Starmaker : Life as a Hollywood Publicist with Farrah, the Rat Pack & 600 More Stars Who Fired Me - Softcover

Jay Bernstein; Larry Cortez Hamm; David Rubini

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770410120 ISBN 13: 9781770410121

Publisher: ECW PRESS, 2011

Synopsis

His women were 10s, his guns were .38s and his collection of jewel-encrusted walking sticks numbered in the hundreds. For nearly 50 years, Jay Bernstein was a Hollywood fixture - owning one of the most powerful PR firms in the district, making stars of Farrah Fawcett and Suzanne Somers and producing dozens of television films and series. The dandy dresser was never without custom-tailored clothes, a cane, a loaded gun and the most important accessory of all - a young, beautiful woman on his arm. Starmaker is Bernstein's behind-the-scenes look at his life.

About this title

About the Author

Jay Bernstein was one of the most famous publicists in Hollywood history, whose creative PR stunts made him almost as famous as his clients. Writer and Hollywood historian Larry Cortez Hamm was born and raised in Vernon, Texas. Hamm ghostwrote and sold dozens of books, screenplays, treatments, and newspaper and magazine articles. Buyers of Hamm's written work included Walt Disney and Paramount Studios.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Starmaker

Life as a Hollywood Publicist with Farrah, the Rat Pack & 600 More Stars who Fired Me

By Jay Bernstein, Larry Cortez Hamm, David Rubini

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Larry Cortez Hamm
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77041-012-1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO THE HOLLYWOOD JUNGLE

A couple of years ago, I was in a clothing store across from Morton's Restaurant, the famous celebrity watering hole and eatery in West Hollywood. It was near dusk on a beautiful, Indian summer day. I was killing time before a dinner engagement, watching the pretty girls and shopping for nothing when a woman's voice called out, "Jay!"

I looked; it was Kathy Hilton of the hotel Hiltons.

Back in the nineties, when I was married, my wife and I used to double-date with Kathy and Rick. We'd meet them for dinner. My wife was a social climber and it meant everything to her to be able to tell her friends, "Oh, the Hiltons joined us last night at Spago," as if the Hiltons gave a damn.

The relationship between the Hiltons and the Bernsteins was brief. I was married for about thirty seconds. Meanwhile, Kathy and Rick, once a noted couple on the social circuit of Beverly Hills, Manhattan and other hotspots of media interest, had succumbed to age and maturity: they were known now as the parents of Paris and Nicky.

Kathy and I chatted a moment about old times, of which neither of us remembered much, and then she said, "Jay, why don't you manage Paris?"

I hardly knew who Paris was—this was before her sexploitation video—and what little I knew about her came from the scandal sheets, which meant I knew nothing. She and her sister were yellow-journalism fodder because they were rich and their name was Hilton.

"What's Paris up to?" I asked.

Kathy gave me an update. Paris had done this and she was going to do that. I was intrigued. My claim to fame was managing entertainment careers, optimizing the potentials of would-be stars. I had three criteria garnered from decades of experience: 1) a client had to have talent, 2) she had to have a physical quality that appealed to me personally, and 3) she had to have a vehicle, a platform from which a career could be launched.

Suddenly Kathy said, "Paris! Paris! Come here!"

Paris came. She was not a naturally beautiful girl, but she had exotic features that were somehow attractive.

"This is Jay Bernstein, the starmaker," explained Kathy. "He created Farrah Fawcett and—"

"I didn't create anyone," I interrupted. "I guided them through the showbiz jungle. I took them from a level six to a level ten." It was my pat explanation, partly true, partly false.

The truth was, in my prime I had a Midas touch. If I said to someone, "This one's gonna be a star!" they didn't argue with me.

What I said, however, was unimportant, because Paris was in her own world. I watched her. She puffed a cigarette like an automaton. Her blue eyes darted about, often to her own reflection in a big mirror on the wall, as her mother spoke.

I had no idea if Paris had talent, but talent is only one ingredient in the recipe for stardom. She was like a nervous bird fluttering her wings; not a beautifully plumed cardinal or blue jay, more like a sparrow. Her attention span was so short she could hardly finish a laugh. She had no redeeming quality that appealed to me. What she had was a television reality show, a vehicle. Unfortunately, reality shows seldom showcase star appeal; they are dumbing-down endeavors, reaching for the lowest common denominator of an audience.

Kathy kept talking. Paris kept smoking and looking at herself in the mirror. Her resumé sounded as empty as a vacuum. She reminded me of Zsa Zsa Gabor, whom I had represented many years before as her publicist. Zsa Zsa had been married to the Hilton, Conrad, Paris's great-grandfather. But Zsa Zsa had never been a star, only a celebrity famous for being famous.

While Kathy kept talking, Paris fluttered her wings and flew away. She wasn't interested in being managed; in her mind she was a star already. Just read the tabloids. Her name was Hilton, and that seemed enough, along with her inheritance, to sustain her image.

I bid Kathy adieu and went on my merry way. I never knew if she was just being friendly or if she was serious about my managing Paris's career, but it made no difference. I didn't think Paris had what stardom required. She was certainly no Farrah Fawcett. In her prime, Farrah had gained icon status—a role model recognized around the world. Through unbelievably hard work and self-sacrifice, Farrah had become a star fixed luminously in the firmament. I suspected Paris was more of a comet, coming and going from time to time, but still no more than a flash in the sky.

Farrah ...

Her name always came up. At its birth, Farrah-mania swept over the entire world like nothing seen since Elvis or the Beatles. From her beautiful blue eyes to her long, golden feathered hair, pearly white smile and sweet demeanor. She had a drop-dead gorgeous figure and possessed the type of over-the-top sex appeal that was fresh, exciting and internationally contagious. Women wanted to be her, and men wanted to marry her, not just sleep with her. Even the young actors and wannabes of the nineties and beyond were aware of Farrah, and this in an era when the longevity of a star seemed to rarely exceed Andy Warhol's proverbial fifteen minutes.

As her personal manager, I put together all the things I had learned along the way to finally do what I had originally come out here for—to be involved in creating Hollywood heroes and heroines.

There had been a time when the names Farrah Fawcett and Jay Bernstein were synonymous. And Suzanne Somers was often mentioned in the same breath. Farrah and Suzanne. I had created them, so it was said. Those were tough days, halcyon only in retrospect—my clients and I seemingly pitted against the world.

But there were many others. William Holden and Susan Hayward. Nick Adams and Robert Conrad. Sammy Davis, Jr., and Aretha Franklin. Robert Culp, Gig Young, Dionne Warwick, Angie Dickinson, Tom Jones, Peter Fonda, Charlotte Rampling, Linda Evans, Catherine Hicks, Tatum O'Neal—six hundred in all, spanning four generations of show business. And ultimately all of them had fired me. My glib explanation for termination was simple but true: "I took them where the air was rarified, they became deified, and then I was nullified."

Fired six hundred times, but I'm still smiling. In most cases I accomplished what I set out to do. I did it by replacing an effete studio system that collapsed in the 1960s—when one man had to assume the role of two dozen specialists the studios no longer provided. For my clients, I became head of wardrobe, style and fashion. I took over publicity for them when the studio publicity departments switched from promoting stars to promoting movies. I guided careers as Harry Cohn, Louis Mayer and Darryl Zanuck had once done as moguls of their respective star factories. None of it was easy, but I did it, and no one can take away my accomplishments.

I was a maverick by necessity, not by choice. Had I not been, people never would have heard of Farrah Fawcett and dozens of other names. Some established stars would have continued to run in place, never advancing. To my clients I was Sir Lancelot; to studio and network executives I was Darth Vader. In the early years it was not easy to be a split personality. I wanted to be popular, loved by all. Then I realized that Hollywood was divided like any industry: it was management versus labor. In most cases, I took the side of labor, the actors and entertainers.

Stars represented glamour to me. They portrayed heroes that gave young people direction and made life meaningful. They were America's role models. When bottom-line corporations gobbled up the studios, I became determined to keep glamour in the industry and stars as heroes. Jay Bernstein—one man against the system.

When I was growing up in Oklahoma City, I was the fattest kid in my class. I had no coordination. I couldn't climb a fence because of my weight; I couldn't do a single chin-up at the bar. I was a total failure athletically, yet my parents thought I should participate in sports: football, basketball and baseball. After school I was supposed to go to practice. I didn't. I caught a bus and went to a movie. Not once did my parents question my whereabouts. They never asked me why I didn't have to show up for a game. I figured they thought my athletic prowess was so negligible that at practice I was nothing more than a punching bag for the real athletes.

Movies became my life. I found my heroes through stars on the big screen: Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, John Wayne, Tyrone Power, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, James Stewart and, most of all, Alan Ladd. I tried to look like Ladd, talk like him. I became a kid version of Alan Ladd. By the time I graduated high school I had seen Shane seventeen times. I could recite the lines of every actor in the movie as they were being spoken. Alan Ladd was not just an actor named Alan Ladd, he was Shane. And Clark Gable was Rhett Butler, Errol Flynn was Robin Hood, and Gary Cooper was Sergeant York.

Westerns were my favorite genre. When I was fourteen, I was still acting out hero roles in front of a mirror in my bedroom. I had two cowboy hats, a white one and a black one, and two holstered toy six-shooters. Wearing my white hat cocked at a rakish angle, I would say into the mirror, "I want you out of town by sundown," and then I would switch hats. "I ain't goin' nowhere, Sheriff."

When I got carried away in my fantasy, my mother would call up to my room, "Jay, who's up there with you?"

"Nobody, Mother!"

"Don't lie to me! I hear voices other than yours."

"I'm talking to myself!"

"It doesn't sound like you."

My mother was incapable of understanding my fixation on heroes. She thought celluloid idols were for suckers. I was too young to express what I perceived intuitively: heroes were necessary. Kids needed role models who stood for something good in society, who fought injustice and villains. The actions of my heroes caused me to forget the mundane aspects of my life. To me, movies were the new literature of the masses. They made me forget I was fat.

I first visited Hollywood when I was twelve. I was with my parents and my sister. For them it was a vacation; for me it was serious business.

Hollywood. The word stirred my imagination. It conjured images of glamour, ideas of gallantry and action, and a variety of abstractions, good, bad and sometimes confusing. Hollywood—the dream factory. It was everything ... but it could be nothing.

In 1949, the real Hollywood, the suburb of Los Angeles from which the motion-picture industry derived its name, was a town already gone seedy. At one end of Hollywood Boulevard was Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where the handprints and footprints were; at the other end was the Brown Derby Restaurant, where stars still lunched and dined. Between the two points you might as well have been in Kansas City. In the minds of most people, Hollywood was no longer a town; it was an idea, an all-encompassing term that meant motion pictures. Hollywood was about images you saw on a screen in a darkened auditorium that you paid to enter. It was about American royalty, like Carole Lombard and Clark Gable.

My mother's sister was an advance press agent for road plays like Don Juan in Hell and John Brown's Body. She had enough clout to get passes for my family to Paramount Studios, where we watched Alan Ladd flub twenty takes before he got it right in a scene for Appointment with Danger. Jack Webb and Henry Morgan played the villains, a turnabout from their later roles as two of television's most famous cops in Dragnet.

Watching Alan Ladd walk up to a water cooler and say one line the wrong way nineteen times was startling. Movies were not easy to make, and there were all those specialists on the set—cameramen, gaffers, grips, makeup people—it was mind-boggling for an impressionable youth, but magical, too.

Once my sister Jan and I were walking down one of the near-empty studio streets. A man rode toward us on a bicycle. He pulled up and stopped. "Hi, kids, I saw you on my set."

My heart leaped to my throat. He was Alan Ladd. It was one of the few times in my life I was speechless. I was so thrilled that I don't remember the ensuing conversation, but it had to be good, for Alan Ladd could do no wrong; he could flub fifty takes for all I cared! He gave me his autograph. My mind was made up: I wanted to be Alan Ladd, King of Paramount.

By the time I made my second trip to Hollywood, in 1953, I had suffered appendicitis, had an operation and lost weight. I could see my ribs for the first time. I could do one hundred chin-ups. I was Shane.

Then something happened. We went to Twentieth Century-Fox, where we saw a very young Robert Wagner in period tights acting in the title role of Prince Valiant. I got his autograph and those of other members of the cast—James Mason, Sterling Hayden and Victor McLaglen. I now had over one hundred star signatures in my autograph book, but something significant had happened: I didn't think I would like wearing tights.

Almost every young person who goes to Hollywood to pursue a career is running away from something; usually it's either a dysfunctional family or poverty. For me it was the threat of living a simple life of boredom in Oklahoma. It was also my mother. My problems with her were congenital. They reached the first of many peaks when I was in the fourth grade. Someone at school explained to me what the middle-finger sign meant. Fascinated with this newfound knowledge, I told my sister, who was three years younger than me. She told my mother, who slipped a note under my bedroom door telling me to leave and never come back. I was ten years old. I went downstairs, got a handful of kitchen matches, went back upstairs, and burned up my bedroom.

Fastidious was my mother's modus operandi; everything had to be perfect. While my room was going up in flames, she went to the kitchen and washed the dishes before calling the fire department. She didn't want firemen seeing dirty dishes when they arrived. Everything in the house had to be in an exact position, from pictures to chairs. She was a perfectionist, the gene of which I inherited. Her father had been extremely wealthy when she was young, but he lost his fortune during the Depression. In the time of plenty my mother spent two years in a finishing school at Lausanne, Switzerland, where the students were trained to marry French nobility. She beat into me the princess training etiquette she had learned abroad, like which of fourteen forks you use to eat spinach or what knife you use to cut asparagus. I resented the training, but it came in handy later down the road when I began to manage female stars.

When I moved permanently to Hollywood in 1960, I had no idea how my life would unfold. I knew nothing about movies except what I saw on the screen and read in magazines. I was a fish out of water, looking for someplace to swim. I was twenty-two, a college graduate, and a "six-month wonder" as a recently separated junior officer from the United States Army. I considered myself the Playboy of the Western World. My major had been history, from which I learned one truth: history does repeat itself. If an unknown John Doe could be successful in Hollywood, then so, too, could Jay Bernstein.

From Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana I went home to Oklahoma City. I had a scattered knowledge of literature, and after two weeks I realized Thomas Wolfe was right: "You can't go home again." Fourteen days in Indian Territory seemed an eternity of nothingness. I didn't even see an Indian; I suspected they were all in Hollywood.

I packed my bags and took off. I wanted to befriend Alan Ladd and find my niche in show business. I didn't know what I was going to do—only that I was not going to pursue an acting career. My thoughts had transcended the embarrassment of wearing tights. The male lead in a motion picture was always handsome; he received first screen credit. The female lead got second credit. The second male lead got third credit. I didn't think I was handsome enough to become a top star and I wasn't going to be third in anything.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Starmaker by Jay Bernstein, Larry Cortez Hamm, David Rubini. Copyright © 2011 Larry Cortez Hamm. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: ECW PRESS
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1770410120
• ISBN 13: 9781770410121
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 354