Word: sonnenbergs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...former days, but it has a certain fitness. The house was a stage set; its natural fate was to be struck. The man who inhabited it, the producer, director and short, waddling star of the comedy of manners that unfolded in its rooms for some 40 years, was Benjamin Sonnenberg...
...stroke of irony that he would, no doubt, have relished, Ben Sonnenberg died last September, at age 77, during the New York newspaper strike. Thus he had no obituaries of any size, and his passing, though mourned by friends, made little news. But then, Sonnenberg's profession was to be the midwife of stories, not their subject. He was one of the first modern public relations men. Indeed he had been at the game so long-"fashioning," as he once put it, "large pedestals for small statues"-that many people thought he had invented the p.r. business...
...gravitate toward people with money," he once said, with winning simplicity. The money brushed off like pollen; at one time or another, Sonnenberg handled the p.r. needs of CBS, Philip Morris, David Sarnoff, Lever Brothers, Samuel Goldwyn, Pan Am, Squibb, Pepperidge Farm and others too numerous to count. A prodigios host and incessant partygiver, he was Manhattan's equivalent of the "talking chief on other, Polynesian islands-the chamberlain who enunciates the real chiefs dicta to the tribe, or, as he put it himself, "I supply the Listerine to the commercial dandruff on the shoulders of corporations...
...studied; he worked as a journalist; he peddled tinted portrait photographs in the Midwest, worked as a $25-a-week movie critic, and then wandered into a job with an American organization distributing food and medical relief to postwar Europe. Thus, in 1922, the young Sonnenberg went back to Europe-armed this time with a salary and an expense account. He went to Rome, London and Paris; "the significance of having a man draw your bath and lay out your clothes," he told The New Yorker a quarter of a century later, "burst upon me like a revelation ... I think...
...Sonnenberg was exquisitely conscious of dress as costume. In the '40s and '50s his style of accouterment was a wonder of Manhattan-cane, tight four-button suits, massive cuff links, a bowler hat, and a mustache that almost rivaled Dali's in local celebrity: not the zigzag antennae of the Spaniard but a drooping bunch of Habsburg bristle, which in his last years came to resemble the questing barbels of an old and sagacious carp...