropout raised by a single mother.

In his younger years, he struggled to make ends meet any way he could. He sold shirts on the black market, played drums in a band and worked as a mind reader.

Still struggling, he hitchhiked to London, where he opened a show with dancing girls. He paid a few of the girls 50 pence (99 cents) extra to perform topless. It was a hit.

And a revelation for Raymond: “There will always be sex, always, always, always,” he said.

He soon opened his own strip club, the Raymond Revue Bar in Soho. Raymond circumvented strict anti-obscenity laws by designating the bar a private club open only to members. Within a couple of years, the bar had nearly 50,000 members.

Raymond quickly expanded into publishing. He saw the success of Playboy in the United States and brought its soft-porn model to Great Britain. His stable of magazines included titles like Men Only and Razzle.

By the late 1970s, the success of the Raymond Revue Bar helped turn Soho into a hive of seedy sex clubs and shops. Property values were dirt-cheap. Raymond bought.

He was already wealthy from his publishing and club operations, but his sizable property holdings would shoot him to billionaire status after London real estate values skyrocketed. According to London’s Daily Mirror, Raymond owned 60 of the 87 acres in the now-trendy Soho.

As his net worth soared, his personal life crumbled. He fell for his only wife, a dancer named Jean Bradley, after seeing her perform nude with a circus lion. Raymond’s philandering quickly strained the marriage. She finally demanded a divorce when Raymond began seeing porn star Fiona Richmond.

Raymond’s marriage produced a daughter and a son, and he also had another son from a previous relationship. Raymond barely acknowledged his sons in his later years.

He doted on his daughter Debbie though, and groomed her to take over his business empire. In the late 1980s, she took the helm of her father’s magazines. Like her father, she had a knack for business but a troubled personal life. She died in 1992 from a drug overdose.

It was an overwhelming blow for Raymond. The legendary man-about-town became a recluse. “His world was shattered,” a number of British tabloids quoted his ex-wife Jean as saying before her death in 2002. “I think she was the only thing that mattered to him more than his wealth.”