The Father of Spin: Edward I. Bernays and the Birth
of Public Relations
By Larry Tye
Crown Publishers
(C) 1998 Larry Tye
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-517-70435-8
CONTENTS
Preface
1 Starting with Symbols
2 Lighting Up America
3 The Big Think
4 Setting the Spin
5 Rationale for a Profession
6 Getting Personal
7 At the Office
8 Going to War
9 Uncle Sigi
10 The Cambridge Years
11 One Last Ride
12 A Question of Paternity
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
CHAPTER ONE
Starting with Symbols
1
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SECRET.
Eddie and Doris had settled on a modern marriage, one
that was more merger than old-fashioned romance and ritual. A coming-together
in the austere marriage chapel in the New York Municipal Building. No family or
friends to bear witness. No gown or tuxedo, no band or bouquet. Not even a
wedding ring--a symbol, to such freethinking youth in 1922, of the spousal
slavery they were determined to resist.
Even the timing was chosen with a concern for
privacy. As the bride and groom arrived, the city-issued clock registered five
minutes to noon, just moments before the chapel would close, almost ensuring
that, no matter how esteemed the couple, the nuptials would not be reported in
the next day's papers.
They'd already managed to hide their attachment from
colleagues at the publicity office they shared on Fifth Avenue. Eddie's family,
meanwhile, was so convinced of his commitment to bachelordom that, when his
sister married five years before, her husband assumed the name Bernays as the
only way to perpetuate a proud line in which Eddie was the only male heir. This
humble ceremony would clinch it, letting them spring the surprise some days or
weeks later, showing off their cunning and casualness.
In the end, however, all the stealth and subterfuge
were for naught, as the young publicity agent couldn't keep the secret, even if
it was his own marriage.
“Directly we reached the Waldorf-Astoria, where we
were to honeymoon, all desire for secrecy blew away like a mist in the sunny
breeze,” Doris recalled years later. “My husband grasped the telephone and
called hundreds of his most intimate friends to tell them about our secret
marriage.”
Some already knew, having read the matrimonial item
that an enterprising reporter had dug up for the paper that evening of
September 16. And the groom's father, who had long anticipated this occurrence,
had stashed a box of jewelry in a vault five years before with a letter marked “For
Doris, when she shall have married Edward.”
For those who were still in the dark, Eddie offered
up the sort of inspired strategy that was quickly becoming his trademark. He
persuaded his new bride to register with him at the Waldorf under her maiden
name. He knew this would trigger a policy that he as hotel PR man had
instituted where the press would immediately be notified of anything
newsworthy. In this case the news was of a married couple who were about to
occupy a suite recently vacated by the king and queen of Belgium and who had
signed in as “Edward L. Bernays and wife, Doris E. Fleischman.”
The result: headlines, here and overseas,
proclaiming, “This Bride Registers Under Her Maiden Name,” or, more simply, “Independent.”
More than 250 newspapers ran stories explaining how, for the first time, a
married woman had registered at the Waldorf with her husband, using a different
name, and the elegant old hotel had permitted it.
So much for their secret. But why save the surprise,
Eddie reasoned, when the marriage could become a major story now, one that
might help him, his hotel client, and the women's movement? “Doris didn't like
the publicity,” he acknowledged forty years later, “but I liked it. In
retrospect, I was crowing. I married the girl I loved, and everyone ought [to]
know about it. I was ego projecting, I supposed, and boasting about the woman I
had captured.
“Doris, overnight, had become the new symbol of
women's rights throughout the United States--and the world. But I really didn't
mind. In fact I liked it .... And as far as the Waldorf was concerned, they
liked it too, for here was an old hotel that stood for feminism in the public
mind, the most modern and contemporary of current ideas.”
* * *
Eddie had been polishing his powers of persuasion for
more than a decade by the time of his marital coup. He began, in a way, when he
stepped onto a lonely railroad platform on the flats of Cayuga Lake in 1908.
The decision to enroll at Cornell's august College of Agriculture had been a
joint one by his father, Ely, an ardent disciple of Teddy Roosevelt's
back-to-the-soil movement, and his mother, Anna, who worshiped nature. They
believed Cornell, with its scientific approach to farming and its remote
setting in the overgrown village of Ithaca, was just the place for Eddie to
sever his ties to Manhattan and learn to earn his living from the land.
But the roots never took. He was short and wiry,
while his farm-bred classmates were tall and strapping. He'd been raised in a
New York City brownstone and reared on the Broadway theater and on books. He
spent his summers at a spa near Wiesbaden or at an Adirondack Mountain retreat,
and when the weather turned cold he dug in to declensions in Latin, Greek, and
German. His fellow students-most of them, anyway--had sprung from the soil.
They were the kinds of boys who'd gone barefoot until November and ordered
their one pair of shoes from the Sears, Roebuck catalog; who knew the
agricultural life they were destined for because their parents and grandparents
had lived it; and who had no use for city boys or Jews although, except for
Eddie, they didn't know many of either.
His culture shock was even more pronounced in the
classroom. He stayed awake just enough to get passable grades in courses like
General Comparative Morphology and Physiology of Plants, Physiography of the
Campus and Immediate Vicinity, and Animal Husbandry, which involved “the
principles of feeding, care, selection and management of dairy and beef cattle,
sheep and swine.” Equally frustrating was how removed Cornell seemed from the
Progressive movement that was sweeping America at the turn of the century,
promising to bust up trusts, eliminate slums, reform corrupt cities, and
otherwise harness the runaway forces of industrialization and urbanization.
His disappointment was still evident fifty-three
years later when Eddie rendered his verdict on his higher education: “My three
and a half years at the Cornell University College of Agriculture gave me
little stimulation and less learning.”
As he stopped to reflect, however, he realized he had
learned more than he thought. There was his work on the Cornell Countryman,
which confirmed that he wasn't a gifted writer but could be a masterful
communicator. Membership in the Cosmopolitan Club had won him friends from
China, South Africa, Cuba, and other far-off nations he would someday work with,
while involvement in the theater and chorus taught him about actors and
singers, if not about acting and singing. And knowing he didn't fit in with
conventional thinking on campus got him accustomed to thinking
unconventionally, to operating at the edge and pushing the boundaries, which
became his trademark over a career that lasted more than eighty years.
As for his complaints about fellow students, he
managed to find enough attractive young women to let him indulge his growing
fascination with females. “Some of my few pleasant memories of Cornell,” he
conceded in his memoirs, “are my drives with coeds over snow-covered dirt roads
overlooking silvery Lake Cayuga, to the accompanying sound of horses' hoofs as
they crunched the packed snow.”
“Perhaps Cornell was the right place for me after
all,” he decided later, “because it furnished, in a negative way, a test for
aptitudes and adjustments .... I was looking for something that was not there
and found something better.”
Important insights, but they didn't make it any
easier for Eddie to decide what to do when Cornell handed him his degree in
February 1912. Trained in agriculture, but not wanting to dirty his hands on
another animal or plant, the twenty-year-old with the wavy mustache and
close-cropped hair accepted a professor's offer to write for the National
Nurseryman journal. He hadn't studied journalism but he'd practiced it in
grammar school, high school, and summer camp, as well as in college. And he
loved it now, relishing the way “German-American proprietors of nurseries in
Danville, New York, greeted me as if I were a rich uncle, inviting me to lunch
and dinner at their homes, where we discussed Goethe, Schiller, and fruit-tree
stock.” The job might have lasted if there'd been more time for Goethe and Schiller
and less need to come up with stories about apples, peaches, and pears.
From there he tried filling out bills of lading on
hay and oats at New York City's Produce Exchange, where his father worked. Then
he booked himself as supercargo on a freighter bound for Rotterdam and from
there made his way to Paris. The City of Light was indeed illuminating, letting
Eddie practice his French on coachmen, muse about life with waiters serving
aperitifs, and, best of all, stroll the narrow streets near the Place Vendome
with his latest amour, stopping occasionally “to embrace and kiss passionately.”
The problem, again, was work. For a time he tried decoding cables concerning
grain trades for the venerable Louis Dreyfus and Company, a job that proved
even more tedious than his previous posts.
His way out appeared by accident, and as he liked to
tell the story, “it all started with sex.”
Back in Manhattan after quitting his Paris job, Eddie
at first pined for Europe's charm and sophistication, dismissing New York as a “dirty
little village on the Hudson.” But he soon got caught up in the spirit of
Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, with its promise of rising economic opportunity
and falling cultural inhibitions. Although he was unemployed, his father's
success as a grain dealer let him settle in to a relatively carefree existence,
one where he could contemplate his future without worrying about it. Still, it
felt good to bump into an old friend like Fred Robinson when he boarded the
Ninth Avenue trolley on a brisk December morning in 1912.
Years earlier Fred and Eddie had been coeditors of
the school paper at Public School 184, and Fred's father had just turned over
to him two monthly journals he owned, the Medical Review of Reviews and the
Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette. Fred asked Eddie, “How'd you like to help me run
the Review and the Gazette?”
Eddie accepted the offer on the spot and began work
the next morning. Neither he nor Fred knew much about medicine or nutrition,
and neither had any real experience in publishing, unless you count the Echo at
P.S. 184. But both were ambitious and enterprising, which was all most
entrepreneurs of the era began with, and both were willing to do everything
from writing and editing to promotion and office errands. They used the Medical
Review to argue against women wearing corsets with stays and to encourage
shower baths; they published expert opinions on health controversies, a
relatively novel approach; and they tried something even newer to promote the
journal and its advertisers: distributing free copies to most of the 137,000
licensed physicians in the United States.
Their real break came two months after they joined
forces, when a doctor submitted a glowing review of Damaged Goods, a work by
French playwright Eugene Brieux. The play--about a man with syphilis who
marries, then fathers a syphilitic child--attacked the prevailing standards of
prudery. It was taboo back then to openly discuss sexually transmitted disease,
and even worse to talk about public health remedies, but Damaged Goods did
both.
Eddie and his partner published the doctor's
review--a bold step, given their conservative audience. Then they went a step
further. They'd read that Richard Bennett, a leading actor (and the father of
soon-to-be movie star Joan Bennett), was interested in producing Damaged Goods.
So Eddie wrote him, saying, “The editors of the Medical Review of Reviews
support your praiseworthy intention to fight sex-pruriency in the United States
by producing Brieux's play Damaged Goods. You can count on our help.”
Bennett quickly accepted the offer, pumping up the
young editor with visions of a crusade against Victorian mores, promising to
recruit actors who would work without pay and prodding him to raise money for
the production. Eddie was so excited that he volunteered to underwrite the production.
There were two problems with his generosity. He was
earning just $25 a week at the journals, and another $25 tutoring the scions of
fashionable New York families, and neither he nor his partner could conceive of
how they'd come up with the money to rent a theater and pay other expenses.
Even more imposing were the New York City censors who several years before had
shut down a George Bernard Shaw play about prostitution and who were not likely
to approve one that featured such frank treatment of syphilis.
Eddie took those hurdles as challenges. Anything
could be accomplished, he believed, if people could be made to see what looked
like an obstacle as an opportunity. All that was required was a bit of insight
into how people defined obstacles and opportunities, along with some creative
prodding to get them to rethink those definitions.
The key with Damaged Goods, he realized, was to
transform the controversy into a cause and recruit backers who already were
public role models. The twenty-one-year-old editor formed a Medical Review of
Reviews Sociological Fund Committee, then attracted members with an artful
appeal that played on Bennett's reputation as an artist as well as the
worthiness of battling prudishness. Among those who signed up were John D. Rockefeller
Jr., Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt Sr., Mr. and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dr.
William Jay Schieffelin, whose company had recently brought to America a
treatment for syphilis, and the Reverend John Haynes Holmes of New York's
Unitarian Community Church. Each committee member was asked to contribute four
dollars, which entitled him to one ticket, and many were asked for endorsements
designed to head off police intervention.
The committee was more effective than anyone dreamed.
Hundreds of checks poured in, and testimonials were offered by luminaries like
Rockefeller. “The evils springing from prostitution cannot be understood,” the
oil magnate said in a letter, “until frank discussion of them has been made
possible.” This was the first time that Eddie, or anyone else, had assembled
quite such a distinguished front group. And its success ensured not only that
he would use this technique repeatedly but also that it would continue to be
employed today, when it takes a detective to unmask the interests behind such
innocuous-sounding groups as the Safe Energy Communication Council
(antinuclear), the Eagle Alliance (pronuclear), and the Coalition Against
Regressive Taxation (trucking industry).
Damaged Goods, meanwhile, was a huge hit, presented
before overflow audiences in New York, then heading to the National Theater in
Washington and a performance before Supreme Court justices, members of the
president's cabinet, and congressmen from across the country. Its success at
the box office was even more impressive given that most reviewers agreed with
the New York American, which pronounced the play “dull and almost unendurable.”
What mattered more was that the production, in the words of one editorial on
March 15, 1913, made it strike “sex-o'clock in America”--precisely the note the
boy editors were aiming for.
Bernays and Robinson dreamed of a string of similar
productions--on narcotics, the white slave trade, and other social evils that
begged for redress. “There were no limits to what we could accomplish,” Eddie recalled
later. Unfortunately, Richard Bennett had other ideas. Having quietly acquired
all American rights to the play, the actor bade Eddie and Fred good-bye. “I
don't need you or your damn sociological fund anymore,” he told his would-be
partners. “I'll start my own fund. I own all the rights to Damaged Goods. Ta,
ta.”
* * *
Eddie's adrenaline was flowing too fast for him to
waste time licking his wounds, and he was too pumped up by his brush with the
brave new worlds of theater and promotion to return to his dull medical
magazines. So he arranged to deliver a young boy to his mother in Paris as a
way of earning ship's fare, then headed to Carlsbad in what is now the Czech
Republic to talk over his recent exploits with his uncle, Sigmund Freud.
The novice promoter had strong familial ties to the
venerated psychoanalyst: His mother was Freud's sister, and his father's sister
was Freud's wife. And when Eddie and his parents left Vienna when the boy was
barely one, his two older sisters remained behind with Freud and Freud's
parents until Ely Bernays got established in New York. All of which gave Eddie
an intimate connection to the Father of Psychoanalysis, a connection he
capitalized on every chance he got.
On this trip he and Freud took long walks in the woods,
where they must have made quite a sight--the Austrian uncle, walking stick in
hand, wearing his familiar green Tyrolean hat with a feather and a ram's horn
stuck in the hatband, salt-and-pepper knickers, and brown brogues, and his
American nephew fitted out in a Brooks Brothers suit. It's not known what the
pair talked about. All Eddie could remember more than fifty years later was his
uncle's playful explanation in a restaurant that “these brook trout are
swimming in the order of their price range,” and Freud's gentle admonition that
his nephew not swat an insect on the tablecloth, preferring to “let the fly
take its promenade on the high plateau.” He also recalled Freud's “pleasant and
easy attitude, his understanding sympathy, more candid and relaxed in his
attitude to me than any other older man I had ever known. It was as if two
close friends were exchanging confidences instead of a famous uncle of
fifty-seven and an unknown nephew of twenty-two.”
Whatever the specifics of their conversation, it is
clear that when Eddie returned to New York in the fall of 1913 he was more
taken than ever with the Viennese doctor's novel theories on how unconscious
drives dating to childhood make people act the way they do. And Eddie was
convinced that understanding the instincts and symbols that motivate an
individual could help him shape the behavior of the masses.
He didn't waste any time testing that understanding.
For starters, there was his work on Broadway, where he had signed on with Klaw
and Erlanger, the General Motors of theatrical booking agents. His job was to
help make hits out of plays like Jean Webster's Daddy Long-Legs, a precursor to
“Little Orphan Annie.” Daddy is a comedy about a twelve-year-old girl whose
irrepressible spirit first helps her endure a grim orphanage, then assists her
in coping with the world of wealth into which she's thrust by an anonymous
benefactor.
Eddie's approach was straightforward: take techniques
that had worked with Damaged Goods and, as he would do over and over, push them
several steps further. That meant linking Daddy Long-Legs to a worthwhile
activity, one that made theatergoers feel they were doing more than indulging
in entertainment. Eddie called it hitching private interests to public ones. He
joined forces with New York's State Charities Aid Association to organize a
network of Daddy Long-Legs funds. Groups formed on college campuses and in high
schools would raise money that private families could use to take in orphans.
The results were impressive. A dollmaker manufactured
ten thousand Daddy Long-Legs dolls dressed in orphan-blue checkered gingham,
and the proceeds went to the Aid Association. A famous race car driver retired
his lucky Kewpie doll in favor of a Daddy Long-Legs doll, and other drivers did
the same. As always, the achievements were chronicled in newspapers across New
York State and eventually the nation, with one story crediting the campaign
with spawning “a small upheaval in clubdom” and noting that the Sophia Fund of
Bronxville had renamed itself the Daddy Long-Legs Sewing Club.
Another pattern emerged in this campaign that would
resurface repeatedly. Eddie had decided that prim and proper Vassar College was
an ideal place from which to launch his promotion. He arranged a meeting with
influential undergraduates, got the gathering written up on the front page of
the Poughkeepsie Evening Enterprise, and placed stories in five New York City
papers: the Times, World, Sun, Tribune, and Post--all based on 15 cents
collected from the students.
Officials at Vassar were not amused. “It could never
have been inferred by any readers that it was a joke collection of fifteen
cents, made, as the girls supposed, for a joke and nothing else,” Elizabeth
Hazelton Haight, head of the Vassar Alumnae Council's publicity committee,
wrote Eddie several days after the stories appeared. In a separate letter to
the Aid Society she wrote, “I surmise Mr. Bernays' advertising methods have
simply run away with him without your cognizance, and I hope that you will
check his use of the name of the college until there are facts here that
warrant it.”
Eddie was chagrined, but he insisted later that he
had learned a lesson: “That it is sound to find out beforehand what people's
reactions may be.” His reason for finding out, however, was so he could adjust
his tactics rather than change course. As he continued in his memoirs, “Vassar's
timidity didn't slow my ardor. I was able to make arrangements for several
Vassar alumnae nights at Daddy Long-Legs .... The Friday after Thanksgiving,
there was a greater demand for tickets than the house could fill.”
The up-and-coming press agent made an even bigger
stir in the rarefied world of dance, handling publicity for the U.S. tour of
Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Diaghilev, a-Russian aristocrat and veteran of
the acclaimed Imperial Russian Theater, had assembled a company blending
classical ballet with the modern dance of Isadora Duncan. He featured the most
sought-after European dancers, including Waslaw Nijinsky; dazzled audiences with
his use of music, set decoration, color, costume, light, and story; and
revitalized a theatrical form that had become ponderous and stereotyped. Rave
reviews poured in across Europe, and now, in the summer of 1915, it was
announced that the Ballet Russe would make its American debut the following
January.
It was left to a twenty-three-year-old agriculture
student to sell the Ballet Russe to a country that didn't care much for
European culture, knew and cared even less about Russia, and thought men had no
business dancing on the stage wearing slippers and tights.
But Eddie was coming to thrive on just this sort of
challenge. He began by acknowledging that he was as ignorant about the ballet
as the public he sought to enlighten, then set out toward self-enlightenment.
That meant digging up all the information he could from the library, secondhand
bookstores, and the Metropolitan Opera Company, which was sponsoring the Ballet
Russe tour. It also meant eliciting bits of dance wisdom from Fred A. King, the
arts editor of Literary Digest, and from budding ballerina Natasha Rambova, who
later married Rudolph Valentino. And it meant conducting what is today called
opinion research, but in 1915 Bernays's research consisted mainly of chatting
with people and forming educated guesses about what they thought of the ballet
and why.
Having roughly determined what the public didn't know
or didn't like about ballet, Eddie set out to educate them and alter their
attitude. The packet he prepared for the press suggests the inventive slants he
used to get skeptical editors interested in the ballet. It featured “4 pages
sketch of Nijinsky's life, 2 pages Choreography Becomes Chirography, 3 pages
Nijinsky's mother-in law brands him a spy, 3 pages Are American Men Ashamed of
Being Graceful? 1 page World's Greatest Dancer Walks Broadway Unnoticed, 2
pages Dreaming a Ballet Into Being, 1 page Nothing Like a Stencil To Keep My
Lady Warm, 1 page Life of Ballet Girl, 1 page It's Safety Pins that Keeps the
Ballet Russe Together, 21 pages (15 stories) of fashions, novelties, and
influence of the Ballet on modern dress.”
Eddie's stints in journalism had also shown him where
he could cut corners. Would a reader recognize that the ballet's press person
had written the Vanity Fair story about the ballet? No problem, he would
shuffle the letters of his name around and become Aybern Edwards. The Ladies'
Home Journal wouldn't run promotional photographs for fear its readers might be
offended by skirts that didn't reach below the knees? No problem. For $600
Eddie engaged a pair of painters to add some length to the ballerinas' skirts,
and the pictures ran in a two-page color spread that reached millions of
unknowing subscribers.
Then there was the problem of how to make the press
pay attention to Flores Revalles, the principal ballerina in Scheherazade. He
tried calling a press conference, but only the Morning Telegraph showed up. So
a short time later Eddie had Revalles photographed in a tight-fitting fringed
gown at the Bronx Zoo with a long, harmless snake draped around her body. The
seductive shot was distributed across the country, with a caption saying the
subject had selected a cobra, but through her charm and beauty had rendered it
harmless, and that she could be seen almost every day in Bronx Park musing over
the reptile's sinuous movements.
Newspapers ran that story on page one, which Eddie
thought splendid. “I urged Revalles to make a pet snake her trademark and never
to travel without one,” he recalled. “She hesitated, but agreed--show people
intuitively adjust themselves to getting publicity for themselves, whatever the
method. When I saw how easily Revalles became a national celebrity, I
recognized how necessary it was to look behind a person's fame to ascertain
whether the basis was real or fictitious. Public visibility had little to do
with real value.
“Without the snake or some equivalent, Flores
Revalles, an attractive, provocative and talented girl, might well have had to
wait years for national recognition. The snake took up a long lag time.”
Stunts like that were standard for press agents of
the day as they promoted popular movie stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Mary
Pickford, and Norma Talmadge. But Eddie had a flair few could rival. He worked
for clients with profiles high enough to ensure that his gimmicks would assume
mythic dimensions, and unlike most of his contemporaries, he learned from and
grew with each new client. And recognizing that press coverage wasn't the only
way to draw attention to clients like the ballet company, he enticed
manufacturers of jewelry, handbags, lampshades, table linens, and other
products to introduce models inspired by the color and design of Ballet Russe
sets and costumes.
Adella Hughes, founding director of the Cleveland
Symphony Orchestra, watched Bernays's machinations as the ballet prepared to
visit the Midwest. “No project was ever better prepared for in the matter of
publicity and promotion,” she wrote in her 1947 autobiography, Music Is My
Life. “The Metropolitan Opera people had placed this in the hands of Edward L.
Bernays. The value and quality of the promotional material that came from his
office have never been equalled by any other organization within my experience.”
The New York Dramatic Mirror agreed, writing in its
December 4, 1915, issue: “Congratulations are due Edward L. Bernays, general
press representative of the Serge de Diaghilew Imperial Ballet Russe, for the
excellent showing he has made in recent numbers of magazines. In these days of
world crises it is, indeed, no easy task to secure publicity for mere
amusements. One can scarcely pick up a periodical of late without finding
illustrated articles about Karsavina, Nijinsky, Bohn and other leading members
of the famous organization.”
There were, of course, hitches, including some major
ones that threatened to sabotage the tour. Nijinsky, who'd been ballyhooed more
than anyone else in the company, was arrested in Hungary as an enemy alien and
missed the whole first season. When he finally was freed, he sprained his ankle
and missed most of the follow-up tour. French conductor Pierre Monteux also was
missing in action at first, in his case fighting Germans on the French front
during World War I. And it seemed everyone on the tour was romantically
entangled with everyone else. The most titillating and tumultuous of those
relationships, according to Bernays, involved Diaghilev; his longtime lover,
Nijinsky; Nijinsky's new wife, Romola; and Diaghilev's new lover, Leonide
Massine, who had replaced Nijinsky during the first U.S. tour.
What kind of impression did those affairs of the
heart and of high culture have on the young promoter? His three years with the
ballet “taught me more about life than I have learned from politics, books,
romance, marriage and fatherhood in the years since,” he wrote five decades
later. “I had never imagined that the interpersonal relations of the members of
a group could be so involved and complex, full of medieval intrigue, illicit
love, misdirected passion and aggression. But while it happened, I took it all
for granted as part of a stimulating job.”
And it wasn't just Bernays who was profoundly
affected by the whole ballet experience. A nation that was used to chortling
over Charlie Chaplin or rejoicing with the high-stepping Ziegfeld girls found
itself drawn to this more refined, decidedly European entertainment. “The whole
country was discussing the ballet,” Eddie wrote. “The ballet liberated American
dance and, through it, the American spirit. It fostered a more tolerant view
toward sex; it changed our music and our appreciation of it .... The ballet
scenarios made modern art more palatable; color assumed new importance. It was
a turning point in the appreciation of the arts in the United States.”
While he was wrapping up his work with the Ballet
Russe in 1917, Eddie was presented with another European artistic sensation to
introduce to America: Enrico Caruso, the greatest tenor of his time and one of
the music world's greatest characters.
Plugging Caruso meant following what was becoming a
familiar pattern. First came the press releases, then the visits to editors and
publishers. He also coined phrases aimed at capturing public attention, dubbing
Caruso “the man with the orchid-lined voice.” What distinguished this
assignment from earlier ones was the amount of time Eddie spent observing the
artist up close, staying in the same hotels and remaining on call twenty-four
hours a day during a swing through Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Toledo.
Being on call sometimes meant handling crises--like
the time when, at the banquet following a nine-encore performance in
Cincinnati, the great singer suddenly slid under the table and wouldn't come
out until Eddie ordered someone to shut a nearby window, the source of a draft
that Caruso worried would give him a cold. Or when, at Pittsburgh's Shenley
Hotel, the tenor insisted on two extra mattresses and seventeen more pillows.
With help from the hotel manager Eddie dug up the extra bedding, and Caruso
supervised the construction of a triple-tiered bed with pillows placed around
the edges to keep out breezes.
Then there was the time a hotel wedding party on the
floor below was keeping Caruso awake. He called Eddie, who called the manager,
who called the revelers, who, when they heard who the complainant was,
willingly agreed to be relocated nine floors down.
Of course, Eddie was well compensated for his labors
as advance man and nursemaid. The Metropolitan Musical Bureau, which had hired
him, took 15 percent of all concert receipts, and he earned 25 percent of the
bureau's profits, which meant thousands of dollars. What really thrilled the
twenty-five-year-old promoter, however, was Caruso's acceptance of him as an
equal.
“We acted like two boys toward each other--boys who
like and understand each other,” Eddie recalled. “We never had to translate our
feelings into words. After I had seen him several times he called me by what I
suppose was an Italian diminutive added to my name-Bernaysi.”
Eddie also was fascinated by the public's adoration
of Caruso. And, in a lesson he'd learned while working with the Ballet Russe
and that he would later apply in behalf of corporate moguls and American
presidents, he realized that such impressions could easily be fashioned or
reshaped. “The overwhelming majority of the people who reacted so spontaneously
to Caruso had never heard him before,” Eddie wrote. “The public's ability to
create its own heroes from wisps of impressions and its own imagination and to
build them almost into flesh-and-blood gods fascinated me. Of course, I knew
the ancient Greeks and other early civilized peoples had done this. But now it
was happening before my eyes in contemporary America.”
The press agent's own image got a lift from Caruso's
American visit. In a tribute repeated by other profilers, music critic Pitts Sanborn
of the New York Globe referred to Eddie as “the Caruso of press agents and the
press agent of Caruso.”
While most of his time in those early days was taken
up boosting the careers of other artists, he also experimented, at a time when
anything seemed possible, with composing his own art. His proudest was a
ten-poem set that ran in The Broadway Anthology, a sixty-page book of poetry by
four press agents.
Like his other verses, the one about Caruso, titled “The
Pillow Cases,” sought to make press-agentry seem poetic, but it also
underscored the thin line between cleverness and chicanery:
On the platform patiently nestled were twenty-six
pieces of
luggage,
Twenty-six pieces of luggage, containing more than
their content,
Twenty-six pieces of luggage would get him the story,
he had
not given himself
Craftily, one lured the reporters to look on this
bulging baggage.
“Pillows and pillows and pillows,” was whispered, “Tonight
he
will sleep on them.”
Vulture-like swooped down the porters,
Bearing them off to the taxis.
Next morning the papers carried the story: “Singer
Transports
His Own Bedding,”
But the artist slept soundly on Ostermoors that
night.
The baggage held scores for the orchestra.
The war raging in Europe affected Eddie, as it did
most Americans, long before America joined in.
First there was its dampening effect on grain
exports, which effectively shut down Ely Bernays's lucrative grain-trading
business. Americans' demand for news about the war also complicated the job of
Broadway press agents, who fought even more fiercely for the meager space that
remained. And the enmity from the battlefields spilled over even to the Ballet
Russe, where Pierre Monteux, Diaghilev's French conductor, agreed to conduct
the works of dead German composers like Beethoven but not live ones like
Richard Strauss, whose Till Eulenspiegel Monteux was scheduled to conduct.
Eddie launched his campaign to enlist on April 6,
1917, the very day America declared war on Germany. He signed up for the army,
then wrote to top army and navy officers to press his case. Finally he used a
contact from the music world to reach a colonel at the recruiting office, who
scheduled him for a physical.
The verdict: flat feet and defective vision. He
demanded and received a second exam, which produced the same results, and was
officially turned down for active duty.
Rejection only made him more determined. He'd always
been a bit insecure about his Austrian roots, his Jewishness, and most of all
his diminutive 5-foot-4-inch stature. Now he was determined to prove he was a
true American capable of defending his country. A string of successful
publicity campaigns had taught him how to get his way, so he decided to conduct
a campaign in his own behalf. He wrote to the Red Cross in France asking for “any
position for which you believe my qualifications and past experience fit me.”
He wrote to the Commission on Military Training offering to get musicians to
perform at army camps. He even helped out at his local draft board, organizing
its statistical and clerical functions.
When none of that produced results, Eddie helped sell
U.S. bonds and war saving stamps, promoted recruitment rallies, and arranged
publicity for a patriotic music festival. He also outlined in Musical America
what the journal called a “vivid, dramatic, convincing” plan for musicians to
pitch in to the war effort. Whenever singers performed, he advised, they should
include a song about the military. Same for orchestras and songwriters, while
music store owners were urged to donate instruments for the troops. And “naval
recruiting would take on tremendous impetus if there were daily parades of
bluejackets through the city streets, headed by the ship's band.”
Being involved on the periphery was frustrating,
however, and he finally wangled an interview with Ernest Poole, head of the
Foreign Press Bureau of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), the
closest thing to a propaganda bureau the government had back then. Poole seemed
impressed by a stack of testimonial letters Eddie brought along, but he
insisted, given Eddie's birth in an enemy country, that any assignment with the
CPI await a complete investigation by Military Intelligence.
The probe took several months, but the result was a
letter from the chief of Military Intelligence attesting that Eddie's “abilities
are unquestionably remarkable. We have nothing in our files to indicate any
disloyal activity and the suspicions that might arise from his infancy in
Austria and his Austrian parentage are far outweighed by the extremely cordial
vouchers for his loyalty contained in letters from Captain F. P. Adams, Earl
Derr Biggers, Frank Crowninshield, and many others, all well aware of his
Austrian nativity but convinced of his desire to serve this country.”
Finally given his chance to serve, Eddie recruited
Ford, International Harvester, and scores of other American firms to distribute
literature on U.S. war aims to foreign contacts and post U.S. propaganda in the
windows of 650 American offices overseas. He distributed postcards to Italian
soldiers at the front so they could boost morale at home, and he planted
propaganda behind the German lines to sow dissent. He organized rallies at
Carnegie Hall featuring freedom fighters from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other
states that were anxious to break free of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And to
counter German propaganda he had American propaganda printed in Spanish and
Portuguese and inserted into export journals sent across Latin America.
In short, he helped win America over to an unpopular war
using precisely the techniques he'd used to promote Daddy Long-Legs and the
Ballet Russe.
Eddie wasn't part of the CPI brain trust, as some of
his reminiscences suggest; he was head of the Export Section and co-head of the
Latin American Section of the Foreign Press Bureau, which was one of several
bureaus of the CPI. Still, with most bureau staffers plucked from newspapers or
universities, he was one of the few versed in the hard-nosed tactics needed to
capture and keep the attention of the war-weary public in America and abroad.
And, as always, he outhustled almost everyone else and exhibited more flashes
of inspired salesmanship. Poole later remembered him as “one of the ablest and
most devoted younger workers on our staff.” And in 1918, when there was
question about Eddie's being drafted for a military clerkship, CPI Chairman
George Creel drafted a letter saying, “As you know, our policy is not to
interfere with military service in any degree, but it is most certainly the
case that Mr. Bernays' present position is far more important to the Government
than any clerkship that he might fill.”
When it came to his role at the Paris Peace
Conference, where he was part of a sixteen-person CPI press team, the reviews
were less glowing. Before the team set sail, Eddie put out a press release
announcing the mission, and the New York World ran a story saying the “announced
object of the expedition is 'to interpret the work of the Peace Conference by
keeping up a worldwide propaganda to disseminate American accomplishments and
ideals.”
That set off a firestorm, with Republicans in
Congress charging that Creel and the CPI were perpetuating their censorship of
the press even though the war was over and skewing coverage to favor the
Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson. Creel insisted the mission was never
intended to influence coverage by American reporters, and in a book published
two years later he blamed the whole mess on Eddie's statement, although he
didn't name him specifically. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, in Words That
Won the War, confirmed that “Creel was not uniformly pleased with the
post-Armistice work of Bernays.”
The battles over Paris can only be understood in
terms of a wider disillusionment in America over the bloody war the nation was
emerging from. Many Americans still weren't sure why they had fought or what
they'd achieved, and they didn't want to get further entangled overseas. The
Senate, sensing those sentiments, voted down the Treaty of Versailles and
repudiated the League of Nations, which President Wilson had passionately
promoted and which Eddie had enthusiastically embraced.
Eddie was convinced he was being made a scapegoat for
the failures in Paris, and he sought to set the record straight in his
autobiography. Poole, he wrote, had okayed his statement to the press. And
Creel was “tired or disheartened by the criticism of the senators and the
press. But whatever it was, it finally wore him down. I can't understand his
giving up; he had always been a fighter. But it is tragically clear that he did
not fight to maintain the functioning of our press mission, which he himself
had created to serve as a press relations body.”
Historians still debate those conflicting
interpretations, but whoever's right, the controversy offers insights into the way
Eddie operated then and until his death seventy-seven years later. He viewed
activities with which he was involved in epic terms, as events that helped
shape American and world culture, whether it was the Paris Peace Conference or
the U.S. tours of Caruso and the Ballet Russe. He was exceedingly proprietary
about his role in those events, seeing himself as having battled for the public
good as others succumbed to temptation, and doing all he could to ensure that
history would see him in the same heroic light. And he always got the last word
because he outlived contemporaries like Creel, who died twelve years before
Eddie wrote his autobiography and therefore was unable to defend himself.
Then there was Eddie's temper. He prided himself on
his mild-mannered disposition, on speaking from fact rather than emotion, and
on responding with reason rather than anger, but he was not one to be lightly
crossed. Or, as Creel discovered, to play the patsy. It's apparent in his
memoirs, in the many interviews he granted, and in his relationships at the
office and at home that if you punched him, you'd best be prepared for a
counterpunch or a barrage of blows. Question his motives or effectiveness, and
he'd marshal all his tactical and creative resources to prove you wrong, doing
so effectively enough to make you wonder whether you were wrong and to make you
think twice about questioning him in the future.
All those personality traits were on full display in
his battle with Creel and the others, which he described in his memoirs with a
vigor that suggested it had transpired months or weeks before, rather than
forty-seven years earlier. “I believe that Creel's failure to insist on
effective handling of Peace Conference press relations--that is to maintain
liaison with the public--helped to lose the peace for us,” Eddie wrote. “In
1918 I was concerned about the future of the world. I still am. Lack of
effective public relations between President Wilson and the people of the
United States, historians confirm, was one of the reasons for the rejection of
the League of Nations by the United States. The final breakdown of the League
in the early Thirties was due in large part to the same lack of good public
relations.”
His experience in Paris may have left Eddie disillusioned
about his government's failure to grasp the power of publicity but it
reinforced his belief in his new vocation and how it could mold the public
mind. He had an opportunity to test those tenets even before he got back to
America.
At one of many cocktail parties he attended in Paris
after the breakup of the CPI press mission, he met Haisan Kendry, an aide to
Arabia's Emir Feisal, who fought alongside the fabled Lawrence of Arabia in the
war against the Turks. Kendry and Feisal wanted Eddie's help in rallying
Arab-Americans to push for U.S. recognition of Arabia as an independent state,
one of the few hopes they saw for forestalling British and French bids to carve
up the land.
Eddie did eventually talk to lots of Arabs in New
York, who “were strong for independence for their homeland but had no
inclination to dig into their pockets and back their enthusiasm with necessary
funds.” While things didn't work out with the emir, the experience planted in
Eddie's mind an idea that “doing publicity for other nations, applying my
experience to other countries, might be a fascinating, constructive career”--an
idea he would later carry forward from Lithuania to Guatemala and from India to
Israel.
That was one of many dreams he brought back from
Paris. The world was changing, he realized, and he saw himself on the cusp of
that change, ready to exploit the new optimism and opportunities infecting
America and the world.
“I knew that musical and theatrical press-agentry and
publicity would not satisfy me, after my experiences in the broader theater of
world affairs,” he wrote, looking back. “I was intent on carrying forward what
I had learned in my work with Damaged Goods, the Russian Ballet, Caruso and the
Committee on Public Information. The impact words and pictures made on the
minds of men throughout Europe made a deep impression on me. I recognized that
they had been powerful factors in helping win the war.
“Paris became a training school without instructors,
in the study of public opinion and people .... The process was as fortuitous as
the flight of windswept pollen.”
