The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry by Mark Borkowski

The stunt reflected Borkowski's fascination with the showmanlike history of his trade, and this gleeful romp of a book is his attempt to trace the influence of publicists on the entertainment industry from the days of PT Barnum to the knickerless antics of Britney Spears.

Barnum was the pioneer, stoking a national outcry when he bought the temperamental elephant Jumbo from London Zoo, then having the pachyderm plough the field of the poorest farmer in each town his circus was to visit. The first press "flacks" were Barnum's spiritual offspring, who learned their trade in carnivals, vaudeville and burlesque shows and perfected it in the fledgling movie industry, using animals to engage the public or the whiff of sex to stoke specious moral outrage.

Borkowski draws here on an unpublished memoir by the forgotten Maynard Nottage, who promoted the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, once set a lion loose to promote a circus, and turned gawky Theodosia Goodman into the vampish, exotic star Theda Bara.

The stunts Nottage and his great rival Harry Reichenbach pulled were playful, sometimes risqué, but the rise of the studio system, when stars were bound by "morals clauses" and the strictures of the Hays code held sway, meant that publicists had to become fixers, or "suppress agents", as well as promoters.

Men like Howard Birdwell, Russell Strickling and Henry Rogers created the template for the modern movie promotion (with their artful campaigns for Gone With the Wind and The Outlaw) and the manipulation of the Oscars (when Rogers ensured Joan Crawford won for Mildred Pierce in 1945). They also covered up infidelity, drug abuse and murder.

Borkowski gives a fresh spin here to such well-known scandals as the death of Jean Harlow's husband, Paul Bern, and TV's Superman, George Reeves, and to the boggling sexual shenanigans of Clark Gable, Lana Turner and Joan Crawford.

His heart, though, is clearly with maverick PR Jim Moran, whose antics shade into performance art, and who opined after one stunt was stopped by the police: "It's a sad day for American capitalism if a man can't fly a midget [on a kite] over New York." But Moran was a man out of time: the end of the studio system heralded the rise of slickly corporate publicity companies like Rogers and Cowan, who MORE BOOK REVIEWS: PAGE 34 ..

turned their stars into brands, and massively powerful über-publicists like Pat Kingsley, whose iron grip stopped Tom Cruise looking like a loon for so many years. At the end, mourning the past from the perspective of the insta-celeb age, Borkowski provides a formula that proves (well, he would say that) how the arc of fame can still be manipulated by publicity, thanks to the guilty complicity of the news media.

Borkowski writes throughout with energy and passion, which tips very occasionally into hyperbole, and does not pretend that this is a comprehensive account of his industry: he says little about the packaging of modern pop music, for example. Rather, it is an engrossing and often scandalous stroll in the company of a knowledgeable enthusiast through that weird zone where talent, gullibility and ballyhoo (lovely word) meet..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

"The Fame Formula" is a gripping study of the forgotten lives, and broken dreams, of the creators of the publicity industry - men who stepped out of the circus life carrying the legacy of P.T. Barnum and applied it liberally to vaudeville and the movies. Starting in the early twentieth century with Harry Reichenbach and Maynard Nottage, whose love of creating bizarre stunts for their clients sometimes outweighed their interest in money, "The Fame Formula" also reflects how the industry changed, and was changed by, society.The book shows how, in the hands of notorious Hollywood fixers Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling, publicity agents Russell Birdwell, Warren Cowan, Henry Rogers and more, this freewheeling, anarchic industry became the corporate behometh it is today. It is a story packed with humour, incident, skulduggery and disappointment. Here are the men who hatched ostrich eggs to promote movies and hatched incredible stories to dress up the lives of stars, who buried stories that didn't fit and buried their lives in their work. And in so doing they laid the foundation of a billion dollar manipulation industry and the modern world's rampant commercial culture.