Before the resurgence of trendy socialism, before Occupy Wall Street, there was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, a television show that reveled in the opulent trappings of the 1 percent. The syndicated show aired from 1984 to 1995, and its sizable cultural impact was due in large part to the exuberance and credulity of its iconic host, Robin Leach. With his bellowing, cockney-ish voice and voyeuristic enthusiasm, the British-born Leach, who died August 24 at age 76, gave a nation of anxious strivers an uncomplicated celebration of wealth and privilege.
Leach, who had spent some time as a reporter for the Daily Mail and the New York Daily News before finding fame on television, never suffered from the pretension of being a serious journalist. He happily referred to himself as a “celebrity interviewer” and seemed both awed and grateful in the presence of stars such as Liberace (whom he called “Lee”) and Raquel Welch.
Leach wasn’t merely a talking head; he was the consummate host, tirelessly channeling his viewers’ curiosity about how the other half lives during his weekly tours of celebrity homes. With the workmanlike voice-over skills of David Greenspan to assist him, Leach marveled over even the gaudiest homes of the wealthy and famous, conducting softball interviews in which he fueled their conceit (and that of his viewers) that money could buy happiness. He could veer from incredulity to familiarity in a single take, and viewers felt (correctly, as it turned out) that he didn’t just profile these celebrities. He partied with them.
Most of his subjects were mid-list celebrities such as Donna Mills, Lynda Carter, and Conway Twitty, but he also produced themed segments on what passed for the exotic in the middle America of the 1980s, such as exiled royalty and Bavarian castles. He occasionally landed a big fish, and when he did, no expense (or cliché) was spared in administering his signature form of adulation.
A February 1985 profile of Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi was given the “very special episode” treatment, complete with descriptions of Khashoggi’s private jet (“a glamour palace in the sky!”), his yacht, and his many homes. Leach lavished special attention on Khashoggi’s Kenyan “hunting lodge,” admiring an entry hall flanked by large ivory elephant tusks as well as the tycoon’s “huge, fluffy white boudoir,” with its mirrored ceiling over the bed and large bathtub where AK (as Leach called him) “loves to languish in the essential oils” crafted for him by his daughter. Outside was a solid marble disco floor (“The only one in existence!”) and nearby was the sprawling manse of his neighbor, King Fahd. The slow camera pans, zooming in to linger on a solid gold animal statue here and a sable bedspread there, are nearly pornographic.
Leach excelled at the vague euphemism. Khashoggi was merely a “businessman,” the “magnificent middle man,” as Leach called him, tastefully avoiding mention of the fact that Khashoggi was an international arms dealer who was known to keep “pleasure wives” on his yacht and was called the “one of the greatest whoremongers in the world” by Vanity Fair. Leach, by contrast, found him to be a “surprisingly private family man.” That’s not to say Leach had no standards: He reportedly refused to profile wealthy dictators like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines.
As the greed-is-good 1980s gave way to the 1990s, Leach endured, doggedly admiring his subjects’ often-gaudy homes and hustling for his side projects, such as a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook and, later, a blog. His later years, like those of syndicated television, were spent in a golden haze. He traded on his own renown to appear as a contestant on the reality show I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! and spent his final years in that most American of cities, Las Vegas. He came to resemble his adopted home—a little louche, a little excessive, always striving to entertain. “He was the life of the party!” recalled Joan Collins, a friend and featured guest on Lifestyles during its heyday, in the Daily Mail after his death.
Although the “rich” part of the Lifestyles brand came first, the show’s lasting legacy—and Leach’s—was its treatment of fame. Leach was the late-20th century’s best celebrity carnival barker. But by the 21st century, celebrity had moved from entertaining sideshow to the main stage of American life, a fact best symbolized by Donald Trump, who appeared on Lifestyles (and bought Khashoggi’s mega-yacht). The deliberate naïveté cultivated by shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous begat grittier reality-television shows such as MTV’s Cribs. Leach was not pleased with the evolution of celebrity television, and he was more than happy to define the acceptable limits for vulgarity. “Now you have Kim Kardashian having her private area waxed on camera,” he told the New York Times in 2014. “Disgusting.”
Today, celebrities don’t need interlocutors like Leach; they inject themselves directly into the public’s veins through Instagram. And lifestyle shows have abandoned fantasy in favor of an almost militaristic zeal for self-improvement. Leach’s genial voyeurism has given way to a grim determination to Be Your Best Self!—which is why nearly every lifestyle show is a contest to determine who has the best wedding dress, the best makeover, or the best flipped house. For Leach, by contrast, it was about celebrating the people who had already won life’s lottery and encouraging his viewers to celebrate along with him.
Leach’s “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” would have difficulty surviving the moralizing popular culture of today (the champagne would have to be locally sourced and the caviar sustainably harvested). Today’s celebrities take pains to publicly check their privilege, and deliberately stoking class envy by boasting about your wealth will unleash a Twitter mob. Yet Leach’s bygone style of voyeurism seems more honest than today’s sanctimonious social media warriors.
It was also a lot more fun. Assessing his career in 2014 for Oprah’s OWN channel, Leach embraced his lifelong celebration of the celebrity lowbrow. People didn’t want to see famous people performing Shakespeare, he said. “They wanna see Suzanne Somers at home in her bathtub with lots of bubbles and froth!”
So they did.
