Stars’ publicist ends his decadeslong run
Charly Zukow helped focus spotlight on the city’s biggest shows
Longtime entertainment and lifestyle publicist Charles Zukow might be retiring at the end of March, but he still remembers the first pitch he made in San Francisco.
It was 1986 and he had just moved to the city from Southern California, following his partner at the time. He’d abandoned his acting dreams, after three people, including his grandfather, took him aside to gently suggest he try something else.
But to move north, he said goodbye to his own promotion business to work at Bill Lanese Advertising. In his small new office in San Francisco, it was still the era of typewriters, when a press list would consist of a thick drawer full of files.
His first client was an Imax film at the Palace of Fine Arts. He had a cheat sheet, in case he got nervous and forgot what to say: “Hi, this is Charly Zukow. I’m calling about ‘Chronos.’ ”
“My first phone call was to the Bay Guardian,” he recalls from his home in the Castro. The paper’s film writer agreed to do a story, and “the jolt that that gave me has lasted for 30plus years.”
If you’ve encountered Bay Area arts coverage online, in print, on TV or on radio since then, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the invisible hand of Zukow at work, shaping how artists and producers package themselves for press and the public. The clients of Charles Zukow Associates, which Zukow has run since 2002 as a successor to Browne Abrams Public Relations, have included “Beach Blanket Babylon,” Cirque du Soleil in Northern California, American Conservatory Theater, touring Broadway shows, the Curran and the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation, for which his work has helped raise millions of dollars, according to Lifetime Director Pam Baer and Chair Judy Guggenhime.
He is a fixture at opening nights, calm and tactful, his eyes keenly alert behind a bold set of spectacles, seemingly a different pair for each new event.
“You might call his work reliable hype,” says former Chronicle theater critic Robert Hurwitt in a statement, “to the extent that Charly’s very presence as publicist came to lend a certain promise to the shows he plugged, an implied imprimatur of quality.”
But after 35 years, “it was just time,” Zukow, 62, says of his decision to retire. “COVID really made John (Ferrara, his husband) and me look at our life and how things can change on a dime — for real, in real time, right in front of us.”
To that end, Zukow wants to spend more time with his six grandchildren and in his garden. He wants to travel after the pandemic is over, too.
Just because he’s retiring doesn’t mean he’ll suddenly dish about his clients. Zukow is too professional for that. He does admit, however, that among his weirdest projects was “Puppetry of the Penis,” which was “two guys turning their junk into a hamburger, a sailboat.”
“That’s one of those ones where you scratch your head and go, ‘What the hell?’ But it sold tickets!” he says.
Zukow prefers to think about favorite artists he’s worked with, such as Shirley MacLaine, whom he represented when she performed at the Orpheum in “Out There Tonight.”
Once they were in the car after a day of interviews and “my partner at the time was dying,” Zukow recalls. She asked him what was the matter; he demurred. “She reached over and grabbed my hand and said, ‘Something’s the matter,’ and I just started crying. She said, ‘Are you afraid of death?’ I said, ‘I don’t want him to die.’
“She looked at me. She took my chin. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, Shirley
MacLaine is touching my chin.’ She said, ‘It’s OK. He’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.’ It stayed with me to this day.”
Even smaller days are still a thrill, he says, citing a piece that had recently run in the Nob Hill Gazette on the 2021 iteration of the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation’s famed Hearts in SF series. “I’m (claps his hands) woo, ecstatic!” he says.
From his early days, as a flack for the San Francisco Film Festival, “the fruits of your efforts were before you,” he says of the job. “It was amazing to have something that everybody wanted.”
A good publicist, he says, is one who doesn’t make promises about what kind of coverage he can get. A good publicist knows that someone who answers the phone one day could be a reporter or an editor five years later, and to treat them accordingly. A good publicist truly believes in what he’s promoting, even when it’s “damn hard” (here Zukow makes “damn” into a twosyllable word).
“I also think that a publicist needs to remain calm at all costs, no matter how horrible the situation is,” he says. “Take a step back. Review the situa
tion. There’s always an answer, if you take another two minutes to look at something. Don’t rush into a decision.”
The rewards of surviving crisis PR are moments such as watching the Las Vegas dress rehearsal for Cirque du Soleil’s “O” in 1998. “I remember sitting in the theater being absolutely blown away by the show,” he says.
“As it came to the finale, the layers that opened up were extraordinary, and I remember shivering and starting to cry. It reminded me of the power of live theater. But I said to myself and my colleague, ‘I couldn’t believe that I was part of an industry that produced that.’ ”