The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (12 page)

After the navy and L.A. City College I worked part-time in the parking lot of the El Dorado Restaurant. One lunchtime a convertible rolled in with a beautiful blonde in the passenger seat. I realized I’d gone to high school with the driver. I thought, Christ, that’s fantastic. I asked him what he did, and he said he’d become an agent. I didn’t know about agents, but I immediately asked, “What can you do for me?”

BOB SHAPIRO:
After college I just wanted to get a job, so I applied at MCA and William Morris. My father, Danny Shapiro, a comedy writer for Bob Hope and
The Jackie Gleason Show
, was represented by Morris. Big agents like Phil Weltman and Sammy Weisbord had been at my bar mitzvah.

I met at MCA with Earl Zook, then Lou Goldberg at the Morris office. I waited a couple of weeks for a call. Goldberg offered me a job on a Tuesday, and I took it. Zook called Wednesday. When I told him I’d taken the Morris job, he harrumphed.

I cleared $37.50 a week after taxes. Not great, even for 1959, but I was very excited. I had always loved
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
so I made sure I looked a little like that when I went in. At the Morris office the dress code was less stringent than at MCA, where a friend of mine had been sent home because he wore a Brooks Brothers seersucker suit in the summer.

RON DEBLASIO:
I knew I wanted something different from the life mine could easily have become. I’m Italian, from Providence, Rhode Island, son of a pharmacist. I thought going to California would be a way to escape all the predictable stuff. I told my family that after high school I was moving, with or without them. They decided to come, and in 1953 we moved to Pasadena. It was about as white bread as possible.

After college and the service I looked for work at a number of industrial outfits. They all said, “Okay, fine, you got the job. Come in on Tuesday, meet our regional boss.” But I’d always make some excuse and not go. I kept wondering: I’m ambitious, why don’t I want these jobs?

I took three days of tests—interests, aptitude, IQ—to find out. Afterward the adviser said, “You should be dealing with people. You could work insurance, advertising . . . but have you ever heard of MCA?”

I knew a guy from high school who worked in their mailroom. But his clique and my clique had been at odds. I took him out to lunch at Frescati’s. It was a big deal for me to humbly ask my rival if he could get me an interview. He confronted me with my sins of the past, but to my surprise he said he’d make a call.

At lunch I also happened to run into another guy, who, by chance, worked at the William Morris office. “What are you doing with
that
guy?” he asked. “William Morris is much better than MCA.”

“Just trying to get a job,” I said.

“Fuck that. You still living in Pasadena? What’s your number? I’ll call you.”

It was an early lesson: Politics were involved in even the social aspects of show business.

RON MARDIGIAN:
I went to Stanford in anticipation of going into medicine. Then the theater and the movies turned my head. I never performed, but I loved the production, the creation, the history. I transferred to UCLA, graduated in 1958, and went looking for a job. I was twenty-four, married, had one child. I lived in Glendale, in an apartment. Unfortunately, that was a depressed year for the entertainment industry. They just weren’t hiring. But a friend who worked for Paul Henning, who created
The Beverly Hillbillies,
said, “You look like an agent.” Whatever that meant. Maybe it was the dark suit I wore to interviews. He said, “Let me introduce you to someone.”

ROWLAND PERKINS:
I went to Beverly Hills High and was always interested in the entertainment business. I thought I wanted to be a producer, movies primarily. After college and the navy reserve I figured I’d give myself two years to get established. If not, I’d practice law.

My girlfriend’s best friend was going with William Bowers, a successful writer who’d won an Oscar. We became good friends, and I told him my plan. He said, “Look, you can always be a producer, but I think you’d be a good agent. And more important, it’s the best way to learn about the business.” I ended up with an appointment at MCA.

That evening I had a dinner with a friend and his aunt, Loretta Young. I told her what I was doing, and she said, “Did you talk to
my
agent at William Morris?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re
gonna
talk to him.” She picked up the phone right then and called Norman Brokaw at his house.

Both William Morris and MCA offered me jobs. I decided I’d be better off at the Morris office because I’d more easily fit into that culture. MCA was much more competitive by design. They pitted people against one another to see who’d survive. William Morris was supposedly more familial, and I wouldn’t have to spend all my time watching my back.

JOE WIZAN:
I am the only son in a Jewish family. My dad had a couple of retail furniture stores in East Los Angeles. He wanted me to take over the business. I hated it; I got such migraine headaches that I thought I had a brain tumor.

I graduated from UCLA in 1956 and went into the National Guard. There I met a young guy named Vic Friedman, who was in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency. Vic got me an interview. I never expected to be hired, because I didn’t know anybody, but it looked good until they asked me if I was married. When I said yes, they said they couldn’t hire me because they paid only forty-five dollars a week.

“Money is insignificant,” I said. “I have my own.” I wasn’t bullshit-ting. I had accumulated a vast sum playing poker in college. I mean a
vast
sum, especially for 1952. I didn’t have to work.

I bought a light gray sharkskin suit, a nice white shirt, and a black tie for my first day. Then I walked up the steps to 151 El Camino and became a different person: amazingly focused and very straight. No one there knew my poker-playing background. No one knew I loved practical jokes. This was work. This was it.

MARDIGIAN:
William Morris was very Jewish. I’m not, so I had to learn all the Yiddish stuff and become sort of baptized in that world. I’m joking about that, of course . . . but it was not unimportant to get the culture.

DEBLASIO:
One guy said, “Aren’t you a little intimidated? You’re a gentile.” I said, “Why? I’ve been around Jewish people, I understand them, they understand me.” There was no intimidation of that sort whatsoever.

MARDIGIAN:
The office was primarily men and primarily short. The story was that there was a rack of suits—thirty-six short—in the basement, and if you fit, you were in. Another joke going around at the time illustrates what I mean: In 1951, a few years before I started, Walter Wanger, a legendary producer who was married to the actress Joan Bennett, thought she was having an affair with Jennings Lang, her agent at MCA. Wanger saw Lang one Sunday in a parking lot in Beverly Hills, pulled out a gun, and shot him. He got Lang right in the nuts. The story was that Lang was left with only one ball, and I think that’s probably true. The joke made afterward was that had Wanger thought his wife was having an affair with Mr. Lastfogel, who ran the Morris office, Wanger would have shot him right between the eyes.

LIEBERSON:
We were all crammed into one room on the first floor, but we managed to get along, which was extraordinary because in those situations it can be very competitive and unpleasant.

PERKINS:
I didn’t come in until the end of the year, and some of the guys were six and seven months ahead of me. Ed Levy in Personnel told me that with rare exceptions people got promoted in chronological order. “It takes time,” he said. “You’ve got to be patient.” Plus no one had been promoted for a while, so the prospect of rapid advancement looked bleak. One guy in the last ten had made it to a desk. Then literally within two weeks five guys got fed up and quit, and William Morris was running around trying to find people. Some of the departures were, uh . . . calculated; other guys in the mailroom wanted these people out of the way, so they encouraged dissatisfaction: “You’re right. It’s taking too long. Why don’t you quit?”

DEBLASIO:
The mailroom was always about who would last. The idea was not to get discouraged and act stupid when some guy said, “This is bullshit. What are we doing this for?” I got the game early. Kill or be killed. If a guy said, “Gee, I have aspirations to be a comic,” even if he didn’t have any talent, I’d say, “Yeah, you’re really good. Keep at it.”

MARDIGIAN:
To get ahead you often had to be pushy and get in somebody’s face and promote yourself. The squeaky wheel got the grease, sometimes without even being competent. I wasn’t a goody-goody; I’d screw someone over to get a job if I had to, if I felt I was more qualified, but I never encouraged someone to quit so I could move up a notch.

DEBLASIO:
After I’d been in the mailroom awhile, I made an agreement with the switchboard that any calls that came in with no place to go—like someone looking for William Morris—would come to me. One day the switchboard buzzed and said, “Ron, here’s a doozy.” Turned out to be a guy who said he was a professor of economics at Harvard and he was in town with this political candidate and he needed help because he was afraid the candidate had blown his throat. He said, “You maybe have heard of him. He’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” I couldn’t believe it. I said I’d do whatever he needed, and rushed to meet him at the Shrine Auditorium. Backstage a guy stuck out his hand and said, “Hi. I’m Frank.” Sinatra. Sammy was also there. They were in their Vegas clothes. I was in my Brooks Brothers. I was so in heaven.

PERKINS:
It’s not necessary to be a Sammy Glick to succeed. In fact, you’re probably better off if you’re not. More Sammy Glicks bite the dust when they’re found out. Of those who survived, many quit being agents early; they got so far and then looked for good opportunities elsewhere. They didn’t really want to be agents; they just liked the business. More to the point, they liked the money.

MARDIGIAN:
The mailroom was Frances Lastfogel’s private collection of boys to take her around to the dressmaker, to the shops in Beverly Hills, to Hillcrest Country Club. We used agents’ cars or idle dispatch vehicles. I’d drop her off, and Mrs. Lastfogel would say, “Here’s a dollar, go have lunch. Pick me up when you get back.”

Mrs. Lastfogel loved
lavosh
—Armenian cracker bread—and when she found out I was Armenian, that became the basis of our relationship. She knew an Armenian bakery, so she’d always ask me to get her some bread. I liked to believe that our dumb connection was a help to me with her husband: “Hey, that Armenian kid, Abe; keep your eye on him.”

SHAPIRO:
Even though she wasn’t particularly forthcoming in terms of the specifics that I wanted to know about the company and people, we got along very well. When I dropped her off at the side entrance of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, she always leaned over and put a dollar bill in my jacket as a little tip.

Years later, when I ran William Morris’s London office, I’d come back to Los Angeles two or three times a year, and Mr. Lastfogel and Sammy Weisbord would always take me to Hillcrest for dinner. They didn’t like to bring wives, except that they both really liked my wife, so sometimes they’d invite her and Mrs. Lastfogel.

The first time this happened, I told my wife that she had to get to Hillcrest on her own because I had a meeting at Warner Brothers. I stopped at the office on the way back to dinner and found a message: Would I mind picking up Mrs. Lastfogel?

So the head of the London office drove to the side entrance of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Mrs. Lastfogel got in the car. She said, “Hello,” and we drove to Hillcrest. When she got out, she said, “Thank you,” then leaned over and put a dollar in my coat pocket.

The valet asked if he should park the car, but I couldn’t move. I sat there for a few minutes trying to figure out if this was a joke or she thought I was still in the mailroom. I
was
young; I had gone to London when I was only twenty-nine. When I finally went in, Mrs. Lastfogel just winked at me and smiled.

LIEBERSON:
Eleanor Flaherty worked for Mr. Lastfogel for about thirty years. She was a wonderful woman but also an alcoholic. It had gotten to the point where the afternoons were, for her, a dead loss. She really couldn’t handle it anymore. So she asked for me to sit in when she left at about four o’clock.

DEBLASIO:
Eleanor Flaherty’s relationship with Mr. Lastfogel was pretty much like that of his clients Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn on-screen—and though I have no evidence, maybe off. All I know is that they were very, very tight and there was some visible tension about it. Frances Lastfogel wouldn’t come to the office when Eleanor was working, which may be why Eleanor left early.

One day she walked into the photocopy room wearing a big smile and said, “You’re DeBlasio. You’re Catholic-Italian, aren’t you?”

I said, “Yes.”

She said, “Okay,” and left. I stood there scratching my head.