Bobby Zarem
Robert "Bobby" Zarem is an American publicist. After starting his own publicity agency in 1974, Zarem created lengthy, personalized pitch letters, a business style, and many campaigns. His clients have included Dustin Hoffman, Cher, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Michael Douglas, Michael Caine, Sophia Loren, Ann-Margret, and Alan Alda, among others.
Early life
Robert Zarem was born on September 30, 1936 in Savannah, Georgia. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, the youngest of three sons. Zarem's father owned a prosperous shoe company and his mother was a pianist. When Zarem was a child, his parents would travel to New York City and bring him back autographed playbills and menus. He would sometimes accompany them, attending Broadway shows that gave him a taste for glamor and stardom.At age nine, Zarem and his friend skipped Sunday school to seek the autograph of actress Tallulah Bankhead, who was staying at the Savannah Hotel. A bellhop at the hotel worked for Zarem's father on weekdays and told Zarem which room Bankhead was staying in. Avoiding possible questions from the elevator operator, Zarem and his friend walked the eight flights up to Bankhead's room. When Zarem and his friend knocked and told Bankhead they wanted her autograph, she shouted, “Go away! I don’t sign autographs!” The pair waited until the maid came by with a breakfast cart and crawled in behind her. When they revealed themselves, Bankhead threw a copy of the Savannah Morning News at them and cursed them out. Years later, after Zarem had achieved success as a publicist, he would again ask Bankhead for her autograph. She refused, saying, “I still don’t sign autographs.”
Zarem's trips to New York became more frequent when his father moved there to receive treatment for lung cancer at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Zarem would stay with his father in the Waldorf Astoria, sitting by the front entrance and collecting autographs from the hotel's famous patrons. When Zarem was thirteen, his father succumbed to cancer. His death left a deep impression on Zarem. “I was scared to get close to anybody out of fear that that person, too, would disappear,” Zarem said. His eldest brother, Danny, took over their father's shoe company and paid for Zarem and their brother, Harvey, to go to college.
Though Zarem struggled with attention-deficit disorder his entire life, he followed in the footsteps of his brothers and attended Phillips Academy Andover and Yale University. He talked himself off the waitlist at Yale and graduated with a degree in political science. After graduation, Zarem moved to New York City and worked for a year and a half at the US Trust Company until he received a draft notice in 1960 from the Army, before ultimately joining the Air National Guard for a brief stint.
Career
Press agent
Zarem's first job in show business began at Columbia Artists Management, a job that lasted five years. Zarem noticed that he had an affinity for public relations and artist promotion, and began his career as a PR agent under producer Joseph E. Levine in 1968. Zarem became an agent by accident. The company had seventeen minutes of the film The Lion in Winter starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. Though Zarem had been working for the company in a business capacity, he invited a number of his friends to watch the preview of the film, a group which included some journalists. When articles on the movie began to appear in publication, Zarem realized he had become a PR agent. Levine later made him head of magazine publicity.Zarem moved on to the PR firm Rogers & Cowan in 1969. There he served some of his first A-list clients, including Ann-Margret and Dustin Hoffman. He began handwriting long, personalized pitch letters and press releases that became industry legend.
In 1974, Zarem started his own agency: Zarem, Inc. He promoted Tommy which premiered in the West 57th Street subway station in front of hundreds of prominent New York socialites.
Zarem earned the nickname “Superflack” at a party he threw for Stevie Wonder in the late 1970s. Mick Jagger and New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud were standing by the elevator waiting to leave when Wonder finally showed up. Zarem reprimanded Wonder for his tardiness in front of Klemesrud. She deemed him “Superflack,” which was later popularized in a profile on Zarem in Newsweek.
Aside from his press releases, Zarem frequently promoted films. He would call outlets and say that films “reeked of Oscar,” threatening to kill himself if the outlet refused to write a piece for him. He regularly worked fourteen hour days, had a notoriously short temper, and was known to hold grudges. Publicist Peggy Siegal insists that he threw a typewriter across a desk at her for incorrectly taking down a phone message. Zarem denies the charge by pointing out how difficult it would have been to miss her with such a large instrument at such close range.
Zarem is credited with helping to remove Saturday Night Fever from obscurity. Though Paramount and Robert Stigwood had hired Zarem to publicize the movie, they expected the movie to flop and did not let Zarem send promotional pictures to media outlets. But several magazines were already eager for material on the film and when Martha Duffy, Time’s art editor, asked Zarem how soon he could get her pictures, he stormed the Paramount office. Saturday Night Fever’s marketing director refused to give Zarem any pictures, so Zarem pushed the marketing director onto a couch and rushed across the hall to the art department, absconding with six color negatives that he sent to The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and People.
Arnold Schwarzenegger also has Zarem to thank for his success. Zarem watched an early screening of the documentary, Pumping Iron, starring the then-unknown Schwarzenegger. Zarem secured the documentary's first national coverage on his own initiative and was hired to promote the film. At Schwarzenegger's request, Zarem scheduled a meeting between Schwarzenegger and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. A picture from the meeting gained significant media attention and earned Schwarzenegger a spot on 60 Minutes, cementing his fame. Schwarzenegger and Zarem would collaborate again on the Planet Hollywood restaurant franchise in the early 1990s. Schwarzenegger was one of the principal celebrity investors; Zarem, who had promoted the Hard Rock Café, was hired to promote the restaurant chain. Zarem claims he came up with idea to make Planet Hollywood a national chain, conceived the signature aesthetic of the restaurants, and put together its financiers, Keith Barish and Robert Earl. But he ultimately feuded with Barish and Earl over credit, and parted company a year later.
Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Zarem would promote the films Tommy, Saturday Night Fever, The China Syndrome, Rambo, Scarface, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and Dances With Wolves. By the turn of the century, Zarem's fees were among the highest in the industry, estimated to be upwards of $10,000 a month per client.
In 1994, Zarem was sent 10 copies of John Behrendt’s true crime book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by the publisher, Random House, in hopes that he would spread the word to his contacts in Savannah, where the book is set. The book quickly became a hit in the city. Zarem wrote an item for Neil Travis’s column in the New York Post about the stir the book caused, which he says secured the book’s international bestseller status. The book went on to break sales records for the non-fiction novel genre, spending 216 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. Savannah now enjoys tourists drawn to the city by the book and its landmarks, and there are many options for guided tours of the locations immortalized in the book.
"I Love New York" campaign
Zarem conceived the public relations for “I Love New York” campaign and helped in its development. On a Saturday in 1975, Zarem was walking home from Elaine's Restaurant on Second Avenue in Manhattan, and realized “you could have rolled a coin down the street and nobody would have stopped it. The city was dying. Something had to be done.” Distraught by the decline of New York's reputation as a cultural hub and declining Broadway ticket sales. William Doyle hired Zarem and brought on the advertising agency Wells Rich Greene to implement his ideas for the television campaign starring Broadway stars, which ended up help turn around tourism for the city. Governor Hugh Carey ultimately raised $16 million for the campaign and when it proved a success, New York mayor Ed Koch started claiming credit for the slogan, as did Wells Rich Greene. But Zarem insists that, other than the iconic heart-shaped logo designed by Milton Glaser, he is responsible for the campaign.Denise Rich controversy
Before she met Zarem, Denise Rich had primarily been known as the wife of disgraced commodities trader Marc Rich, who had been accused of owing millions of dollars to the US government and fled the country for Switzerland. “Baby Jane” Holzer introduced Denise Rich to Zarem in 1991, hoping that Zarem could help Rich crawl out from the shadow of her ex-husband and gain recognition as a songwriter. Zarem and Rich grew close and he helped her in her career which allowed her to become more known on the New York social scene.When Rich got involved in the Democratic Party and began donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, critics accused her of angling for a pardon for Marc. These critics believed Zarem was masterminding her campaign. Zarem denies this accusation, citing his life-long support of the Democratic party and insisting that his only motive was to sway Rich to support causes he cares for.
These charges peaked in January 2001, when President Bill Clinton issued a number of pardons on his last day in office, including one for Marc. Zarem dismissed claims that Denise had taken any direct action to bring about Marc's pardon. Days later, news broke that Denise had written a letter to Bill Clinton asking for clemency for Marc, contradicting what Zarem had been telling the press. Zarem claimed that it was he who exaggerated Denise's surprised reaction into a denial, but when Denise invoked the Fifth Amendment at a congressional hearing, many in the press portrayed Zarem as duped by Denise.
Savannah Film Festival
In 1998, the Savannah Film Festival was a year old and based at the Savannah College of Art and Design when Zarem took over its program, a job he would maintain until 2013. Every year, the festival honors excellence in film and rewards prizes to nurture young talent. Zarem was responsible for drawing A-list names to the event and often met with SCAD students in an advisory capacity. In 2010, Zarem moved back to Savannah and received the festival's Lifetime Achievement Award.Four years later, the Savannah Film Festival chose not to renew its contract with Zarem. He filed a lawsuit, claiming that the festival fired him for reporting a sexual predator who had allegedly assaulted four women who Zarem says complained to him directly. “I went to warn Paula Wallace. She told me she was going to launch an investigation. Instead, she launched a coverup,” Zarem said. SCAD claims that it was forced to close its investigation because Zarem would not name the women who had reported being assaulted. Zarem's lawyer countered that Zarem did not have the victims’ permission to reveal their names. Though Zarem was never reinstated, the alleged perpetrator was removed from campus.
Feuds
Zarem is known to hold grudges and has had prominent disputes with notable figures. One of the most publicized was his spat with gossip columnist Liz Smith. Zarem identified Smith as the author behind the pseudonym “Robin Adams Sloan,” a columnist who wrote critical coverage of Zarem's clients. He asked her to stop writing negative press about his clients but Smith refused, turning the disparaging focus of the column on Zarem himself. Zarem responded by sending out hundreds of wedding announcements, revealing Smith's recent marriage to Iris Love, her partner, effectively outing Smith as gay. Smith was irate, but to her knowledge, Love never saw the announcements. Though Zarem denied responsibility for the prank at the time, he would admit to conceiving of the announcements with pride decades later. Zarem would later accuse Smith of murder, a charge she laughed off.Zarem also feuded with Page Six gossip columnist, Claudia Cohen. The feud started when she approached Zarem and asked him to pass on a note to Kirk Douglas, with whom he was eating lunch. Not knowing that Cohen and Douglas knew each other, Zarem hid her note under his plate. She returned to his table and told him that if he didn't give her note to Douglas, she would ban him from Page Six. He ripped up both notes, stuffed them in his mouth, and pretended to swallow.
Zarem was on the outs with his early client, Dustin Hoffman, for years. Zarem represented Hoffman as he was becoming a star in the early 1970s. On December 31, 1973, the last day of Zarem's contract with Hoffman, Hoffman asked Zarem if he could get him some marijuana. After hours scouring Greenwich Village, Zarem bought some and deposited it through Hoffman's mail slot. That was the last Zarem heard from Hoffman for years. When the two saw each other again decades later, Zarem says Hoffman asked him if he still hated him.
Elaine's
Elaine's was an Upper East Side restaurant opened by Elaine Kaufman in 1963. Three weeks after its opening, Zarem discovered the restaurant and would frequent the place for the next forty-seven years, eating there at least twice a week. He began bringing his celebrity clients to the restaurant to open it up to them. Kaufman and Zarem became close friends and she encouraged him to open his own agency in 1974. It was at Elaine's that Zarem introduced Mia Farrow to Woody Allen. Allen was a regular there and Farrow asked Zarem to introduce her. Zarem obliged, and after Farrow left that night, Zarem gave Allen her number at Allen's request. When Zarem moved to Savannah in 2010, he held his farewell party at Elaine's. Less than a year later, Elaine died of emphysema and pulmonary hypertension. “I just don’t know what to say,” Zarem said after Kaufman's death. “We were best friends and extremely supportive of one another.” Elaine's closed within months of Kaufman's death.Personal life
Zarem never married and has never had an intimate relationship. He says not having a partner has allowed him to devote more time to his work and be a better agent.For over thirty years, Zarem was a devout client of Czechoslovakian psychiatrist Samuel Lowy. While he was in therapy, he enjoyed talking about it and often recommended Lowy to his friends.
Zarem has been candid about his psychological motivations for becoming a PR agent. He told Hampton
Legacy
Zarem is regarded as the “original New York publicist." He trained PR agents such as Peggy Siegal, Jason Weinberg, Liz Rosenberg, and Peter Himler.Zarem bemoans the state of PR today. “It’s a whole different world and there’s no logic to it,” Zarem said, “no building of a campaign. Today there is no schedule or program anymore, because there are so many outlets that by the time major publications learn something it’s already been out on Gawker or Nikki Finke.”
Al Pacino’s character, Eli Wurman, in the 2002 film People I Know takes inspiration from Zarem. Director Daniel Algrant had met Zarem in the early 1990s and said that the idea for his film came from watching Zarem, confined to his apartment by a broken leg, conduct his business over the phone against the backdrop of the New York skyline. Pacino insisted on spending time with Zarem to prepare for his role.