Robin Leach

A few thoughts on the passing of Robin Leach, the Herald of Galactus for the nascent American Plutocracy.

Adam Bernstein writes in the Washington Post that "as a veteran gossip writer and son of a London vacuum company manager, he understood better than most the success-obsessed middle class and, in his exclamatory catchphrase, their "champagne wishes and caviar dreams!" He offered voyeuristic access to the decadent playgrounds of the 1 percent, from Hollywood to the Riviera, and he packaged it as a veneration of free-market, up-by-your-bootstraps capitalism."

When they write the real history of the 80's, I hope and expect that Robin Leach and Denise Austin - cable's twin avatars of Envy and Lust - will get their due. 

Because fitness

I do have one story.

In the late 90s I was in a bar in New York with some Wall Street guys.  Not bankers or portfolio managers, but handlers - the guys who take the investment talent around to see the clients.  Smart but not smart enough to be A list, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-paid, and halfway to schizoid crisis from having to be nice to assholes all the time.  They partied with commitment.

We had gotten a drink or two in, and I was checking my watch and looking for an escape route - because by that time I knew where this sort of thing led - when Robin Leach entered with an attractive young woman on each arm.

To my left, someone at our table immediately and loudly engaged a very good Robin Leach impression:  "It's famous reporter ROBIN LEACH out on the town in Manhattan with TWO FABULOUS HOOKERS."

Leach, who I'm sure had plenty of practice at this, pirouetted like a principal at the New York City Ballet, and went in search of a friendlier venue.

Here Leach explains to Oprah that, although he has a taste for caviar, in the end a smile in your heart is more important: