What becomes a Beat Generation legend most?
Literary immortality and a permanent place on the A-list of cool is fine, but when your image hawks hipness to home buyers four decades after your death, you’ve really arrived.
The recently opened Jack Kerouac Lofts in Denver’s Central Platte Valley bear the name of the Beat icon who wrote “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums.” Naming the upscale lofts after Kerouac is no stretch; the author was a Mile High regular during the late 1940s and 1950s, and hauled watermelons at the Denargo Market, which sat near the lofts.
“I was concerned that a lot of people in the current generation wouldn’t know who he is,” says Dana Crawford, a longtime developer and champion of historic Denver who is a partner in the Kerouac Lofts. “But as it turns out he’s someone who is still taught in school. There’s something about him that really gets people involved, something spiritual.”
And something that sells – in this case between the high-$200,000 and low- $400,000 range.
Kerouac is the latest example of a marketing strategy that has become entrenched in American business: Icons pitching products from beyond the grave.
John Wayne has strolled into a Coors beer commercial. Jackie Robinson has been featured in campaigns for McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, General Mills and Apple Computer. Ernest Hemingway’s name is on a line of Thomasville furniture, Alcatel uses Lou Gehrig’s image in ads, and Steve McQueen is behind the wheel for Ford.
Fred Astaire, debonair and digitized, even danced with a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner.
When Madison Avenue meets the mausoleum, the resulting campaigns offer big upsides to advertisers.
“The right celebrity creates a sense of quality or value of interest to the brand,” says Richard Lancioni, a professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and Management. “It’s the idea of standing the test of time … an idea of trustworthiness.”
A dead celebrity’s image also tends to be fixed, negating fears about an ad campaign imploding because of scandal. A living athlete’s boozing and womanizing would be a marketer’s nightmare. For Babe Ruth, dead since 1948, it’s merely part of the legend, so why not trot him out for Citibank ads?
Enamored as we are of celebrities, not any dead icon will do. A few rules apply.
“Generally these ads are effective, but the celebrity does need to be recognized by as wide a range of the audience as possible, and certainly by the target audience,” Lancioni says. “Marilyn Monroe is an icon that cuts across several generations. Elvis Presley does too.”
Such ads can be disconcerting. It’s one thing to have Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith hire their music out to Cadillac and Buick. Aging boomers are long resigned to the fact that their heroes need retirement plans too.
But James Dean – or his forever-young photo – peddling Gap khakis? King Tut at least managed to enjoy a few centuries of peace before being wheeled out for the adoring masses.
“When you take a famous celebrity who is still famous decades after they’re deceased, you’re talking about something that has become a very valuable brand,” says Mark Roesler, head of CMG Worldwide, an Indianapolis company that handles image rights for celebrities. “It becomes like Coca-Cola. There’s a level of goodwill there that people want to use.”
Roesler’s client list includes about 400 celebrities. Some, such as boxer Oscar De La Hoya, are very much alive. But about two-thirds are dead, Jack Dempsey, Duke Ellington and Princess Diana among them. Roesler has cut deals for the families of deceased stars for a quarter century; his first clients were Elvis and James Dean.
“Someone like Kerouac, dead these many years, is still widely respected,” Roesler notes. “Babe Ruth, whether as a symbol of the Curse of the Bambino or Yankee tradition, is a very constant image of power and instantly recognizable.”
Not everyone is so sanguine about dead icons as pitchmen.
“Basically it’s the appropriation of history by the most powerful force we have going right now – advertising,” says Bradford Mudge, an English professor at the University of Colorado at Denver who also teaches courses in popular culture.
The ads can backfire: Alcatel ignited controversy in 2002 for using doctored footage of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in a TV commercial. King’s family was criticized for selling the rights.
“Is it a bad thing to have high-end lofts carrying Kerouac’s name?” Mudge says. “I can think of worse. But his name should be on a highway, something that connotes movement, not something fixed in place like a building.”
The Kerouac Lofts sit at 3100 Huron St., northwest of Coors Field. They are not too far from Larimer Street, the haunt of Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s car-crazed, Benzedrine-fueled running mate who was immortalized in “On the Road.”
The lofts sit within sight of Interstate 25 and Park Avenue West. They are hard by the Burlington Northern Railroad; Kerouac’s beloved freight trains rumble by.
A spiffy website (kerouaclofts.com) celebrates the “Lifestyle with a beat” and offers passages from the author’s work for folks who might not know Jack and Neal from “Will & Grace.” Kerouac, who crisscrossed the country dozens of times pursuing hipster enlightenment, died at 47 in Florida in 1969. He suffered a stomach hemorrhage, triggered by years of alcoholism, while watching “The Galloping Gourmet” on TV.
Denver architect Edward White was a good friend of Kerouac’s. The two met in New York. White was studying at Columbia University, Kerouac’s alma mater, and the author visited White on forays here during the 1950s.
White finds the notion of the Jack Kerouac Lofts a bit ironic. He is amused when asked how Kerouac might react to his name being used to pitch four stories of trendy bricks and mortar.
“I think ‘baffled’ is a pretty good word,” White says. “It’s not something he would have sought. It’s not the sort of thing that would have interested him.
“He was pretty shy, and I think a little embarrassed by the success of his novels. He wasn’t comfortable with his fame.”
But fame is comfortable with Kerouac.
One can argue that attaching an author’s name to a place is natural, even when it morphs into commercialism. Look at Shakespeare’s Stratford-on-Avon or Thomas Wolfe’s Asheville, N.C., towns chockablock with tourists seeking a whiff of immortality.
“Great writing gives gravitas to a place,” says Dennis McNally, the San Francisco-based author of “Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America.” “There’s a municipal water reservoir in Massachusetts that I consider a holy place. It’s just a little pond, but it’s Walden Pond.”
McNally cites Hannibal, Mo., the boyhood home of Samuel “Huckleberry Finn” Clemens, as an example of the confluence of literary enshrinement with rampant hucksterism.
“The people in Hannibal for the last 100 years have exploited it,” he says. “They ignore Mark Twain’s themes of racism and humanity and turned it into Disneyland on the Mississippi.”
Which brings him to the Kerouac Lofts.
“Clearly there are some ironies, you can’t argue with that,” McNally says. (He is quick to point out one: that while he is weighing in on the use of Kerouac’s name, he is also publicist for the Jerry Garcia estate, and deals regularly with approving or barring use of the late Grateful Dead guitarist’s image.)
“Jack’s connection to Denver is significant and important, though I don’t know what he has to do with lofts,” McNally says. “I suppose, given that Jack thought of himself as a tenderhearted Roman Catholic/
Buddhist monk, that it’s a comment on an ever-more commercialized world.
“But if it increases people’s memory of him, that’s a good thing.”
Staff writer William Porter can be reached at 303-820-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com.
