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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
The Publicity Stunt Is an Institution as American as, Well, the President by P Carlson 
When Elephants Ski The Publicity Stunt Is an Institution as American as, Well, the President By Peter Carlson Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, May 1, 2004; Page C01 Ayear ago today, President Bush flew a Navy warplane to a place of honor in the grand and glorious history of the American publicity stunt. At a Navy base in San Diego, the president donned a flight suit, climbed into a spare seat on an S-3B Viking anti-submarine jet and zoomed off into the wild blue yonder. A few miles out, the pilot, Cmdr. John "Skip" Lussier, allowed Bush, a former National Guard aviator, to take the controls for a while. Then Lussier brought the Viking in for a dramatic tailhook landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which was returning from the war with Iraq. Moments later, the president hopped out, his helmet tucked under his arm. Smiling broadly, Bush swaggered across the flight deck. "That's the fighter pilot's strut," said CNN reporter Miles O'Brien, covering the landing on live TV. The carrier's 5,000 sailors cheered Bush's dramatic entrance. So did the media. "A brilliant piece of stagecraft," said the Los Angeles Times. "The mother of all photo ops," said CNN. "Bush the pilot performs ace publicity stunt," read the headline in the Times of London. Of course, there were naysayers. Irate Democrats denounced the flight as a "tax-subsidized commercial" and a "shameless stunt." But such carping sounded tinny because of one undeniable fact about our national life: Americans love shameless stunts. In fact, the shameless publicity stunt just might be America's greatest art form. Pundits can debate the propriety of the president's tailhook landing -- and they do -- but as pure theater, it was a spectacular success. Surely, it qualifies for a place in the pantheon of great American publicity stunts, right up there with Bill Clinton playing the sax on "The Arsenio Hall Show" or Bill Veeck sending a midget to bat for the St. Louis Browns or Janet Jackson accidentally-on-purpose revealing her right breast during the Super Bowl halftime show. Bush's top gun landing may be the most dramatic entrance by a celebrity since Aug. 21, 1996, when NBA star Dennis Rodman promoted his book, "Bad as I Wanna Be," by arriving at a Manhattan bookstore in a horse-drawn carriage wearing a full-length wedding gown and surrounded by a phalanx of comely bridesmaids clad in tuxedos. Sen. John Kerry paid homage to Bush's carrier stunt last September by using an aircraft carrier as a prop for his own stunt. Although he'd been campaigning full time for months, Kerry flew to South Carolina to stand in front of the USS Yorktown and formally announce that -- surprise! -- he was running for president. It wasn't much of a stunt, but it worked: Kerry got front-page coverage for saying something everybody already knew. From Cheap to Cherished A publicity stunt is, of course, a stunt designed to attract publicity. (Duh.) It's a perfect example of what the late librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin famously dubbed "pseudo-events" -- happenings planned "for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced." The publicity stunt is a great American tradition that has given our nation some of its iconic images: Presidents throwing out the first pitch on opening day. Pols wearing Indian headdresses or miner's helmets on the campaign trail. Hollywood stars putting handprints in wet cement on the sidewalk outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre. In America, the publicity stunt is a delightfully democratic art form. It is used by protesters and presidents, by showmen and salesmen, by Christian evangelist Arthur Blessitt, who has spent the last few decades carrying a 12-foot cross around the world, and by Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, who staged a highly publicized 1967 baptism of his daughter Zeena on an altar topped by a reclining nude. Some of America's most beloved annual events began their existence as cheap publicity stunts. The Rose Bowl grew out of an 1890 stunt designed to promote Pasadena, Calif., with a "Tournament of Roses" festival. The organizers staged photo-friendly bronco-busting competitions and a race between a camel and an elephant. (The elephant won.) In 1902, they added a football game. But when the visiting team, the University of Michigan, creamed the home team, Stanford, 49-0, the organizers jettisoned football for chariot races. In 1916, football returned and soon the Rose Bowl was born. The Miss America pageant began in 1921 as a publicity stunt to lure tourists to Atlantic City after Labor Day. The stunt was so shameless that in 1924, the Newspaper Publishers Association urged its members to refrain from covering the pageant because its goal was "the most flagrant use of free publicity." Of course, newspapers ignored that advice, proving that a good publicity stunt is more powerful than the journalistic ethics police, particularly if the stunt involves beautiful women in bathing suits. The Academy Awards began in 1929 as a cheap publicity stunt for the movie industry, and over the decades has become a much more expensive publicity stunt for the movie industry. Just as publicity stunts can evolve into national institutions, national institutions can evolve into publicity stunts. Back in the old days, political conventions did the tough work of choosing presidential candidates. Now presidential candidates are chosen in primaries, and political conventions are simply week-long series of publicity stunts, including meticulously planned spontaneous demonstrations and the ceremonial dropping of red, white and blue balloons. In fact, sometimes a presidential campaign itself is merely a publicity stunt to promote the candidate. Did Al Sharpton really think he had a chance to get elected? Did Dennis Kucinich or Jesse Jackson or Gary Bauer or Pat Buchanan? How about Ralph Nader? Pat Paulsen? Dick Gregory? Vermin Supreme? Last year's California gubernatorial recall election was used as a publicity stunt by more than 100 dubious candidates -- including washed- up actor Gary Coleman and pundit Arianna Huffington. The recall's winner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, capped his campaign with a classic stunt: At a rally in Orange County, he announced that he was about to demonstrate "exactly what we're going to do to the car tax." Then a crane dropped a 3,600-pound wrecking ball on an old white Oldsmobile as the crowd cheered and the cameras rolled. Pranks for the Memories "We staged a triple groundbreaking in the sky!" says Aaron Cushman. Cushman, 79, is a legendary Chicago PR man and author of a 2003 memoir, "A Passion for Winning: Fifty Years of Promoting Legendary People and Products." He's talking about a shameless stunt he produced for Marriott hotels in the late '70s. When Cushman learned that Marriott was planning to break ground for three new hotels in one day -- in Kansas City, Denver and Newport Beach, Calif. -- he figured he had to come up with something sensational, something spectacular, something stupendous. And he did. He chartered a DC-9 in Washington, filled it with reporters and cameras and flew to Kansas City. There, the plane picked up local TV crews and took off again. While it circled the site of the future hotel, a lovely flight attendant dramatically walked down the aisle holding a purple pillow equipped with flashing lights and a plunger. "The lights were meaningless and the plunger was hooked up to nothing," Cushman recalls. "She put the pillow in Mr. Marriott's lap and he pushed the plunger." At that moment, the plane tilted on its side so the TV cameras could get a good shot as Marriott's construction crew broke ground with a gigantic blast of dynamite. Boom! The plane flew on, repeating the stunt over Denver and Newport Beach -- Boom! Boom! "It was a great stunt!!" says Cushman, now retired in Florida but still speaking in multiple exclamation points. "We got unbelievable coverage!!" Ah, stunt stories! Old PR guys love to tell tales of great stunts and many of the stories are true, more or less, if you allow for the artistic embellishments inevitable in a trade based on hyperbole. Perhaps somebody should build a Publicity Stunt Hall of Fame. Who would be enshrined? Max Rosey would be there. Rosey was the legendary New York PR man who put an elephant on a giant water ski in the Hudson River to promote an amusement park. Jim Moran, another New York PR guy, would be there, too. To publicize a book called "The Egg and I," Moran sat on an ostrich egg for 19 days 4 hours and 32 minutes before it hatched. When Moran died in 1999 at 91, the New York Times wrote: "His life might be described by two symbols: the exclamation point and the dollar sign." William Castle surely earned a place. Castle was a Hollywood producer who made wretched movies but promoted them with fabulous stunts. In 1958, he publicized his schlock horror film "Macabre" by purchasing a Lloyd's of London policy insuring all ticket buyers against death by fright. When the movie opened in Minneapolis, Castle arrived at the theater in a coffin delivered by a hearse -- a stunt chronicled in his autobiography, "Step Right Up! I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off America." Abbie Hoffman, clown prince of the yippies, brought the publicity stunt to radical politics in the 1960s -- throwing money off the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange to protest capitalism, and nominating a snorting, oinking pig for president in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention. If there's enough space, the Hall of Fame could display a 40-by-40-foot target emblazoned with "Free Taco Here" in big purple letters. When Mir, the Russian space station, was about to splash down in the Pacific Ocean in 2001, the folks at Taco Bell built that target and floated it in the Pacific, announcing solemnly that if Mir hit it, they'd give everyone in America a free taco. As it turned out, nobody got free tacos -- Mir landed elsewhere, alas -- but Taco Bell got plenty of free publicity. Perhaps the hall should have a display devoted to stunts that didn't quite work: A video of Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate, looking laughably goofy as he rode in a tank, wearing a helmet too large for him, to demonstrate his military prowess. Plus the famous photo of Rudy Giuliani, wearing shades and a Hell's Angels jacket, standing next to Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, wearing shades and an Army hat, on that wonderful night in 1986 when they bought crack on a Manhattan street to show that, well, even middle-aged Republicans in dorky disguises can buy dope in New York. The folks at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals stage so many publicity stunts they deserve their own wing in the Hall of Fame. PETA activists have dressed up as chickens, rats, carrots, rabbits, priests, Santa Claus. They have frequently stood naked in the streets of freezing cities covered only by a banner reading, "I'd Rather Be Naked Than Wear Fur." "You can have 5,000 people marching against fur and five people getting naked for our 'Rather Be Naked' campaign," says Dan Mathews, PETA's vice president for communication, "and I guarantee you that the naked people will get a lot more publicity." Mathews learned that lesson in the early '90s, when he staged the first "Rather Be Naked" stunt outside a fur fashion show in Tokyo. "It made front-page news all over the world," he says. "We learned that, as Madison Avenue could have told us, sex sells." After that, PETA staged a stunt with Pamela Anderson in a bikini made of lettuce. It protested the circus by putting naked women painted like tigers into cages. It dispatched two bikini-clad women -- one a former Penthouse model -- to promote vegetarianism by wrestling in a vat of tofu in cities across America. "I refer to myself as a vaudevillian," says Mathews. Keeping the Art Alive Aaron Cushman is worried about the future of the publicity stunt. "The publicity stunt is kind of disappearing over the past 10 or 15 years," says the genius behind the triple groundbreaking in the sky. The problem, Cushman says, is that today's PR people are too stodgy. "In the public relations business, people have become so strait-laced," he laments. Cushman should meet George and Richard Shea, two brothers who run a Manhattan PR firm that specializes in shameless publicity stunts. "I would do a stunt every single day of the week if I could," says George Shea, 39. The Shea brothers learned their art working for Max Rosey, the genius behind the water-skiing elephant. Rosey promoted Nathan's hot dogs with an annual hot dog-eating contest, which inspired the Shea brothers to create the International Federation of Competitive Eating, which stages eating contests as publicity stunts for restaurants across the country. This year, the brothers were hired to promote Spamarama, a 26-year-old Austin festival devoted to the greater glory of Spam -- the kind you eat, not the kind that chokes your computer. They came up with a stupendous stunt: the National Spam Torch Run. "It was just like the Olympic torch run," says Shea, "except there was no torch. It was a can of Spam on a chair leg." The event was, Shea says with a straight face, "the first-ever meat-based torch run in the United States, if not the entire world." The Spam torch left Times Square on April 1 and arrived in Austin in time for the opening of Spamarama on April 3. That amazing speed was achieved because the Spam runners skipped a lot of places in between. "Of the 2,000-odd miles," Shea says, "I'd estimate that we actually ran approximately 2.5 miles." Several hundred yards was in downtown Akron, Ohio, and the inevitable story in the Akron Beacon Journal revealed that the stunt had successfully communicated Shea's ideas: "I got out of school today for this," a local 10th-grader told the Beacon Journal. "It's the first meat-based torch run." Now, Shea is planning his next stunt, to hype a documentary called "Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating." Scheduled for Tuesday at New York's Tribeca Film Festival, the stunt will consist of . . . well, let Shea's news release tell the story: "EATER TO BE BURIED ALIVE IN 'POPCORN SARCOPHAGUS' " "In a never-before-attempted stunt, renowned competitive eater Crazy Legs Conti will be buried alive under 128 cubic feet of popcorn inside a 'Popcorn Sarcophagus.' Conti will seek to eat his way out in time for the premiere of the film." It's a stunt William Castle would love, and Shea has sweetened it with a few flamboyant touches. "We are going to equip him with a special snorkel so he can breathe while he's eating," Shea says. "And he'll be able to communicate with a special traffic light. Green means 'all is fine.' Red means 'sledgehammer the thing open to save me.' And yellow means 'I need more butter.' " No need to worry about the future of the publicity stunt. America's greatest art form is alive and well. |