The Most Memorable PR Guy I Ever Met
By Dean Rotbart
Since graduating journalism school in 1979, I estimate that I have been pitched by no fewer than 2,200 different PR people. Starting in 1992, I began conducting workshops for PR people and hence have likely helped train another two or three thousand communications executives. Among those I've encountered are the truly influential and those who only think they are influential. I've heard from the head of large agencies and the proprietors of hundreds of one-person agencies. I've known nice PR people, competent PR people, flamboyant PR people, na•ve PR people, dishonorable PR people and savvy, savvy PR people.
But of all the PR people who've ever crossed my path, one comes to mind most often when I pause periodically to remind myself of the many PR people I've known.
My first awareness of Len came in 1984, when I reported for duty as a Heard on the Street columnist for The Wall Street Journal. I was an energetic 27 years of age and had already been a bureau reporter for the daily business bible for more than four years.
By then, I knew a heck of a lot about business and journalism, but not a twit about writing a daily stock market gossip column.
The two departing columnists, along with other veteran Journal reporters, gave me a crash course on the intricacies of my new duties. Each, at one point, imparted these words of warning: "Whatever you do, watch out for Len! He's not somebody you want to associate with."
What an endorsement for a PR guy!
Sure enough, I hadn't picked up my first New York paycheck before the craggy; Brooklynesque voice on the other end of the line greeted me:
"Welcome to the Big Apple. How bout I buy you lunch and introduce yah to some people yah gotta know?"
It was Len.
"No, thanks. I'm still learning my way around the newsroom," I begged off.
"Natta problem, I'll call again."
And, of course, he did.
Len was nothing if not persistent.
After a while, my curiosity about Len overtook my hesitancy, and I agreed to break bread with the man.I scribbled down the address of the restaurant and appeared at the prescribed place at the prescribed time.
By now, I had grown accustomed to pitch lunches. They were often at big-ticket Wall Street digs, such as Harry's on Hanover Square or Delmonico's. The routine was pretty much the same: drop a lot of dough, hobnob with some bigwigs, and point to some even bigger wigs seated in the corner booths. Being seen at these spots and glad-handed by the maitre d, lent the PR person an air of respectability.
Len's meeting place, its name long since forgotten, was a greasy spoon cum bar. When I entered from the bright daylight, I was momentarily blinded by the darkness of the joint. Then I heard his unmistakable booming voice: "Over here, I'm over here." Sure enough, he was. Sitting facing the entrance, in the dead center of the otherwise empty eatery, was Len. He'd already had a few by the time I arrived and encouraged me to join him as if we were old drinking buddies.
The first thing anyone noticed about Len was his bowling ball belly. Len was nearing 60, bald, squat and casual. I don't remember ever seeing him sport a tie or a white shirt. Whether it was this Italian restaurant, where the calamari was exquisite, or any one of a series of similar ethnic dives, Len always found a way to sniff out the best food and drink in the absolutely worst locales.
From the moment I met Len I tried hard to dislike him. But I just couldn't. Len knew more about my colleagues and bosses at the Journal than all the other polished, white-shirt PR people I met that year combined. He read and seemingly memorized every column I wrote and was nothing if not frank in his assessment of them. Begrudgingly, he taught me a lot. Like Woody Allen, who played a down on his luck talent agent in the movie Broadway Danny Rose, Len's clients were almost all C-string talents, a motley crew of Wall Street wannabes and has-beens. Like Danny Rose, Len believed in every one of them and inevitably was mortally wounded when, after all his efforts, they dumped him at their first glimmer of genuine media
recognition..
Most journalists were no more loyal to Len.
For years, perhaps decades, Len took green journalists like me under his wing and helped them find their way around their own newsrooms and around Wall Street. When the day came, as it always did, that every story one of Len's protˇgˇs was mining turned up dry, Len was always there to help us cobble together a column or feature for the next day's paper.
Typically, that was how Len got press for his clients. By default.
As I grew to know Len and his clients, I could spot which of my colleagues or competitors had hit a rough patch the day before, because their columns quoted three or four apparently unrelated sources. Yet I always saw the common thread. Unbeknownst to readers and editors, each source had the same PR guy, Len.
Len's specialty was Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser.
Len never missed an episode and undoubtedly held the unofficial record for PR people who placed the most clients on the program. Best I could tell, Len's method was this: He watched and dissected each show without fail. He also cultivated the show's young producer/booker, Rich Dubroff, to further enhance his understanding of WSW's editorial mission and goals. Then Len set about hunting for potential clients who fit the bill. His pitch to them, "I can get you on Wall Street Week."
Len was quoted in a 1989 USA Today article about the clout of the long-running PBS program saying "there are people who have considered a Wall Street Week appearance to be worth $25,000 to $50,000." Privately, Len displayed copies of his bank deposit slips to prove the point.
While Len targeted young journalists, he also cultivated those at the other end of the age spectrum. These hacks were often too bored, burned out or drunk to muster much energy for their work, so Len made their lives a little simpler by feeding them ready-made feature ideas (chock full of his clients) and plying them with drinks, as required, before and after hours. My favorite such Len story came from Len himself. After I started my TJFR newsletter about financial journalists, Len tipped me off to a story. An aging syndicated columnist, the kind Len loved to cultivate, had been so lazy he had actually taken one of Len's pitch letters, verbatim, and ran it as a news column under the journalist's own byline. Len
provided me with both the published column and his original dated pitch.
Eventually, like his own clients, the young journalists Len adopted went on to greater professional status and found they had no further need of him. Indeed, many journalists, including my Journal mentors, were embarrassed by their own previous associations with the old coot.
Len's coterie of true-blue media friends thus consisted of half a dozen or so old timers, who often shared Len's now outmoded love of the bottle, and one or two younger punks like me who looked upon Len not as an embarrasement, but as a treasured relic.
As the years passed, Len's growing list of client defectors, ungrateful journalists and his predilection for booze took their toll. Len grew increasingly grouchy and disillusioned. He bailed out of his practice and eventually out of PR altogether.
Work was the sustenance of Len's life. Outside of it, he spoke only of his son and daughter and his "lady companion" de jour. He vacationed periodically in warmer climes, played cards, and eventually retired to sunny Florida, where he died in 1998 at the age of 71.
I lost track of Len well before his death and didn't actually learn about it until I sat down to write this tribute and discovered his paid death notice in The New York Times archives.
To me, it was sadly ironic.
In the end, the man who generated so much free press for others and had helped so many successful journalists launch their careers, had to pay for his own valediction in the paper.
September 24, 2001
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