The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (22 page)

After I was at William Morris a week or two, the guy who had showed me around got fired. I knew how much he loved the job, so I asked him what he’d done. “I made up that I’d gone to CCNY [City College of New York],” he said. “The company checked my references.”

I got a pit in my stomach. I thought, Oh, shit. So I came in early every day for six months, until all the letters had arrived from the places they had written, asking for my references. I steamed open the envelopes from UCLA and CBS, who said they’d never heard of me, and substituted confirmations and recommendations on fake stationery that I’d had made up at a printer.

SHUKAT:
David Geffen told me he needed only one sheet of UCLA stationery, but the printer wouldn’t do less than a gross. But David would pay whatever he had to in order to get that one sheet so that he could send it to his brother in California and have it sent it back with a Los Angeles postmark: “Mr. Geffen graduated . . .” I remember being stunned that anybody had that kind of nerve, both to lie
and
to be so resourceful.

GEFFEN:
I never gave a shit if anyone understood or thought it was a bad thing. My intentions then were simple: I was happy to do whatever I had to do to keep the job. What’s more, when I became successful at William Morris, I
told
them the truth: that I had never graduated from UCLA.
I told the secret; I informed them
. So it’s not something somebody unearthed about me. And I’ve continued to tell the story for this reason: People say, “Oh, his entire career is based on a fraud.” That’s such nonsense. If
only
you could make it by lying about your past history,
everybody
would make it. No. You make it because you either have the ability or you do not. Without having a college degree, I couldn’t have gotten in the door. I needed to get in the door.

ROBERTS:
David also came up with steaming open other mail at 6 A.M. to see who was doing what to whom, then resealing it and delivering it. We all did it.

SHUKAT:
Unlike David Geffen and others, I didn’t open the mail. It would have been against the way I operated on a human level. I think David referred to me as a Boy Scout, but there’s no shame in operating the way you think the people who are paying you expect you to operate.

GEFFEN:
I don’t think the rules of ambition have changed. If you want to succeed, you’d better not care too much about what other people think about what you’re doing. I
was
ambitious. Some people thought, Who is this guy? He didn’t go to college. He’s short and ordinary-looking.
How dare he!
But that some people were put off did not deter me. I was, of course,
surrounded
by other ambitious people—the very ones complaining—and the only difference between me and them was our willingness to display our ambitions. That’s like life, isn’t it?

However, I did think I’d figured out the game: The people who did the best were those who
signed
the artists, rather than just
booked
them. I decided to be a signer. Starting in the mailroom, I spent a lot of time going out and looking at talent. It was kind of cool to be able to go to clubs and say, “David Geffen, William Morris Agency,” and just get right in. I loved that.

ROBERTS:
The music drew us together. We had group dinners, would go to Hal Ray’s or David’s apartment. Larry Kurzon and Jay Jacobs came, too. Our whole social life was based around the business we were learning. I lived in the East Village on Seventh, between A and B, and we’d go to the different cool clubs. We could get high, hit eight or nine acts every night. We didn’t have William Morris business cards, but the doormen and owners knew who we were. We were young, single, aggressive guys.

GEFFEN:
I also tried to become friendly with everyone I could, like Hal Ray and David Krebs, who were in the mailroom with me. I was also friends with Elliot Roberts, with whom I later went into business; we’ve now been friends for thirty-seven years. I was also friendly with Larry Kurzon, who was already an agent, as well as Jerry Brandt and Steve Leber in the Music Department. I did the best I could to engage as many people as I could so I could learn as much as I could. Some responded negatively; some asked me to come into their office and sit down. Some thought it was wrong for a guy in the mailroom to socialize across “class” lines, but I wanted to know and become friendly with the people I thought would be important to my career. Some didn’t want to know me, so I forgot about those people. I stuck where I found a warm welcome. That’s hardly unique.

For instance, I wanted to get to know Nat Lefkowitz, who was head of the New York office. I quickly learned that he came in on Saturdays, so I came in every Saturday and would have lunch with him. Why?
Because he would always ask whoever was there to have lunch with him
. I certainly wasn’t the only person who tried to create a relationship with him, but had somebody suggested that I
not
try to get to know Nat Lefkowitz because it wasn’t proper, that wouldn’t have made any difference. I made the effort and I succeeded, and Nat Lefkowitz was extraordinarily nice to me. In fact, it seemed to me that the people I admired the most were not that difficult to get to know. I did it because I quickly figured out that if I was going to be an agent, the one ability I’d
better
have is to create relationships. It isn’t about how tall you are or how good-looking you are or whether or not you can play football. It’s about whether you can
create a relationship
.

SHUKAT:
The other guys used to hang out after work, have a drink, dinner, stay up until the middle of the night. I didn’t socialize. I had no time. I was married. Sometimes the guys—David—would call and wake me up because they were sitting around drinking. They enjoyed teasing me. But it stopped. The morning after one call I went into David’s office and I said, “It doesn’t matter what happens to me. You call me ever again, I will throw you right through the plate-glass window, physically.” His office was on the thirty-third floor, facing east. And the windows in the building
weren’t
designed to open.

ROBERTS:
A lot of people didn’t like Scott Shukat. We thought he was the kind of guy who treated his assistant and the mailroom people with disdain. He thought they were spoiled brats. Jeff Wald was into pranks, and we’d hide in the office until we knew everyone was gone. Then we’d go into Scott’s office and pee in his plants. There was this urine stench in his office all the time, and he never could understand what it was.

WALD:
He said that Abe Lastfogel had given him the plant. What that really meant was that when Abe Lastfogel visited the New York office, somebody gave him a plant he had no use for. He handed it to the first guy who walked by, said, “Here, do you want this?” It could just as easily have been the janitor, but it made Shukat feel important. He gave me detailed instructions to feed and water this plant, but when he was gone, the first thing I did was piss in the pot. Regularly. I think I even stabbed it with a letter opener.

SHUKAT:
I got out of the mailroom in three months. Dennis Paget was promoted to Ben Griefer’s assistant, and I got to be Griefer’s secretary. When Dennis became an agent, I became Griefer’s assistant. Again he needed a new secretary. He told me, “Get someone from the mailroom.”

I chose David Geffen. I first noticed David delivering the mail. He made sure people got to know him. He stood out from the gang. Something about him was different. It’s the same reason Dennis picked me. Working with David wasn’t especially remarkable, though, except when I’d find him at eight or nine o’clock at night on the WATS line, talking to John Hartmann, an agent in the Los Angeles office. I wondered, What is going on here?

GEFFEN:
I wanted to work in the Movie Department. Griefer was in the talent area, a booker for TV variety shows. But I didn’t want to stay in the mailroom any longer than I had to, so when I was assigned to Griefer’s desk, I took it. But I quickly got the sense that Scott Shukat genuinely disliked me and didn’t want me around. He constantly tried to make Ben Griefer not like me, too. At some point he succeeded.

SHUKAT:
We—Griefer and I—were buyers. We bought talent for the Jimmy Dean and Sammy Davis Jr. shows, for
Sing Along with Mitch
. You could say to the agent you were buying from, “Why don’t you send me a list of your clients so we can talk it over with the show’s producers?” and they’d send it. We kept these lists in a file cabinet and once or twice a year got a phone call from Nat Lefkowitz: “Let’s take a look at other people’s clients. Is there anybody vulnerable? Anybody they’re not doing the job for?” One day, to get ready for the call, Ben told me to get the lists. I couldn’t find them. Everything was gone. I turned around and there was David, blathering. I said, “Oh, my God. What did you do with the lists?”

He said, “I brought them to Nat Lefkowitz.”

I immediately went to Griefer and told him. I was really embarrassed.

GEFFEN:
That’s all nonsense. Nat Lefkowitz already had every list there was. Why would I think, I’m giving this list to Nat Lefkowitz so that he’ll think good of me? It’s a silly story.

Still, the turmoil Shukat made created a lot of problems for Ben Griefer, and so he fired me. I went to Nat Lefkowitz and begged him not to let me go, and he instantly agreed to transfer me to another office. Why? Because I had previously created a relationship with him. It was not possible, finally, for Scott Shukat and Ben Griefer to get rid of me, which is what they wanted to do.

SHUKAT:
Nat assigned David to Arnold Sank’s desk, where he flourished. I think David played the son thing with Nat; it was always his card.

GEFFEN:
Nat Lefkowitz was smart. I mean, what’s the bottom line of this story? He kept me, and I turned out to be one of the most successful people that had ever come through the William Morris Agency. Scott Shukat and Ben Griefer . . . they had their careers; I had mine. What can I say? If I were Scott Shukat and I felt that I had not reached the level of success that I had hoped for myself, I might be bitter, too. The problem is that the message there is “If I am willing to be as much of a scumbag as this guy, I, too, could be successful. But
I
[Shukat] am a good person.
He
[Geffen] is a piece of shit, that’s why he succeeded.” Again, nonsense.

People of a certain level of ability and accomplishment are threatened by people who seem to have more fire and more charisma, more of whatever it takes to make it. They sense it and they’re afraid of it. Then what they want to do is kill you. My transparent ambition antagonized Scott Shukat tremendously. He found it threatening. But my friends didn’t resent what I did; they never treated me any differently. I wasn’t the leader. I was an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances who lived it one day at a time. We all wanted to make it in the areas we were interested in. We all rooted for one another. But everybody’s writing his own movie, I guess.

ROBERTS:
Everyone at William Morris knew that David Geffen was the rising star. David had this incredible mind and great focus. He was sensitive yet aggressive, and already mythic. But he was also a regular guy. He was a role model for us and the class after him. We all learned from watching what happened to David, and we all emulated what we thought was the best way to get what David got. It was pointless to be intimidated by him, because he was so good that it was never a matter of burying him; you weren’t going to. You’d only bury yourself if you tried to bury him. David and I were close friends right off the bat. He turned me on to Buffy Sainte-Marie, which is how I met Joni Mitchell, and started my career. Later I partnered with David, and we were, for a time, the most successful personal managers in the world.

KREBS:
My mailroom stay was no more than a couple of months. I took an assistant job in Business Affairs. Four years later I told the company that unless they made me an actual agent, I’d leave. They agreed. I’m sure they were surprised when I chose the Rock Music Department. It was the lowest of the low at the agency. Rock was the stepchild. It was, “Why would you do that?” Here’s the answer: It was a brand-new field that had only one step. You were either an agent in the department or the agent who
ran
it. There were no other layers. To have any real power in the other departments, you had to be in your forties. Someone in his twenties doesn’t want to wait that long. In retrospect it was a good move. I could make significant decisions when I was very young. If you wait until your forties or fifties, you may not have the energy anymore.

GEFFEN:
After Griefer, I worked a year for Arnold Sank. He was incredibly nice to me, very accommodating, and not concerned about my ambition at all. He got who I was. Afterward I became Harry Kalcheim’s assistant, then an assistant to Lou Weiss. Kalcheim was extraordinary and also incredibly generous. If anything, he was amused by my ambition. Kalcheim was one of the great talent agents of that period. He signed Elvis and all the Second City people. But while I worked for him I decided I wanted to be in the Television Department, because that seemed to be where all the money was. So even though I was already a junior agent, I went to work as Lou Weiss’s assistant. And while I worked for all these men I watched them.