STILL HAPPENING.(The Talk of the Town)(Gene Weber)

When the raffish Winchell-era press agent Eddie Jaffe died, in March, at the age of eighty-nine, the consensus was that there went the last of his kind. Then, in December, Leonard Traube, another New York publicity man of the old school, died, at eighty-three, and that pretty much seemed to be that. As it turns out, flaks are a heartier breed than we thought. Gene Weber, who is eighty-eight, is still open for business and still sending out typewritten press releases, such as a recent one announcing a stunt at a restaurant called the Pump, involving the "largest, biggest, hugest bowl of soup ever served in a restaurant--over 400 bowls of soup in one soup bowl." If asked, Weber will concede that, in his prime, he was "the No. 1 Broadway press agent for newspaper columns" and "the No. 1 contributor to Walter Winchell," not to mention "the No. 1 creator of events, or light news, for television--nobody even came close." He credits his success to a simple rule: make things happen.

Since 1946, he has attracted a far-flung, if fluid, group of clients, including Eddie Cantor, Buddy Hackett, Sarah Vaughan, Merv Griffin, Eddie Fisher, Louis Armstrong, Lenny Bruce, Joe Namath, and Nelson Rockefeller, plus dozens of restaurants and night spots and a racetrack or two. Weber was Edith Piaf's American press agent, and he handled Mike Nichols and Elaine May early in their careers, when they were appearing at a basement club called Down in the Depths. Winchell once called Weber "the finest writer of one-liners since Will Rogers," a talent that culminated in a bogus last will and testament that Weber devised for Henny Youngman to read at a press conference on his eighty-eighth birthday, in 1994: "To Madonna I leave my body--if she can't wait, she can have it sooner. . . . To my nephew, Irving, who's always asked me to mention him in my will: Hello, Irving."

Weber explained the other day, "The key to making things happen is to take your client, who may not even deserve to be in the papers, see what he has to work with, and, even if it's not much, rub a few ideas together till something hopefully catches on fire." A few years ago, when Weber was handling Gallagher's Steak House, he had Jake LaMotta put on a cutaway, a stovepipe hat, and a fake beard, and recite the Gettysburg ...