The price of love is more than a million

LONNIE MOORE is a fantastic Los Angeles archetype. A partner in the Dolce Group, which owns the nightclub Les Deux and the restaurant Geisha House, among others, he’s charismatic, brash and brusque. Incapable of training his attention on any one thing for more than a few seconds, and with a hairstyle that’s more a feat of engineering than styling, he’s the embodiment of young money. And young money doesn’t care.

Except on Sunday nights, apparently, which is when he gets lonely after a week of nonstop movement. It’s that emptiness, he says, that brought him to Patti Stanger, owner of the Millionaire’s Club, a dating service for high-net-worth men.

This week, he’s one of two millionaires looking for love, or something like it, on Stanger’s new Bravo show, “The Millionaire Matchmaker” (Tuesdays at 10 p.m.). He is matched with Sabrina, a young model, but doesn’t visibly perk up until the word “Playboy” slips from her mouth. It was not a dream pairing -- he took phone calls during their date, then invited some friends to crash the dinner. Maybe his appearance is just another masterstroke of using reality television as free advertising? (Moore’s Dolce Group partner is the execrable Mike “Boogie” Malin of “Big Brother” fame.)

But here’s where reality can intrude even into a critic’s column about reality television. In December, TMZ reported on a civil suit recently filed in L.A. County Superior Court against Moore and others. (His appearance on “Matchmaker” was filmed before the lawsuit was filed.) In the suit, the plaintiff alleges Moore forced her to have intercourse in an August incident at Les Deux. Reached for comment, Ronald Richards, Moore’s attorney, said, “Mr. Moore vehemently denies those allegations.”

Presuming Moore’s innocence, he has been thrust into the spotlight by his appearance on “Millionaire Matchmaker,” a show that already seems to thrill in unraveling its subjects. Membership in Stanger’s Millionaire’s Club includes access to a pool of genetically blessed women, to be sure, but also, as has been clear from the first episodes of this show, a heavy dose of televised humility. Stanger isn’t so much in the dating business as she is in the honesty business.

She is refreshingly direct, a must in this line of work. (Matt Titus of Lifetime’s “Matched in Manhattan” and Patti Novak of A&E;’s “Confessions of a Matchmaker” are almost as unfiltered, but their clients -- just regular Joes and Jills -- are a bit more sympathetic.)

“What I can do for Harold,” Stanger said, in last month’s premiere, of a nebbishy 46-year-old who wants to date a Cindy Crawford type two decades his junior, “is teach him a lesson.” This involves setting him up with a younger woman who will, in essence, leave him in the dust. Inevitably, he tweaks his specifications.

Of Patrick, the other of this week’s millionaires, Stanger is withering: “Patrick’s personality at first was like paint drying -- he has no edge, no personality, and he’s stale, like day-old bread.”

Behind every good love match is, it seems, a healthy dose of sadism.

And because they’re millionaire bait, and the currency upon which Stanger’s enterprise is founded, the women do not escape Stanger’s harsh glare either. (Redheads, she sighs, are “just not the freshest produce on the aisle.”)

But women at least get to join the club for free. That these financially successful men would pay to subject themselves to such humiliations indicates levels of ego that are either astonishingly high or astonishingly low. It would be easy to think the former, but it may truly be the latter. Stanger’s millionaires are without fail socially awkward in some way. Julien, 28 and handsome, still lives with his college roommates (he begins to search for his own place). Dave, an adult products distributor who gleefully refers to himself as “Sex Toy Dave,” is advised to hide his penis cactus and de-install his living room stripper pole (yes, no).

Perhaps they don’t make millionaires like they used to -- but they certainly make more of them. According to a 2005 study by Merrill Lynch and CapGemini, there are approximately 2.5 million millionaires in the United States. (The study took into account financial assets excluding the primary residence.)

Which means business is good -- Stanger says she needs to sign up between six and 10 new clients a month “in order . . . to sleep at night.” And “Millionaire Matchmaker” gives an interesting glimpse of what wealth looks like today -- it is diverse, insulating, and indiscriminate.