The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (3 page)

These days you have to fight to get in at the bottom. While it never hurts to be able to fill in “David Geffen” on the “Who do you know?” line of the employment application, it’s almost as tough to find a place in a talent agency training program as it is for an agent to get a client a steady acting gig, maybe tougher. Candidates are routinely interviewed by anywhere from three to ten people. There’s a basic skills test. According to
Entertainment Weekly,
only one in ten applicants makes it into the William Morris program, the granddaddy of them all. A
New York
Times
story placed the ratio even higher, at thirty to one, and compared it with the chances of getting into Harvard Law School (nine to one), Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (four to one), and Stanford Business School (four to one). No wonder David Geffen once called his alma mailroom, the Morris office, “the Harvard School of Show Business—only better: no grades, no exams, a small stipend, and great placement opportunities.”

And once you’re in, of course, it’s all about getting the hell out—as quickly as possible.

In the old days you could start in the mailroom right after high school, or work summers while still in school and if they liked you, go full-time after graduation. Now summers are reserved for showbiz kids between college semesters who, if they want to make it permanent, need to reapply, degree in hand, like everybody else. Don’t bother lying about the sheepskin, either; they check. Just ask David Geffen, who famously fibbed about his. The irony? He didn’t have to; degrees weren’t officially required in 1964—unless you said you had one. Panicked when another dissembling trainee got canned, Geffen came into the mailroom early, intercepted the letter from UCLA, forged a confirmation, and got to stay at William Morris.

Today, for anyone who meets the educational requirements, the agency training programs are equal-opportunity power boot camps for the self-starter.

“It’s the American dream,” says Joel Peresman (WMA, 1979), now a vice president of Madison Square Garden, “because getting in gave you access to so many opportunities.”

“What I love,” says Patrick Whitesell (InterTalent, 1990), now a top talent agent and partner at Endeavor, “is that the mailroom is the great chance for the outsider in a town that often runs on nepotism.”

Peresman’s father was in the garment business. Whitesell is a lawyer’s son from Iowa Falls, Iowa, who first tried mortgage banking. Bob Crestani (WMA, 1976) is a steelworker’s kid from Portage, Indiana, who rose to run the company’s television operations before casting his fate to the new technology boom. Donna Chavous (CAA, 1984) is the Los Angeles–born daughter of a cop and a nurse—and was the first African American in CAA’s mailroom. Gary Lucchesi’s (WMA, 1977) dad drove a bread truck in San Francisco. David Geffen’s mother created custom-made bras. Mark O’Connor (CAA, 1994) loved television so much that when he was in the eighth grade, he wrote the late Brandon Tartikoff at NBC with scheduling advice. Ben Press (ICM, 1991), scion of the J. Press clothing empire, thought his experience selling political candidates would translate nicely to selling actors. Gary Randall (WMA, 1975) sold insurance. Brandt Joel (UTA, 1991) was in the Gulf War. Sandy Gallin’s (GAC, 1962) fantasy was “to live in Hollywood, be rich, have a big house, and have stars know me, like me, and recognize me on the street.”

Others were better-connected; someone they knew knew someone. Lou Weiss, a Morris employee since 1937, is George Burns’s nephew. Brian Medavoy (ICM, 1986) is industry legend Mike Medavoy’s son; Jodi Guber (ICM, 1993) is producer and former Columbia Pictures head Peter Guber’s daughter. Countless sons (and now daughters) whose fathers started in the mailroom followed in their footsteps.

But whether you have a show business bloodline or just have show business in your blood, once you’re in the door, whatever got you in doesn’t matter anymore. “It was just, ‘You’re in. Now start swimming. See where it takes you,’ ” says Peresman.

That’s why, despite the list of spectacular successes, perhaps only 3 percent of those who start at the bottom of the pyramid even make it to midlevel. “Cream rises,” says Marty Bowen (UTA, 1991), “but even bright kids don’t make it. There’s an enormous amount of contradiction at an agency. You’re asking the same people who are incredibly aggressive to work as a team, to sublimate their instincts and pay their dues. That’s really hard. Everybody who goes in the mailroom wants to be the first and the best and the fastest and the most powerful—and then they’re told to answer the phones, be someone’s ‘person,’ and live vicariously through someone else for three years. That conflict was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to deal with.”

The talent agency mailroom tradition began in 1912 when fourteen-year-old Abe Lastfogel, a Russian immigrant’s kid from the tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side, was hired as an office boy at the William Morris Agency. Described by Frank Rose in
The Agency,
his must-read history of the Morris office, as “a scrappy kid, compact and solidly built . . . a hustler who knew right from wrong,” Lastfogel soon became Morris’s personal secretary and then, according to Rose, more than that: “He was his chief lieutenant, most trusted aide, almost a son.”

By 1930, suffering from heart disease, Morris turned over the business jointly to his son, William Morris Jr., and Lastfogel. Bill Morris became largely a figurehead president. Lastfogel became general manager and had hands-on responsibility for running the agency.

In May 1952 when Bill Morris retired, Lastfogel was alone at the top. Though it had long been the reality, now his ascension was indisputable. He had risen from the mailroom to run it all, and the mailroom was reinforced as an embarkation point for the promised land.

Others who wanted to make something of themselves followed his route, not only to William Morris, but to talent shops such as MCA, CMA, IFA, Ashley-Famous, Triad, Leading Artists, Bauer-Benedek, InterTalent, and today’s majors: UTA, CAA, ICM, Endeavor. Through mergers and acquisitions, and agents changing jobs or starting their own businesses, every agency was pollinated with the training program tradition.

“The personality of the agency is created out of the mailrooms, and that’s also where the history of the town is passed on,” says Ron Mardigian (WMA, 1958). “The people starting out are at a most impressionable age, and there they are, sucking up all this stuff, real or myth. And it comes from the very top, from guys who were very strong and very specific, straight to the training program, where their philosophies were put into effect. At William Morris I had the feeling that the traditions of the company came straight down a tube, right into an in-basket in the mailroom, and that they contained all the instructions for how I was going to comport my professional life. Nobody said it out loud. At the most Abe Lastfogel would pop in and say, ‘Does anybody have any gum?’ It was just tradition. Somehow, what the guy before you did, you did. If you could change it to improve it a little bit, okay, but there were certain rules of behavior—ethics, honesty—and lines you didn’t cross. It was very much like lessons from your parents.”

As the mailroom generations changed, streetwise hustlers became college grads and postgrads. The perks and seductions also evolved. The new attraction was less the thrill of it all and more the thrill of
having
it all. This started in the eighties, when the Michael Ovitz–led CAA juggernaut earned him the title “the most powerful man in Hollywood” and raised the stature of agents from putzes to power brokers who had not only cash and clout, but finally, and most importantly, respect. According to the
New York Times,
“Once thought of as a pen of rough-around-the-edges Brooklyn teenagers who would do anything (ethical or not) to become a talent agent, the mail room now attracts lawyers and M.B.A.’s. There is a formal, structured training program with seminars, luncheons, manuals and grammar tests, a change that reflects the new button-down image of the profession as a whole.”

I wanted to know what it was like to start at the bottom, in a talent agency mailroom, dreaming of the top. Having reported on show business for many years, I knew the mythology: the training program is a secret society, a breeding ground, an incubator for baby moguls. The mythology is a great recruiting poster. I wanted the reality.

To find it, I started with a few names. Each name led to more names, like a chain letter, and the list grew exponentially. For two years, and in two-hundred-plus interviews, I asked people who had started as long ago as 1937 and as recently as 1999 to share their experiences, insights, and hindsights. Who were you before Hollywood beckoned? Why show business? Why the mailroom route? Who put you on the path? What was it like to push a mail cart? What was your plan to get noticed, your scheme to get ahead? What opened your eyes? What caused a meltdown? When did you stop being naive? What was the most fun? Most dehumanizing? What almost got you fired? What challenged your values; what confirmed them? Did your boss come from the mailroom? What was passed on? How did it change you? What story would you tell at a mailroom class reunion? How do mailrooms create show business culture? Does it mean anything more than just a job?

The result is more than oral history; it is oral anthropology. It is a portrait of ambition, of accident, of serendipity, of dreams lived and dreams broken. The mailrooms and training programs, in all their incarnations through the years, are at the core; but in the end they are simply a process, way stations, long hallways with many doors. It’s a journey. A rite of passage. It’s about Hollywood and not about Hollywood at all.

Some things I discovered:

No one wanted to be thought of as Sammy Glick, anti-icon of Budd Schulberg’s classic show business novel,
What Makes Sammy Run?
because Glick is to opportunism what Brutus is to betrayal. Understandable. Glick was relentlessly grasping and deceitful. (Schulberg now laments that Glick has become a role model for these cutthroat times.) But even if they knew, no one who mentioned his name ever pointed out that the Glick character was a
newspaper copyboy turned Hollywood
mogul.
Most people think he was an agent. (He wouldn’t have made a good one because he cared more about himself than anyone else.)

Only a few of those I interviewed really
wanted
to be agents at the outset. The rest needed a job. They loved the glamour. They were pushed into it. It was a stepping-stone. They’d try it, and if they liked it, who knew?

A few confessed to once having had absolutely no idea what an agent did, what an agent was. “Do you mean travel agent?”

Others knew but reflexively imagined agents to be disreputable, unprincipled men chewing big cigars who talked out of the side of their mouth. These men were not movers and shakers but schleppers. Chislers. Flesh peddlers.

The idea of aspiring to
that
was offensive.

They did it anyway. For the stardust, for the money, to please their parents, to piss them off, or to follow an irresistible muse even though Daddy had paid for an Ivy League education and thought they were throwing it all away.

Some were actors/musicians/writers/film-school grads who, in the end, could never be the talent. The next best thing: help the talent be the talent and learn to enjoy the reflected glory.

Many kept an open mind and relished the adventure.

To be sure, they all swore the same oath before a gauntlet of interviewers—“I was born to be an agent”—but then, that’s what they had to say. It doesn’t mean the uncertain ones fooled anyone. In Personnel the bullshit detectors log much overtime.

So what did the trick? Enthusiasm, passion, relentlessness. Smarts. A good reference. An interesting personality quirk. A belief in their own bullshit—which, in the kindest sense and with all due respect, is just what it takes to be an agent, or anything else in show business. Unless there were obvious disqualifications (in the early days being black or a woman; sometimes not being Jewish), somebody was finally willing to take a chance that the fresh-faced kid across the interview desk would either find a quick and comfortable fit, learn to love the life, or discover something about him- or herself and stick around.

If not, the kid would at least have worked hard for slave wages until he or she couldn’t take it anymore and moved on. Or got fired.

Here’s what everyone who made it—and some who went on to other successful pursuits—had in common:
an addiction to opportunity and a
voracious thirst to become.
They are the bedrock of the whole enterprise.

Making it, especially in Hollywood, is all about a commitment to perpetual forward motion. Aspiration. Upwardness. It’s all about traction and trajectory. You “start” in the mailroom. You “sweep” the office for envelopes. Deliver packages on “the runs.” Get a desk—but you don’t have the desk, you’re just
on
it—and waiting to
pounce
on a bigger one. It’s about striving, reaching, grabbing, moving, shaking—not sitting with your back to the wall, waiting for the party to come to you. The life is lived call to call, crisis to crisis, lunch to lunch, deal to deal, ulcer to ulcer, score to score. To survive and prosper, you have to go with the flow, even if you have to create the flow yourself.