How Use of ‘Personal Touch’ Has Built a Minority Public Relations Firm

It’s the returned phone call, no matter how late the hour. It’s the special gift, the shoulder to lean on. Touches like these have helped make Terrie Williams’ reputation as a public relations expert and trusted adviser in the entertainment industry and beyond.

People who have benefited from Williams’ skills range from neophyte job-seekers to big names such as Eddie Murphy, Nelson Mandela and Sally Jessy Raphael. A social worker-turned-entrepreneur from suburban New York, Williams made her mark in just six years as head of the largest minority-owned public relations firm in the nation, one that bears her name.

“She’s very good, she’s a pro,” said Howard Rubenstein, a prominent press agent who has known Williams for 15 years. “She’s honest. She gives you a very straight answer. There’s no dancing with her. Her name and (reports of) her stage presence pop up all over the place.”

Since she opened her doors in 1988, Williams’ client list has included former New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins, Washington Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, comics Sinbad and Martin Lawrence, actor Wesley Snipes, actor and filmmaker Robert Townsend, Time Warner Inc., astronaut Mae Jemison and singer Janet Jackson.

Williams, 40, author of a newly published book, “The Personal Touch: What You Really Need to Succeed in Today’s Fast-Paced Business World,” attributes her success to trying “very, very hard to think about the human beings” she deals with.

“I am a deeply spiritual, caring and thoughtful person, and there isn’t anything that I wouldn’t do for someone that I care about,” Williams said in a recent interview.

In the foreword to her book, Bill Cosby wrote, “Terrie Williams has become a success because she knows how to deal with people and she knows how to treat everyone with respect.”

Williams returns telephone calls with a husky, weary voice even as she prepares to board a red-eye flight in Los Angeles to come home to New York. She holds hands or lends a shoulder when necessary, even when she’s resting in Mexico or is in France with another client.

She also finds the unique gift. For Toni Fay, a friend and vice president at Time Warner who has hired Williams, it was a makeup compact that erupts into a wolf whistle when opened.

Williams grew up in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., earned a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and a master’s in social work from Columbia University.

Stressed out in 1978 after being involved with terminally ill hospital patients for 2 1/2 years, Williams took a public relations seminar.

She began free-lancing and tackling jobs where she could do public relations work. Then, in the early 1980s, the publisher of Essence magazine wanted her to handle public relations for him.

“It was the dream job I had been waiting for,” Williams said, but she was deeply involved in another job at the time. “There was no way it would have been right to leave that project.”

Essence waited six months, and in 1983 Williams moved to the magazine for a five-year stint that ended with a vice presidency and a networking base on which she formed her company.

At the launch, she had two stars lined up: Eddie Murphy and Miles Davis. She and Davis clicked after she introduced herself when he was a patient at the hospital where she worked. She met Murphy at Davis’ 60th birthday party.

Sometimes her relationships with clients are rocky. She has quit Murphy and he has fired her, but they have stuck it out. For her 40th birthday, Murphy sent “an incredible basket with a bottle of Geritol and Epsom salts,” Williams said. “It really made me laugh.”

Thoughts of the late Miles Davis, however, bring tears to her eyes.

“Miles was a wild, crazy, talented guy who could tell the funniest stories and was as real as real could be,” Williams said. “He was just a very special person. I miss him more than words could ever say.”

One of the things they had in common was a love of basketball. Davis regarded the play on parquet as poetry in motion, she said. “He used to hear music in the guys’ sneakers streaking across the floor.”

With the help of a friend who played in the National Basketball Assn., Williams began to work for NBA players.

She recognized that young players are but “6-foot-5 babies” who “are awesome on the court, but they don’t have someone in their lives to guide them.”

That’s why she became involved with an NBA program that teaches rookies how to socialize and how to deal with the stress of fame and money at a young age.

John Salley, formerly of the Detroit Pistons and now with the Miami Heat, remembered his early, lonely NBA days in Motown and how Williams befriended him. She has offered him advice on all manner of things, he said, including how to handle his wedding a year ago.

“Ain’t nobody better; the lady can do it all,” Salley said. “She’s a real giving woman.”

That also involves the giving, or getting, of jobs. Hundreds of people, from attorneys interested in practicing entertainment law to public relations interns, have been through the Terrie Williams Agency.

“I have been able to send a lot of people to Terrie because of her unselfishness,” said Anthony P. Carter, manager of public affairs at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. “There’s a joke about how ‘I got my job through the New York Times.’ There are a lot of African Americans who can say, ‘I got my job through Terrie Williams.’ I’m a big fan.”