The term "playboy" was more than a century old before Gunter Sachs, who has taken his own life aged 78, ordered the first magnum of champagne to be sent up to his suite, yet he defined the job description during its era of optimum use, the 1960s. He later took seriously his roles as a photographer, documentary film-maker and industrialist, but fellow Germans thought of him as the crown prince of pleasure, living it up internationally on their behalf while they were at work on the production line, bolting together the postwar German miracle. He led those who made St Tropez fashionable and for three years (1966-69) was married to the queen regnant of the Côte d'Azur, Brigitte Bardot.
The money for Sachs's toys (yacht, planes, handbuilt cars, go-karts and sports gear, cameras and a navy's worth of chronometers) came from his maternal great-grandfather, Adam Opel, founder of the car manufacturer, and from Gunter's father, Willy Sachs, a supplier of parts to the motor industry. The boy knew early and well how metal was assembled.
The family might have lost its fortune in 1945 – Willy was socially close to very senior Nazi brass – but the American military vetted him as fairly clean, and his firm was essential to economic recovery, so Gunter was well enough subsidised to be able to say he had never needed to work a day in his life (although he chose to study mathematics and economics, and did not loaf after 1970).
The early 1950s was a transitional period for the well-heeled. Half of old Europe was closed, such society routines as had survived the war and austerity felt narrow. The golf courses, tennis courts, polo grounds, Riviera and Alps remained reliable and Sachs played, dived, skied and bobsledded – part of the St Moritz Olympic run is named after him. He made a nice, right marriage to a student, Anne-Marie Faure, but she died after a car crash in 1958, the year Sachs inherited the familial enterprises on his father's suicide.
He was a widower with wealth, several languages, movie-star looks, a suave uniform of four pairs of white trousers, six blue shirts and two blazers (he complained that Michelangelo Antonioni copied this look for the film Blow-Up, but it was more cruelly alluded to in an earlier film, Plein Soleil, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley). He had a dozen male peers, centred on the diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa; a sense of humour; and a genuine fondness for women.
Those who famously reciprocated included the former Iranian consort Soraya Esfandiary and Bardot, at the peak of her appeal. Hours after they met, he arranged for a helicopter to douse Bardot's house in red petals: "It's not every day a man drops a ton of roses in your garden," she wrote, and married him precipitately in Las Vegas. The photo magazines slavered and published fabulous shots (the best with Sachs as Mephistopheles, Bardot as nubility incarnate and Salvador Dalí as more or less himself at her birthday party). The marriage ended courteously, without alimony claims. When he later sent her diamonds, she sold them for her animal charities.
Sachs then married a model, Mirja Larsson, and began to put the lens of a camera between himself and the women he still appreciated (notably Claudia Schiffer), turning his interest in photo- grapy into a near-career while paying enough attention to his industries and investments never to drop off the rich lists. He collected the art of his prime, when he had known Andy Warhol (who painted him), and was on the board of galleries and museums. He commissioned a statistical study of astrology, setting up the "empirical examination of the possible truth of astrology in relation to human behaviour" to gather and analyse 10m items of data from Swiss official statistics (it all cost less than a luxury car, he said). The results were published as The Astrology File (1997), a bestseller.
Sachs killed himself at his home in Gstaad, Switzerland, explaining in a note that a "no-hope illness" meant that "the loss of mental control over my life was an undignified condition, which I decided to counter decisively". Mirja and their two sons, and a son from his first marriage, survive him.