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1 Introduction “My name is the symbol of my own identity and must not be lost” The woman who wishes to be famous should not marry; rather she should attach herself to one or more women who will fetch and carry for her in the immemorial style of “wives”; women who will secure her from interruption, give her freedom from the irritating small details of living, assure her that she is great and devote their lives to making her so. —Psychologist Lorine Pruette, “Why Women Fail,” 19311 All three marriages were unexpected. Edward L. Bernays had so often and persuasively declared he never would marry that his family was convinced the name Bernays would not be passed on to the next generation, since he had four sisters but was the only son. In reaction, soon after his sister Hella wed Murray Cohen in 1917, Cohen legally changed his name to Murray C. Bernays so their children would keep the name alive. Newspaper coverage of the unusual name change spread the story of Hella’s brother’s vow to remain single. Among those who knew the story well was her brother’s friend Doris E. Fleischman, the first person he hired—as a writer and his office manager—in 1919 when he set up a business offering a new service he called publicity direction. He quickly realized her skills were invaluable but was glacially slow to acknowledge the growing romantic attraction between them, and only in the face of an ultimatum from Fleischman did he reconsider his vow. Ruth Hale, too, had adamantly declared she never would marry. This did not interest newspapers, although in early 1916 her friend Heywood Broun’s engagement to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova was the subject of a New York Times news story. Three months later Lopokova broke off the engagement and Broun began to focus his attentions on Hale. Smart, tenacious, sharp-edged, and argumentative , Hale could not have been more unlike his exotic, delicate ex-fiancée, even as she was strikingly different from Broun in both personality and accomplishments. When they first met in 1915 he had a low-status job as a sportswriter for the New York Tribune—where he was known for his light touch with words, geniality, and laziness—while she was a writer for the Sunday Times and had been one of the country’s few women drama critics. Jane Grant had no objections to marriage but she was finding life as an exceedingly popular single woman so enjoyable that marriage must have seemed a tame alternative. Her suitors included Harold Ross, whom she had met in Paris at the end of World War I when he was editing the Stars and Stripes, the newspaper for 2 Anonymous in Their Own Names U.S. servicemen, and she was performing for some of the same troops as a volunteer entertainer. After the war she returned to her New York job, and he overcame his strong dislike for the city to take an unpromising editing position there so he could be near her. That proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated, however , because not only was she dating many other men, but his sparse social skills placed him at a competitive disadvantage. Fleischman and Bernays married in 1922, Hale and Broun in 1917, Grant and Ross in 1920. The men then went on to extraordinary professional success. Bernays has sometimes been called “the father of public relations,” for the business he founded was instrumental in transforming press agentry into a new field marked by complex campaigns that could shape trends and change habits and attitudes . The high fees paid by a long, impressive list of clients attest to the effectiveness of some of the firm’s strategies. In his 1996 social history of public relations, author Stuart Ewen concluded that Bernays “left a deep mark on the configuration of our world.”2 Broun was a phenomenon. From the mid-1920s through the 1930s—a time when newspaper columns were a dominant force in molding public opinion—he was one of the country’s most popular, influential, and generously paid columnists, and one of the best-known journalists. By 1929 his nationally syndicated column was estimated to have one million readers, many of them drawn to his humor and idiosyncratic, engaging “voice,” as well as to his passionate protests against social, political, and economic injustices. In 1925 Ross plunged into an immensely challenging job as the founding editor of a...

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