The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (32 page)

KERNIS:
In fact, a lot of agents in the film and TV departments, and especially books and theater, wanted career assistants—not mailroom boys who wanted to become agents.

SARKES:
Occasionally we had fights in our mailroom over the stupidest stuff. There were only two phones you could use: in the conference room if it was empty, or in the mailroom—but that was always ringing. One guy would tie up the phone, another guy wanted to use it, someone would get mad. Maybe a pack of cigarettes went missing. Suddenly there was a wrestling match on the floor.

KERNIS:
Sometimes we’d haze a guy into leaving, but it had to be someone George didn’t like, like the fuckup kid in
Full Metal Jacket
who brings everybody else down. We took our marching orders from the top.

One ritual was the fishy cake. We’d order a cake from Wolf’s Deli. We’d put it on the conference table. Everyone would gather. Then Jaimie would say to me, “Come here, smell this cake. Can you believe this?” I’d smell the cake. Someone else would smell the cake. “Jesus Christ, it’s like fish.” Then we’d call over the schmuck who was bothering us the most, and Jaimie would say, “Smell the cake.” When he did, Jaimie would tap his head and the guy’s face would go fully into the cake.

QUENNEVILLE:
Once, a guy came up swinging.

ROBERTS:
He chased me around, screaming, “How dare you?” He caught me and had to be pulled off. I had to apologize.

KERNIS:
A mailroom guy once told me about a box that had arrived in the pouch from Los Angeles. The packing tape had come off. While trying to rewrap it, he saw inside. It was a Tiffany sterling silver box. His job was to deliver it to an actor that afternoon, at a theater, as an opening-night gift. As he rode on the subway the wrapping kept getting loose, and he hadn’t covered the box with anything else. When the train jolted, he dropped the package, the wrapping came off, the two halves split open, and about twenty Quaaludes rolled out—in twenty directions. The guy fell to his knees and crawled around picking up pills from between people’s feet while the passengers read their papers or slept or ignored him. Then he put all but one—it was too dirty—back in the box and resealed it.

GALLEN:
Actually, I’m not sure it came in the pouch, only that it came from a Los Angeles agent who was in the New York office at the time, hence the confusion. Lyle Halperin was the mailroom kid who delivered the Quaaludes. They were in a tin. Sometimes you were curious about what you were carrying, and we’d hear rumors. . . . He opened the tin on the subway, and the pills dropped on the floor. I know this because a couple of days later I had to go to the actor’s apartment to bring back a package—a return gift—for the agent. It was a joint. Sinsemilla. He gave me an envelope, and you could smell the skunk odor through the paper.

ROBERTS:
Sam Cohn had a telescope, so at lunchtime we’d go in and peer into people’s apartments to see if we could catch any activity.

KERNIS:
One of his big clients gave it to him. It faced the Park Lane Hotel. We’d try to zoom in on chicks all the time. I had a friend who had an office near the Sheraton, where all the stewardesses used to stay. We’d have bets about who could find a naked woman in the windows.

ROBERTS:
Even if you didn’t, it would be hang-out time with the rest of the guys. We never got sloppy or stupid or crazy, though Cohn did come back from lunch early one day and catch a few of us in his room. He yelled at us and kicked us out. I don’t know where I got the audacity to do this, but as I walked out I turned around and said, De Niro–like, “Are you talking to me?” and to my surprise, he chuckled. Then he said, “Yeah. Just get out of here.”

KERNIS:
Some guys used to smoke pot in the stairwell at the end of the day. Another group did coke off Sam Cohn’s marble desktop. Sometimes it got out of hand. One mailroom guy did so much coke, he had to go into rehab. He was from a very wealthy family. I thought he was going to be the hugest success in the world, but he was in fact homeless in the mid-eighties. Today he’s a rehab counselor.

Another guy, just about to get out of the mailroom, hid a major coke problem. I saw him on Friday, congratulated him on his promotion. He died the next night. Nobody knew he had a problem. He was a Harvard grad. His brothers came up and interviewed people who knew him. They couldn’t believe it. I loved the guy. He was like Charles Bukowski. He’d do anything for a lark.

GALLEN:
His name was Sam. He had a teddy-bear quality. Very New York, Jewish, Woody Allen–ish, though he didn’t look like Woody. He just had that personality. We hung out a few times. I remember speaking to him that Friday because I told him I was having people over on Saturday and did he want to come? He said he might stop by. He never made it. He was a bit overweight, so it could have been a heart thing— which coke can do to you. It was a tragic story. He’d gotten a promotion to the Literary Department and was really excited.

A mailroom guy named Michael Fox got the call at work: Sam’s brother saying, “He’s dead.” I was there. We were blown away.

KERNIS:
One mailroom guy showed up with a top agent at the Bottom Line. People were like, “Why’s this agent with a guy from the mailroom?” It was pretty shocking, then suddenly understandable. The mailroom guy was great-looking, a model. At night he tended bar at Studio 54 and Xenon. The agent in question was single, but until then nobody thought he was gay. All these agents covering the show were like, “What the fuck?” It was a more homophobic time. It’s not like they were so cool about that kind of stuff. Eventually the mailroom guy left, and the other guy continued to be an agent, but he held a big meeting and he came out of the closet.

SARKES:
One mailroom guy, Christopher Radko, started a Christmas ornament import business in the sixth-floor mailroom. It’s now top of the line. Disney has a piece of it. It was a wonderful ending to a sad story. The guy wanted the Theater Department or the Film Department, and it just wasn’t going to happen for him. He saw his dreams dwindle. So he decided to use the company and began importing trinkets. He stayed at ICM for three or four years while it grew.

QUENNEVILLE:
He asked us at lunch one day what we thought. We said, “It’s seasonal work. How are you going to make real money?” Now look at him. He’s huge.

SARKES:
I began politicking immediately. After a week in the mailroom I asked George to go to lunch. My pitch was, “Keep me in mind. If you know somebody needs somebody, let me get on his desk.” George was a big guy, but he was on a diet and having half a melon. I had a burger. I always shake ketchup before I put it on food, to mix up the water. I started with my speech as I shook the ketchup. Someone hadn’t put the cap back on tight. The ketchup went flying, hit George in the face, got all over his shirt, and filled up his melon. I figured right then I might as well pack it in, because I was fucked.

Luckily it didn’t kill my career. About a month and a half later Quenneville told me to work at Sam Cohn’s desk because his second assistant was gone for the day. I didn’t know Cohn, only his reputation as an animal. He humiliated people. But I didn’t want to be in the Movie Department anyway, so I figured I wouldn’t schmooze him. I’d just keep my mouth shut and do a good job.

That afternoon, about five o’clock, Cohn asked me to bring him a book of matches. I did, and as I turned to leave he said, “Hang on,” and ripped the cover off the book and started chewing it—that’s his big thing. He waited for my reaction. I said, “Is there anything else?”

He said, “No.”

The next day I got a call. Cohn wanted me back on his desk. I was there for the next two months. When people realized I could stay at Cohn’s desk for two months, it did my reputation and status a world of good.

KERNIS:
My uniform, when I got there, was khaki pants, a pair of brown cowskin bucks, and a Brooks Brothers shirt or something. Then, as the summer and fall passed and the weather got crappy, I didn’t want to go out on trips anymore, so I started dressing up really, really nicely. I spent a fortune on clothes wherever I could get stuff on sale. I had a pair of leather half boots, cordovan color, and I’d say to George, “I can’t go out with these boots, they’ll get ruined.” I only meant to stay inside, but dressing up had an unintended consequence. Because I looked good, the agents and assistants started to recognize me less as a schmucky mailroom guy and more as assistant material.

LIGHT:
By the end of the first week I was really depressed. I saw no light at the end of the tunnel. I couldn’t imagine being in the mailroom for four or five months, let alone eight or nine months, which most did. I was already thinking I should get a job in a manager’s office or at a record label.

Then I heard that the Music Department was transferring a guy from the West Coast to New York and he would need an assistant. The day he started, another mailroom guy, Mark Siegel, and I got a set of deliveries. We went to the elevator together and rode down eighteen floors. Mark said, “That new guy started in Music today.”

I said, “Yeah, I saw.”

He said, “Trefe set me up an interview with him when I get back from this run.”

I said, “That’s great!”

The elevator doors opened. Mark left, and I went back into the elevator. I went upstairs, right into the new guy’s office. His name was Terry Rhodes. I closed his door. “Hi, I’m Rob Light. I’m the guy you want for the job.”

Rhodes was from Macon, Georgia, a warmhearted but redneck Southerner who was almost a fish out of water in New York. After asking why I wanted the job, he said, “Are you married?” I said no. He said, “Good. I wouldn’t hire someone who was married.” I asked why, and he said, “Because you’re married to this job.” I got it. “Everything you’ve got is in this job,” he said. “You work for me twenty-four hours a day.” I was so excited to be out of the mailroom, he could have told me forty-eight hours a day.

Terry told Arthur Trefe he wanted to hire me. When Mark Siegel came back from his deliveries, I was on the desk. I’d been in the mailroom only eight days.

I’ve always felt bad about Mark, but I also rationalized that he missed his opportunity. He’d already been out of the mailroom once and got put back in. I don’t know if he looked at it like I screwed him. I told him what had happened, that I had to take the shot because I
had
to get out of the mailroom. I was desperate. It’s like signing a client: If a client’s looking for an agent, you don’t wait for them to call you. You call them. I figured Terry would want someone who had a little chutzpah.

In hindsight, after getting to know Terry, I don’t think he and Mark would have jelled anyway. I think, as fate would sometimes have it, that I
was
the right guy at the right place for the right person.

GALLEN:
I’d been in the mailroom about eleven months and had been on a few interviews to be an assistant. I really wanted to be in the Music Department, but I didn’t dazzle them enough. I was frustrated. I wanted out of the mailroom, but I wasn’t even the number-one guy; that was Michael Fox.

When George Quenneville went on vacation, the senior guy ran the mailroom. On Monday I walked in, expecting Michael Fox to be in charge for two weeks—only to find out that he’d quit. All of a sudden I was number one. Mr. Trefe called me into his office and said, “Joel, you’re the guy.”

I seized the moment. I ran that mailroom like it had never been run before, and all of a sudden I became a commodity around ICM. The assistants who had sort of known me
knew
me. When they needed something done [
snaps fingers
], it was done. It took a few days to figure out what to do, then I was rocking. It felt really good. I had responsibility. I could show people that I could lead and manage.

When George got back, Mr. Trefe told me he could not believe how many calls he’d gotten about how smoothly the mailroom had run and how wonderful I was. Mr. Trefe was normally a crotchety old guy who never really got excited, but now he was promising to get me an assistant’s job. He said, “Are you flexible? Do you only want to work in Music?”

The company had just started a division of the Television Department called ICM Television Marketing. It was syndication. They had hired three executives—two from the East Coast, one from the West. Their first project was the original
Richard Simmons Show
. Howard Mendelson was the VP of sales. I had interviewed to be his assistant, but he’d hired a woman instead. Two weeks later he walked into the mailroom and said, “I hate her. Will you be my assistant?”

“Definitely.”

They got the Simmons show on but cleared only about 60 percent of the markets, and it mostly aired at six in the morning. Six months after the division started, the company lost patience and shut it down. Everyone was fired except me. Mr. Trefe said, “I’m going to put you back in the mailroom until a job opens up because we really like you.”

I said, “Thank you, but I ain’t going back to the mailroom.”

LIGHT:
After six or seven months Terry Rhodes went to Shelly Schultz, who ran the Music Department, and said, “We should promote this kid. He’s booking up a storm. We’re wasting him as a secretary.”