Legendary Hollywood Flack Ready for Next Starring Role

When someone points a camera at Warren Cowan and Lee Solters, the Macy’s and Gimbel’s of Hollywood flackery, Cowan immediately scurries around to Solters’ right. That way, when the morning newspaper identifies the men “left to right,” Cowan will get top billing. If Solters lets him get away with it, that is.

Warren Cowan, who knows all these tricks, is from the old school. “Call me Warren,” he says, as if everyone in America isn’t already on a first-name basis. His attire is natty at a time when two-days’ beard and a little rattail are what many men in Hollywood wear. Warren remembers when you represented someone called a starlet, and did everything you could to keep her out of Playboy.

You don’t just write a column about the guy who did publicity for Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, Gene Kelly and countless others. He doesn’t want to walk down memory lane. He needs to think about it. Maybe he should wait until he’s ready to make an announcement.

How could it be any other way for the man who spent 42 years as half of Rogers & Cowan, perhaps Hollywood’s best known praisery? You think that Warren doesn’t know how to handle some snot-nosed newshound? This is the father of the Lucille Ball Backgammon Tournament. Many of Hollywood’s most eminent flacks learned the business at his knee.

But the tense is past. Today is Warren’s last day as chairman of the firm that he and partner Henry Rogers made synonymous with Hollywood press agentry before selling to the British public relations concern Shandwick six years ago. Rogers, now 78, left a while ago. The 68-year-old Cowan ankled--er, quit--the firm last week after failing to reach agreement on a new contract.

As we like to say in the news biz, it’s the end of an era.

It’s lunchtime at Jimmy’s in Beverly Hills, where leathery men and groups of women in makeup as hard as masks gather to dine among themselves. You can’t get in and out without passing Warren, seated strategically at a table near the door. He only wants to talk about the future: “I’ve received all kinds of, not offers, but inquiries,” he says. “I’m very excited and enthusiastic.”

His resignation was front page news in the trades, and every few minutes well-wishers stop by. Investor Marvin Davis gives a hug. Jim Robinson, chairman of Morgan Creek Productions, shakes hands, as does Ted Mann, of the theater chain that bears his name.

“How can you leave Rogers & Cowan?” movie and stage producer Robert Fryer asks in disbelief.

Well, times change. Nobody knows that better than Warren, who spent years amassing more “plants” than a greenhouse, seeding news items--sometimes concocted--all over the newspapers, including this one.

Rogers & Cowan would cook up awards, for instance, including a legendary escapade in which Rogers wired one of his first clients, Rita Hayworth, with the news that she’d been selected Hollywood’s best-dressed, off-screen actress by some fashion group he’d invented. The stunt landed her on the cover of Look magazine before anyone ever wised up.

Cowan says most of what he did was real--once he thought of it. He’d get some UCLA sorority to name a client America’s sexiest man. He’d get the Beverly Hilton to name a 10-millionth guest. He’d figure out that Julio Iglesias sold more than 1 million albums in each of six different languages one year, get this into the Guinness Book of World Records, and watch in glee as a British paper headlined the story: “Move Over, Beethoven.”

Nowadays, though, Arsenio, Sally, Oprah and Phil have replaced Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper in the PR pantheon. Says Warren: “ ‘The Today Show’--and 50 other shows like it--are more important than the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times put together.”

So now he arranges satellite press tours for clients who sit in a room and do remote interviews all day with, say, “Good Morning, Detroit” or the noon news in Cleveland and so on, across the time zones. Fortunately, he says, most reporters ask the same things.

The economics of show business is vastly different too. Cowan says it’s now so expensive to promote a film that its fate is usually determined by its first weekend of release. A bad showing and spending ceases.

“In the old days, the studios would wait a month of so,” Warren says.

In the old days, it was tacky to have products tied to a film. Today, product placements and promotional tie-ins are de rigueur; Rogers & Cowan has an office in Burbank that does nothing but place Ford cars in movies. Joan Collins drove Cowan’s old Lincoln off a cliff in “Dynasty.”

Of course, Rogers & Cowan are responsible for some of the changes. “Henry and I invented celebrity sports tournaments for charity,” Cowan says, with the Frank Borzhage Invitational Golf Tournament perhaps 30 years ago. Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney and Clark Gable played while Marilyn Monroe kept score. Frank Sinatra landed on the first tee by helicopter to caddy for Bing Crosby.

Rogers & Cowan is a Hollywood publicity agency, but it’s not a Hollywood movie, so one thing that won’t happen now is a reunion between its founding partners.

Like so many enduring couples, Henry Rogers and Warren Cowan have had a love-hate relationship throughout their nearly 50 years of association. Rogers already had a public relations business when young Cowan began doing publicity for him in 1942, while in the Army. As well as either of them can remember, they became partners eight years later.

Despite a cantankerous rivalry that sometimes split the firm into camps of opposing loyalists, the two men have nothing but praise for each other now, as is fitting. Rogers even helped Cowan write the press release announcing his resignation.

“Just as married people have their arguments, we had our arguments,” Rogers says. “But he was the absolute best at what he did.”

At lunch, I decide to give Cowan a little test. Who was your favorite client? I ask. Warren doesn’t miss a beat. “My next one,” he says with a smile.

Now is that a pro or what?