The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (9 page)

—Marty Litke

The
mailroom
is
like
a
blind
date.
You
don’t
know
what
you’re
getting
yourself
into,
but
if
you
like
it,
you
want
to
do
it
more.

—Bernie Brillstein

IRWIN WINKLER:
I guess I could have gotten another job. Actually, I
had
another job, which I didn’t like, working as a trainee in a big textile company. I was going to be a salesman in Cleveland. Then I read
The
Carpetbaggers,
by Harold Robbins. The glamour of the show business lifestyle he described seemed somehow . . . more interesting.

I went to MCA and talked to someone in the Publicity Department. He asked me a whole bunch of questions that I couldn’t answer because I knew nothing about agents. The meeting took ten minutes, and most of the time the guy was on the phone with Burt Lancaster. But through talking to him I found out about this other agency, William Morris, so I went there for an interview a couple days later, with Sid Feinberg, who was in charge of Personnel. He asked almost the same questions, but this time I was smart enough to give better answers.

Feinberg gave me a job in the mailroom, but just for the summer. I took it even though it was a big risk for me. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way because I hated the textile job, but it meant giving up a formal training program that paid almost seventy dollars a week, for something temporary at forty dollars a week. I just didn’t want to move to Cleveland enough that I was willing to gamble.

GEORGE SHAPIRO:
In the early 1950s my brother, Don, worked as a lifeguard at Tamiment, a resort in the Pocono Mountains. When I was eighteen, Don suggested I work there, too. I brought my best friend, Howard West, with me. We’d known each other since we were both eight years old and Howard was the new kid in third grade at PS 80 in the Bronx. The school has a rich background: Garry Marshall and Penny Marshall went there, the comedian Robert Klein, Ralph Lauren—who then was Ralphie Lifschitz—and his brother, Lennie, and even Calvin Klein.

At Tamiment, Howard and I got our first big exposure to show business. The resort put on shows, and part of a lifeguard’s job was to work as a stagehand. It was my first hyphenated job: lifeguard-stagehand. The management brought up writers, singers, choreographers, dancers, and composers. Neil Simon and Danny Simon, Herb Ross, Dick Shawn, Carol Burnett, Woody Allen. Max Liebman, who produced Sid Caesar’s
Your Show of Shows,
was the artistic director; certainly Caesar’s
Your
Show of Shows
had its genesis there.

HOWARD WEST:
As part of the “social staff,” George and I slept adjacent to the talent quarters. That alone helped seduce me into the business. I don’t know why I was impressed by celebrity. I guess it’s where you grow up and what you’re exposed to. I was lower middle class from the streets of New York, always looking for an edge.

SHAPIRO:
After the army, my brother, who had become a salesman in El Paso, said I could work with him. He offered me two hundred dollars’ draw a week against commission. I tried to imagine working with him, but I had seen
Death of a Salesman
and I didn’t want to be Willy Loman in El Paso. I also applied to the management training program at Household Finance. That job paid eighty-five to start. A third possibility was the William Morris Agency. Carl Reiner, who was married to my aunt Estelle, suggested it. I liked that idea, and Carl made the call.

WEST:
In the 1950s the college grad of my generation got a starting salary, depending on the company, of between $100 and $125 a week. But there were two industries that said, “We’re glamour industries. You want in? You work for less.” One was advertising, the other was entertainment. You got from $38 to $45 a week and needed a lot of intestinal fortitude to swallow hard and believe you’d potentially love it enough to live on that money, because when you’re in your twenties, how the hell do you know what you’re going to love or not love?

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
In every job you’ve got to start someplace, even show business. You’re young. You think, I think I know talent, but I’ve never done it. No one is going to hire me. I’m not good enough. But I want in. You could become a network page, go to a record company, work at a studio. But the place where all those roads intersect is the agency.

Most of the mailroom guys I worked with came from Brooklyn or the Bronx. My roots were Manhattan. I grew up going to the Stage Deli and the Stork Club. My father, who sold millinery in the garment district and was president of his temple, took me to Madison Square Garden, Murray’s Sturgeon Palace, Barney Greengrass, the Polo Grounds. I went with him to Fifty-second Street, where his friends from Harlem, the connected guys, owned the jazz clubs in which you could hear music like nowhere else in the city.

My uncle Jack Pearl was a successful comedian who’d been with the Ziegfeld Follies and went by the name of the Baron Munchausen. He showed me Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, the Stork Club (where you could see Ethel Merman and Walter Winchell), the Harwyn—and Toots Shor’s. There I saw presidents, movie stars, ballplayers. Jackie Gleason. Joe DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Jack Benny. George Burns. My favorite spot was the Copacabana. I was comfortable around celebrities.

My friend Billy Rubin told me he thought I’d make a great agent and set me up with Lou Weiss, a cigar-smoking TV packager who handled NBC for William Morris. Weiss sent me to Sid Feinberg, a civil-servant type. His first question was “Can you type?”

I told him I’d learned in the army.

“Do you know anyone in show business?”

“Yes, my uncle.” He probably thought my uncle had set up the interview. He hadn’t.

Feinberg said, “You’re terrific. There’s only one problem. You’re too old.”

“For what? I’m only twenty-four.”

“That’s too old to put up with the crap in the mailroom.”

Maybe he was testing me. I didn’t want to take no for an answer. I told him how much I loved and understood show business. “I can put up with anything,” I insisted. What I
didn’t
say was that I didn’t plan on staying in the mailroom long enough for my age or the crap to matter.

He said he’d call me.

I went home that night not knowing what to do next. To my surprise I had a message from Sid Feinberg. “You got the job.” I’d start on Monday, June 6, 1955. I still have my first paycheck. I made $38 a week—or $32.81 after taxes.

Good thing I wasn’t in it for the money. I got into show business for the thrill of it all, not the thrill of having it all.

MIKE ROSENFELD SR.:
I was born in 1934 in Philadelphia and grew up in a pretty much all-Jewish neighborhood called Strawberry Mansion. My dad was a state senator for eight years. When my parents could finally afford it, we moved out to the Main Line. I went to Penn State as a music major and put on two shows a year.

Eventually I graduated, got married, and moved to a dump on Eighty-seventh and Amsterdam in Manhattan. I knew I had talent, but I began to wonder if I had
enough
talent. By then my dad had passed away and I didn’t have him to talk to about it. I figured I should probably get a job. Two close friends had a friend, Sid Kalcheim, whose father and uncle, Harry and Nat Kalcheim, were at William Morris.

Nat Lefkowitz interviewed me. He said, “You’re married, your wife’s pregnant, you’re a college graduate. Are you sure you want to do this?” Good question. I didn’t really want to be an agent. I thought it was pretty much a piece-of-shit job: forty dollars a week to deliver mail and schlepp stuff around town in the snow. But I have no regrets. I do things for a reason and I don’t look back. That’s how—twenty years later—Ovitz, Meyer, Perkins, Haber, and I started CAA.

MARTY LITKE:
I graduated from Brooklyn College with a B.A. in speech and theater and English, but I wasn’t clear about what to do next. So I pushed my draft up to get it over with but forgot that I’d had rheumatic fever. The doctors told me to go home. My uncle was a critic for the
New York Times
. He said, “You’ve always been interested in the business”—I used to discuss his reviews with him—“so why don’t you go work in an agency?” He said I should apply to the biggest one, William Morris.

HARRY UFLAND:
I played baseball in the army and at one time thought I’d go pro for the Yankees. But when I left the service in 1958, I applied to CBS and to William Morris because I had this big fantasy about being a producer. I had already worked in the Paramount mailroom for a couple of summers, because my aunt, who worked for the Shuberts, had arranged an introduction. CBS and William Morris both asked me to start in their training programs. I chose the Morris office because after being in the army, I liked that you didn’t have to get in until ten o’clock.

BRILLSTEIN:
A few years earlier the Morris office had moved to 1740 Broadway, in the Mutual of New York Building. It took up one square block between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth. The Park Sheraton Hotel was behind it; Jackie Gleason had a triplex apartment there. Sometimes the William Morris guys met after work in the hotel bar, which was right next to the barbershop where, in 1957, Albert Anastasia of Murder, Inc. was killed in a mob hit.

Everything that mattered was in the neighborhood. ABC was on Sixty-sixth Street. NBC was at Fiftieth and Sixth Avenue. CBS was at 485 Madison. Radio City Music Hall was at Fifty-first and Sixth. Both the
Ed Sullivan Show
and the
Jackie Gleason Show
were broadcast from the Ed Sullivan Theater (then called CBS Fifty-third Street, now home to David Letterman’s show) on Fifty-third and Seventh. Steve Allen’s Sunday program came from the Colonial Theater, at Sixty-sixth and Broadway, which is now Lincoln Center.

The Stork Club was at Fifty-second, off Fifth. Toots Shor’s was at Fifty-first, between Sixth and Fifth. Food: The Stage Deli was on Seventh Avenue, between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-third; the Carnegie Deli was between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-fourth, but the Stage was more popular. Danny’s Hideaway was on Forty-sixth, between Lexington and Park Avenues. Los Angeles Scala was at Fifty-fourth and Seventh. We’d eat there Fridays because we got paid—that is, if we had any money left over after the lazy Friday-afternoon floating craps games at work.

In other words, the show business life was all encompassing. There was something for everybody.

SHAPIRO:
I walked into 1740 Broadway on my first day, wearing a suit and tie, and looked around the lobby. There were two sets of elevators, and nearby on the wall was the building directory. I stared up at the names of all the agents and visualized my own there. They were listed alphabetically. One agent was named Sol Shapiro. I thought, Soon my name is gonna be just above Sol Shapiro’s. That was a big thing for a kid from the Bronx. Every day I’d walk in, look up at the names, and imagine.

BRILLSTEIN:
My first day I wore a suit—my only suit—a tie, and a white shirt. Sid Feinberg told me, “Your object is to get out of the mailroom and become an agent’s secretary. Not all of you will succeed. It’s up to you.” At first I was a bit nervous, but after a couple of days it was just like being in basic training: I knew everyone, we were all pals, and I couldn’t remember being any other place.

LITKE:
Feinberg explained that if we wanted to work for an agent, we’d have to take typing and shorthand lessons.

BRILLSTEIN:
Every morning from 6 to 8 A.M. I went to Sadie Brown’s Collegiate Secretarial Institute. But all Sadie wanted to do was fix me up with the rich Jewish girls and yentas who went there. Even worse, William Morris wouldn’t pay for it, so I had to foot the bill.

SHAPIRO:
Lucky for me, when I was in high school, my mother had said, “Typing always comes in handy.” So I had a little step up. But I didn’t have shorthand. Bernie Brillstein recommended I go to Sadie Brown’s. Fortunately the GI Bill of Rights gave me an allotment of one hundred dollars a month while going to school, and Sadie Brown’s was fifty dollars a month, so I had fifty dollars left over in addition to my thirty-eight-dollar-a-week salary, which enabled me to eat.

BRILLSTEIN:
There were other ways to get by. Sometimes managers would send their clients’ record albums to the Morris office. We’d clip them and take them to the record store, where the exchange rate was eight promotional copies for one new record. But we did that for records, not money. That would have been stealing [
laughs
].

BRILLSTEIN:
A young black guy, Lloyd Alene, ran the mailroom and had a little office inside, surrounded by smoked glass. Along the wall were mailboxes and shelves. Our mail carts were like little metal shopping carts with file folders labeled for every agent and executive. Each floor had its own cart. Our routine was simple. Each employee had a mailbox; when the mail came, we put it in the right slot. Three times a day we’d deliver whatever was in the slots and collect outgoing mail, pushing our carts down the hallways. At first I tagged along with a couple of more-experienced guys. Because I had a college degree, I remember thinking, Oh, how thrilling.