How Blaine could be out in days

Entombed in his glass box 30ft above the Thames, David Blaine had no idea about the latest crisis unfolding around him. This time, it had nothing to do with drunken yobs or pelted eggs or even remote-control toy helicopters brandishing Big Macs. Rather, 3,000 miles away, in an office block on Fifth Avenue in New York, a state of near-panic had taken hold.

In the management suite of the Manhattan public relations consultants PMK - "the" showbusiness PR firm whose clients include Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow and Blaine himself - only one piece of business was on the agenda: How To Save Our David.

As Blaine's starvation spectacle in London descended into farce and violence - with even Sir Paul McCartney, as the Evening Standard revealed last week, launching into a four-letter tirade - across the Atlantic, Blaine's management could only watch the TV reports in horror as one of their prize assets threatened to become a reviled and pathetic figure, his ignominious and faltering stunt broadcast worldwide.

"What we saw appalled us," one of PMK's management said yesterday. "David is a huge star, a brand name in America on which an entire campaign was based and, suddenly, across the Atlantic, all the hard work and planning was being blown away. It left us dumbfounded."

The result, the Evening Standard can reveal today, was an extraordinary late-night dash from New York by Blaine's advisers, a series of fingerpointing crisis meetings with Channel 4 and Sky Television, who paid £1 million for broadcast rights to the event, and - most sensationally of all - the prospect that Blaine would be humiliatingly taken out of the box and put on a plane back to the States before he had completed his 44 days in his Plexiglas prison.

"It is that bad," a PMK associate said. "It has got to the stage of 'Do we just get him the hell out of there?' Whatever the repercussions, the worst-case scenario is being taken very seriously indeed."

It's not simply that Blaine has fallen foul of the British penchant to poke fun at any kind of pretentiousness ("But we think the joke's running a bit thin when people are trying to cut off his water supply," a Blaine associate said, referring to the incident when a spectator climbed on to the deck alongside the box).

Rather, at the heart of this story is a clash of cultures and ambitions. There are Blaine's American PR people - with their eyes on further multimillion-dollar "performances" around the world - and, up against them, British television executives, well-schooled in the art of hyping "reality TV", for whom Blaine's event is just another exercise in the ratings war.

It was a volatile clash of cultures which erupted in behindthescenes recriminations and name-calling last week. Since he first entered the box 17 days ago, what had been promoted as a riveting TV spectacle has become notorious for something else: the mayhem below him. Initially, the (admittedly predictable) antics of spectators were regarded as funny; but as the crowds became rowdier, every day it seemed that another, often violent, incident dominated the headlines. One fan was led away covered in blood after scuffling with security guards. Extra police have had to be drafted in to control the crowds.

By last week, the Americans had had enough. "Blaine's management are beyond livid," one source privy to the dramatic meetings told me. "Basically, in their view, the British TV people didn't seem to care what happened to him as long as the ratings were up. This isn't Big Brother. Frankly, he could die in there and they wouldn't give a s***. A spectator could die."

As Blaine, 30, continued to endure an almost medieval barrage of abuse at Tower Bridge, further up the Thames at Channel 4's headquarters, a "blood on the floor" emergency meeting was called last Thursday. At that meeting, Blaine's management people laid in to the TV executives, accusing them of allowing the stunt to spiral out of control. "They've no idea of how to handle this," the PMK associate said. "It's madness."

In recent days, Blaine has looked increasingly listless and dejected. Friends also say that his girlfriend, model Manon von Gerkan, had to leave the site last week for a modelling assignment, fuelling Blaine's loneliness.

At the same time, Channel 4 and Sky accuse Blaine's management of sour grapes and of not understanding the media - or the public - in London. According to them, Blaine and his team only have themselves to blame. "You wanted publicity and you've got it," a Channel 4 executive said in one heated exchange.

Heading the list of complaints the Blaine team brought with them from New York was the appalling lack of decent security at the site. "The security firm should be sacked - I mean, what is this? A public hanging? You can't have pictures of bloodied spectators being led away appearing around the world. What does that do for David's image?"

Image, of course, is the crucial word here. Ever since he first auditioned at the offices of ABC television in New York five years ago, and so amazed its management with his magic tricks that they offered him a $1 million contract on the spot, David Blaine has been an eminently marketable product. Alongside his $1 million-a-series US TV shows, in which he stopped members of the public on the street and performed almost psychic stunts, Blaine produced a series of DVDs and books which have sold in their millions worldwide. The result is a $50 million fortune which has enabled him to buy Houdini's former home in California and an apartment on New York's Upper East Side.

But at the heart of his "brand" were his one-off stunts and their subsequent publicity. Having performed another biblical stunt in New York by standing on the top of a 100ft pole for 34 hours without moving, and immersing himself in an "ice coffin", Blaine wanted to go one better: the world could watch live as he went on a public hunger strike.

The idea was first mooted at the beginning of this year. In the Los Angeles offices of Blaine's top Hollywood agents, CAA, a number of capitals throughout the world were examined for their marketing potential: the list included Tokyo, Paris and Rio de Janeiro ("David wanted to hang beside the Sugar Loaf mountain overlooking Rio but it was deemed to be too dangerous," one source said.) In the end, London emerged as the winner: the reason, apart from the lucrative TV rights, was the fact that the capital was seen as being "safe" and the demand in Britain for " reality TV", however perverse in Blaine's case, remained high.

But almost from the beginning, problems began to dog the project. Contrary to advice, Blaine decided to "go it alone" in London. Accompanied only by his girlfriend and two male friends, one the controversial film-maker Harmony Korine, Blaine rejected the pleas of his advisers to fly a team of support staff into London. "The thing about David, the nice thing about him, is that he likes to do things on his own," one management source said. "He's not like other magicians, David Copperfield-for example, who would turn up with a huge entourage. But the problem with an event of this magnitude is that there's no one on the ground looking out for his interests."

It is an independent streak which Blaine has displayed throughout his meteoric rise. There's little doubt that he has very cleverly manipulated his own image, something which the London debacle now threatens to derail.

Tantalisingly few details have been released about his childhood. His mother was said to be a gipsy. His father, a Vietnam veteran, abandoned him as a baby. His Jewish-Russian grandmother allegedly taught him tarot-card readings at the age of three, and from this his obsession with magic took hold, or so the stories went. Blaine liked it that way, as did his media advisers.

The reality, of course, is not quite as exotic. His mother Patrice was a schoolteacher in Brooklyn who died of ovarian cancer when Blaine was just 17; and the man he calls "Dad" is his step-father and personnel manager, John Bukalo, who still lives in the family home in the New Jersey suburb of Little Falls, a pretty all-American house with a swimming pool in the garden and neatly tended lawns.

His real father has never been found, but Blaine enjoyed a comfor table middle- class upbringing before trying his luck as a bit-part actor.

In his late teens, having failed to make it as an actor, he finetuned his magician's act. So began an archetypal New York story of small-time to primetime, culminating with Blaine dating the likes of Madonna and actress Daryll Hannah.

And so it was that the London spectacle - now more a debacle - would launch this very 21st century magician onto the wider world. Only it hasn't quite worked out that way, of course.

His advisers - still incandescent over how their client has been treated in London - are scouring the capital for a team who might rescue his faltering image.

The Rolling Stones' PR team LD Publicity has been mentioned as the kind of troubleshooters needed to turn round the constant stream of bad publicity, but the firm refused to comment on whether it is being parachuted in to "Save David".

One idea being discussed in New York is to create a proper VIP centre under the box in which visiting celebrities can come and "talk" to Blaine via hand-written cards they could hold up. Another is to erect an electronic screen in which members of the public could text him messages from mobile phones.

What is certain is that this global event has, so far at least, left almost everyone involved with eggs on their faces - or, in Blaine's case, egg on the box.