Lee Solters, a foxy, flamboyant press agent who cranked up his raspy Brooklyn-accented voice to hyperbolize about Broadway, Hollywood and, for 26 years, Frank Sinatra — not to mention the psychic who summoned the ghosts of the Three Stooges — died on Monday at his home in West Hollywood, Calif. He was 89.

Jerry Digney, his business partner, confirmed the death.

Solters harked back to the days when a Broadway press agent brandished the verbal swagger of the sideshow barker, even as he helped lead his profession in a more corporate direction. Early on he saw how celebrities could be used as marketing tools.

At its peak, his firm, which had different names over the years, employed 40 people. But he resisted selling out to a conglomerate during the merger mania of the 1980s because he had to be his own boss, Digney said.

As much a showman as the showmen and women he publicized, Solters promoted or helped promote more than 300 plays and musicals, at least half of them on Broadway, including the original productions of “Guys and Dolls,” “Funny Girl,” “The King and I,” “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot.”

His clients included Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Carol Channing, Yul Brynner, Cary Grant, Mae West and Dolly Parton, whom he claimed to have known “since she was flat-chested.” He handled music groups, including the Beatles (on their 1964 American tour), the Eagles and Led Zeppelin.

He publicized the Muppets, for whom he grandiosely but unsuccessfully campaigned to get Miss Piggy nominated for an Oscar.

Other clients included circuses; movies like “The Graduate”; events at presidential inaugurals; ice shows; television shows like “Dallas”; a woman Solters said was the first over-50 model to pose nude in Playboy; the city of Las Vegas; and Jackie Gleason.

In 2000, Solters orchestrated naming Pope John Paul II an honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters before 50,000 people in St. Peter’s Square.

‘Giving good quote’

Though he did his most effective work behind the scenes, Solters was known for “giving good quote,” in the phrase of jaded reporters. When supermarket tabloids offered him $20,000 in 1993 to pinpoint the whereabouts of Michael Jackson, he snapped back that he would give the tabloid editors $30,000 for the same information.

When, in 1990, rumors buzzed that Bubbles, Jackson’s chimpanzee, had died, Solters referred to Mark Twain’s remarks on false reports of his own passing and said, “When Bubbles heard about his demise he went bananas.”

After Kitty Kelley, author of unauthorized biographies, announced in 1983 that she was taking aim at Solters’s prize client, Sinatra, the publicist castigated her as “modern mud-slinging’s miniscule mistress of malice.”

William Safire in his language column in The New York Times suggested, perhaps charitably, that Solters misspelled minuscule because “the word’s spelling has been confused by miniskirt.”

It was Solters’s strategic acumen that impressed other press agents, whose profession he thought should be licensed to improve its quality. A classic coup in the late 1960s was inviting columnists into Sinatra’s dressing room minutes before he was to go onstage.

The New Yorker in 2002 reported: “The first columnist they tried this on was Larry Fields of The Philadelphia Daily News, whose wife fainted when Sinatra kissed her cheek. ‘Take care of it, Lee,’ Sinatra said, and he was off.”

Oft repeated, the technique created a nationwide journalistic chorus whom Solters trusted to warble his essential message: “He’s not an ogre.”

‘That’s showbiz’

Lee Solters was born in Brooklyn on June 23, 1919. He studied journalism and advertising at New York University and wrote for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, as a draftee in the Army.

He started his own publicity firm in 1948, quickly mastering the “planting” of items with columnists like Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper in places like Toots Shor’s. An early triumph was helping the producer David Merrick to salvage a foundering Broadway show: the two of them took out a newspaper advertisement with quotations from men they had found in the phone book with the same names as top theater critics.

In the late 1970s, Solters moved to Hollywood, where he helped set the pattern for using entertainers to sell products and images. Digney recalled the time he went to Detroit to compete with a half-dozen agencies for an auto account. After the others’ slick multimedia pitches, Solters waved his client list and declared, “That’s my presentation.” He won.

Solters’s wife, Ann, died four years ago, Digney said. He is survived by his daughter, Susan Reynolds; his son, Larry; two grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

Solters once allowed that doing publicity came naturally to him, “like putting on a pair of shoes.”

To promote a delicatessen, he had a giant matzo ball dropped from the roof into a giant bowl of soup. To usher celebrities through crowds, he excitedly shouted, “Hot coffee!” And when an athlete he represented was accused of lying his head off, he had the perfect response.

“Hey — that’s showbiz!” Solters said.