Paul Wasserman, whose career as a top entertainment publicist for musical greats such as the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and movie stars such as Jack Nicholson crashed in 2000 when he was jailed for using the names of famous clients to swindle some of his closest noncelebrity friends, has died. He was 73.
Wasserman died Sunday of respiratory failure at the Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, said publicist Joan Myers, a friend of Wasserman.
During his four-decade career, the journalist-turned-publicist built one of the world's most impressive client lists -- one that included pop music artists such as the Who, Neil Diamond, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Tom Petty and Linda Rondstadt.
Wasserman also represented numerous actors, including Lee Marvin, Dennis Hopper, Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott. And he publicized dozens of films, including "Cat Ballou," "Easy Rider," "Annie Hall" and "Star Wars."
But it was in his role as a rock 'n' roll publicist that the man whom friends called Wasso made his greatest mark.
"He was one of the first ones to sort of accept and represent the new school of rock 'n' roll, so he was able to use the so-called old-school tools that he had in representing this new breed of people," music producer and impresario Lou Adler, who met Wasserman in the early 1960s, told The Times on Monday.
Adler, who said Wasserman "was very involved in the Mamas and the Papas PR," was "able to cross both worlds and bring them together, which was very beneficial to the acts because he had contacts at Life magazine and [the Saturday Evening] Post magazine. We had to make inroads into those old established outlets, and he already had them."
In 1987 -- the same year Wasserman conducted a campaign that landed U2 on the cover of Time magazine -- five pop music reporters and critics for The Times named him as a member of "Los Angeles rock's royal court" -- "the people whose telephone calls are always returned."
"He was the most important rock publicist in town," Robert Hilburn, The Times' former longtime pop music critic, said Monday. "He was a brilliant media strategist who helped usher rock 'n' roll into an era of new respectability."
"Rock 'n' roll was this rowdy kind of thing, and he was somehow able to make the mainstream press more interested in them and make the artists available for interviews and stories," said Hilburn.
Indeed, Hilburn said, "he was able to coax some of the most reluctant pop stars, such as Dylan and the Rolling Stones, to do interviews."
