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The British bunny who hopped into bed with a Warren! Mr Beatty wasn't the only Lothario to fall for Sandra Bates - sixty years after the Playboy Club opened, her unabashed memoir recalls flings with Sean Connery, George Best... and Kojak

Smoothing out the black satin sheets and checking her make-up in the reflection of her mirrored headboard, 22-year-old Sandra Bates lay naked on her bed as she awaited the arrival of actor Warren Beatty, her suitor for the evening.

They had never met, but Beatty, who was then 30 and had just finished making the film Bonnie And Clyde with Faye Dunaway, had spotted the stunning redhead working at the Playboy Club in London's Mayfair and asked a friend to pass on his number.

When she called, he suggested visiting her at the flat she rented near the club, and the order that she should be wearing no clothes was just one in a list of very specific instructions given on that night in 1967.

Sandra was also to leave her front door unlocked and keep her eyes closed when he entered her bedroom, as well as throughout their lovemaking.

Most important of all, she says, she was to pretend that she had no idea who he was, referring to him only as 'The Phantom'.

All this was bizarre enough, but Beatty saved perhaps his most unexpected request for the moment their intimacy was over.

'He sat up and put his feet on the floor. I was worried that he hadn't enjoyed himself,' Sandra recalls

'Phantom,' I said, carrying on the act. 'Is everything all right?'

'Everything's great, but can you do something for me?' he asked.

'Anything,' I said.

'Make me a cup of tea,' he replied. 'Two sugars.'

This mundane end to their erotically charged evening is one of the many bedroom scenes described in How To Be A Kept Woman, the autobiography penned by the self-styled 'Lady' Sandra Bates.

It's 60 years this month since Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago. And times have certainly changed a lot since then.

Sandra's trysts with legendary Lothario Warren Beatty — then in a relationship with Julie Christie — followed soon afterwards. She rates him as a 'very, very good lover. Some men are better than others, and he had such an imagination'.

But it was Telly Savalas, star of the long-running TV detective show Kojak, who appears to have captivated her most at first sight.

She recalls that they met when she was 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 era.

'Roger Moore was also there that night, and he had recently finished his TV series The Saint.

'I was just thinking of ways to turn him into The Sinner when my friend dug me in the ribs and pointed out Telly, who was playing roulette nearby. I looked casually about until I caught his eye. Then I smiled and lowered my eyelashes. A bottle of champagne was at our table within minutes, then he went to the bar and motioned to me to join him there.

'I don't think a woman can say she has lived until she has been beckoned by Telly Savalas. There is something mischievous about that man. He just looks naughty.'

Although he and his wife, Marilyn, had rented their own flat while in London, Savalas was such a high-rolling gambler that the Colony offered him free use of their own luxury flat just a few doors away from the club. And there Sandra says she was installed by Savalas for the next six months, taking delivery of the lavish gifts he bought her whenever he was away working or with his wife.

Almost every day she received white lilies, but on one occasion he sent her a bracelet from Cartier. On another she opened a dark green box from Harrods to discover that it contained a full-length sable coat.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8133237/The-British-bunny-hopped-bed-Warren.html