The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (27 page)

The next morning Elmer Silver said, “Chuck, you were the last guy here. What happened? The whole wall has handprints. What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“But you were the last one here.”

I said, “Maybe the ape got off the poster.”

Elmer didn’t think it was funny. He wanted to fire me.

I was hauled in front of Kathy Krugel and Chuck Booth. I wasn’t ready to lose my job, so I sat there, sweating, while she lectured me. She said I was one of the worst people they’d ever worked with. “Do you think you fit in? Do you want to stay here for the long term? Are you really sure you’re happy here?”

I said, “Oh, yeah, it’s one of the great experiences of my life. It’s fabulous. I’m making a hundred bucks a week, I’m thrilled to death. I’m in show business.”

I don’t think she believed me.

“Why don’t you quit?” she asked. “It will be better for your reputation.”

“What reputation?”

“Within the
entertainment community.
”

Yeah, but if I quit, I wouldn’t be in the entertainment community.

The only thing the company thought I
did
care about was fan mail. Every day the agency would get gray, filthy postal bags full of thousands of fan letters for two hundred different clients, like Elvis and Ann-Margret. Kathy Krugel said, “Nobody has ever kept it up the way you do.” I was supposed to sort and put them in boxes for the dispatch guys to deliver. Honestly, I would have been there for the rest of my life had I actually sorted that mail. Instead, I’d just dump it. Shred it. Throw it away.

To me, Booth and Krugel and the other people at the company were like from another planet. I knew if I quit, I’d never get unemployment insurance. I said, “If you want me out of here, fire me. I’m not walking out.”

They gave in and fired me.

I had to tell my father, and that really bothered me. But he kind of expected it. He figured I was like Peter Pan and I was never going to grow up.

LUCCHESI:
My first day I came barreling out of the mailroom and ran into an agent with a Van Dyck–ish beard and pushed-back hair, slightly balding. He was talking to a British woman, Judy Scott-Fox, also an agent. As he talked he squeezed her breast. When I bumped into him, he said, “Who are you?”

I said, “I’m Gary Lucchesi, I’m in the mailroom.”

“You’re cute,” he said.

Then he put his tongue in my ear. I couldn’t fucking believe it. He completely freaked me out. I almost hit him. Meanwhile, he laughed hysterically. Later I found out he was Ed Bondy, a powerful agent. And, obviously, flamboyantly gay. I’d never known anyone gay. In fact, I knew only one Jew—my high school librarian. Boy, was I green.

BRODY:
Eddie was the last of a dying breed, a New York theatrical agent who
really
knew acting. He could say just about anything and get away with it. My first day floating on his desk, Louise Fletcher called. She had just won the Academy Award for
Cuckoo’s Nest
. I stayed on the line to listen. The first thing he said was, cooing: “I send you these scripts with offers. You pass on them. The problem with you is, you spread your legs, the wind rushes up your cunt and rattles your brain. You’ve got to start saying yes to some of these things.” In that moment, in that split second before her reaction, I thought, Oh, my God. But she just laughed hysterically.

RANDALL:
One day I got in the elevator and pushed three. Eddie got in behind me and pushed two. The doors closed. He looked at me and said, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

Eddie had just moved out from New York. I didn’t know who he was. I said, “For what?”

“If you’ll let me suck your cock.”

Then the doors opened and he walked out, not waiting for the answer. I pushed one and went immediately to Kathy Krugel and said, “You are not gonna believe what just happened in the elevator!”

“Oh,” she said. “I see you met Ed Bondy.”

Ed and I became friends after that because we would constantly rib each other and he would up his offer. By the time Eddie died, the deal on the table was my own Mercedes, my own room in his house, and twenty thousand dollars a month.

MARKS:
Ed was into shocking people for fun. He could be a good guy, but he also screamed and threw things. That was his way of intimidating his assistants, like me. His procedure in the morning was to start by throwing papers at me: “Monday. Two weeks from now. We’ll deal with this today,” while yelling, “Can’t you keep up? I’m so irritated!” Once, he picked up a paperweight, a gold star that said FUCKER, and made as if to throw it. I said, “Ed, if you throw it at me, I’m gonna shove it up your ass.”

He said, “Do you promise?”

One day Ed got sick, and the doctor told him he couldn’t yell anymore. When he finally came back to work, twice a day, in late morning and late afternoon, he would go off to another office to meditate, to calm down.

IEZMAN:
Eddie died suddenly, of a heart attack, at fifty-one while standing at his sink. The memorial service was a standing-room-only crowd at the old Huntington Hartford Theater on Vine Street. The stories were funny and incredible.

MARTY LITKE: Eddie was a very dear friend of mine—I’m the godparent of his children—and a terrific man who discovered incredible talent. Eddie wrote three wills. The first will said that his ashes should be
scattered in Switzerland. My wife said, “Well, Eddie, you know if
we’re going to Switzerland, we have to go first-class.” As only Eddie
would do, he rewrote his will. The second will said a group of people
would scatter his ashes at the Ventana Inn in Big Sur. Then he realized that with twenty people going, it would also be expensive. So he
rewrote his will a third time, choosing the Santa Monica Pier. That’s
where we scattered his ashes.

RANDALL:
Seniority in the mailroom got you only so far. You had to network the agency. A big part of that was schmoozing the secretaries and the assistants. It was a pretty incestuous environment. In the mid-1970s it was still a relatively free-love world. I didn’t have sex in the office until I was an agent, but I think Rapke did it once while he was a trainee, in Mardigian’s office, while Ron was out of town. And Iezman did it on a run one day; we stopped by the apartment of a girl he was seeing, and they had a quickie. Otherwise, you spent all your time in the building, so the only place you were going to meet anybody was in the agency. Most of us dated the secretaries, and they looked at the mailroom guys as the future of the industry. If they had a relationship with one who was on the right track, they could ultimately have a relationship with an agent.

BROWN:
One secretary, Barbara Bell, had the longest legs anybody had ever seen. When we found out she took a tap-dance class, we all enrolled. She looked at us like, Who are these nerds? It made her a little uncomfortable, I think. But it was a great moment, to see her dancing. The view was everything you could ask for.

RANDALL:
Dating secretaries meant access to information. You might read a deal memo in the mailroom and know that the secretary had been listening in on her boss’s phone conversations. You’d have a drink after work and say, “I see we made this great deal at Warner Brothers for so-and-so. How did that deal coalesce? Tell me about the inside workings.” You’d have pillow talk: “How did this television package happen?” You put together the pieces of the puzzle.

Iezman had a long-term relationship with Jamie Shoup, an assistant in the Music Department. She had a phenomenal body. Everybody wanted her. Brody met his wife, Ruth, on his first day in the mailroom. She worked for Ron Mardigian. Rapke had a relationship with Laurie Perlman, an assistant at CAA, whom he ultimately married.

RAPKE:
I first met Laurie when I was at NYU. I was reintroduced later on, when she was a secretary at CAA working for Ron Meyer, and I was working for Ron Mardigian. I knew a personal relationship between people at competing agencies could be sensitive, but I didn’t think anything was wrong with it. In fact, I told Mardigian about it.

MARDIGIAN: Interoffice dating was really frowned upon. Ruth Daniels
worked for me, and even her seeing Dennis Brody was kept hush-hush. But the intraoffice thing would not have incurred as big a
penalty as dating the competition. In my time that meant going out
with someone from MCA. That was grounds for dismissal, and that
old-fashioned concept permeated the company.

SOMERS:
It could be quite incestuous. Gary Randall was sleeping with Bruce Brown’s girlfriend. Bruce was clueless, but all the guys knew about it. It was such a scandal. The girl was a secretary at William Morris. She’d leave Bruce’s place and go into Gary’s place—right across the hall in the same apartment building.

BROWN:
Oh, I knew. When I’d open my front door on Sunday afternoon and see Gary’s newspaper still outside, I knew he was sleeping with the girl I was crazy about. She liked Gary, she liked me. She had trouble deciding. But Gary and I also liked each other. It was a friendly rivalry.

Eventually she became my first wife. For a wedding gift Mr. Lastfogel gave us cash. A year and a half later we got divorced. Gary ended up marrying Lenny Hirshan’s assistant, Patricia.

BRODY:
When I left the mailroom, I became the dispatcher. We had a fleet of Gremlins that took a lot of abuse because the guys often took their frustrations out on the cars. One guy ran into a wall on purpose. Another opened a door into traffic, and the door came off. A third guy drove up a winding Hollywood Hills driveway and took out the right side of the car. He knew it was happening, but he just let the wall do its damage.

RANDALL:
The Gremlins were total pieces of shit. The transmissions sucked. The cars had no power. And they didn’t have any air-conditioning or radio. We drove in hundred-fucking-degree heat, wearing ties, drenched in sweat, trying to look like professionals. We complained, but they didn’t give a shit. The only way to vent was to destroy the cars as quickly as possible. It was always an “accident.” I not only opened a car door into a light pole, but I have the rather dubious distinction of trying to figure out how fast you could go down the Santa Monica Freeway, slam the car into park—and see whether or not the transmission would blow out.

BROWN:
Some guys were whiners: “I got to go out alone in the rain?” When I ran Dispatch, if I didn’t like someone, I’d send him into Hollywood at five o’clock, when the traffic was terrible, in the rain, by himself, with a big package. Or I’d make up a story so that he’d have to deliver a fake package to a fake address. Or if I didn’t like a guy—say, he always wanted to leave early—I’d give him the Friday five-o’clock deliveries to people who wanted to get their scripts before they went to Palm Springs for the weekend. I did this to Steve Epstein. He complained a lot. He was from Pittsburgh. We nicknamed him Sluggo because he talked and looked like the comic-strip character Sluggo. He’d say, “Don’t call me Sluggo.”

We’d say, “Okay, Sluggo.” It drove him crazy. Even Barbara Bell called him Sluggo.

Other guys were creative slackers. Marty Rosenberg, a relative of Danny Thomas, was into visiting graveyards. Marty knew every graveyard in town. Sometimes we’d leave early just to make a run. Or we’d finish the night before, type up a fake run sheet to make it look like we were busy the next day, and go graveyard hopping.

BRODY:
There was always a temptation as a messenger to look at what you were delivering, and sometimes I couldn’t help it. I can’t tell you how many times I picked up drugs. But I have to make this very clear: As heinous as that might sound now, drugs then were very out in the open, and it was hip and chic to do them. Users and nonusers interacted. There wasn’t a drug subculture, it
was
the culture.

SOMERS:
The William Morris receptionist was rumored to have gotten into Quaaludes, because at times she would nod off. But I don’t think management had a clue. Unlike our group, who had come straight out of the sixties, the senior agents had no drug experience. People would do blow prior to a meeting; one agent even shot up heroin in the bathroom. Then he’d piss alongside senior executives, who never noticed.

RANDALL:
Snooping is how we learned that one of our good friends who had recently graduated from the training program sold drugs. He ended up being
our
top supplier. He wasn’t yet an agent, but he was on the fast track to becoming one. It was very surreptitious. But it was an era when people referred to the snowcapped mountain of Paramount’s logo as being the cocaine mountain. It’s not like we didn’t know what we were delivering. We knew.

RAPKE:
I’m now going to tell the most famous mailroom story ever. It happened.
We were there
.

There was this older agent, in his mid-sixties at the time, who covered CBS. They called him the Silver Fox. His secretary was Michelle Triola Marvin, who was famous for the Lee Marvin palimony suit. She used to push us around: “He has a run. Come and get it immediately.” Not once or twice, but ten times a day: “He has a run.” She used to beat the shit out of us. We were like, “Fuck her. Fuck him.”