Malcolm Forbes

Closeted Gay Financier with Money to Burn

Homoerotic art was splashed liberally on the walls of his Manhattan townhouse. He had a penchant for handsome young men hired as servers for his catered parties and dinners. Before the guests arrived he would lure one of them into his Jacuzzi and give him a blow job – followed by a $100 tip – and then send him back out to work his party. Same deal with the houseboys, bodyguards and chauffeurs. He often gave blow jobs to his male employees at his magazine office, with the door wide open, so others would not suspect what was going on. His son Steve was in an office not thirty feet away. His secretary, seated near the open door, but out of sight of his desk, knew never to just walk in. She always called first. Smart gal.

His preference in gay porn was any video produced by Colt Studios. A reflection of this super-masculine and macho lifestyle was his penchant for motorcycles, especially Harleys. His other forms of private transportation were private yachts (see photo of Highlander V, below) and airplanes (his private Boeing 727 was named Capitalist Tool). He was one of the richest men in the world. His name was Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990), and his eclectic range of friends included Prince Charles and Mick Jagger.

His closeted gay life prevented him from mingling with prominent gays, but that didn’t keep him from picking up hot leather dudes and squiring them around NYC on the back of one of his Harleys. He married to sire offspring, then went about having one promiscuous affair after the other, always with men. No one ever recalled his talking about having sex with women.

Forbes and best pal Elizabeth Taylor, both looking glamorous in skirts (at right).

Forbes was famous for making money, and he knew how to throw serious parties. He spent $2.5 million on his own 70th birthday party in Morocco; 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 and co-host Elizabeth Taylor, Gianni Agnelli, Robert Maxwell, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, half a dozen US state governors, and the CEOs of scores of multinational corporations likely to advertise in his magazine, FORBES, which had been founded by his father. 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.

Malcolm Forbes bought this 17th-century French chateau in Normandy in 1970, which he restored and refurnished. An early masterpiece by the architect François Mansart, the pink and grey Chateau de Balleroy was built in 1626 for Jean de Choisy, chancellor to the brother of French king Louis XIII.

 

 

Oh. In addition, he owned seven other homes, including a palace in Tangier and a private island in Fiji. Nice!

 

Sources:  

Encylopedia Brittanica

Wikipedia

Town & Country Magazine

Malcolm Forbes: The Man Who Had Everything by Chrisopher Winans (1990)

Anthony Perkins: sexually conflicted actor

Anthony Perkins was an actor who had affairs with A-list male celebrities: Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Rudolf Nureyev, Paul Newman, Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, and Stephen Sondheim. The one that lasted, however, was with dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom Perkins had a six-year relationship before his 1973 marriage to photographer Berry Berenson, the sister of actress Marisa Berenson. Dale, who had been Perkins’ understudy in the stage musical Greenwillow, also married in 1973 (must have been something in the water that year). Perkins was 41 years old at the time of his marriage and said he had sex with a woman for the first time just a year before that, at age 39, with his co-star Victoria Principal during filming of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.

Perkins was a veteran of stage, screen and TV, even earning an Oscar nomination for Friendly Persuasion, but he lived in utter fear that Confidential magazine would out him, as it did with Tab Hunter, one of his early lovers. Perkins had two sons with Berenson, but he died of AIDS in 1992 at age sixty; according to the Los Angeles Times obituary, Perkins did not acknowledge that he had the disease until he released a statement shortly before his death, even though the National Enquirer had broken the story two years earlier. According to author Shawn Levy (The Castle on Sunset, 2019) during the 19 years of his marriage and while being a father, Perkins kept a hotel room on hold for himself at Chateau Marmont so that he would have a place for trysts with young men. Hmmm...

Before his marriage Perkins met influential gay men who resided at Chateau Marmont at various times -- Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood (and his partner Don Bachardy) among them. Earlier, Perkins had been introduced to Tab Hunter at the hotel's pool. Moments later, Perkins invited Hunter up to his room. Thus began a two-year sexual relationship between Perkins and Hunter. Studio executives tried to quash rumors by "allowing" Perkins and Hunter to go on double dates with studio-provided starlets.

His performance as Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s film Psycho* is unforgettable, but his career went into decline soon afterward. Perkins was known to frequent gay porn stores and gay movie houses in Times Square, NYC, where he watched men have sex in the stairwells.

*Note: Perkins was not filmed in the infamous Psycho shower scene. A double was used. On the day that scene was shot, Perkins was in rehearsals for Greenwillow, a Broadway musical. Source: Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.

For over a decade Perkins lived in a platonic relationship with photographer Helen Merrell, a dominating force of a woman fourteen years his senior. Merrell went on to become an influential theatrical agent and philanthropist.

In the late 1950s, Perkins released three pop song albums, but a career as a singer never materialized, although he did have a starring role in Greenwillow, a Broadway musical (closed after 97 performances). Perkins also worked as a stage actor. In 1958, he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor for his performance in the Broadway play Look Homeward, Angel. During this time he also starred in Green Mansions (1959) with Audrey Hepburn and the college comedy Tall Story (1960) with Jane Fonda.


His widow, Berry Berenson, was tragically killed while aboard American Airlines flight 11 as it crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.


In a role that forever defined him: Perkins (as Norman Bates) with Janet Leigh in Hitchcock's masterpiece PSYCHO:

 

Samuel Steward: Renegade Professor...

...tattoo artist, writer, masochist & Thornton Wilder's lover

Steward (1909-1993) is the subject of a lurid and fascinating biography penned by art scholar Justin Spring: Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (published September, 2010). 478 pages. Print and kindle editions available.

The title is not the half of it. Steward was the polymath to end all polymaths. He was a poet who made a career in academia, teaching English at DePaul and Loyola Universities (Steward held a PhD in English), but used the name Phil Sparrow when he began a career as a tattoo artist (he used a pseudonym so as not to jeopardize his teaching position). Steward became addicted to the use of pseudonyms. As the author of gay S&M pulp fiction over a period of more than 30 years, he went by Phil Andros (among many others), providing eager readers with astonishingly literate porn. When the Hells Angels in Oakland, CA, used him as their official tattoo artist, they called him Doc Sparrow. Readers of his articles in underground newspapers and magazines knew him as Ward Stames (an anagram of Sam Steward). And most of these circles of friends were completely ignorant of each other. Suffice it to say that the Hells Angels were unaware that their resident tattoo artist had once been Thornton Wilder's lover.

To a close circle of prominent artistic friends like Paul Cadmus, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood, photographer George Platt Lynes and the like, he was known as Sammy. Thornton Wilder drafted the third act of Our Town during a brief affair with Steward in Zurich, Switzerland, upon their first meeting. Steward had a fling with avant-garde writer James Purdy when Purdy was still in his teens. In the early 1950s Steward made pornographic drawings, many of them based on his own Polaroid photographs, and some of his work was published in the trilingual Swiss homosexual journal Der Kreis (The Circle). Oh -- forgot to mention that he played a mean piano.

What a life this man led. As a teenager he seduced Rudolph Valentino (and kept some of the silent film actor’s pubic hair as a memento*), made love to a much older Lord Alfred Douglas (providing an amorous link to his hero Oscar Wilde), bedded Andre Gide’s Arab lover (with Gide’s full consent), and put the moves on Rock Hudson in a department store elevator. Steward kept a card file of every single sexual dalliance, complete with statistics and descriptions of acts performed. Steward was a protegé of Albert Kinsey, who flew in a partner to engage Steward in S&M sexual activity so that Kinsey could film it (assisted by Kinsey's wife!). In his spare time Steward reveled in abusing alcohol and drugs. By the age of 26, while he was a professor at Loyola, Steward was drinking more than a quart of alcohol a day, all the while never missing a class or appointment.

Spring’s book jumps to no conclusions and is assiduously non-judgmental. He simply relates what he discovered among the 80 boxes full of drawings, letters, photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts and other items made accessible to him by the executor of Steward’s estate. Included was that infamous green metal card catalog labeled “Stud File,” which contained meticulously documented index cards on every sexual partner that Steward had enjoyed over a 50 year period.

It is possible to purchase new and used erotic paperback copies of Steward's pulp porn from amazon.com (search "Phil Andros"), but the prices are staggering: $30-$60-$90 and up for a used paperback, in the hundreds of dollars for new, uncirculated  copies. The Advocate magazine called the Phil Andros erotic novels "the Rolls-Royce" of gay porn. When Justin Spring (author of this biography) passed along several of them to a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, she stated that it was the "happiest, most well-adjusted pornography" she had ever read. My personal reaction (I read one only for researching this post, I swear!) is that you might think that only if your taste runs toward rough sex (and mine does). Enjoy this biography, and try to get your hands on a Phil Andros paperback, many of them replete with covers illustrated by Tom of Finland (see photo at beginning of post).

In an interview by Owen Keehnen in the last year of Steward’s life, Keehan described Steward as "a charmingly smutty Auntie Mame, only instead of life's being a banquet, it was a gay orgy in a tattoo parlor." Steward told Keehan why he gave up teaching English: "I was teaching a freshman class, and I had a little trick of firing a lot of questions at the class to find out what their background was. One of the questions was 'Who is Homer?' It was a mixed class of forty, and not one of them had ever heard of Homer. Can you imagine? Then I asked how many knew how to change a sparkplug, and about thirty hands went up. So that day I decided that maybe it was time for me to think about leaving higher education. I wanted to get as far away as I could. That was tattooing. The mysterious and dark side of tattooing attracted me as well."

*This incident is worthy of its own post. Rudolph Valentino, the silent film heartthrob of countless women, had been called a "pink powder puff" in the Chicago Tribune, a reference to his effeminate mannerisms. Valentino headed to Chicago by train to challenge the reporter to a duel (the writer never showed up) and was then on his way back to California when he stopped for an overnight at a hotel in Columbus, Ohio (July 24, 1926). Valentino was registered incognito, under his real name. Steward, who was living at his aunt's boarding house in Columbus, was an avid collector of autographs, and he got tipped off by a friend who worked at the hotel. Steward, who had celebrated his 17th birthday the day before, knocked on Valentino's door and got his autograph. Their collective gaydar must have been working overtime, because Valentino asked Steward, "Is there anything else you want?" Steward replied, "Yes. You!" Valentino obliged, and Steward kept a scrap of Valentino's pubic hair in a monstrance(!) by his bed for the rest of his life. Steward had not yet converted to Catholicism (1936; he left the church 18 months later, when he came to realize that no one with honesty could be both a Catholic and a homosexual); he was raised Methodist, and his father had taught Sunday School in a Methodist Church for 20 years. Tragically, within a month Valentino died of a ruptured appendix at age thirty-one. Steward's first published book, Pan and the Fire-Bird (1930), a collection of poems and short stories, contained Steward's tribute to Valentino, a poem titled "Libation to a Dead God."