Being a PR, I just can’t resist a quick plug: those looking to understand Bernstein’s remarkable talents could also do worse than investing in a copy of my book The Fame Formula. In it, I dissect, analyse and celebrate the incredible gift of Bernstein and his ilk for capturing the public, as well as understanding so well the stars they catapulted to fame with apparent ease. Their arts aren’t lost, but they are essential background reading for anyone seeking to make waves in the comparatively anodyne world of modern communications. In these uncertain days in the shadow of a certain Lord L, the lessons of the past have never been more pressing.

Bernstein was one of the absolute greats. Unmistakably, he was a true showman of the kind I’ve always admired. His stunts, which ranged from artificially stoking Tom Jones’s sex bomb reputation with hired pantie-throwers to holding his own-televised- wedding underwater, are now the stuff of legend. Like Jim Moran and other ancient heroes of mine, he was a fabulous ringmaster of publicity and pizazz.

However, for all the hype about him being the ‘inventor of the modern publicity stunt’, his greatest talent was far more subtle. While researching the Fame Formula, he was one of the figures I had the pleasure of interviewing during a stint across the pond. A gent and an enthusiast, he gave up his valuable time without complaint. Upon entering his house- formerly owned by Rita Hayward and site of the first Jacuzzi in Hollywood- my eyes were assailed by a remarkable collection of memorabilia. The place was filled with debris from his remarkable time in the industry.

As a hopeless collector myself I was excited by the sheer volume of it (and I particularly wonder what happened to his incredible collection of stuffed animals), but I was also impressed and touched: these deeply personal items were evidence of the highly developed bonds Bernstein had with his clients. His memories of each and every client were fond, full and nuanced. One particularly memorable moment involved him musing as to what John Wayne might have said if he’d been offered the script for Brokeback Mountain, just released at the time.

He took clients all the way, and each of the crazy stories he launched came from a place of deep thinking, considered strategy and mutual trust.

It strikes me that, while Jay’s stunts place him in the vein of ‘publicist’s publicist’, his relationships with clients offer up lessons to those in any line of work. Brand communications in any field can only work from a basis of deep mutual respect between those working within the brand and those pushing it out. Madness, controversy and conversation spring from narratives mutually developed and sculpted over years- Bernstein knew this, but I fear it’s something we’re starting to forget.

I hope many of Russell’s obituaries credit the strategic mind of another Russell, the Texan Russell Birdwell, for shaping Jane Russell’s narrative. Let’s not forget that behind every Hollywood icon there was an incredibly clever publicist.

Birdwell was a poacher turned gamekeeper, lured away from the Hollywood Reporter to become publicity director for David O. Selznick. Birdwell created some of the most iconic publicity campaigns of the studio era, including the Gone with the Wind campaign that lasted years.

His efforts to explode Russell in the public consciousness are worth remembering. It is quite possible that without Birdwell we would not be celebrating the life of Jane Russell. Given the difficulties surrounding her debut feature, she could easily have been a mere footnote – just another beautiful wannabe who never made a true mark.

When researching The Fame Formula a few years ago, I stumbled on Birdwell and was amazed at his instinctive ability to generate ink. Russell was a heavenly body from a starrier time, admittedly, a goddess fused to an erotic earthiness; but such qualities can be missed without support.

She was supported by none other than Howard Hughes, who set Bird the task of making her debut role in The Outlaw unforgettable. Bird’s work with Russell was risky and could have easily backfired. Carefully manipulated, it can be seen now as an intelligent process of invention, not containing the contemporary demeaning elements of today’s fast and loose exploitation.

Birdwell focused publicity around her voluptuous mammaries, admittedly, but not in a cheap way. He designed a campaign to assuage the lustful desires of a nation of boys fighting for their country in the Second World War, separated from their sweethearts. Birdwell understood the need for a highly eroticised product, he created a powerful brand of the time, before the looming fragmentation of the star system.

The campaign was full on and lasted years: Bird gave a photographer free reign to shoot thousands of photos, from which he picked the iconic shots of Russell in the hay that caused outrage even though they only intimated at showing flesh; he had photos of Russell holding shell fragments from a Japanese bombing sent around the world, managing to spin Pearl Harbour into her career and emphatically building her up as a forces sweetheart; he seeded the idea of a bra built especially for Russell, suggesting that nothing else could contain her; and to stop cuts, he hired a mathematician from Columbia University to prove that, in relation to her size, Jane Russell showed less flesh than other Hollywood starlets – and got the censor’s 100 proposed cuts reduced to two!

The Outlaw was originally due to come out during 1943 but, partly thanks to a fuss about the raunchy nature of film, it only received a general release in 1946. By which time, thanks to Bird, Jane Russell was already a star.

What can we learn today from the mind of Birdwell? The Hollywood publicity men then had at their disposal the news wire services. Their aim was to dominate the output with powerful content and stories about their clients. Narratives that found their way into local newspapers and radio stations the length and breadth of America.

Never forget the news wire of the 1920s is the internet of today. In both eras captivating content is the fuel for human interaction. Peppering stories on Jane Russell on the net today would not have the same effect unless the storyline matched the talent. And talent was just one thing that Jane Russell had in abundance.

So I have produced a short list of suggestions for for awards ceremony costumes for any star who has run out of outrageous ideas. If anyone has any more suggestions, please post them below – the strangest but most plausible costume idea wins a signed copy of my book, The Fame Formula. Let me know which star the costume would be for and any symbolic relevance.

Here are my suggestions:

1)      A movable maggot farm. Using the idea of an ant farm, mould some plastic chambers to fit the contours of the star’s body and fill it with rotting meat and flies. Once the maggots have reached maturity, head for the nearest award ceremony. Symbolic possibilities: the decay of the music industry. Thematically, it follows on well from GaGa’s meat dress.

2)      A costume made out of hair and fingernails sent in by the star’s fans. The ultimate fan bonding exercise, it would take the idea of the star and their fans being a close knit community that much further.

3)      A plastic external venous system carrying real blood around the star’s body for all to see, feeding through a pump where the heart should be. Like Marc Quinn’s blood head, the blood should preferably all be the star’s, saved up over time. Otherwise, fan donations will do. Symbolically, this is far cleaner and safer than carving ‘4 Real’ in your arm, as Richey Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers did years ago, but still rock and roll.

I will be outing some of Nottage’s darker and more dubious practices, some of which didn’t appear in the book, and illustrating who it affected and how. It will take in ambitious actresses, pornography from the Roaring 20’s, carnival freaks, forgotten Hollywood B listers and even a water-skiing lion.

For anyone who doesn’t know what Peachy Coochie is, it’s a night of lectures, each of which take just over six minutes. Each lecture comes with 20 slides and the speaker discusses each slide for 20 seconds. A Peachy Coochie night will inject information right into your brain so painlessly that you don’t even realise you’ve learned something.

So my Peachy Coochie on Nottage will be a 6 minute lesson about the past, as well as a bittersweet warning to all PR people. And there’ll be so much more to hear too, given that Rachel Mars, Harry Meadows, Deborah Levy and Julian Baker are also taking part.

Click here for more information and online booking.

I might be wrong, but it all feels so fake. Certainly, David Beckham looks set to sue the US magazine for the claims that he went a bit Rooney.

Bauer – who publish In Touch – clearly did not comprehend the chaos that would be unleashed. I suspect their office must have echoed with the cry of: “Bugger the truth, the story is too good to ignore!” The fall out and collective web chatter suggests a plethora of conspiracy theories. My favourite so far is the one that suggests that it is a hoax attempting to derail England’s World Cup bid.

A close second is the theory that it’s a desperate publicity play by the fragrant model, a ridiculous attempt to generate traction at a time when she has designs on becoming governor of NYC. Can the US stomach their very own La Cicciolina, the porn star who was elected to the Italian parliament? Stranger things have started in the bedrooms of international football stars. If so, the deluded über-babe has gone to a lot of effort to force herself onto the celebrity radar.

I expected the wonderfully funny fake Max Clifford twitter account to go into overdrive, anticipating a flurry of tweets suggesting that he leaked the tale to cover up a breaking exposé concerning Simon Cowell’s affair with Goldenballs.

In a world of total lunacy please take time to read the mischievously wicked tweets from @Straightsimon and @Max_Clifford. God bless the respective camps for allowing these comic tweeters to hilariously cyber squat; they prove beyond doubt the publicist Jim Moran’s dictum: “There’s nothing so dismal as a fact!”

It’s not the opportunity to win a walk-on part in the series that I’m talking about, either – although that is a fine stunt to grab attention (who wouldn’t want to get dressed up in Madison Avenue finery and appear on screen with the intensely glam Mad Men and Women?). It’s more the homage to the great publicist Jim Moran in the actual episode that piqued my interest.

In the episode, a couple of actors are hired to fight over a ham to garner attention and are then seen being bribed to blow the stunt – it’s a fairly knockabout scene, especially when the cast try to stop the actors blowing the stunt. In real life, Jim Moran staged a row between to New York barkeepers to launch Pimms in America – he had them end up in court, rowing about the perfect ingredients for a Pimms and garnered a great deal of attention for the drink.

If Moran’s elegantly twisted wit and genius is being plundered by Mad Men already, it just goes to prove my point about PR being a richer seam to mine – they’ve run out of real stories from advertising. Is it not time. then, for a truer drama looking at the heart of the American dream? One that looks at the lives of the PR men?

If all this sounds too good to be true, that’s surely because it is; this tale strikes me as a PR scam. Face it, even the Times, revelling in every second of the story, can’t help but pitch it as if it’s a high concept movie: “Part Huckleberry Finn, part Catch Me if You Can” is how they describe the Barefoot Bandit’s escapades, whilst the inevitable Facebook Fan Page describes him as “Western Washington’s new Jesse James (without the murders)”.

The crash landing of the plane is a stunt too far, however, as is the gobsmacked but supportive mother, who apparently said: “I hope to hell he stole those airplanes – I would be so proud!” If there isn’t a canny movie publicist brewing up a long-term publicity campaign for a blockbuster film somewhere behind the scenes, I’d be amazed.

If you ask me, someone’s taken the sort of stunts Harry Reichenbach used to pull about 95 years ago and run with them. Take Reichenbach’s campaign for The Virgin of Stamboul, just after World War One, which I wrote about in detail in The Fame Formula. To promote the movie, about a runaway bride who flees Istanbul, Reichenbach hired a bunch of Turkish waiters and dressed them as a sheik and his entourage. He then announced to the press that said ‘sheik’ had come to America to find his runaway bride, the virgin of Stamboul, and would appreciate the American public’s help finding her in New York.

There followed a feeding frenzy in the press, who drank up the story and portrayed it in lavish detail to an equally attentive public. Only one journalist noticed the ‘sheik’s’ frayed cuffs and picked apart the story to find it wasn’t true – but by that point no one else in the press or the public cared. It was exposed as a hoax and still people lapped up every carefully staged detail. Then, when the movie came out a few weeks later, they went to see it in their droves.

All this resonates deeply with the Barefoot Bandit’s alleged two-year-long spree of relatively harmless crime. It’s like the Virgin of Stamboul campaign, being played under deeper cover to hide the frayed cuffs a little better. There’s the mother, who wants him to flee the States and continue his spree abroad; the cross and concerned FBI special agent who worries that people are making a hero of the Bandit; the Bandit himself, a geeky looking everykid, who finds time to be charitable even as he rips of aeroplanes, but who only really hurts the insurance companies. These characters, and the harmless crimes, are so generic-yet-quirky that major stars would surely be knocking over each other to play them.

There have to be some frayed cuffs somewhere in the Bandit’s story; there’s nothing new under the sun after all and in these Twitter-obsessed times, where copy permanently needs to be filed two minutes ago, this is the sort of story that could run and run. The article reads like a movie synopsis for a family adventure movie that will doubtless have an inspiring moral tacked on at the end, and that’s probably what it is. It’s just that the journalists don’t have time to check their facts anymore.

Not that it really matters if the Bandit’s story is fact or fiction, just so long as you want to see the film version, coming in 3D to a multiplex near you soon…

One sacking, several arrests (ambush marketing being illegal in South Africa) and a barrel-full of free publicity for Bavaria later and the only clear winner is the beer company, although the attractive young ladies – already described as ‘blonde bombshells’ in tabloids and blogs – will probably enjoy their day in court.

Anyone wanting to manage a crisis should never have let this get to court, of course. The great American publicist Jim Moran, who I wrote about in The Fame Formula, always wanted to get his stunts to court so as to achieve maximum notoriety and ability to push out sound bites on behalf of his clients. This is the man who said “It’s a sad day for American democracy if a man can’t fly a midget on a kite over Central Park” after the police stopped him from executing that stunt in the 1940s.

The biggest loser in all this is, of course, Robbie Earle, who has hired Phil Hall to help massage any potential long-term career damage and who should take more care about where his largesse is actually going in future. I doubt he actually knew that the tickets he passed on were going to a guerilla marketing company but regardless.

But I can’t imagine that the sponsors will be too happy that FIFA, instead of starving the incident of oxygen actually fanned the flames of publicity by letting it get to court. A big company’s sponsorship is dependent on exclusivity – but enforcing the law rigorously with a group of attractive women is always going to attract further, and unwanted, interest.

TV learned the lesson with streakers – ignore them and the tendency to seek publicity by stripping withers and dies. Had FIFA done this, and had ITV waited a while before ousting Earle, we would likely not have heard of Bavaria beer except as a passing reference, an arcane trivia quiz question in years to come. But thanks to the manhandling of the situation, the midgets are flying over New York for all to see. Jim Moran would have been delighted.

It certainly seems like the Fame Formula is finding a life of its own again – I’ve recently received a number of emails and tweets from people who like the book. I’m humbled by their praise – and intrigued by one tweet that insists that the book has more to say about the ad industry than most books actually about the ad industry.

I suspect that this may have something to do with the corporatisation of the industry – there have always been interesting people in both PR and advertising but as the money gets bigger, so the personalities and the opportunities for risk-taking reduce.

Mad Men, which is starting on the BBC again, is proof of the changes that have been wrought, but it’s a shame that the fictional world this excellent show portrays has obscured the real characters who created the industry. They seem so utterly real – and make real ad men seem insubstantial by comparison.

The Fame Formula is a celebration of the huge characters of PR, of the risk-takers who built the business up. It would be good to see something, be it book or documentary, that gives a greater focus on the real characters of the advertising industry too.