Steve Hannagan

Steve Hannagan, publicist extraordinaire, never made Las Vegas his home, and rarely set foot in the town. His agency, Steve Hannagan and Associates, represented Las Vegas for less than two years, 1949 and 1950.
But the “Hannagan Method” was adopted by the Las Vegas News Bureau, and it became one of the most effective publicity machines in the world. Like many good ideas, one of Hannagan’s simplest was also one of his best.
“Every morning, we would have a ‘hometown run,’ ” recalls veteran photographer Don English, a former Hannagan employee who came to Las Vegas in 1949 and stayed until retirement.
“We would go to all the hotels — there were about four of them at the time — and look for attractive couples. The idea was to take a photo of people vacationing and send it back to the subject’s local newspaper. It would run the picture of this couple sitting by the pool, and a neighbor would see someone he knew and say, ‘Well, if the Joneses can afford to go to Las Vegas, then we can, too.’ And we did a saturation job with those pictures.”
Editors also were saturated with Las Vegas cheesecake — featuring an abundance of swimming pools and showgirls.
Hannagan was a native of Indiana, born in Lafayette in 1899, who began his career as a correspondent for United Press. His first public relations job was promoting the Indianapolis 500. His success earned him a position as a publicist for Miami Beach, and the money to open his own agency in New York City.
In the mid-1930s, the publicist came to the attention of W. Averell Harriman, the young chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad. Harriman, according to his biographer, Rudy Abramson, was thinking about developing a ski resort similar to those he had seen in Europe. It was a totally new concept in the United States, and one that Harriman hoped would build ridership on his trains. He purchased some property in the mountain cow town of Ketchum, Idaho, and hired Hannagan to develop a publicity strategy.
“Hannagan had earned a reputation as a promotional genius by mesmerizing snowbound New Yorkers with images of sun, golden sand and tropical luxury at Miami Beach,” Abramson wrote. “He was a brainstormer, promoter and nonstop talker who poured out so many ideas that some were inevitably winners. He had all the machinery and contacts that Harriman needed to sell the novel idea of a winter vacation in Idaho.”
The place would need a glamorous name, and Hannagan provided it; Sun Valley. It also needed a definitive publicity photo. It was created in a New York studio, not on the slopes. A muscular young man, stripped to the waist, was slathered with petroleum jelly and posed against a backdrop that suggested he was pausing to soak up some rays after an extended downhill run.
The resort opened in December 1936, by which time Hannagan had become a legend.
Meanwhile, the little railroad town of Las Vegas was slowly becoming aware of an entirely new industry. Since 1931, people had been coming through Las Vegas, en route to Boulder Dam, then under construction. After the dam was finished in 1935, the people continued to come.
In 1939, Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce President Bob Kaltenborn convinced the chamber to spend $500 on a publicity experiment. Ria Langham, wife of film idol Clark Gable, came to town that year to get a divorce. She stayed the six weeks required to establish residency, playing in the casinos, cruising on Lake Mead, horseback riding at a nearby ranch, and talking freely and publicly about Hollywood and her famous husband. Noting that the national press had taken an interest in the story, the chamber issued a single press release extolling Nevada’s liberal divorce and marriage laws, as well as nearby scenic wonders and its various forms of indoor recreation.
“The return in publicity astounded … Kaltenborn and everybody else,” recalled a Review-Journal writer some 10 years later. However, the war intervened.
By 1944, Maxwell Kelch, founder of radio station KENO, had been elected chamber president, and was exhorting his fellow business people to get behind a regional advertising and publicity campaign that would make Southern Nevada a well-known postwar travel destination. The means to that end was dubbed the “Live Wire Fund.” Kelch persuaded nearly every business in the chamber to contribute 1 to 5 percent of its annual gross receipts. The final tally was $84,000.
The New York-based J. Walter Thompson agency was one of the nation’s most prestigious. The chamber hired it, but its performance was unremarkable. The chamber switched to the advertising agency of West-Marquis, which gets credit for inventing “Vegas Vic,” the rangy, cigarette-smoking cowboy who became the city’s mascot.
The agency handled only advertising. Publicity was handled directly by the chamber.
By definition, publicity involves persuading newspapers, magazines and broadcasters that your product — or city — is worthy of a story.
In 1948, the nation’s top publicity agency was Steve Hannagan and Associates and its biggest client was the Union Pacific Railroad, whose president, George Ashby, was a resident of Las Vegas. He offered Hannagan’s services to the chamber, paying half of his $50,000 annual fee.
That summer, Hannagan’s publicity machine, headed by Neil T. Regan, popped its clutch and roared off to “Operation Las Vegas,” establishing the “Desert Sea News Bureau.” (The name refers to Lake Mead, and later would be changed to the Las Vegas News Bureau.)
“Hannagan made it clear that he would ignore the obvious glamour of gaming, divorce and marriage chapels, and would instead publicize Las Vegas as the hub of a surrounding scenic wonderland. He felt that the coverage by outside writers on the land of Sodom and Gomorrah made Las Vegas known as a gambling resort, and wanted to diversify the other images in order to entice wives and families to come,” wrote Perry Kaufman, in “City Boosters, Las Vegas Style.”
For 1950, Hannagan submitted a bid of $87,000 to continue his services. The chamber turned it down. Union Pacific was under fire from other towns on its line who wanted a sweetheart deal; instead the railroad ended the subsidy.
“The chamber announced that it will set up its own publicity bureau modeled and staffed as closely as possible along the lines of the current Hannagan operation,” said the Review-Journal of October 1949.
Hannagan died Feb. 3, 1953, and was buried in his hometown of Lafayette.
Hired to head the new Las Vegas Bureau was Ken Frogley, formerly employed by Hannagan. Several other former Hannaganites stayed aboard as well.
It is unknown what Hannagan would have made of the advent of the above-ground nuclear testing in 1951. But when producer David O. Selznick punched a Hollywood banker at a gala in the Sun Valley Lodge, Hannagan issued a press release.
So it’s probably safe to assume that he would have approved of the way the Las Vegas News Bureau handled atomic testing as another tourist attraction.
Atomic tests were difficult to cover, and especially difficult to photograph. A photographer might spend several days on the road, and there was always a good chance the test would be postponed.
The other option was to rely on the photographers of the Las Vegas News Bureau. They were reliable and provided a lot of unsolicited material involving celebrities and pretty women at poolside.
“It was an opportunity for the Las Vegas News Bureau to service the L.A. papers and wire services and to get a rapport with those people,” says English. “And it worked. It was very successful.”
Jerry Abbott, who was the bureau’s head photographer for several years, recalled in a 1988 interview that his guys were always looking for a new way of presenting the atomic “shot” photos. One lensman, Joe Buck, decided that he could illustrate the “false dawn” created by the early morning blasts. His idea was to pose a rooster on an antenna, backlit by the blast. He obtained a suitable bird and froze it. On the appointed day, he perched the bird and waited. The test was canceled and the rooster returned to cold storage. Another date was set, and Buck and his rooster were there. No go. With each partial thawing, the rooster’s feathers were becoming increasingly disheveled.
“After about the third time, the bomb finally went, and this rooster looks like it’s really getting blasted off the antenna,” Abbott laughed. Even so, the picture went out, and was widely used.
In the late 1960s, the News Bureau’s function began to change. Las Vegas was by then a household word, and the News Bureau increasingly functioned as a liaison between travel writers and hotel publicists.
In mid-1992, the Chamber of Commerce, headed by Bob Maxey, decided the Las Vegas News Bureau had completed its mission. The board voted not to provide its $650,000 annual budget. The bureau’s huge archive of historic photographs, along with its equipment, was handed over to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which re-opened a much smaller bureau later that year.
The News Bureau’s legacy, the aforementioned photo collection, was used in a final salute to the legendary lensmen in late 1992. The Nevada State Historical Society put together an exhibit of 70 of the most celebrated News Bureau pictures, entitled “Spinning the Magic: The Las Vegas News Bureau Story.” Frank Wright, curator of the museum, gave a straightforward explanation for the timing of the show.
“This exhibit will show just how much these photographers did for Las Vegas,” he said. “They were damn good photographers.”