Hollywood movie mogul Steve Bing asked a close friend to help him kill himself after the overdose death of his girlfriend — 10 months before he eventually leaped to his death, according to a new report.
The 55-year-old father of Elizabeth Hurley’s son was thrown into a deep depression by the fatal overdose of Allexanne Mitchum, the 27-year-old great-granddaughter of movie legend Robert Mitchum, after they had a row in June last year, friends told Town & Country magazine.
Bing started calling Mitchum’s aunt, Carrie, refusing to believe that the death — an OD of Xanax with fentanyl — was an accident, she said.
“He started asking me if I believed in the afterlife … Did I have dreams about her?” Carrie told the mag. “I think it really shook him.”
Bing — who was also battling addiction, including heavy meth use — got so depressed, he called a close friend and asked him to help him kill himself last August, an unidentified confidante told Town & Country.
The friend said he managed to talk Bing down from his suicide plans, which were not detailed, and took him out for a steak dinner — which the mogul devoured.
“He looks at me and he goes, ‘I guess it’s a good thing I’m alive. Maybe I shouldn’t kill myself,’” the friend recalled to Town & Country, saying the mogul later checked into rehab.
But the respite would not last — and in June this year, Bing killed himself by leaping from the 27th floor of a building in LA’s Century City where he had a $65,000-a-month apartment.
“There were two of him,” a former lover also told the mag. “He could be charming, generous, kind, the life of the party, but at the end of the day he went home alone. He was a very lonely guy.”
As well as drugs and depression, it later emerged that Bing — who had inherited $600 million at age 18 from his grandfather, New York real estate developer Leo Bing — had also lost most of his vast fortune by the time of his death.
Some feel that Bing — a close pal of Bill Clinton, who said he “loved [him] very much” — was ultimately destroyed by his wealth.
“He realized he purchased everything. Every person, every opportunity, every glorious moment,” close friend Josh Chrisant said. “The tragedy is he needn’t have.”