Born On This Day- August 19th... Malcolm Forbes

The personality trait I most deplore in others? Entitlement. Here is a little tale:

Malcolm Stevenson Forbes probably means nothing to anyone under 40 today. Yet when he died 21 years ago at the age of 70, he was one of the most famous men in America, the result of his shameless, showy smarts at self-promotion.

Forbes inherited Forbes Magazine from his father, its founder, B.C. Forbes, in the late 1950s when he was 38. The magazine had long been a successful business magazine with a strong personality identification with B.C. Forbes. By the early 1970s, Malcolm Forbes, now sole owner, turned it into a hugely successful business monthly magazine. One of his great sensations was the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 Richest.

In the 1970s & 1980s, Forbes lived a luminous, lavish lifestyle, separate from his sedate base on his inherited estate & his large family. In those years he became more prominent & took to the bright lights of NYC.

That was also his public image, although mainly because of his large yachts, his private jets, his residences around the world, & his planeloads of famous, powerful friends.

In late August of 1989, on a weekend, from the 18th to the 20th, Malcolm Forbes gave himself a 70th birthday party in Tangier, Morocco where he owned a palace, the Palais Mendoub. 800 guests were flown in on a chartered Concorde: famous friends, wealthy associates , USA governors, CEOs of multinational corporations, Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Robert Maxwell, & Forbe's “date” for the event-Elizabeth Taylor.

It was a party of glitter, glamour & guise, comparable to Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball 23 years earlier. It was well publicized in the fashion & society pages, with a big whack of fairy-dust in the daily papers. It was good for business, mingling advertisers & potential advertisers with the elite of London & Manhattan & his “date” Elizabeth Taylor. It was good for his social reputation, transporting & taking care his very rich friends for free & in style in an exotic country with a Mediterranean climate. The party entertainment was on a grand scale: 600 drummers, acrobats & dancers, a fantasy with a cavalry charge which ended with the firing of muskets into the air by 300 Berber horsemen. The cost of this shindig was more than $3 million.

Forbes died less than 6 months after his party, at home on his estate in Far Hills, NJ. Shortly after he died, he was “outed” as by gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile. Forbes was long known as gay by some & unknown to many. In his later years he became quite the partyer, making up for lost time. The “outing” was a shock, especially to his friends who were not aware, or chose not to believe, that he was gay. Signorile published the story more with intention of showing how acceptable a gay man is without the predictable pale of prejudice. In this case, the band did not play on…

When Forbes died, he was held up by many conservatives as a great American capitalist. Signorile felt that the historical record also needed to show that he was homosexual; he interviewed many people who knew Forbes as gay, some of them men who’d been intimately involved with Forbes.

Highlighting how heated it was at that time to report on the undeclared homosexuality of a public figure who was dead, let alone living, many newspapers viewed Signorile's Forbes story as shocking & scandalous, & it took months for some papers to report on it. The NY Times ran the story 4 months after the fact in a story about outing, & still would not identify Forbes by name, saying that a 'recently deceased businessman' had been 'outed'. Years later, the NY Times would finally report that Forbes was gay, in a story about his son Steve Forbes’ run for the presidency. Steve Forbes has courted the Conservative Christian Right & has come out publicly against gay rights & same sex marriage while campaigning.