OBITUARY : Legendary Publicist Guido Orlando, 80

Guido Orlando, the peripatetic publicist whose manipulations involved world figures ranging from Pope Pius XII to King Farouk, has died in a Hollywood hospital after suffering a heart attack.

His longtime friend, Pat Anderson, a retired journalist who was helping Orlando with his memoirs, said he was 80 and died Sunday.

The self-described “second-greatest publicist in the history of the world” (behind Adolph Hitler’s Joseph Goebbels) died not far from the five-room apartment he had lived in for years. There he was surrounded by scrapbooks that documented his bizarre success stories, epitomized, perhaps, by the story of the hat makers and the Pope.

Came Up With a Story

In 1958 he was hired by the Millinery Institute of America to boost sagging hat sales. Orlando fabricated a nonexistent “Religious Institute of Research,” which released a fictional survey that purported to show that 22 million Roman Catholic women throughout the United States went to church bare-headed every Sunday.

Through a friend in the Vatican, Orlando managed to obtain a statement from Pius XII pointing to the dignity and decorum of hats in church. Sales soared.

And then there was the King Farouk caper.

In 1950 Orlando planted stories in the world press that the Egyptian king, known for his lavish life style and affection for the opposite sex, was chasing a 16-year-old American girl around Europe. (Orlando had somehow obtained a copy of the king’s travel schedule and arranged to have the girl photographed at every city Farouk was visiting.)

By the time the newspapers of three continents had finished, the girl had gotten what her parents had hired Orlando for weeks earlier--a movie contract.

A native of Italy who wheedled entree into the world of entertainment in 1925 as an $18-a-week errand boy for a film company, Orlando staged the first of his many manipulations when he sent himself a phony telegram offering himself a part in a non-existent play so his father would let him leave Wheeling, W. Va., and go to New York.

There his diminutive stature (5 feet, 5 inches) helped him land a role in a real play, as Napoleon, and he parlayed that part into others. He met silent screen idol Rudolph Valentino at a party (“We Italians stick together,” he told The Times in a 1972 interview) and became his friend and man-in-waiting, and finally his press agent.

In the 1932 presidential campaign he formed the Republicans for Roosevelt Repeal (of Prohibition) League and the League of Citizens of Foreign Birth for Roosevelt. Though neither became household words, they led to White House connections during the Roosevelt years and once prompted the colorful President to call Orlando the “King of Contacts.”

In the 1940s and ‘50s he shuttled back and forth between Italy and the United States and claimed to have helped prevent the Communists from winning the 1948 elections. He mapped the final weeks of the Democratic-Christian campaign, one of the few altruistic (“well, not entirely,” he admitted) adventures of his career.

Unruh Not Amused

Orlando retired in the early 1970s, shortly after suggesting to an unappreciative Jesse M. Unruh that the unsuccessful 1970 California gubernatorial candidate write a book called “How to Lose a Campaign.”

His friend Anderson said that Orlando spent his time studying and investing in the stock market while helping her write a book on his life.

During what generally was a wide-ranging and flamboyant interview in 1972, Orlando grew serious at a point. After describing some of his other macabre campaigns, he said he was not “really such a bad guy. I never hurt no one. . . . I’m just a dream merchant; I make people’s impossible dreams--fame, money, the movies--come true.”