Greed is good, as Michael Douglas’s amoral Wall Street character, Gordon Gekko, proclaimed in Oliver Stone’s era-defining 1987 film. Greed was very, very good to Robin Leach, who, as host of the phenomenally successful syndicated series, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, took greed and turned it up to 11.
Nothing succeeds like excess. The 1980s, dubbed “the Decade of Greed,” was defined in large part by voluptuous images of conspicuous consumption and the nefarious and heedless wheelings and dealings of the 1 percent as played out on TV series such as Dallas and Dynasty. But Lifestyles left the fictional Ewings and Carringtons in the dust. In a 2016 interview, Leach told me with pride that Joan Collins, who portrayed Alexis Carrington on Dynasty, told him that the cast would gather to watch Lifestyles and pilfer lines of dialogue from the people Leach profiled for their show.
“We documented bigger wealth than was ever dreamed up for the Carringtons,” he said. “When you saw the Carringtons with 20 Rolls-Royces, that was a typical scene from Lifestyles.”
Leach died August 24 at the age of 76. He had been hospitalized since last November after suffering a stroke in Cabo San Lucas, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He had a second stroke on the Monday before he died.
Lifestyles premiered in 1984. Each week, the British-born Leach took viewers into the crazy-rich homes and lives of celebrity (and actual) royalty, including Malcolm Forbes, Elizabeth Taylor, and Princess Diana. His signature catchphrase, “Champagne wishes and caviar dreams” and his hyper-exuberant, decibel-busting line-readings made him the voice of an era and ripe for parody, most notably by Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live (“I’m Robin Leach; I’m yelling and I don’t know why!”) Rather than take offense, he took the “sincerest form of flattery” mind-set and considered it as an indication that he and the show earned its place in the glittery, glamorous zeitgeist.
“The show was absolutely lambasted by critics,” he said. “They wrote that television had reached an all-time low. But I looked at the ratings every Monday morning, and I was rubbing my hands with glee. We were a hit.”
As big a draw as “the privileged tours of the fantasy palaces [the stars of show business and big business] call home,” was Leach himself, with his outsized commentary. “It was all deliberate,” Leach stated. “The loud voice, the alliterations, the rapid pace of my talking. . . . I was the kid in short pants from England whose mouth opened in awe and wonderment at the way people spent their money, and I had to project that I was, and I still am, amazed at what I see.”
The phrase that paid a million times over was uncorked one drunken midnight weary of trying to come up with a catchphrase with writer Jeff Samuels that would encapsulate the show and that people would talk about at the water cooler. “For the life of us we could not come up with one that was short, powerful, and potent,” Leach recalled. “We ran out of British beer and I opened up a bottle of bubbly. Literally as the cork flew off, Jeff and I looked at each other and said, ‘It’s staring us right in the face.’ Being a connoisseur of drinking large quantities of champagne over the years, the best thing to eat with it is caviar.” Thus was born “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”
More than a decade before Survivor and all the rest, Leach anticipated the ascendency of reality television and further fueled Americans’ fascination with wealth and fabulousness. Yes, that’s 80s-era Donald Trump featured in the show’s opening in a clip of him with Michael Jackson.
In 2000, MTV Cribs took Leach’s concept from “caviar dreams” to bodacious bling; The Simple Life sent rich kids Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie to live among the hoi polloi; Keeping Up with the Kardashians launched in 2007 and we’re still living in its luxe shadow. The No. 1 movie in America? Crazy Rich Asians. It doesn’t take a president with a fixation on gold to know that Leach was on to something.
But for Leach, the show also inspired people for the better. Scores of parents, he said, thanked him for changing their children’s lives. “[They told me] kids who were rebellious in the 80s watched Lifestyles, and they would say, ‘I want to be like that.’ Suddenly they knuckled down and did their homework and went off to college. Businessmen have told me it changed their lives for the better.”
In 2016, Leach joined the Las Vegas Review-Journal as a chronicler of Las Vegas society and attractions. To the end, people recognizing him on the street would call out his catchphrase to him. “I’m grateful,” he joked with me, “but sick to death of it.”
