21st Century Woman: Karen Murphy O’Brien, the Good Ol’ Boys and #MeToo

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

Karen Murphy O’Brien could have been a classical pianist. Or a country music star.

Instead, The Highlands entrepreneur helped set the tone for the 21st century #MeToo movement, based on the novel idea of respecting and empowering women as if they are, like, human, back in the distant 20th century.

Murphy O’Brien, the third-biggest public relations/brand management company in Los Angeles, is approaching its 30th anniversary in the same spirit in which it was founded: by promoting women to take the lead and sort out all the men’s problems.

Brand PR has often been regarded as a “woman’s job,” maybe because it requires a forbearance, focus and inner calm not encouraged in the louder gender, but even back in the day, Murphy O’Brien was exceptionally laden with female talent.

Today there are still only a handful of “token men” in the 50-strong team, whose core management had remained stable for quarter of a century, unriven by lawsuits, personality clashes or tell-all memoirs.

Year after year it wins accolades from publications such as Los Angeles Business Journal as a good place to work.

How does Murphy O’Brien set this tone and still get the business done on behalf of clients, ranging from theater chain Cinépolis (coming soon to a Caruso development near you!) and Shutters on the Beach, to the source of so much Friday night temptation that is The Cheesecake Factory?

Some of it, inevitably, stems from her mobile past.

Karen Murphy was raised in Western Connecticut, moved to Florida (“against my will”) when she was 11, graduated summa cum laude from Florida State’s Conservatory of Music and then realized, with a sinking heart, she was facing a lifetime of piano school.

“Teaching was not for me, but it prepared me for dealing with some of my clients,” she recalled in an interview with the Palisadian-Post.

So, she fled to Texas—the Florida of America—to become a country music writer.

Where have all those songs gone?

“Strange that you should ask,” she shared. “I am working on them again with my mother-in-law, who has discovered she likes writing lyrics.

“We are embarking on a musical retreat to Nashville in early May to see what we have. Something may be based on recent life events, such as the loss of my sister [to cancer] and my parents. I am sure there is a country song in there somewhere.”

The first time around, she kept herself in guitar strings in the marketing department at Hyatt: Her world changed when she found herself with a one-way ticket heading to the Hyatt Regency on Maui, where she found herself writing the Hyatt on the Beach gossip column, and dealing with showbiz and media types with a Rolodex of colorful demands.

“I realized I liked making connections between people, and I loved the hospitality business—never a dull moment. And then there was the beach … ”

She set up her own shop in Los Angeles with her husband-to-be, Brett O’Brien: She still runs the business while he works on high-tech offshoots such as Flyer, an online subscription service for businesses to self-publish their own works.

She was aware she was part of something changing, even in the 1990s.

Yet the rise of the woman-only (or driven) business is shockingly recent, pioneered by boutique legal firms such as Geller Law of Fairfax Virginia, where partners can wrap schedules around families. No more answering “urgent” emails during labor, they ruled.

Was this a deliberate strategy for Murphy O’Brien?

“It was organic,” she explained. “We recruited men along the way, especially in the early days when we had less choice. Today it’s mostly women maybe because more women than men apply for our posts, maybe because it’s the nature of the public relations we are doing—hospitality, luxury brands and downtown real estate development.” (Although that is the dangerously similar to arguments used to justify male dominance in, say, engineering.)

“We are a very nurturing environment. From 10 to 3, you should be visible in the office, but other times you can be working out or whatever you need to do—so long as the clients are happy. It allows women to spend more time with their families and set their own priorities.

“We always say if you join Murphy O’Brien, you are either married, going to get married or have a baby because we find the space to allow that to happen.”

Technology has helped, she said: One senior vice president relocated to Tampa for family reasons, another staffer works out of New York—mobile phones and the net keep connections seamless.

“I remember driving out to the Esmerelda in Desert Hot Springs, stopping at every phone box to check in on clients: Now we are always connected. There is a danger there. I became addicted to an early flip phone, but then I lost it checking into the Golden Door [Spa] near Escondido and then had to learn to live without it. It was painful, never again.”

The Murphy O’Brien mantra is carving time out from the working day: For her, like many of her staff, it’s yoga plus trail running in Malibu. Cooking, connecting with her kids, Christopher (musical, like her) and Nicholas (a budding financial whiz), and, even, her husband.

She began corporate life when women in top jobs in hospitality made headlines, when PR was run by macho characters like Jim Mahoney, the cigar-chomping studio fixer known as Crime Mahoney because he got away with … a lot.

“He was very old school, hanging with Bob Hope and Jack Nicholson, so I was having dinner with Robert Wagner and Burt Lancaster. I learned what I did not want to do.”

She laid down boundaries.

Her trick, when the “Good Ol’ Boys” got “frisky” (a ghastly term), was to slip away to the restroom and never return.

“I never got trapped in a bedroom, but in Vegas, always Vegas, there was the hand on the knee under the table and the call to my room seeking an invitation.

“I turned down a contract with a developer who gave off that bad vibe. He promised to be good, and we got on after that.”

This was back in the era when America was great the first time, maybe the 1990s: She is hopeful that #MeToo is a permanent shift, “a collective sigh of relief that a new day is dawning.”

The hospitality industry is changing, albeit without appointing many women to top jobs, and none of her staff would entertain a hotel mogul such as Steve Wynn for a moment.

More importantly, Murphy O’Brien is part of an emerging self-sustaining ecosystem of women’s organizations.

Staff donate time and money to Thorn and its patron, Demi Moore, which exposes child traffickers, and Visionary Women, which raises money for shelters and woman in the arts.

They have worked with Shine Global, backing the extraordinary documentary “The Eagle Huntress.”

It is a meme spreading around the world (hey, Saudi women are learning to drive now!) across to the recently formed Success Becomes Her group monthly meetings at Palisades Branch Library—women helping each other succeed in business.

Murphy O’Brien staff take time off to volunteer with such groups—“there is a queue to take the nine-week training course with Chrysalis, helping women with tough histories find jobs. Our women are part of something bigger than themselves, and they love it.”

There is, say observers, a joy in celebrating the camaraderie of women.

And Murphy O’Brien is happy to be a fairy godmother to, potentially, maybe the first truly liberated generation of women in history.