Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... (26 page)

For this movie, although my contribution in the larger sense was minuscule, I feel as though I can take a little bow. By the time
Cabaret
came along, I'd been involved in the negotiation of dozens of motion picture contracts and knew them as well as I knew my name. I wouldn't be allowed solely to do those negotiations now; whole squadrons of attorneys are now in place to do what I did, but back then, once I had wormed my way to the inside, negotiating deals was not a problem. It was my long suit.

I've never had any difficulty practicing law without sanction of the bar. I did it for all my clients, and passed the contracts on to house counsel to review. So on
Cabaret
I negotiated the important star deals, and the film's producer, Cy Feuer, allowed me to coach him on his deal with the studio. Feuer was basically a Broadway guy and a good professional friend. I'd made a number of actor deals with him in my theater-agent days, and I loved his spirit, his smile, and his tough-guy attitude. He was a little bulldog with a rumpled shirt, and he spoke straight. Trust me, there weren't many like him, certainly not in Hollywood.

*   *   *

Ray Stark, a megaplayer in Hollywood, was as unlike Feuer as oil is unlike water. Ray, the
ü
berproducer, was only one of many who wanted to do pictures with “ordinary Bob.” I won't go on about the films I negotiated for Redford. He worked in one after another. He worked on the development of his own material with different writers (
The Candidate, Jeremiah Johnson, Downhill Racer
); he had a strong sense of what suited him—playing interesting Americans from different walks of life—and he chose well. The only film I ever talked him into was
The Great Gatsby
, and it wasn't good. I did all his deals, which saw him jump from three-hundred fifty thousand for
Butch
to a million for
Willie Boy
before
Butch
was released. Representing him and doing his deals helped burnish my image, and nobody cares today but me. I don't even think about it anymore. It's more fun and more revealing of the industry both then and now to talk about the silly things that went on, and, as you already know, I love silly.

The Way We Were
, a Ray Stark production, was one of Redford's biggest successes. I urged Bob not to do it because when he had to sign his contract the script wasn't ready, and he was upset about it. “If it's not on the page, it won't be on the stage,” I said. Words of wisdom someone else wrote, surely out of hard experience. But Sydney Pollack, the film's director, was a good friend of Bob's, and Bob decided to go forward in spite of any warning from me. The way it was on
The Way We Were
was that the script was rewritten nightly before each day's shoot. This was at first unacceptable to Ray Stark, who liked the script he had purchased and didn't want to see it changed. But to explain what happened on
The Way We Were
, I have to go back to a little dustup in my office that should never have happened.

*   *   *

Stark tried to renege on a cheap script-development deal with a young writer, Steve Tesich, he had contracted for a mere fifteen thousand dollars. The deal was for a treatment based on Steve's original story idea. The writer delivered the treatment under the terms of the contract, and Stark didn't like what he had written. However, Stark owed him the money. For Ray the amount was nothing, but it would mean food on the table for a year for the writer's family. Marian Searchinger, a lovely woman in my department, came to me in tears, begging me to intercede on behalf of the fledging writer who was a minnow in the pool where Stark was the shark. Stark was also one of Begelman's best friends, and we did lots of business with him. Too bad! I made Stark pay what he owed by being terribly nasty, threatening never to allow the film department in New York to work with him again, and he relented, paid the bill, and never forgave me.

This happened just as Redford was starting to film
The Way We Were
. The other unrelated thing that happened in the same month was that I broke my leg badly in a skiing accident. Oddly enough, my broken leg, the young writer, and Bob's concern about the script on
The Way
all came together in a gesture of uncharacteristic kindness from Ray, who sent me a dozen yellow roses with a sweet note. He had suffered a similar skiing accident a couple of years earlier, and the note was your run-of-the-mill “from one skier to another,” wishing me a speedy recovery.

I was pleased that Ray was willing to put the bad feelings away, and I wrote a similarly mundane thank-you for the roses he'd sent. Ray then took my thank-you note and scribbled the following on the bottom: “Dear Sue, we really should have shot her!” (Referencing what one does to a horse with a broken leg.) Sue Mengers, who how lived on the West Coast, was also a good friend of Ray's, and it was she who had persuaded Ray to send me the flowers in the interest of burying the hatchet someplace other than in my back.

Unfortunately Ray Stark's busy secretary made a mistake, and instead of sending the note with Ray's scribble on it to Sue, she accidentally sent it back to me. Suddenly I'm looking at my ordinary thank-you bearing Ray's addendum, knowing how Ray really felt: that he preferred to kill me flat out. I took this awful note and sent it to Redford, who was busy filming and hating every minute of Ray's interference on the set. He was known to show up with different hookers in tow from time to time—hookers whom he put on the movie's payroll.

Redford and director Sydney Pollack decided to order Ray removed from the set—permanently. Ray's response was to send a case of good wine to Bob, hoping Bob would relent and let him back in. Bob now took my thank-you note for the flowers (with Ray's ugly addendum), and he scribbled on the very bottom of it, “Dear Stevie, let's shoot the gift horse instead.” And he had his secretary send it to Ray, along with the unwanted case of wine.

*   *   *

God bless producers who talk a good game and then don't pay up. I reaped the benefit of just such a mistake. It arose out of Bob's quest for interesting original material. Bob was a serial developer of scripts, and early in the seventies he saw a six-page photo spread in
Life
about a man who was single-handedly trying to save the bighorn sheep in the mountains of Montana. He thought it would make a good movie. The savior, an environmentalist named Jim Morgan, was an interesting character and by no means an ordinary mountain man. He held a doctorate in ecological studies and, while living in the mountains, was also busy filing impact statements with the EPA in Washington, DC. Redford asked me to get the rights to Morgan's life story, and off I went in hot pursuit. Not an easy man to find—even using Redford's name liberally wherever I called. I finally got a callback from Morgan, who found one of the messages I'd left at a diner in Idaho Falls. When at last I heard Morgan's voice on the other end, I introduced myself and told him the reason I was calling. But before I even got Redford's name out of my mouth, he interrupted with: “Are you one of those Hollywood cocksuckers?”

“Well, yeah! I am.” He then told me that he had already granted the rights to another producer whom I happened to know, Edgar Scherick, and he hadn't gotten paid. Boy, was he angry! “Why don't you send me the contract?” I suggested. He took down my address and then hung up. I was surprised when the agreement arrived, a one-page, two-paragraph contract, handwritten in pencil on grease-stained yellow legal-pad paper, and it was airtight. I called Edgar, whose offices were just down the block from the agency, and suggested forcefully that he send the check over immediately:

“Edgar, you dine out on more than this each week. You're depriving a man that's trying to save America for you and your children. Aren't you ashamed? Send me a check for two thousand dollars [the full amount] within the hour, or I'm going to embarrass you by telling this story in places you'd rather not have your name mentioned in the same sentence as ‘thief.'” The check came within the hour, and I forwarded it to Morgan immediately. He was so grateful he said he was determined to “do something wonderful” for me, and I let him.

He asked me to put together a group of my friends—as many as I wished to invite—and he would host a float trip for us down the Salmon River, otherwise known as the River of No Return. I collected eleven buddies—the most famous of whom was a producer on
60 Minutes
—and on the appointed day we showed up, as instructed, in a cornfield near Idaho Falls, where we were picked up by small planes belonging to the Idaho Fish and Game Department. We were then flown at a thrillingly low level through the magnificent Snake River Gorge and dropped off in Salmon, where, that night, at dusk, we were led on horses to a scenic overview that “breathtaking” doesn't begin to describe. It was all about the light; “purple mountain majesties” is right on the nose.

The next morning we rendezvoused with the guys from Idaho Fish and Game at the Salmon put-in, and started the float. They brought everything. The entertainment was provided by Morris Morgan, Jim's older brother, a real mountain man who hunted for his food, built his own shelter, sewed all his clothes from animal hides, and had wonderful campfire stories.

The River of No Return: long placid pools and horrific rapids. Close to the onset of fast water, you could hear the rapids' intimidating roar as loud as a jet plane just overhead. The object of the exercise was to brave it in a McKenzie, a tiny rowboat with a flat surface underneath less than two feet, created so that it could easily be swiveled into a channel by a strong “river rat” capable of reading the current in advance. I'm proud to say that I went over the Salmon River Falls in a McKenzie rowed by the head of Idaho Fish and Game, and I lived to tell the tale. This amazing experience opened up a new world of rivers for me, and in later years I ran the Middle Fork River, the Upper and Lower Rim of the Colorado, and the Arkansas, Roaring Fork, and Animas Rivers. The film about Morgan, incidentally, never got made.

*   *   *

Nothing is forever, as we know. And I knew that representing two out of the top five or six stars in America could not go on forever, but I did not expect it to end the way it did.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Betrayal

Freddie told me more than once that they all move on. Every client—every star, and actors not yet stars—all ultimately believe they can be better served elsewhere. No matter how hard you have worked, or how well you have succeeded for your clients, they eventually find it difficult to refuse all the good meals at great restaurants that are accompanied by strong selling from the next agent in line. In a business where one's only commodity is one's own self, selfishness rules. And when a star is being courted by competition that uses flattery and promises—the great tools of our trade—it is hard for the star to resist the overtures. There is some loyalty in showbiz, but one has to look hard to find it. I'm still looking, and basically I'm an optimist. Freddie did sign many more clients than he lost, and when he lost them he took it in stride. I didn't.

When I lost Redford in 1975 I was heartsick. Bob was straightforward and honorable about leaving. He met with me and told me he wanted to move on. I knew I couldn't hold on with all the rumors flying around—that is, with Sue Mengers bitching and moaning on the phone every day that Freddie had sold the company and sold her out—all long before any announcement was made. I always knew that part of Bob's attraction to CMA was Freddie Fields, who would no longer be there. It was speculated that Freddie would head a studio or make an independent-producer deal at one. And then there was also a new kid on the block. Mike Ovitz, trailing heat wherever he went, was forming a new agency with the top young agents at William Morris. The buzz was all about Ovitz, who was seen holding hands with every important star in Hollywood. It took Ovitz four more years to get Redford, who went to William Morris first.

I thanked Bob for seven wonderful years. Truthfully, his career only got better once he was gone because he added another gem to his crown. He started directing, and first time out he won the Best Director Oscar for
Ordinary People
, which I thought was brilliant. I dropped the ball by not knowing he wanted to direct, by not pushing the envelope with him. Directing may have been his idea, but it should have been mine. He was doing everything during our representation of him that directors do except calling the shots. He was always on the hunt for good material and good writers, he worked on the development of the movies he starred in, he conferred on casting and locations—it was clear what came next, and I didn't see it.

I hold myself responsible for not coming up with the first directing project before anyone else. That might have saved the day. I did not introduce him to enough new writers or find source material that was fresh. I was on automatic pilot. I wasn't thinking. I wasn't one step ahead of the next guy, which is where I needed to be to hold on to an actor as intelligent and thoughtful as Bob. And that, after seven wonderful years, was the end of my professional relationship with “Ordinary Bob.”

However, Redford gave me the American West as a present. I skied a thousand runs, hiked a hundred trails, climbed a number of Colorado's fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, did horse-pack camping trips in the high-country wilderness, fished for trout in uncharted mountain streams, and fell in love with the Navajo and Hopi cultures because he showed me the beauty of that part of our country for the first time. I owe him. Some of my favorite Redford films—
The Natural
and
Out of Africa
—were made soon after he left. And it's still heartbreaking.

*   *   *

Losing Pacino was less straightforward. CMA did not lose Al Pacino, only I did. But I learned a big lesson that would serve me well: The blame game is not worth playing. It's a waste of time. To start with, Al and I were not pals like Bob and I were. We did not speak on the phone three or four times a day like Bob and I. I'd always found Al difficult to talk to, and consequently we never grew close. Al had a business manager, Martin Bregman, who handled Al's money and that of other clients, like Barbra Streisand, Alan Alda, and Liza Minnelli. He and his good buddy Begelman worked together on a one-hand-washes-the-other basis. They brought each other clients, and that enriched them both.