The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (20 page)

Working hard and getting noticed is great, but most bosses couldn’t care less. It’s the fuckup they remember, even if the actual circumstances are forgotten. Do what you say you’re going to do. People may not always appreciate that you do, but they will always
remember
that you didn’t.

At CAA we spent a lot of time with the trainees. We talked to them often, we interviewed them intensively. The first five years, Mike Rosenfeld, Ray Kurtzman, and I spent a lot of time making sure the people we liked were people we thought would fit in with us. Probably more than anything we were looking for a personality type. Someone who could communicate. In this business you’ve got to be a salesman, and you start by selling yourself. If you can’t, it’s pretty hard to go out and sell others. Even if you’re not consciously selling yourself, just having a distinct personality and a certain warmth helps the interviewer realize that you might be the right stuff.

A lot of people can’t stick it out in the mailroom. But you can’t move kids through too fast, because you want them to be educated. You want them to understand the business. Of course, none of the people in the mailroom think they’re moving too fast; they all think they’re moving too slow, and they probably are. In a three-year period there’s probably one year during which they are way overqualified. But you need to make sure a trainee has endurance. You don’t want to invest the time and money into training somebody and then have him go to work at another company or find a different career. You want people who love what they’re doing.

It’s also a young person’s business. You don’t want thirty-five-year-old trainees. If they’re too old, they’re not going to tolerate it—and shouldn’t. You need kids fresh out of college who can live in an apartment three at a time.

The guys who run CAA now were all mailroom people. Richard Lovett, particularly, was a quality guy the day I hired him; and he’s a quality guy today.

The kids in the mailroom are your future.

RON MEYER,
Michael Ovitz, Mike Rosenfeld, Rowland Perkins, and Bill Haber left William Morris to form the Creative Artists Agency. Twenty years later the founders had all departed. Meyer joined Universal (then a division of Seagram, then of Vivendi) and is currently chairman of Universal Studios.

AMBITION

William Morris Agency, New York, 1961–1967

STEVE PINKUS, 1961 • WALLY AMOS, 1961 • SCOTT SHUKAT, 1962 •
DAVID GEFFEN, 1964 • DAVID KREBS, 1964 • ELLIOT ROBERTS, 1965 •
JEFF WALD, 1965 • PETER LAMPACK, 1967

I
don’t
think
the
rules
of
ambition
have
changed.
If
you
want
to
succeed,
you’d
better
not
care
too
much
about
what
other
people
think
about
what
you’re
doing.

—David Geffen

Failure
is
the
only
modern
disgrace.

—from
The Flesh Peddlers: A Novel About a Talent Agency,
Stephen Longstreet, 1962

WALLY AMOS:
I got out of the air force in September 1957 and came to New York. My plan was to live in Hawaii, where I was once stationed, but one thing led to another, and I got married and was stuck. I needed a job.

A friend told me to check out the Collegiate Secretarial Institute, owned by Sadie Brown. She came to work in a limousine. Always wore black. Strong, bright, sensitive, maybe five feet tall. Collegiate had their own placement service, and if you showed Sadie that you were industrious, she’d do anything to support you. Through her I got a temporary job at Saks, unloading trucks and working in the Supply Department at Christmas. I was one of the better workers, and the department manager asked me to stay, and when he got transferred, he recommended me to be manager.

In 1961, after four years at Saks, I made eighty-five dollars a week. I had a little gold executive card that gave me some status. I got a 30 percent discount on as-is stuff. But I needed more money. I had a two-year-old son, and my wife was pregnant with our second child. I’d done a great job. I had a great personality. Everybody liked me, so I asked for a ten-dollar-a-week raise.

They said no.

I told them if they didn’t give me at least a five-dollar-a-week raise, I would leave. They said, “Wally, we can’t do it.”

My brother was a handyman, and I worked with him for a while. I considered the sanitation department—those guys made a hundred and twenty-five a week—but in New York the smell of garbage in the summertime was not appealing. I thought I’d drive a cab, but as I filled out the application I realized I didn’t want to drive a cab, so I threw it in the rubbish. I sold vacuum cleaners. I sold mutual funds. I took the New York State insurance exam to sell life insurance. While I waited for the results, I went back to Collegiate and they promised to find me something. Finally they did. The civil rights groups were applying pressure to the theatrical agencies to hire blacks. They had a lot of black acts and no black agents. I was sent to William Morris for an interview.

I had no idea about show business; I just needed a job. I was a high school dropout with a GED. Sid Feinberg in Personnel said they only wanted trainees with college degrees. But he thought I had potential, so if it was okay with Howard Hausman, the executive vice president, I’d get the job. He approved. The pay was fifty-three dollars a week, but by going back to school on the GI Bill to brush up on my secretarial skills, I got a supplement of fifty dollars a week.

STEVE PINKUS:
We lived in a poverty belt in Brooklyn, and everyone in the family had to work. Through school I got to choose between a job at a printing company or the Theatre Guild. The latter was made up of the biggest Broadway producers, and they owned a TV show called
The
U.S. Steel Hour. The choice was obvious.

From 1954 to 1958 I worked there after school, on Saturdays, and on vacations. I was a little kid, only four eleven; I started when I was thirteen. Lawrence Langner—he coproduced
Oklahoma!
and helped create American musical theater—took care of me. I got to work for Katharine Hepburn on Saturdays, watering her plants. I was Judy Holliday’s baby-sitter. Before he made big money, every once in a while James Dean came home with me to Brooklyn. The guild also sent me over to The U.S. Steel Hour every other week, and I learned a bit about television.

When I got out of the navy on January 18, 1961, Langner called Nat Lefkowitz, the president of William Morris, and said, “I have a young man here who’s going to take your job.” Lefkowitz hired me. I was twenty. I had to be there at nine; I got there at six-thirty. I knew I was in the right spot.

SCOTT SHUKAT:
I was born in Brooklyn, too. I went to the High School of Performing Arts, then Columbia. I acted, studied history and music, and graduated in 1958. Did summer stock. Studied with Herbert Bergoff and Sandy Meisner. Got an Equity card. Played at Jilly’s and Pillow Talk in New York. I was one of the first acts at the Playboy Club in Chicago. But the work was unpredictable, so I got a job at CBS Television, in their mailroom. Going up and down the elevators all day made me sick to my stomach half the time, so I quit and went back to acting.

After I got out of the army, I went back to performing and got really far down the line in the auditions to replace Bobby Morse in
How to
Succeed in Business without Really Trying
. I thought things might go my way, but I got cut. I stood in the long hallway of the Forty-sixth Street Theater, crying and thinking, I don’t know if I have the guts to do this anymore.

One night as I played piano at Jilly’s, a guy named Dennis Paget, from the Morris office, sat at the bar, and we got into a conversation on my break. He said, “You’re gonna do this for the rest of your life?” I said, “I don’t know. I’m a little mixed up right now.” He said, “Well, if you’re college-educated, you can go over to the Morris office and maybe start in the mailroom.”

Ironically, I had been to William Morris earlier that year to play some of my original comedy songs for Larry Auerbach. I sang “Please Don’t Sing Along with Me,” which was a parody of Mitch Miller, whose NBC show Larry handled. He offered to sign me as a writer. I didn’t think I’d feel comfortable just doing that special material, so I didn’t sign. I still wonder what would have happened if I had.

At the Morris office I met with Neil Felton in Personnel. Nice guy. Australian. He said, “You’re hired. You can start Monday.” There was only one problem: The pay was fifty dollars a week. I told him I was married and couldn’t live on that. “What I’d like to propose is that you allow me to work on the weekends, playing bar mitzvahs, clubs, and wedding dates.” He agreed, and that’s how I made another two hundred dollars a week.

DAVID GEFFEN:
In 1963, when I was nineteen years old, I got a job quite by accident as an usher at CBS Television City, in Hollywood. The first day I was assigned to
The Judy Garland Show,
she had Barbra Streisand and Ethel Merman as her guests. I thought, Wow, I’d pay
them
for this job. It was the greatest job I’d ever had. That was the beginning of my career in show business.

Of course, I didn’t think of it that way then. This was just an usher’s job that
happened
to be in show business. But from that job I got another, in New York, at Keefe Brasselle’s company, Richelieu Productions. Their series
The Reporter
hired me as a receptionist. I got fired, but I asked a casting director there I’d befriended, Alex Gordon, if she could recommend another job. She asked what experience I had and what I knew about anything.

I said, “I don’t have
any
experience and don’t know
anything
.”

“Oh, well,” she said. “You could be an agent.”

She referred me to the Ashley-Famous Agency.

I met with Al Ashley, brother of Ted Ashley, who owned the agency. Al looked at my résumé, which was completely accurate—I listed all my jobs, wrote that I hadn’t graduated from college—and he said it was terrible, that he’d never hire a person like me.

I felt bad I didn’t get the job, but I didn’t take it personally. My first thought was, Oh, this résumé is a mistake. Next time I’ll give them
exactly
what they want. So I made up a new one. Now I had a
college degree
in theater arts from UCLA, and I’d worked as a
production assistant
on Danny Kaye’s and Judy Garland’s shows. I also made myself two years older, because I was actually too young to have had all those credits. Then I made an appointment with the William Morris Agency and gave them my perfect résumé.

Neil Felton interviewed me. He was very impressed with my résumé, as he should have been. It was designed to be impressive. He hired me instantly.

DAVID KREBS:
I’m from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. I went to Columbia and got three degrees: a bachelor’s, an M.B.A., and a law degree. Then I went looking for a job. I thought that growing up Jewish in the 1940s and 1950s meant that you could go into the entertainment business and find unlimited possibility. In the waiting room of an ad agency—where I discovered that they didn’t hire Jews—I saw a copy of
Television
magazine with a cover story on the William Morris Agency. I’d never heard of it. I read the article and thought, That’s where I want to work.

At William Morris I met with Neil Felton. He insisted I actually bring in my three college degrees to show him, because someone had recently pulled a ruse and turned out not to have the educational background he claimed. I lugged them in, mounted. I think the company was impressed that they’d attracted someone with my educational background. With my law degree, I figured I’d go into business affairs or legal. But there were no openings. Felton said, “Do you want to work in the mailroom?”

JEFF WALD: I went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. My brother and cousin went to the Bronx High School of Science. I got accepted there, too, but before I started, somebody hit my brother, so I grabbed the guy by the hair and dragged his head along a chain-link fence, nearly wiping his nose off his face. The kid’s mother made a big deal, and Bronx Science wrote my mother—my father, a doctor, died when I was eight—telling her to let me go somewhere else. They didn’t want discipline problems. I didn’t give a shit, to tell you the truth.

I had a great time at Clinton. You couldn’t walk fifty feet without running into a doo-wop group. I started booking these groups into the YMCA and the YMHA for twenty-five bucks, took a five-dollar commission. It was fun. It was rock ’n’ roll.

I wound up moving to Buffalo, New York, after my junior year of college. I thought I’d finish school there, but it never happened. Instead I went to see Oscar Brown Jr. play at a tiny club. After the show we hung out. I was a huge fan, but the immediate connection was that he smoked pot and I had plenty. I drove back to New York to see him at the Cafe au Go-Go and hung around backstage again. He told me he made $2,500 a week. My mother, a schoolteacher, made $110 a week.