Malcolm Forbes born 19 August 1919 (d. 1990)Malcolm Stevenson Forbes was publisher of Forbes magazine, founded by his father B C Forbes and today run by his son, Steve Forbes.
He is a graduate of the Lawrenceville School and Princeton University, where he donated the money for Forbes College, one of the five residential colleges at the University.
After dabbling in politics, including a term in the state legislature and candidacy for Governor of New Jersey, he committed to the magazine full time by 1957, three years after his father's death, and after the death of his brother in 1964 acquired sole control of the company.
The magazine grew steadily under his leadership, and he diversified into property and other ventures. One of his last projects was the magazine Egg, which chronicled New York's nightlife. (The title had nothing to do with Forbes's famous Fabergé egg collection.)
Malcolm Forbes was legendary for his lavish lifestyle, his private jet, ever larger Highlander yachts, huge art collection, substantial collection of Harley-Davidson motorbikes, his French Chateau (in Balleroy, Normandy), his collections of special shape hot air balloons and historical documents, as well as his opulent birthday parties.He chose the Palais du Mendoub (which he had acquired from the Moroccan government in 1970) in the north-western city of Tangier, Morocco to host his 70th birthday party. Spending an estimated $2.5 million, he chartered a Boeing 747, a DC-8 and a Concorde to fly in eight hundred of the world's rich and famous from New York and London. The guests included his friend Elizabeth Taylor (who acted as a co-host), Gianni Agnelli, Robert Maxwell, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, half a dozen US state governors, the CEOs of scores of multinational corporations likely to advertise in his magazine. The party entertainment was on a grand scale, including 600 drummers, acrobats and dancers and a fantasia - a cavalry charge which ends with the firing of muskets into the air - by 300 Berber horsemen.
He died suddenly in 1990 following a heart attack.
In March 1990, soon after his death, OutWeek magazine published a cover story, 'The Secret Life of Malcolm Forbes', by Michelangelo Signorile, which outed Forbes as a gay man. Forbes was known to many in his social circles as gay, but his homosexuality was never reported on in the media. 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 just how controversial it was at that time to report on the undeclared homosexuality of even a public figure who was dead - let alone living - many newspapers viewed Signorile's Forbes story as shocking and scandalous, and it took months for some papers to report on it. The New York Times reported on it four months after the fact in a story about outing, and still would not name Forbes, only saying that a 'recently deceased businessman' had been 'outed'. (Years later, the paper would finally report that Forbes was 'gay', in a story about his son Steve Forbes’ run for the presidency).
