Super-rich philanthropist and producer labelled ‘Bing Laden’ over Hurley love child

Libertine, philanthropist, film producer and activist, the contrasting facets of Steve Bing’s complex personality were connected by the umbilical cord of unimaginable wealth, though it seemed to bring him as much trouble as it did pleasure.

The heir to a property fortune of US$600 million, which he inherited when he turned

18, Bing was a Hollywood playboy and Las Vegas high-roller in his youth who showered

$100 bills on strippers and enjoyed nights out at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion. His dates, who included Liz Hurley, Sharon Stone, Uma Thurman, Farrah Fawcett and Naomi Campbell, were picked up in his private jet and courted with sapphires and diamonds. When he was in his twenties he checked in for a night at the exclusive Hotel

Bel-Air in Los Angeles and ended up staying nine years. When he finally left, the bill ran into many millions of dollars after room service and other extras had been added.

As a producer he was the man behind the Sylvester Stallone film Get Carter (2000), Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the Rolling Stones, Shine a Light (2008), and

The Polar Express (2004), which starred Tom Hanks and in which he invested $80m of his own money.

With more cash than he knew what to do with, he took to giving it away to liberal causes. He started modestly enough with a

$3.5m contribution to an anti-smoking initiative. By 2002 he had gifted $10m to the Natural Resources Defence Council. It was followed by $49m to an alternative fuels initiative and by 2012 he had signed up to the Giving Pledge, started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, under which multimillionaires commit to donating most of their wealth to charity during their lifetimes.

Although he preferred to remain beneath the radar as an enigmatic Jay Gatsby figure, such conspicuous expenditure, the partying lifestyle and the celebrity relationships regularly propelled him into the headlines.

His philanthropic activities generated favourable publicity and he was hailed as a national hero when he lent his Boeing 737 to Bill Clinton in 2009 to bring home two American journalists from North Korea where they were imprisoned on spying charges. Clinton called him a man with ‘‘a big heart . . . willing to do anything he could for the people and causes he believed in".

The coverage of his personal life was less favourable and he was labelled ‘‘Bing Laden’’ by the tabloids in 2002 when he became embroiled in a paternity suit with Hurley. The couple began an 18-month affair in 2000. When she told him she was pregnant he is said to have told her to have an abortion and questioned whether he was the father. ‘‘Ms

Hurley and I were not in an exclusive relationship when she became pregnant. It is her choice to be a single mother.’’

After Hurley’s son, Damian, was born in

2002, a court ordered a DNA test and it was confirmed Bing was the father. He announced he was paying £100,000 a year into a trust for his son that could be accessed when he turned

18. Hurley rejected his gesture and told him his money was ‘‘not wanted or welcome’’.

Bing became ensnared in a second paternity suit in 2001 when genetic testing showed him to be the father of Kira Kerkorian, the daughter of the former professional tennis player Lisa Bonder.

Gregarious and sociable, he was understood to have been depressed by the lack of human contact during the Covid-19 lockdown and jumped to his death from

his apartment in Los Angeles.

At the height of his very public feud with Hurley, he had told Vanity Fair that he wanted to settle down with kids someday ‘‘kids, that is, that I voluntarily play a part in conceiving’’. He never did and is survived only by two adult children in whose upbringing he played little or no part other than financially.

Stephen Leo Bing was born in 1965, the son of Helen, a nurse, and Peter, a doctor. The family fortune, which earns the Bing family a place in the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans, derived from his grandfather, Leo Bing, who in the 1920s had developed some of Manhattan’s most desirable apartment houses and built up a vast property portfolio.

While at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, Bing co-wrote his first screenplay with the veteran sitcom writer Arthur Silver. It was made into the 1984 Chuck Norris film

Missing in Action and spawned two sequels. He enrolled at Stanford, but after coming into his inheritance dropped out without graduating to ‘‘spend more time with his money’’, as one newspaper wag put it. He later contributed more than $20m to his alma mater.

At 6ft 4in (1.93m) he was a commanding presence, habitually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, which gave no hint of his wealth but was described by one observer as ‘‘the I’mjust-like-you uniform of the super-rich’’. Pursuing a career in movies, he directed the

1994 thriller Every Breath and co-wrote the

2003 action comedy Kangaroo Jack, though many of his projects turned out to be straightto-video turkeys.

Bing’s transformation from gossip-column fodder to Democratic Party powerbroker came after he met and befriended Clinton. A key member of the former president’s inner circle, he also enjoyed friendships with Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Elizabeth Warren, whose unsuccessful bid for the 2020 presidential nomination he funded.

Badly bruised by the ‘‘Bing Laden’’ jibes during the paternity dispute with Hurley, he retreated from the public eye. Even after his role in Clinton’s North Korean mercy mission had made him the hero of the hour, he declined requests for interviews. It meant that there was no opportunity to ask if his vast wealth had brought him happiness.

A man with ‘‘a big heart . . . willing to do anything he could for the people and causes he believed in.’’

Bill Clinton describes Steve Bing