Robin Leach, chronicler of rich and famous, dies
Host reveled in ‘champagne wishes, caviar dreams’
Robin Leach, a Britishborn TV personality and unapologetic practitioner of “Jacuzzi journalism” whose long-running show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” ogled the world’s most conspicuous consumers consuming conspicuously, died Aug. 23 in Las Vegas. He was 76.
His family announced the death in a statement. He had two strokes in the past year.
With his thinning hair, paunch, elfin grin and tendency to speak in a quasi-Cockney tongue at carnival-barker volume, Leach was few people’s idea of an urbane sophisticate or a blow-dried television host. He called himself “the most unlikely star in the world.”
Yet 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.
“What Robin Leach presented is an incredibly seductive batch of cultural catnip,” said television and pop-culture scholar Robert Thompson. “However much you may think it’s terrible to feature people with way more than their share of the resources of the Earth, it is really fun to watch how incredibly luxuriously it is possible to live as a human being.”
“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” began its 11-year run in syndication in 1984. It was picked up by more than 200 stations, and such was its penetration that, in some markets, it was broadcast seven days a week, often multiple times a day, beaming garish displays of Croesus-like wealth into millions of living rooms.
Leach spent his early career as a tabloid scoop artist and flourished as a cheeky guest on TV entertainment programs. He joined the nascent celebrity-interview show “Entertainment Tonight” in 1981 but, after a few years, complained to producer Al Masini that the focus was too much on actors bloviating about their latest work and not enough on beautiful people enjoying their trappings.
“I became frustrated,” Leach told the Chicago Tribune. “We’d go into these houses and we’d talk to these blondheaded bimbos who’d talk about how they wanted to stretch by doing Shakespeare-inthe-park. They were nothing more than jiggle queens and I’d say to myself, ‘I don’t want to see anything more than you taking your clothes off and stepping into the bubble bath.’ From that gem of facetiousness came a TV show.”
Over 60 minutes — later reduced to 30 — Leach interviewed actors, models, industrialists and anyone else with a net worth above $50 million (the minimum cutoff). He delivered bromides in breathless tones, promising “Lifestyles” viewers “another journey with the most envied people in the world” and admission to “the homes of the world’s elite ... where winning at the top is the ultimate victory.” He repeated “glamorous,” “exclusive” and “success” loudly and ad nauseam.
“I believe in talking in 96-point,” he told the New York Times, referring to the font size of banner tabloid headlines. “... I love cliches. I love alliteration. On television, you can wrap your tongue around cliches and aggressive verbs.”
Cameras lingered worshipfully over the rococo and the vulgar. In the $10 million home of the Vegas animal-act duo Siegfried and Roy, Leach marveled at their replica of a section of the Sistine Chapel over the bar. One Australian business magnate had a dining room with a wall that opened to reveal a private bullring. Another episode featured a 120-footlong limousine modified to fit a hot tub and a helicopter landing pad.
Leach’s survivors include three sons from a marriage that ended in divorce.