Rally Round the Flack, Boys

Her face and figure are unfamiliar. But this week, when the black-haired, violet-eyed beauty strides across two pages of the movie trade papers, dressed in nothing but a wet white silk shirt, Hollywood will get the word. "R.B."--the modest monogram on the shirt's breast pocket--tells it all. Russell Birdwell, Hollywood's busiest huckster, is on the job. After a brief dry spell trying to direct pictures (The Girl in the Kremlin, Flying Devils), and a few months of promoting such inanimate products as automatic laundries, "the Bird" is back at his appointed task: fabricating movie myths and getting their names into print.

Everything else in Hollywood may change, but after 23 years at work, Russell Birdwell, 55, remains the flashiest flack in the business--the man who happily takes credit for inventing Jane Russell, rescuing Norma Shearer from being treated like a superannuated widow, nearly succeeding in making Rumania's ex-King Carol popular. To launch unknown, 25-year-old Diane Hartman (Birdwell calls her 22) in that white silk rig, he has concocted some accompanying ad copy to the effect that Hollywood is empty of female glamour--except, of course, for Diane, who is described thus: "An untamed animal who has learned the art of song, mastered the modern primitive dance. A 22-year-old nymphet free of fingerprints--a desirable but unattainable, unchained barefoot wench, uninvolved personally and professionally. Now--on the Hollywood block to the highest bidder . . ."

For his services Birdwell will collect $25,000 from Diane, who can handle this sort of expense, thanks to some dancing schools she owns in Michigan.

Who Is Brando? Meanwhile, the Bird is busy with his other charges. Hollywood recognized his belligerent direction behind Director Rouben Mamoulian's recent spat with Sam Goldwyn. (Even Mamoulian does not seem to mind that the publicity-reaping battle cost him the job of directing Porgy and Bess.) And not long ago, Birdwell sold gullible movie columnists the phony yarn that Greta Garbo had expressed an interest in the movie version of Lolita. Director Stanley Kubrick, who is Birdwell's client, is supposed to have ruled Garbo out of Lolita but offered her the part of Marlon Brando's mother (there is no such part) in Brando's new picture, One-Eyed Jacks. Garbo, so the Bird's story goes, answered: "Who is Marlon Brando?''

Russell Juarez Birdwell, a slimmed-down, mustachioed version of the late Bob Benchley, has a secretary in constant attendance to record his every word, suggests that his glibness is an inheritance from his father, a Texas revivalist preacher. From his mother, says the Bird, he got an appetite for cash. "She always insisted that we work and save. When I was small, I made money by trapping and skinning skunks.'' Young Birdwell soon learned that there are as many ways to make pocket money as there are to skin polecats. In high school and the University of Texas he kept himself in sharp clothes by working on local newspapers, later took "The All America Super Jazz Orchestra" to Mexico. After years of reporting (on the New York Mirror, Birdwell scored a beat on Lindbergh's take-off for Paris), the Bird found his perch as publicity man for David O. Selznick.

Who Has His Number? His methods proved to be simple, disarmingly unsophisticated--a kind of fraudulent folk poetry. For Selznick he once flew "the entire town" of Zenda. Ont. (pop. 12) to Manhattan to attend the premiere of The Prisoner of Zenda. After the Bird set up his own office, he encouraged indignant cries of fraud by claiming that he had insured a client (Southern Starlet Margaret Tallichet) for $1,000,000 against the loss of her drawl. Smugly he was able to exhibit the policy; he had indeed insured Margaret--for one day, at the cost of $26.

While he devises unending eccentricities for his clients, the Bird indulges in few of his own. In his small, two-room office, the Bird allows himself but one flamboyance: two telephones--one green, one red. In accord with Hollywood tradition, the red phone has an unlisted number. On the rare occasions when it rings, the Bird stares at it in sullen suspicion. Has the town finally got his number? Then he relaxes. "No one knows that phone. Must be a wrong number," he says, and refuses to answer.

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