Lucius Beebe

Lucius Morris Beebe was born into a wealthy old Bostonian-area family on December 9, 1902, Wakefield, Massachusetts. By a young age he'd already developed a pronounced distaste for casual clothes, bad manners, foreign places, most foreigners and anything that was expected to occur before noon. Educated at Yale and Harvard, he gained a reputation early on as an unabashed homosexual, defying almost every prevailing societal convention as to his mannerisms (flamboyant), opinions (very flamboyant) and dress (yet even more flamboyant). At Yale, a professor was heard to complain about the 'infestation' of women on campus and spying Beebe off in the distance wearing exaggerated white pantaloon-like knickers, quipped, "and here comes two of them right now." What he possessed however was a keen wit and an unvarying loyalty toward his friends. His social circle included Noël Coward, writer/snob Louis Bromfield, dancer Clifton Webb, five and dime heir Woolworth Donahue, and perhaps most significantly (at least as far as women were concerned), scandalized Broadway star Libby Holman (he would remain her most loyal supporter in the press through her murder charge debacle- which was dropped - and lurid gossip of her lesbian lifestyle, which dogged her for decades). Beebe landed a reporting job on the Herald Tribune and earned the ire of his editor by covering hard news events in audacious formal wear. Either by design or shove, he quickly moved from hard news reporting into the society pages where he happily covered New York society, which flourished after the repeal of Prohibition. His column competed in good stead with the likes of Ed Sullivan and, to a certain extent, Walter Winchell--- but, unlike them, had the advantage of being a ranking member of the clique he reported on, without having to pay for gossip. Within this group however, his reporting was considered wildly unreliable; Tallulah Bankhead remarked, "he must have a great respect for the truth since he very rarely uses it." While the vast majority of America was mired in the miserable depths of the Great Depression, Beebe publicly stated he'd do his part by limiting his food and drink allowance to $100 per day. He also claimed to brush his teeth in Chablis. Still, by some strange vicarious quirk of the American psyche, Depression-era readers were fascinated by the rich, even while they nearly starved. His newspaper column, "This New York" wherein he chronicled New York's Cafe Society- a term he created, remained popular for years (in 1939 he was an advisor to the film Cafe Society in which he appeared). Beebe was also an avid railway enthusiast, and in later life traveled around the country in an opulent private railway car - decorated in Venetian Renaissance style. He and his partner Charles Clegg traveled extensively, wrote books, and became noted photographers (they met at a Washington D.C. party - Beebe was wearing the Hope Diamond as a gag). Eventually tiring of New York, Beebe and Clegg relocated to, of all places, Nevada, to successfully resurrect the newspaper that once employed Mark Twain. After selling that the couple retired to San Francisco. Beebe died of heart attack in February, 1966. Charles Clegg committed suicide at precisely the same age Beebe died in 1979.