Motion Picture Herald (Apr-Jun 1931)

12 MOTION PICTURE HERALD June 2 7, 1931 THE IRREPRESSIBLE HARRY NOW FIGHTING HIS BRAVEST BATTLE Reichenbach's Spirit of Wit, Verve Remain Famed Publicity Man at Doctor's Hospital Undergoing Long, Tedious Treatment by TERRY RAMSAYE In a white draped bed in the hush of Doctors' Hospital in East End avenue up where the greenery of Carl Schurz park sweeps down to the river, Harry Reichenbach, entrepreneur, adventurer extraordinary and most flanibuoyantly famed of motion picture publicity men, is fighting the bravest battle of his life. For months on end he has been there undergoing radium treatment for a throat affliction, with the tide of fate rising and falling through the long tedious days. Through it all the spirit and wit and verve of his dashing two decades of Broadway have stayed with him, even in the grimmest hours of pain. This week the irrepressible Harry whispered orders that a sign must be placed over his bed on the wall : "Hospital Room — Make no Noises." Through the year of his illness Mr. Reichenbach's resources have been faaing through continued costly outlay and the lack of his administrative attention, so that now his all has gone into the battle. Not so long ago, Mrs. Reichenbach, eternally devoted, took employment in sales and customer contact work with the Fifth avenue establishment of Jay-Thorpe, couturiers. This is a sad aftermath of a career of spectacular and sparkling successes under the bright lights of Broadway and across the first pages of the nation's press. For more than ten years Mr. Reichenbach has been rated in the thousand-dollars-and-up a week class of exploitation agent. His earnings have run to imposing figures, sometimes as high as $6,000 a week, with large annual totals. But with the nonchalance of his best after dinner manner he has lived and flung the chips back into the game of life as fast as the cards have been dealt to him. His successes and his failures alike have been magnificently complete, and ever full of color. AAA My acquaintance with Harry Reichenbach began that day in 1915 when John Flinn organized a special luncheon session of the young A. M. P. A. at the Hotel Claridge to bid me goodbye on my departure with the removal of the Mutual Film Corporation's offices from New York to Chicago. My merry contemporaries seemed charmed to have me go and there was a full attendance, with Harry presiding as toastmaster through a function in which he applied the heat with great zeal and vigor. From that day on we have never passed an opportunity to cross foils in cheerful disagreement. Harry went to work when he was 15 years old, with an insurance company. But that matter of fact sort of enterprise could hold the animated young Mr. Reichenbach only briefly. Soon he appeared in the employ of Mile. Wanda, a fortune teller. Then came the -S »lls-Forepaugh circus and after that the Swanson & Layton Carnival Company. With that he was definitely aligned with the activity which was to be his life career, amusement promotion. About 1911 he opened a free-lance publicity office in the Putnam building where the Paramount building now towers over Times Square. His first client there was the Russman Art Corporation, which had to offer that now classic painting by Paul Chabas entitled "September Morn." In behalf of the younger generation it may be recorded that this masterpiece portrayed a slim maiden at dawn shivering on the shallows of a pool and clothed exclusively in the rising mists, which were quite light. It lithographed charmingly. After giving the esthetic and commercial aspects of the problem his most profound consideration, Harry arranged a window display of a sizable reproduction of the picture in the window of a shop in West 31st street and employed a handful of Western Union messenger boys to stand in front of the window and make remarks calculated to indicate their excitement. Harry then telephoned Anthony Com