"A stalwart individual pushing along the side of a church"
[SOME PEOPLE I'VE LIED ABOUT]
Being reminiscences of the author's nefarious, but more or less innocuous career as a press agent.
A press agent, as you may have gathered from the preceding article, is a person employed to obtain free newspaper advertising for any given thing, and the thing usually is a theatrical production. This advertising he is supposed to get as the Quaker was advised to get money—honestly, if possible. Since it isn't often possible, the press agent may be described in two words as a professional liar.
There is neither malice nor "muck rake" in this assertion. The press agent knows that his business is the dissemination of falsehood, and he is proud of it. Go up to any member of the craft you find on Broadway and say to him: "You are a liar!"; you will see a smile of satisfaction spread itself over his happy face, and his horny hand will grasp yours in earnest gratitude. Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray were liars, too, according to his way of thinking, and not overly ingenious or entertaining liars, at that. Their fiction was spread upon the pages of books, as his is spread upon the pages of the daily journals, and their mission, like his, was the enlivening of a terribly dull little planet. This altruistic motive really lurks behind the prevarications of the press agent with imagination. He conceives his philanthropic duty to be the making of news to fill a demand largely in excess of the supply. If the pursuit of this purpose brings him an income hovering about that of a United States Senator he cannot be blamed.
I became one of the guild of Annanias some ten or eleven years ago, coming fresh from the position of dramatic critic on The Washington Times, and I think I may say without undue egotism that, during the period of my membership, I lied industriously, conscientiously, and with a fair degree of success. There have been and are more able falsifiers than I, but the confessions of one man cannot in honor include the deeds of another, and so I must omit them from this chronicle. Suffice it to say that the stories of Anna Held's bathing in milk, of Mrs. Patrick Campbell having tan bark spread in the street in front of the Theater Republic to deaden the rumbling that annoyed her during performances, and a score similar in nature remain conspicuous examples of the cleverness manifested by brilliant press agents in attracting attention to the actors and actresses in whose behalf they labored.
The successful launching of a "fake"—so they are known to the profession—like these is not at all the simple matter it would appear to be. The mere conception of the story is only the beginning of the task. It is not enough to decide that such and such a thing might happen, or to swear that it has happened; it must be made to happen. Moreover, the occurrence must be so natural, and the plans leading to it so carefully laid and concealed, as to prevent suspicion and baffle investigation. Whenever it is possible, the press agent should be ostensibly unconnected with the affair, and, whenever it is not, he must hide his knowledge behind a mask of innocence in comparison with which the face of Mary's little lamb looks like a selection from the rogues' gallery.