Below is the weekly summation after this long holiday weekend. The main positive is that, three weeks after the election, the Biden transition has officially now begun, hopefully clearing the way for a smoother than expected transfer of power. The main negative is that a relief bill is still not forthcoming leaving a record 26 million Americans without funds to buy even essential basics like food. This weekend I could only find downbeat articles about the growing pandemic and the post-election chaos.
The closest I could find to a "happy" story was this ironically amusing article about a Hollywood mogul who, despite producing nothing but flops, still managed to befriend some of the most famous people in the world, amass a $600 million fortune, then kill himself only to have his heir squander the 600 million. The amusing part of this piece is -- how is any of this possible? Oooh the problems of the rich and famous. Hope everyone had a great holiday!
Succinct Summation of Week’s Events for 11.27.20
Succinct Summations for the week ending November 27th, 2020
Positives:
1. POTUS belatedly admits loss, allows GSA to begin transition.
2. Home mortgage apps rose 4.0% for the second straight week.
3. FHFA House Price Index rose 1.7% m/o/m, above the expected increase of 0.9%.
4. Chicago Fed National Activity Index came in at 0.83 for October, above the expected 0.1
5. PMI Composite came in at 57.9 for November, above the expected 55.6.
6. Wholesale inventories rose 0.9% m/o/m, above the previous increase of 0.7%.
Negatives:
1. Congress still dithering over aid package as as 26 million Americans on food lines reach new records.
2. Concerns about Astra Zeneca vaccine raises questions about widespread distribution.
3. Jobless claims rose 30k w/o/w from 748k to 778k.
4. Durable goods orders rose 1.3% w/o/w, below the previous increase of 2.1%.
5. New home sales fell to an annual rate of 999k in October, down from previous 1.002M.
6. Retail inventories rose 0.8% m/o/m, below the previous increase of 1.7%.
11-29-20 BigPic: Steve Bing's Death, Suicide Investigation
The Strange Last Days of Steve Bing
What led to the movie
mogul's suicide? For the first time, his closest friends reveal the dark drama
behind a real life film noir and how the heir to a $600 million fortune ended
up nearly broke.
BY JESSE HYDE
OCT 20, 2020
It was late June, and Steve Bing wasn’t picking up his phone.
This wasn’t all that unusual. The movie producer and real estate heir was known
to disappear at times, usually without warning. Only his closest friends knew
where he went, and why he frequently changed his number.
He was weathering the lockdown at the hottest address in Los
Angeles, the Ten Thousand Building in Century City, where a 4,000-square-foot
penthouse costs $65,000 a month, and the isolation was bringing deep-seated
anxieties into sharp relief.
Back in the 1990s Bing had cultivated a Jay Gatsby–esque image
in Hollywood, dating supermodels and starlets, most famously Elizabeth Hurley.
At six-foot-four, he had the lanky build of an athlete, but he was quiet and
elusive, and he took great pains to downplay the $600 million fortune he had
inherited from the family business, Bing & Bing, a New York real estate
development firm that had become one of the most successful of the early 20th
century. He once imagined he would dominate the film industry like a modern-day
Howard Hughes, but things hadn’t gone according to plan.
He was 55 years old, and most of the films he had produced had
flopped, including the Hughes biopic Rules
Don’t Apply, starring, written by, and directed by Warren
Beatty, one of several octogenarians, alongside James Caan and Jerry
Lee Lewis, Bing admired and befriended. The L.A. he and his cohort romanticized
was gone, and for days texts from worried friends went unanswered. They feared
he was in a downward spiral. By the evening of June 22, most of Bing’s inner
circle, including Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger, had heard the news: Just after
1 p.m. Bing had leaped to his death from his apartment balcony.
“I loved Steve Bing very much,” Clinton
tweeted that night. “He had a big heart, and he was willing to do
anything he could for the people and causes he believed in. I will miss him and
his enthusiasm more than I can say.”
Within hours conspiracy theories were circulating on the
internet that Bing had not killed himself but had been murdered because of his
connection to the late multimillionaire sex offender Jeffrey
Epstein. Friends found this absurd, even offensive—the two never
met, close associates say—and they speculated that loneliness had pushed him
over the edge. Few knew the truth: that Steve Bing feared he was on the brink
of financial ruin, and that long-buried secrets were catching up to him. By the
time of his death, bad bets, unpaid bills, and wrong choices had left him with
next to nothing.
ONCE
UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD
Steve Bing stepped outside his house in Bel Air and looked out
toward the ocean. It was 1993. “Where do you want to go to lunch?” he asked his
friend Josh Chrisant, an interior designer 14 years Bing’s senior.
“I don’t care,” Chrisant tells T&C he replied. “I’m easy.”
“Well, I just inherited
$600 million last night, so…” Bing looked at Chrisant and grinned.
Everyone who knew Bing back then has similar stories. Carrie
Mitchum, the granddaughter of Hollywood icon Robert Mitchum, remembers meeting
Bing at Trader Vic’s in the ’80s. He was hanging out with members of the Brat
Pack—Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe—but Mitchum didn’t know that Bing came from
money until he invited her to a pool party at his parents’ house on Alpine
Drive, not far from where Charlie Chaplin had once lived.
“They had this gorgeous
house overlooking all of L.A., and I was shocked, because he just wore khakis
and jeans and tennis shoes and drove an old car,” Mitchum tells T&C. “He was such a change from most people in
L.A., because there wasn’t anything flashy about him. I guess the term is
extremely humble.”
The Bings were as close as L.A. got to old money. His
grandfather Leo S. Bing built some of the most famous apartment buildings on
Manhattan’s Upper East Side and amassed a fortune of more than a billion dollars
before his death in 1956. When Steve was three, his father Peter, a doctor who
had served in public health under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, moved the
family to Beverly Hills. Even though they were on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans, Peter drilled into his
children the importance of modesty. They flew coach and drove beat-up station
wagons.
Steve got straight A’s at Harvard-Westlake, one of L.A.’s most
prestigious private schools, and sold his first screenplay while
still there, but his adolescence was marked by a complicated relationship with
his father. Steve, who slept in a guesthouse on the family compound, called
himself an orphan.
Bing found surrogate fathers in movie veterans like the director
Garry Marshall and Caan, who persuaded him to coach his son’s T-ball team. Bing
went on to Stanford, where his father, an alum, was on the board of trustees
and had endowed a building named after the family, but by his junior year he
had dropped out to pursue filmmaking full-time.
“He was a bit of a whiz
kid, and good-looking,” recalls the longtime entertainment journalist Lynn
Hirschberg. “He liked old Hollywood. If you grow up somewhere else, it doesn’t
matter to you. But if you grow up in L.A. it matters. It means something, and
he wanted to be part of that world.”
By the late ’80s Bing had developed a reputation as a womanizer,
much like the men he had grown up idolizing. He was prone to categorizing the
women in his life—the girl you call at 2 a.m., the girl you take to an event.
“You never know,” he liked to tell friends, quoting Beatty to explain why he’d
sleep with just about anyone. “She may be the best fuck of your life.”
Heidi Fleiss, the infamous Hollywood madam and, later, convict,
recalls meeting Bing when he was 22 at a party at the Mondrian Hotel.
“The balance was always off at my house, heavier on the girls’
side. So I’d call Steve and have him bring some guys over,” she says.
Every once in a while, Fleiss says, Steve would call and ask her
to send over one of her charges, even though he insisted he was never her
client. Once, according to Fleiss, one of her women came back and told her
she’d seen drugs in Bing’s bathroom. “And I was so adamant. I said, ‘You’re a
liar. You don’t even know who this person is. He would never do drugs,’ ” Fleiss says. “To me, Steve was so
pure and sophisticated. I was positive he didn’t do drugs. I had no idea.”
THE BAD
BOY & THE BEAUTIFUL
In 2000 Bing formed a production company called Shangri-la
Entertainment and scored an eight-picture deal with Warner Bros. He also
co-wrote what became a hot screenplay with his buddy Scott Rosenberg, who had
established himself as a buzzy screenwriter with the action hit Con Air. Their pitch sparked a major bidding war, and
it garnered Bing and Rosenberg a $1.4 million payday from Jerry Bruckheimer.
“Part of what happens in
Hollywood is that if you are sincere, truly sincere, and energetic and happy
about what you’re doing—and the stars align—sometimes good things happen,”
Chrisant says. “In the beginning, at least, he was optimistic about everything he
did.”
Around the same time, Bing met the model and actress Elizabeth
Hurley, who was then the face of Estée Lauder. Bing didn’t seem like the
average L.A. producer. “He wasn’t douchey,” says a Hollywood agent who knew
Bing for more than 20 years. “He might have been out the night before partying
with Charlie Sheen, but he never talked about it.” Hurley was charmed by Bing’s
nerdiness—he had just finished the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of
Lyndon Johnson—and his passion for the environment and liberal causes. He was
also a cinephile: Twice a week he rented out a Beverly Hills screening room and
showed old films to his friends.
Bing had not given up what one of his friends called his
“decadent bad boy life”—there were frequent trips to Vegas strip clubs, and an
affair with an Armani model while he and Hurley were together—but he had fallen
for Hurley, and he wrote love letters, bought her a sapphire and diamond ring,
and flew her around the world on his private jet.
In the late summer of 2001, Hurley called Bing to tell him she
was pregnant and planned to keep the child. He asked her to fly to L.A. to
discuss it and, once she arrived, he reportedly advised her to get an abortion.
She flew back to London, and they soon split up.
In November, Hurley announced to the public that she was
pregnant. A month later, when she went on NBC’s Today show
and identified Bing as the father, he was incensed. He had always
carefully guarded his privacy, and now there were pictures splashed across the
tabloids. He issued a terse press release saying they had been in a
non-exclusive relationship and that it was “her choice to be a single mother.”
The London papers pounced, calling him "Bing Laden."
Two months later the New York Post was
proclaiming him “the
Sperminator,” after a private investigator proved that Bing had
fathered a baby
girl four years earlier with Lisa Kerkorian, the ex-wife of the Las
Vegas casino magnate Kirk Kerkorian.
Humiliated and hurt, Bing poured himself into philanthropy. In
2001 he quietly pledged $10
million to the Natural Resources Defense Council; the next year he
wrote a $5
million check to the Democratic National Committee, then the
second-largest such donation ever. In 2006 he singlehandedly bankrolled a
California ballot measure that aimed to raise $4 billion in oil
production taxes. And over time he gave more than $10 million to the
Clinton Foundation.
He also started a record company and a construction company, he
bought real estate, and he spent lavishly on producing films—$63 million for
Sylvester Stallone’s Get Carter and
$100 million for a pair of risky animated movies by Robert Zemeckis—but too
many were expensive flops. That comedy that had once triggered a bidding
war? Kangaroo Jack was
savaged by critics and ultimately eked out only a modest profit. Hollywood
increasingly saw him as a dilettante with a checkbook, and by the end of the
decade he was an aging playboy, his appetite for younger women a punchline. In
2008, Gawker named Bing part of Clinton’s
Billionaire Boys Club, which included Ron Burkle and Jeffrey
Epstein.
“He was definitely in
this circle of dudes who were hitting the clubs and were too old to be doing
it,” says an agent who worked with Bing and represented some of his friends.
“You’re in your mid-forties and you’re hitting Tao three times a week? There’s
something slightly pathetic about that.”
Friends like Chrisant, who designed the interior of Bing’s
Boeing 737, saw him frequently. “He loved to drive, especially in the desert,”
he says. “We’d drive for 10 hours and just talk and giggle and share stories.
And then he’d go back into the real world where he had to live.”
So did Fleiss, who was becoming a supporting player in a rather
familiar plot. She became concerned when Bing’s
depression led him to crystal meth, and three years ago she realized
something was up when they were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “When I saw
his arms, I said to him, ‘Oh no, Steve, you’re over. It’s done.’ My heart just
sank. I don’t know anyone who comes back from that,” she says.
Last winter Fleiss was in L.A. and wanted to meet up with Bing.
When she couldn’t get hold of him for several days, she called around, panicked
that he might have overdosed. He was fine. Embarrassed, she apologized for
raising the alarm. He told her there was no need. His circle of friends might
include a former president and some of the richest men in California, but he
was happy that there was someone looking after him.
TWO
LOST SOULS IN BEVERLY HILLS
In June 2018 Carrie Mitchum met Bing for dinner at Mr. Lyons, a
popular steakhouse in Palm Springs. They had known each other since their
twenties, and he worshiped her grandfather. He had once said his most prized
possession was a framed note, on stationery from the Four Seasons Hotel,
letting him know that Robert Mitchum would join him for lunch, a meeting
arranged by his girlfriend at the time, Sharon Stone. Bing told friends that if
his house burned down the note was the only thing he’d save.
That night Carrie’s niece Allexanne Mitchum joined them. She was
27, younger than Bing by 26 years, but she was an artist and had an ethereal,
new age vibe he found intriguing. Despite the age difference he saw in her a
kindred spirit, and soon the unlikely couple were inseparable. A child of
actors, she had also suffered a bittersweet upbringing, and she shared his
cynical view of Hollywood.
“I felt like he needed answers I didn’t have,”
says Bing’s friend Carrie Mitchum.
They talked about getting out of L.A. and starting a family
together. Bing rented a house for them in Palm Springs and promised to build
Allexanne an art studio. For the first time in his life, he was cooking meals
at home and eagerly talking about having another child.
Then, in June 2019, while they were staying at a hotel in
Beverly Hills, the couple had a fight, and Bing asked her to spend the night
elsewhere. Allexanne went to a friend’s house, and 24 hours later she was in a
coma at a UCLA hospital from a drug overdose. She died
eight days later.
Bing became convinced that her death had not been an accident,
and Carrie Mitchum says she got calls from him in the middle of the night
asking her if she had learned anything new from the hospital or the detectives
investigating her death. Even after the death was ruled an accidental overdose
from taking Xanax with fentanyl, Bing kept calling. “He started asking me if I
believed in the afterlife,” Mitchum says. “Did I have dreams about her? And if
so, what did she say to me? I think it really shook him.”
Last August, Bing summoned a confidant who managed his finances
to meet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The person, who agreed to speak on
condition of anonymity, found Bing feeling regretful, in bed with the lights
off and the curtains drawn, after several days of drug use. He had made strides
in a two-year effort to reconnect with his daughter Kira Kerkorian, now a grown
woman studying public affairs at UCLA, but substance abuse had again gotten the
best of him, and he had begun blowing off dinners. Eventually she stopped
taking his calls.
Bing asked for help with killing himself, but the friend managed
to talk him down, and instead they went down the street for a steak dinner,
which Bing devoured. “He looks at me and he goes, ‘I guess it’s a good thing
I’m alive. Maybe I shouldn’t kill myself,’ ” the friend says. Shortly thereafter, Bing agreed to enter
rehab.
FADE TO
BLACK
A month before Bing died, Carrie Mitchum paid him a visit and
found his 27th floor palace mostly empty. They sat across from each other
eating macaroni, and Bing asked her if she believed in God. “You know what? It
doesn’t matter,” she recalls him saying. “You can believe in God or not and the
result is the same. It’s irrelevant.”
“I felt like he needed answers I didn’t have,” Mitchum says.
Bing was speaking to a therapist twice a day, and he had been sober for several
months. A dispute with his father over a trust for Bing’s children had left him
bruised, but it had also led to his reconnecting with Hurley and their son
Damian, a budding model.
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Contrary to press reports, Bing did not leave a suicide note.
The morgue contacted Kira to make funeral arrangements, but in the end it was
Peter Bing who claimed the remains of his son. Per his wishes, Steve was laid
to rest in Santa Monica in a green cemetery with a petrified wood headstone.
In September a judge in L.A. ruled that Kira would administer
what little remained of his monumental birthright. Only about $300,000 is left
in liquid assets, which was meant to be bequeathed to the Clinton Foundation,
and that’s before debts are settled. Relative to the extraordinary estate he
inherited in his youth, Bing was broke.
“There were two of him,” says a former lover. “He could be
charming, generous, kind, the life of the party, but at the end of the day he
went home alone. He was a very lonely guy.”
In the end, the most gripping production Steve Bing ever
financed was his own life. Perhaps it was the one script that had gone
according to plan, an L.A. story filled with the film noir themes he loved: the
corrosive toll of wealth, the strange alliance between celebrity and decadence,
the solitude that settles upon a man stripped of power and riches.
“He realized he purchased everything. Every person, every
opportunity, every glorious moment,” Chrisant says. “The tragedy is he needn’t
have.”
This story appears in the
November 2020 issue of Town
& Country.
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