The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (8 page)

I’d been working for MCA for approximately two weeks when someone pointed him out to me in the hallway. A couple of days later he and I passed each other in the hall, and he said, “Good morning, Rick, how’s everything in the mailroom?”

I said, “Thank you, sir, it’s just wonderful,” or whatever baloney I could muster before I turned the corner and almost had a coronary. No wonder he’s the president, I thought. It was really impressive that he should know the lowest cog in his building, with the possible exception of the janitor. I was the number-six man in Traffic, for God’s sake.

KANTER:
For the first few months I was very busy because I was the only one in the mailroom. Then one of Lew Wasserman’s many secretaries left, and I was offered the job.

I had to meet Mr. Wasserman first, and that made me nervous. But it wasn’t much of a job interview after all. One reason I’d been offered the job was because Mr. Wasserman liked to come in early and leave late, and he felt it was an imposition to ask a woman to work until eight-thirty at night.

SPECKTOR:
I worked in Traffic about eight months, then went to work for George Chasen. George was always nice to me, but I don’t think he took any personal interest. This is just what he did for a living, and if I wanted to get into the select club of MCA agents, good luck.

Then I was Lew Wasserman’s second assistant. He was intense. It was all about work. No sense of humor, seldom a smile on his face—at least at the office. The agents were scared to death of him. He never said much, but he was the most powerful man you could imagine.

Lew’s office probably wasn’t as big as I still think it was. His desk was at the far end, and he’d come in every morning carrying his coffee cup. In the afternoon I’d sometimes drive him to lunch at the Polo Lounge. He had a great 1951 Bentley, dark green.

Wasserman liked to listen to baseball games. We were driving to some studio and heard Ted Williams hit a home run. It was his last year of baseball. I said, “Oh, isn’t that fantastic for an old man!”

Wasserman said, “Watch what you say, kid. You know how old I am?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “You’re forty-four. What I meant was an old man in baseball.”

“Well, you know, you’re right,” he said. “He is an old man in his business. And I’m an old man in my business. This business is all about guys like you.”

I thought, I’m twenty-two years old, making a dollar an hour driving this car. What kind of business could it be that’s about me?

RAY:
I had been in Traffic about two months and was still number six when I got summoned to Mike Levee Jr.’s office. He was head of the Television Division and had a gorgeous room on the second floor. Levee was as sophisticated, handsome, suave, debonair, and well dressed as Cary Grant. Every time he walked down the hall, women fainted. He was also smart, and he became my mentor.

Levee said, “How would you like me to pull you out of Traffic, jump you over the other five guys, and make you a literary agent?” What he saw in me I do not know. I had only my two months’ experience and a giant crush on Grace Kelly, who used to come in at night and go down to the theater and watch movies. Her only problem getting down the hall was slipping on my tongue.

I had decided I wanted to be an actor’s agent—so I could represent Grace Kelly, of course—and told Mike. Back to Traffic I went. Three months later I was the number-one man. I ran Traffic superbly. I don’t want to pat myself on the back, but I was really good at it. One day Lew Wasserman’s office informed me that I was being made his personal assistant.

For three months I drove Mr. Wasserman around in his Bentley and sat by his desk. I learned almost instantaneously that if I had anything to say to him, I’d better know exactly what I was talking about and make it brief; otherwise he’d tear my throat out. Casual conversation was not Mr. Wasserman’s style.

Eventually I got called to Mike Levee Jr.’s office again. “How would you like me to take you out of Mr. Wasserman’s office and make you a literary agent?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I’d kill for the opportunity.”

“You’ve learned something in the last nine months, haven’t you,” he said.

“You bet I have,” I replied.

BROWN:
I was at MCA twice. The second time I stayed two years. I worked for Mickey Rockford, who was head of the Radio Department. I was earnest and I showed up on time, but I wasn’t desperately efficient. Still, they moved me up from the secretarial pool to outside Rockford’s door, in the hallway. Lew Wasserman’s secretary, Janice Halpern, also worked near him, but that was about it. It was a big deal for Jules Stein, the owner, to allow women upstairs. Secretaries and bosses did not fraternize. There was never a lunch date with your boss. The girls hardly talked to the agents.

If an agent wasn’t supposed to have lunch with or talk to one of the girls, he certainly wasn’t supposed to take her to bed, but nonetheless I began having an affair with an agent named Herman Citron. I didn’t feel too bad about it. Citron was very eligible: thirty-seven years old, very attractive, very sexy, and not married. I was nuts about him and I expected to marry him. I used to meet him after work. He’d park his car on Burton Way. When it was dark, I’d slip into the car and get down on the floor so nobody could see me waiting. Eventually I left Herman. He wouldn’t marry me because he was Orthodox Jewish.

Sometimes I also went out with Mr. Rockford, my boss. No sex, but it was a date with a lot of smooching. Eventually I got fired because I think he was a little irritated that I was having an affair with Herman but wouldn’t go all the way with him.

SPECKTOR:
Jay Kanter was a hotshot agent who represented Marlon Brando. But Jay was so young that it became an industry legend. Years later there was a sitcom called The Famous Teddy Z, about a mailroom guy to whom a big star took a liking and insisted he represent him, so they had to make the kid an agent. People think the story was based on Jay.

KANTER:
Here’s what really happened: I had
just
become an agent, the youngest, lowest man on the totem pole. As such, I got all the worst jobs, like covering a little studio on Cahuenga called the Motion Picture Center. It was home to a lot of independent producers, like Stanley Kramer, and I serviced his company on behalf of MCA. At the same time I’d developed a very good relationship with some of our theater agents in New York: Maynard Morris and Edith van Cleve. Edith represented Marlon, and I used to correspond with her quite often. One day she told me that Marlon had finished doing
Streetcar
and was living in Paris. However, his father wanted him to go back to work. It would have been easy; all the studios wanted him, but they wanted him to sign a seven-year contract and he wouldn’t.

Stanley Kramer was producing a movie written by Carl Foreman and directed by Fred Zinnemann called
The Men
. Stanley wanted Brando. I said, “Well, he won’t sign a long-term contract.”

Stanley said, “I don’t want a contract; I just want him for this movie.” He gave me a twenty-page treatment of Carl’s story, and I sent it to Edith, who sent it to Brando. Based on that, Marlon agreed to do the movie and came to Hollywood. His plan was to stay with his aunt in San Marino. I picked him up at the train station. We got on very well.

Later I took him to meet Stanley and Carl and Fred, and our friendship grew. A couple of times I said, “Marlon, why don’t you come in and meet some of the other people in the office?” He’d say, “What for?”

“Everybody wants to meet you.” He was about as hot a young actor as you can get.

Finally he let me bring him to the MCA building. Afterward he told me, “Look, I don’t want to be talking to a lot of different people. I’ll just do all my business through you, okay?”

I said, “Great!”

As it happens in this business, if you’re handling the talent, suddenly all the business starts to come to you. Calls would come in about Marlon, and Lew Wasserman would say, “I can’t get him on the phone. You have to talk to Jay Kanter.”

They’d say, “Who is Jay Kanter?”

I handled Marlon until MCA went out of the business—and we’re still good friends.

FENTON:
I’d been number one in Traffic for three months. One day Earl Zook said, “The time has come. You’re going into the Motion Picture Department to work with Herman Citron.”

I was fortunate to end up with him. A friend in the mailroom, Fred Roos—we were classmates at UCLA, and I had brought Fred to MCA; he later became a big producer—worked for Herb Brenner and lasted about nine weeks before getting fired.

I introduced myself to Citron, and we chatted. He handled Alfred Hitchcock, Shirley MacLaine, Jerry Lewis, Lilli Palmer, Cliff Robert-son. He said to show up at nine o’clock on Monday morning, prepared to become an agent.

For the next three years I was with him almost every waking moment.

The first day Herman said, “See if you have any phone calls to return, then meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes. We’re going to Paramount for lunch.” At twelve noon we got in his black Cadillac and drove off.

Herman had his own parking place at Paramount. We walked to Jack Karp’s office in the executive building. Karp, a lawyer, ran the studio. He wasn’t an artistic producer type, but he was very smart. Karp’s secretary buzzed us in.

That office was gigantic. Citron took me up to the desk and said, “Jack, I want you to meet my colleague Mike Fenton.” I never forgot that. I wasn’t his assistant. I wasn’t his trainee. I wasn’t his slave. I was his colleague. He spoke of me that way to everyone. I loved Herman like a second father.

SHERMAN:
I was out of Traffic and a junior agent before I was twenty-one. But I had to be accompanied by a senior agent all the time because they couldn’t get me a subagent franchise until I was of legal age. I guess they thought I was good.

I worked in the Story Department under Ned Brown, a great agent but a prick of pricks. Three months later Mickey Rockford called me and said, “This guy Ned Brown is going to find a way to kill you. How would you like to be in the Television Department?” By then, I would have gone into any department.

But what I mostly thought about was waves and surfing and having fun. Probably because he could tell I wasn’t happy, my dad said, “Come work for me.” I quit and joined his company for a while. I didn’t enjoy it. When two of my buddies went to Europe, I sold my car and went along.

I came back when I turned twenty-five. I’d grown a bit smarter and realized I’d screwed up at MCA. I tried to get back in, but they wouldn’t take me. Their policy was if you leave, you leave.

RAY:
I wound up as second in command to Laurie Helton, the head of the Television Literary Division. I’d been there about a year when Laurie went on a vacation and simply didn’t come back. She was a lovely woman, but I think that psychologically she had a lot of trouble with being an agent. Agents have to be able to go to a lot of places where they know they’re not wanted. You have to have enough assertive elements in your personality to be able to walk through those doors. Laurie had difficulty dealing with the job. Mike Levee Jr. gave her a month to get her act together and get back, but she didn’t do it. I patiently waited for my new boss to arrive. One day Mike informed me that my new boss was me. Suddenly I was head of the Television Literary Department. I brought in somebody else to be my associate, and I stayed with MCA until it went out of business in 1962.

HELEN GURLEY BROWN
became editor in chief of
Cosmopolitan
magazine, as well as the widely published author of
Sex and the Single Girl
and other bestselling books.

JAY KANTER
is currently a film producer based in Beverly Hills.

ROBERT SHERMAN
is retired and living in Colorado, where he skis, rides his horse, “listens to his contemporaries bitch,” and has started writing screenplays. To get there, he worked in public relations, was an agent, produced movies, and held high-level studio production jobs at Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, and Orion.

FRED SPECKTOR
has been an agent at CAA for twenty-five years.

RICK RAY
was a founding and senior partner of the Adams, Ray and Rosenberg Agency and its president on a rotating basis. He gave it all up to become a gentleman of leisure. Today he flies his plane, rides his horse, plays tennis, and pursues a “lifestyle worth living.”

MIKE FENTON
has been a major casting director for movies and television since 1963. Today his company, Fenton-Cowitt Casting, is among the foremost in the business.

THE THRILL OF IT ALL

William Morris Agency, New York, 1955–1958

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, 1955 • IRWIN WINKLER, 1956 • GEORGE SHAPIRO, 1956 •
HOWARD WEST, 1956 • MARTY LITKE, 1956 • MIKE ROSENFELD SR., 1957 •
HARRY UFLAND, 1958

The
dream
then
was
to
become
an
agent
and
to
find
talent.
Now it’s
the
bottom
line
and
owning
stock.