Who’s Hot on Today’s Public Speaking Circuit : Fees of $30,000 Commanded for Some Engagements

Last week in Washington, as Howard Baker was moving into his new White House post as chief of staff, his speaking agent in New York was making some fast adjustments, too. Suddenly, suitably distinguished replacements had to be found for about a dozen Baker lecture dates before high-paying audiences, according to Don Walker of the Harry Walker Agency.

Industry sources familiar with Baker’s speaking fees and lecturing schedule estimate that the former senator collected more than $500,000 in the last 18 months working the lecture circuit. But now that Baker has assumed his new $90,000 post, he is expected, like others on the White House staff, to forget about giving paid lectures.

$90,000 for 44 Speeches

Meanwhile, last week in California, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown was explaining why he felt justified in picking up about $90,000 for 44 paid speeches during 1986.

Welcome to the strange and amazing arena of public speaking, a world in which Brown and Gov. George Deukmejian may receive $5,000 for a single speech--the same fee that Richard (Mr.) Blackwell can command for narrating an afternoon fashion show.

In the realm of paid speaking, however, a fee of $5,000 is considered peanuts--for nationally known figures currently in the public eye. Silence may be golden, but for many audiences, the price of talk is right up there, too. Consider some of the recent fees paid for a single luncheon address or after-dinner speech:

--Radio commentator/syndicated columnist Paul Harvey: $30,000.

--Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick: $25,000.

--Author/management consultant Thomas J. Peters: $25,000.

--Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: $25,000.

--Television journalist Ted Koppel: $25,000.

--Television journalist David Brinkley: $18,000.

--Syndicated columnist Art Buchwald: $15,000.

Such fees are generally for providing an hour- or 1 1/2-hour talk (with questions and answers) and travel is frequently required.

But sometimes, high fees are offered to well-known lecturers for non-speaking engagements as well. For instance, all that some individuals may be required to do is stand on a podium and shake hands with a firm’s sales award winners. Or the duties may be even less if the individual is also a film or television personality.

“People pay stars to do nothing but show up at a party. They’ll pay anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000. There are stars available for that. It happens to be true,” said Joyce Aimee, owner and president of Aimee Entertainment Assn., a Los Angeles “full service agency” that specializes in booking speakers and entertainers for local women’s clubs.

It is said that California Angels star Reggie Jackson can collect $25,000 for attending a baseball card collectors’ convention and also pick up $9 each time he signs a baseball card there. Jackson’s agent, New York-based Matt Mirola, declined to confirm or deny those figures, saying only “I think that’s personal.”

Mirola added, however, that Jackson “doesn’t charge. They just pay him what they think he’s worth at the time. This is more than just people coming in to get autographs. It’s an involved thing. Reggie’s used to draw the crowd.”

Sometimes even those who are known for their exceptional speaking abilities are also offered big bucks merely to attend events.

Tom Peters, co-author of “In Search of Excellence” and “A Passion for Excellence,” revealed he once turned down an offer of $15,000 to show up at a cocktail reception in Hawaii. Like many in the upper strata of the talk business, Peters feels admittedly “schizophrenic” about asking and receiving whatever the market will bear for him to open his mouth.

“On the one hand, the fees are totally insane and the commercialism has appalled me,” said the author, who’s currently working on a new book in Vermont, away from his Palo Alto headquarters. “The other side of the coin is that if you have 30,000 people coming to a convention then I suppose the economics aren’t that weird. It’s a stupid amount of money, but there is some logic associated with it. These poor souls who are meeting arrangers are trying to create the event of a lifetime for the people who come to the meetings.”

Peters is also willing to admit that though his fee is one of the highest in the business, it’s also somewhat deceptive. Like many other speakers, he does considerable numbers of addresses for free or for reduced fees if the audience appeals to him. “I do between 150 and 200 speeches a year, with fees from 0 to $25,000, with a lot more of the former than the latter,” he said. One of the groups for which Peters and other business management speakers are known to lower their fees is the President’s Assn., a New York City-based organization of about 3,000 presidents of small to medium-sized corporations. Tom Lambert, the group’s marketing director, acknowledged that his organization is able to book “the big gorillas (speakers),” for far less than their normal rates because the audiences promise other rewards as well.

‘Consulting Business’

A speaker like Peters, Lambert said, “can get a lot of consulting business out of it.”

But if Peters is cleaning up on the lecturing and consulting trail, he has also paved the way for other business speakers to receive large fees, according to observers.

Peters, however, thinks such due may belong to John Naisbitt, author of “Megatrends.” Just after “In Search of Excellence” was published in 1982, Peters recalled, Naisbitt’s speaking agent advised him that his lecturing fee ($1,500) was far too low and suggested he raise it 500% to $7,500.

How did Peters’ fee then blossom from $7,500 to $25,000?

Mara Neiman, a former Tom Peters Group employee who for three years booked nearly all of Peters’ speeches and worked with him when he was both low- and high-priced, remembers the escalation occurring this way:

“The way I did it was I tested the market. I’d ask for a higher fee and I’d check the response really closely. Tom would say, ‘It should be $7,500’ and I’d say, ‘$10,000.’ He’d say, ‘What do you mean?’ And I’d say, ‘But, Tom, they said yes.’

For many speakers, fee setting is a delicate and complicated matter. Speaker Brown, for instance, emphasized at his press conference that he does the majority of his speeches for free and refuses to accept honorariums from groups he suspects may be trying to influence him in his political role. He said he has no set fee and merely tells inquirers what sort of average amounts have been paid in the past. And he reminds his hosts that if he accepts an engagement, it is still not necessary that he be paid for it.

(While U.S. senators and representatives are permitted to receive fees for speaking engagements, those amounts are limited; there is no law or policy prohibiting such outside lecturing by California officials. Some, like Deukmejian, give paid talks only rarely; in 1986, the governor gave one remunerated lecture to the Chinese American Economic and Technology Development Assn. of Los Altos for $5,000. Deukmejian’s Los Angeles rival, Mayor Tom Bradley, gives no speeches for fees, according to an aide.)

“The problem in my office is for my staff to keep me from accepting speeches and speaking opportunities,” Brown explained to reporters. “ . . . on a Saturday, while . . . probably you are either playing tennis, going to the race track or doing some of the things that ordinary, normal, rational human beings do, I don’t do any of those things. I spend my full time doing public events or public activities, out of my enjoyment of it.”

Another person who devotes a good many of his waking hours to speech-making is Richard Byrne of Los Angeles, who is known for describing the impact of high technology to business executives in a manner similar to the way Richard Pryor delineates the impact of drug abuse for Comedy Store audiences. Bryne has such a good time on the lecture circuit that he gave up his work as a full-time professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication in order to do about 90 national and international lecture dates a year.

Like Peters, Byrne has watched his fees escalate rather dramatically in the last few years and he observed that price tags on speakers are governed by basic laws of supply and demand.

“Most speakers usually pick a fee that they can get easily and use that until they’re booked 75% of the time that they actually want to speak. That means that the market will easily bear that price,” said Byrne, who lectures frequently at conventions and for such firms as IBM and AT&T.; “Most people then increase their fees by, say, 25%. Some try 50%. Some try 100%. There’s no price list. You increase it and you see if you can get bookings at that amount. But the market knows and the market tells.

“There are people who get paid more than their performances or appearances are worth. But they won’t get paid that very often if their clients don’t believe it’s worth it . . . . Speakers’ fees are not based on the amount of money that’s spent (by audiences). They’re based on the results that are generated. So if people come to your convention and then say for an entire year, ‘I met Reggie Jackson’ it was worth it.”

‘People Don’t Understand’

Byrne said he did not want to mention his own fee because “people don’t understand. For every day that you speak there’s a full day of travel in my life. Some people think you get paid a lot of money to talk, but it’s like saying you get a lot of money to make a film that’s 90 minutes long. People don’t realize how much time is spent preparing for it.”

But even if audiences don’t recognize the homework that went into an address, Byrne contends powerful public speakers are “the best bargain in the market there is.” As he reasoned, “Just ask a person who is in charge of an event for 3,000 people what the impact was of the best speaker at the convention. Frequently people will remember sailfishing, horseback riding, scuba diving and one speaker. When you have speakers who are not good and the convention is not working, the people in charge sweat blood.”

Carol Fall, who books Byrne and other speakers through her Sausalito firm, Fall Presents, said that professional meeting planners eager to draw and satisfy huge crowds are only one of the reasons that account for high fees paid to speakers.

“Executives of corporations will pay a lot of money for one half of 1% of leverage over their competitors,” she said. “They think that someone can come in and talk to them and tell them how to use their technologies better, how to plan for the future, how frontiers in space may affect their business. So many companies bring speakers in to talk to their executives. It’s not education for the education’s sake. It’s competition.”

Fall also observed that high fees for speakers can basically indicate two things: “One is that you’re very hot. And the second is that you don’t want to speak that much.”

In the former category, many speakers’ agents agree, are the people who may be famous for a relatively brief time. At the moment, they note that the lecture circuit is ripe with recently released hostages, communicable disease and safe sex experts, the latest adventurer/explorers (such as Voyager pilots Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan or Robert D. Ballard, the American scientist who discovered the sunken Titanic) and current athletic heroes (most prominent among them, Dennis Conner, the skipper of the Stars and Stripes, which won the America’s Cup).

Expected to join these people on the circuit soon are the figures connected with the Iran arms scandal: members of the Tower Commission, Oliver North, John Poindexter and possibly even Fawn Hall. (Although her modeling agent, Pamela Grossman, of the Erickson Agency in McLean, Va., said Hall has received “a lot of offers from all sorts of different people,” none of those requests thus far has been for lectures.)

Bernie Swain, co-founder of the Washington Speakers Bureau in Washington, D.C., calls such instant-lecture celebrities “streak speakers.”

“Anybody can be a streak speaker, who will speak for a period of time, but runs the risk of being good for six months. That’s usually the limit,” he said.

But, as Swain and other agents will readily admit, it is not the red hot “streak speakers” or even the top-of-the-line evergreens who provide the bulk of the income for most lecture bureaus. Rather, it’s the larger numbers of low- to medium-priced speakers, many of whom lecture full time.

“The majority of people don’t speak for those huge fees,” insisted Ruth Alben of the Ruth Alben Speakers Service in Beverly Hills, an agent who books such speakers as actor John Houseman, writer Ray Bradbury and Los Angeles television news anchor Kelly Lange. “The bread and butter of the industry is not the $20,000 speaker. There are some groups who must have big names to create interest in their conventions or in their causes. I understand that. But it’s not the nuts and bolts of the industry.

“The industry survives because there are some excellent people who are willing to take three planes and two buses and go to places where they cheerfully give their opinions. These are people who speak because they think they have something to contribute.”

Tom Lutgen of The Times editorial library contributed research to this story.