Need a Senator to Promote a Film? This Aide Could Make It Happen.

Paul S. Green, who died Feb. 6 at age 90, became one of Hollywood's inside publicity men in Washington while working as a Capitol Hill aide in the 1950s and 1960s.

His first coup was getting a former vice president to dress like Davy Crockett to promote Burt Lancaster's 1955 frontier drama, "The Kentuckian."

Green said he had an easy time persuading Alben Barkley, a Kentucky-born senator who had been Harry S. Truman's second in command, to wear a coonskin cap and a buckskin jacket while carrying a long-muzzled rifle and a powder horn.

The next year, when Robert Aldrich's small-budget war film "Attack" needed publicity on the eve of its release, Green was asked to gin up controversy over Eddie Albert's depiction of a spineless officer in combat.

He arranged for Rep. Melvin Price (D-Ill.), a future chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to see the film. Price apparently liked Albert's portrayal.

"This permitted the studio to issue a statement saying the film did not claim to portray an actual event and at the same time stressing the critical praise it had received," Green wrote in an unpublished memoir. "All in all, the fuss that was kicked up made the movie more than a modest success."

His work for Hollywood was unofficial and largely unglamorous -- shopping American films to foreign embassies. There were moments of intrigue, as when he briefly fell under FBI surveillance after meeting with a Soviet cultural official.

The role Green most enjoyed was as technical adviser, and his greatest opportunity came during the filming of "Advise & Consent" (1962), based on Allen Drury's novel about a president's nomination for secretary of state. The film's producer-director was Otto Preminger, and the cast included Henry Fonda as the nominee and Charles Laughton as a Southern demagogue senator.

At the time, Green was writing speeches and doing antitrust investigative work for Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.).

"Estes was a rascal," Green told Foster Hirsch, a biographer of Preminger. "He had a keen interest in movies and in starlets, and he couldn't wait for the film people to come to town. He wanted to meet all of them.

"I had no trouble getting clearances for the film crew's cumbersome equipment, which cluttered Senate hallways and meeting rooms for days on end. I arranged it so that Preminger could film anywhere inside and outside any building or room on Capitol Hill except for the Senate chamber itself."

He added that the British-born Laughton was nervous about getting an accurate molasses-like drawl. At Preminger's request, Green took Laughton to the Senate when it was in session. From the gallery, Green pointed out the range of Southern accents, from that of John C. Stennis (D-Miss.) to that of Olin D. Johnston (D-S.C.).

One day, Preminger rewarded Green with a few moments of screen time. Green sat on the Senate trolley back to back with Walter Pidgeon, who portrayed the Senate majority leader.

"I felt embarrassed as the crew fussed over me and applied makeup, getting me in exactly the right positions as the camera focused on us," Green wrote in his memoir. "The car started rolling, the huge movie lights flashed on and the camera recorded the scene, shooting Pidgeon from several angles and me from one.

"Too soon, I was stepping off the car on my reluctant return to anonymity."

Green, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, was born Saul Greenblatt on June 20, 1917, in the Bronx, N.Y., and raised in Brooklyn.

He was a 1938 graduate of City College of New York and afterward changed his name to Paul Sanford Green to avoid anti-Semitism. He received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1940.

During World War II, he was a combat reporter for Stars and Stripes and was part of the four-man reporting team that produced in June 1944 the first Rome edition of Stars and Stripes after the Allied takeover of the city.

A few of his wartime colleagues became reporters and publicity agents in Hollywood, and they were pivotal to Green's work for studios and independent producers.

On occasion, Green was tempted to leave Washington and work in California. During one visit to Hollywood, he was taken by friends to Charlton Heston's home to watch home movies of marine life on the Great Barrier Reef.

The job offers Green received came without enough financial security to support his wife, Shirley, and their two young daughters. He stayed in Washington and retired as a Transportation Department congressional liaison.

He spent the past several years writing for the house newsletter at Maplewood Park Place, the Bethesda retirement home where he died of Alzheimer's disease.

"Modest though my role had been," Green wrote about his movie career, "I found it a great show while it lasted."