No one knows the press better than superagent Danny Newman, who turns 88 next month; he’s been wrangling reporters for 74 years, promoting everyone from Sally Rand to Renee Fleming and everything from Minsky’s burlesque to the New York Philharmonic. So when he confides his frustrations with University of Illinois Press, the publisher of his new book, Tales of a Theatrical Guru, I’m pretty sure he understands that there’s no way I won’t be sharing the story. Newman says he had to battle every inch of the way to get this academic press to make his book look like a star-studded memoir should, with big readable type and plenty of well-reproduced photos from his personal collection. And now, he says, it’s not in all the bookstores for the holidays.
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Nothing Newman has dreamed up in the name of promotion–not even the fictional bio he once created for Yul Brynner–is more unlikely than the facts of his own story. Born in Chicago to Lithuanian immigrants, he was raised in the Douglas Park and Garfield Park neighborhoods and lost his mother to cancer when he was six. By the time he graduated from Sullivan High School he was working as a publicist anywhere he could, from Bishop Bernard J. Sheil’s Catholic Youth Organization to movie houses that featured the “double whammy” of vaudeville and flicks. In the early 1940s he shepherded celebrities like Jimmy Durante and Milton Berle–newspaper photographers in tow–to five-show-a-day gigs at the Oriental Theatre.
For years Newman represented both commercial and nonprofit clients, bringing his street-smart hustle to groups like the Metropolitan Opera. In 1954 Lyric Opera of Chicago founders Carol Fox and Larry Kelly enlisted his help with their nascent company. Newman headed publicity at Lyric for the next 48 years, building an unequaled subscription audience. He was also a big part of the Art Institute’s turnaround of the money-losing Goodman Theatre. Newman’s radical contribution was the understanding that broad subscription sales, not
