Determining the deformed configuration and the induced stress of a suspended slender element is a felt problem in many engineering applications. To recall just a few, suspended high voltage cables, suspension bridge cables, the lifting and lowering of onshore pipelines or the laying (J or S layout) of offshore subsea pipes. All these cases have in common a high length if compared to their thickness and can be modelled as very slender beams. The high flexibility implies solving a non-linear problem, inasmuch involves the phenomenon of geometric nonlinearity in which the stiffness of the structure in the deformed configuration is unknown due to the large displacements. Many authors have worked on this issue; a widely used procedure consists of a two-field model that alternates the use traits of linear beams (small displacements Eulero-Bernoulli theory) and cables (large displacements catenary solution) to model the region with high and small curvature rates respectively. To avoid this intricacy, we propose a new procedure to directly address the non-linear large displacements problem of slender beams in this paper. The idea comes from the observation that the catenary, the simplest problem involving large displacements, is fully governed by only one variable, the stress at the vertex. This concept it is here extended to the beam case in which bending strain is considered dominant. The method turns out to be very simple and fast and can manage the cases of cable-lines or pipelines loaded by multi-hooking points. The solution algorithm is presented with some numerical examples which concern the end-lifting of pipes initially in contact with the soil and the fully suspended pipes by some loading points.