The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (16 page)

The only person I knew in California was George Shapiro. He was like my older brother. George said, “Listen—you’re a great hustler, you’d be a great agent. Lemme get you a job.” George brought me in to meet Phil Weltman. He liked me, but he knew I had a family. He said, “How are you gonna be able to do this?” George thought fast. “His father will send him twenty-five bucks a week.” That was it. The fifty dollars from William Morris and the twenty-five from my father made life livable. I gave my father’s money to my wife, and it was enough to buy food for five people to eat for a week.

STAN ROSENFIELD:
It seemed like there were three Jews in Oklahoma City, and they all lived on my block: Jay Bernstein, who became a huge publicist and manager; Alan Hirschfield, who eventually became president of Columbia Pictures; and me.

I was supposed to go be a stock underwriter. They’re far more edgy than brokers, and that appealed to me. But in May 1962, after I’d spent a year in a candidate program, the stock market took its worst dive since 1929, and the company said, “Nothing personal, but don’t come back.” With that I went to California, figuring as long as I didn’t have a job, I’d rather struggle there.

I lived in an apartment complex in Brentwood. I asked another tenant, Sandy Freidman, what he did. Sandy worked for a public relations company called Rogers and Cowan. Coincidentally, Jay Bernstein worked there. But PR had never seemed challenging or interesting, so I took a job at a computer accounting company. I’m sure they were all very nice people, but I couldn’t stand any of them. They fired me after three months.

I considered law school, then someone suggested ad agencies. But they were difficult to get into if you were Jewish. I sent out résumés anyway, got a couple of calls. During one interview the guy suggested I try a theatrical agency.

I called the Morris office, filled out an application, let it sit on my table for three weeks, sent it in. One day, just like in the movies, the phone rang. A woman said, “Mr. Rosenfield, this is Jackie Secaris from Ed Levy’s office.”

I couldn’t quite connect the dots. She said, “The William Morris Agency? You applied for a position in our training program? There is an opening. Would you like to come in?” Of course I would. She said, “Before you say yes, let me tell you that the job pays fifty-five dollars a week.”

I did the math. I took the job.

EBBINS:
I spent one summer in the basement Photostat room making copies. Some of the guys nicknamed me the Mole.

One day a very sexily dressed young woman came down and said she was looking for the Mole. She said Pat Rothkins, from the Acts Department, had sent her. Rothkins was a real character who booked nightclubs and Vegas. He’d been an agent since vaudeville.

I said, “What can I do for you?”

She came right out with it: “I want to interview Frank Sinatra.” She said Rothkins had told her the way to get to Sinatra was to get to me, in order to get to my dad, because my father and Frank were real close.

“Why?”

“I’m writing a book.”

“Oh.”

“And I will do anything to get you to help me.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

I was scared to death. Seventeen. Naive. Not exactly slick.

“Well . . . maybe we should, uh . . . have dinner or something,” I said.

God, I was pathetic.

We didn’t have dinner. In fact, nothing happened. When Rothkins asked me about it, he said, “Whaddaya mean, nothing happened? Whaddaya talkin’ about?
She was ready
. Kid, you blew it! I gave it to ya on a silver platter. What the fuck are ya doin’? Christ!”

EBBINS:
I tried college for one year and decided I wanted to work at the Morris office full-time. My dad was not happy. My argument was, “Hey, did
you
finish school? Did Abe Lastfogel finish school?” Being a summer camper wasn’t enough to get me in. I had to apply officially for the training program. Ed Levy and his assistant, Kathy Krugel, interviewed me. She had black hair, and she wore it up, well sprayed. We called her the Fly.

HARTMANN:
She was a wreck, hyper, everywhere all the time. Hence her nickname.

EBBINS:
The Fly was very straitlaced. We acted like we lived in a frat house. We made fun and terrorized her, down to throwing spitballs. Amazingly, the Fly secretly married a guy from the mailroom, Tom Krugel, and that caused some scandal. I have a vague picture of Tom as lanky and goofy.

ROSENFIELD:
I was already gone when she married Tom, but I remember he was there when we would blast her, and he wouldn’t say a word. Before that, I think the Fly actually lived with her mother, but she’d be the type who would. I remember looking for something in her drawer one day, and I came across a little notebook with entries that read “Tom Krugel was late today” and “Gary Ebbins was late getting back.” Kathy had an artificial, saccharine quality, and nothing could faze her. She probably was so repressed that . . . nah. I don’t need a visit from Tom Krugel. If he was nuts enough to marry her, he’s nuts enough to come after me.

HARTMANN:
The guy hired just before me was Barry Diller. Diller was kind of introverted,
seemingly
cold, kind of sarcastic—as he’s remained. But he and I were close for some reason. I could befriend anyone.

EBBINS:
You had to be conservative at the Morris office. You could wear only blue or gray suits, and a sport jacket on Fridays. People shopped at Sy Devore, in Hollywood, and Tavelman’s, an upscale Sy Devore in Beverly Hills. Diller prided himself on wearing clothes from Tavelman’s. Who bought clothes from Tavelman’s? Bankers.

HARTMANN:
The guy hired before Diller was Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day. Melcher was the spoiled brat of the group. He didn’t have to do the grunt work like we did. He was anointed keeper of the film room instead. We were peons, but he had his own little office, where all the kinescopes were stored, and a desk. We had to be there at nine o’clock, but he could come waltzing in at ten-thirty with his coffee and doughnut because there were morning meetings in the conference room, so nobody could watch films earlier. Melcher’s habit was to sit in his office with his shoes off. If he had to get up, he’d slip them on and walk away. But not always. Once, he was out of the office in only his socks. Rumor has it that Barry Diller sneaked in and glued Melcher’s shoes to the floor.

DILLER:
Not true. It wasn’t me.

HARTMANN:
That was a rare practical joke. The William Morris mailroom was very much like West Point or freshman year at Harvard Law School. No one wanted to do anything that could get him into trouble, because it was very easy to get dumped. Guys were cut all the time. The other big concern was keeping your place in the lineup so that nobody got out of the mailroom before you. I remember being so paranoid when Larry Fitzgerald was hired. We were afraid he was somehow related to JFK and would pass us all.

NANAS:
I used to go to lunch with mailroom guys who’d been there longer than me and try to convince them to quit. I told this one dope who’d been around three years: “You got a fucking Ph.D. in philosophy? You know what a stupid business this is? If I had that degree, I’d be out . . .” I worked him. “What are you gonna do, stay here for twenty-two years? I have no choice, but you . . .”

HARTMANN:
I had a different agenda. The mailroom guy may be the lowest-paid in the building, but he still has infinite potential. There’s a certain power and prestige in the possibility that he could run things one day. It made me feel like I had class, that I was somebody. I wanted everybody on my team because just by looking at who else was there with me, I figured I could win it all. I was handsome, intelligent, and charming. For obvious reasons I didn’t announce my candidacy for greatness, but it was the first time I’d ever been so totally confident. I could be
Hartmann,
and everybody would buy it.

DILLER:
My first day on the job I was so excited, it was like being blown out of a cannon. The only game I played was how to spend the least time on mail runs and the most time reading the files. My great strategy was to take what was seen as the worst job in the building— photocopying—in the worst place in the building, the dank basement, in a little room with the machines and a big, comfortable chair. I’d collect things to copy, along with as much of the file room as I could carry, and hole myself up for most of the day reading through the history of the entertainment business as seen through every deal, every development, every contract: for Elvis Presley, Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Garson Kanin, James Michener. I mean, you go to college to read, and that’s what I did at William Morris. I read their entire file room. It took me three years. I didn’t care whether I was noticed as much as I cared about learning as much as I could every day.

NANAS:
The routine was that every few days you had to come in at six o’clock in the morning to sort the mailbags. We rotated. I went to the head of the mailroom and said, “I’ll do it every day, and the other guys won’t have to. Would you pay me overtime?” For some reason he agreed.

The first morning, at ten to seven, Phil Weltman came walking in. We said, “Good morning,” then he went to his office. A half hour later he came back and checked his mail. The second morning there he was again. The third day, same thing. Then I figured out the game. The fourth day I came in at five-thirty in the morning, went through hundreds of fucking letters, and as he walked by I said, “Here’s your mail, Mr. Weltman.” He looked at me and said, “Oh, thanks.”

Bingo. From then on, every morning,
bang,
the mail was in his hand. That was the beginning of our relationship.

At the end of every day I’d walk around the building and introduce myself to every agent. “Hey, how ya doin’? I’m Herbie Nanas, I’m in the mailroom. Can I hang out? Can I sit on your couch and listen to you?” Put me in a room with three strangers, and I’ll be the one who talks. Weltman used to tell me to relax, but I was driven.

HARTMANN:
I charmed the secretaries. Dated some. They can make you or break you. One of them was Regis Philbin’s current wife, Joy. She was a wonderful girl.

FITZGERALD:
William Morris considered itself a family, and the mailroom was where that sensibility first took hold. It mirrored the entertainment world on a smaller scale. Everyone knows it’s a closed little unit, hard to get into, and there’s a real bond between people. The mailroom was my fraternity, and through it I established friendships that have lasted forever.

EBBINS:
Larry Fitzgerald, Hartmann, and I rented a house together in Laurel Canyon. This gets fuzzy—maybe Hartmann and I lived in one house, and then Fitzgerald and I lived in a different house. Anyway, I was a pot smoker in those days—which probably explains the fuzziness—and knew a gal named Arlene who booked the acts at the Whisky A Go-Go. One night we were up at the house Hartmann and I shared, and I had a little bit of grass in a plastic bag, hidden in a shoe. I said, “John, want to smoke some?”

Hartmann freaked out: “You’ve got to get rid of that. You’re going to ruin my career. You cannot smoke that shit. If anybody found out, we’d get fired.”

I rolled a joint anyway, then Arlene sat on Hartmann’s chest and forced him to inhale. He’d never done anything like it in his life; his biggest vice was buying ten dollars’ worth of candy at a drugstore before we went to the movies, because it was cheaper.

NANAS:
I saw John Hartmann go to the fucking Twilight Zone. I sat with him in a room one day on an acid trip. I actually watched his brain leave his head. He said, “I’m going!” and was never the same ever again.

MCLEAN:
I bonded with Gary Ebbins immediately. I hung out at his parents’ house. We both loved the music business, and while we were in the mailroom, we put together a proposal to take over Twentieth Century Fox’s dormant record label. We labored over it and were really proud of it. I bet we could have turned that label into something, but when it came to music, William Morris often said no.

One Friday night I had just cashed my forty-dollar paycheck. I went to a poker game and got shit-faced drunk. I lost all forty dollars in five minutes. I got up from the table and walked out through some French doors but forgot I was on the second floor. I fell off the balcony, hit a lamppost, and fractured my clavicle.

I remembered that Larry Fitzgerald had been a corpsman in the navy. God knows how I didn’t kill somebody in the car, but I drove up to Ebbins and Fitzgerald’s house, still shit-faced, knocked on the door, and said, “You guys gotta help me.” They took me to UCLA. I was the happy drunk—until they set my shoulder. They said they heard me scream all the way out in ER reception.

Afterward they put me in one of their bedrooms at home. I snored so loud that I kept the whole house up. That they still fucking speak to me proves what good friends we are.