The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (19 page)

BARRY DILLER
is currently chairman and CEO of the Universal entertainment group, with responsibility for Universal Studios, the film and TV operations, and theme parks. He is also chairman and CEO of USA Interactive. Diller has headed Paramount and Fox, invented TV’s “movie of the week,” and generally made a name for himself in show business.

JOHN HARTMANN
has worn many hats, from high-powered talent manager to his current job as president of Topanga Pictures.

GARY EBBINS
is a personal manager, representing country singer and actor Dwight Yoakam.

MICHAEL MCLEAN
spent twenty years as a casting director and counts among his credits
The Sound of Music, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid, Patton,
and numerous other movies. He is also a personal manager for talent that includes Dennis Hopper, Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens, Armand Assante, Nicole Kidman, and Peta Wilson, as well as the late musician-songwriter John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas.

LARRY FITZGERALD
is president of the Fitzgerald Hartley Company, based in Nashville, a management firm that represents country star Vince Gill among others. They are also involved in music, TV, and film production.

HERB NANAS
is president of Mores/Nanas/Hart Entertainment. He produces films and manages actors.

STAN ROSENFIELD
is the owner and president of Stan Rosenfield and Associates, “the entertainment industry’s leading—if not the best—public relations company.”

EVERYBODY LOVES RONNIE

Paul Kohner Agency, Los Angeles, 1963

RON MEYER

I’ve lived my whole life in Los Angeles. My house was on Pandora, a narrow little street off Beverly Glen, near the Twentieth Century Fox studios. In those days Fox extended as far north as Little Santa Monica Boulevard and covered all of where Century City is now. It was a huge back lot and an extraordinary place. When they filmed a movie, I could see the lights from my house. If it was a war movie, I could hear the explosions.

On weekends, when I was probably twelve or thirteen—this was 1956—friends and I would climb over or under the Fox fence, or get clippers and cut a hole in it, and wander around the lot. I guess that’s where my interest in the entertainment business started, except for two things: I didn’t really know about the business part, and I didn’t go to the movies much because we couldn’t afford it. My father was a traveling dress salesman. My mom was basically a housewife. They came from Germany, and although they were fascinated with movie stars, the closest we got were telethons sometimes held at the Carthage Circle Theater, on Olympic near Crescent Heights. I’d go with my father to get autographs.

When I was seventeen I joined the Marine Corps. At some point I got the measles and was quarantined. To pass the time, my father sent me a couple of books to read, and both had a great influence on me.

The first was
The Amboy Dukes,
about that era’s version of street gangs. They were certainly nothing like gangs today, so I don’t mean to glamorize, but I
was
one of those guys: a high school dropout who thought he was tough and was always in trouble. I related to the torn jeans and the fighting.

The other book,
The Flesh Peddlers,
by Stephen Longstreet, was a story about a young guy in the talent agency business. He drove a fast car, worked for a fictitious company called COK—for Company of Kings—like William Morris or MCA, made big money, and lived a glamorous life. It took place a little after the
What Makes Sammy Run?
era, but the stories were different. Sammy Glick was not an attractive character to me; this kid was. I don’t remember how the book ends anymore
¹
, but what impressed me then was that the entertainment business seemed like a way for me to make a buck. When I got out of the marines in 1963, I went looking for a show business job. I combed through the yellow pages and went to every agency, literally door-to-door, in my one suit, which didn’t fit very well, saying I’d just gotten out of the service, hoping people would relate to me. No one would hire me.

In the meantime I had to make money, so I sold shoes, was a short-order cook, cleaned duplicating machines. I was selling suits at Zeidler and Zeidler when a friend of a friend’s in-law got me an interview with Walter Kohner, the brother of Paul Kohner, who had his own talent agency. Kohner was a small company on Sunset Boulevard; they represented Lana Turner, Charles Boyer, Maurice Chevalier, William Wyler, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Ursula Andress, Charles Bronson. In other words, he was a premier international agent with a great list.

Walter Kohner was very nice, but he said, “We already have a young guy who’s been working with us for many years.” I said I’d clean toilets, whatever there was to do. The kid in
The Flesh Peddlers
had inspired me with a vision, and I just wanted to be in show business. But when Kohner said no, then
everybody
had said no, and I thought it was over with.

Maybe a month later, out of the blue, Walter Kohner called me. He said he’d remembered “a guy named Ron” who worked at Zeidler and

Zeidler. Kohner didn’t recall how he’d met me, but he said that their mailroom guy had just quit and they needed someone desperately. Did I want the job? Kohner offered me sixty-five bucks a week and said they’d pay for my lunch. I couldn’t believe it. I was working on commission and made probably thirty bucks a week. I lived in an apartment that cost fifty bucks a month, and made my rent by saving my lunch money. That was on a Friday. I quit on the spot and started at Kohner on Monday.

From early in the morning until late at night, sometimes seven days a week, I did everything. Mailroom. Messenger. Kohner had a Cadillac; he’d get in the back, and I’d drive him everywhere. Once, I drove him to Cuernavaca, Mexico. When Kohner left town and needed someone to house-sit, I did it. I walked his secretary’s dog every day. I was a switchboard operator. I drove around picking up checks. I delivered scripts. I got people at the airport and took packages there, like the first Federal Express courier. There were no metal detectors, so I’d walk to the plane and explain that I was a messenger for a theatrical agency and that if they would take the script to Europe, someone for Maurice Chevalier or Charles Boyer, or whoever, would pick it up on the other end. I’d say they could read the script and see that it wasn’t contraband.

In other words, I did whatever job they wanted done. There was never any thought of
my
life. But I had a great time. Part of it was good people skills. I could talk to anyone, like my father the salesman. But I was also very protective; I would never do anything over the edge. The clients knew they could depend on me. I became well known within the agency as the go-to person.

My direct boss was Kohner’s secretary, Irene Heyman. She was a really tough taskmaster. When I did something wrong, she’d yell at me, embarrass me, like a drill instructor who could reduce someone to tears.

After I’d been at Kohner about three years—and was still the lowest-paid person—I had a meltdown. As Irene shrieked at me about something I finally broke and said, “Take this job and stick it up your ass. Go fuck yourself.” I believed the office couldn’t live without me because I was the best messenger on the planet. I could do alone what years later it took the entire CAA mailroom to do.

I had said it loud enough so that everyone in the place heard me . . . because what I really wanted was someone to run up to me and tell me they loved me. No one did. So I got up, grabbed my coat, and walked out onto Sunset Boulevard. I lingered, waiting for someone to come out and apologize, to give me a raise, to beg me to stay—you know, change my life. Nobody came. I started walking slowly to my car in the Schwabb’s parking lot. Still no one came. I waited by my car for a half hour. Nobody came.
Nobody came
. I got scared. I realized that they weren’t concerned about my coming back. They’d just hire somebody else. Apparently only
I
thought I was brilliant and that they couldn’t live without me.

I was at a crossroads: either get another job or go back—if they’d even take me. I went back. Irene was still at her desk. I started filing again, like nothing had ever happened—and that was that.

They just let it go.

I’d been at Kohner four years when I decided I couldn’t do the same job forever. Kohner had said to me, “You’ll be an agent here,” but I knew the reality. There were two parts of the agency: Kohner and his great clients, and his brother and Carl Forrest, who worked on commission. They had to represent a great assortment of people in order to make money, mostly European actors who did day parts. I really didn’t know where I’d fit in.

I said, “If I’m going to be an agent, I’ve got to have somebody doing my job,” and I convinced them to let me bring in another person to work in the mailroom under me, to free me up to be part mailboy, part messenger, part agent. Robert Stein was a friend. Our families were very close; also European, similar background. He’s with William Morris now.

My career as an agent there never turned into much, as I’d always known. If I wanted to grow, I had to leave. But I was afraid. It’s like that joke about the circus guy cleaning up after the elephants. They say, “If you hate it so much, why do you do it?” He says, “What, and get out of show business?” But I couldn’t shake myself loose. I was living well, making seventy-five bucks a week and a free lunch; I even met girls at the medical center next door. In many ways it was paradise. But the handwriting was on the wall, so I looked for opportunities. I wanted to work at CMA, but they weren’t interested. Then I wanted William Morris. I knew a guy there, Paul Flaherty, a publicist and a very nice fellow who I used to see at the studios when I picked up checks. He was an agent. I begged him to get me an interview. He set up a meeting that started a dialogue between me and Phil Weltman. For my whole life I’ll be grateful.

Over a six-month period Phil and I met often. They had never hired anyone from the outside to be an agent, but in 1969 he took me on as a talent agent in the TV Guest-Shot Department.

Once I was in, I thought I would spend the rest of my career there. I really believed that. It was a big, powerful agency, an institution, and it felt like I had found a place where I could grow.

Phil Weltman was an extraordinary guy, an amazing man. He loved the agency business. He was tough on me, too—but not like Irene. His heart and soul were into nurturing young people. That’s nurturing in the truest way. I learned a lot from Kohner, but he didn’t mentor me. He was not a guy to sit and teach; you had to pick it up wherever you could. Phil and I spent a lot of time together and became very close. We even went to baseball games. It was very much father and son—though it was always “Mr. Weltman,” even at the ball games. If my hair got too long, he’d send me home and say, “Don’t come back until your hair is cut.” I had to wear a suit and tie every day.

To the day he died we had a connection. It was just one of those things. I guess we just loved each other. He certainly gave me great confidence in myself and in my ability to succeed.

At Kohner I’d been to “agent college” for six years and gotten a real education. I completely understood the agent’s role and the agent’s responsibility, and I knew my way around town. I knew what to do and what not to do. But that didn’t qualify me to
be
an agent. It’s hard to say what makes someone qualified. There’s much more to it than just knowing the lingo and knowing your way. The joke is that agents have no soul. But in truth, to be a good agent, you have to have a lot of soul. You don’t get that in the mailroom. You either have it or you don’t have it. If you’re a bum, you’re a bum all the time. To really be successful and do it right, you have to care seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. There are a lot of good deal makers; there are not a lot of people who are good at caring. You don’t grow into caring.

Kohner was never political; the Morris office was, and by the time I realized how much so, I understood I’d never win and I had to get out of there. I had started disliking people I worked with. I didn’t like the way Sam Weisbord treated Phil Weltman. Yet I didn’t want to go out on my own, so in 1974 I convinced Mike Ovitz that he and I should start a company—Creative Artists Agency. With Mike Rosenfeld, Rowland Perkins, and Bill Haber there were five of us, so it wasn’t very complicated. The first office was in what they called the Hong Kong Bank building, on Wilshire and Rexford. We had five offices and a conference room, and a little closet as a mailroom. Mike Menchel was our first full-time trainee.

I was important in developing the philosophy behind the service CAA required and expected. People had to be honest and work hard and to care. Nothing very complicated, unless you don’t have those qualities. I used to tell people in the mailroom that assumption is the mother of all fuckups, and if you fuck up, you’ll be judged on that much more than the work you do. For instance, suppose your boss tells you, “Get me a tuna on rye with ketchup, and get it from Louis’s Deli. I get the same sandwich every day.” When you get there Louis is standing at the door saying, “Here it is!” You’d better open it and peek in and make sure there’s ketchup, because if you assume that Louis did what he’s supposed to do—which most of the time he doesn’t; most people don’t—and you bring it back and it’s got mayonnaise—which is what people usually put on tuna sandwiches—your boss isn’t going to blame Louis. He’s going to think you’re an idiot.