The Press Agent

He Spends His Life in the Service of Others

The story appears in the dramatic section of the Sunday paper that Melinda Mulch, star of the Stupidities of 1923, keeps a canvasback duck in her dressing-room. One day the duck snaps at the leading man; another, it escapes and is discovered in the bass viol; finally it lays an egg and half the company pay bets to the other half. These diverting incidents the public reads intently. The interest thus aroused lures them by tens and dozens to part with $4.40 to see this bizarre Melinda Mulch--the leading lady with a leaning toward canvasback ducks. As a matter of fact -Miss Mulch has never seen a canvasback duck except during the game course as her current cloak-and-suit man nourishes her at the Ritz. Miss Mulch would be thoroughly at a loss as to the line of conduct one follows with an unroasted duck. In fact, she may be secretly annoyed. Whence, then, do these stories come? Why, if there is no duck, is a duck thus strikingly exploited? Who is the duck's creator? A press agent is the gentleman who keeps The Stupidities before the public. It is his business to ferret out facts about the company, fashion them into entertaining if reading, hawk them among the dramatic editors. When the facts run dry he "plants" a story. His steadfast purpose is to keep The Stupidities in the headlines. If he is successful, the patient public parts with the aforesaid $4.40 and the production thus makes money. Though the duck incident herein outlined may seem farfetched, such is not the case. During the current month a Western press agent, exploiting a cinema of whaling days, planted a full-sized cardboard whale on the top of Pike's Peak, crawled inside it with a hundred siphons, projected the liquid in a towering stream through the creature's nose. The mystified populace stampeded from the plains to view the curiosity. The papers carried columns. My, how the money rolled in! Naturally, the papers are wary; so suspicious, in fact, that only an occasional "planted" story is successful. Necessarily the press agent must be highly intelligent. He is a specialized individual, highly trained, well paid. Every successful production requires his services. He is as essential to the American theatre as the star, the manager or the patrons themselves. He is the man who spends his life getting other people's pictures into the papers.