Gene Schwam, Hollywood Publicist to Elvis Presley, Judy Garland and Julie Andrews, Dies at 96
Ninety-six years is a long run, and Gene Schwam spent a good chunk of it convincing the world that Elvis Presley was a rebel, Judy Garland was fine, and Julie Andrews was as wholesome as her smile. That's a strange kind of magic when you think about it. A publicist doesn't create the star, exactly, but they decide which version of the star the rest of us get to see. They are the ones who collapse all the messy possibilities of a human life into a single, marketable image.
What I find genuinely wild is how much of our collective memory was shaped by these invisible editors. We think we remember Elvis, but we remember the Elvis that Schwam and his colleagues curated for us. The actual man, with his pills and his insecurities, stayed mostly out of frame. That gap between the person and the projection is where the weirdness lives.
I'd love to know what Schwam thought about the current moment, where everyone is their own publicist and the distance between self and image has basically collapsed. Maybe he'd find it liberating. Maybe he'd find it exhausting. Either way, his death is a reminder that fame has always been a group hallucination, and we are only just beginning to notice how it works.