CHAPTER 9
Most people consider Jane Fonda the outlaw of the Fonda acting dynasty, but it was really her brother Peter who was the true black sheep. Before Easy Rider created a motion-picture revolution in 1968, Peter’s name was already attached to a pocketful of low-budget, anti-establishment pictures. Peter was a tall, lanky, bright young man, and a rebel with a cause. He hated institutional authority (read motion-picture studios) with a passion.
I became Peter’s publicist in 1966 when independent producer-director Roger Corman was wrapping principal photography on The Wild Angels, an extremely low-budget bike picture that was a precursor to Easy Rider but without the latter’s vision. The movie starred Peter, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. If you look at the film closely, you can even glimpse Peter Bogdanovich as an extra in one of the rumble scenes.
Peter Fonda and I became close friends, although our world perspectives were at variance. The beatniks of the fifties had transmogrified into the hippie movement, and Peter was a full-fledged member. Since beads and marijuana were alien to my Oklahoma roots, I was not tempted to join. It was a movement looking for its reason, dancing lightly on the fringes of the Civil Rights movement, two years away from locking into an antiwar stance. In 1966, pot smoking and free love exemplified its major defiance of authority.
Peter and I talked often on the phone. It was confusing—he signed off saying, “Hello.”
Invariably I would say, “What?”
“We’re finished with our conversation, aren’t we?” Peter would respond.
“Yes, so why did you say ‘hello’?”
“I don’t like saying ‘good-bye.’”
“Okay, Peter. Good-bye.”
“Hello.”
Not long after The Wild Angels went to the editing room, Peter became indirectly embroiled in a drug sting. Two of his buddies had rented a “hippie safe house” in Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley. After paying the first and last month’s rent, the guys were broke and couldn’t get a telephone. Peter put his name and credit on the line for them. He also stored some of his gear there, guitars and other paraphernalia.
Within a matter of weeks, a marijuana crop had been cultivated in the backyard of the house and the noise and odor of pot parties were becoming recurring nuisances to some of the neighbors. At two o’clock one morning, Peter got a call from Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas fame. She was an overnight guest at the Tarzana safe house. Police had staged a drug raid and discovered Peter’s gear. An investigation revealed the telephone was in Peter’s name.
“You’re in trouble,” Cass told Peter. “Guilt by association.”
Peter called his lawyer, Harry Weiss, who advised him to get out of town fast. Peter did, flying first to New York and then working his way back to Palm Springs. He did not call me immediately, which was a mistake. The next day his name was plastered on the front pages of four of the five Los Angeles dailies. The only paper that didn’t try to exploit the Fonda name was the Times; it buried the story as a sop to father Henry.
All I could do at that stage was chastise the offending journalists and demand front-page coverage when Peter was exonerated of a crime he had not committed and had not even been charged with. But we knew it was coming. The year 1966 was one of transition, half modern and half medieval in its pretensions. Possession of marijuana was a serious crime, as were many other things we take for granted today. A Manhattan court had recently ruled Fanny Hill an obscene novel. Linda Lovelace, who would rocket to fame as the real Deep Throat, was a teenager in Texas; the only thing she could suck without going to jail was a lollipop. Peter was in trouble. Los Angeles law enforcement was hungry to prosecute a name figure for marijuana use, something not done since Robert Mitchum went to jail on the same charge back in 1949.
Weiss arranged for Peter to appear in a Van Nuys courtroom without fanfare. Peter and his friends were charged with possession of nine pounds of marijuana, a weight investigating officers calculated by adding several packets of birdseed they found on the premises to the actual stash. Peter was released on his own recognizance, pending a jury trial in six weeks.
Although Weiss was reasonably certain Peter would be acquitted, based on the flimsy evidence, I knew that Peter, and therefore his career, was in jeopardy because of the press. The papers were beginning to fall in love with the idea of knocking people off their pedestals. I kept hammering at my theme: acquittal deserved front-page coverage.
Peter was rightfully angry and defiant, but what he did next compounded his problem as well as my work on his behalf. It happened two weeks before the trial.
The Sunset Strip was undergoing one of its periodic cultural transitions. In the forties and fifties, the Strip had been old Hollywood’s playground, a collection of glittering nightclubs, fine restaurants and popular lounges. More recently, members of the counterculture, youthful hippies, had gradually invaded it with no particular agenda aside from having a good time. The movement presaged a clash between establishment and anti-establishment, as owners and managers of old-line businesses complained that the hippies were ruining business.
On November 11, a group of three hundred young people congregated at one of their hangouts, Pandora’s Box, at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights at the east end of the Strip. They rallied because businesses had pressured the city fathers to condemn the club and declare the property in the public domain, ostensibly to widen Crescent Heights Boulevard. The rally ended with the arrests of dozens of young people after two city buses were attacked; in one case, the passengers were forced off and the bus was burned. If there was anything good about the near riot, it was that Peter Fonda’s marijuana story was lost in the shuffle of more recent news.
Incensed by what they considered police brutality, the leaders of the youth movement announced another rally the following week. Frankly, I did not pay much attention to what was happening. I was running a business and my offices were at the opposite end of the Strip. I knew, of course, that another confrontation between alienated youth and the police was at hand, but I didn’t stick around at the end of the day to observe it. I went home.
Sometime during the night I received a telephone call from a photographer who was covering the riot. He was calling on behalf of Peter, who, with fellow actor Brandon De Wilde (“Shane! Come back, Shane!”) and singer-musician David Crosby (Crosby, Stills & Nash), had been arrested while aiding his fellow hippies in the riot. Peter wanted me to get them out of jail and counter the potential bad publicity.
“Where are they?” I asked the photographer.
“They’ve been taken to the West Hollywood sheriff’s station, but I think they’re going to be shackled and transferred downtown.”
The first image that flickered in my brain was a front-page photograph of Peter Fonda in shackles with a headline reading: Fonda Busted Second Time. Publicity of that kind was enough to negatively influence a jury in Peter’s marijuana trial. I grabbed a 35 mm still-frame camera, hung it around my neck and took off.
The station house was a mob scene. Dozens of kids and young adults had been arrested and the booking process was underway. Peter, Brandon and David were in a holding cell. I began firing rounds from the Gatling gun of my imagination. Peter later wrote in his memoir: “From my cell I could hear my publicist, Jay Bernstein, raising holy hell in the booking room, demanding to see me.”
I raised such a storm that a sheriff took me to Peter as if I were his privileged attorney. They neither searched me nor removed the camera that hung around my neck. The instant I entered the cell I told Peter to sit down and shut up. He did. I looped my camera over his head and dropped it to his chest. “Listen to me!” I said, leaning in close. “Here’s your story. You were at the scene of the riot to shoot preliminary photographs for a documentary that you, Brandon and David are going to do about the changing culture of the Sunset Strip. This camera is your alibi!”
We looked at each other, our thoughts in sync. I went back to the booking room and started cornering journalists, hammering the fact that Peter had been caught up as an innocent filmmaker and if any of them wrote a big story about nothing, it could destroy his career. Later, Harry Weiss showed up and got all three of them released with no pending charges.
From the outset of Peter’s indictment, both Harry and I had impressed upon him the necessity of his father testifying on his behalf at the trial, a ploy Peter was opposed to. Henry was on location in Arizona shooting a Western shoot-’em-up called Welcome to Hard Times. Two days before the trial I got a telephone call at home. My heart leaped; I recognized the voice.
“Mr. Bernstein, this is Henry Fonda. Peter says you need me in court this week.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Fonda. We do!”
“Well, tell me what my motivation is. Tell me what you want me to wear, what you want me to say and how you want me to act.”
Peter was hardly more than a kid and I was only a couple of years older than him, yet I was being asked to coach a Hollywood legend. I offered Henry my advice as if I were directing a movie. Before his testimony, I loaned him a walking stick Sammy Davis had given me. “It’s a prop that will lend you an air of dignity and wisdom,” I explained. He followed my instructions to a T.
After the jury retired, Harry Weiss told me they were hung. It may have been a guess; he may have had inside information. Whatever, he was correct. The prosecutor chose not to retry the case, and Peter kept his freedom. The dailies ran front-page stories absolving him, and the Fonda name remained in good stead in the public eye.
Eventually Peter became a premier moviemaker. He understood the process as well as anyone, from preproduction to postproduction. His failure came about because of success. The mainstream industry hated Easy Rider. They didn’t understand it; more important, they loathed the idea that a couple of young guys (Peter and Dennis Hopper) could go against the grain and produce a box-office blockbuster for less than a million dollars. It’s hard to skim from a small budget, and there’s no financial room to put your buddies on the payroll.
A few years later, when I lived in Elvis Presley’s former mansion in Stone Canyon, Peter lived with me for a short time. He was in the doldrums. He had been relegated to working in independent pictures. After Easy Rider, Universal let him make one picture, and then they left him on the industry periphery. “They let me continue to work because of Dad,” said Peter. “It was a game to them. They walked me on balls, but never let me get past third base.”
In Hollywood, you never truly know who your friends and enemies are because many times they are one and the same. I was dining with a client at the Daisy, a popular Hollywood club on Rodeo Drive. A waiter came over and said, “Mr. O’Neal wants to speak with you.” He pointed. Ryan O’Neal was standing at the cigarette machine near the door. His eyes were locked on me. A second man was standing on the threshold, guarding the door. I recognized him as Harvey Lee Yeary; he’d had a bit part in William Castle’s ill-fated Strait-Jacket. He was doing better now, but not as well as Ryan. Ryan was starring in ABC’s Peyton Place.
I sensed what Ryan wanted. I had been dating his estranged wife and Tatum’s mother, actress Joanna Moore, while Ryan was engaged in a very public affair with Barbara Parkins, his co-star. Unfortunately no sparks ignited between Joanna and me—we were friends. A few nights before, we had gone by my place, where I needed to change clothes. We never left. Joanna, who had been drinking when I picked her up, got drunk and naked, and passed out on my bed. Nothing happened. At four, she woke up. “Where am I? Oh, my God! I have to go!”
I got up and put my clothes on.
“Did we do anything, Jay?”
“Yeah, you were great,” I said.
“Oh, no! What did we do?”
“What did we do? You don’t remember what we did?”
“Did we do . . . it?”
“How about five times?”
“Oh, my God!”
Now, at the Daisy, I excused myself from my client and went over to Ryan at the cigarette machine. When I offered my hand, he grabbed me, slammed me against a wall and put his nose in my face. Yeary stood guard at the gate.
“I’m gonna kill you, Bernstein!” said Ryan. His teeth were clenched. “You’ve been spreading stories that you fucked my wife five times in one night!”
I didn’t say anything, but my eyes were darting about, looking for something I could use to crush his skull. His ears were smoking and his eyes were like red marbles.
“I’m gonna kill you,” he repeated. “It may be tonight; it may be later. But I’m gonna kill you!” He released his grip on my shoulders, spun on his heels and left. Yeary followed him.
Ryan and I remained enemies, but ten years later Harvey Lee Yeary became one of my first official management clients. He had changed his name to Lee Majors.
One day I got a call from actor Gene Barry. He was peeved, and he wanted me to represent him. After a successful run as Bat Masterson, Gene was now starring in Burke’s Law, another successful television series that had just completed its first season. He was angry with Aaron Spelling, the show’s executive producer.
My ears perked. Aaron Spelling? It was he who tried to get me fired over the Sammy Davis, Jr., fight incident on Dick Powell Theater. Powell had subsequently died, and Aaron was now producing the first of his many successful series. Curious, I asked Barry what the problem was.
He said he felt ignored. He owned part of Burke’s Law and was co-executive producer with Aaron. “But every time a press release goes out, there’s only one name there,” said Gene, “and it’s Aaron Spelling!” He said Aaron’s people ignored his complaints.
“I know how to handle Spelling,” I told Gene.
A couple of days later I issued a press release that made trade-paper front pages. “Producer-star Gene Barry signs Gary Conway to be his co-star in ABC TV’s Burke’s Law.” The body copy did not mention Spelling’s name.
Fifteen minutes after the trades hit the newsstands, I got an irate call from Aaron. “Whoa, Jay! What am I? Chopped liver?”
“Aaron, I don’t work for you. I work for Gene Barry.”
Spelling took a diplomatic stance and invited me to come by his office at the old Four Star Studios, now CBS at Radford Row in the Valley. I had never met Aaron. He reminded me of a scarecrow in disrepair—thin as a fencepost, blond, with big, bulbous, expressive eyes and a scratchy voice that didn’t seem to fit his frail frame. We sat down. He had Larry Gordon, his assistant, go fetch me a Coca-Cola. Today Gordon is my friend as well as one of the most successful motion-picture producers in Hollywood. In those days he was Aaron’s legman.
Over Cokes, Aaron and I discussed the problem.
“It’s like this, Jay. I busted my ass to get Burke’s Law on the air, and here you come acting as though I don’t have a place at the table. What goes here?”
What he was really saying was this: television is a producer’s medium. He’s the guy who makes the show happen. It’s not like movies, where, after you sign a big name, everything falls into place around the star. In television, the producer is the star; he’s the cohesive element that makes things happen.
We struck a deal: I wouldn’t put out any news releases about Aaron’s projects without mentioning his name, and Aaron’s publicists wouldn’t put out any stories concerning Burke’s Law without mentioning Gene Barry’s name.
I liked Aaron. He was fifteen years older than me, but he was youthful and hip. He had served a long apprenticeship in the industry, first as an actor, then as a writer and finally as a producer. He understood television as well as Sheldon Leonard did, which was a lot. Aaron was providing escapist entertainment for millions of people who did not have the time or the money to venture downtown to the local movie theater once or twice a week. He was giving them a temporary interlude in which their problems were forgotten. He was also making gobs of money.
Aaron was hardworking, determined to be the best producer in the business, quick of mind and terribly naïve. He was in the midst of getting a divorce from actress Carolyn Jones, and after our meeting at Radford Row I began to see him frequently on the social circuit. Aaron, Nick Adams, Bob Conrad and I, along with our girlfriends or wives, often went to parties or restaurants together. It was a long-ago time now lost, when business was business and fun was fun. You could argue all day with a competitor, but at night it was forgotten.
Aaron fell in love. He met a schoolteacher who lived in the San Fernando Valley; she consumed his conversations. “Why don’t you bring her over here for dinner?” we asked. By “over here” we meant Hollywood or Beverly Hills. The Valley was erroneously stigmatized as the Ozarks of Los Angeles.
“She won’t come,” said Aaron. “She’s not into the Hollywood scene. She thinks the glitz and glamour are phony.”
Here was a guy on the verge of becoming one of the greatest television producers of all time, and he was nuts about a woman who hated Hollywood. All Aaron talked about was his “schoolteacher.” He would go to her home in the Valley, and they’d light candles and be romantic.
At last, the schoolteacher agreed to go with Aaron to a Hollywood party. I don’t remember whose house it was, but the guest list was laden with television stars. Aaron’s girlfriend got drunk. Then she started making clandestine trips upstairs. Then she started making trips upstairs that weren’t clandestine. Finally somebody caught her in bed with one of the male guests, a minor television star. He was maybe her tenth lover of the evening. She was a nymphomaniacal star-fucker! After the party, Aaron never mentioned his girlfriend again. He forgot her like a bad dream. I don’t think he ever dated another Valley Girl.
Well, that was poor Aaron’s dating prowess back in these early days. It’s comical in retrospect. We were just kids back then, experimenting socially and professionally. I was always on the prowl, trying to date every beautiful girl I could. I was lonely because I was working around the clock.
And if my first mentor was Sheldon Leonard, my first role model was Guy McElwaine, my link to Frank Sinatra. He was a cucumber of the cool type, very smart, very debonair, and very much into his own world. He was the original Ring-a-Ding man, who knew how to thread his way through the Hollywood jungle. He was a second-generation movie man—his father had been a publicist at MGM. In his career, Guy was a publicist, an agent, a producer of some great movies and the head of a studio. He was Hollywood’s everyman, with a touch of class.
Guy acted on both instinct and experience, going with the flow but always landing on his feet. When long hair was in, Guy grew long hair. When wide-collared open shirts were the fad, there was Guy with an open collar. These were temporary changes; in the end he always went back to French cuffs and diamond-studded links. At heart, Guy was a product of “old” Hollywood and all the glamour its antiquity implied. He was a vestige of a time past without ever realizing it. I admired him.
Barriers didn’t bother Guy. He was elusive, involved in a lot of extracurricular activities. He was an Adonis, courting and seducing some of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars and starlets. He ran neck and neck with Elizabeth Taylor in securing and disposing of spouses. He was married seven times.
We were in front of a restaurant when a young lady accosted him: “Hi, Guy, how are you?”
Guy’s face drew a blank. The young lady was full of smiles and good humor, rattling reminiscences like a machine gun. Guy had not a clue as to who she was.
“How are Don and Ann?” she asked. “Do you still see Mary and Jim? I keep up with you in the gossip columns. I read that you’re with Rogers & Cowan. How long will that last?”
Guy stared, trying to figure out who she was.
Finally the young lady realized she was forgotten history. “For God’s sake, Guy!” she exclaimed. “I was married to you!”
Another star who desperately wanted to wring my neck occasionally was my client Michael Landon. Regardless of our personal and professional battles, Michael, in my honest opinion, was indeed a multitalented filmmaker. He was an actor, writer, director and producer. As an actor, he disdained personal publicity. He enjoyed the good life, and his power and prestige gave him opportunities most mortal men never have. Girls were always knocking on his dressing-room door and he didn’t always send them away. It was an aspect of his private life he wanted newshounds to avoid.
In the late sixties, Bonanza was in the midst of its extraordinary fifteen-year run as one of television’s most popular shows in history. Michael played Little Joe, the youngest brother in the Cartwright family. Little Joe was a beloved character, the one who drew women like a magnet, which happened to suit Michael perfectly.
Every hamlet, village and city in America clamored after Michael to appear at fairs, conventions and reunions. Of all the stars I knew, he was the most willing to participate. He felt the public had made him what he was and he wanted to give them something in return. When he wasn’t working, he was often on the road promoting Main Street, U.S.A.
One such venture took him to a flower festival in Michigan. He was the grand marshal of the parade. I wasn’t with him, but after the festivities he called me.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
Michael laughed. “Okay, until some kid threw a rock at me.”
It was the kind of story I could make hay out of. The real story was as simple as Michael told it. A kid in a high-rise building had dropped a pebble from a window that landed on Michael’s convertible. No injuries, no damage, no nothing—except I turned the pebble into a boulder. I took the story to Harrison Carroll at the Herald-Examiner.
“You don’t expect me to believe this, do you, Jay?”
“Well, it happened.”
“One little kid threw a boulder at Michael Landon?”
“Several kids,” I exaggerated. “They rolled it out the window of a building. Had it hit Michael, it would have killed him.”
Harrison loved offbeat stories, but you had to sell him. I put my name on the line. “It’s true, Harrison. They probably weren’t aiming the boulder at Michael, but it was his car they hit.” I gave an inch of space between my thumb and my index finger. “He was that far from being killed. The officials wanted to stop the parade, but Michael wouldn’t have it. He braved it out, even with the possibility of more boulders from more windows down the parade route.”
The story ran the next day in Harrison’s column. The wire services picked it up and headlines around the world proclaimed dramatically: “Little Joe Almost Stoned to Death,” or “Michael Landon Escapes Rockslide in Flower Parade.”
It was easy to get Michael’s name in the newspapers and on television, but stories with a handle were hard to come by. This one worked, and I was proud of myself. When Michael returned to L.A., he gave me a call. I joined him for lunch at the Rangoon Racquet Club, a popular watering hole and eatery in Beverly Hills.
Michael wore a grim expression. He was cold, formal. We chatted; our meals were served and then Michael got to the point. “Jay, I’ve written two Bonanza scripts and directed one, but you keep publicizing Michael Landon, the person.”
What he said was true, but there were mitigating circumstances. First, the public wanted information on Michael Landon, and his two scripts and one directorial performance didn’t exactly overwhelm newspaper editors. Little Joe was a known commodity.
“Did you read the piece in People?” he asked.
He was going back a few weeks. Of course I had read the piece. I had arranged the interview. The reporter had promised he would stick to Michael’s role in Bonanza. He hadn’t. At the tale end of the brief item, he had delved into Michael’s private life, which had been growing messy. “I didn’t write the piece, Michael. I just set up the interview.”
He cut me short. “Where in hell did you get the boulder story every newspaper is running? That’s not what I told you.”
“So? I exaggerated, Michael. That’s what gave the story legs.”
“But it’s not true,” he said with exasperation.
“Ninety percent of the stuff people read isn’t true. But they want to believe it. Harrison Carroll wanted to believe it. The wire editors wanted to believe it. As a result, you’ve been in the news for days. Readers sympathize with you. They admire your courage under fire. You’re a hero. Do you think George Washington really cut down a cherry tree?”
“I don’t want to be a hero,” he said. “I only want publicity for what I write and what I direct. You’re fired.”
My pasta was steaming on the plate before me. I picked it up, flipped it and dumped it on the table. “And fuck you, too,” I said, exiting the premises. I felt humiliated.
By the time I got back to my office, I was really pissed. I had put a creative effort into Michael’s public relations for a lousy thousand dollars a month, and now the ungrateful bastard had fired me. The next morning my attitude had not changed. Then my secretary buzzed.
“Michael Landon on line two.”
I grabbed the phone. “Jay Bernstein,” I answered gruffly.
“Hey, Jay! How’s it going?”
“Just peaches and cream, Michael, as you can well fucking imagine.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said with sheepish inflection. “Let’s continue to work together.”
During the next decade, through the rest of Bonanza, which still had five years to go, and through all of the Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven series, Michael fired me another five times and hired me back four times. It was always touch and go, but after a while I got used to it. Landon was one of those stars, like Sinatra, I wasn’t terribly fond of as a person. But he had a golden touch when it came to product. He did for human beings what Walt Disney did for animals—he made them poignant and likable. In most of Bonanza, he was just another actor in an ensemble cast, but Little House and Highway were his creations and he put his indelible stamp on them. I don’t think anyone else in the industry could have made those series as successful as Michael did. Being a wonderful person wasn’t his forte. He was driven by an urge to succeed, and if you got in his way, he’d run over you. To that extent, we were similar.
Welsh singer Tom Jones was already a bona fide hit when I became his publicist in 1968. In previous years he had been part of the swinging music scene, scoring hits with movie themes like “What’s New, Pussycat?” and James Bond’s “Thunderball.” He was a powerful singer, masculine and roguish in appearance, with an onstage bare-chested presence that at least one nameless woman found extraordinarily sexy.
Gordon Mills, Tom’s manager, hired me to launch the singer’s first American performance, at the famous Copacabana in New York City. The Copa was a supper club with an intimate atmosphere that allowed an entertainer to move about in the room as he performed. I had a front-and-center table with half a dozen guests in case Tom’s debut needed extra bodies. It didn’t. The place was packed on opening night.
During his performance a strange incident occurred. Tom was moving from table to table, stopping here and there, singing directly, as if personally, to some of his female fans. Suddenly a woman stood up, slipped off her panties and handed them to him. Gordon Mills told me later that Tom was startled; women had slipped him dinner napkins with their telephone numbers written on them, but never their underwear.
Later that year, Tom opened at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. After a few days Gordon called me. The crowds were small and lukewarm. Tom wanted to be more than a saloon singer who had to compete with the clink of cocktail glasses. “Think you can do something for us?” Gordon wanted to know.
I flew to Vegas and took in the Tom Jones show. It was sexy and dynamic, but I didn’t think it had the oomph to put him over the top as a long-term Vegas hit. It needed a push, a headline-making push.
I talked to Tom and Gordon. They had old-fashioned concepts and came up with the same type of stuff rockers had been doing for years. I went to my suite to think about it. In the process I remembered the knickers incident at the Copa. I had an idea that might work.
By this time, through Sammy and other clients, I was well-known in Vegas by management. It wasn’t difficult to persuade the hotel to give me a couple dozen bogus keys with the Flamingo logo on them. I then went to a lingerie shop and bought several pairs of ladies’ lacy silk underwear.
That night I stood at the entrance of the Flamingo showroom. When I saw a good-looking young woman without a date, I approached her. She was usually with another girl or one of a trio. I chose the ones who seemed extroverted and hungry for a laugh. I offered one of two deals. I would give twenty-five dollars if she would throw a room key on the stage while Tom was performing or fifty dollars if she would throw a pair of panties.
I had no trouble getting girls; they were like actors at central casting. Now I had to choreograph the show. I wanted one girl here, one there; I needed them spread throughout the room, planted in strategic spots. Furthermore, timing was everything. They needed to wait until Tom had supposedly worked them into a frenzy with his sex appeal.
Tom was in the dark; he knew nothing about my gambit. The show began, and in his usual way Tom began working up to his most popular songs—“It’s Not Unusual,” “Delilah” and “Help Yourself.” He had great presence, his own style (helped by his friend Elvis) and a sort of waterfront masculine appeal. He wore tight pants and his shirt open to his navel. He was belting away when the first girl threw a room key. Tom paused ever so briefly, swept up the key and looked at it in one quick gesture, and then continued singing. A couple of minutes later another girl tossed a pair of panties. Tom picked up his pace. Another girl tossed a room key.
It was like shots of electricity suddenly bolting through the room. Tom really began to sing and move, convinced that he was motivating the women by virtue of his sexuality. The women responded in kind, and the more they did, the more magnetic Tom became. The room keys, the panties, Tom’s gyrations and his sensuous songs—they added up to an explosive performance, both onstage and off.
I stayed in Vegas a week, repeating the same routine every night. Gordon and I purposely left Tom out of the loop. By the time I went back to L.A., Tom thought he was the most magnetic man on the planet. During the second week, however, without panties and room keys, the show lost its magic. It was good, but it lacked that indefinable dynamic called sex appeal. Gordon gave me a call; I returned to Vegas.
I got more keys and another bunch of panties. This time, however, I invited members of the press to attend and gave them the Bernstein royal treatment before the show. The same thing happened: Tom began to jive and the women went nuts. Each night was wilder than the one before. The press coverage gave the campaign its needed kick. By week’s end, the hotel had enlarged the letters of Tom’s name on the marquee and women were lining up at the ticket window. I went back to Los Angeles and kept up with the coverage in the papers. There were no more bogus keys and panties bought at wholesale. The real things were now landing on the stage. Tom was transformed into an authentic Vegas star. What began as a gimmick had become a phenomenon.
Tom eventually moved to ever-larger showrooms—the Hilton International, Caesar’s Palace, and the last I heard he was packing the room at the MGM Grand. I’ve always felt a sense of pride in that particular campaign. I was a ghost, an invisible man who motivated the audience in obscurity.
In addition to individual performers, corporations came my way because they sponsored television shows. I was hired to publicize and promote them. I represented AT&T, U.S. Steel, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, among many others. Inherent in the job was taking care of corporate executives and their advertising reps when they came out from New York or Dallas or Chicago. They thought Hollywood was la-la land. They had two goals: breaking par and bedding a starlet.
In the beginning, I was naïve. I actually fixed these guys up with girls who were my friends. “Margo, would you like to go out with the head of a major corporation?” “I’d love to!” The day after the date, however, she’d call me: “God, Jay, the guy tried to tear my clothes off!” I got identical reports from four out of seven girls. It was disgusting, but I needed those big accounts to pay my office nut; they kept me in business.
Before Heidi Fleiss, the hot madam in town was a woman named Alex. I went to see her. She had a big, elegant house in the Hollywood Hills. I told her my predicament and the type of playboy men I represented who visited Los Angeles. “I need dates for these guys—dates who look like college girls, who dress like college girls and flirt like college girls. They need to be sunny and fresh and fun and sexy, while dining on lobster and champagne. At the end of the night, however, they need to let their dates get lucky.”
Madam Alex was delighted to help me. We agreed to a fee, which under the circumstances seemed reasonable. The main criterion was the maintenance of secrecy. I didn’t want the girls ever to reveal their true occupation. The chicanery worked better than I anticipated; some of the corporate geeks actually fell in love, or thought they did, never realizing their new all-American girlfriends were hookers. Like most plans requiring subterfuge, however, the scheme had one major flaw: it seemed too easy.
One afternoon, my secretary said there was a beautiful young woman in the outer office who wanted to talk with me. I took a peek; my secretary’s judgment was on target. The girl was stunning, about twenty years old. I invited her into my office. She quickly turned the conversation to the purpose of her visit. “A friend of mine told me she was doing some work for you.”
“Oh, what kind of work?”
“She’s on a list you use to set up dates with clients of yours. I’d like to be on that list.”
I shrugged. “Did your friend explain everything to you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re okay with what you have to do?”
“Oh, sure.”
She was wearing a wire. It was a Jaik Rosenstein sting. Three days after I rejected buying an ad from him, Jaik ran a banner headline in Hollywood Close-Up: Publicist Runs Call Girl Ring. The sheet sold out at Schwab’s. I thought I was finished.
The following week Jaik ran a scandalous story on Robert Evans, head of production at Paramount. The story about me rang of truth; if I sued, the facts would ruin me. The Evans story, however, had not a thread of truth. I don’t know who, but someone acted: Hollywood Close-Up abruptly stopped publication when its office was blown up. Strangely, it was rumored that Rogers & Cowan were the culprits. Jaik Rosenstein faded into oblivion, and nobody ever mentioned my “call girl ring” again.
George Hamilton understood publicity as well as the best press agents—he could have made a fortune in public relations. I worked with George on and off for years. He shared Nick Adams’ attitude about Hollywood money, although it was the only trait they had in common. “I came out here with $75,” he said proudly. “Now I owe $750,000!”
In 1970 he gave me an anxious call. “Jay, I need your help. If you want a big account, I’ll give you the Evel Knievel production I’m going to do.”
Evel Knievel was the daredevil motorcyclist who got his rocks off by trying to jump over rows of buses and trucks and natural wonders like the Snake River Canyon. He often missed his landing mark and ended up in the critical ward of a hospital with a bunch of broken bones. When George called me, Evel had just crashed while trying to jump over something like a thousand buses at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He had been transported to an outlying hospital in Los Angeles.
“I don’t have the story rights yet,” said George, “but I just talked to Evel, and he said if I can set up a big press conference for him today, here at the hospital, he’ll give me the rights.”
As a favor, as well as a challenge, I told George I would do it. Unfortunately, Evel’s daredevil jumps and subsequent injuries had become so commonplace that most editors relegated his press releases to page forty, and that was often for thirty-eight-page newspapers. Furthermore, the hospital was in the desert somewhere on the fringe of “the valley”; that is, in the middle of nowhere.
Nevertheless I called my guys together—I had about fourteen really good publicists then—and we went to work, burning up telephone lines to every journalist, columnist and wire reporter we could contact. We called television and radio stations and rag writers; we called everybody and begged them to attend Evel’s press conference at four p.m. at the desert hospital.
By the time we exhausted our sources, I had a sinking feeling. I asked my Green Berets what they thought. The consensus was that maybe four people would show up, six at most. George had emphasized that Evel wanted a “big” press conference. I took my guys with me to the hospital.
George had set up a terrace area as though preparing for a presidential news conference. By four thirty p.m., it was evident that no member of the press was remotely interested in quizzing Evel about his latest escape from death. Not one reporter showed up. My guys were standing around like so many cacti in the hot sun, and George was wringing his hands. “Go get Evel,” I said. “We’ll be the press.”
He took off. We formed a semicircle of chairs on the terrace concrete and sat down with pencils and notebooks in hand. A few minutes later Evel was trundled out of the hospital in a wheelchair, his arms and head bound in bandages and his legs in casts. He wore a serious expression, as if he were about to announce the cessation of the war in Vietnam. He stopped and motioned for us to draw closer, which we did, scraping our chairs on the concrete.
Here we were, fifteen publicists in chairs surrounding Evel Knievel in a wheelchair looking like a mummy, two nurses sweating in the sun in their white uniforms, and George Hamilton standing at Evel’s shoulder like a nervous aide beside his commanding officer. I was sitting closest to Evel’s left hand. He looked at me and said, “Hi, I’m Evel Knievel. Who are you, and who do you represent?”
I stared at him, thinking fast, wondering if he was smarter than we were. “I’m Jay Bernstein, Mr. Knievel, George’s publicist”—I turned quickly to the person on my left—“and this is Stan Rosenfield . . . of the Los Angeles Times.” Evel smiled. Stan, catching my lead, turned to the person to his left and said, “And this is Stan Moress . . . of the Herald Examiner.”
Around the semicircle it went, with each of my troupe introducing the one next to him and coming up with the name of the place of his employment: The Daily News, the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Associated Press, United Press International, until at last, with all legitimate sources used, they were actually making up names of papers and magazines. I was proud of them; each was smart enough not to use the name of a television station, suspecting Evel might ask where his camera crew was.
After the introductions the news conference proceeded. We asked the same insipid questions Evel had dealt with a thousand times. But it worked, and after we wrapped I told the guys they had to expend a real effort to get something in the papers, especially in the ones we said we represented. The next day we landed stories in about half of them. Evel was apparently pleased; George got his rights, and Jay Bernstein Public Relations went on to represent the movie.
I went to Acapulco with a girlfriend and another couple to relax a few days, staying at a downtown hotel. But just a few minutes after we arrived, I stepped on a sea urchin. As I quickly and painfully discovered, it affects one in the same way a twelve-gauge shotgun shell would if it went off inside your foot. It was the most excruciating pain I have ever felt. I needed badly to get to a hospital, but we were told there wasn’t one, so I ended up in a doctor’s office: Taco Cedars-Sinai.
“Your foot is full of spines,” the doctor told me.
I didn’t need an explanation. I needed a painkiller.
“They are alive,” continued the doctor. “If we don’t get them out, they’ll begin to flow into your body like sperm flows from a woman’s vagina into her ovaries.”
“Shit!” I screamed. “Do what you need to do! I don’t want to get pregnant from these things!”
I was lying on a surgical table and didn’t think I could take the pain much longer. Through clenched teeth, I said, “Doc, give me something to kill the pain.”
He shrugged. “I have no anesthesia, señor. Lo siento.”
“Low what? No anes-fucking-thesia?”
Two male nurses entered; they looked like the zombified prizefighter in The Harder They Fall. They pinned me to the table while Jekyll extracted the needles, one by one, digging into my flesh with a syringe. I passed out.
When I came to, I had a cast on my lower leg and foot and a pair of crutches. Back at the hotel, I collapsed on my bed and slept restlessly for several hours. I woke to a ringing telephone. Taco Bell was back in business.
“Jay, it’s George.”
“George who?”
“George Peppard! I’m in a heap of trouble, and I need you!”
He was in Boston, shooting the pilot for Banacek. The day before, George had picked up one of the extras on his set, a young woman who had initiated a flirtation. He had invited her to his hotel suite for dinner. Later, while they were making love, she bit him on the neck like a lioness.
“So you hit her, I suppose.”
“No,” he said, which surprised me because George had an explosive temper. “I was shocked; it was so unexpected. It wasn’t rough sex at all. I mean, shit, her bite brought blood. Then I saw that she was expecting me to hit her. She wanted me to. So I shoved her out of bed.”
“What happened next?” I asked.
“She grabbed her clothes and ran through the lobby in the buff.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Ritz-Carlton.”
“The Ritz-Carlton has the most conservative clientele in Boston!”
“It’s worse than that,” said George. “She was screaming, ‘George Peppard raped me! George Peppard raped me!’”
It smelled like a setup, but I let George continue.
“So the cops come and arrest me. When I posted bail, I called the studio, but nobody would talk to me. The same thing at NBC.”
“Did it make the papers?”
“Page two everywhere, including the L.A. Times. ‘George Peppard Accused of Rape.’”
“That’s why those bastards at the studio and the network wouldn’t take your calls,” I told him. “All of a sudden, they don’t want anything to do with you. You’re anathema to them.”
“You’ve got to come and get me out of this shit.”
“What’s the weather like?”
“It’s snowing.”
There were no flights from Acapulco to Boston. The fastest route was via L.A. When I arrived at LAX wearing tropical threads, Marsha, my secretary, was waiting at the gate with a change of clothes, an overcoat and a packed suitcase. I hobbled to the men’s room, my foot beating a tattoo of pain. I couldn’t get my pants over the cast. Marsha had to help me change.
By the time I got to the Boston Ritz-Carlton, George had received a telephone call from an anonymous person who said the rape charges would be dropped if he forked over $20,000. “It’s extortion,” he said bitterly.
I was not surprised by the call, but I was surprised by the amount of money being demanded. While airborne, I had considered George’s predicament from every conceivable angle. I thought he would be hit up for something like a quarter of a million dollars.
“Pay it,” I said.
George being George said, “The hell I will!”
“It will cost you a hell of a lot more if you fight it, George.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “Nobody’s gonna extort money from me!”
We hired a private detective and a fleet of lawyers. I got in touch with some underworld characters through Las Vegas connections; two weeks later it unfolded that the scheme was an inside deal, a police setup. Two cops had come up with the scam. After busting George’s “victim” on drug and prostitution charges, they blackmailed her, telling her she was going to prison unless she cooperated with their plan. The cops managed to get her on the set as an extra.
Meanwhile George had spent in excess of $20,000. Vindicated, I thought he should quit. “No fucking way,” he said.
He went to court, and I went with him. I remember the judge telling the girl how horrible she was, as if the cops had been persuaded by her to join the scam rather than she by them. They got light sentences, which pissed George off. I called a press conference and told the reporters turnabout was fair play. George had been accused of rape on page two; I demanded his vindication be on the same page using the same size type and the same space, à la Peter Fonda seven years earlier. The result was better than I’d requested. The story got front page across the nation. L.A. Associated Press reporter James Bacon said it was the first time in his memory that a person was accused on page two and acquitted with a front-page headline.
George and I went back to the Ritz-Carlton. NBC and Universal were burning up the phone lines with congratulations. Hollywood was alive and well.
Susan Hayward was an idol of my youth who became my client, and later a close friend and confidante. At times we were more than friends as we occasionally became romantic when she was extremely depressed and lonely. She was getting ready to fly to Africa, where I had arranged a safari trip for her with accommodations at William Holden’s Mount Kenya Safari Club. A couple of nights before she was scheduled to leave, I took her to see Aretha Franklin perform. After the show, we went to Aretha’s dressing room. Aretha was nervous, upset. As Susan and I left, Aretha asked me to call her the next morning.
I called. Aretha’s problems were compounding by the moment; preperformance “nerves” were becoming a minor part of her psychology. I hung up. Susan was packing.
“Why don’t you go with me to Africa?” she said.
“I can’t. I’ve got too many problems to tend to.”
“Like what?”
“For one, I’ve got to babysit Aretha. She’s a mess.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
I explained, to the best of my knowledge. Among other things, Aretha was having marital problems. She was tied up in knots. “She needs a crutch, and I’m it,” I said.
Susan’s eyes lighted up. “Why don’t you have her come with me?” she said enthusiastically. “She can be my maid. No one will know who she is, and she can have a good rest.”
I looked at Susan; she was serious and expectant.
“Well?” she said.
I cleared my throat. “Susan, that’s sweet of you, but I don’t think I can ask Aretha Franklin to pose as your maid.”
“Why?” asked Susan.
I didn’t answer. Susan belonged to another generation. She was incapable of switching gears in the face of old age. She was too set in her ways. Her solution to Aretha’s problem was the problem in black versus white relationships, innocent as it appeared. The only real solution was time . . . a long, long time.
I stayed and helped nurse Aretha out of her depression. But she was just one of dozens of clients, all with problems of one sort or another. I was becoming more disenchanted by the moment. I was managing careers and mindsets under the guise of a publicist when I was really a psychologist. I needed a change—a career change.