NEW YORK — Millionaire publisher Malcolm Forbes pursues the “unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” with an intensity that has made him the focus of public fascination for nearly 20 years.
Often perceived as a late-blooming playboy and a publicity seeker, Forbes is hard-working, gregarious and often self-deprecating. And he fills the mold of the ideal American capitalist: an honest man who can balance work and play with no sense of guilt for the favors fortune has heaped on him.
He avows gratitude for having inherited a money-making business and pride in having built it into a giant, multifaceted corporation. Both were reflected in the party he gave for the 70th anniversary of Forbes magazine, circulation 720,000 worldwide, on a moonlit evening in May.
This was Malcolm Forbes’ kind of party: every detail planned for months; nothing overlooked in pleasing his 1,100 guests. Forbes turned his 75-acre New Jersey estate into a Scottish fairy tale, with castellated tents, skirling bagpipers and fireworks.
There were presidents and chief executive officers of more than 70 corporations. Media magnates mixed with socialites, and New Jersey’s governor and the White House chief of staff were among the postprandial speakers.
At Forbes’ tartaned side was Elizabeth Taylor. Whether she agreed to come because she knew Forbes would present her with a check for $1 million for her American Foundation for AIDS Research or because the party had been hailed by the press as “The Party of the Century” was anybody’s guess.
But Manhattan gossip columns began pushing the romance angle, reporting that Malcolm and Liz dined a deux at showcase hideaways like the 21 Club and Le Cirque.
“What I do, I do to enjoy life and promote my business,” he said as he puffed one of his two daily cigars in his Forbes Building office near Washington Square.
“As I said at the party, the million-dollar contribution to the campaign against AIDS was given to give the Forbes magazine celebration more significance than just a social event.”
Forbes, 68, lends significance to almost anything he undertakes. He has given motorcycling and hot-air ballooning the cachet of reputable leisure sports. He has been in the forefront of the revival of interest in 19th- century art and artifacts and created new interest in American historic memorabilia.
Above all, he has made capitalism — a dirty word as late as the 1970s — respectable.
Forbes is the possessor of a personal fortune estimated at $400 million to $600 million, earned in the course of building a publishing and real-estate development empire. Even among his rich friends he is known as “the man who has everything.”
He was considered daring when he began advertising his biweekly Forbes magazine, of which he is chairman and editor in chief, as a “capitalist tool,” which he admits was the suggestion of an ad executive.
“It has humor, but it has its point and really rehabilitated the word capitalist when the word had almost become a cuss word,” Forbes said. “It makes people realize that capitalism means free enterprise.”
His chief competitors, Fortune and Business Week, have never latched onto anything quite like “capitalist tool,” although Forbes himself latched onto the idea of the Fortune 500 leading industrial companies. His spin-off, begun in 1983, is an annual social register of the 400 richest people in America, including Forbes himself.
“We learn from our competitors,” said Forbes laconically. “We’d be foolish not to.”
Forbes’ father, magazine founder Bertie Charles Forbes, had not even arrived from Scotland when the Social Register was first published in 1887. Forbes and all four of his sons and his daughter are listed in it today, having made the transition from emigre to eminence in just two generations.
Few other families boast as many of the trappings of capitalist success as the Forbeses. In addition to their own private homes, there is a palace in Tangiers, a chateau in France, a mansion in London, a plantation in Fiji, and a ranch in Wyoming. A 150-foot yacht, Highlander V, and a Boeing 727 are just the tip of their transportation system.
Malcolm Forbes was the third of the five sons of Bertie Forbes and did not seemed destined by birth to be heir to the magazine his father founded in 1917.
However, Malcolm Forbes was fascinated by newspaper publishing and wrote his senior thesis at Princeton University on weekly newspapers. He bought the Fairfield Times, a weekly in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1941, two days after pocketing his Princeton University diploma.
World War II, in which Forbes was a much decorated Army staff sergeant, ended the Lancaster venture because, “I couldn’t afford to pay the editor out of my $90-a-week sergeant’s pay,” he explained. He joined the Forbes magazine staff, becoming a vice president in 1947 when the circulation was 67,000, and was named associate publisher in 1949.
When his father died in 1954, Forbes was elected editor and publisher, but he shared stock in the magazine with three brothers.
“The happiest day of Malcolm’s life was when he saw his way clear to get 100 percent control of the business,” said a longtime New Jersey neighbor.
The unhappiest day of Forbes’ life came in 1985 when his wife, the former Roberta Remsen Laidlaw, decided to divorce him after 39 years of marriage. She preferred life on their ranch in Wyoming to life in the fast lane with Malcolm.
Forbes, who enjoys his reputation as a devoted family man, explained: “When our children were growing up, my wife and I were not great goer- outers. In more recent years I have had to do a great deal of entertaining and traveling, but Bertie remained an extremely private person. Public life was uncomfortable for her. She finally said she had enough of being told when and whom to entertain.”
The divorce has made Forbes one of the world’s most eligible bachelors.
“I get letters of proposal through the mail,” he said with a grin. “It’s very flattering to one of my age. Probably has less to do with my charms than with my solvency. … “
Forbes’ profile is highest when he is entertaining at his 17th-century Chateau de Balleroy in the French province of Normandy, site of his annual ballooning rallies, or on the Highlander V.
“I’ve never known anyone who enjoys life and people as much as Malcolm or who enjoys giving his friends pleasure the way he does,” said Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, a longtime friend. “He has such a wide range of interests. He is truly a fascinating man.”
Years after devoting his life to business, Forbes found another obsession — sports. He had always enjoyed swimming, tennis, riding and boating, but at 48 he took up motorcycling and at 52 hot-air ballooning.
“Both sports have to do with the elements,” he observed. “You have the wind in your face, and you’re a free spirit. I got interested in ballooning by answering a newspaper ad for a $75 ride over Princeton. I was so turned on I took lessons.”
Forbes had one brush with death when he tried a trans-Atlantic balloon flight in 1975 and has sustained a number of injuries on the road, including three broken bones, a collapsed lung, and a concussion in a motorcyle accident in Montana in 1984.
“People ask me why I took up motorcycling and ballooning so late in life,” Forbes said. “I think too many people don’t take things up on the premise that they need to know too much about it. I outgrew that. One sign of maturity is the realization that you shouldn’t be inhibited about trying something you’re not good at.
“Enthusiasm, not expertise, is the requisite. Anything you haven’t done is an adventure. Wanting to is the principal requirement. If you can do and want to do, don’t not.
” … You’ll live longer if your spirit is stirred by the world about you, be it a new campus, the next village, the next border, the next continent, or the next planet,” he said. “The worst hurt to mind and life is never to have moved out at all. Don’t stay put when you can put your foot into any part of this still whole, wide and mostly wonderful world.”
