The Promoters

Thou art not for the fashion ofthese times,Where none will sweat but forpromotion.

Shakespeare said that. He said everything, as a matter of fact, and although he did not live long enough to meet these seven promoters personally, he would be pleased to know that they conform to his dictum. They are among the country's most successful promotional and public-relations people; by the rigorous application of energy, intellect and muscle, they have turned chutzpah into cold hard cash. Lots of it--for themselves, their families and sometimes even for their clients. While they are out there making all this money, they are also determining what records we buy, what film stars we pay to see, what sporting events we go to, where we build our vacation homes, what we spray under our arms, in our mouths, on our feet and over our privates.

How do they do all this? It's easy; we help them. As a people, we love to be promoted, there is so much security in letting someone help us make up our minds. Our Government, for instance, is always eager to help: For decades it sold us the Yellow Menace; then overnight, as our President shook hands with Chairman Mao, it sold us instead the Yellow Compatriot, and we bought that. In fact, we owe our very existence to one of history's great promoters, Christopher Columbus. You remember him--he promoted the idea of a New world to Queen Isabella of Spain and then went out and discovered it. There are no hard-and-fast rules in promotion as to whether the product actually exists. As women and other great promoters have known down through the centuries, suggestion is often more enticing than reality.

The following seven Wunderkinds understand all this and more. They sense our needs before we do, and they fill them. It's not just being in the right place at the right time, they say, it's discipline. Stay with it, maintain self-control and don't look back. You should be prepared to lose everything, but if you start with nothing, there is little downside risk, so stop worrying. Go do it.

They did. And while some of them seem to be speeding through life like marathon runners past a picnic, at least a few have taken time off to enjoy the rewards of their own success. That, for any of us, may be the hardest discipline of all.

Publicist Jim Moran knows more about everything than you and I will ever know; yet, in spite of this handicap, he manages to enjoy life. What he does for his living is a $150,000-a-year mystery. It starts something like this: A sane businessman with a new product decides to find an unconventional means of publicizing it; being both sane and conventional. he seeks the assistance of a sympathetic maniac. Others who have been through this sort of thing refer him to James Sterling Moran. "He likes his booze," they say, attempting to suggest that Moran isn't quite as crazy as he may appear. The businessman then meets with him in Moran's II-room New York apartment and is offered the opportunity to pay Moran a $3000 "30-day cogitation fee."

Wiping up his spilled martini, the businessman asks what he might expect to get for his money.

"Nothing," Moran replies. "Or everything. During that thirty days I shall devote myself to research and development of ideas. I may solve your problem or you may blow three grand. In either case, I won't return your money. If you then wish me to implement my ideas, it will cost you between thirty-six and fifty thousand dollars, plus expenses. Frankly.s compared with a one-minute commercial on TV, I'm a great fucking bargain."

It is necessary to Moran's stratagem that he remain an anonymous benefactor to his client. He won't discuss his present projects nor the companies employing him. He gets paid to dissemble publicity as news; if he blows his cover, the news story loses its credibility. Reporters back off. "Christ," they shout, "it's another one of Moran's stunts; we've been had."

Familiarity sometimes breeds contempt. City editors grow wary, but in Moran they are dealing with a former newspaperman who saw the light; Moran knows their problems, what turns them on and what puts them off. "If my ideas are good," he asserts, "it's their obligation to cover them."

Among the several hundred Moran-inspired incidents they've been obliged to cover:

• A bizarre accident in front of the United Nations Building: A kid on a white horse bearing a lance roams the streets of New York to promote a local hotel. Nobody pays much attention. But in front of the UN he lurches forward, his lance punctures the radiator of a taxicab. Water shoots into the air. There is a terrific commotion, a threat of violence; newsmen from the Times and Post and Daily News and Associated Press rush to cover the story. Photos are sent out over the wires and in them the name of the hotel is prominently displayed. Only much later is it revealed that this apparent accident was a staged contrivance; that the taxicab driver was, in fact, an employee of Moran's and that the shooting water resulted from a small pump having been concealed within the cab's radiator. Moran scores again.

• A camel crosses Manhattan laden with Persian rugs and parks in front of the New York Times Building: It won't budge. When people stop to inquire, its Bedouin keeper explains that there was to be a Persian-rug sale at Madison Square Garden. But the Times will not run an ad for it--no room, they say. So the camel is boycotting the Times. Curiosity mounts. Camel dung messes the sidewalk, the Times reneges, runs the ad, as well as a small news item, and $2,000,000 worth of rugs are sold in Madison Square Garden. Chalk up another for Moran.

• The same camel becomes the first customer of the One Hump Camel Wash. In a parking lot next to Toots Shor's, photographers gather to shoot the event. They get a picture of a sudsy camel balking at the entrance while a desperate man tries to push him in. The man is ... Moran ... who owns the camel and has as his client the detergent manufacturer whose product name is boldly displayed over the One Hump Camel Wash.

In the line of duty, Moran has literally acted out some of our more venerable clichés, and has won considerable publicity doing it. It is he who once sold an icebox to an Eskimo, found a needle in a haystack (it took 82 hours) and changed horses in midstream.

But none of Moran's professional escapades are as intriguing and complex as the man himself. Thrice married and divorced, he lives alone in his baronial West End Avenue apartment--a baroque affair cluttered with exotic impedimenta including pith helmets, clawed traps, gongs, a hand-carved embossed antique piano, Balinese masks, Venetian wall carvings, animalskin drums (in each bathroom), zithers, tapestries, Turkish hookahs and a 10,000-volume library. He carries himself with the bearing of a professor, an illusion further enhanced by his long gray-flecked beard, his soft, precise tones, his scholarly mien.

The haughty posture represents a perfect front for the madman within. He will, for example, appear as a guest on the David Frost show and listen patiently to a computer expert explain his most recent digital discovery. Eager to assist, Moran will stroke his beard and ask: "You're familiar, of course, with De Groot's principle of the excluded thirteenth?"

The computer expert clears his throat, studies the somber, erudite gentleman beside him and nods. "Of course," he replies. Sweat forms on the upper lip. Please, God, change the subject. And when in time the computer expert rushes back to his books to learn of De Groot. he will find there is no De Groot. No principle of the excluded thirteenth. Only that crazy fellow sitting beside him in front of millions giving him acute gas pains.

It is this sort of action that Moran, 65, loves and lives for. Women come a close second. "Someone defined youth for a man as a time when a woman can make you happy and miserable; old age as a time when women make you sad; and middle age as a time when women make you only happy. By that definition I'm middle-aged," says he. His emphatic tone carries a suggestion of defiance: Others may go gentle into that good night, but not Jim Moran. "My sex life has never been better," he reveals. "Never." It is aided and abetted, he explains, by ten women in their early 20s who respect Moran's wisdom, delight in his classical-guitar virtuosity and have only good things to say about his physical prowess. "With me they get no deception, no lies. I rotate 'em through here pretty good." And taking notes along the way: He recently published How I Became an Authority on Sex.

What prevails is a sense of detachment. In the end, he must be by himself in order to create; permanent relationships compromise the privacy of one's thoughts. Suddenly now an idea comes into his head. He reaches for a tin of Dr. Rumney's Mentholyptus Snuff; he taps the top three times for luck, snorts a hefty noseful and gazes out through watery eyes to the polluted Hudson below. Tomorrow an ostrich will be discovered laying eggs on the mayor's desk; news reports will be certain to disclose the name of the moving company that has been mysteriously called in to transport the bird from city hall. Only later will it be revealed....

• • •

What: (a) weighs 365 pounds, (b) escorts nude women to airports in the line of duty and (c) once insured a pair of siliconed breasts for $1,000,000?

The answer to all three of the above is Davey Rosenberg, who bills himself as "the world's greatest press agent." Well, the bulkiest, at any rate. Davey, 37, credits himself with the rise to glory of that particular art form known as topless entertainment. "All I had to work with was a Rudi Gernreich swimsuit and a flat-chested cocktail waitress named Carol Doda," he explains by way of historical perspective. That was back in 1964. The Beats had filtered away from the North Beach area of San Francisco, leaving behind several hundred Italian restaurants and several million tourists from Kansas City looking everywhere for a little action. Along came Davey, fresh from promotional alliances with several pro athletes. He was after, well, bigger things. Just then, as serendipity would have it, he ran into a North Beach night-club owner who sought to boost trade by snipping the bra straps off his go-go dancers. Davey, master of the malapropism, tells it best: "I'm in the Condor and Pete comes over to me and he says to me, 'Davey, I got some business I want you to help me curtail.' So I say OK, but now I gotta find a handle. So I'm walking down the street, it's four a.m. and I see on the newsstand this picture of a four-year-old girl in a topless bathing suit. So bells ring! That's it--TOPLESS! I personally am responsible for the name topless entertainment. I personally put topless in the dictionary. Then later we branched out, of course, into bottomless. I had a whole bunch of merkins made up special for the event."

In the meantime, it was press agent Rosenberg's task to keep the customers packing into Big Al's, El Cid and other nude nighteries that rim Broadway in North Beach and ream tourists to the tune of $2.75 per drink--lots of water, a spray of Scotch, and don't order champagne.

"For a while," says Davey, "people used to come just to watch Carol Doda's tits grow. They growed from a 34-B up to a 44-D. When they stopped growing, I stepped in with a few campaigns. I'm always thinking, thinking, thinking ... and what I don't think up myself I steal. So one day I see in the paper an item on Grauman's Chinese Theater. So I got fresh cement poured in front of Big Al's on the sidewalk and I stage a press conference and I have all our big-name topless entertainers lie down and stick their (continued on page 102) The Promoters (continued from page 98) boobs in the wet cement. I called it a landmark of busts. What happened? I got arrested, that's what happened. For disturbing the peace. Fine with me. Press-wise, the police are my greatest ally."

The sidewalk--riddled with craters--was later decreed a safety hazard by the city's Public Works Department and resurfaced. So Davey moved on. He managed to get La Doda's breasts insured with Lloyd's of London to promote her return to Broadway. Thinking, thinking, thinking all the time, he ushered in San Francisco's first topless Santa Claus, nude nubile bathers in the city's newest public fountain and topless Berkeley coeds.

Says Davey, less humble than large, "The day I die, the street will die."

His greatest challenge: to get Carol Doda on the Johnny Carson show. It would seem to be a natural, but not to Johnny, who wants no part of such parts. Still, Davey keeps trying. A nonswinging bachelor devoted to his mother and father, he delights in his own success. Despite women's lib, the decline of sin and guilt as traditional American neuroses--and even despite the Supreme Court, as of the time this issue went to press--North Beach topless-bottomless clubs continue to prosper. They are about as erotic as pot cheese, but no matter. As long as Davey keeps pushing the product--for fat fees netting him "a good income for an illiterate"--people of both sexes will come and pay to visit "the adult Disneyland of the universe." (Guess who thought up that phrase?)

A somewhat vainglorious flack, Davey loves to be the center of attention; all 365 pounds of him pout when ignored. Among those who have ignored him most recently is Henry Kissinger. Davey sent Henry unretouched photos of some of the girls who take it all off for the tourists. Why? "Look, Henry might come to San Francisco and be searching for a date. So I offered him his pick, plus a lifetime pass to the Condor. He never answered. Well, so I'm not hurt, maybe he has other things on his mind."

Future plans--"To diversify myself," Davey confides. And, indeed, he has. He is now promoting San Francisco's first X-rated men's room, deep in the heart of the financial district.

• • •

"Woolf establishes sports lawyer as unsigned stars' best friend on the dotted line," bannered the Sunday New York Times sports section early in 1971. Directly under the front-page head ran a four-column photo of Robert Woolf, Esquire, standing between hockey star Derek Sanderson and basketball star Calvin Murphy, two of the 300 professional athletes Woolf represents, advises and promotes. In the photo, all three men smile with the certitude of those who know what it means to prosper: Exuding confidence, beatific, they impart an air of implacable trust in themselves and in the lavish, benign kingdom of sports.

Eighteen months later, in his lawyer's Boston office, Sanderson is sitting across the desk from Woolf and nervously sucking the juice from the bones of his Southern fried chicken lunch. He is grousing, cursing and miserable. Woolf consoles, interrupts to take an emergency phone call.

Murphy, on the other end, is upset, frantic and edgy. The Houston Rockets aren't playing him, there are rumors afloat that he's about to be traded. Will Woolf check them out?

"I'll see what's going on, Cal," Woolf tells him. "What? Buffalo? Hey, that might not be so bad. For Christ's sake, you'll be a star in Buffalo. Yeah. Right. Right. Sit tight. OK. Bye." Woolf hangs up.

Sanderson licks his fingers, then his mustache. "Calvin's got trouble, too?"

"Well," says Woolf, "you know, they stop playing you for a few games, you begin to wonder."

"I know," says Sanderson. "I fucking goddamn know."

Woolf smiles, places a call to the Rockets' general manager. "I don't know why they think it's their attorney's job to make sure they're playing," he tells the man. "But when they get worried ... well, you know. Cal's a little worried. If there's nothing to the rumor, I'll tell him, Ray, it will put his mind to ease. It's not my business to interfere with a team's organization. Oh, thanks, Ray. Sure. OK, I'll ... fine, I'll tell him everything's OK. Well, you know, he wants to play, he wants to contribute; who can blame him? Bye, Ray." Woolf hangs up.

"You can't fucking blame anybody for wanting to play the fucking game they're paid to fucking play," Sanderson observes, downing three French fries whole.

Compared with Murphy's, Sanderson's current problems seem massive and unsolvable--to himself and everyone else in the sports-crazed city of Boston; but not to Bob Woolf, whose grace under pressure is equaled only by his ability to navigate safely through the choppy waters of professional sports. Notwithstanding the moral virtues pro sports are meant to exemplify in the American scheme of things, expansion has blown the lid off their integrity. Tammany Hall and Billy Sol Estes might profit from a study of the manipulations of many new franchise owners. In order to compete, they have been known to bid for players with money they don't have and with promises they can't fulfill. Recipients of their largess often wind up victims of their hype. Derek Sanderson is, at the moment, such a victim. Tempted away from the Boston Bruins by a $2,600,000 contract with the Philadelphia Blazers of the World Hockey League--"Derek had to be the world's highest-paid athlete so he would feel it was worth while to play in a new league," says Woolf--the sybaritic hockey star was benched after eight games. The Blazers claimed he was physically unfit to play. Sanderson and Woolf claimed that the Blazers couldn't afford to pay Sanderson and were trying desperately to dump him, preferably with a breach of contract on Sanderson's part. For 30 Blazer games, Sanderson showed good faith by sitting it out in the stands. Mobbed by fans, yelled at to cut his hair by nonadmirers, he was permitted to hang around the Blazers' dressing room fully clothed, but was not allowed by the Blazers' management to don skates in any league game.

As the man who helped get Sanderson into this bind, Woolf feels compelled to extract him from it--with dignity and with a just cash settlement. "This scene is contrary to anything I've ever been involved in," he repeats daily as he fields offers from other hockey clubs and parries questions from sports editors across the country. Occasionally, he pauses to ask a visitor, "What would you do?" And on this particular afternoon, with Sanderson munching toward the marrow of a chicken leg, Woolf pauses to take a phone call from his mother, now 78. He has just finished speaking to the Rockets' general manager in tones of easy authority, but confidence gives way to a son's frustration when Mother phones. "Momma," says Woolf, 45, "I've been doing this for three weeks!"

Later, he hangs up, smiling. "My mother's telling me how to practice law. She doesn't want I should get discouraged with our problem, Derek. 'If you come over, maybe we could talk it out,' she tells me. Oh, gosh."

Sanderson snorts. "I'm going," he says suddenly. He flips the chicken into a wastebasket. "I got a hot one lined up tonight. Last night was outrageous. All she wanted was to go at it, boom boom boom. That's my kind. See ya." He stomps out, turns at the door and tells the visitor, "They don't make 'em any better than Bobby."

Woolf's success does seem to prove that occasionally nice guys finish first. It helps to possess a shrewd analytical mind, and in sports it doesn't hurt to operate from a position of humility and boyish enthusiasm. Way back, Woolf decided that athletes had replaced movie stars as national celebrities. With proper management, they could capitalize on their fame. Autographed T-shirts, for instance. Personal appearances. Caricature wrist watches. Helmets. Bats. Sneakers. Talk shows--whatever the traffic would bear. Then, too, many professionals weren't getting paid as much as they deserved. A former collegiate basketball player caught up in criminal law, Woolf entered the world (continued on page 222) The Promoters (continued from page 102) of sports biz when a Red Sox no-hit pitcher sought his advice on negotiating a contract. "Oh, wow," said Woolf, "this is an area that has been virtually untapped!"

Eight years later, he has tapped nine out of twelve Boston Celtics as clients, Sanderson, Jim Plunkett, athletes on more than half the terms in every division of every major league in pro sports. He is their advisor, manager, surrogate father and number-one fan. A staff of eight legal assistants helps him put together a mighty package for each client. Woolf pays all bills, handles taxes, investments, promotions, drafts, contracts, endorsements, speaking engagements, wills and estates. His athletes draw an allowance. "I try to teach them how to handle money," says Woolf.

"These are often young, inexperienced kids who have been coddled and protected from the time they entered high school. They're continually getting surrounded by fringe people with wild schemes for quick riches. I get calls at two A.M. from young clients, would I send five thousand dollars fast, they've got a friend with a wild idea. Most of my time I spend preventing exploitation...."

What distinguishes Woolf from others performing similar services is his rapport with the men he represents. He walks the snowy streets of Boston with despondent Plunkett after yet another Patriot debacle, opens his home to all, is available always for any emergency. His family includes a loving wife, three happy children and dozens of clients who drop by for snacks, pool games and moral inspiration.

Team owners and managers who have to deal with him at contract time find Woolf invariably as good as his word. He won't renegotiate a client's contract for more money and, because of it, last year lost basketball star Julius Erving. In his quiet and unassuming way, Woolf is a man of strong principle. With an income of $200,000 a year, one might assume that he can afford to be. The suspicion lingers that he still would be if he were to go broke tomorrow. "My job," he says, "is to make sure an athlete gets what he's worth and learns how to manage what he gets. His body is his skill, and it can depreciate very fast."

When it seems to be depreciating overnight, as in the case of Sanderson, Woolf's solid reputation enables him to deal directly with management--in this case, the Blazers' owner--in an atmosphere notable for its lack of contempt, distrust and deception. The meeting takes place at Woolf's vacation home in Hollywood, Florida. In the end, Sanderson walks away with $1,000,000 (or $125,000 for every game he played as a Blazer) and his freedom to rejoin the Boston Bruins. And Woolf? He leaves the way he came in: respected, unperturbed, slightly awed by the power he wields. "It's unbelievable!" he exclaims. "Think of the damage I could do to sports if I ever lost my head." But there must be something difficult. "There is," he admits. "The hardest thing is trying to do it all as a gentleman."

• • •

Terry Knight, 30, has learned to express himself with precision ("I may mention discipline many times, because to me discipline is the essence of any promotional campaign"), with humility ("As a singer, I worked until nobody would have me") and with conviction ("My thing is not to sell record albums, my thing is to turn a group into a longevity money-maker"); but it is not until the subject turns to his former rock group, Grand Funk Railroad, that he begins to talk turkey: "It cost me a fucking fortune to get the exposure I should have been getting for free" and "On their last tour, when I wasn't in charge, people came to see them the way they come to a car wreck to see the remains. I'll tell you what the problem was, they weren't fucking hungry any longer."

Pop-music trade papers gloated over the decline and fall of his relationship with Grand Funk, three young men who are currently suing Knight for more than $8,000,000 and are being sued by him and others in turn for $56,000,000. Hip young writers delved into every detail of the separation and divorce with such smarmy self-righteousness that Louella Parsons must have belched in her grave. Why? Because, man, Grand Funk was boondock rock! I mean, like, those dudes couldn't even play Tea for Two and they were grossing, like, $50,000 a night, man, just for balling their guitars in front of spaced-out teeny-boppers. That's why. Dig it?

Yet let it never be said that Knight, the engineer of Grand Funk Railroad, did not give rock critics something to hate. And it may now come as a mild surprise to these critics and their readers to learn that Knight had it calculated all the way. In fact, he ran only bad reviews of the group in his ads. He reasoned that kids were always being lied to and would take the reviews as a hype. He refused to let G. F. R. appear on television, he refused to allow them to be interviewed; in short, he turned aesthetic hostility into a massive financial success. Amazingly, he did it without much air time. It was all part of the master plan--a case study in superb music promotion--and it all began when he got a call one winter night from three musician friends who were playing a gig on Cape Cod and eating snow to stay alive. That was 1968. Knight, himself poor, fronted them a little money, then listened to their music. "I didn't know whether I liked it or I hated it," he recalls. But something told him it would sell if properly packaged--experience, perhaps, for Knight had put in time as a Detroit disc jockey in his early 20s and had developed a commercial ear. Consigning a sizable chunk of G.F.R.'s earnings to himself, he choreographed the group's stage act from start to finish. When histrionic performer Jimi Hendrix died, he realized that "there was a gap here" and he determined that one of the group would fill that gap by ripping off his vest during each gig, kneeling on the stage and feigning intercourse with his Fender. (Eventually, the musician would object that it got his pants dirty and would refuse to copulate; Knight would offer to launder his pants for him after every performance, but by then nothing would ease the tension.)

Knight wanted Grand Funk to be "bigger than life." They were actually three farm boys from Michigan with lots of ambition and not much talent, but when they were hungry they listened well, and Knight told them enough about a stage presence to make them a highly salable commodity. Having done that, he then went out and spent several months pounding on doors to get them a record contract. Then he talked Capitol Records into putting up $250,000 to promote their first album.

Knight is a very persuasive person. Intense. Deceptively boyish. And very good at hard-nosed pitching. But if you work for him, listen and don't talk back. Because he has a ... concept. He understands society and its relationship to cultural trends, and you will be part of it--a leader of it, in fact--if you pay attention.

"What I say to record executives is, 'Fuck truth and honesty and being cool and sitting on your ass behind a desk, figuring out what kids are gonna listen to in Omaha!' When I want to know, I go to Omaha, I get out among the people. I have to be on the street. On the street I learned that after any national catastrophe, like the first Kennedy assassination, there will be a swing toward fun escapist entertainment. After 1963 it was the Beatles singing I want to Hold Your Hand. Then what happened? The Beatles grew introspective. Vietnam. Another cycle of depression, so I put together Grand Funk, a totally escapist group, and they played tocapacity houses wherever they went. In one month in 1969, we played 23 dates. They put on a great show. I mixed the sound from the middle of the audience. I made it incredibly loud. Why? Because it's a fact that loud music affects the fluid in the inner ear and creates a sense of euphoria and you go home from a concert feeling stoned. That's why."

Did it work? Christ, did it work. Thanks to his inner-ear awareness, Knight's income now increases by $1,000,000 every 90 days, according to The Wall Street Journal. He invested wisely, he observes. "I exist as an entertainment complex today--including a limousine company, two publishing companies, a movie company in partnership with Twiggy and a new record company, Brown Bag."

While he was running Grand Funk's railroad, he never let the boys read their awful reviews, he isolated them from the public and spread their faces over two blocks of billboard in Times Square, among other places. When they grew up, they learned that they were disdained as schlock musicians and they freaked. Now Knight has moved on, with Brown Bag, to promote new groups--first Mom's Apple Pie and, more recently, Faith. He has saturated the news media with press releases informing one and all that Faith members must remain anonymous. Only their thumbprints appear on the recording contract. They're photographed from behind, naked to the waist. Their arms are interlocked. Could they be ... queer? Who are these gay and nameless blades?

Knight is telling no one, not even those who couldn't care less. He has launched yet another assault on the musical tastes of young America, and rewards are sure to follow. He's been to Omaha; he should know.

Like many other promoters, Knight refuses to socialize with his groups. "I never lower myself to their level," he says. "Nothing personal, it's professional discipline. When you get too close, you begin to listen to excuses." But groups are not really where Knight is at. It's promotion that gets him off. Not to mention 9000 units of vitamin E twice a day. If there is any challenge left, it is purely one of status. "It would please me to convince the people with muscle in the industry that I am not a bullshit hype. If they would pay attention the way I have, it would make the word promoter taste a hell of a lot better to me and everyone else."

• • •

In the lavishly furnished rotunda of a boathouse lodge fast by a lake in Orlando, Florida, a black woman on an improvised stage breaks down and sobs: "My parents took my baby from me when I joined the organization and my husband left me and my friends wouldn't have nothing to do with me, 'cause they thought I was crazy, too ... but I'm gonna show 'em, so help me, God and Glenn Turner, I'm gonna dare to be great if it kills me!"

The audience of 100 women rises to its feet. Cheering. Shouting. Stamping: "GO! GO! GO!" The black woman brushes away tears, a look of defiant selfconfidence sweeps over her features. She is one of thousands, millions now, who have been caught up in one of America's most incredible evangelistic movements, a lapel-tugging, hard-sell, beat-the-bushes sales Gospel whose followers worship at the shrine of a man with a harelip, a toupee, false teeth, boots fashioned from the skin of unborn calves, red double-knit straight-legged suits and legal actions pending against him in 46 states of the Union.

The unstoppable Glenn W. Turner comes about as close to being a workingclass hero as anyone in recent memory. We created him, America, now we don't quite know what to do with him. He has pitched himself into the hearts and minds of the proletariat; has won fame, fortune and a devoted following by twisting and warping the Horatio Alger myth out of shape. "You know what's wrong with the world?" he yells. "We're too dignified!" (Cheering) "Who says you got to go to college? I come into the world with a harelip, the son of a sharecropper, I never got past the eighth grade and I'm driving an Eldorado!" (Cheering) "You know why? 'Cause I was stupid, that's why! I didn't know you was supposed to go to school, then wait six years. I made a profit my first month! And I'll teach you to be stupid just like me!" (Wild applause)

A failed sewing-machine salesman, Turner six years ago borrowed $5000 from a bank to start his own cosmetic company. He brought in 23 recruiters and sold $1,000,000 worth of distributorships even before he found a full line of products to distribute. He wasn't worried. The worst he could do was go broke. "Going broke," he reckons, "is just like brushing your teeth. You have to do it a few times to get over your fear of failure. Sure I made mistakes. I bought sixtyseven years' worth of eyebrow pencil from a manufacturer 'cause nobody told me better ... but I put errors out of mind, and so can you!"

It's the same exhilarating pitch wherever Turner, 39, travels in his Convair 880. He runs down the aisle, leaps up onto the stage, pulls off his suit coat, loosens his tie, throws off his boots, Jumps up onto a chair. "Fake it till you make it," he cries. "GO! GO! GO!"

The audience does go. It goes crazy with the heat and fever of promised success. Chimney sweeps, chambermaids, midgets, cabdrivers, hash slingers--" real folk"--they come think and fast to hear Turner's hustle; many leave a few thousand dollars leaner; they have taken the plunge, have signed up and paid their money to join Turner's Koscot Interplanetary Cosmetics as "distributors." What they get in return for their checks puzzles and upsets law-enforcement agencies everywhere. But at the moment, it doesn't matter. Turner is about to mount the stage in the rotunda. The women he will speak to are salesladies in many of his corporations, which now number 70; some sell cosmetics; some sell self-motivation courses; all are frantic with delight at being invited to his Orlando "clinic" for a week of instruction; they are, in his words, "jacked up." Way up. One has called Turner's organization "Christianity in action" to a healthy round of applause. Others have cried, kissed, hugged.

Now, Glenn: At leisure he plays the informal host--no flaming-red croupier's suit tonight: Levis rolled up over his boots, a captain's hat, a polo shirt. He talks about himself, about how he felt clumsy in public in the early days but soon got to where he could make tears flow. The checks started coming in. "If it all collapses on me tomorrow, so what? I'll pick up and start again," he says. Later he reads from a poem given to him by one of the young ladies in attendance. "The poem I want to read to you is If by Rudolph Kipling," he announces. Rudolph? Occasionally, like a nervous friend, his lack of formal education betrays him. Turner likes what Rudolph has to say, he analyzes the verse line by line. Two hours later, the bleary-eyed women file out. Turner and his charming wife, Alice, shake all hands. In three days he will be in Venezuela, then Puerto Rico, then Malaysia ... Mexico ... Italy ... spreading the word around the globe. Jacking them up. Putting down the corporate ethic of hard labor, low wages and a gold watch at the end of 50 years. It's out there for the asking. Go get it. I did. "I took two lemons--my speech impediment, my harelip--and I turned them into lemonade. You can, too."

In recent years, Turner's sales methods have been called "a cancerous vice," a "Frankenstein," "an enormous fraud" by Federal and state authorities. They involve "multilevel distributorships" if you like them, "pyramid sales" if you don't. In either case, it will--or would have, until Turner's most recent round of legal hassles--cost you up to $5000 to buy the right to sell his products--which now include wigs, pink fur coats and mink-oil body lotion--and the first thing you did when you paid up was go out and try to sell someone else a distributorship for a hefty commission, and the first thing he would then do ... and so it went. The problem with chain letters is that they seldom work. Sometimes you don't even get back the price of your stamp. But in spite of the odds, many Koscot converts turned a handsome profit. At its inception, Turner's organization was riddled with sloppy management: no defined sales territories, no exclusive sales areas, no logical chain of command, no way of controlling head-hunters who stormed people in the streets for their check. Complaints flooded the offices of attorneys general. They set out to cramp Turner's style; and the vengeance with which they have attacked the man suggests that they see more at issue than consumer protection. For as long as greed has flourished, others have bilked, cajoled and coerced under the corporate ethic of sanitized larceny. That's what lobbyists are for. Today others operate with official blessings in areas of merchandising more marginal than Turner's, but few corporate heads have been so bold as to preach heresy in the church of establishment success. Governmental agencies, so it seems, are paternalistic toward the uneducated; they will feed them and find them menial jobs as long as they keep their place. If they start driving Eldorados, they must be either pimps, gangsters or dope dealers. The idea that they, too, might have a right to succeed on the basis of their own initiative and hustle offends, infuriates and boggles the mind. There is something goddamn ... revolutionary ... about this concept.

A bastard child of capitalism, Turner sells these have-nots the confidence to play at the Horatio Alger myth. Far from being a cynical crook, he demonstrates a genuine love for them and is, for instance, a leading employer of the handicapped in Florida. A magnificent salesman, he also happens to be a miserable business administrator. Surrounding him is a crew of subordinates who display little of his warmth, openness or sympathy for the meek. They look, act and carry on like a hard-nosed corps of mercenary soldiers; and Turner, who is a genius at inspiring his troops, is so shaky on troop deployment that he has in the past allowed them to run amuck, plundering neighborhoods at will. Civil suits have cost him a small fortune in legal fees alone. Attempting to extricate himself, Turner recently relinquished control of his companies and now functions primarily as a consultant. He has worked out a tentative agreement with civil plaintiffs to the tune of $4,700,000 in liquidated funds, turning over this amount to an independent holding company. Its negotiable stock will be issued to those who got burned and want their money back.

Under similar duress, lesser men might be expected to retreat from the wars of commerce. Not Turner; he has set about to advance in yet another direction. Within 18 months he plans to open 1000 "mind spas" throughout the country. "These are just like health spas," he explains, " 'cept we're gonna exercise and develop the mind. It's a place where you can go and jack up your attitude for twenty-five dollars a month. We're callin' it Welcome to Our World. There's no pyramid sales involved. I had my fill of that."

Despite their eagerness to quash his activities, few states have any statute against multilevel selling. And Turner, despite his defiant nature, has worked hard to clean up his operation. Too late, perhaps: In May, a Federal mail-fraud indictment was handed down against him by the Post Office, the IRS briefly locked up his Sand Lake facility and, a month later, he was arrested in Germany, facing extradition to Britain on charges of fraud.

About these and other adversities he remains philosophical. "When you're the fastest gun in the West, everybody's always trying to draw on your" And in a more meditative analogy: "When a feller reaches for the sun, he's bound to get a few blisters."

Blisters, guns, civil and criminal suits--all impart the same advice: If you sense in yourself a talent for promotion, do it, but go easy on administration. Chances are you'll be terrible at it and will suffer the consequences of overreaching ambition. Turner may still do himself in. If he isn't in jail or otherwise occupied at the time, he plans to run for President in 1980. He says he would legalize marijuana but hang smugglers who try to bring it into the country illegally. There are other inconsistencies in his plat form; they may bother you, but they don't bother Turner. It will all work out. "God." he confides, "has programmed my computer." Looking up past the turrets of his $3,000,000 Orlando castle, he smiles.

• • •

Jay Bernstein, the world's most successful young show-business public-relations man, has just taken delivery on one of the world's most expensive automobiles, a Stutz Blackhawk. For this hand-tooled Italian touring car he paid $37,000, the expense of which presented no problem. The difficulties set in when Bernstein tries to understand why he bought it. He already owns a customized Fleetwood. After one spin around the block on Sunset Strip, where his office is located, he takes his driver aside and asks: "Jack, what will I use this car for?" It is a solemn inquiry.

The driver reflects. "Well," he explains, "you'll use it for ... pleasure." Bernstein sighs mournfully and climbs back inside.

At 35, Bernstein has reached the top of his profession, and he has managed to do so at least in part by avoiding pleasure at all costs, except where it happens to coincide with business. He safaris with client Bill Holden in Africa, kayaks with client Isaac Hayes in Hawaii, sport fishes with client Susan Hayward off the Bahamas. Dozens of framed color photographs on his office walls bear witness to these excursions, and proudly he takes a visitor on a guided tour, jabbing at each one with a long-bladed dagger. "Here I am with Susan ... with Isaac ... now over here are my TV Guide covers, just a few of the clients I've had on the front ... and over here are some of the Nielsen ratings I helped achieve, and--

The visitor remarks that the dagger Bernstein uses as a pointer is a Balinese kris, a ritualized weapon of great significance in the Hindu religion. Bernstein suddenly turns. "You like it? Here, it's yours. I insist, take it, I have another one at home."

Upon closer inspection, it develops that the kris has a cigarette lighter embedded in the butt end of the handle. The visitor makes an earnest effort to refuse. Too late. Bernstein loves to give things away, has probably given away everything in his possession that anyone has ever paused to admire.

What he has given away free to one of his newest clients, Mark Spitz, is open to speculation. The fee for his professional advice is not: It is definitely costing Spitz a cool $12,000 a year and it will cost you the same, unless you happen to be the sponsor of a TV special employing Bernstein to ensure good ratings, in which case it will set you back $25,000 per shot.

And what in hell do you get for all this money? You get Oklahoma-born Jay and his staff of 42 dynamo flacks hustling you press and media coverage when you want it, and non coverage when you might want that even more. If you are a celebrity and you get arrested on a messy morals charge, for instance, Jay will use his contacts to get the arrest buried deep inside the morning newspaper; when and if you get acquitted, the news will make page one. If, as a celebrity, you get picked up in a riot and hauled off to jail, Jay might very well smuggle a camera into your cell, slip it around your neck and have a reporter send out a story over the wires explaining how you were mistakenly arrested as a rioter while photographing location shots for your next film.

These are but a few of the services he has provided in the line of duty. When the major Hollywood studios collapsed, they abandoned their elaborate publicity departments, whose energies had been concentrated on protecting the stars and the public from one another. Enter Jay Bernstein, independent PR man, ready and waiting to pick up the slack. You and I may be convinced that the star system is dead, but Hollywood isn't. It still maintains its lines of defense and its anachronistic belief in projecting an image. Bernstein knows all about projecting an image. He's terrific at it. Needless to say, he's a millionaire.

The son of a wealthy department-store owner, Jay refused to be carried along into the family business. As a youth, he earned spending money by shoveling dung out of Oklahoma outhouses. Eventually, he moved West to break into showbiz, got fired from a couple of jobs and sank his last $400 into his own PR firm.

Today, ten years later, it costs him $80,000 a month "just to keep the lights on."

"I've created a monster I can't get out of," he confides, pausing to spray Binaca into his mouth. Two squirts later he continues: "I'm a computer, I run my organization by electronics. I've got to have efficiency or I'm dead, it's the nature of the business."

Efficiency is as close at hand as the little transistorized beeper that each member of his staff is required to wear at all times. He can be beeped on a golf course, in bed with his old lady, anywhere day or night. When a PR man's services are needed, Bernstein explains, they are needed now. "I don't tolerate failure. We're the Green Berets of the public-relations industry, and I try to run my firm just like a general. My employees are units, I don't have time to be nice to them. I don't want to hear about their personal problems. I have a house rabbi and a house priest for that. I am totally dedicated, ninety-five percent of my time is spent in my business, I demand the same from people who work for me. It's the only way I can survive. For example, I know exactly how much time I have at night to get my sleep. I'm a bachelor, I have Jack drive my date home at midnight. Now, if I should wake up at four in the morning and have to open my eyes to look at the clock, it would take me a long while to fall back to sleep. So I've had a clock built beside my bed that's operated by a button. If I wake up now, I keep my eyes closed, I push the button and the clock speaks. It says 'Four-thirty-seven' and I fall asleep immediately. See?"

It is easy to see but difficult to behold. In an age of practiced lassitude among rich young men, Jay Bernstein is out there hustling like a Turk. In an age of sensitivity and humanistic concern, he insists on coldly impersonal relationships. Patton would have admired him, but Patton is dead. If Bernstein were not quite so candid--and, in an odd way, innocent--about himself and his career, he would be damned intolerable.

Yet he is as open as a child, and not in the least cynical. He understands media people better than they understand themselves. Backstage at a press conference with Spitz, he demonstrates his knowledge. ("Spitz is easy to work with. I say, 'Take the red pill, then the green pill,' and he takes them without any arguments.") As Spitz listens, Bernstein calmly instructs him on how to handle the press. "They'll be after your throat today," Jay tells him. "It's part of the trend. First they love you for winning medals, then they hate you for trying to make a living, and eventually they'll be back on your side again. But at the moment, expect the worst."

Five minutes later, Spitz gets it. He has come to announce his association with an outdoor-pool firm--"Money didn't have anything to do with it, I like the quality of their product." But the newsmen scoff at that. One says that Spitz seems to be endorsing everything except hemorrhoids. Spitz smiles. Another asks: "Is it true you plan to replace Flipper the Porpoise when he retires?" Spitz smiles again. Doesn't lose his cool. Doesn't kiss any asses, just stands there and parries these loaded questions with considerable skill. How? Only his press agent knows for sure, and throughout the press conference, Jay Bernstein never says a word.

• • •

Chicago, 1935: A man sits in a restaurant doodling on a napkin. He's read somewhere that 93 percent of American fathers buy skates for their children. Facts like this stick in his mind. What he would rather do is garden--he loves plants--but there's no money at the moment in geraniums and the country's in the midst of a Depression, so he's gone into sports promotion. He reasons: "Anything you're good at as a kid you'll stick with if there's an outlet." On his napkin he jots down some ideas on how to make roller skating work as a sports attraction. Where there's a wheel there's a way, if only he can find the angle. The angles turn out to be shaved off the corners of a looped track. He arranges to present the world's first roller-skating marathon at Chicago's Coliseum. People come to watch, they fall asleep in droves. The "Nightly Sprint to Nowhere" goes on the road. People fall asleep in Louisville, in Miami; promoter Leo Seltzer begins to lose faith. He doesn't know yet that he has invented one of America's two original sports--the other being basketball. All he knows is, he's losing money. Along comes Damon Runyon. He likes Seltzer's folly, and offers to help. Together they devise a set of rules to make the marathon into a contest, complete with winners, losers, heroes, villains, pratfalls, elbows, grunts, fights ... and female participants as well as male. "Empathy," says Seltzer, "it's got to have empathy." It does. He goes out and copyrights a name: Roller Derby. Now he owns a name and a sport that people will pay to see. "Everybody loves my game," he decides. "It gets rid of frustration."

Oakland, 1958: Nobody loves Leo's game any longer. On a good night it draws 200 fans into a 10,000-seat auditorium. There is plenty of leg room. Like Candide, Seltzer wanders back to his garden, wondering where he went wrong. Ten years earlier, Roller Derby and Milton Berle were the two hottest properties on television. They were, of course, almost the only properties, and soon became television's first victims of overexposure. Derby Queen Tuffy Brasuhn and other talents named Pee Wee, Bumper, Slugger and Bouncing Betty experienced a rapid dispiriting descent into obscurity. The Derby died on its tracks, never to roll again, it seemed.

But wait. Leo has a son, Jerry, who used to eat lots of paint chips and pencil lead and sofa strings as a kid. Somehow he survived his gastronomical habits and grew up to graduate from Northwestern's School of Business. Bored, he heads West, dabbles around the fringes of Roller Derby, which is like being on the fringe of a fringe, and discovers in himself, much to his amazement, an inherent gift for promotion. He revives his father's moribund idea and sets out to apply a few resuscitation techniques of his own device. In a deserted garage, he kinescopes the games and syndicates them to an Oakland TV station. Attendance picks up. Along comes video tape, a vast improvement over the fuzzy kinescope prints that made many viewers think they were watching Martians with acne. Jerry, son of Leo, capitalizes a parent company for $500, locates a sponsor and sends off a video-taped game to Portland, Oregon. At the end of the televised turbulence, the announcer asks, as an afterthought, "Would you like to see Roller Derby in Portland?" Hundreds write in. Seltzer books a game there. The track arrives but not the players, whose plane is grounded. Two hours late, they show up anyway. Nine thousand patient fans give them a standing ovation. Just for making the game. Seltzer knows he's got a hot one. There is nothing to do but expand.

By 1961 there are 40 TV stations carrying the Derby. "It hardly seems to be any sort of revelation now," Jerry will remark some years later, "but at the time I was stunned, for it suddenly occurred to me that there were no longer any boundaries as we had known them. As far as the great eye extends, people have the same interests." In the particular case of Roller Derby, these common interests include a zest for hoked-up violence, pseudo slaughter and calculated chaos. "I produce programs I wouldn't watch myself," Seltzer will also later remark. No cigarchomping carney reject, he carries himself with a style and elegance befitting the owner of a thoroughbred stable and uses part of his Roller Derby revenue to produce a film on ballet.

But his genius lies in promotion. He owns the leagues, players, skates, uniforms and concessions. He is forced to outbid no one but himself, and his players work for wages not far above their former salaries as secretaries, truck drivers, dishwashers, stevedores. They don't seem to mind. Roller Derby has quickly become the last rags-to-riches Hollywood myth: They seek fame more than fortune, a shot at glory. "They're all escaping from something," Seltzer reveals. Famous or not, Roller Derby stars arrive early to put up the track they will skate on, and they go back later to pull it down. There are no pretentions other than to entertain. Seltzer, 41, insists on a lighthearted approach. Sitting in his Oakland office, he manipulates his television shows to draw fans for live performances; he institutes a concept of regional home teams that small-town blue-collar audiences can identify with; he puts his stars in direct contact with his fans; he shortens the tracks, spruces up the uniforms, adds cities to his off-season touring schedule and prospers.

Oakland, 1973: Twenty million people now watch Seltzer's Roller Derby on television, 5,000,000 pay to see it live each year. Fifty-thousand paid to see one game in Chicago, 17,000 at Madison Square Garden, 35,000 at the Oakland Coliseum. Some sportswriters now refer to Jerry Seltzer as "the finest promotional mind in professional sports." Others go out of their way to ignore him. Two years ago, Seltzer attempted to buy The Golden Seals' National Hockey League franchise. He had the money but not the reputation. One N. H. L. owner fell asleep as Seltzer made his presentation. "I knew we were in trouble when nobody bothered to wake him up," Seltzer recalls. "They called me a hippodrome promoter' and they gave the franchise to Charley Finley. He's already tried to sell out. I won't touch it now."

Is he bitter, then? "Sometimes the lack of personal recognition among my peers bothers me. In Roller Derby, I didn't start with the most palatable subject. Look at me today. I could fool anybody. My strength is conceptual--putting our teams on tour, for instance. Execution, forget it. I have a staff for that. I don't like to do something the same way twice, it's a personal quirk, and it can tend to drive you batty if you work for me. Are Roller Derby games fixed? No, not exactly, but let's put it this way: You pick a team in any game, I'll bet against you and win. The fans don't care, they come for the noise, the color, the body contact. We don't take ourselves seriously; everybody can see us for the sham we are."

Seltzer smiles broadly. Behind him on the wall of his plush office, he and P. T. Barnum stare nose to nose in cameo caricature. "My secret," says Seltzer, "is that I know how to use people." He leans forward to shake the hand of an Inquiring Writer. "I'm using you, I hope you realize that."

Oh, dem promoters, they sure know how to close a deal.