Halley’s Mania : Selling the Comet: Sky Is the Limit

Forty years after he saw the comet that would one day bear his name, Edmond Halley was pulling down the piddling salary of about 100 pounds a year, and England’s Queen Caroline went to bat for him, trying to raise the wages of the astronomer royal--which Halley was.

Halley, a devoted man of science, politely declined. Too lavish a salary, he warned, might in future “only attract those interested in emoluments rather than science.”

Now, nearly three centuries later, Halley’s predictions are right on two counts: The comet he charted is indeed coming back on its 76-year schedule and with it have come the entrepreneurs, and some of them spell the word $CIENCE.

Halley discovered the cycle of a comet, and now America has discovered Halley. In a country where a man can put a rock in a box and sell it as a pet, anything is possible.

Galaxy of Merchandise

So the sky, literally, is the limit. Within recent months, there has been a million-dollar galaxy of merchandise as endless as the universe: Halley’s Comet “stock” certificates at 10 cents a share; comet gold and diamond jewelry; Halley haircuts (comb it back horizontally and spray it until it looks like a comet tail); a Halley scientific videocassette program hosted by Captain Kirk of “Star Trek” (actor William Shatner); Halley running shoes and glow-in-the-dark clothing; Halley-spotting land and sea vacations, from impromptu beer-and-binoculars parties in the California desert to $8,000 tours; superb Halley sky charts and educational posters from venerable science firms and kiddies’ gaudy cardboard giveaway “finder scopes” from a hamburger chain.

There are happy-face comet stickers, Christmas ornaments, license plate frames, comet-year wines, comet souvenir silver and bronze coins, Frisbee-like flyers with five-foot silver mylar “tails,” comet Christmas cards, postage stamps from 20 countries, two score comet books, cloisonne comet pins that even the Soviets trade for, Halley champagne glasses and a dry-ice drink that some staffers at the Griffith Park Observatory are concocting, a beverage they’ve already named “cometose.”

‘Once in a Lifetime’

First among these items--they began appearing about three years ago--is the icon of the age, the T-shirt. There are dozens, some showing the comet’s ellipse and paragraphs of data; some being bought for kids by doting grandparents, reading, “I’ll See It in 2061;” some with the singles-bar come-on, “I’m Just Like Halley’s Comet--A Once in a Lifetime Experience.”

Three and four years ago, when retailers were first approached by these “mom and pop” visionaries--men like New Jersey community college administrator Joseph Laufer, who mortgaged his house and created on his kitchen table first a Halley’s newsletter and then Halley souvenirs like yogurt-and-raisin “Comet Fever Pills”--merchants thought they were nuts.

When Aussie Sun Ltd. in Montclair started making its rock ‘n’ roll takeoff T-shirt, “Halley’s Comet, World Tour 1985,” “a lot of people looked at it and thought it was Bill Haley and the Comets,” advertising vice president Randy Robertson said in disbelief.

Now, said Ted Donahue, a partner in the licensing company General Comet Industries in New York City, the same skeptical retailers are clamoring for a share of “official” products.

General Comet Industries isn’t really official--no one owns the comet--but company founder Owen Ryan duly registered the name, “so I guess you can patent a celestial event,” Donahue said with a laugh.

“Our business started off basically as a lark, a takeoff on the over-commercialization of the Olympic Games in L.A., where everything was licensed,” Donahue said.

Their whimsical sortie into the froth of American marketing has turned into “a profitable nightmare.” They are besieged by retailers wanting to buy and by hundreds of work-bench hobbyists wanting to sell them rights to items ranging from “stuffed comet creatures that looked like they came from a taxidermist in Arkansas” to a droll comet exercise book called “Thinner Thighs in 76 Years” to “every lousy homemade comet song ever manufactured in the basement with an electric guitar,” Donahue recited.

The comet is not just a boon for mercantilism. Planetariums and museums are now as crowded as Macy’s on Christmas Eve. There are at last count 17 Halley hot lines nationwide, with blow-by-blow comet updates.

‘Already Overwhelmed’

Callers to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco are avid to find out about the comet and what they can do to be a part of it. “We’re already overwhelmed with requests for information,” executive director Andrew Fraknoi said. His phone used to ring 150 times a week; now he gets 1,600 calls.

The Astronomical Society printed 1,000 of its $4 Halley’s information packets and got 18,000 requests.

Schools are inundated with queries. Academics who have been closeted for years studying astronomy, celestial folklore or Halley himself can dine out on the comet for a good three months. Fraknoi has turned down offers to lecture on 10 cruises--mostly because the pitch-and-yaw of ships make for indifferent viewing. Laufer, a self-styled hobbyist and hardly an astronomer, is lecturing at a planetarium every Monday night.

“The neighborhood ‘eccentric’ with a telescope all of a sudden becomes a local hero,” said Steve O’Meara, assistant editor of the venerable Sky and Telescope magazine in Cambridge, Mass., which publishes a modest $2 “Mr. Halley’s Comet” guide.

“I don’t look on the marketing aspect as being that terrible. For a lot of us, we’ve heard about the comet, been waiting for it, then to have some kind of souvenir to hand down--it’s not that terrible an idea. We know we’re buying a gadget, a joke. Like comet hair spray--you don’t believe it’ll hold your hair together. It’s like a can of Florida sunshine--you’re not buying it because it is a can of sunshine,” O’Meara said.

U.S. Will Be Ready

It is a memento, proof that one was around and aware at the moment this happened--much like newspapers saved from the day of an assassination or an earthquake.

So when Halley’s appears more brilliantly this spring, like a luminous paint stroke in the southern sky, America--wearing its Halley’s T-shirt, chewing its Halley’s Comet Rocks candy, checking its Halley’s wristwatch--will be ready.

“Our society likes to commemorate events,” like the Bicentennial, said Laufer, who to his wife’s dismay is already planning for the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage in 1992. “Americans are great at celebrating these events, and that’s all it is.”

Halley’s Comet didn’t always have good public relations. Comets are often seen as omens, a thing apart. Halley’s appearance through history--this is its 30th recorded visit--has coincided with the births of two-headed calves, the deaths of kings and the fall of empires. Even in 1910, which lightheartedly celebrated the comet with rooftop galas and comet party hats, there were a few hysterical suicides.

All comets--which Halley called “bearded stars”--are invested with a primordial “glamour and dread,” E. C. Krupp, Griffith Observatory director, noted. And the comet souvenirs, comic and serious, allow people to cherish the glamour and laugh away the dread.

In his oak-paneled office, waist-deep in boxes labeled “Comet” and “Halley Xmas,” Krupp said these tokens--which are selling “stunningly” at the planetarium gift shop--”are in a sense the natural exploitation of a natural phenomenon and a genuine human response to a natural thing.”

‘Makes You Think’

Displaying a grapefruit-sized “I Halley’s Comet” button, which the planetarium did not find clever or educational enough to stock, Krupp said, “While there is certainly an artificial consumerism being created, I don’t think this would work if people really didn’t care” about the comet already. These talismans simply “make an abstract idea, a celestial object far away, suddenly very concrete. It makes you think about history, your own life.”

It is no coincidence that, although other astronomical patterns also repeat themselves, Halley’s Comet returns on a cycle that approximates the human life span.

“The solar system doesn’t have a whole lot invested in whether Halley’s Comet comes around or not, but people do. It punctuates our lives with a historic, scientific but inevitably personal meaning. The old people have seen it, the young people expect it and we become part of the river of time because of it,” Krupp said.

At Pasadena’s Planetary Society, where such illustrious names as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury adorn the letterhead, executive director Louis Friedman, founder of the 6-year-old International Halley Watch, thinks that the scientific exposure from Halley’s will outlast the kitsch.

“Sure, there are people making Halley Comet party hats or T-shirts, and that’s great fun, but we didn’t need that to have to story passed down,” said Friedman, who collects Halley pins and picked up a couple in the Soviet Union this month.

‘A Cultural Phenomenon’

“Halley’s Comet isn’t strictly a scientific event, so we can’t pretend only scientists should pay attention to it,” he said. “One would hardly be in a position to resent or be upset about one PR (public relations) venture or another. It is truly a cultural phenomenon; it belongs everywhere in our society, for better or for worse. So if somebody makes a fast buck--which clearly there are a few people trying--that’s part of our society too, just as a worldwide effort to launch a spacecraft to investigate it is.”

Astronomers, too, are charmed by the comet, the ageless, rootless gypsy of the universe. Only a handful have disdained Halley’s and its hoopla as too flashy, in a way believing that Halley’s is to astronomy what some art aficionados believe Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” is to art--trivially popular.

Where merchants have rushed in, however, some scientists have feared to tread. Eleven years ago, after a big build-up, Comet Kohoutek turned out to be a fizzled celestial Edsel, and the disappointed public blamed the scientists for the no-show.

Determined that that not happen again, some scientists have been deliberately low-balling Halley’s, which is expected to be far less than the brilliant slash of light it was in 1910.

“We don’t want another Comet Kohoutek,” said O’Meara, anxiously adding, “Let’s take it for what it is, something nostalgic, and look on it with wonder. It doesn’t matter if it’s bright or not.”

‘Dirty Snowball’

Most find the public well informed about what to expect--a fuzzy vision of the “dirty snowball” of space, better seen by binoculars than by some hastily marketed telescopes. O’Meara was dismayed, however, when a well-heeled Halley-watcher asked him in all seriousness in New York recently, “Now while I watch tonight, is it going to just circle around and around?”

Scientists groan when they hear that; the notion of a comet streaking across the sky in a flash is wrongly but deeply rooted. Instead, watching a comet move is about like watching a rose bloom.

Mark Osborne, Costa Mesa manager of the Nature Co., a chain of elegant educational science-for-yuppies emporia, said that most customers are eager for Halley’s but that some have remarked, “ ‘I’m not going to spend any money just to see this little dot of light in the sky.’ People see illustrations and expect a big glowing ball across the sky.”

Fraknoi said he fears, too, that in the 76 years since Halley’s last “apparition,” sci-fi movies and special effects have spoiled people, and the subtleties of natural wonders escape them in the roar and flash of man-made razzle-dazzle.

“I think the hype has been oversold, but the comet has not been,” Fraknoi said. “Everybody’s had a chance to learn from Kohoutek, and most people will realize this will not be a Steven Spielberg or George Lucas spectacular,” with “lights and lasers and dancing girls and everything. The comet is not going to be that way. It will quite a bit more subtle.”

‘It’s Wonderful’

At the center of all this is Edmond Halley, a self-effacing man who might cringe at the boisterous hoopla.

“It’s wonderful to have spent your life studying something, then having it come back to you like this,” said UCLA’s Norman J. W. Thrower--evidently speaking of Halley and the comet and of his own research, which includes his two-volume opus that covered three years of Halley’s complex work that took Thrower 10 years to analyze.

An expert on Halley, Thrower (who admitted to having “a lovely collection of Halley T-shirts”) is also director of UCLA’s prestigious Clark Library, where a recent Newton-Halley conference drew cultists handing out apocalyptic pamphlets: “Halley’s Comet is Coming! The End of Mankind is Near!”

For Thrower, whose calendar is chockablock with luncheon speeches, the comet year has been “a vehicle to inform” people about Halley, a pioneer in geomagnetism, a naval captain and the “great hero,” Thrower said, of insurance underwriters: Halley invented the first actuarial table.

Still, Thrower said, “Halley has his blaze--every 76 years.”

So, this time, do the retailers. Most realize this is a commercial flash-in-the-sky, balanced between the American public’s brief attention span and the stately, eternal progress of the comet.

‘To Commemorate’

“I think when you finally view the comet, there should be nothing commercial attached to it,” Donahue said. “That end is to commemorate and remember. There’s a tendency on most people’s part to be lazy because everything’s done for everybody today. They shouldn’t let it happen. They shouldn’t wait to see the comet televised, they shouldn’t be told how wonderful and majestic it is.

“They ought to drive themselves out from the city lights on a peaceful evening and look up to the heavens and experience it for themselves. If they don’t, they’ll be missing something every other generation has done since the Stone Age.”