Nicolas Cage, Compulsive Spender

Your email has been sent.

Thanks for recommending The Daily Beast!

X Close

So was Cage’s pet collection, which in addition to a handful of purebred dogs, included rare birds and a host of lizards, snakes, and other creepy crawlies. “Basically, a zoo,” is how a person who’s known Cage for many years describes it. He also had two albino King Cobras, this person says, as well as “an antidote serum on the wall, so that if you got bit by a snake you could save yourself.”

There also was a dinosaur skull that Cage purchased in 2007 for $276,000 in a heated auction with Leonardo DiCaprio.

It was a fabulous life while it lasted, but it helps explain why so many people in Hollywood aren’t entirely convinced his ex-money manager is solely to blame for the actor’s financial troubles. Says one person who has known Cage for many years: “I remember a bunch of us saying, ‘How many more magic tricks can Sam do to keep Nic afloat?’ It was a house of cards… I think Nic thought he was invincible.”

Certainly, Nic Cage was a man without an ordinary idea of living on a budget. Born in Long Beach, California, in 1964, he is the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola. (Interestingly, Coppola also experienced serious money problems over the years related to alleged overspending.) “I think Nic spent a lot of his life with his face pressed against the glass, looking at his uncle Francis,” says one person who’s worked with the star and knows him well. Cage’s father, August Coppola, died last month at the age of 75.

From the early days of his career, Cage displayed a taste for the finer things in life—which he shared with just about everyone around him. One crew member from the celeb’s 1993 film It Could Happen to You tells The Daily Beast about an episode in which this person was dispatched to caviar hotspot Petrossian in New York to get takeout for the star and a few people on the set. “It was something like $2,000 for a snack,” this person says. “He was really friendly and nice, but almost dorky.”

His largesse was even more pronounced with the women he became involved with. During his divorce proceedings from Lisa Marie Presley (Cage married her in August 2002 and filed for divorce 108 days later), it emerged that in the course of one of the couple’s fights, Presley’s $65,000-plus engagement ring was tossed over Cage’s California-based yacht, the Weston, named for his son. There are conflicting reports about who threw it overboard, but Cage nevertheless hired divers to recover it. The ring was never found.

There have also been acts of extraordinary generosity. In 2005, he gave $1 million to the Red Cross to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, Amnesty International put out an announcement that Cage was giving the organization $2 million.

From time to time, Cage also cut his price drastically to appear in smart, ambitious films such as Adaptation and Matchstick Men. But working for less money didn’t prompt him to live cautiously. In 2005’s The Weather Man, made for an overall budget of about $22 million, Cage played a dowdy meteorologist, yet the actor still brought his personal chef with him to the set in Chicago and got himself a brand new Lamborghini that spent most of the film shoot sitting unused at the Peninsula Hotel. “He barely drove it,” says someone who was there. Soon after, the person says, the star got rid of the car and bought something new.

Another time, two sources report, Cage spent over six figures on a Bentley, then sent it to be fitted with custom cabinetry in the back. A TV, stereo, and bar were all put in. The renovation costs totaled more than $50,000, but when it was done, the man for whom the car was spruced up couldn’t even fit inside it. “It was a bastard,” says a person who worked with Cage at the time. “You couldn’t sit in the back unless you’re 5’8. He’s six-feet. Ultimately, he got rid of it.”

View as Single Page