From Beat Generation to South Beach celebrity, Susan Brustman led an extraordinary life

If Susan Brustman’s life story were a movie, it would take a director with the skill of Steven Spielberg to tell it.

At 18, she worked alongside famed record producer and engineer Tom Dowd at Atlantic Recording Studios in New York. Soon after, in the early 1960s while living in California, she called Beat Generation poets and Woodstock entertainer Wavy Gravy her pals. She was unwittingly dosed with LSD by one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and her experience helped inspire Tom Wolfe’s book on the era, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

And in the late-1960s and ‘70s she lived in New York City’s Chelsea Hotel alongside Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol.

Brustman followed her old friend Dowd to Miami after he established a new base at North Miami’s Criteria Studios. Soon, she was steering the South Beach scene to national renown in the 1980s and ‘90s through her roster of celebrity chefs, clients of her namesake PR firm, Susan Brustman & Associates.

Brustman, the longtime Miami public relations executive and force behind the Miami food scene, died on Sept. 16 at 80. The cause was cancer, said Larry Carrino, her partner at Brustman Carrino Public Relations.

“Susan was the voice, the ambassador, for an entire generation of artists, chefs, restaurateurs, developers and visionaries who — back in the late-1980s and then 1990s starting with the South Beach renaissance — made Miami, which had fallen by the wayside in a way, into the international destination it is today,” Carrino said.

Brustman’s bold approach

Brustman moved from New York to Miami Beach in the early 1980s and worked as a freelance writer and journalist. She joined Hank Meyer Associates for a while and later Robinson and Weskel Communications, where as public relations head in 1984 helped promote the Miami Beach Marina with a poster featuring an oiled, bare-chested man hoisting a sledgehammer and a braless blonde in a tight tank top straddling a chunk of concrete.

“Pardon our appearance,” the ad slogan read, “We’re getting in shape.”

So was the plucky Brustman’s career. And she showed her wit along the way.

In 1989, Miami Herald columnist Fred Tasker awarded Brustman a mention in his annual humor column, The Freddies, for a quip overheard at a party. Seems she was introduced to a then prominent local husband and wife who were each divorce lawyers. She asked how they met. Brustman was told, “At the Florida Bar.” She asked without missing a beat: “Oh. In the Grove?”

That eye-opening marina ad years earlier seemed in character.

“This is a fresh, new campaign to turn around Miami Beach’s antiquated image,” Brustman told the Miami Herald in February 1984, likely directing her comments at those who sniffed at the suggestive poster she was promoting for the Miami Beach Marina’s construction. She said the idea was to give South Beach a “buoyant, today image.” This was about seven months before “Miami Vice” premiered on NBC with scenes shot all around the city for five seasons.

She established Susan Brustman & Associates, her public relations firm in 1985. Brustman hired Carrino when he was 20 in 2005. As a partner and then president, he bought Brustman’s share of the business when she retired. The company never lost her name and it won’t now, he said.

“I never removed her name as the foundation of this place she laid and I was lucky enough, blessed enough to find a home here under her auspices and make it my own. Never saw a need to change the name even when she was fully divested as it was/is an honor to have my name beside hers and to say her name carried clout in the industries we serve is a gross understatement,” Carrino said.

Brustman’s influence on South Beach

Brustman found a cool client for her PR firm to continue South Beach’s progression as a destination. She promoted Gary Farmer’s The Strand restaurant that had opened in the former Famous Restaurant space on a run-down block of Washington Avenue. Through shrewd introductions and some marketing muscle, she helped make The Strand modern South Beach’s first hip culinary destination, a success that helped rejuvenate the Art Deco District.

“People looked to her and trusted her to tell their stories far and wide and draw the spotlight south to the gleaming city by the sea,” Carrino said. “She did this successfully for decades and was a progenitor in the world of culinary public relations, representing at one time or another every James Beard Award-winning chef in Miami.”

By the 1990s, Brustman’s agency represented numerous South Beach restaurants, Goldman Properties, several Miami Beach hotels, Wynwood Walls and Hard Rock Cafes in Florida, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas.

“As a publicist and a private citizen, she was very community involved,” Carrino said, citing her work promoting the Miami Design Preservation League, Care Resource’s AIDS Walk, Taste of the Beach, Share Our Strength, the Miami Film Festival and as “an architect of the Miami Spice program in the wake of 9/11.”

Repping the Mango Gang

Brustman represented South Florida James Beard-winning chefs including Michelle Bernstein and Michael Schwartz and the group affectionately known as the Mango Gang for their tropical cuisines — Norman Van Aken, Allen Susser, Cindy Hutson, Mark Militello and Douglas Rodriguez.

“Susan was a true trailblazer in the culinary world, always seeking to elevate and support the talents of us chefs in Miami,” Susser said in an email to the Miami Herald.

“Her passion for food and commitment to helping those in need was truly inspiring. Hopefully her legacy of kindness, generosity and innovation will continue to impact the community for years to come,” he said. “Susan was a dear friend and mentor for me. She will be deeply missed, but her impact will never be forgotten.”

South Beach Wine & Food Festival

Brustman was key in the launch and the success of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival from its inception as a fundraiser for Florida International University to its ongoing legacy, founder Lee Schrager said.

“As the only local agency of record the festival has ever worked with, her guidance and expertise were invaluable in shaping the festival during its early years and continued to be throughout her career. She was a true partner and a trusted voice in every sense of the word,” Schrager said in an email to the Miami Herald.

“Susan Brustman was a pioneer in Miami’s culinary and hospitality scene long before it became the dynamic destination it is today. She had an incredible ability to identify talent and tell a story that captured the essence of an event, restaurant or chef. Her passion for what she did was infectious, and she was deeply dedicated to her clients. She not only shaped how Miami was perceived as a food city, but she also played a vital role in elevating its reputation on the global stage. Her influence in this industry will be felt for years to come,” Schrager said.

Telling stories

Brustman’s colleagues and clients, like one of those James Beard chefs, Van Aken, have spent the days since she died swapping stories and celebrating the life of one of South Florida’s most colorful characters.

They are doing so because Brustman, born in Brooklyn to an interior designer mother, Blossom Brustman, on Dec. 15, 1943, wouldn’t often promote herself. Her job was to boost her clients.

“Susan was just an extraordinarily culturally diverse person, and she’s the kind of person that, when they pass, you go, ‘Wow, I wanted more time with her,” said Van Aken who, in his time with Brustman as his publicist, opened his namesake restaurants in Coral Gables and Orlando and earned the designation “founding father of New World Cuisine” nearly 20 years ago.

She always called Van Aken “Maestro,” he said, a term of endearment for her chef pal.

“I wanted to be around her. I wanted to hang out with her. I wanted to just sit and talk over coffee or a glass of something stronger and just hear about her extraordinary life, because she doesn’t talk about herself first. She’s doing her professional work. But when you do get a chance to learn even a little bit, she just was amazing,” he said.

The combined wattage of Brustman’s husky New York-kissed voice as she worked the phones or sat across from you in a chic Miami area restaurant, along with that cheeky smile and twinkling eyes that revealed streaks of mischief and an unmistakable sense that she was cooler than her clients — though she would never suggest as much — put her on equal footing with them and forged friendships.

Finding her son

Van Aken shared an email exchange he’d had with Brustman after she had begun her retirement and after, in 2010, she had rediscovered and reacquainted with Matt Bohm, the son she had put up for adoption when she was 19 in the early 1960s.

“I found this exchange between us,” Van Aken wrote. “It is one of so many I am so lucky to have had both in emails and in person. She made me, like so many, more ALIVE.”

Hi Sweetie: These are good days. Spending time with the new family — teaching my granddaughter Zen. Started notes for a book — who knows if I’ll ever get past ten pages — my usual. I’m in good shape — swimming, yoga, jogging/schlepping along beach path in a Not Susan meditation. Traveling a lot — spending way too much dinero. Going to Paris and the South of France this summer. Rented a pad in the Marais and taking a yacht cruise to St. Tropez. All in all, having a ball. Tell me about you and yours. Miss you. xxx

Bohm, an advertising executive and now 60, found Brustman, his biological mother, in 2010 after Googling her when he saw her name on a Brustman Carrino post on Facebook about chef Michelle Bernstein. Remarkably, they lived three blocks from each other in Miami Beach.

Today, he calls their career paths and connection “serendipitous.” She became grandmother to the son and daughter Bohm shares with his wife, Jill Muller.

“I’m very glad that we got to know each other,” Bohm said. “She became part of my family and she didn’t have much family to speak of by the time I met her. She lost her sister and her mother. As adults we formed a relationship from scratch. It wasn’t too long until she was coming to every social event, every Thanksgiving, every Yom Kippur. And as time went on and she got older, it was even more apparent that I was kind of like sent to her to help her through the last parts of her journey.”

In a story in the Miami Herald from 2013, Brustman rejoiced in their reunion.

“All those years, I just wanted to know that my son was OK. There was such a big black hole for me. We go on cruises together, we spend holidays together, I got to light a candle at my granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. I’m living a ridiculously happy scenario I never dreamed of,” Brustman said.

She said her son “is the most gentle, beautiful, thoughtful human being.”

Life inside the Chelsea Hotel

Sometimes Brustman, buoyed by the mere force of her personality, put people together before it was how she made a living.

Take the time her passing comment preceded a tryst between Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen and Texan blues-rock singer Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel. That encounter led to Cohen’s song, “Chelsea Hotel #2.” Cohen had said he began composing the tune in a Polynesian restaurant in Miami in 1971 and released it in 1974, nearly four years after Joplin’s death.

Let Brustman tell the story.

She recalled the episode in an article she wrote for Business Traveler in 2022. The story detailed her time living at the Chelsea Hotel in the late 1960s into the ‘70s. Publisher Eric Newill said on Facebook the article was to be Brustman’s “first take on a memoir.”

Exasperated by the slow elevator, I ran down the stairs. As I approached the lobby, I ran into Janis Joplin sitting alone at the bottom of the staircase looking forlorn. I sat down next to her and asked what was wrong. She explained that she felt alone, she’d never really known love, and no man had ever sent her flowers.

“You’re so talented and beautiful,” I said. “Love will come.”

A few minutes later I ran into a handsome young folk singer who was excited that Joplin was staying in the hotel and wanted to meet her. “To begin, why don’t you send her flowers?” As is now history, [Leonard] Cohen got to her first.

The Beat Generation and Wavy Gravy

One of her friends’ favorite stories revolves around Brustman’s early days living on the West Coast, hobnobbing with the Beats and rooming with lifelong buddy, the activist Wavy Gravy, who is now 88. And the time she got dosed with psychedelics.

“What probably blew my mind and moved it into another dimension for me was when she talked about being quite young, I think 18 or 19 years old, and living in San Francisco or somewhere. She hung out with some of the characters from the Beat Generation and there’s still people on earth that have these memories,” Van Aken said.

“We were two Brooklyn girls who first met at a promotion for the Miami Film Festival at Vizcaya,” said Pauline Winick, a civic leader and former Miami Heat executive. The party started on a Friday the 13th and stretched into Valentine’s Day 1987 and was titled Leather and Lace. The leather came in the form of a local chapter of Hell’s Angels that crashed the shindig, Winick recalled.

“They roared into Vizcaya. No one had ever seen anything like it. We looked at each other. Shrugged our shoulders and just went with it. Two similar personalities — creatives, adaptable, fun-loving and determined to turn possible defeat into triumph,” Winick said of the bond she shared with Brustman.

“Susan was a person who never forgot a birthday. She was a champion competitive Scrabble player — played tough each round. She had great stories and was always available to give advice — solicited or not. Her stories of the people she met either in L.A. or at the Chelsea Hotel are legendary. When I read the Brustman Carrino post this afternoon, my first impulse was to call her to talk about it. There is a hole in my heart,” Winick said.

In a 2013 Miami Herald story on Wavy Gravy and Brustman’s enduring friendship, the pair reminisced about the Beats in their lives.

“We always talk about how we’re among the very few of our friends from that time who actually survived,” Wavy Gravy said in the story. He was staying at Brustman’s beachfront condo, swimming and chatting over old times.

They met when Brustman was 19 and shattered over having to give her baby up for adoption. She’d moved to the West Coast to help start the underground newspaper, Los Angeles Free Press, and found a large house in North Hollywood that she shared with a friend. They rented one of the extra bedrooms to Wavy Gravy and the other to singer-songwriter Tim Hardin, who wrote the folk standard, “If I Were a Carpenter.”

They said the Merry Pranksters visited the Free Press and Brustman invited them back to her house. She was intrigued by Ken Kesey and the Pranksters, she said, and had told them she wanted to hang around their farm to write a book about their movement. But as she jotted in her notepad, one of them slipped LSD into her beer.

“I started to hallucinate. Until then the only thing I had tried was pot. I thought I was going crazy. It was a really bad trip and I couldn’t come down from it,” Brustman told the Herald. She said she went to stay with the mother of a friend, who helped her come down. The mother’s boyfriend at the time was writer Tom Wolfe.

“I told him about the Merry Pranksters. He had never heard of them. I told him I had these notes for a book but that I wasn’t going to write it anymore because I had lost my objectivity. I was very angry about what they did to me,” she said. So was Wavy Gravy. Dosing people unaware? “It was just not cool,” he told the Herald.

Brustman says she handed over her notes to Wolfe, who used them as the inspiration for his 1968 book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

“He mentioned me in the book. That was the deal we struck, that he would only mention my name, not even use adjectives to describe me. I’m happy it worked out for him. And I could have never written the book he wrote,” Brustman told the Herald.

Her son, a Grateful Dead fan, also befriended his mom’s old pal and he and his wife took him to a concert by Dark Star, a Dead tribute band.

“When Wavy came back from that show he said to me, ‘Boy, did you luck out,’” Brustman said. “And I really did.”

The first and only concert Bohm shared with Brustman featured another 1960s music vet, Paul Simon, at Hard Rock Live near Hollywood in December 2011. “I referred to it as the ‘Mother and Child Reunion,’” Bohm quipped, dropping the name of Simon’s first solo hit.

“I really probably was a major pest asking her all about Neil Cassady or Ken Kesey or hanging out with Wavy Gravy, the guy from Woodstock. She wasn’t name-dropping. It was just a part of her extraordinary life,” Van Aken marveled. “Tom Dowd walked into my kitchen one night when I was first on South Beach at A Mano at the Betsy Ross Hotel and I was just floored that he had tasted my food. The guy that recorded “Layla” and Eric Clapton. I mean, wow. Somebody needs to do a beautiful documentary on her life.”

Survivors and services

Brustman’s survivors include her son, Matt Bohm; his wife, Jill Muller; and her grandchildren, Halley and Zachary Bohm.

A funeral service is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Friday, Sept. 20, at Vista Memorial Gardens, 14200 NW 57th Ave., Miami Lakes.