DAY 9 and 10 My final weekend in New York is spent trying to get stories out of some of the old carnival fiends down at Coney Island. I find them terribly reticent to talk about the glorious past. They seem totally paranoid about making conversation with someone who isn’t marked by a tattoo or…
Day 8 Joe Flynn seems to have been one of the most fertile press agents around the turn of the century. He spun the Salome vogue, the phoniest craze of all to hit the stage. It was all based around the then provocative Salome dance. When New York went Salome-mad the rest of the nation…
Day 7 Wandering up Broadway I am bedazzled by the neon marquis’ that cluster, brashly proffering the stupendous wares inside the auditoria. The press quotes are probably filtered, the longer running shows benefiting from reviews from forgotten newspaper critics marvelling at the original cast, long since moved on to another spectacle. Reading the hype I…
Day 6. A visit to the New York public library suggests that there was a great deal of consternation in the City around 1919. Adventurous stuntsers were beginning to show little respect for the law. There is evidence that Harry Reichenbach got himself into real hot water when he was exposed, attempting to pay an…
Day 5 Bedazzled by the amount of fake bling on Canal Street I make my way to Tribeca to have brunch at Bubby’s with an old Post journalist, who gives me the telephone number of a man whose father was a famous silent movie stunter.
Day 4 I had a wonderful morning chewing the fat with the legendary long-time Broadway and Hollywood publicist, Bobby Zarem immortalised by Al Pacino in the movie People I Know. Zarem was the first press agent to be called a superflack, by the Washington Post.
Day 3. Walking the streets of New York I get a real sense of place and can almost conjure up the spring of the origins of PR. How cool would it be to reconstruct some of the great exploits of Harry Reichenbach? Visiting the lobby of Hotel Belleclaire I can only imagine the chaoses of…
Exciting news, I have located the great Harry Reichenbach’s office on West Broadway was it here that he plotted the great Hotel Bellclaire Tarzan caper. The space was rented to him by a friend who ran a tailoring business. Harry very quickly made a name for himself and soon became known as the “thousand dollar…
Research for the Sons of Barnum brings me to New York to find the great publicists of the entertainment business, Broadway, in particular. Many of the early film companies had headquarters in New York and it was in such places that many of the great publicists like Harry Reichenbach fine tuned their craft in the…
More spin tales from the old colony. I am told by email from Ralph Hawkins that when the news was announced that the wacky Marx Brothers were making a movie called A Night in Casablanca, the suits at Warner Bros. spun a campaign that Casablanca might get tainted by the Marx’s low brow humour.