I ASKED a couple of publicists recently what they thought of Mark Borkowski. "Genius," said one. "Mark's trouble is he thinks he's the story, not the client," said another. Both have a point. Borkowski's stunts have become a part of the Edinburgh Fes
tival, indeed of national life, for two decades. This is the publicist who arranged a motorbike jump over an Edinburgh traffic jam to promote a circus and who was evicted from a BBC green room for releasing scorpions.
A few years ago, Borkowski blew his own trumpet entertainingly with a book called Improperganda: Art Of The Publicity Stunt. His new offering, The Fame Formula, attempts the same but more laterally. Ostensibly the book is a history of how Hollywood's "fixers, fakers and star-makers created the celebrity industry". But its ulterior purpose is to aggrandise the writer by placing him in a historical lineage, much as medieval monarchs used king lists to gain legitimacy.
Should anyone doubt his desire to be taken seriously, Borkowski begins by quoting the Iliad before claiming that "the publicist is the person who delivers, and truly understands, the Conradian soul of man". A bold claim – especially from someone who once created a newspaper column for a cat.
Borkowski dates the start of the modern PR industry to the circus owner, Phineas T Barnum, who said "every crowd has a silver lining". Borkowski notes that the circus owner felt it foolish to be disrespectful to his audience, though this didn't stop him stitching together a monkey and a fish to make a mermaid or passing off a slave woman as George Washington's 163-year-old nursemaid.
Vaudeville soon overtook circus, but the spirit of PT endured. One of the more free-spirited early publicists, Harry Reichenbach, made his first big buck in 1913 by complaining to New York's Anti-Vice Society about a nude lithograph. After the subsequent furore, the picture sold seven million copies at a dollar each.
But it is Reichenbach's less famous contemporary, Maynard Nottage, to whom Borkowski seems most drawn. Nottage worked on Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show before entering the movies. If simplicity was Reichenbach's watchword, Nottage favoured elaborate set-ups, once grafting a dog's tail on to an actor to promote cosmetics.
Where Reichenbach thrived, Nottage failed. By the 1960s, he was an embittered alcoholic. At least that's how Borkowski tells it. Astute readers may wonder whether the Zelig-like Nottage ever existed. The sole documentary evidence comes from papers Borkowski claims to have been given by the "stuntster's" granddaughter. In a book about fakers, perhaps the temptation to join them was too strong.
No matter. Whether Nottage was real or not, the role he plays here is clear, a sort of PR equivalent of Sunset Boulevard's deluded silent movie star Norma Desmond, sidelined by wider changes in society. The dawn of instant communications made the publicists of the vaudeville era seem old-fashioned. From now on, the press agent would be a "suppress agent". The rise of the studios and the new moralism of the 1930 Hays Code made this essential, requiring fixers such as Howard Strickling and Eddie Mannix, said to have covered up a pornographic film featuring Joan Crawford. This new puritanism was summed up by Gone With The Wind director David O Selznick's comment: "I don't want any press agentry. I want imagination. But it must be accurate and true."
Not that the ways of Barnum died entirely. Among those continuing to prosper was the legendary maverick Jim Moran, whose attempt to attach midgets to kites and use them as advertising blimps was stopped by the cops – but only because they feared the midgets might fall on to ball-players below.
The book's final third follows the blanding of PR from 1945 onwards, which may explain why it is so dreary. Readers won't be surprised that the studio system's breakdown put power in the hands of actors' personal PRs.
Borkowski tries to liven things up by offering a mathematical formula for fame. The best that can be said of this unlikely string of numbers is that it may divert Metro readers for a moment.
Ultimately, The Fame Formula gives us a lot of whos and hows. What it fails to establish is what's in it for the publicists, pay cheque apart. To aspire to fame is an easily understood ambition. But to want to hover around celebrity and shape it seems on oddly opaque desire. Making sense of that requires a more subtle formula than this book provides. v
Edinburgh International Book Festival, Friday, 2pm-3pm
The full article contains 776 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
