Puttin' on the glitz - Rita Tateel's Celebrity Source books celebrities for public events

Nation's Business, May, 1990 by Michael Barrier

Only in Los Angeles, surely, could there be a company that you can call when you need a celebrity in a hurry.

"A lot of times," says Rita Tateel, "we get emergency requests. Because the entertainment industry is so big here, invariably what we hear is that so-and-so knows somebody's brother, who's somebody's uncle, who's somebody's dentist. They all try to get to the celebrities directly, because they think they have an in, and it doesn't work. Then they call me, two weeks before the event, and say, |Help!'"

Tateel, 39, owns a 2-year-old company called Celebrity Source. She is a match-maker: Corporations and nonprofit organizations pay her to arrange personal appearances by celebrities at events of many kinds--parades, track meets, golf tournaments, the Kentucky Derby--all over the country.

She and three employees work in her home. It's on a side street west of downtown Hollywood, blocks away from Sunset Boulevard, but she has a Sunset Boulevard mailing address. Tateel explains: "A Sunset Boulevard address for a business like mine seems to impress people outside Los Angeles." Those people expect a business dealing in glitz to have glitzy quarters itself--not a couple of workaday rooms stocked with phones and computers. But, as Tateel says, "the commute is fabulous" (hardly a minor consideration in L.A.), and she needs the computers a lot more than she needs a glossy front.

She has built up a database on more than 3,000 celebrities--mainly actors and musicians--and she puts it to work when a request comes in: "If, for example, we want to find a black celebrity who is from the Midwest, is over the age of 55, plays tennis, and is anti-smoking, the computer will do that."

Her information comes largely from the celebrities themselves; many of them have filled out a five-page questionnaire asking, among other things, the sports they play or watch, their favorite charities, the kinds of products they'd like to endorse, and how much they must be paid for a speech.

Tateel's fees start at $2,000--that's what she charges a nonprofit organization that needs only one celebrity--and rise from there, depending on the nature of the event and the number of celebrities needed. For the Hollywood Christmas parade and the Los Angeles Marathon, she rounds up dozens.

Tateel was not born to glamour. Her parents were Polish survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and she spent her first two years on the family's chicken ranch east of Los Angeles. She worked for nonprofit organizations for 17 years, starting as a camp counselor when she was 16 and winding up as education director for the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles.

She also headed the federation's speakers bureau, and she started meeting celebrities that way. In 1985, when a friend asked her to become his partner in a new company devoted to lining up celebrity appearances for charities, "it just fit." Three years later, she left to start Celebrity Source.

Her business is booming; she handled "25 to 30" events her first year, she says, and in her second year the total "at least doubled." Although a few other Los Angeles companies do roughly the same kind of work, Tateel says that actual competition is slight, since each firm more or less specializes in certain areas. Her strong suit is "cause-related marketing," which typically involves corporate sponsorship of a celebrity-studded athletic event, with the proceeds going to charity.

Despite what Tateel describes as a growing interest in adding celebrities to events of all kinds--"everyone loves to mix and mingle with stars"--the nature of the work may prevent a lot of new firms from invading the field. Not only does Tateel have to talk stars into taking part in events, but she also has to oversee a lot of details after they say yes: "Everything from making sure that the right kind of mineral water is in its place to making sure that a dressing room is set up exactly right."

It may be no accident that success in this particular field has come to a woman who has a bachelor's degree in child development and a master's in social work. "The bigger the celebrities are," she says, "the less likely they are to know how to do certain things themselves. There's a lot of hand-holding that takes place in my business, and I don't know that a lot of people have the temperament and a tolerance for that."