How this ex-drug addict became a millionaire artist painting portraits of Brad Pitt and Lady Gaga
nypost.comJody Foster and schmoozing with Michael Caine. Celebrity paintings by Townley – besidesFoster and Caine, he’s captured the likes of Brad Pitt, Samuel L.
Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Lady Gaga, Matt Damon and others – sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Caine once called him “the next Andy Warhol.” His work will be shown Thursday night at the Fairmont Hotel in Los Angeles, but his life was once far from glamorous.After a job in the transport business went bust, Townley got offered a gig working for London strip club magnate Peter Stringfellow in 2007. Charged with bringing in horny high-rollers, he took to the life all too well.
Like his clients, many in banking, he developed a serious taste for booze and cocaine. “It had a lot to do with trying to stay up,” the 51-year-old Townley told The Post from his hotel room at the tony Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood.“I was 35 or 36 and knocking around with 20-year-old girls in the club.
After work, I went to nightclubs galore and lock-ins” – so named because they stayed open after hours and locked the front door to keep authorities at bay. “I was surrounded by cocaine, and I really liked it.”Sex came with the drugs and he was not above slipping off to lavatories for quickies. “One night I was in a disabled bathroom, going at it on the sink,” he remembered. “I put too much pressure on the sink and the whole thing came loose.”When he wasn’t screwing, he was often fighting. “I would get into a lot of scraps and was well-known by the local police.
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