The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (28 page)

Dennis Brody was head of Dispatch. The town was divided into three runs: Hollywood, Valley, and Beverly Hills. We were all out of the mailroom and in Dispatch—me, Iezman, Randall, Bruce Pfeiffer, Somers—and we got a call from Michelle Marvin: “I have an
immediate
package that has to go
immediately,
first stop.” Where’s it going? Century City, so it’s the Beverly Hills run. Who’s on the Beverly Hills run? Gary Randall and Bruce Pfeiffer. Gary Randall was driving. Bruce ran the packages.

They went down to the guy’s office. The rest of us went outside, on a break, to the catering truck. We were hanging around the roach coach when Pfeiffer came out carrying a white paper bag like you’d get at a pharmacy. The dispatch slip read CENTURY CITY HOSPITAL. Bruce carried the bag at arm’s length. He didn’t know what was in it, and he didn’t want to know. He got in the car with Gary and put the bag on the floor between his feet.

Gary and Bruce left the lot and turned up Charleville, heading east, then to Olympic and the hospital. But before they arrived, curiosity finally got the better of them. They had to stop and check out what they were carrying. They figured it was a urine sample.

It wasn’t.

It was a stool sample.

They literally delivered shit. When they told us, we were outraged at the thought that a big-time agent couldn’t take the dump himself at the hospital—or, conversely, take in his own stuff.

BROWN:
I
drove with Gary Randall. Gary was a volatile guy. Instead of making the delivery, he took the bag to the agent’s office, put it on his desk, and said, “I’ll eat shit, but I won’t deliver it.” That’s pretty much verbatim.

RANDALL:
This story is legendary. Every trainee has heard it. There are many different versions, all horseshit. It was just me.

Part of our responsibility was the bank run in Beverly Hills. Every day, two or three times a day, someone would be sent upstairs to Accounting and given a package to go to Bank of America or Union Bank. These deposits were mind-boggling. A $10 million check from CBS to the agency. An actor’s check for $1.6 million. An agent depositing $450,000 in his kid’s trust account. We were already aware of being in the middle of Beverly Hills, surrounded by astounding wealth, at an agency through which zillions of dollars were funneled. But these bank runs,
handling
all that money, were when the stardust really hit. It was the top of the heap. That’s when it hit me that I
had
to make it in the business. That’s when I found my desire.

One day I got a call from Kathy Krugel: “There’s an important package that needs to be delivered.” This wasn’t a typical dispatch assignment. Dispatchers drove. Mailroom guys walked. Michelle Marvin handed me a brown lunch bag and said, “Take this to such-and-such address on Bedford.” I also had a couple of bank deposits to make.

The delivery was only six blocks from the agency. I strolled along holding the bag, not curious at all about what was inside. I stopped at the banks, dropped off huge checks, and finally got to the building on Bedford where I was supposed to deliver the bag. When I got off the elevator, I realized I was at a doctor’s office. I walked up to the nurse at the front desk and said, “I’m here to deliver the package from William Morris.” She looked over her shoulder to somebody else and said, “The stool sample has just arrived.”

I went, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

She didn’t even smile or answer, just shook her head. No, not kidding.

I walked all the way back to the agency thinking, This is the absolute lowest. I was
appalled
. Not only had I delivered someone’s shit, but I hadn’t known it. I walked into the mailroom and said, “You guys are not gonna fucking believe what I just did!”

Of course Rapke, being the street-smart New Yorker, said, “Asshole. Why the fuck didn’t you open the fucking package? You could have dumped it out and put some dog shit in there, and he would have gotten a call that he has worms.”

Everyone cracked up and ribbed me like crazy.

I went to Kathy Krugel and said, “Don’t you ever call me to do something like that again.” She said she hadn’t known what was in the bag. But it never happened again. I’m sure someone told the agent, “You cannot use the mailroom guys to drop off your shit for you.”

Later it struck me that on that afternoon between the shit run and the money run I had held the absolute bottom and the absolute top of the entertainment industry in my hands simultaneously. In terms of a metaphor for mailroom existence, nothing prior or since comes close.

SOMERS:
Our group bonded because we all had similar goals. We lived near one another, partied together, decided to make something of ourselves.

IEZMAN:
Jack was the street smarts. Somers was the surfer. Randall was the salesman, the rainmaker, like the Burt Lancaster movie where the con man–hero comes to town. Gary could sell ice to the Eskimos. I was the wise father. Brody was the quiet entrepreneur who didn’t want to be noticed but was always working a deal behind the scenes. We all had lunch together almost every day at a little coffee shop called the Four Corners, two doors down South Beverly Drive from Charleville. It was cheap enough that we could afford it. The waitresses were eccentric old ladies—and our friends. We’d eat, swap stories, tell about our day and our dreams. When Jamie and I broke up, I turned to Rapke—this despite that macho thing of not revealing emotion and vulnerability when you’re young. When
any
of us had a problem, we would coagulate like blood.

SOMERS:
I think part of it was that there was such a need at William Morris for people because of the void left in the middle of the company when the Creative Artists guys left. Loads and loads of people came through our mailroom. At one time I put a list together. If we took a ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and had a reunion—and not just the people who got to desks and got to be agents, but anyone who came through—it would be huge. And each era had its thing. In the Music Department you’d find the faint smell of marijuana in the afternoon. Elsewhere some of the older guys were having their three-cocktail lunches. With the disco era it was cocaine.

IEZMAN:
Every year our little group will have an anniversary lunch at the Palm. Nobody else. Just us. We always start out with a toast. We still talk about everything.

BROWN:
Everyone thinks the idea is to brownnose your way out of the mailroom, but there’s a fine line between obnoxious and aggressive. Too many of the guys were not that sophisticated. I wasn’t from a showbiz family, but at least I knew how to use a knife and a fork.

Because I was an excellent tennis player, I started getting calls on Thursday or Friday to play on the weekend with Norman Brokaw and Roger Davis. Sometimes General Al Haig would come out, because Norman had started making all his Washington connections. When Larry Auerbach and Lee Stevens were in from New York, I’d play with them. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. It screwed my weekends, but I’d do it.

RANDALL:
Another way to network was to get involved with charities. Stan Kamen ran the Jewish Big Brothers of Los Angeles operation, and every year there was a big stag party held at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Somehow our class became the guys responsible for helping put the bash together. We had to go to the hotel and make sure the tables were set up properly, get invitations out, keep the RSVP list. Then, because we had done it, we were invited, and surrounded by every major guy in the business. We were the blessed kids, the next generation of Morris agents. Unless you were a fucking idiot or an asshole, you had to think you were going to get somewhere.

BROWN:
Even though in the mailroom we made only eighty, a hundred dollars a week, at the Big Brothers event
everyone
was required to put fifty dollars in a drum—cash before taxes—there was a drawing and someone would win it. They called my number. I won four thousand dollars. At first I was embarrassed. I was a William Morris employee, and we were sponsoring the event.

Cut to the end of the night. I was walking down the street outside the hotel. Walt Zifkin was on one side of me and Roger Davis was on the other.

Roger said, “I hope you know you’re giving that money back.”

Walt said, “The kid makes eighty a week, leave him alone.”

Then the two of them got into it. It was like who had a bigger dick. I felt like a Ping-Pong ball. I didn’t know who’d been drinking and who hadn’t. All I knew was, four grand was a lot of dough to me. Roger finally said, “What’s your decision?”

I didn’t know if they were just playing with me or if it was a test. I said, “It’s my money, I’m keeping it.” Davis asked why. I said, “Like Mr. Zifkin said, I’m making eighty a week, so this would float me for fifty weeks. If you were to fire me today, I could get a job tomorrow and still keep the four grand.”

Just like an agent. That was the end of it.

RAPKE:
Steve Reuther, who was Stan Kamen’s assistant, would come into the mailroom and say, “Who wants to read?” He meant scripts. I’d volunteer and ask when he wanted it. “As soon as possible.” I figured that meant read it after work, finish the synopsis at 2 A.M., and give it to him when I came in. I didn’t know that other people took two or three days. Then other guys started getting in their coverage the next day. I didn’t want to be with the pack, so I did
two
scripts a night. On the weekend I’d sometimes take home eight to ten. I’d be up until three-thirty, four o’clock in the morning, typing away. One night the police came because the elderly woman in the next apartment had complained that my typing kept her awake. I said, “What do you want from me? I’m working.” There was nothing they could do.

I think that’s when my girlfriend and I broke up. I don’t blame her for being unhappy. I was twenty-five, and nothing was more important than getting my career on track. On the weekend I worked, worked, worked, and did the laundry. I was motivated not by the love of where I wanted to go but by hate. There were many nights that I would go home and pound my fists on the wall, saying, “They will not break me. I will die before they will break me.” A monster had consumed me, because there was never anything I wanted more in my life than to succeed at William Morris and be in the movie business.

SOMERS:
My big move was for all the right reasons, but it couldn’t have seemed more inadvertently political. I was already an assistant when Sarah Elswit passed away; I was there at the end, holding her hand. I wrote a eulogy. I asked my mom to read it because I knew it couldn’t sound like it had any other purpose than to express my love for Sarah. But somehow I ended up reading it at the funeral in front of the whole William Morris executive board. I even cried. Everyone was touched and I got promoted.

BAUMSTEN:
I just assumed that if I presented myself appropriately, I would get an opportunity. I didn’t think about it in terms of maneuvering. It’s not that I’m ethically superior; I’m just not very good at it. Fortunately, I couldn’t help but be very visible. I was a head and a half taller than most of the senior agents. They loved it. Sam Weisbord came up to me one day and said, “Are you still growing?” One day as I pushed the door open to leave the building I heard someone call to me. I turned back and stood there for a moment, holding the door, answering. And while I stood there, Abe Lastfogel walked out the door, under my outstretched arm.

BRODY:
I read scripts for Stan Kamen, who was the head of the Motion Picture Department. Then they told me that his assistant, Steve Reuther, would be promoted and I could have Stan’s desk—if I could wait. Of course I’d wait. I ended up waiting a year, but I became Stan’s gatekeeper when he was at the pinnacle of his career. It was a prestigious, ego-satisfying place, and as a result some trainees didn’t care for me, and some agents as well.

One day Stan came back from a lunch date and I said, “Stan, what are you doing here? It’s two-thirty. You’re supposed to be at Paramount now.”

He said, “What are you talking about?”

I explained. He started screaming. “How dare you book me into lunch with a long-winded person like”—the guy he’d just had lunch with—“and expect me to be at Paramount at two-thirty?” He stood in the doorway, turned red, then purple. I said nothing. By the time he turned white, all I could think of was, The guy’s going to have a heart attack and it’s going to be my fault—and I’ll never become an agent. Then he turned away from me, leaned his arm against the doorframe, and grew quiet. When he turned around again, he said, “By the way, we made you an agent in the Motion Picture Department.” Then he started screaming again.

SOMERS:
I went to work for Barry Solomon in TV Talent. Barry had married the daughter of one of the senior agents—Mike Zimmering— had a kid, and gotten divorced. He hated his ex-wife. I mean viciously. They had screaming matches. As his assistant, I’d close the door, buffer him, then do whatever I could to get him back on track for business. But the pain affected him emotionally, and he drank and he did other things. I became his baby-sitter. He’d lie and I’d cover his lies. Needless to say, he never really trained me to be an agent. I would do things— like contracts—just because
somebody
needed to do them. He had enough good clients—Elizabeth Montgomery, for one—and he made enough deals. But I couldn’t intervene or get him clean, so I just maintained him in a codependent way.