NEW YORK -- Thousands of business and political leaders, employees and friends celebrated Thursday the colorful life of publisher Malcolm Forbes at a memorial service held to skirl of bagpipes, the blare of French horns and the roar of motorcycles.
The nearly two-hour Episcopal service at St. Bartholemew's Church drew a standing-room only crowd of 2,500 including former President Richard Nixon and actress Elizabeth Taylor into the vast Byzantine-style sanctuary on Park Avenue. Hundreds of others were held behind police barricades on the steps and sidewalk outside.
Traffic on the avenue was diverted for four blocks to accommodate the mourners' limousines. Onlookers cheered such figures as Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, former Mayor Edward Koch and Lee Iacocca with his fiancee, Darrien Earle, as they entered the church.
Some 25 leather-clad motorcyclists riding Harley-Davidsons, Forbes's favorite mount, blasted up Park Avenue just as the memorial service started.
The 70-year-old publisher-sportsman who died of a heart attack last Saturday was remembered as 'the happiest millionaire' in remarks made by his five children. They said life with father was a matter of 'him bringing us up, and we bringing him up because there was always something of the child in Pop.'
'One of Pop's favorite epigrams was 'He who dies with the most toys wins',' said son Christopher Forbes. 'I think Pop gets the blue ribbon there.'
Malcolm Forbes Jr., who inherited 51 percent of Forbes Inc., recalled that his father had a simple philosophy.
'He believed things come out for the best in the end,' Forbes Jr. said. 'Being around him was always uplifting. He loved life, and once told me, 'I'll be the saddest person at my funeral'.'
The eulogy delivered by St. Bartholomew's rector Thomas D. Bowers dealt with the resurrection and ended with the promise that 'Death does not triumph and if we follow the better angels of our nature as Malcolm did, it never will.'
More than 500 Forbes magazine employes, including the uniformed crews of the publisher's private jet and yacht, joined Forbes' divorced wife, Roberta, their four sons and a daughter, and eight granddaughters an infant-in-arms grandson, Malcolm III.
The tiny heir apparent to the Forbes empire protested loudly when his sleep was interrupted by the Forbes family bagpiper, Glenn Ellison, and a choir of eight red-jacketed French hunting horn players flown to the service from the family chateau at Balleroy in Normandy, center for Forbes ballooning activies.
Taylor, swathed in mink and adorned with pearls and diamonds, sat next to Nixon in front left pews opposite the large Forbes family. She had often been escorted by Forbes since he was amicably divorced from his wife four years ago.
Others in the celebrity section were Brown University President Vartan Gregorian, Happy Rockefeller, business tycoons Leonard Lauder, David Mahoney and Leonard Stern, fashion designers Diane von Furstenberg and Calvin Klein, novelists Fran Leibowitz and Dominick Dunne, interior designer Mario Buatta, boulevardier Jerry Zipkin, and society columnist Aileen Mehle.
Forbes body will be cremated and his ashes interred on the Fijian island of Laucala, a copra plantation he purchased in 1970.
