Publicist helped gay celebrities handle media peril

Howard Bragman, a publicist who, like many in his line of work, often helped the famous and the reluctantly famous navigate embarrassing or volatile spotlight moments, but who also had a specialty of advising clients who were coming out of the closet, died Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 66.

The cause was leukemia, his family said in a statement.

Bragman was a familiar face in news coverage and on television shows like “Good Morning America,” whether talking about particular clients or about the art of public relations and damage control. Over his career he handled plenty of garden-variety public relations chores — promoting products, announcing engagements or deaths — but clients often made use of his services because they were in crisis mode.

In 2008, when Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s onetime sidekick on “The Tonight Show,” faced possible foreclosure on his multimillion-dollar home in Beverly Hills, California, Bragman was there to help handle the news media. In 2010, when a JetBlue flight attendant named Steven Slater had an onboard meltdown that went viral and landed him in court, Slater engaged Bragman to deal with the fallout. In 2017, after Anthony Scaramucci was dismissed as Donald Trump’s White House communications director just a few tumultuous days into the job, he hired Bragman to help orchestra his political afterlife.

Often in those situations, Bragman’s answers to journalists’ questions were more deflective than informative — “Not in the habit of confirming my clients or their strategies” was his oft-quoted response when asked what specifically he was telling Scaramucci — although behind the scenes he would advise clients on things like which interview requests to accept and what to say during those interviews.

More of an activist

But for another type of client, a gay man or woman going public, Bragman was more open and more of an activist. He was gay himself — “the gay guru,” he was sometimes called — and he was both a counselor and an admirer of actors, athletes and others who were coming out.

“These people are heroes, because coming out is the single most important act any gay person can do,” he told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2011. “Because every bit of research that’s ever been done says if you know more gay and lesbian people, you are going to support our rights.”

Among the celebrity clients he worked with in this capacity was Dick Sargent, who some two decades after he played the husband of Elizabeth Montgomery’s character on the classic sitcom “Bewitched” announced on National Coming Out Day in 1991 that he was gay.

In 2009, when Meredith Baxter, who as a star of “Family Ties” in the 1980s had been one of America’s best-known TV moms, started getting inquiries from the tabloid press after going on a lesbian cruise, her manager advised her to contact Bragman, who gave her blunt advice.

“We have to take control of the story or you will have no say in it at all,” she recalled him saying in her autobiography, “Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame and Floundering” (2011).

He booked her on NBC’s “Today,” where she told the world she was a lesbian. Bragman, she said, gave her the courage to go through with the interview.

“He said as soon as it’s done, you’ll be free,” Baxter told NPR. “And we walked out that door of NBC studios in December, and it was the most freeing thing I had ever experienced.”

Bragman performed a similar service for country singer Chely Wright in 2010, when, though well into the gay liberation era, a gay performer in country music was still a rarity.

“Historically, country music would rather an artist be a drunk — they even encourage that one,” Wright told The Los Angeles Times at the time. “They would rather you were a drug addict than be gay.”

Bragman also worked with former NBA player John Amaechi when, in 2007, he came out, and with Michael Sam, an NFL prospect, when he announced in 2014 that he was gay. Sam would become, in a brief pro career, the first publicly gay player in the National Football League.

Howard Benjamin Bragman was born on Feb. 24, 1956, in Flint, Michigan. His father, Leonard, had an insurance company and later a real estate business, and his mother, Myrna (Wolin) Bragman, was a homemaker who later worked with her husband in real estate.

“I was fat and Jewish and gay in Flint, Mich.,” Bragman told NPR. “And that makes you a bit of a Martian, because there’s not a lot of peers, there’s not a lot of role models, to really look to.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and psychology from the University of Michigan in 1978 and soon landed a job at a small public relations concern in Chicago whose clients included Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser and other beers.

The rich and famous

Bragman was soon turning up in newspaper articles. When Stevie Wonder and Kai Millard Morris had a child, Mandla, in 1979, it was Bragman who announced that the newborn weighed 7 pounds, 8 ounces. When Tom Earhart, a snowmobile racer sponsored by Budweiser, set a speed record of 148.6 mph in 1982, Bragman told the world.

He was a founder, in 1989, of Bragman Nyman Cafarelli, which quickly became a major public relations player. One of his first acts there was to offer pro bono help to Joseph Steffan, who had been kicked out of the U.S. Naval Academy in 1987 after acknowledging that he was gay and who in late 1988 sued for reinstatement. (The suit was ultimately unsuccessful).

“Sometimes causes need publicists, too,” Bragman told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “I felt it was important that he have all the help he can in fighting his battle.”

Bragman, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by his husband, Mike Maimone, whom he married this year, and a brother, Alan.

Bragman Nyman Cafarelli was sold in 2001 to Interpublic Group. Bragman, after teaching public relations for five years at the University of Southern California, founded a new firm, Fifteen Minutes PR, in 2005, and another, La Brea Media, in 2019.

In 2008, he put his public relations knowledge into a book, “Where’s My Fifteen Minutes: Get Your Company, Your Cause or Yourself the Recognition You Deserve” (written with Michael Levin). In the book, he cited the biblical story of Moses, who was reluctant to deliver the messages that God wanted delivered, and so God told him to bring along Aaron, his brother, who was more eloquent.

“So a lot of us in public relations believe that Aaron is actually the first practitioner of our craft,” Bragman wrote, “thus making public relations the third oldest profession, slightly behind spycraft and prostitution.” And, he added, “we get accused of both of those as well.”

Bragman