Princess Pennie anxiously studied the program as I looked over her shoulder. “Maybe a page fell out,” I said, “maybe our names were on a page that fell out.”
“No,” she answered slowly, “it's alphabetical. This is the page our names would've been on.”
I reached down once more to feel the little gold buckle that lets you adjust the waist on rented pants. The buckle wasn't there because this tux wasn't rented. Pennie had bought it for me because she said that people who went to parties at the Waldorf could tell the difference. I scanned an Arctic sea of two hundred tabletops where white linen lay like a snowy blanket and crystal goblets glittered like winter ice and lilting laughter glowed like the Northern Lights above twelve hundred sparkling faces that chattered and tinkled their way toward numbered tables. Nope, not a gold waist-buckle in sight. Pennie had been right.
We looked one last time to make sure that our names hadn't magically appeared next to a table number.
This story of 2 lost puppies who find themselves at New York's poshest Park Avenue address begins with a telephone call from Ray Bard, our publisher.”A man in Denver just wrote a check for 350 copies of your book and then faxed my office the receipt with a question written on it; 'Is this enough for you to arrange a meeting with the author?'”
Have you ever met someone and immediately felt like you've known them all your life? That's how it was for me when Dean Rotbart (ROTE-bart) arrived in my office. Looking back, the only thing unusual about Dean that day was his amazing skill at deflecting my questions and redirecting the conversation. When he left at the end of the day, Pennie and I knew nothing about Dean except that he had a wife named Talya and two kids named Maxwell and Avital and that we really liked him a lot.
We received an email a few weeks later: “Cancel whatever plans you have for March 10 and be in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York at 7:00 PM. Trust me. – Dean Rotbart.”
Do you remember the old TV sitcom, Green Acres? When it comes to New York, Pennie and I are just like Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert except that the Eva Gabor character is me: “New York is where I'd rather stay. I get allergic smelling hay. I just adore a penthouse view. Darling-I-love-you-but-give-me-Park-Avenue.” I added one more line, “And it would give us a chance to see a couple of plays on Broadway and we're way overdue for a visit with Dror and Leora Yehuda and Richard and Ronnie Grosbard, don't you think?”
Pennie had agreed at the time, but now as we stood staring at a seating chart from which our names were awkwardly absent, she was beginning to have second thoughts.
She began to talk in a slow, strange voice, “Honey, did you look closely at these other names? Donald L. Barlett – TIME, Richard Behar – FORTUNE, Ron Insana – CNBC, Michael Bloomberg – The Bloomberg News, James Cramer – TheStreet.com, Ray Brady – CBS, Steve Forbes… “ She scanned the program for another few seconds, then said, “Roy, there's at least a hundred people here who have won a Pulitzer or a Nobel or an Emmy and few hundred more who have been nominated for one.” Then with eyes like saucers she lifted an insert that had been carefully tucked into our program and held it up for me to see. It was a note from the President of the United States. Pennie looked long and hard into my eyes and whispered, “Exactly what are we doing here?”
As though from a great distance, I heard my voice say, “Dean clicked our email address by mistake.”
We tiptoed toward the exit like 2 mice trying to step over the whiskers of a sleeping cat. Three more steps, two more steps, one more step and we were out the door.
“Pennie? Roy?” We froze like we'd been hit with a spotlight. Expecting to hear, “What are you doing here?” we heard only, “Did you have a good flight?” Before we could reply, the air sang the song of someone rapping a champagne flute with a butter knife.
Twelve hundred people turned toward a man with a goblet in his hand, “I have an announcement to make.”
Dean whispered, “Follow me.”
Like people in a trance we followed Dean to the head table where he sat to my left and the chairman of MasterCard International sat to Pennie's right. (The chairman picked up the tab for the whole event and said he was thankful to have been given the opportunity.) This was Dean and Talya Rotbart's annual party and all the literary glitteratti were there. MasterCard was there just to rub shoulders with Dean's influential friends.
No one on earth knows the minds of journalists like Dean Rotbart, America's leading consultant on public relations. “Bad PR is sending out a generic press release to hundreds of publications and hoping that a journalist notices your story. Good PR is sending a custom-tailored press release to a specific journalist that you know in advance is going to be interested. You've got to talk to each journalist – in the language of a journalist – about what matters to that journalist.” Interestingly, Dean was making this statement to his public relations clients for more than a decade before he heard my similar statement in a seminar about advertising.
Attend Newsroom Confidential with Dean Rotbart. You won't be disappointed.
See you there.
Roy H. Williams
PS – This true story happened on the evening of March 10, 2000. A few months later, Dean came back to Austin to be part of the very first graduating class of Wizard Academy with Chuck Mefford, Phil Stewart, Karen Coletta, Bob Lonowski and 8 other of the world's most fascinating people.