Literary Up: Jay Bernstein’s Burn-Out

Starmaker—Life as a Hollywood Publicist with Farrah, The Rat Pack and 600 More Stars Who Fired Me by Jay Bernstein as told to Larry Cortez Hamm with David Rubini (ECW Press)

For a superstar press agent, Jay Bernstein’s timing is way off in releasing this book just now. For one thing, he’s dead—the memoir was finished by friends and family, who apologize at the end of it for all the cool stories from Bernstein’s half-century Hollywood career which aren’t in the book because he never committed them to paper.

Bernstein represented some of the biggest celebrities of the ‘70s, but those clients—predominantly Farrah Fawcett, her husband Lee Majors, and Three’s Company’s Suzanne Somers—don’t have a different cachet now.

If Bernstein could’ve revealed then what he reveals now, it would have changed a lot of impressions about these stars, whom he guided through.

 

Bernstein wasn’t a mere observer. He shaped the public images of his clients and advised them on major deals and lawsuits to such a degree that he was portrayed in separate “Behind the Camera” TV movies about Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company. (In both cases, the “Jay” character was played by Wallace Langham of The Larry Sanders Show.)

 

He also created a persona for himself that was as vivid as any he concocted for the stars he handled. He owned thousands of walking sticks. He grew a beard, he writes, so as to appear more threatening and mysterious in the cleanshaven Californian movie culture.

 

The ‘70s loom large in Starmaker, and how quaint that age seems, a time when managers made stars, rather than the masses having their say via reality shows or YouTube. It was a time when audiences were followers rather than leaders, and Bernstein’s job was to corral them and keep them happy. He created excuses for his stars’ transgressions, ones that would never hold up in court but which suited the tabloids. And he learned how to overlook bad behavior from the most notorious bad boys of their time, The Rat Pack, as an assistant publicist on the film Sergeants 3. (Sinatra was a jerk to him, ordering to play racist practical jokes on Sammy Davis Jr., but also told him “You’re the only guy around here who seems to have any fucking class.”)

 

Starmaker thus begins with the old Hollywood of Frank & Dean and the preeminence of motion pictures, then shifts to TV as the top medium for the bulk of the book. What it misses is a third act. Bernstein faded into the background credits as a TV producer, and the stories of his overseeing the Stacy Keach Mike Hammer series are considerably more distant than his ratty ‘60s or jiggly ‘70s. He remains a legendary figure in Hollywood history, but for all his longevity and influence, he was of his time and that time passed him by.