The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (21 page)

In 1963 I moved into Oscar’s house in Chicago and became his gofer. He paid me $110 a week, same as my mother.

When Oscar got into a beef and fired his manager, I “managed” him for close to a year. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, so he told me what to do. We had a great time on the club circuit: the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C.; Mother Blues in Chicago. The occasional college concert. There was pot, acid, lots of women. It was fucking heaven. Met Jack Jones, Jill St. John. It was very glamorous and exciting for a kid from the Bronx.

One day Oscar decided to leave his agency and go to William Morris. He wanted to be with Harry Kalcheim, a really important guy who had Elvis Presley, the Smothers Brothers, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, Sergio Franchi. I left a message with Kalcheim’s secretary that I wanted to set up a meeting. The next day I got a phone call from Wally Amos and the meeting was set.

I walked into Wally’s office and immediately laughed. Wally asked, “Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’re black,” I said. “This is ridiculous. I’ve got a black act, so they send me to the black guy?”

It must have been the right thing to say. Wally and I instantly hit it off. He sent David Geffen, Hal Ray, and Chris Winner to see Oscar at the Cafe au Go-Go. Geffen especially wanted to sign Oscar.

Geffen, Winner, and Ray fascinated me. Hal Ray’s still at the William Morris office. Chris Winner got fired and became a dishwasher for a time. Geffen, everybody knows. They seemed to dress nice and they had apartments in Manhattan. Hal and Geffen lived in the same building. I remember nice carpeting. No linoleum.

I decided I wanted a job at William Morris. I thought that, based on my show business experience, they’d make me an agent right away and pay me a lot of money. After all, I’d been managing for over a year. I thought I was big-time.

Geffen set me up with an interview. Wally Amos endorsed me. The company offered me a job—in the fucking mailroom. Fifty-five dollars a week to be a fucking flunky. I was shocked. I already made close to three hundred dollars a week. But they gave me the whole spiel about all the people who started in the mailroom, and how you got to somebody’s desk, then you become an agent. I figured I’d be an agent in a week, so I took the job. Even Oscar thought it was a good idea. I sold grass in the mailroom on the side.

ELLIOT ROBERTS:
Jeff Wald and I lived across the street from each other as kids. We were good friends. I wanted to be an actor. I went to Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, but was asked to leave after I was arrested for leading a civil rights demonstration over a barbershop that refused to give haircuts to the black athletes. I transferred to Grinnell, in Iowa, but left after a year to act.

I was twenty years old. I had already done
Bye Bye Birdie
in Chicago. In New York I attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts at night and got a job at NBC as a page. After hours I managed a band called Nickel Misery. I lived in the Village. I was also in an Elaine May revue called The Third Ear. Hal Ray, Jeff’s good friend from William Morris, came down to see it. Afterward he told me, “Give up this acting shit. I can get you a job in the mailroom. There are two openings coming up soon because some kids are being promoted.”

Jeff had told me the same thing. I didn’t really want to be an agent, but I also knew that the William Morris mailroom was a prestigious little job that everybody’s son wanted, so I went in.

I lied about a college degree. So had Jeff. We never assumed that they would check, because we didn’t think showbiz worked that way. We got lucky, but David Geffen, who was already an assistant when I started, found out they
might
check, and wrote a letter from UCLA to cover himself. But he can tell that story.

It was a legendary period in the New York office. Lefkowitz ran it. The Kalcheim brothers were big. Jerry Brandt ran the Music Department. The modern music business was just forming. There were no rules yet.

Well . . . there was one. The week I started I got on the elevator, on the thirtieth floor, with Mr. Lefkowitz. I pushed thirty-one. When we arrived, Lefkowitz said, “Go down to thirty and walk back to thirty-one. When you’re in the mailroom, you don’t take the elevator one floor.” That was the only time he ever talked to me, and it scared me to death. I remember waiting all day to be fired.

PETER LAMPACK:
I came out of Hobart College, in Geneva, New York, with a degree in English. My father and two of my uncles were lawyers, but I didn’t want to do that. I tried premed for a couple years but didn’t have the stomach for it. I floundered, to be honest.

My uncle, a playwright, suggested a career in the entertainment business. I was intrigued. He set up a series of chats with show business executives and an interview at William Morris. I met with Marvin Mann in Personnel. He wanted to make sure I didn’t have three arms and six legs, that I spoke with some degree of fluency, and that the possibility existed that I could benefit from the mailroom program and potentially become an agent. Maybe because my uncle was a client, or because Mann was in a good mood that day, or because I did well in the interview—or all three—I got hired.

PINKUS:
I knew right away that I fit in. Abe Lastfogel never went past the fourth grade. Sam Weisbord never went past the fifth grade. But they were still streetwise and very smart. I dug the tradition and history. I figured if I worked hard and was honest, I’d make it. No matter what anybody asked me to do, I never said no.

AMOS:
I wasn’t concerned with the history of William Morris; I was busy trying to get the hell out of the mailroom. I worked all day and went to school at night. I didn’t take lunch; I set up a typewriter in a corner of the mailroom and practiced. I figured that when you show initiative, people automatically respond. After two months I became a floater because my skills were comparable to any of the secretaries’. I worked on many desks and got to prove to everybody what Wally Amos was about.

GEFFEN:
I didn’t know enough about the process at the beginning to have a goal. I just observed those who had accomplished something— Lou Weiss, Wally Jordan, Lee Solomon, Steve Jacobs, Marty Litke, Murray Schwartz—and tried to act as much like them as I could. I thought Larry Auerbach and Tony Fantozzi were very stylish, plus they were accomplished
young
guys. Every office I walked into, as I delivered the mail, I saw some person who didn’t look that much different from me, talking to somebody famous on the phone. It seemed so cool. I thought, I know how to do that; I can talk to famous people on the phone.

SHUKAT:
The mailroom had a real hustler sensibility, not a sense of educated people. It was mostly “I want to be in show business and I want to make money.” Look through the annals; there are many hustlers, even former furriers. Guys who can’t read scripts and don’t understand story have run studios. Their lack of schooling doesn’t affect their enormous success. They’ve taken gambles. They’re chums, pals. I was always surprised at the lack of depth. Many of the guys I met were good talkers, good spinners; they could have been car or insurance salesmen. That was always the object, I guess: make the sale. I had a different sensibility.

ROBERTS:
To get noticed, I tried to be funny, witty, and knowledgeable and show the agents that I knew more than I knew. I tried to create ways to define myself as an up-and-comer, to suggest that in ten years
I’d
be in the big seat. I wanted the agents to know I could get tickets for clients who needed tickets; I could get them to the Knicks or the Rangers game. When I delivered scripts to artists, I tried to act like I wasn’t just a messenger boy; rather, an
agent trainee
. Plus, I read the product—at least ten pages on the way to dropping it off—and could convincingly tell them, “It’s fabulous. You’re gonna love it. The characters are so well drawn.”

LAMPACK:
The mailroom was the civilian version of basic training: they broke you down before they built you up. For somebody like me, who came from a decidedly middle-class background and for whom graduate school was certainly a possibility, to suddenly be confronted with pushing a mail cart seemed not what I was raised to do. Yet there was great knowledge to be gleaned.

It didn’t take long for me to decide that being an agent was for me. Within the first six months
Fortune
magazine put the William Morris TV agents on the cover. The article was about how many hours of prime-time network television the agency directly controlled. The attention seemed very sexy, and being an agent, the best of all worlds: you had the glamour of the entertainment business, the potential to make a substantial income, and could do it in essentially an entrepreneurial environment where there were not tremendous restrictions on your comings and goings. I was seduced.

SHUKAT:
The lowest guy in the mailroom got to run the wet Xerox machine. It was poisonous. You had to wear gloves.

WALD:
I detested changing the liquid soap in the men’s room. I thought, What the fuck am I doing? But everybody did it, and after a couple of weeks it was somebody else’s turn. Another awful job was going out in the afternoon to get theater tickets. Nat Lefkowitz would service whoever the fuck was in from California with theater tickets, so I had to stop at five or six different places. I hated that job, especially in the wintertime—walking in the cold and standing in line. The William Morris rule was that even though the tickets were for the agency, you couldn’t cut in line. Most of the time I tried to figure out how to cut in anyway.

SHUKAT:
I picked up tickets for Irwin Winkler. Then he’d say, “I want you to go back to the box office, return them, and give me the money.” The truth is, nobody was making enough money. Everybody lived off their expenses.

GEFFEN:
The work was more tedious than it was tough. I had to change the toilet paper in the bathrooms and fill the soap dispensers. It wasn’t challenging, just what I had to go through to get to the next step—and I was
always
willing to do that. I would have done anything, even if I thought it was shitty. The mailroom is where you learn that if you haven’t got the patience to go through the shit, you’re not going to get to the cream. It’s a test. It’s about humility. Lots of people complained, though, and quit because they thought it was demeaning. I kept hoping
everybody
would quit, because the more people who quit, the higher up on the list I got toward getting a desk. I can’t remember if I actively encouraged their dissatisfaction, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

WALD:
Julie Newmar lived on Sutton Place, and I had to deliver a script to her. She came to the door in a fucking negligee. She just acted like she was dressed. I thought I would drop dead.

SHUKAT:
I heard a story about one guy sleeping with Shelley Winters. It might have been Harvey Kreske. Supposedly he went to her house, she said, “Stick around,” she put on a negligee, and they got into bed.

PINKUS:
George Wood was one of the great old-time agents. He took care of Frank Sinatra for years. I think Frank even lived at his apartment at 40 Central Park South. I lived at 230 Central Park South in a rent-controlled sublet I got the first week I was at William Morris from a very pretty dancer who was leaving for Las Vegas on a fifty-two-week contract.

Wood called me one day and asked, “You got a suit?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “All right. I want you to meet me at eight o’clock at the Round Table.” It was a club in New York City. “I’m taking out Rita Hayworth and her daughter, Princess Yasmin, and I need you with me.” Yasmin was about fourteen, and I was about twenty-one. From the Round Table we went to Basin Street East, and my job was to dance with Hayworth or Yasmin—she told me to call her Yazzy. That’s when I knew I was in the right business.

LAMPACK:
Sometimes I wasn’t sure. Once, while pushing my mail cart down the hall, about to make a turn, a chimpanzee on roller skates, wearing clothes and smoking a cigarette, flew by me. I thought I’d imagined it. Maybe it was a little kid. But what was a kid doing on the executive floor? On skates? And smoking? I turned the corner and there was his trainer, talking to an agent. William Morris represented the chimp.

GEFFEN:
I learned to read memos upside down, not to show off, but because I’m curious about everything. I also read the room: people’s tastes, the pictures on the walls, the suit and tie or dress someone wore. Even their shoes. I took mental notes on everything, and I pretty quickly came to believe I could succeed at William Morris, because I didn’t see anybody there who I thought was that much smarter than me. I don’t mean that arrogantly: I’ve never gone to my doctor’s office and thought, He’s not so smart;
I
should be a doctor. But after reading the mail I sorted, and reading the files and memos I found lying around—and things were
always
just lying around—I knew I could do it. The idea of being a William Morris agent was extraordinarily appealing. I had visions of a respectable career and making lots of money. I remember thinking: I’ll be here the rest of my life.