The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (23 page)

ROBERTS:
I spent very little time in the mailroom. I might even have broken David’s record for getting out quickly. I wanted to be in the Music Department, but they needed someone in Legit Theater, so I took it. One day a guy named Joel Dean at Chartoff-Winkler, a management company Irwin Winkler had started, called and offered me a job. They were getting into the film business, doing an Elvis movie at MGM in Los Angeles, and they wanted to get out of their management business. But they had contracts with their comedian clients, so they more or less hired me to destroy the company by getting all the comedians to leave.

WALD:
To get a desk you were supposed to learn shorthand. I went to Sadie Brown’s secretarial school for a day. Then I said fuck it. After five months I got a desk anyway with Murray Schwartz, a pompous prick and petty despot who hated me and got rid of me in a week. I had opinions and he didn’t want to hear them. Murray had fired Geffen, too. Murray handled
The Merv Griffin Show,
which, in those days, wasn’t the high end. Then he became president of Merv’s company and wound up with a ten- or twelve-million-dollar score when Merv sold out. He’s still a prick.

Next I got put with a guy in the Legit Theater Department, who was an ex–army officer. Also gay. Those were the days when guys didn’t come out of the closet, but you just knew. Most of the Legit Theater Department was gay. Ed Bondy, who was married and had two kids, would come by and crack amyl nitrates under my nose. I loved Ed Bondy. I gave him his first joint. My boss handled Molly Picon and Claude Rains. We became friends much later, but in those days he wasn’t someone you could get close to.

Legit theater bored the piss out of me. I couldn’t stand to sit through a whole show. I wanted rock ’n’ roll. Hal Ray booked colleges and hung out with the Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkel. I wanted that instant gratification and the tumult of the action, so I went to work for George Kane in the Nightclub Department. That was more fun.

I really wanted to be Jerry Brandt, who ran the rock ’n’ roll division. He wore cool suits and sunglasses and sat in the dark because he was stoned all the time. He got away with murder and was one of my idols. Jerry was responsible for my first ride in a limo. When I became a secretary, he sent me to service the Rolling Stones when they were on
The
Ed Sullivan Show
. I broke out the dope right away and got everybody high. But there was no room in his department. Hal Ray got the last opening. Steve Leber was there. Larry Kurzon. A Puerto Rican kid named Hector Morales. Wally Amos. Guys didn’t leave.

I kept moving around a lot, but I didn’t feel like I was getting ahead. One of my biggest problems was that I thought most of the agents were dumber than dirt. My disrespect was enormous. They weren’t bright. They weren’t aggressive. They weren’t ambitious. They had nice expense accounts and lived on Long Island in nice houses that William Morris had loaned them the money for. From day one the tradition of the office was drilled into everyone: pension and profit sharing.

One of the few guys I admired was Harry Kalcheim. Harry had a great letter from Abe Lastfogel framed on his wall, dated 1947. It read: “Dear Harry: The Morris office will not loan the young comic Jackie Gleason $5,000. We’re not a bank.” Blah, blah, blah. And “I don’t think he has much talent or will go very far.”

LAMPACK:
I became David Geffen’s assistant. He was the ultimate seduction.

David was five times brighter than anybody else in the place, without exception. You only had to spend a few hours with David to understand that you were dealing with somebody who was playing in six dimensions when everybody else was playing in three.

David was actually a terrific boss for a lot of reasons: He was my age, though I didn’t know it at the time; I thought he was three years older. He was loose in a very stiff place, and he was an iconoclast. He broke all the rules. And because of that he was a mentor whose example showed me that you could push out the edges and perhaps rise more rapidly by doing so. You could take some risks and not simply be dismissed as being arrogant or foolhardy. You could take the risks—even if you were not David Geffen. That inspired me.

What David expected from me was absolute discretion and absolute loyalty. You didn’t gossip about David, you didn’t talk about what he was trying to do. You respected his boundaries. He would have had no tolerance whatever for perceived disloyalty. That would have been a death sentence. But if you showed up when you were supposed to, did what he asked you to do, were pleasant and responsible, he responded to that and was loyal to you.

After a year David said, “You can work for me forever, but it is healthier for you to have other experiences in this company, with other bosses.”

I agreed, and I went into the Motion Picture Department and worked there for maybe six or seven months. When David left the Morris office, they promoted me back into Television as an assistant agent.

WALD:
One day Hal Ray told me about this party on Fourteenth Street for a hypnotist from Australia named Martin St. James. Hal Ray had his own apartment and was fucking a lot of great girls; we were always looking for action. Elliot and I crashed the party. I met a girl there. She came up to me and said, “This is my party. It’s my birthday. It’s to raise rent money.” I didn’t contribute, and neither did Elliot, by the way. Later she said, “I’m going to fuck you tonight.” I married her three days later. Her name was Helen Reddy.

Helen had a two-year-old kid. I moved in with her at the Hotel Albert, on Ninth Street and University Place. What a fucking shithole. You’d be in the bath and the cockroaches would scurry up the wall. Every day on the way home from work I stopped at Ruben’s Supermarket and Deli to buy a can of Black Flag. It was my biggest expense. When we emptied the can, we threw it at the fucking cockroaches.

I remember telling Helen, “If I could ever get promoted . . .” Agents got a hundred and a quarter to start in those days. That was fat city. I had a new Ford Galaxy, for which I paid $32 a month. Helen was singing in strip bars. We’d work four-bungalow colonies in the Catskills for $125. Take the piano player, drive up, sleep in the back, do “Bei mir bist du schön” and some other crap. A fucking nightmare.

Finally I was the next guy slated to become an agent. People knew me. But I could see I was going nowhere. Shukat was my undoing. The Morris office didn’t represent artists for recording contracts, just for personal appearances. They had the Beach Boys and they had the Temptations and others, but they didn’t have a piece of their record deals. Scott Shukat was trying to set up this record division, but he was going about it by representing the
comedy
people. I thought that was fucking ludicrous and wanted to fix it. Geffen set me up with a meeting with Nat Lefkowitz. I said, “I’m working for an idiot who doesn’t get it. Why don’t we have the Beach Boys’
recording
deal?” It was a mistake; I should have known better. I got stepped on pretty good. You don’t go over your boss’s head. I guess I tried to fuck him, and I wasn’t very subtle or creative. Geffen protected me a bit with Lefkowitz, but Shukat hated my fucking guts and wanted me out. I knew it was time to leave. David recommended that I go to Ashley-Famous. I knew a guy there whom I’d met in the Village, and I got the job as a junior agent making $125 a week. I lasted about a month, got fired because of something I said, but before I left, I introduced Ted Ashley to David Geffen. I said there was a great agent over at William Morris who wasn’t happy because he wasn’t moving fast enough. David came over right after I left.

GEFFEN:
Ashley-Famous was a tremendous opportunity and much more money. I made five hundred dollars a week at William Morris; Ashley offered me a thousand a week and the office next to his. I went to Nat Lefkowitz and explained the whole thing. Nat was upset. But for some reason he was not angry with me, as he had been with others who had left.

I guess he knew that I was on a fast track with my career, and that in order for me to stay with William Morris, I would have had to tone it down. He wanted me to stay and told me that if I did, one day I could run the place.

I told him that I was in a hurry.

He let me go, and we remained friends until he died.

AMOS:
When I stopped floating, I became Howard Hausman’s secretary. He had an insatiable appetite for work. Howard became a mentor, almost a surrogate father. He was a great influence.

After five or six months William Morris brought in a Rock Music Department. I actually mean
brought in
. Rock ’n’ roll then was Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, and Bobby Vinton, and our company was not a part of it. So they hired Roz Ross from GAC, and she brought her own secretary, Esther, and Jerry Brandt. Jerry needed a secretary, and Howard suggested me.

I hated rock ’n’ roll music, so I turned it down. I said I’d like to wait and see what came up in the Movie Department or in Television, and that I’d prefer to keep working for Howard until then. Howard sat me down for a heart-to-heart talk. He said, “Wally, we don’t know when something is going to come up, and this is here now. You’ve got a family. It’s an opportunity for you to advance. I think you ought to take it.”

Six and a half years later the Rock Music Department had gone through tremendous changes, I was tired, and I wanted to do something else. I asked Howard Hausman to transfer me to motion pictures. He said, “Wally, we don’t feel that the motion picture studios are ready for a black agent.”

I said, “What about television?”

He said, “Well, we don’t feel the networks are ready for a black agent.”

I said, “Then make me the manager of the Music Division. Where do I go?”

He said, “Well, we don’t think the guys are ready to accept direction from a black guy.”

“That’s really crazy,” I said. “I trained them. They worked for me and now they can’t take direction from me?”

It was clear then that I’d gone as far as I could go at William Morris. I made more than twenty thousand dollars a year, I had profit sharing and a pension and an expense account. But I was miserable. I lived at 100th Street and Central Park West, and on nice days I’d walk to work simply because I didn’t want to get there.

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and told Howard I had to leave because there was no future for me, just like at Saks. Howard did his damnedest to talk me into staying, but he couldn’t offer anything.

I left William Morris in 1967, moved to California, and started making cookies in 1970—just because I liked chocolate chip cookies. But there’s no way I could ever have been Famous Amos without going through William Morris. They prepared me to sell cookies. I was an agent for the cookies.

SHUKAT:
I remember seeing Wally at his first store. I said, “After everything at William Morris, what made you do this?”

He said: “The cookies don’t talk back.”

STEVE PINKUS
is vice president and managing director of National Entertainment, a television production company.

WALLY AMOS
is a motivational speaker, an author, and the chairman of Uncle Wally’s Muffin Company. He lives in Hawaii.

SCOTT SHUKAT
is based in New York and works for the Shukat Company, literary representatives–personal managers and music publishers via two companies: Trunksong Music and Otay Music. His clients work primarily in the theater as directors, composers, lyricists, playwrights, book writers, and so on.

DAVID GEFFEN
has done extremely well for himself, thank you. From agent to manager to record mogul to art connoisseur to political contributor to film and theatrical producer to the “G” in DreamWorks SKG, he is the consummate show business insider.

DAVID KREBS
is president of Krebs Communications, an artist management company based in New York.

ELLIOT ROBERTS
is owner and founder of Lookout Management, and partner with longtime client Neil Young in Vapor Records. He lives in Los Angeles.

JEFF WALD
is president of Jeff Wald Entertainment, a management and production company. He is also a boxing promoter.

PETER LAMPACK
is a literary agent and president of the Peter Lampack Agency in New York.

THE GOOD MIKE

William Morris Agency, Los Angeles, 1969

MICHAEL PERETZIAN

Mike
is
the
classiest guy on
the
planet.

—Bruce Brown

I grew up in New Jersey and had two stepsisters who moved to Los Angeles. They’d send home letters postmarked Hollywood, CA, and I thought wouldn’t that be great to go there, to UCLA, to major in motion pictures and become a director.

I was thirteen years old.

When my dad died, my mother did move to Los Angeles. I went to Hollywood High School, then to UCLA for seven years, majoring in motion picture production. I took another year to get a teaching credential and yet another year to get a master’s degree in history of the theater, and another master’s in fine arts and directing in the theater.

Now I had to figure out how I could be involved in the business. I taught for two years at the Pasadena Playhouse. One of the instructors knew some television producers, and she asked, on my behalf, who I should talk to. These producers mentioned two agents; one was Ron Mardigian at William Morris. When I placed the call, David Guiler, a very hot screenwriter, was in his office. I had been in high school with David, and he urged Ron to pick up the phone and talk to me. He did, perhaps thinking I was another potentially hot new screenwriter client—and Armenian like him. That was fate! I told him that I was looking for a job, and I could hear his voice go, “Oh. Well. All right. If you want to come in, let’s talk.”