Word: maney
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...show opens a hit, Maney can choose his spots, reserve good stories for the big papers. With a flop, veterans like Maney don't try pleading or high-pressuring. They think fast and try stunts. Publicity stunts have turned many a tide. Anna Held's fame dates chiefly from her milk baths. Belasco strewed tanbark outside a theatre, ostensibly to cushion street noises, actually to start people talking. Lions have been let loose in hotel bedrooms, Ziegfeld girls have marched to New York's City Hall in tights...
...Maney's stunts are those of a born tongue-in-cheeker. When he did the publicity for The Great Magoo, which the critics drubbed, he had a hand in the decision of its playwrights, Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler, to lie in state in separate coffins at a funeral parlor. For Billy Rose, Maney concocted an advertisement for "100 bona fide noblemen" to serve as dancing partners at Rose's Fort Worth Frontier Centennial. "In answering," read the ad, "submit photographs in uniform, with orders, ribbons and decorations evident. . . . Bogus counts, masqueraders and descend ants of the Dauphin...
...Maney's most successful stunt was for The Squall, which opened as a floperoo. A line in the play ran "Nubi bad girl, Nubi stay." Reviewing The Squall in the old Life, Robert Benchley retched: "Nubi stay, Benchley go." Quickly Maney hoisted big ads reading: "See the play that made a streetwalker of Robert Benchley." The Squall ran over a year...
...Maney, born 47 years ago in Chinook, Mont. (then full of Cree Indians), has said so often that he spoke only Cree until he was twelve that he now believes it. Actually, the only strange sounds he uttered came out of a cornet he played...
...first important press-agent job was handling Broncho Billy Anderson, the cinema cowboy most in favor before the days of Tom Mix. Since then, Maney has press-agented some 90 shows for virtually every big producer on Broadway and for such oddities as a colored gentleman "a year removed from a treetop in the Congo." He has publicized such hits as The Front Page, Coquette, Fifty Million Frenchmen, Sailor Beware!, The Children's Hour. Says he from experience: "I have yet to find an actor, producer or stagehand who did not like to see his name in print." Among...