‘Nobody’s Been Around That Long’ : Pioneering publicist Henry Rogers looks back on half a century in the star-making machinery

On Wednesday, Henry Rogers, who recently retired as the founding partner of the entertainment publicity firm, Rogers and Cowan, is being honored at a $350 a ticket banquet celebrating his 30 years of service to the Music Center as board member and fund-raiser. Gregory Peck will emcee the dinner, which is called “Rogers’ Rave Review.” Art Buchwald will be the principal speaker and the dinner committee ranges from Rona Barrett to Mike Ovitz by way of Paul Newman and Gene Kelly.

Memory does not reveal a similarly grand tribute to a public relations man . Then again, Henry Rogers, long regarded as the dean of the profession in Hollywood, has never been your average public relations man.

On one of my first days in Los Angeles in the late Eisenhower era I covered a Johnny Mathis opening at the Cocoanut Grove. Over dinner beforehand, the young publicist handling the event was telling of a new chemical he was taking experimentally under the care of a psychiatrist.

LSD-25, he said it was. Blank stares. You seemed to breathe colors and gained profound insights into your nature, he explained. More blanks stares-- trip had not yet entered the language. The insight he had gained from LSD-25, the young man said, had been to leave the agency he worked for, Rogers & Cowan, and go independent. This event indeed was his last official chore for the firm.

A young woman at the table ventured to say that if LSD-25 was so wonderful, why didn’t everybody take it?

In the momentary silence that followed, I remarked, as only a newly arrived smart aleck from the East might: “Because if everybody took it, Rogers & Cowan wouldn’t have anybody left.”

There was another momentary silence and then the young publicist pointed a finger at me and said in a hoarse voice, “That’s a very funny line.”

My first thought was, “Welcome to Hollywood,” where people don’t laugh at a joke, they look at you solemnly and tell you it was funny. Then again, new in town and having previously led a sheltered life reporting politics and other disasters, I’d never heard of Rogers & Cowan. Later on, I realized that it was a very funny line.

For already, and even more emphatically when I returned to Los Angeles to work for The Times in 1965, Rogers & Cowan was the powerhouse among independent publicity agencies servicing the entertainment industry. The shrinking of the major studios in the growth years of television, and the decimating of the studio publicity staffs in particular, had created boom times for the independents.

In a fiercely competitive area, Rogers & Cowan in the ‘60s and ‘70s was the MGM, so to speak, of the agencies. It had the largest staff, as many as 250, all complaining of overwork, had the starriest client lists (from Audrey Hepburn and Paul Newman to Danny Kaye and Kirk Douglas) and represented the hottest movies, Vegas acts, television series, corporations and products.

It was presided over by two dissimilar but catalytically complementary figures: the elegant, silver fox founder of the firm, Henry Rogers, and his employee-turned-partner Warren Cowan. Increasingly Rogers handled the corporate side of the business. Then and now, Cowan was the idea man, recruiting and working closely with the personalities and the events.

When I read, not long ago and with some surprise, that Henry Rogers was retiring, I talked with both Rogers and Cowan about the era in which they had played such a part.

In 1987, the two partners, to cash in the assets they had built over their four-decade-long partnership, sold Rogers & Cowan to Shandwick PLC of Great Britain. They were to stay on for four years. Now, his term up, Rogers has left, but Cowan, who is younger, has just signed up for another two years.

Rogers started in the publicity trade as a $5-a-week office boy in 1934, when the family moved to Los Angeles after his father’s dry-goods store failed in New Jersey. He became what the trade calls a downtown planter, delivering column items to the newspapers for his employer, a pioneer independent publicist named Grace Knowland. In addition to the several daily papers that then existed, he dealt with the Louella Parsons office by phone and visited Hedda Hopper’s office in Hollywood.

“When I was fired from that job,” Rogers said at breakfast not long ago, “I went to the three top publicity offices in Hollywood, all run by women--Helen Ferguson, Margaret Ettinger and Nancy Smith. I couldn’t get a job with any of them, so my father loaned me $500 and I went into the publicity business on my own. That was 1935. Nobody’s been around that long.”

His first clients were nightclubs and restaurants, which paid little but enabled him to tell the columnists which stars had been seen on the premises. It helped the clients; it also got Rogers better known.

Cowan joined him in 1945. “There were two of us and a secretary and I started at $15 a week,” Cowan remarked recently. Later, when he was making $200 a week, he was interviewed for a job handling publicity for Sam Goldwyn, at $1,200 a week. “But I decided to take the long gamble with Henry. I think about it today when people are jumping around,” Cowan says.

One night in 1950, after a dinner that had become a weekly ritual, Rogers asked if Cowan had an attorney. “I’ve changed the name of the firm to Rogers & Cowan and made you a partner,” Rogers explained, “and there’ll be a lot of papers for you to sign.” (For a time, the firm became Rogers, Cowan & Brenner, named for Temi Brenner, who headed up its television operations and who later died of cancer.)

Once upon a time, press agents/flacks/publicists were regarded, by the press especially, as about on a par with horse-traders, snake oil salespersons and racetrack touts. If the image has changed, Rogers can claim a fair amount of credit for it.

“I never mind being called a flack,” says Dale Olson, a former trade paper journalist and R&C; alumnus who now has his own firm. “But there was never a time you could call Henry a flack. He was an elder statesman even before he was middle-aged. If it hadn’t been for Henry and Warren, none of us could be doing what we do now. Henry practically invented independent entertainment publicity, representing Rita Hayworth and Joan Crawford and stars of that magnitude.”

The shrinking of the motion picture studios let independents like Rogers & Cowan handle more stars and more pictures. R&C; ran successful Oscar campaigns on behalf of Crawford for “Mildred Pierce” (1945) and Olivia de Havilland for “To Each His Own” (1946) and hoped to make it three in a row with Rosalind Russell in “Mourning Becomes Electra.”

“My wife bought new carpets because we were going to get a bonus if Roz won. She didn’t. Loretta Young got it for ‘The Farmer’s Daughter.’ My wife was so worried about paying for the carpet she ran out of the Shrine Auditorium and threw up,” Rogers remembers.

R&C; did repeat its success the next year, however, with Jane Wyman, who won the best-actress Oscar for “Johnny Belinda.”

Early in the television era, R&C; represented advertisers who were sponsoring shows, like “Kraft Theater” and the “U.S. Steel Hour.”

“I told them, ‘You’re not in advertising anymore, you’re in show business. You need us.’ At one time we were handling Procter & Gamble and Lever Bros. and Colgate,” Rogers says. Then, when the costs grew too high and the shows went to multiple sponsors, he took the agency into product promotion for these firms.

In the olden days of, say, the 1930s, the publicist’s principal function was to get his client’s name in the paper.

“I think I was one of the first to introduce the concept that our function was to help the client get better roles and make more money,” Rogers says. “It became more and more a business. Things aren’t as flamboyant and probably not as much fun as they were in the early days.”

Although some practitioners enjoy thinking of themselves as press agents in the old razzmatazz tradition, the publicity business has suffered from a certain amount of upgrading and dignifying. Indeed, the press, the present writer included, frequently complains that the current philosophy of the profession is to deny rather than facilitate access to the clients and to raise stonewalling and the timing of stories to a high and extortive art. As recent articles in Los Angeles magazine and elsewhere have reported, some publicists exert editor-like powers, demanding the guarantee of a cover story before making a client available.

The new philosophy is an almost inevitable extension of Rogers’ argument that the aim of publicity (get the name in print, and hope it’s spelled right) has surrendered to the goal of having a major hand in shaping the client’s career.

In part, the new approach reflects a changed audience, which no longer accepts with eager amusement the myths that once were constructed around star lives. The news that a starlet dines exclusively on a diet of African violets might make one or two of the supermarket tabloids, but probably not a full-size newspaper.

“The public has become more sophisticated,” Rogers admits, “and consequently the press has become more sophisticated. And we have to think in terms of making news instead of making up news. In the very early days, we used to dream up funny items about our clients, and the press used them.”

On his wedding day, Rogers recalls, he sent columnist Harrison Carroll, who was always eager for news of illness and injury, an item about a client who had a narrow escape in an automobile accident. All fictitious, it was, and as Rogers presumed Carroll realized. But Carroll gave it an eight-column headline. Back from his honeymoon, Rogers called to thank Carroll for the play. “That was my wedding present to you, Henry,” Rogers says Carroll told him.

“I’ve always said that our business could be aggravating, could be annoying, could be frustrating. But it was never boring,” Rogers says.

Some of R&C;’s chief rivals have long since bit the dust, including McFadden, Strauss, Eddy and Irwin and its successor firm, ICPR. But R&C; carries on with a long list of clients old (Kirk Douglas) and new (the Jenny Craig weight-reduction chain).

By now Rogers & Cowan alumni and alumnae dominate the Hollywood publicity business the way West Pointers dominate the Army--suggesting the same kind of rigorous training. By another irony, two of the newly potent and controversial publicists, Pat Kingsley of PMK and Andrea Jaffe, both began at Rogers & Cowan. Kingsley was Warren Cowan’s secretary at the start of her career, and Jaffe, who handles Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, among other clients, answered phones at the agency when she switched careers after a boring start in real estate. Both are now chief rivals of their alma mater.

Cowan calculates that more than 100 former R&C; people either have their own firms or are partners or key figures in other firms. The list includes, in addition to Kingsley, Jaffe and Olson, Jim Mahoney, Ronni Chasen, Jay Bernstein, Howard Brandy and Pat Newcombe. Guy McIlwaine, now a leading agent who was formerly head of production at Columbia, is an R&C; alumnus, as is Tom Wilhite, who was at one point in charge of production at the pre-Michael Eisner Disney.

Cowan finds retirement out of the question: “I’m like George Burns. I say, ‘Retire to what?’ ” Rogers too is only retiring from R&C.; He is working on a fifth book, a biography of the colorful show business attorney Greg Bautzer, whose former wife, Dana Wynter, was an R&C; client. Rogers also lectures widely, often on college campuses, about rules for success and not least about his personal victory over a severe stutter, which had made his life miserable from early childhood.

Hoping to get the publicity account of a tobacco sponsor in television’s early days, he was scheduled to make a flip-card presentation to what proved to be a gray-flanneled Madison Avenue audience of nearly four dozen ad agency and corporation executives (each, he remembers, with a pristine yellow pad, needle-pointed pencil and individual carafe of water at his place). Rogers was so nervous about his stammer that he was about to plead illness and flee, but the audience walked into the room before he could get away. He stammered through the presentation, and, to his later amazement, R&C; got the account.

“I always talk about it,” Rogers says, “because college kids always have a reason why they think they won’t succeed. They’re black, they’re Hispanic, they’re women, too fat, too thin, have a wart on their nose or a twisted mouth, or something, or something, or something. So I tell them that story and I end up by saying, ‘Don’t talk to me about handicaps.’ ”

“He (Rogers) gave the field a patina of respectability,” Olson says. “You got the feeling he could walk with heads of state. The clients liked that. It made them feel secure.”