He is both right for the part, and all wrong for the part. Short in stature, smooth in talk, the requisite rings and things, a tortoise-shell cigarette holder, a levelled-down pompadour. By his own description, a little guy with a big mouth. And though it’s not immediately apparent, Gino Empry – publicist, manager and booker of acts – is also shy.

He insists that beneath that Sammy Glick exterior beats an impressionable heart that still gets a kick out of meeting the big names who make up his top-drawer clientele, who goes home to mama for dinner on Sunday nights, plays father to his eight brothers and sisters, is desperately proud of being a Canadian and gets into tangles with the press only when they don’t play by the rules. And if you don’t watch the little so-and-sos, his smile implies, they won’t.

Empry is, by some accounts (mainly his clients), the quintessential public relations man, a prize plum in the Canadian publicity world. To others (mainly the media), he is the quintessential flack, the ubiquitous obstacle block between Story and Subject.

“I don’t apologize for what I am,” Empry shrugs over a luncheon aperitif of Amaretto-on-the-rocks. “If someone doesn’t like me, it’s his problem, not mine. I’ve got 12 good points, and 60 bad – but I know what they are.”

His major good point, at least to those he works for, is an unhesitating and 100 per cent dedication to his job. He is there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, says female impersonator Craig Russell, a client and cheerleader.

“Gino works around the clock,” says singer Peggy Lee. “He sees his job as anticipating your needs, and he does it very well. Too well maybe – sometimes he worries me.”

Keep in touch

Empry’s job doesn’t end when a star’s engagement is over.

When the Peggy Lees and Jack Lemmons and Tony Bennetts aren’t in town, they still keep in touch, oblivious to the fact that time zones differ between the West Coast and here, but sure in the knowledge that, 3 a.m. or 3 p.m., Gino will be there.

And that’s the way Empry likes it – that’s the way, in fact, Empry loves it. It’s taken 15 years to gain his reputation (one, he says, that gives him rather more credit than is due) – 15 years of contact building, deal making, contract writing, ego massaging, press placating, hustling, manipulating and just generally staying ahead of the game, a showbiz game that can be a killer.

It came close to getting him early this winter. Empry, 38 and a chain-smoker, was up to 35 Valiums a week before even noticing his dependence. “I thought I was taking the odd one; I had no idea how many.”

He went off the pills cold turkey and is now chirping the praises of regular sleep, multi-dose vitamins and, following a tip from the late Duke Ellington, a monthly B12 injection.

“Your health, in the end, is the only important thing,” he says. “Tony Bennett told me that, and it’s true. The only other thing you need to know – as Sam Shopsowitz says – is to have fun with whatever you’re doing.”

Empry, emphatically, does. Arranging interviews for Deborah Kerr or swapping stories with Ralph Richardson is, whatever the price, a lot more interesting than working as an accountant for a trucking firm. Which is what Empry did for the first confused years of adulthood.

It was the sort of job expected of the eldest of nine children in an Italian-Canadian family whose livelihood depended on the income from a small butcher shop. The family name is Emperatore, and according to Empry (who’s never had it legally changed), the blood line has been traced back to 43 BC. He wears a family crest ring (and a Mickey Mouse watch), and announces in tones that defy skepticism that his ancestors include three Roman emperors – Gaius, Gallus and Marcellus.

Despite his distinguished heritage, Empry admits that his Little Italy childhood was an ordinary, if not sad, affair. He was, he recalls, the only one in his Catholic school not to reassure the nuns that yes, he did plan to become a priest when he grew up; the one singled out for his shyness and shortness by a passing parade of school bullies. After school meant working in his father’s shop, an obligation that ultimately led to his cutting off the tops of two fingers in a meat-slicing machine.

“My dream throughout all this,” he says, “was to someday sit, just sit, in the Royal Alexandra Theatre. I loved the theatre. By 14, I was producing and starring in CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) shows like The Christmas Carol and Tilly Goes to Town and just loving it.”

By the time he finished high school, reality had set in. Empry took an accounting course at business school and did the dutiful thing. Not, however, without a characteristic twist. He worked for a waterfront trucking company – and so, decided to live on Toronto Islands.

And living on the islands led, unexpectedly, to a furthering of his budding attraction to show business.

Empry was the star and producer of a little-known annual extravaganza called the Ferry Boat Follies (“lots of high kick lines”). It led to his membership in the Central Ontario Drama league and, over the next five years, more than 50 semi-starring parts in plays bound for the Metro-and-environs circuit (“Pickering, Port Credit”).

$2,000 advice

“I was, I am, renowned for my portrayal of Tikini in Teahouse Of The August Moon,” he says. “But the more involved I got in the acting world, the more I seemed to succeed in the business world. I was the fastest-rising, youngest executive in the trucking business.”

By 1963, Empry was facing a career crisis, so much so that he spent $2,000 on a career consultant who simplified the problem by suggesting he take two years off trucking for a full-time look at show business. It made eminent sense to Empry, if not to his family. His mother, he recalls, greeted the news by saying, “You want to be in show business, be in show business. When you want to go to work, come back.”

He did not go back.

The contacts he’d made with the Ontario Drama League – such movers-and-shakers as critic Herb Whittaker, Pauline McGibbon and Ed Mirvish – led to several contract jobs, including a stint selling groups sales for the old Crest Theatre, and signing on as press agent for the refurbished Royal Alex.

“I think I was hired as a press agent,” Empry laughs. “Neither Ed nor I really knew what I was meant to be doing.”

In those years, touring Broadway productions travelled with their own publicists. Show by show, Empry learned the tricks of his new trade. In time, the word filtered back to New York that the Royal Alex publicist, a young kid named Gino, could be trusted to handle the local publicity.

By 1965, Empry was doing enough business to rent office space on St. Clair Ave. W. from Johnny Lombardi and hire out as a personal manager to a handful of Toronto actors – Robin Ward, Sean Mulcahy, Ken James. The Irish Rovers signed him as their international publicist, and a year later, the CNE contracted him to publicize the Grandstand Show acts.

“By 1967 it was all starting to happen. But the Grandstand job threw me. I remember sitting on the steps of the Better Living Building and crying. I didn’t know where to begin. That’s when Shopsy first said to me, ‘Gino, if you can’t enjoy it, don’t do it.’”

Empry did it and enjoyed it. A couple of years later, the Royal York Hotel hired him as publicist for the Imperial Room; more than a decade later, Empry’s still there. But now, he handles the entire hotel.

“He’s a classical publicist,” says Jim Monaco, a one-time Empry assistant who now heads national publicity for A & M Records in Canada.

“For a year and a half, I picked his brain, studied his filing system, watched how he pays attention to every single detail. The job is his life. I don’t know what motivates him other than the total love he has for entertainers.”

“He can be bad news, and I know he gets a lot of criticism from the media. But the point is that it’s the artists’ interests he has at heart – not the press’. And for that, I love the guy.”

Ed Mirvish agrees. Empry helped put the new Royal Alex on the map, and the two are now close friends. “He has a special talent,” says Mirvish. “He’s accessible, he’s devoted, and he’s a hard worker.”

On call

Twenty-four-hour days, total absorption in his work. The phrases crop up when people talk about Empry. He’s afraid it gives him the image of a workaholic, and that, he says, is neither fair nor accurate.

“I am not a workaholic,” Empry insists, stamping out another cigarette and immediately lighting another. “It’s just the nature of the business that you have to be on call day and night. I’m trapped between time zones…”

That means taking calls early in the morning at his Wood St. apartment, taking calls through an office lunch, handling the last flurry of calls before that evening’s show – and between the Royal Alex, Imperial Room and Theatre-In-The-Dell there is always an evening show.

Empry is always there, a predictable sight. Chatting with Imperial Room maitre d’ Louis Janetta. Working the crowd in the lobby at the Alex. Buying a drink here, chatting up a reviewer there, studying the show in case he’s asked for an appraisal after.

He never visits performers before they go on. That’s their concentration time, he says, and even the best, folks like Katharine Hepburn, need 1½ hours to themselves without press or publicist popping in with the best of misguided intentions.

It’s later on that Gino is sought out for post-mortem drinks sessions.

“You have to be there as much as you can,” he says. “I’ve learned that most performers have been abused. They’re surrounded by con men. Not all of them travel with an entourage, and when they come into a new town, they need someone they can trust. Two of the rarest qualities in their world are honesty and sincerity. I try to give it to them.”

He’s low-key

“Entertainers aren’t necessarily temperamental, but almost all of them have problems. But over time you learn how to cope with each one.”

To the otherwise uneffusive Peggy Lee, Empry is “kind, thoughtful, sensitive and low-key – a rarity in the field of public relations.

“He never makes me do things that are uncomfortable for me. He’ll handle things, like the press, on my behalf.”

That tendency may, at times, lead to the vicarious living of other peoples’ lives.

“He deals with egos, and I think in the process his own has taken a beating,” says Craig Russell, a veteran of the ego-beating scene.

“I owe him a debt of gratitude, however. When I haven’t been a good boy, he’s always been there for me. He protects me – he protects all his people. I’ve been on the verge of hating him in the past, but I think he’s the greatest now.”

A major gripe on the murmur mill is that Empry has now superceded his own clients: his name pops up too often in gossip columns. A good publicist, says one Toronto journalist, is an anonymous publicist: his own name should never appear.

Empry is aware of the criticism. He worries that he may indeed be becoming better known than his clients, the low-profile Canadian ones at least.

“I admit I have some vanity,” he shrugs, “and I worry that some of my clients think I get too much publicity for a PR. But then I figure that I’m not just a PR. I’m a booker and a personal manager, a person in my own right, so why not?”