One of the world's most colourful personalities, American publisher
Malcolm Forbes, died suddenly at the weekend. Though born in America, he
never lost contact with his father's Scottish roots, and is seen (left)
with the author of this farewell tribute, Herald writer JACK WEBSTER.
HE treated his days on earth as a glorious adventure and exhorted
others to follow his personal motto, which was: ''While you're alive,
LIVE!''
Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, the fabulously wealthy New York publisher
and son of a poor Scots immigrant, did exactly that, gaining in his
later years an overblown public profile which owed much to his romantic
connection with Elizabeth Taylor.
In contrast to the colourful exposure of his life, he flew back from
London to the United States at the weekend and died quietly of a heart
attack in his armchair, at his beautiful estate in Far Hills, New
Jersey.
Despite the wealth and flamboyance, any suggestion of a spendthrift
playboy would give a totally false image of a very sound, shrewd and
serious man.
He took his father's modest millions and turned them into a business
empire, of which he was the sole controller. His personal wealth would
have to be counted beyond the #500 million mark.
There are many labels which could be attached to Malcolm Forbes, who
was publisher, writer, investor, highly-decorated hero of the Second
World War, balloonist, motor-cyclist and adventurer with an
all-consuming love of life.
He could also go down as the greatest President the United States
never had, having given up politics at a time when he was as hot a tip
for the White House as John F. Kennedy, who was two years his senior.
My own unlikely friendship with Malcolm Forbes dates back to 1937,
when he was a teenager.
Every two years, his father came back to the Buchan district of
Aberdeenshire to entertain his old parish to a picnic. Wee Bertie had
been the sixth of 10 children of the local tailor at Whitehill of New
Deer, known at school as ''Patchy'' Forbes from the repairs on his
trousers.
Times were hard in that latter part of the 19th century. My
great-grandfather, Gavin Greig, gave him all the schooling he ever had
and set him on his way to work as a printer's devil on the Peterhead
Sentinel. He moved on to the Dundee Courier, then joined up with Edgar
Wallace to revive the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg before heading for
New York in 1904.
Developing as a brilliant financial journalist, Bertie started his own
Forbes Magazine in 1917, becoming a friend of the famous, from the
Rockefellers to the Woolworths. But he never forgot the family and
friends back home.
Most of all he idolised his old dominie, Gavin Greig, and gave me his
attention and advice, perhaps by way of repaying a debt to his mentor.
Thus we were entertained at the old Cruden Bay railway hotel in 1937,
when I met Malcolm.
He was the third of five sons and, therefore, unlikely to succeed his
father in the publishing enterprise. But fate plays some strange hands.
When Bertie died in 1954, he was succeeded at the magazine by his eldest
son, Bruce.
But Bruce died of cancer in his forties. The second son, Duncan, had
been killed in a car crash as a youth and Malcolm, who had stood for the
governorship of New Jersey, fell heir to the business.
He proceeded not only to build Forbes into the most influential
financial journal in America but to spread the business interest into
land and property, buying up hundreds of square miles of Colorado and
Montana.
He acquired the South Pacific island of Laucala, Zane Grey's old home
in Tahiti, the Governor's Palace in Tangiers and Old Battersea House in
London, where he was staying at the end of last week.
Having won the Bronze Star and Purple Heart for his bravery in Europe
in 1944, he went back and bought the Chateau Balleroy in Normandy, which
has become the base of his annual hot-air balloon festival.
Along with son Christopher, he built up one of the great art
collections, not least his Victorian pictures, and amassed the world's
largest collection of Faberge eggs.
Just last month, he flew into Moscow in his private Boeing 727 -- with
''Forbes: Capitalist Tool'' emblazoned on it! -- to put the eggs on show
in the land where they originated. The Russians were fascinated.
It was part of a trend in his later years, when he became an
unofficial ambassador for America, visiting everywhere from Berlin to
Peking, offering the hand of friendship and presenting each country with
a hot-air balloon shaped as a national symbol. Thailand got an elephant,
Egypt a Sphinx and West Germany a bust of Beethoven.
''It's mighty hard for people to dislike a balloon!'' he told me
recently, by way of explaining how he had broken down barriers.
Again, in his later years, he began to feel the genetic pull. His
daughter, Moira, had studied at Aberdeen University in the 1970s and he
himself was given an honorary doctorate there in 1986.
As we dined afterwards, he asked if I would help him restore his
father's annual picnic for the folks of Whitehill. We did so in 1987,
when he was welcomed back to the old parish, arriving in a pony and
trap.
When it was time to return to his Boeing at Aberdeen Airport, I could
hardly tear him away. He gazed out over the rolling farmlands of Buchan,
breathing deeply, marvelling at the freshness of the air and the simple
beauty of the Scottish countryside.
I think he had come late to an appreciation of it and was determined
to make the most of the time. As we passed the local kirkyard, he said
''I think Dad would have liked to have been buried there instead of in
New Jersey''.
On the following year, they exhumed the remains of Bertie Forbes and
brought them back to the old cemetery at New Deer, where he lies in the
family grave.
Malcolm Forbes was becoming more and more aware of his own mortality.
He had survived the battles of the Second World War, when he was
seriously wounded. He had diced with death in three ballooning
accidents, once when he struck a high-voltage cable.
In 1971, he was attending the birthday party of King Hassan of Morocco
when the fireworks display seemed to have started prematurely.
Truck-loads of soldiers had come driving up the Casablanca road, swung
into the palace gates and started firing.
Before the attempted coup was over, 100 guests lay dead. Malcolm
Forbes escaped but was caught and brought back to lie face down among
the dead. Miraculously, he survived to tell the tale.
Then eight years ago, he faced one of his biggest battles -- against
cancer of the bladder. He was among the lucky ones for whom the cure
worked.
He thanked the Lord and went on spreading his largesse around
countless causes. I was at a party at his home in New Jersey when he
handed over a million dollars to Elizabeth Taylor for her campaign
against Aids.
By then, she had become the lady in his life, a much-publicised
liaison which, for all the speculations of marriage, was never going to
be anything more than a close friendship.
He had been married for nearly 40 years to Roberta, a charming lady
who preferred the solitude of their mid-West ranches to her public
duties. The marriage finally broke up four years ago but she continued
to live on the Forbes estate at Far Hills -- and re-appeared on the
Christmas card photograph last year.
Malcolm celebrated his 70th birthday last August, with a fabulous
party at his Morocco palace, for which he flew in his American guests in
Concorde, among other jets.
For his Scottish picnic this year, he was planning to arrive in his
Highlander yacht, berthing at Fraserburgh Harbour on July 22, and to
entertain his guests in a marquee at the nearby Pitsligo Castle, an old
home of the Clan Forbes, which he bought in 1988.
Just hours before he died at the weekend, I was there to make
arrangements for the picnic.
He was also negotiating to buy the cottage of his father's birth, with
a view to restoring it to Victorian charm, and was looking forward to
meeting old friends, not least his own cousins, Andy, Charles and Arthur
Forbes. (Andy, who lives in Simshill, Glasgow, is the former champion
runner who won a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1950).
But there would be no more picnics for Malcolm Forbes. He knew well
that all the wealth in the world would offer no immunity when the Great
Reaper came calling.
With his bubbling good humour, he was more than ready for the call,
realising that matters had been rounded off neatly with the arrival of
the allotted span.
Of his four sons, all involved in the business, he will be succeeded
by his namesake, Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, known as Steve, an extremely
erudite and talented man of 42, whose quieter style will be in contrast
to that of his father.
I have just been reading Malcolm's final column, which will be
published in Forbes this week. As usual, it was headed by the motto
which his father took from the pew in New Deer kirk: With all thy
getting, get understanding.
Malcolm Forbes got the understanding -- as well as a deep and abiding
joy from spreading happiness wherever he went. I can think of worse
faults.
