That Old Flack Magic

EVERYONE INSIDE the narrow greenroom beside the studio of Live at 5 is trying not to stare at Catherine Deneuve. But there she is, as big as life, at the end of the couch, not ten feet away, so they steal a glance at her swept-back golden hair and perfect face, then steal another and another.

Sitting just across from the legendary beauty but making no effort to conceal her excitement in Susan Blond, a woman in her late thirties who looks like Olive Oyl and is blond in name only. A very thin brunet with an enormous smile, Blond finds nothing embarrassing about being transfixed by a star. Even though she is here because her own client, the jazz composer James Mtume, is about to be interviewed by Sue Simmons, Blond can’t pull her eyes from Deneuve. Not that Blond is a particular fan of the French actress – she can’t name any of her films. But Blond’s fascination has never been with talent; it’s with celebrity itself. “I think everyone is fascinated by stars,” she says in her startling nasal squawk. “I have no understanding of people who aren’t fascinated by them.”

That Blond should be so star struck is a little surprising, considering that making people famous has been her only employment for fifteen years. As one of the music business’s masters at contriving fame – she’s the woman who brought you Michael Jackson, Boy George, Cyndi Lauper, and Sade – you’d think she’d have acquired a little ambivalence about the whole thing. But Blond remains as riveted by celebrity as she was when growing up beside the Throgs Neck Bridge, daydreaming of a world more glamorous than Queens. “When you meet someone, sometimes you instantly feel that vibration of being a star,” she says, uttering the word with such dramatic emphasis that it leaves no doubt she is talking about the acme of human achievement. “Cyndi, no matter what she did, was always a star. Michael was always a star.”

Perhaps Blond can identify with her clients so well because she herself wanted stardom so badly. The desire drove her to become one of the most colorful characters in the Warhol entourage of the early seventies and to take off her shirt on cable television almost every week for two years.

Since 1972, when she turned from star climbing to star making, Blond has promoted herself as a publicist as tirelessly as she has pushed any of her acts. Just as with her clients, she has isolated the parts of her own story that most have the ring of legend and has wheeled them out again and again until every editor in town has heard something about her Warhol connection, her Channel wardrobe, and her bizarre rules of etiquette (“Parties are not to have fun! Never sit down at a part until you get to A-level fame!” is one example). Blond’s self-hype has been as good her career as for her ego. Is has elevated her above virtually every other publicist in the music business, gotten her phone calls returned, and made her, within a certain circle, into a bona fide celebrity.

Outside you can hear the sleet pinging off the air conditioners and the cabs humming down Broadway through the slush, but inside Susan Blond, Inc., where the door is shut, the shades are drawn, the only light comes from a low desk lamp, all is cozy and copacetic.

Seating around Blond’s desk, day planners open on their laps, are Blond, who sips her boncha tea, free-lance publicist Gail Parenteau, and secretary Linda Bakaty. As the women run through the new company’s client list, they seem like the three Fates of publicity, plotting strategies to boost the destinies of all who pay them up to $5,000 a month.

They’ve already booked Gregory Abbott (whose “Shake You Down” had just hit number one) on the Today show, Joan Rivers, and Carson, and now they’re trying to keep the momentum going with stories in Playboy and People. They got Ozzy Osbourne’s dove-eating grin on the cover of Spin, and if he ever turns up again after disappearing from a Minnesota drug clinic, they’ll schedule him on Letterman. For the West Side disco the Tunnel Club, it’s just a matter of churning out more juicy celebrity items for the social columns, while trying to come up with that one big glossy magazine piece that will convince people the club’s almost as cool as Nell’s. “Just putting the right subject with the right writer is half the job,” Blond says. “So much of what you do is cumulative. After telling the right thing to the right people long enough, you eventually get the cover of Rolling Stone.”

After a while, the whole room feels buoyed up by the sweet narcotic power of hype, a legal drug by which all artists are geniuses, all key executives real mensches, and all things are possible, even making new client Julio Iglesias hip. “I believe in talking about things as they are in the works,” Blond says, “and that in a way that helps them happen. And even if it doesn’t it almost doesn’t matter, because at least you get credit for the fact that it seemed like it was about to happen.”

It’s this fanatical, and not unfounded, belief in the power of hype that makes belief in the power of hype that makes Blond such a phenomenon as a publicist. While others overidentify with their clients and then burn out after a few vertiginous flights across the public consciousness, Blond, who commitment to the practice of hype is always stronger than to any one of her acts, just keeps getting better and working harder. “Susan loves publicity,” says New York Times music critic Stephen Holden, “and she loves people who are obsessed with publicity, loves it, appreciates it, and studies it through all her stars.”

Blond’s brand of hype us so pure she doesn’t have to know anything or feel anything about an assignment to flack it to within an inch of its life. For someone who has spent almost her entire career in the music business, Blond knows very little about the subject. And for all she’s done to shape musical tastes, she has no strong tastes of her own. One well-known Blond story started when it somehow got out that she didn’t know Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And Blond finds nothing strange about gushing in the same breath over the Clash and Engelbert Humperdinck. “With Susan,” says former Voice reporter Billy Altman, “the music is almost beside the point.”

What is not beside the point for Blond is knowing who to know. Over the years she has cultivated virtually every byline on the masthead of city journalists who decide what’s hip – from music critics such as Holden and Bob Christgau to society wags Stephen Saban and Michael Musto (downtown) and Bob Colacello (uptown). Considering that most journalists react to flacks the way everyone else treats insurance salesmen, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Blond’s method is persistence (“You have to be ready to hear twenty nos before you get a yes”). And lunches in her own booth just inside the Russian Tea Room. And, as one might expect from a woman who considers How to Make Friends and Influence People the most useful book she’s read, flattery. “Lunch with Hold is like a romantic experience,” she says. “He has such amazing and interesting attitudes and opinions about things.”

Blond always employs an oddball style so guileless it throws writers off guard. “I was trying to convince [music writer] James Truman to go macro,” she says, “telling him about the miso soup, the brown rice, the kasha.” Then she had to warn him, she says, that his new diet would have a dramatic effect on basic bodily functions. “Once I’ve talked to a guy about that, how could he not listen to me when I tell him something so less personally significant about trying to put some new act on the cover of Spin?”

“I FEEL SO INSIGNIFICANT IN New York,” Maura Moynihan is saying to Blond, as the macrobiotic and the vegetarian poke around their kasha at the Tea Room. Moynihan called Blond and invited the publicist to take her to lunch because she needs some career advice. Should she hang fast to her dream of becoming an actress? Or should she become a comedienne? Or a rock star? Or a jazz singer? In the meantime, she needs the right tack for an item about her that’s scheduled in New York. The problem, Moynihan says, is the wrong kind of press. “It’s always, ‘Look what Senator Patrick Moynihan’s daughter is up to now.’”
“How about a ‘Maura Moynihan has grown up’ kind of story?” Blond suggests. “Maura, the girl who used to do everything, has decided she wants to act.”

Perhaps Blond is being so generous because she recognizes in Moynihan something of herself. Although it was some twenty years earlier, Blond also arrived in New York from college in Boston with an undirected but fierce lust for fame. And though she didn’t have a famous name, she had an unusual one, as well as an offbeat voice and an outrageous habit of saying what everyone was thing but was afraid to say. And like Moynihan, she immediately became a comical fixture in the Warhol troupe.

“That that was her real voice and name never occurred to me for a second,” remembers Blond’s old friend Fran Leibowitz, who had a column in Interview at the time. “It was exactly the kind of voice Andy was using in his early movies and the kind of name booming with irony and camp that everyone around him had. When I met her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Blond, I assumed they had changed their name along with her. But the thing about Susan is she turned out to be real.”

Blond even shared with Moynihan the experience of a brief television career, although with Blond it was cable, an improvised sitcom shot for the cost of the tape, in which Blond, who costarred with Taylor Meade and Tinkerbelle, often disrobed. And like Moynihan, Blond even had her moment of downtown celebrity – not as an actress, artist, or musician, but simply for being Susan Blond. “I would go to Max’s Kansas City and get a standing ovation just for walking in,” she says.

But before almost anyone else around Warhol, Blond realized that being a member of his repertory company, even with all the trump-up-in-house attention, wasn’t leading anywhere. And so, taking advantage of the priceless education in hype she’d received from the master himself – from his favorite lecture on fifteen minutes of fame for everyone to his advanced tutorial, in which he arbitrarily selected one member of the group and made him or her a “superstar” – Blond went out and got herself a job as a publicist.

“Susan was the first person I knew of in our circle,” says Leibowitz, “to get a real job.”

Blond started her career in 1972 at United Artists Records, where from the start she showed a nervy flair. Billy Altman remembers one of the first calls he got from Blond, concerning the band Hawkwind, who music-of-the-spheres sound was being promoted with a concert at the Hayden Planetarium. When Altman told her he couldn’t make it because he was going to a wedding, Blond suggested he bring the entire reception in from Long Island.

After a couple of years spent lubricating the careers of Don McLean, ELO, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Blond moved to CBS Records. By thirty, she was the only female vice president in its Epic division and one of the most visible women in the industry.

But not necessarily the most likable. If you’ve seen the movie This Is Spinal Tap, you may recall the tough 100-mm-cigarette-smoking head of artist relations with the Jappy twang: “That’s right, Bobbi Fleckman, the hostess with the mostess, you know, you know.” Whether or not the rumors that the character was based on her are true, Blond said she found the movie so real she couldn’t laugh.

During her thirteen years at CBS, Blond was behind some of the most hype-driven acts in pop history: Cheap Trick, Meat Loaf, Ted Nugent, and Adam Ant. Blond did so well she almost escaped altogether from the traditionally female cubbyhole of publicity into the nascent video operation.

“I set up the link between the company and MTV in the very beginning, when it was all very exciting,” says Blond. “When video caught on and they realized they could sell records, they decided it should be handled by the promotion department.” Disillusioned, Blond quit and eight months ago opened Susan Blond, Inc.

Since then, she’s signed Iglesias and Suzanne Vega – each of whom has been the subject of a recent major magazine profile – as well as Duran Duran. There have been lunch with Raquel, meetings about Jagger, and a proposal for Billy Joel. “First I want to be the best company, then the biggest,” Blond says. Most people might be superstitious about jinxing something by talking so soon, but Blond, a true artist of hype, knows that talk is never cheap, even if she’s only blowing in the wind.