Ruth Webb, 88; talent agent took on the once-famous and the infamous

As a talent agent, Ruth Webb earned a reputation in the 1970s for giving new life to such old stars as Ginger Rogers, Dorothy Lamour and Donald O’Connor on the dinner-theater circuit.

She also helped rekindle Mickey Rooney’s career, prompting him to write in a 1980 ad in Variety while appearing in the Broadway hit “Sugar Babies” that Webb “took me when no one else wanted me and made me a star.”

But it wasn’t until Webb and partner Sherri Spillane launched a “scandal division” in the mid-1990s that the Ruth Webb Agency in Hollywood suddenly found itself thrust into the limelight by offering a rogues’ gallery of clients who included Tonya Harding, Gennifer Flowers, Joey Buttafuoco, John Wayne Bobbitt and other notorious newsmakers.

As Los Angeles magazine put it at the time: “If you want representation at the Ruth Webb Agency, you’ll need a head shot and a rap sheet.”

Webb, 88, who once said “We take the hard sells and make them stars,” died Dec. 4 in a Los Angeles hospital after a lengthy pulmonary illness, Spillane said.

A former Broadway actress and Manhattan cabaret singer, Webb launched her company in New York in 1962 and moved it to Hollywood a decade later.

Spillane, who once described Webb as “a combination of Auntie Mame and Zsa Zsa Gabor,” said Webb would “go to all kinds of lengths to get work for her clients.”

“One time in New York, she actually auditioned for a show just to be able to get to the producer to convince him to use one of her clients,” Spillane said. “She’d have performers who were down on their luck stay at her home.”

“I was very fond of her,” onetime MGM musical star Kathryn Grayson, a former Webb client, told The Times this week. “She was very good and got a lot of work for me.”

Spillane, herself a former Webb client as a musical-comedy actress in New York in the 1960s -- and an ex-wife of the late mystery writer Mickey Spillane -- joined Webb as an agent in the early ‘90s.

The idea for getting Webb’s agency into the scandal business came to Spillane after Harding gained notoriety for her part in the 1994 attack on fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan at the U.S. national championships in Detroit.

“It was simply a lightbulb that went off in my head,” Spillane said. “An article said she’d never work again. I looked at Ruth, and she said something to the effect, ‘That’s what they think; let’s go get her.’ ”

Dubbed “specialists in turning public disgrace into private gain” by the Washington Post in 1995, Webb and Spillane soon added more names to their scandal division client list.

They included, among others, Sydney Biddle Barrows (the “Mayflower Madam”), cop-turned-call-girl Norma Jean Almodovar, Tammy Faye Messner (the ex-wife of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker); and Kato Kaelin, fresh off the O.J. Simpson case.

“I wanted to get him a hair commercial and put him in comedic roles, but his management didn’t want to go that way,” said Spillane, who handled the agency’s scandal division clients.

It didn’t take long before the Ruth Webb Agency was generating more publicity than many of its clients.

In addition to a stream of newspaper and magazine stories, Webb and Spillane were profiled on “Dateline NBC” and appeared on “Entertainment Tonight,” “Inside Edition” and other television shows.

“It’s not just cash for trash; I’ve always tried to help people,” Webb told USA Today in 1995. “We’re not going to deal with any murderers or politicians or anything like that.”

For a long time, the Ruth Webb Agency was based in Webb’s Hollywood Hills home. The house, according to a 1995 story in the London Independent, had “all the meretricious trappings of a bordello -- plus Rocky, a pet raccoon draped around a tree in the garden, five fluffy cats snuggled into the white shag-pile of Webb’s candy-floss boudoir, and a squawking parrot perched above an old jukebox.”

The flamboyant Webb, who was given to wearing gold lame jackets, feather boas and sequins and once went on an audition with one of her pet raccoons on a leash, was no stranger to notoriety.

“I was no-TOR-ious!” she dramatically proclaimed in a 1994 interview with The Times, claiming that the Mafia once put out a contract on her and that while she was married to Albert Benajam, they were known in the New York press as “The Battling Benajams.”

Born Ruth Thea Ford in New York City on March 17, 1918, Webb launched her career in show business in her teens.

She made her Broadway debut in 1942 in the play “The Walking Gentleman,” which she followed with roles in the Broadway musicals “Early to Bed” and “Marinka.” She also succeeded Betty Comden in the musical “On the Town,” which ran on Broadway from 1944 to 1946.

Her summer stock credits included starring roles in productions such as “Auntie Mame,” “Kiss Me Kate,” “Pal Joey” and “Damn Yankees.” She also sang at the Latin Quarter and other nightclubs in New York in the off season, appeared on the covers of Town & Country and On the Town magazines, and was a model for a national Chesterfield cigarette ad campaign.

In 1961, a year before starting her own agency, Webb went to work for her agent, Laura Arnold.

Although Spillane said their scandal division “put the agency on the map big time,” it was phased out in the late 1990s. “It had run its course,” she said. In the wake of the hit TV show “Survivor,” the agency began representing the “breakout personalities” of other reality TV shows.

Spillane said Webb wasn’t as active as she had been with the agency in recent years but “was still involved in the decision-making,” and she recently completed her autobiography, “Welcome to My Web,” which she was constantly rewriting.

Webb, who was married four times and most recently lived in Northridge, is survived by her sons, Michael Benajam and Jack Webb; and three grandchildren.

A celebration of her life will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com