Hey Yo! How You Livin'

Ricky Powell: I think if the term “Jet Setter” was in the dictionary, your picture would be right next to it.
Robin Leach: For years I chronicled the lifestyles of the rich and famous; not just for the television show, but in everything I’ve ever done, really, going back to when I was in England and then when I came to New York and LA, and now for the last seven years in Las Vegas. I would say that Las Vegas certainly in the last three to four years has become part of what used to be only a “golden triangle” for the American Jet Set, which was New York, Miami, Los Angeles. In the last three to four years, Vegas has been added to make it a quadrangle. Las Vegas, now, is a must-stop for the Jet Set from Europe. When they fly between London and Paris and the French Riviera and Rome and then they come to the States, Vegas has become one of their top two cities of must visit.

RP: What are you doing in Vegas, specifically?
RL: A number of things. I came out here originally to be involved with all of our Food Networks chefs to the restaurants at the Venetian. I was one of the founding fathers of the Food Network after Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous—
RP: What?!—
RL: Yes!
RP: Wow. . .
RL: I was at Food Network for five years until it was sold. During that time we started talking about putting a satellite TV studio in Las Vegas so the chefs could open restaurants in Vegas and at the same time do their television shows. I had never intended to be a full-time resident in Vegas. I was very happy in my apartment on Park Avenue in New York, but I fell in love with the city and I realized it was a city just about to explode, and I’d arrived at the right time to help it explode. We’ve been involved with a number of chefs, a number of hotels, and then we started bringing TV shows to Vegas, including one that I did recently which was a show called Fame Games on VH1. It was a multi-part twelve-week series. And we are now in the throes of wiring with fiber optic all the hotels on the strip so by the spring our studios will be able to just roll on wheels, plug into any hotel in Vegas, and we can get the satellite out of the resort to anywhere in the world in any format.

RP: That’s what’s up. Smart move, I like that—portable studio.
RL: Just plug it into the wires and then we just roll the tires off. Then we are going to launch an old fashioned variety talk show from any location we want to do it on the Strip.

RP: I like it, I like it. We need to bring back the good old variety show.
RL: Yeah, and if you could do it, the only place in the world you could do it would be in Vegas. Ellen DeGeneres did it recently as part of the Comedy Festival. It was throwback to Ed Sullivan. You can’t reinvent the wheel all the time, you can only update the wheel.

RP: Uh huh, well said. Yes, indeed. I myself have had a talk show, but on Public Access TV in Manhattan. Now I’m going to start doing it on YouTube.
RL: Very good.
RP: That seems to be the Public Access for the world.
RL: The Internet is very, very powerful and in some terms more powerful than television. I’m trying to figure out how you marry the two because the two should be married. You can’t interact with the TV set. If they take the TV programs on the Internet where you can interact with them, then you have the best of both worlds. That way you can then make money out of both with commercial advertising.

RP: Let me ask you this, if I may.
RL: You can ask me anything you want.
RP: I’m a freelance artist, right? I usually don’t sell any work when I have an opening, and then I ask the gallery owner what is it gonna take to sell some prints, and he told me it’s all about circles, as in circles of people. You seem to have come up in an interesting circle of people yourself.
RL: I don’t know if that’s really true. I’m still the kid from London from the wrong side of the tracks. I’m still scrappy. I don’t regard myself as having won anything yet. A lot of people would tell you that somebody who had a successful TV show, somebody who’s done this, that and the other, normally you would just stop and sit back and retire. But I think if you retire, you die. Therefore, I still wake up every morning thinking I’m 21 years of age standing in America without a penny in my pocket and I’ve got to go to work again. I think work keeps you young, keeps you healthy and it’s exciting. I don’t know that there are any circles that I’ve ever had and moved in, but I’m not rich, I’m not famous—maybe a little infamous—but I’m still scrapping to make an extra dollar here.

RP: I appreciate your foremost honesty. I agree with you. You have to keep reinventing yourself.
RL: Well, in this day and age of television, longevity is very short. A TV star certainly explodes out of one TV show. Like Grey’s Anatomy is the hot show this year. But how many of those cast members do you really know? And how many of those cast members ever really get seen again?
RP: Yeah, I hear you, I hear you.
RL: You have to be a businessman as well as an “actor” and entertainer, or in my case, a writer, and keep punching away with a different and a new idea every day of the week until one of them gets bought. Nothing ever comes to you in television unless you’re a superstar or a sex symbol. You were fantastic in Baywatch, now I need you to headline a magic show in Vegas. That’s the culture we live in where girls on television are far more favored than somewhat aging men with receding hairlines and protruding stomachs. I don’t resent any of it, I just think that’s another challenge one must take on.

RP: When you see the programming on television today and the “celebrities” of today, how do you feel? Do you think the bar has been lowered?
RL: Let me try and give you a double-edged answer. What happened is when cable television came on the scene, it’s success depleted the revenue of regular television. And in the old days three networks and two local stations cut up the pie between the five of them. Cable came along, lots more independent stations came along and now we have a hundred stations that cut up the pie. Each of those stations are trying to make television programs that are a very expensive undertaking. And so what happened was TV shows became cheaper to make—they had to. So you got Reality Television where it was easier to not have a cast of 12 but it was easier to have an unpaid house of 24 people and just let the cameras roll without scripts, without anything. So the bar got lowered. As a result, when those people could get ratings, what did you need stars for? Or as many stars? So the old days of television, when an actor or actress became a hot commodity, was sort of pushed down as we went into this cheaper and cheaper form of making television with the result that the “star system” suffered. And so it’s only in the movie industry that you really have the same stardom of yesteryear that we had with people like Clark Gable or Cary Grant. We have a handful of people who really will be bankrolled by the money men of Wall Street or Hollywood so that they don’t lose money by putting a new actor on top of the marquee on top of the
new movie.
RP: Oh, brother.
RL: It takes a long time for an actor or actress to become a bankable star. And that’s why we see so few names making so many movies.

RP: I see, excellent point. Speaking of the old, glamorous stars, my friend runs Gina Lollobrigida’s estate for her. He looks out for her. He got a signed postcard for me from her. I did a little research on her. I was amazed that her photography and her sculpture work came before the movie career, but she’s doing it all. My question is, did you ever cross paths with Gina Lollobrigida, and if so, what were your sentiments?
RL: I haven’t crossed paths with her in a long, long time. But when I lived in New York up until 2000, I would often run into her at parties or dinners or social gatherings. I always liked Gina, but I must confess I always liked Sofia Loren a little more. But what you have to admire about Gina Lollobrigida, and you talk about the photography and the sculpture, is that there was a woman who knew that at such a point her career as a glamorous actress would come to an end. If you don’t have another craft like sculpting or photography, your days become very miserable. Gina, even after she’d become a little aged in terms of what the movies wanted from her, had a very formidable career as an artist.

RP: Cool, cool. Did you come up with the idea for the show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?
RL: Yes.

RP: Did you ever catch that show on MTV that they called MTV Cribs?
RL: Yes, an absolute copy and a rip off of what we did. They even did it with a fake English accent. I’ve always said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But I’ve always said if you are the original with an original idea, then people, however many times it gets copied, you still remain number one. So like you said, everybody knows Lifestyles and everybody knows Cribs, but everybody knows where Cribs came from.
RP: Of course. I was kind of baiting you! I thought your stomach might turn hearing the name of that show.
RL: Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was the first form of Tabloid Television. I was involved with the launch of Entertainment Tonight two years earlier than we started Lifestyles. When you look back to the very early criticism of Lifestyles, people said how rude it was to take a camera into people’s houses, how disgusting it was that Leach asked questions about their money, et cetera. And then it gave birth to everything we now know as tabloid TV. So you know, we were before Geraldo opened Al Capone’s chest. We were doing all that stuff before all those other programs began.

RP: Were you ever approached to do the conventional talk show format?
RL: The new show that we do—
RP: Is that more like standard talk show, Johnny Carson style?
RL: No, it’s ensemble/variety. Here in Vegas, we have the greatest acts in the world and they change every week.

RP: Thank you for your time and continued success, sir.
RL: Thank you for your interest.

RP: Alright, chill.