The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (11 page)

I befriended the agents’ secretaries. They’d once been in the mailroom, so they knew the procedure. They were trying to move up the ladder themselves, to junior agent, so the idea was to get someone to recommend you to take their place.

I did favors for agents—within the law. Along the way you somehow learn how it all works. If you’re smart and you absorb it, you can look around and say, “Aha. These guys ain’t so fucking smart.” Then you’re ahead of the game.

SHAPIRO:
No one in the mailroom impressed me, and everyone who’d gotten out and found a desk to work on did. I’d ask, “How long did it take you? What did you do? How long have you been at that desk? What do they tell you? What was your raise?”

WEST:
I looked at the assistants and agents ahead of me. I saw how they dressed. I saw them out at night. I thought, I’ve gotta get there, too; that’s for me. To do that you have to learn very quickly about the competition: your peer group. How smart they are and what they know. Who’s aggressive? Who’s passive? What assistant desks are opening? Who should you buddy up to? It took guile. Intestinal fortitude. Brilliance. Inquisitiveness. A work ethic. The idea was to become a sponge for information, however acquired. The smart ones look for the edge. Otherwise, who would want to hire you? If you’re not looking for that edge, you won’t make a very good agent, because agents
better
be looking for the edge on behalf of their clients. So you learned to go where you weren’t supposed to go, to read things you weren’t necessarily supposed to read. We weren’t encouraged to break the rules; you had to figure that out for yourself.

LITKE:
Lots of guys fell out of my mailroom group. Either they weren’t ready for the business or they couldn’t be patient for a year or two. At one point I told my parents I was never going to make it at William Morris. “I see these guys who are supposed to be pushing the mail wagons, schmoozing with the agents, not doing their work. Meanwhile, I do
my
work, but I can’t stop feeling like they’re going to get ahead faster than me.” My parents, being good parents, said I’d be judged by my abilities. They were right.

WINKLER:
Some people remember a lighter and more inspirational time, but I felt misused and exploited in the mailroom. I knew I was just a messenger boy with a college degree. At first it didn’t bother me because William Morris masked the job in this mystique that if you did well, you’d get promoted and be an agent someday. You were motivated by that hope. But only a handful of “trainees” ever got out and developed into talent agents, not to mention producers or writers or directors or managers. Meanwhile, the executives took advantage of those hopes and got young people to work a five-and-a-half-day week for very low wages.

Of course, I never shared these feelings with anyone. I didn’t want to get fired.

SHAPIRO:
When an agent asked you to be his assistant, most guys took the first offer. My offer was to work in the Nightclub Department. I wanted Legit Theater instead and decided to wait. Some thought my refusing was a bad move, but I believed in setting my own path.

It took nine months until I was asked to work for Lee Karsian in the Legit Department. He was married to the actress Pat Carroll, who’d been a performer at Tamiment. I worked for him maybe three months, and then he got fired.

After Karsian I floated until I got another desk, working for Elliott Kozak, a television agent. Then Kozak got fired. When I tried for another desk, most agents looked at me funny, as if I were bad luck.

In the early sixties I moved to the Los Angeles office. All of TV was moving to the coast, and I badly wanted to be there, too. Bernie Brillstein had told me, “Look, you’re smarter than most people, especially out in California. You should do well.” (Later he was my inspiration for going into management. He was the role model for my career path. So thanks, Bernie.) But no one would actually send me, so I asked an agent friend, Elliot Wax, who’d already made the move, to help me start a rumor that I was being transferred. Pretty soon everyone was saying, “Shapiro’s coming. Shapiro’s coming.”

ROSENFELD:
I also looked toward California. I asked Charlie Baker if I could do anything out there to help him. I also offered to pay for my own move. It took him a while, but he came up with a plan for me to be an assistant to Lenny Hirshan and Julie Sharr. Lenny was in the movie business and Julie did variety television, but they also did West Coast theater. Years later when Abe Lastfogel found out that I’d been transferred but the company didn’t pay for it, he didn’t believe it.

BRILLSTEIN:
I got out of the mailroom by finding a weak link in the company, someone whose personality and job performance created an opportunity. I could have tried to be an agent’s secretary, but what for? When you’re on a toll bridge, you try and pick the line that moves the quickest. Some people wait for the best job. Some people wait for a middle job. I didn’t care. I wanted
anything
. I thought, Just get me outta here, because no one’s gonna know I have any talent
until
I get out of here. In my heart I was always an agent and just working to make it official.

Jerry Collins was head of publicity. His assistant quit and he offered me the job. All my friends said, “It’s grunt work. Don’t take the job.” But I knew three things: One, the publicity office was opposite Nat Kalcheim’s office, and proximity is priceless. Two, in publicity you worked with
everyone
in the company. Three, I’d be
out of the mailroom!

WINKLER:
After the mailroom I was put in charge of the audition room. It was the lowest job around. No one was anxious to have it because it didn’t lead to anything specific.

Even so, something good happened for me. A guy named Lou Bass ran the audition room in the Los Angeles office. One day he sent me a note about a woman he’d met socially who had just moved to New York. It read, “She’s a very nice lady. Why don’t you call her and ask her out?” I did, and that’s how I met my wife. Lou later married Marie “The Body” McDonald. It didn’t last very long. Then he quit the Morris office. I think he became a cop.

When I finally became an agent, Wally Amos was my secretary. He used to come into my office with chocolate chip cookies that his grandmother had made. He’d point to the cookies and say, “This is going to be my fortune.” I said, “Wally, you’re not going to make a fortune making chocolate chip cookies. Get back to the typewriter.”

Oh, well.

LITKE:
After eight months I went to work for an agent in the Play Department. I lasted about a month. Luckily there was an opening with Joe Wolfson in the TV Guest Appearance Department, which was big because there were twelve variety hours in prime time.

When Betty Hutton replaced Carol Burnett in a Broadway musical for two weeks, Joe took me to meet Hutton. She was my first star. Most of the executives at William Morris were five foot four or less and wore a thirty-six short suit. I’m a thirty-six short. Joe said, “Betty, I want you to meet this young man. He’s gonna be very big in the business.”

“Well,” she said, “he’s fucking-A the right height.”

WEST:
I resented being a college grad who made only thirty-eight dollars a week, so after six months I left the company. No one cared. I didn’t mean anything. We were all Schmendricks in the mailroom. But a couple months later I was back. You want glamour? You pay the price. You learn how to live on tuna sandwiches and coffee. I went to Harry Kalcheim instead of Sid Feinberg. I said, “Listen, I screwed up,” and sold myself back in with whatever story I could create. I had to. If I couldn’t sell myself, how could I sell a client?

I got a part-time desk, floating. Then I got tired of the low pay/sacrifice bullshit
again
and left again. I went to IBM, which was boring, and sold card-punch equipment.

In 1964 I moved to the West Coast. George Shapiro was already in town. I met with Morris Stoller. He was an accountant, an attorney, and, to me, God. Stoller was the most well rounded person at the company. If I wanted to discuss music, art, the Korean War, self-hypnotism, problems in the London office, why so-and-so is a putz—whatever—he could. Sam Weisbord, on the other hand, talked about seventeen-year-old girls, stocks, and his dinner with Mr. Lastfogel. Morris let me start over again, as everybody’s assistant in the Variety Television Department. They gave me a barely livable salary, but I quickly got the lay of the land. I learned how to shoot by people who had been there for ten or fifteen years. My life was all about outworking, outthinking, seven days a week—and I made agent.

A few years later I noticed someone else with the same drive. I’d come in early to work the phones and saw this young man who assisted Fred Apollo wandering around the halls. I started talking to him not only because we were both in before everyone else, but because that quality suggested he was bright and had a great work ethic. After a while I grew to like him enough that I managed to arrange for Michael Ovitz to leave Apollo and come to work as my assistant.

LITKE:
I spent my nights going to Greenwich Village. I went to the Gaslight Club and saw a young black comedian who turned out to be Bill Cosby. We signed him. I saw this ugly girl singing her heart out until two or three in the morning. She was Barbra Streisand. It was about finding the Smothers Brothers in the clubs and Linda Lavin in an off-Broadway show. It was about discovering people you could make into stars. They don’t do that anymore. If you’re casting a TV series today, you go to a college, find twenty-seven attractive kids, pick out five, throw them on the screen, and whatever happens, happens. They “people” the shows. It doesn’t have to do with talent.

UFLAND:
In my day we were great characters and we worked with great characters, and that’s completely gone. So many agents then had a real love of this business. They were not afraid to be themselves. Today you’ve got people who don’t know how to be themselves. They’re from a mold.

BRILLSTEIN:
In the mailroom you read the mail of the biggest stars in the world. You touched the letter. Or you went to a nightclub opening because the boss invited you; never mind he just needed to fill a table for a William Morris act, you were
there
and you felt part of the family. You saw acts that your friends hadn’t seen. You got records your friends didn’t even know about. You met people on delivery runs your friends couldn’t hope to. Then some big agent asked you to go to a TV show, sit in the audience, laugh, and lead applause—and get paid five bucks to do it. What could be better?

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN
is the founding partner of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, the industry’s preeminent management/production company. He will always love show business with his eyes wide open.

IRWIN WINKLER
is a widely respected producer whose films include
They
Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; Raging Bull; The Right Stu f; GoodFellas; Mu
sic Box; New York, New York; Up the Sandbox; The Mechanic; Rocky
(and sequels);
Round Midnight; The Shipping News;
and more. His movies have been nominated for Best Picture four times—a record; he won the Oscar for
Rocky
. Winkler also directed
The Net, Guilty by Suspicion, At
First Sight, Life as a House
, and
Night and the City
.

GEORGE SHAPIRO
and
HOWARD WEST
are big-time managers (of Jerry Seinfeld, among others), TV and movie producers, and partners in Shapiro/West and Associates of Beverly Hills. According to Mr. West, he’s been carrying Mr. Shapiro forever, and vice versa. Between one’s brain and the other’s body, they are one perfect person.

MARTY LITKE
became vice president in charge of talent, East Coast, at William Morris before leaving in 1974 to pursue management and production. Now in semiretirement, he teaches theater at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey.

MIKE ROSENFELD SR.
is one of five former William Morris agents who, in 1975, cofounded Creative Artists Agency. He retired in 1982 and relocated to northern California, where he is now a flight instructor who believes it is better to be lucky than smart.

HARRY UFLAND
is a film producer whose work includes
Snow Falling on
Cedars, The Last Temptation of Christ, Moving Violations,
and
Not Without My Daughter
.

THE MENTOR

William Morris Agency, Los Angeles, 1957–1959

SANFORD LIEBERSON, 1957 • RON MARDIGIAN, 1958 • JOE WIZAN, 1958 •
RON DEBLASIO, 1958 • ROWLAND PERKINS, 1959 • BOB SHAPIRO, 1959

Phil
Weltman
truly
cared.
It
was
his
humanity.

—Rowland Perkins

SANFORD LIEBERSON:
My parents were both poor immigrants from Russia. My father died when I was eleven. My mother worked for Prudential Insurance, in the cafeteria. Show business seemed as far away from my life as China.