R. Couri Hay, PR 'fixer' and project Epstein (fail)

R. Couri Hay

The Secret Plan to Rehabilitate Jeffrey Epstein's Image https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a28378863/jeffrey-epstein-publicist-couri-hay/

Conceived by publicist R. Couri Hay, the plan for the registered sex offender involved signing the Giving Pledge and an audience with the pope.

Probably the most interesting thing in this article is Hay's orgins in the Andy Warhol circles.

Early Days at Warhol's Factory

Robert Couri Hay, a native of Portland, Maine, is now 70. As he tells it, as a young man dining with his grandmother in the restaurant of a hotel, he caught the eye of Andy Warhol, who propelled him headlong into a fashionable beau monde.

Hay turns up in Warhol's diaries at parties with Barry Diller, Diana Ross, Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. At a dinner with Diana Vreeland for the designer Zandra Rhodes, Hay is somewhat mystifyingly referred to as her “fiancé.”

“So I brought up his wife,” Warhol writes, archly. “Oh, you know, his ‘wife,’ that boy.”

Couri Hay and Andy Warhol. pic

Courtesy of Couri Hay

(In fact, the designer Hay was sleeping with at age 17 was Halston. He told the New York Post: “Halston said I was the only white boy he ever loved.”)

Beginning in 1976, Hay was able to parlay his access to the shiny set into a lucrative gossip column in the National Enquirer.

He claims credit for brokering the tabloid’s most memorable scoop of the decade: a photograph of Elvis Presley, lying in his coffin, which the Enquirer ran on its front page. Hay also claims to have been the first American print journalist to have earned a combined salary and expenses package of a million dollars.

His public relations work overlapped with the Enquirer column, which ended in 1983. An early junior socialite client was Cornelia Guest, daughter of the Truman Capote “swan” C.Z. Guest, for whom Hay claims to have coined the sobriquet “Debutante of the Decade.”

Hay never did stop combining journalism and public relations, penning articles and society columns for numerous publications while also being a source for the city’s many gossip columns. Former Daily News columnist George Rush recalled that in 1997, Hay phoned from the slopes of Aspen to provide an eye-witness account of the ski-accident death of Michael Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy.

“The Kennedys are on their knees, saying the Lord’s Prayer,” Rush quotes Hay saying then. (The family later put out a statement condemning “scurrilous and inaccurate” claims about the accident by an unnamed “individual,” widely believed to be Hay, “with his own transparent agenda and an elastic regard for the truth.”)