his may be the first and the last time you’ll ever read a profile of David Rawle. The 65-year-old avoids the spotlight like an owl. But if you’ve ever taken in a show at Spoleto or visited the South Carolina Aquarium, if you’ve ever read the Post & Courier or swiped your PFC card at the Piggly Wiggly, you know his work. He’s out there.

As founder and chairman of Rawle Murdy, a marketing and communications firm headquartered on King Street, Rawle has helped mold the public personalities of international businesses such as the cookware company Le Creuset and the luxury hotelier Orient-Express. Most importantly, for the last three decades he has been the mind behind the words and images that many of Charleston’s most important cultural, commercial, and political institutions use to present themselves to our community.

Remember “Charleston: America’s Best-Preserved Secret,” the late-’70s campaign that increased tourist spending in the region by 178 percent in a single year? Vintage Rawle. How about the Flying Wallendas’ high-wire skywalk atop the Four Corners of Law, a stunt that landed on national television and sent Spoleto tickets sales surging during a rocky early year for the festival? Rawle again.

Successes like these established Rawle as the go-to guy for businesses faced with communications challenges. And often Rawle’s client is the city itself. According to Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., on the morning after Hurricane Hugo, Rawle was in the darkened mayor’s office getting him to sign off on “Charleston: We’re Going Strong!” a phrase Rawle had emblazoned on t-shirts within hours, so that when the television cameras descended on the storm-bruised city, Riley’s staffers projected a unified message to the world: Yes, we’ve had a crisis, but don’t cancel your vacation plans!

So how did a guy who spent the first half of his life in the North end up being a guru to Southern institutions like The Pig and the Post & Courier? “David’s an insider with an outsider’s perspective and I think that actually enables him to know who we are,” says Buzzy Newton, president and CEO of Piggly Wiggly Carolina, a Rawle Murdy client of 20 years. “He’s the one who reminds us that we are a Southern tradition, to be proud of that, and to never forget it because that’s what makes us different.”

Rawle seems to keep his perspective by traveling to New York and Europe on a regular basis. When he and Carol Perkins were married in Italy two-and-a-half years ago, he arranged for a private wedding ceremony in the bedroom of Cosimo de Medici in Florence. Mrs. Rawle, a former Ford model and fire-eater for Penn & Teller, now owns Harry Barker, an internationally recognized dog accessories catalog business headquartered in Charleston.

“David is wildly romantic,” she says, “the most romantic man I’ve ever known. He’s also incredibly private, loyal, and a good confidante because he listens so intently. You can tell him your deepest darkest secret, and it’s safe with him; he’s like Fort Knox. He also has a great sense of occasion and is a master of old-fashioned gratitude. His thank-you note to a host will be written that night, and he always means what he says—he’s articulate and very careful with his words, discreet and subtle. But what I love most is David’s sense of justice and fairness. He’s always fighting for the underdog. I’ve seen people come up to him with tears in their eyes, thanking him for something he wrote or did. And he has mentored so many at different stages in their lives.”

Rawle grew up in Noroton, Connecticut, and attended Choate-Rosemary Hall and Harvard University. Today, he often looks the part of the art history student he once was—gray European suits with soft shoulders, funky glasses. After college, Rawle enrolled in Harvard Business School, and upon graduating, worked for Corinthian Broadcasting in New York. In 1974, he came down to Columbia to manage communications for the gubernatorial campaign of his Harvard business-school roommate, Charles “Pug” Ravenel. Many South Carolinians remember the television and radio ads he produced for the Ravenel campaign as being groundbreaking.

“People watched those commercials like you’d watch a TV show,” says Virginia Deerin, founder and CEO of Wings for Kids, who met Rawle as a Ravenel campaign staffer. “They were new, they were about lifestyle, and they really connected you to who Pug was and why you wanted to get on his bandwagon. David was ‘branding’ Pug decades before anyone knew the word.”

Of course, Ravenel won the nomination, but he was disqualified by the State Supreme Court for not fulfilling the residency requirement. “Pug was left with a great disappointment,” Rawle says. “And I didn't think that was the time to leave a friend, so I decided to stay a while, see if I could help him and start a business doing what I'd done for the campaign.”

Rawle moved from New York to Charleston, opened his business on the ground floor of a house in Ansonborough; furnished it with art by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Joseph Beuys; and soon had a roster of blue-chip clients like Sea Pines and Kiawah. He managed all of the communications for Joe Riley’s first mayoral campaign (and every successive campaign), and added other major clients like Piggly Wiggly Carolina and the Spoleto Festival. Eventually he moved the firm out of the house and into a stately commercial building at the corner of King and Beaufain, overlooking the empty lot that would become Charleston Place (another client).

Rawle has built the firm largely in his own image—disciplined, elegant, razor sharp, and slightly mysterious. Entering the Rawle Murdy offices above the Banana Republic on King Street, you’re greeted first by Josephine, Rawle’s rare French sheepdog. No fluorescent-lit waiting room with walls of framed industry awards here. Instead, a lofty, open workspace with natural light and hand-woven rugs—looking more like a small museum for contemporary art—welcomes visitors. Claes Oldenburg’s 1970 soft sculpture of a drum set sits on a coffee table. “What I like about art is it represents a different way of seeing things,” Rawle says. “That’s what we do for our clients. We see things differently, so that we can identify the essence of their business and communicate that in the most effective way.”

Besides collecting important art works, Rawle has also been a behind-the-scenes supporter of artists and writers. “David threw a party to celebrate my first novel, and I didn’t even know him,” says novelist Josephine Humphreys, a native of Charleston. “We’ve been good friends now for 20 years, but he’s still kind of a mystery to me. What I know for sure is that he’s a true book lover, with a really witty sense of humor, a big heart, and a passionate concern for the community.”

Rawle’s business partner, Bruce Murdy, who moved to Charleston from Chicago and joined the business in 1986, concurs, “David’s intriguing. He’s not just a collector of art and objects, he’s a collector of individuals.” And what seems to unite the people who surround him at Rawle Murdy is self-confidence, bred of survival in a high-powered, demanding work environment. The employees who stay are the ones who can go head-to-head with the man behind the purple glasses. “David can be intimidating,” Murdy continues. “Rawle Murdy is not a place to hide. If you’re mediocre, you’ll be found out quickly.” And that just may be Rawle’s secret to maintaining his influence, away from the spotlight. “Because David’s willing to be behind-the-scenes,” Deerin says, “he’s propelled a lot of people forward and allowed them to become leaders. If you’re good, David will make you extraordinary.”