Citizen Forbes: Unplugged, Unpublished

He’s worth upward of $400 million, but most Saturday mornings he picks up his own dry cleaning and heads to the market for the out-of-town papers.

He’s listed in the Social Register--shoot, his family actually owns this telephone book of the high and mighty--but he buys his clothes straight off the rack, cotton oxford shirts from Lord & Taylor, khaki slacks from Banana Republic.

He is Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Jr., 48, and he wants to be president. But here in the graceful, old-money heart of the mostly industrial-strength Garden State, he goes by Steve.

Most of his neighbors think he’s a regular guy--except for the ones who consider him to be the Bigfoot of Bedminster, a powerful man who threw his wealth around to interfere in local matters.

Forbes has focused his campaign on policy pitches and attack ads, a constant chorus of “17% flat tax,” of “growth, hope and opportunity,” of “changing the culture of Washington.” The personal side has yet to emerge in the same way. Unlike many of his rivals, who make their biographies a centerpiece of their campaigns, Forbes zealously guards his privacy, especially his finances--brushing aside requests to release his tax returns as a “diversion.”

There is scant information for those who want to know more about the man’s personal values, about his family, about his life an hour southwest from the Manhattan office of Forbes magazine. For the most part, so far, the generally shy and often awkward Forbes swiftly sidesteps personal questions; his campaign is loath to answer similar queries.

Privacy is easy to maintain in a place like this, where even a man of Forbes’ wealth fits in. “I see him every Saturday. He’s a nice guy,” said Ken Batten, vice president of the dry-cleaning shop. “He has a nice family. They’re very down-to-earth people. They’re not snobby at all.”

Familiar Face

Indeed, Forbes used to be able to wander the tree-lined roads of Somerset County, cloaked in a cocoon of privacy that is cherished in these parts, rarely turning a head. All that began to change on Sept. 22 when he told the world he was running for president. Now, like it or not, that anonymity has begun to fray.

Scrutiny is especially likely because Forbes has lived virtually all his life in Somerset County, now living not far from the estate where he grew up. And this cloistered life of privilege--private schools, a virtual lifetime job with the thriving family business, few brushes with big-time politics--stands in sharp contrast to the lives of rival candidates. Even now, he is probably best known as the son of the late publisher Malcolm Forbes.

But that too has begun to change. Last Sunday at the A&P;, during his normal weekend round of chores, there he was near the checkout stand autographing copies of Time and Newsweek thrust upon him by eager customers. His picture was on both of the covers.

“I saw him Sunday,” said checker Carolyn Frank. “I never knew it was him before. I know what he bought: aspirin, two kinds, one Tylenol. The other night I was telling my sister, ‘Steve Forbes comes in here all the time.’ She said, ‘He could be the next president of the United States.’ Wow.”

Previously, regulars at the A&P; would be more likely to see Forbes in the aisles of the store, clutching a tub of ice cream and a handful of candy bars--family-sized, not the skimpy kind. Apple pie is Forbes’ dessert of choice, but his sweet tooth is ferocious--a fact that goes a long way toward explaining the 38-inch waist on his low-couture slacks.

The Mansion Set

Steve joined the family’s Forbes magazine--started by his grandfather in 1917 and expanded by his promotion-minded dad--after graduating from Princeton University in 1970 and serving a stint in the New Jersey National Guard, sparing him possible service in Vietnam. By 1976 he was an associate editor. He became deputy editor in chief in 1982 and took over the company after his father’s death in 1990.

In 1985, President Reagan named him chairman of the Board of International Broadcasting, which oversees Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. A federal audit contends that, during Forbes’ tenure, the agency paid excessive salaries and benefits and spent $250,000 to renovate one official’s living quarters.

Opponent Bob Dole took up the charge last week in an attack ad in Iowa. Said Forbes spokeswoman Gretchen Morgensen: “It’s just another piece of proof that Dole is getting more and more desperate.”

If any place exists on Earth where Steve Forbes can be a regular guy, it is in the hill country of northern Somerset County, where his money is not the oldest, his estate not the largest and--until recently--his blend-into-the-crowd mug far from the most famous.

John Z. DeLorean owns nearby Lamington House and is a regular sight--along with Forbes and his wife, Sabina Forbes--at Kings supermarket. Former Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady and his family own 2,500 acres in the region. The king of Morocco has a home here; so does the governor of New Jersey. There’s a sprinkling of former senators, some actresses and adjunct Vanderbilts. Before he was convicted of rape, boxer Mike Tyson lived in a gray stone Gothic Revival mansion called Kenilworth with then-wife Robin Givens.

This is a place where the houses have names, where the horses are bundled up against the cold better than most people, where former Bedminster Mayor Joseph H. Metelski (his house is named Shalebrook) said most residents give the rich and famous “all the space that anyone deserves.” Translation: Privacy is a commodity here, lovingly tended and closely guarded.

“Everybody [who] comes here has some money,” said Greg Roberts, customer service supervisor at the Bernardsville branch of Friendly’s restaurant.

Friendly’s is where Forbes convenes occasional power breakfasts, meeting sober-suited associates before 8 a.m., sitting in a plastic corner booth in a section of the restaurant usually closed to customers at that hour. “I’m not gonna say, ‘No, you can’t sit there,’ ” said Heather Sullivan, waitress and college student.

Penny Pincher

Breakfast is generally the Big Two-Do special: Two eggs, two strips of bacon or sausage, two slices of French toast, regular toast or waffles for $2.22. Sullivan would not divulge whether Forbes is a bacon man or how he eats his eggs: “I don’t think it matters what he eats . . . when there’s important issues at stake.” But she did, when pressed, describe his tipping habits. “Normal, 15%, which is good, I’ll give him that,” Sullivan said.

That he’s a regular at Friendly’s should be no surprise for a man who brags about being a skinflint in keeping with his Scottish heritage. He ends nearly every luncheon campaign speech with some version of the goodbye he gave Monday at the Nashua Rotary Club in New Hampshire: “Let me say again, thank you very much for your kindness . . . and also thank you too for a free lunch.”

He is so frugal, friends said, that he will not pop for a second phone line at Southdown, his 500-acre estate, which is valued at $26 million. As a result, his antiquated fax machine often ties up the phone for long stretches.

Longtime friend and advisor Jude Wanniski, who planted the seed for Forbes’ presidential run, said his best conversations with Sabina Forbes have come when he has called her up to turn on the fax. “She’d want to have conversation,” he said. “Steve was out flogging Forbes [magazine], she had a 7-year-old girl at home and here’s an adult calling in. She’d tell me about her pheasant farm or when she’d been birthing calves.”

Sabina Forbes, 48, and the couple’s five daughters, ranging in age from 8 to 22, are among the most abiding mysteries of Forbes’ run for president. They were with Forbes at the National Press Club in Washington when he announced that he was running for office. Since then, Sabina has been a virtual stranger to the campaign trail, making only one appearance at a New York fund-raiser in December.

“I think she’ll do very well as first lady,” Forbes insisted Wednesday night in a CNN interview. “I think she’ll be in the tradition of great first ladies such as Barbara Bush. . . . She’s very proud and very supportive, and she came to that conclusion knowing what we were going to go in for.”

Some of his daughters help out intermittently on the campaign, and he always points to them when he is asked about his stand on abortion. He would like, he said, to create an environment where abortions wither away--in an interview with The Times on Friday, he said for the first time that, ultimately, he would support making the procedure illegal except in cases of rape, incest and when necessary to save a mother’s life. Meanwhile, he would ban third-trimester abortions and oppose public funding. “And being the father of five daughters,” he said, “I would support parental notification in the case of minors.”

Unsung Family

Forbes’ Bedminster neighbors see more of his family in town than they see him. Elizabeth, 8, plays Little League baseball, and Sabina is a regular sight in her beat-up blue station wagon, which seems to list to one side and bears a “Forbes for President” bumper sticker.

“They’re as close to normal as they could be, given as much money as they have,” said Bill Leavens, who has butted heads with Forbes over local political issues.

But Forbes’ normal may not be your normal. Consider:

Your parents probably made you dress up to go to church. Forbes’ splashy father made Steve and his siblings wear kilts to Sunday worship. You took music lessons as a child. Steve Forbes learned the bagpipe. You played with dolls. Forbes staged mock elections with his stuffed animals.

You had a job in college. At Princeton in tumultuous 1968, Forbes started a national magazine for students titled Business Today, which is still in operation. Among the magazine’s first editorials was one that congratulated the administration of Columbia University for standing up to student demonstrators: “We found it a refreshing sight to see the cops, their clubs a-swingin’, disrupt a band of willful ruffians disrupting an entire university.”

You bought your house with a 30-year mortgage. According to disclosure forms filed with the Federal Election Commission, he has four such loans, two for somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million and two for more than $1 million.

Forbes is running for the Oval Office as the new guy on the national political scene. But here in New Jersey’s horse-and-hunt country, where he grew up on an estate called Timberfield, he is no novice to the rough-and-tumble world of politics.

Forbes has worked hard to block improvements to a small, family-owned airport down the road from Southdown. In a six-year battle, during which Forbes sued the township, he successfully blocked a 600-foot expansion to Somerset Airport’s runway, later buying up the property where a new runway area would have extended.

Through his attorneys, who have been present at nearly all town meetings regarding the airport, he has successfully lobbied against any improvements at the 50-year-old facility, which was in place before he moved in. “Wealthy Put Squeeze on a Family Business,” read a Page One headline in the local Courier-News.

“He’s the one spouting less government, a more business-conducive environment, family values,” said Dan Walker, who runs Somerset Airport with his 90-year-old father, George. “Yet he’s the one . . . using his wealth and influence with local government to stymie a family business that’s been here 50 years.”

Then-Mayor Cheryl Seiferheld had voted in favor of airport improvements. When she and another member of the Bedminster Township Committee were up for reelection, Forbes, his wife, his brother Christopher and several colleagues donated heavily to her competition. Together they gave nearly $5,000--small potatoes in general but nearly 40% of the money collected by her rivals.

“If you weren’t going to vote the way Steve wanted you to vote, he was going to do what he could to get you out,” Seiferheld said. “There’s no question in my mind that Steve bought and paid for that election. To me, it speaks of a contempt for the system.”

Morgensen disputed the view of events described by the candidate’s critics. His view against airport improvements “was the community’s view,” she said. “They were also working to stop this--not simply Steve.”

As the presidential campaign shifts into high gear, Forbes’ life in Bedminster and on the campaign trail has changed drastically. One subtle sign is the family Christmas card. Through most of the early 1990s, the annual mailing bore color photos of the five Forbes girls: 1992, jaunty in flowered summer dresses, standing around a classic blue Corvette; 1994, in jeans, seated on the grass in front of Southdown’s green barn.

And what about last year, after Publisher Forbes became Candidate Forbes? There’s Steve in a sober gray suit and Sabina in a plaid coat dress posed behind their dressed-up daughters in a formal room with gilt-framed paintings and brocade furniture. The 1995 model could have been mailed from the White House.

His campaign entourage has changed as well. Only six weeks ago, a handful of reporters at best attended his events. Last week, in Nashua, N.H., television cameras and prospective voters vied for space in the home of Barbara Pressley, host of a reception for the candidate. Boom mikes threatened the chandeliers, cameras got tangled in the wall sconces, and the bay windows fogged up.

When the post-speech Q&A; started, Pressley called from room to room, hoping not to miss anyone. “Is there anyone in the kitchen out there who has a question? How about the dining room? There’s a question in the dining room.” A buoyant Forbes, it seems, was somewhere in the parlor.

This day in New Hampshire, his favorite question didn’t come from a voter but from the reporters who were now dogging him: Do you think Bob Dole is still a viable candidate for president?

With his trademark quirky grin, he replied: “Sen. Dole must never be underestimated. Just remember what people were saying about me two or three weeks ago.”