Maynard Nottage

Stuntster and publicist Maynard Nottage was born in 1885 (no exact birth date on record) and died on January 25th 1965, aged 79.
One of the formative figures in the publicity industry. Nottage, along with Harry Reichenbach and others, created the star system and the publicity industry. He was lost to history thanks to the rapid changes in publicity and communication in the 20th century and his archive was only recently rediscovered by Mark Borkowski when he was researching a book on the history of the publicity industry in Los Angeles. The resulting book, The Fame Formula, will be released by Macmillan in August 2008.

Nottage was raised in a Methodist household in Maryland, USA and left home at 16 to travel with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West from 1901 to late 1902. Whilst touring with them he developed a strong fascination with John M Burke (Buffalo Bill Cody’s publicist and biographer) and Phineas Barnum, whose circus swapped seasons in Europe and America with the Wild West show, also sharing transportation. After leaving the Wild West show, Nottage went to New York determined to make it big in Vaudeville and the movies. He worked the vaudeville, carnival and movie circuit for the next 25 with mixed success.

Early Years

His first work in the movies was organising a road show promoting The Great Train Robbery in 1903 - a small outdoor horse stunts and safe cracking show designed to create a buzz around that night’s showing of the film, one of the first to really grab an audience,
He made his first real impression on Hollywood in 1907, rescuing the Selig film company from an embarrassing situation after Tara Tiplady, starring as the Virgin Mary, was admitted to hospital with burns after one of her co-performers accidentally dropped hot oil on her whilst she performed oral sex on him as he was cooking pancakes. Nottage told the press that Tiplady had been kicked in the face by the donkey, which had been startled by a rattlesnake, and that her co-star had been kicked in the groin when he went to assist her. He later took the donkey on a tour of the country, having kept the actresses name whiter than white.

In 1908 he released a lion in Chicago that year to gain attention for a failing circus and arranged for a young child to lead the beast back - the lion was tame and the child in no danger.
In 1909 Nottage worked a stunt for exotic python dancer The Great Decantle, persuading a waiter to pose as a Sheik to woo her in public with a poster in Arabic begging her to dine with him. The stunt was intercepted by a rival press agent, Walt Simmons, who changed the words in Arabic to read as a slur on Nottage. Nottage went straight to the press and exposed the stunt.
In 1911, Nottage hired George Brocklet to pose as a man who believed he was turning into a monkey to promote A Monkey Bite, distributed by Pathe.

For the promotion of the 1914 Charlie Chaplin film, "Laughing Gas", in which Charlie pretends to be a dentist, Maynard Nottage offered free dental work to the first five bookers of the movie. Unfortunately, the tooth-smith who was on offer to administer the work was a veterinarian, who Nottage knew from the carnival circuit.

In late 1918, he had been working for a US Pharmaceutical company and was shipped out to Romania by the government to apply his knowledge to help stem panic about a flu epidemic - he had the Government send all their children to the mountains and, in the best tradition of the snake oil medicine men he had met on the carnival circuit, got them to gargle a special medication, which garnered global press but was in fact only hydrogen peroxide.
In 1919, he sold a stunt to a now defunct American spring manufacturer. The company had developed an industrial strength spring for elevator safety. Nottage persuaded a Hollywood stuntman, Dan Wilson, to test the spring by allowing himself to be dropped five floors in an elevator from a Chicago office block. Wilson broke both legs and his pelvis.

Throughout the 1920s, Jack Pickford was forever being rescued from scandals by Nottage. One of his greatest acts of subterfuge on Nottage’s part was when Pickford’s first wife Olive Thomas, a known heroin addict, was found dead in the Ritz Hotel in Paris while Pickford was filming in the city.
Maynard Nottage hit hard times in the late 1920’s, unable to get the lucrative movie publicity jobs as Harry Reichenbach was cleaning up in that area. Instead he took to publicizing the “Roving Barber”, an idea, set up following the bankruptcy of a barber’s shop, to try to salvage some of the financial losses. A special motorcycle with pillion was invented, inviting clients to sit in the side car while the barber cut the hair or shaved the client. Unfortunately, it was funded by a mafia man called Abele Castelli. The promotional stunt ended in a police chase and disaster.
In 1928, he was employed by the Rutger Brothers, a Quaker clothing manufacturer. In a bid to revive their fortunes, he set up a “How to Dress Your Preacher” competition which he weighted in their favour by planting a mole from his troupe of actors. The result was a striking outfit consisting of black woollen crepe trousers tucked into knee-high black leather boots, and completed with black shirt sporting an armband depicting a scene from the Old Testament. The mole was discovered and the Rutger Brothers ruined. They fled back to Germany just before the Great Depression and made a fortune selling a version of the uniform to the Nazi party.

Later Years

During the 1930s, he worked for various airline companies but his carnival style, influenced by Burke and Barnum, had fallen out of favour with the movie industry, which, under the watchful gaze of the Fixers at MGM and the other studios, had become much more careful about who it employed. He had bits of work over the last 34 years of his life promoting small outfits with limited success. He died in 1965, a bitter and lonely old man abandoned by the industry he had helped create.

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