Since Monday’s post on balding movie stars, I have received an email from Spencer Torvil, who has alerted me to a website – the bald movie stars forum. This website shows you how to read early indications of impending baldness by close observation of receding hairlines and scalp texture. Apparently the website was set up to dispel the myths about baldness and temper embarrassment for the afflicted. The publicist for the site actually called me to say that in this day and age, balding movie stars should act as role models for the young in our society who are prematurely…

One of the greatest secrets of Hollywood was which actors and actresses wore wigs. Many Hollywood publicists held this information close to their chests, only to use the information later to get higher fees. But George Evans, Sinatra’s publicist would never even allude to such a thing for fear of ending up in the river. Going bald in Hollywood during the studio system was a sure way of losing your career, with the exception, of course, of Telly Savalas and Yul Brinner. But one budding young studio publicist called Stan Jones decided to endorse a men’s grooming product via his…

While researching radio stunts recently, I was reminded of the famous marriage organised by BRMB in Birmingham where the station married off two complete strangers who were listeners of the show. Another good one was the dry ice stunt, where participants in an endurance test were encouraged to sit on dry ice for hours on end, resulting in a number of them getting frost bite. This affair culminated in a protracted legal dispute. However, nothing seems as ridiculous as the Yoghurt promotion fiasco, instigated by Nassau Radio in NY State. A young female bookkeeper claimed she lost her hair after…

The last two blogs on the site have prompted a flurry of emails offering many examples of disaster stories involving animals and PR stunts. Jeremy Binns from Philadelphia recounted one of many stories he has surrounding ill fated stunts and publicists. His best story involved an Alaskan bear that was used in the 1950’s by a U.S. honey producer on a nationwide tour to big up the then defunct honey producer in Arkansas. Alas the bear escaped while touring and went on a trail of devastation before being shot with a tranquiliser dart. However, there was a happy to ending…

I got an email from a gentleman on the West Coast of the U.S. who recounted an interesting tale about a publicity stunt gone wrong. Vince Angelo, a well known off strip Las Vegas publicist was hired by the great Cecil Lester and his speciality owl act. The troupe of owls, who could howl famous tunes on demand, had gained great acclaim and had come to the attention of those in Sammy Davis Junior’s inner sanctum, who decided to book the act as a warm up for a forthcoming Davis Junior show. Determined that this would be his big break,…

From the outset, Marilyn Monroe had numerous press agents spinning her image. As a starlet, she was owned by 20th Century Fox who made up numerous stories, then Roy Craft who invented myths around her, long term manager Milton Greene, who got her the best deals and the svengali, Johnny Hyde, who built her up to be the star she was.

I received an email today which recounted a tale from Las Vegas in the 1960’s which demonstrates the flip side of PR stunts. Will Jones’s variety act, a troupe of amazing chimpanzees that played the pianoforte, were doing a support show in Las Vegas, off the strip, for a magician. Norman Berry decided to set up a publicity stunt to promote this show and thought it would be funny to let the chimpanzees loose in the lobby of a hotel.

The 1960’s saw the dawn of the creative publicity campaign for television. The very best TV producers were alive to the concept of drumming up ideas to entice journalistic interest. Ever since the dawn of the TV age, the publicist Warren Cowan had cast his considerable professional shadow over the promotion of television. There was a growing recognition that this legendary movie publicist was now the doyen of publicity scams for TV clients. Cowan’s creative thinking that had originally been developed for the movie studios and their stars like Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Mildred Pierce,…

Much hype surrounds the launch of the ‘Da Vinci Code’ in Cannes, newspapers around the globe are filled with snaps of the cast pictured alongside a train. On Tuesday at Waterloo Terminal, the Eurostar high speed train was renamed The Da Vinci Code. The high speed beast of burden took stars and producers of the movie to the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere on Friday. It is reported that a total of two thousand festival cognoscenti, plus other assorted party animals and dead beat liggers will parade up the Croisette for the premiere.

Many of the great Hollywood publicists had died by the 1970’s, so tracing their histories can often be fruitless. When information is available, it’s like gold dust as so many great careers have gone undocumented. But the career of Pete Smith, an original disciple of Harry Reichenbach, is not only fairly well documented, but also very different. Pete Schmidt , as he was born, (1892 – 1979) was the son of a Brewery cooper, who dropped out of school at 13 to begin a low paying job as a stenographer-typist.

The practice of using new technology to create havoc is not new to the 21st century. Unscrupulous publicists hired companies to spike telegraph messages at the turn of the last century. Sophisticated equipment developed for espionage was made available to all those industries that might be able to afford them. Wire tapping was rife in the 1900, false telegrams were sent to newspapers in order to seed stories, or even throw clever journalists off the scent of scandals. A clever message sent to an agent might tip off, or even provoke panic, about possible blackmail plots. Publicists used this tactic…