There is more to it than that, of course, but knowing the people who run things--or at least knowing how to get to them--is not a bad way to start. When Rubenstein combed through his Rolodex a few years ago--he was giving himself a party to celebrate his 45th anniversary as a PR man, and he had to decide whom to invite--he found he had some 15,000 names and numbers listed. He winnowed this down to his 3,000 closest friends and sent out invitations. The party was at Tavern on the Green in Central Park, and almost everyone he invited showed up.

Many, no doubt, were there simply to see and be seen. This was, after all, New York. But most were there because they liked and admired Rubenstein. "Because of Howard, I feel better about me, Sarah, which means I can go forward with a better life," Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, told The New York Times. "With Howard walking by my side, I am very lucky." The duchess was impassioned, and why not? A few years before that, Rubenstein had put her together with Weight Watchers International, another client, to the mutual satisfaction of both. Rubenstein often puts people together--politicians, real estate barons, duchesses, whoever--more or less with the hope that one hand will wash the other. Often they do, and synchronicity is a great help to his PR practice.

Despite Rubenstein's extraordinary success, however, few in New York seem to have anything really nasty to say about him. Even his critics tend to sound half-hearted. For example, a Times reporter who left the paper to become an executive at Rubenstein Associates once said that "working for Howard lessens one's fear of death." But that may be taken as a tribute to Rubenstein's demanding standards rather than a criticism of the man himself.

Meanwhile, former Mayor Ed Koch once said that Rubenstein "always supports whoever is the mayor. It doesn't matter who it is. It could be Caligula." Apparently, though, Koch was in a playful mood when he said that, and anyway he and Rubenstein are still friends.

So Rubenstein goes on, widening what he calls his niche in the sometimes murky field of public relations. It is hard to define the profession very precisely. Ivy Lee, a former newspaperman, is usually credited with opening the first PR firm, in New York before World War I. His most prominent client was John D. Rockefeller. Lee advised him to hand out dimes to poor children as a way of showing his philanthropic impulses. Lee also invented the Betty Crocker symbol and the "Breakfast of Champions" slogan for Wheaties. Meanwhile his great contemporary was Edward L. Bernays, who also operated out of New York, and who tried to put public relations on a scientific footing, often by applying lessons he had learned from his uncle, Sigmund Freud. Bernays staged "overt acts"--today they would be called media events--to awaken apparently subconscious feelings. "He was a genius, an absolute genius," Rubenstein says. When he was in his twenties, Rubenstein heard Bernays lecture in New York, but was too much in awe to speak to him. Instead, he recalls, he went up and shook his hand after the lecture. Ivy Lee supposedly told Bernays that when they died public relations as a profession would die with them. But obviously Lee was wrong, and you may think of Rubenstein now as inheriting the PR tradition, perhaps by the laying on of hands, or anyway by that handshake.

If the great influence in Bernays' life, though, was his Uncle Sigmund, the great influence in Rubenstein's life was his father, Sam, a police reporter in Brooklyn for the old Herald Tribune. "He told me, 'Always be nice to other people,'" Rubenstein says, "and he also taught me to look for the human element." The Rubensteins lived in a two-family stucco house on Bay Parkway in Brooklyn. Young Howard attended Midwood High School there, and then went on to the University of Pennsylvania. "'Don't drink and don't be a playboy,'" his parents told him, he says, and so he didn't. After graduation, he was accepted at Harvard Law School, but after six months he decided he did not like it there and wanted to drop out. Sam took a train to Cambridge then and told his son to follow his instincts, but if he did drop out, he should consider public relations.

So Rubenstein moved back to Brooklyn and found his first client, the Menorah Home and Hospital for the Aged and Infirm. He wrote speeches and press releases and was paid $100 a month. Sam passed the press releases on to his friends and helped plant them in the papers. Rubenstein's second client was the Barber and Beauty Culturists of America. It had headquarters on Flatbush Avenue, and he was hired to edit its newsletter. In 1954, however, when it held its national convention in Atlantic City, he wrote a speech for its president. The barbers were upset by some bill before Congress and Rubenstein had the president say, "When you're shaving your customers, tell them you oppose this legislation." Then he wrote a press release about the speech and took it to the Associated Press, which put it on its national wire. The Herald Tribune used it on page one and then it turned up in The Times Sunday Magazine. Rubenstein had achieved his first PR coup.

Meanwhile his office, so to speak, was the kitchen of the family home on Bay Parkway. However, when he asked his mother to say, "Rubenstein Associates," when she answered the phone, she refused. What if, she said, her aunt or the butcher was calling?

Rubenstein moved on then to the police shack, where his father was based with the other reporters. But the reporter from the New York Post complained that he made too much noise and he had to move on again. He rented a one-man office in downtown Brooklyn on Court Street. There was a telephone answering service in the office next to him, and for $5 a week someone there would pick up his calls and say, "Rubenstein Associates."

Onward and upward then in the PR game, and getting to know the right people, even if Rubenstein didn't quite know it when he did. Rubenstein did some work for Brooklyn politicians. Abraham Beame, Hugh Carey, Stanley Steingut and Thomas Cuite were among them, and later they would become, respectively, Mayor of New York City, Governor of New York State, Speaker of the State Assembly, and Cresident of the New York City Council. Rubenstein's big break, though, came when he was introduced to Morris Morgenstern, a real estate man in Manhattan. Morgenstern wanted publicity, and for $150 a month plus bonuses, he hired Rubenstein to produce it.

Look for the human element, his father had said, and Rubenstein did. Morgenstern loved to sing, and Rubenstein took him to a Jewish orphanage, where, backed by a choir, he sang on a Jewish holiday. The attention this attracted so delighted Morgenstern that he gave Rubenstein a $1,000 bonus. He also said he would donate $5,000 to any charity or organization Rubenstein might choose if he could get more publicity. "Oh, I had nerve," Rubenstein says. "I called Harry Truman at his hotel and said I had $5,000 for the Truman Library." The former president had only to make a joint appearance with Morgenstern when he received the donation. Truman did not mind that, and Morgenstern once again was delighted. Rubenstein was learning how to make news.

Indeed the young PR man appeared to doing quite well. He had some 30 clients and he was making himself known, but he was starting to feel trepidation. Brooklyn was running down in the 1950s. Its economy was in decline and it seemed to be losing political clout. Rubenstein decided that it was no longer the place for a PR man, and he moved Rubenstein Associates- by then it had a secretary and a bookkeeper--to the Woolworth Building in downtown Manhattan. This was, in its way, a very brave move. Bay Parkway and Court Street, psychologically speaking, are farther away from Manhattan than any mere subway ride. Besides, Rubenstein had wondered at times whether he really wanted to do public relations. Sometimes it had seemed to him to be almost a raffish profession, better suited for circus barkers or flashy press agents, say, than for anyone serious. He had even gone to night school at St. John's University and gotten a law degree, graduating first in his class. That way he would have some flexibility. If he decided to leave PR, he could always practice law.

But Rubenstein found a wider world in Manhattan than the one he had known in Brooklyn, and whatever his misgivings they soon disappeared. It was one thing to make news with the barbers and beauticians, but quite another to do it with the people who run the city. There are, Rubenstein estimates, some 200 or 300 men and women who do this. Among them are the owners of the big real estate companies, the publishers of the four daily newspapers, executives of the major banks and the representatives of the city's various ethnic, cultural, educational and charity organizations. When they coalesce they can help move New York in a positive direction, and while Rubenstein does not necessarily include himself among the two or three hundred, he probably should. Over the years he has worked with most of them one way or the other. Sometimes he has done this with old-fashioned showmanship. Rubenstein once attached a huge King Kong balloon to the top of the Empire State Building to get people to visit the Empire State's observatory. When the balloon began to collapse, he launched a new campaign: Would King Kong live?

Sometimes, however, he acts very quietly. He advised Donald Trump, for example, on how to deal with his marital problems, and Kathie Lee Gifford on how to deal with her sweatshop problems. Meanwhile he has also represented--for years--the Association for a Better New York. The owners of the big real estate companies all belong to it. It is also where Rubenstein first thought of treating politicians and real estate owners as celebrities and getting them to make news.

So here is Rubenstein now, on an ordinary day in an ordinary week, in his big corner office on the 30th floor of a skyscraper on Sixth Avenue and 54th St. He moved there from the Woolworth Building 31 years ago, when, as he said, his business started to flourish. He had eight employees then; he has 190 now. "Today this agency is involved in a broad spectrum of business and public policy issues that go to the very heart of our future as a city, a metropolitan region and a nation," Rubenstein says. "And I take enormous pride that the next generation of Rubensteins are also hard at work in public relations, a field that requires ethics, energy and enormous commitment. This is still the best city in the world to tell your story."

Meanwhile, on this particular day, he arose in his Fifth Avenue apartment, as he usually does, at 4 AM. At 6 AM he and Amy, his wife of 43 years, ran four miles, as they usually do, in Central Park. He was at the office before 8 and was on the phone shortly after. On any given day, Rubenstein is on the phone some 100 times, either making calls or answering them, and on this particular day he will return calls to, among others, Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner, Veronica Hearst and Sarah, the Duchess of York.

Rubenstein will also drop in at a reception for Tishman Speyer Properties at "21," stage a news coneference for the United Federation of Teachers and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hold a "strategy" session for the Brooklyn School for Special Children, and attend an awards ceremony at the National Arts Club. There will also be more phone calls. When Rubenstein answers, he will speak very softly and turn his head away from a visitor. He is giving private advice and, good professional that he is, he is making sure no one overhears him.