Rich Man, Pour Man
Celebrating a Deathday™: Natty, martini-swilling yuckster Arthur Bach died on this day March 27, 2002. The fortunate son of New York multi-millionaire Stanford Bach, Arthur led a charmed life, never growing out of the bubbly baths he so loved as a boy, the same baths drawn in adult years by personal valet John Gielgud — who, it should be noted, never washed Arthur’s “dick” for him despite offering to do so in direct violation of the Hollywood ratings board. The top-hatted Arthur was the original lovable lush, pounding away on his penthouse piano and nursing mimosas until proper cocktail hour — noonish — and then galavanting about Manhattan in the back of his chauffeured limousine, yelling out the window, sword in hand, slurring insults at older pedestrians with great comic effect, back in a time when getting plastered in public didn’t earn you scorn on the Twitternet® . Arthur was in line to inherit his father’s $750 million fortune, but with the stipulation that he marry upper-crusty attorney Ann Kelsey of L.A. Law firm McKenzie, Brackman. Alas, the besotted Arthur set his bleary eyes on shop-lifting Queens waitress and former Cabaret singer Linda “Liza” Marolla, which put a wrench in the marriage plans to Kelsey, who went back to L.A. to marry attorney Stuart Markowtiz. Gielgud kicked the bucket, Arthur plunged into a depression and onto a bender that Liza was certain she could pull him out of him because that’s what the love of a codependent can do for a chemically-imbalanced partner. Lo and bloody behold, Arthur’s Granny came through with the inheritance money after all, and the good times commenced to re-rolling. Arthur and Liza married and adopted a child after Liza assured the woman at the adoption agency that everything would be fine with Arthur’s drinking, it wasn’t a progressive illness, he just had a little stagger in his swagger. No sooner did they sign the bloody adoption papers that Liza discovered she was pregnant, all of which sounds like something right out of one of those infernal Hollywood rom-coms starring Richard Dreyfus and Neil Simon’s wife or Matthew McConaughey and Goldie Hawn’s daughter. Anyway, today we remember the party hearty boy Arthur Bach. He got lost between the moon and New York City and the best that he could do was fall in love. Happy Anni-hearse-ary™, Chumley.
