The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (31 page)

He said, “So, when are you gonna be in New York?”

I lied. “I’m going to be up there Monday.”

“Okay,” he said. “Come see me.”

ROB LIGHT:
I grew up in Westchester, in the era of Watergate, and went to Syracuse University to be a writer and journalist. My first assignment from the college paper was to write a story on the concert committee. I was so fascinated that I quit the paper to work on the committee and ran it for two years. After graduation I went to the alumni office to find out which graduates had gotten into the entertainment business. Jack Rollins’s partner, Charles Joffe, was on the list. I called Joffe and he told me to start in a mailroom. “You’ll learn more there than anywhere else, and then you’ll decide what you really want to do.”

I met with Arthur Trefe at ICM. He was very dignified. Very suit-and-tie. Intimidating. He said there was no guarantee that I’d ever get out of the mailroom and go on to do anything. In fact, he tried to talk me out of it, as did the William Morris guy, saying that it was demeaning and horrible, and that the people already in the mailroom were much more talented and had much better résumés than I had. He also said that starting in the summer was the worst time: I’d be on the streets making deliveries, it was humid, sticky—he tried to make it sound awful.

I didn’t believe him.

JOEL GALLEN:
I was a marketing and business major at the University of Rhode Island. I also worked on the student entertainment committee. My job was promoting new music on campus. Friends thought I should be in the music business, but I knew absolutely no one. I sent letters but mostly got ignored, so I pursued marketing, did interviews. Xerox in Boston expressed an interest.

The last weekend before graduation we had a big concert and party. A girl, Janet Koenig, who really believed in me, said, “There’s an agent here, Rob Light, from ICM. You should talk to him.”

I said, “Agents just want to sell me another band. They don’t want to help me; they’re not interested in my career. I’m not into it.”

Later that night I just happened to sit next to Rob. Janet came up and said, “Oh, I see you’ve met Rob.” Turns out we had a nice chat. He said, “When you graduate, send your résumé and call me when you get settled.” I didn’t tell him about Xerox.

A few weeks later I gave Rob a call. He’d given my résumé to Arthur Trefe, and we set an appointment. Mr. Trefe’s office was like a dark cave; maybe there was one lamp, otherwise it was pitch black, nothing on the walls. I was scared, like I’d been sent to the principal’s office. The job sounded miserable. Even so, there were no openings. He said to call in a month. I figured he said that to everyone.

Xerox hired me. It was July and I’d start in mid-August. I was about to go to Boston and look for an apartment, but because I’d promised, I gave Mr. Trefe a call. He said, “We have an opening. Can you start next Monday?”

“Next Monday? Well, uh . . . sure.” I figured I’d say yes and think about it when I got off the phone. My parents thought I was crazy. I said I’d work there for one week, and if I hated it, I’d go to Boston and work for Xerox. If I liked it, I would see.

After the first week I was miserable. Grunt work. Sweating. Riding the subway in one-hundred-degree heat. I was a 3.53 magna cum laude student with a marketing degree, and now I was just a messenger. Degrading.

My sister, Barbara—wiser, older—said, “Look. You wanted to be in this business. For all those people who don’t have relatives or friends inside, this is how they start. At the bottom. You’re young. If it doesn’t work out a year from now, that’s one thing, then get a regular job. But to give up after a week . . . you owe it to yourself to stick it out. This is your foot in the door. An opportunity that lots of people don’t have.” She convinced me to stay.

LIGHT:
I didn’t think I’d
really
be in a mailroom. I thought it was a fiction, or like a fraternity initiation: once the hazing is over, you’re a brother. My first day I wore a jacket and tie and dress shoes, expecting to work at a desk.

The mailroom was really a supply room, with Xerox machines on top of everything and a half-dozen guys my age crowded in. Their facial expressions ranged from dull to dazed. I don’t think I was there twenty minutes before George Quenneville, who ran the mailroom, said, “Here’s six packages. Go deliver them.”

“You mean, like, go walk on the street and deliver them?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Walk in the street and deliver them.”

I spent the whole day hoofing around Manhattan, sweating my nuts off. I’d been a messenger in the city during high school, and it was an awful flashback. I knew I hadn’t gone to college for this. When I got home, my feet were blistered beyond belief. I wanted to quit.

ROBERTS:
George Quenneville was used to years of all these wanna-bes coming in with big dreams. He looked at me with a weary amusement, as if to say, “Let’s see how long you can take it.”

GEORGE QUENNEVILLE:
I started in 1969, part-time, an after-school job. I was sixteen. I grew up in Queens. Dad was a truck driver, Mother was a housewife. I’d been working at a store, but some of my friends who were already at the agency said I should come work with them because I’d make fifty cents an hour more. The company was CMA then, owned by David Begelman and Freddie Fields. In ’71 or ’72 we merged with IFA, owned by Marvin Josephson, and became ICM.

After I graduated from high school, my boss decided to leave. They offered me the permanent position of running the mailroom.

I’ve seen hundreds come and go [
laughs
]. I’ve interviewed almost everyone who started in this mailroom, after they saw Arthur Trefe. I’ve always wanted to make sure they understood the kind of stress they’d be under and the kind of work they’d be doing. Was this where they really wanted to be? Were they willing to do whatever it took?

KERNIS:
George would line up the trip tickets—they looked like phone message slips—and divide them by what side of town they were on. Invariably someone would say, “Oh, fuck. I’m not going to Wall Street!” However, a Village trip might be to Lauren Hutton or Cheryl Tiegs or Mariel Hemingway. Guys used to fight for those. There were definitely stories of guys who did the model run who said they got laid. Were they true? Who knows. But I can’t count the times I heard, “I could’ve. She came on to me. She was smoking dope. She was drinking. She was this. She was that.”

To get those trips, you’d have to work George.

I’d say, “You see the Yankees game last night, George?”

He’d say, “Can you believe that Reggie Jackson?”

Then you’d say, “By the way, George, do you mind if I go downtown and take that . . . ?”

GALLEN:
You wanted to get on George’s good side, because if you got on his bad side, he’d give you the big stack of routing slips all over the city. You didn’t want to get the big pile.

QUENNEVILLE:
People tried to influence me any way they could: drum up conversation, ask if I needed anything, talk baseball. Unfortunately, schmoozing didn’t really work. When trainees first arrive, they know the least of what has to be done day to day, so when there are trips to make, those guys are the most expendable. The easiest way to stay inside is to learn everything on the inside as quickly as possible. Some guys would ask for lists to try and memorize everyone’s names and locations. We’d make maps of the floors. Some guys did the outside work, then just came back and sat around. I’d say, “If you’d jump up and do stuff around here instead of just sitting, you’d be more valuable to us.” Hard work always impressed me more than getting an apple.

KERNIS:
Less than a month after I started, there was a garbage strike, a newspaper strike, and an elevator employees strike. The garbage strike probably lasted the shortest, but still, it was bad news. I had to hustle around the city in the heat, smelling that smell.

Doing runs during the elevator operators strike was even worse. I took a package to a building on Central Park West. They had their mail spread out on long tables in this beautiful old lobby. The tenants had a sign-up sheet to work the elevator. But during lunchtime maybe there was a twenty-minute lapse when nobody was around to operate the lift. I had to deliver a script to Marlo Thomas. She lived on the twenty-fifth floor. The doorman called upstairs and said there’d be a package waiting in the lobby when she came down. She said, “No, I want it now.” I looked at the guy and said, “I’m just supposed to leave it.” He said, “Well, she wants it, and she wants it right now.”

It wasn’t as if she had to come down to get it either. She could have waited twenty minutes for the next resident who had signed up— former New York mayor John Lindsay; I saw the list—to start his shift. But no. The stairwell was not air-conditioned, but I did it. She opened the door, grabbed the package. I thought I could at least get a glass of water or a “Thank you,” but she slammed the door right in my face.

ROBERTS:
I went to Barbra Streisand’s apartment on Central Park West to pick up and return a bra to Bloomingdale’s. I was a little taken aback.

SARKES:
Try going to a junky hotel on Eighth Avenue to pay somebody’s day rent.

GALLEN:
I delivered to Candice Bergen a lot. You’d think we’d just have to leave it with the doorman, but sometimes they’d let us upstairs. She answered the door in her silk robe. She’d just gotten out of the shower and her hair was wet. It’s almost the naked-actress fantasy. She wasn’t naked, but it was enough that you could tell that she was recently naked.

ROBERTS:
Sometimes Quenneville would give us subway fare. Because we got paid so poorly, we’d often just pocket the fifty cents and walk to our destination if we could.

KERNIS:
Thank God for the young secretaries. They knew we were broke and that we couldn’t afford to go out on dates with civilians. Most of them were a few years older than us, and they were, like, “Hey, let me take you to dinner,” or, “Hey, stay over at my place.” I exploited it as much as I could.

ROBERTS:
I was on a run uptown and saw Sam Cohn coming out of the Dakota on West Seventy-second Street. Cohn was Mr. Agent at ICM. The top clients. He had a car waiting. It was a hundred degrees, my feet were throbbing. I had walked so much that I finally understood why ladies who worked in retail wore orthopedic shoes. I don’t know what possessed me, but I yelled out, “Sam. Sam. Mr. Cohn. Jaimie Roberts from the mailroom. Can I get a ride back with you?” I know he heard me, because I was loud—but he never even turned around.

KERNIS:
I delivered a package to Maureen Stapleton, and she wanted to tip me, but Arthur Trefe told us we couldn’t accept tips because we weren’t professional messengers. Miss Stapleton lived in a town house on the West Side. She was getting ready to go to the theater and answered the door in her slip. I was, like, “Whoa!”

She said, “Ah, kid, just give me the package.” Then she held out some money.

I said, “I can’t accept that, Miss Stapleton.”

She said, “Just take it.”

“I really can’t accept it. I’d get in trouble.”

She said, “If you don’t accept this, you are a schmuck. And you know what? You’ll be a schmuck all your life.”

I grabbed the money and said, “No one calls me a schmuck.”

A year or so later, when I was dating an assistant in the Theater Department, I ran into Miss Stapleton. She gave me a glimmer of a look, and I said, “How are you, Miss Stapleton? You probably don’t remember me.”

She said, “I do. You’re the schmuck with the tip.”

ROBERTS:
I loved pushing the mail cart and talking to people. I’d introduce myself to the agents. That annoyed Mr. Trefe, who’d say, “Who is this little pisher running around acting as though he’s best friends with these people?”

KERNIS:
At the end of the day the agents would start to let their assistants go. Jaimie would walk into the agents’ offices and go, “How you doin’?” and call them by their first name. He even walked into Sam Cohn’s office—Cohn was on the phone—and said, “Sam. How are you?”

I said, “Wow, Jaimie, Sam Cohn. You know everybody.”

Jaimie said, “I really don’t know him. I just say hello because I want him to know who
I
am.” That was the ballsiest thing.

SARKES:
Everyone politicked to position themselves with the agents or their assistants. You’d even jockey to take the mail to the department you wanted to be in.

KERNIS:
If somebody got sick and an agent couldn’t get an outside temp—
and they were desperate
—they’d get a guy from the mailroom. Otherwise you trained in the fine art of moving furniture, stamping envelopes, taking the meter to the post office. That kind of work had nothing to do with what we were hoping to do as agents.

SARKES:
Except that if you could take the shit thrown at you in the mailroom, you could take the shit thrown at you on a desk. But once there, if you wanted anything out of the place, you had to get it yourself. It was not a formal program like at William Morris or CAA, where they beat the crap out of their people, and those people know they’ve got a good shot of getting a desk after they eat shit for a year or two.