Portrait of a Press Agent

No producer, tiny or tremendous, bucks Broadway without a press agent. He can't, because his union contract calls for one; but he wouldn't anyway. A show without a press agent would be like a store without a show window.

Broadway's press agents (officially known as press representatives) number some 50 (a few of them women). About 15 really count. They are a special breed, with one foot in the theatre and the other in a newspaper office. They earn a minimum salary of $150 a week. (But it's a job in which a couple of lousy breaks might end a career.) They are suspicious characters to the public, which regards them as a kind of licensed liar who cooks up tall tales. Actually, their bread & butter depends on being strictly truthful. The newspapers are their lifeblood, and as Press Agent William Fields once said, "An editor who has been taken in by a press agent never forgets the incident--and shouldn't." A publicity man's style may be tropical, lush, mendacious--but his facts must be straight.

Broadway's press agents divide into four classes. There are those who work for one boss, as does portly John Peter Toohey for Sam H. Harris and courtly Claude P. Greneker for the Shuberts. There are smart free lances, such as Willard Keefe, Nat Dorfman, Karl Bernstein, eight or ten others. There are the in-&-outers (some on the way up, some on the way out). And there is Irish-tongued, Scotch-drinking Richard Maney, who is a whole industry in himself.

Last week Dick Maney was living a pressagent's dream: he was handling six shows at once* four more than any other press agent, and all that the Theatrical Managers, Agents & Treasurers Union allows. His factory was going full blast under strict union rules: he had hired an assistant as soon as he handled two shows; a second assistant as soon as he handled four; a third when he handled six. His helpers were getting a total of $275 a week; he, a minimum of $625 and very likely about $1,000.

Dick Maney's personality stands forth in the rackety, sulfurous, epithet-crawling style, "as distinctive as the Dietrich limbs," of his press stories. But it is his walking & talking personality that has put Maney on top. He scorns the usual props: high-pressuring, dancing attendance on people, buttering his employers. Instead, he hobnobs as an amusing guy with hundreds of people of all kinds, while through the years he has won and held the confidence of editors.

The most sociable guy in the business, he is also the most hardboiled. He frequently treats producers rough. But he plays them smart. He may explode working for explosive Jed Harris, but he is a gent when working for gentlemanly Arthur Hopkins. He may write reams of copy about a play for the press, but to its producer he never offers a word of unsolicited advice. And the producer--the man who pays him--comes first, last & always with him. Composer Dick Rodgers once asked him: "Is it a secret that I am writing the music for this show?" Retorted Maney: "It's Billy Rose who is handing out the pay." He says himself that a press agent should have the face of a cherub and the heart of a section foreman.

Maney insists that, however spectacular publicity may look, it is actually nine parts routine. Before a show opens, it is almost automatic. He begins by announcing the production, follows up with announcements about who is in the cast, who is directing, what the play is about, where it will tryout, when it will open. With luck, that produces ten unpaid advertisements. His first real chance to prove his worth comes in landing big advance stories in the Sunday papers. At such times his only task is selling the editor his idea for a story. Once the idea is sold, Maney (unlike other press agents) writes a story too good for an editor to throw out.

If a show opens a hit, Maney can choose his spots, reserve good stories for the big papers. With a flop, veterans like Maney don't try pleading or high-pressuring. They think fast and try stunts. Publicity stunts have turned many a tide. Anna Held's fame dates chiefly from her milk baths. Belasco strewed tanbark outside a theatre, ostensibly to cushion street noises, actually to start people talking. Lions have been let loose in hotel bedrooms, Ziegfeld girls have marched to New York's City Hall in tights.

Maney's stunts are those of a born tongue-in-cheeker. When he did the publicity for The Great Magoo, which the critics drubbed, he had a hand in the decision of its playwrights, Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler, to lie in state in separate coffins at a funeral parlor. For Billy Rose, Maney concocted an advertisement for "100 bona fide noblemen" to serve as dancing partners at Rose's Fort Worth Frontier Centennial. "In answering," read the ad, "submit photographs in uniform, with orders, ribbons and decorations evident. . . . Bogus counts, masqueraders and descend ants of the Dauphin will get short shrift."

Maney's most successful stunt was for The Squall, which opened as a floperoo. A line in the play ran "Nubi bad girl, Nubi stay." Reviewing The Squall in the old Life, Robert Benchley retched: "Nubi stay, Benchley go." Quickly Maney hoisted big ads reading: "See the play that made a streetwalker of Robert Benchley." The Squall ran over a year.

Maney, born 47 years ago in Chinook, Mont. (then full of Cree Indians), has said so often that he spoke only Cree until he was twelve that he now believes it. Actually, the only strange sounds he uttered came out of a cornet he played as a boy.

He studied journalism at the University of Washington, but being stagestruck, ushered without pay in a Seattle theatre. At 21 he reached New York as the least important of Anna Held's four press agents. Subsequent ups & downs turned him into a heavily liveried doorman at the old Century Theatre, into editor of The American Angler while knowing nothing about fish. He offered his readers such advice as "keep your fly in the water, the trout don't live in trees," then resigned, "not without considerable support from the public."

His first important press-agent job was handling Broncho Billy Anderson, the cinema cowboy most in favor before the days of Tom Mix. Since then, Maney has press-agented some 90 shows for virtually every big producer on Broadway and for such oddities as a colored gentleman "a year removed from a treetop in the Congo." He has publicized such hits as The Front Page, Coquette, Fifty Million Frenchmen, Sailor Beware!, The Children's Hour. Says he from experience: "I have yet to find an actor, producer or stagehand who did not like to see his name in print." Among producers, his pet annoyance is the Shuberts. No great admirer of Billy Rose, he admits that Rose is a pressagent's Dream Boy because "he scorns dignity in favor of delirium." His favorite producer is megalomaniac Jed Harris because Harris is cyclonic, unpredictable. "All female stars," adds Maney, "have one thing in common: after you stand on your head to arrange an interview, they break the date because they have to have their hair washed."

With his Irish mug and scarred nose, Maney--who in appearance is a roustabout George M. Cohan--looks the part he plays. He also talks it. Without using cusswords he gets an effect of violent swearing from piled-up epithets, from a trick of calling people things like "low Kanakas," "foul Corsicans." He once called Billy Rose "a penthouse Cagliostro." Suspicious, Rose inquired who Cagliostro was. Said Maney: "An 18th-Century charlatan." "Say," said Rose, "that's swell!"

Evenings Maney makes the round of his shows. He seldom has time for other people's, has never seen six-year-old Tobacco Road. After theatre he drifts to a tavern, usually a newspapermen's hangout like Jack Bleeck's, where he guzzles and plays the match game for high stakes with his cronies, also gets in a word with dozens of useful newspaper people.

Smart, cold-blooded businessman though he is, Maney sometimes takes on flops, turns down successes. Last season he almost took on Madame Capet, which ran for seven performances, instead of Oscar Wilde, which ran for 247. He sets his income at $25,000 a year; Broadway sets it higher.

*The Little Foxes, Hamlet, Ladies and Gentlemen, Kindred, Christmas Eve (which closed at week's end), The Male Animal (opening on Broadway next week).

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