The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (5 page)

WEISS:
First I was a delivery person. If an actor had to sign a contract, you got on a bus, went to the actor’s house. I once waited for Mae West to sign a piece of paper.
That
was exciting.

HIRSHAN:
I was told to deliver a script to Judy Garland at the Palace Theater. It was a matinee day. I brought it over between shows. I went down to the dumpy-looking dressing rooms, looked in one, and saw a little girl in a ratty bathrobe sitting on the floor watching television. I said, “Excuse me, young lady. Do you know where I can find Judy Garland?” She turned around and said, “I am Judy Garland.” It was so embarrassing.

AUERBACH:
I delivered to Marilyn Monroe. She had just started, but I knew who she was. Her guy at William Morris was Johnny Hyde, a terrific agent, and there was some romance going on between them. I also took something to Gloria De Haven. She opened the door in her underwear. I was too young to know if I was getting an invitation to come inside, and if I was, I didn’t know what to do about it. The only thing I remember is that her underwear was pink. Later I decided that I had really blown it!

WEISS:
Belle Baker was not quite Sophie Tucker, but she was an important client who’d made a name for herself in vaudeville. She had an apartment on Central Park West. I had to get her to sign a contract. Her little dog yapped the whole time I stood in the vestibule. When I went out, the dog bit me. I stood there, my leg bleeding, afraid to go back in. At the office I told Morris Stoller what had happened.

He sent me to a doctor, who said the board of health
had
to get the dog. But Belle Baker had left town. They found her working in Atlantic City. They grabbed the dog and checked it out for hydrophobia. Thank God it was clean.

AUERBACH:
By 1944, Sid Feinberg, a lovely man, oversaw the trainees. He was deathly afraid of Nat Lefkowitz, his boss. There was a cutout window between their offices, and when Nat would open it and say, “Sid!” he’d jump. Sid had the tough job of telling us when we did things wrong, and what to do. One day he told me the company wanted to paint the office walls but didn’t have the money. Would I be interested in putting together a group of kids and whitewashing the walls? You bet. Then one guy stood on William Morris Jr.’s desk to reach the ceiling and broke the glass top. Of course we denied it was us.

HIRSHAN:
According to tradition, on my first day I was taken in to meet William Morris Jr. He looked up at me from behind his desk and said, “Ah. Another capitalist.” I thought, I’m making $38.50 a week. What is he talking about? But he was right. I didn’t understand. He was saying that in the agency business if you become successful, you make a good living. My game plan was if I didn’t get out of the mailroom in a year, I would go back to law school. If I got promoted, loved what I was doing, but didn’t make agent in two years, I’d also leave. But I was willing to give it a chance because almost immediately show business had seduced me.

ELKINS:
One joke around the mailroom was the way I dressed—considering the salary. I did that on purpose. Everybody had to wear suits, but there are suits and there are suits. I went over the edge. I was very chic.

One of my first delivery runs was to the Berle show. Milton, at that time, was Mr. Television. He ran the rehearsals a little bit like Auschwitz, but he got the goddamn shows on. I came in with a package, and he said, “Who are you?”

“Hilly Elkins.”

He looked at my clothes. He said, “And what do you do?”

“I’m one of your agents,” I said. I don’t think he believed me, but he said nothing.

AUERBACH:
A college education wasn’t yet required to get into the mailroom then. All you needed were street smarts and the ability to deal with a situation on your feet. There was no book to read, no school to go to that would tell you how.

The mailroom was my school. I made it my business to read every piece of paper I could get my hands on. Booking sheets. Internal memos. Meeting minutes. I memorized important telephone numbers. I sopped up information. They didn’t tell you to do that or not do that,
but only a schmuck wouldn’t read stu f before he delivered it
. It was very glamorous to learn about the money the performers received. Some got paid so much, the salaries read like telephone numbers, and it’s still that way, only now the numbers include area codes. I thought these people must have been like God to get that kind of money.

ELKINS:
An early assignment was to take Abe Lastfogel’s New York bankbooks in for interest to be recorded. I went to ten banks, each with the maximum of $100,000, and I had them stamped. I figured if his New York money alone was a million bucks, it’s got to be a good business.

WEISS:
Everybody wants to be in show business. Today a thousand college graduates show up every June to go into our training program, when there’s room for just a few. We eventually drew the line at college degrees to thin out the number of applicants. At least we wouldn’t be getting the high school dropouts; we’d get people who were educated and ready to face the next step in life.

AUERBACH:
They’ll kick me in the ass for saying this, but the truth is that the reason a college degree became important was not to have to accept every minority applicant. That’s where it started. At some point you could no longer say no to minorities, because you would face legal problems, so they required a degree.

WEISS:
The day it was decided that you had to be a college graduate bothers me. Abe Lastfogel didn’t go to college. Normie Brokaw didn’t go to college. I didn’t go to college. Being street smart is not dependent on having a higher education. David Geffen is well known for having gotten into the program by saying he had a college degree when he didn’t. He didn’t reveal that until much later, but had I known then that he didn’t have a degree—after I got to know him to some extent—I wouldn’t have let him go for anything.
Anything
.

WEISS:
I went into the service in early 1941. It was not a European pleasure trip. I didn’t think about a show business career, only surviving. I was in Italy with an infantry division. Bob Dole was in my outfit. I was discharged in September of 1945. While I was gone, the Morris office put aside 10 percent of my weekly salary each week so I’d have a few dollars when I got out. I made next to nothing, so it was 10 percent of nothing—but it was better than nothing.

I got my job back, but after four and a half years William Morris had changed and so had I. I was married and a different man from the one who had gone to war. War makes you grow up fast. Now I had a great interest in facing rather than avoiding responsibilities. I wanted only to be in the business. I loved the company in a way I can’t describe.

ELKINS:
The learning opportunity was there for anyone who wanted to take advantage of it. I was unquestionably an ambitious guy. My one-liner is that I was the only guy in the office who
wasn’t
there to get laid. Not totally true: A lot of other people weren’t there for that reason, and I
did
want to get laid. But it was my love of theater that propelled me and made me want to make it work for myself.

LEON:
If you showed some promise, you were assigned to a desk and you worked for an agent. You listened in on all the phone calls and got to learn a little bit about the business.

WEISS:
I was asked to handle publicity and do less office-boy stuff. That didn’t mean sending items to Walter Winchell. When an actor was booked, I got their picture and a bio and made sure at least a week in advance they were mailed to the venue. It was a lot of work because we booked acts all over the country.

After publicity I became an assistant to Sam Bramson, who booked clubs. Sam already had a secretary. My job was to find a chair to sit in, hang around, and learn. His job started late in the afternoon, with clients like Joe E. Lewis, Harry Richmond, Sophie Tucker, and a lot of lesser stars. They played the Copacabana, the Latin Quarter, and whatever the other clubs were. I can see how Sam might have thought I was a monumental pain in the ass, but he was a saint. He tolerated my bothering him and his secretary with endless questions. I also went with him on the rounds after work, and in those days there were three shows a night, the last being at 2 A.M. Sam always ended the night at Lindy’s, and I’d go with him. All the Runyonesque guys were there. I got to know all the racket guys, the gamblers and the shylocks. The bosses were tough guys, but they loved the business.

I’d get home at four o’clock in the morning. I diapered the baby and went to sleep. What kind of life my wife had, I don’t know. For me it was cockeyed, but I loved every second of it.

I also worked very closely with an agent named George Wood. Having George as a friend could come in handy. I once booked a club in the Village, and the owner confirmed the deal with me. A couple days later he changed his mind. I said, “I’ve already written it up. You can’t do that. The deal’s made, and a deal’s a deal.”

“Are you telling me what to do?” He was a tough guy.

“No, but you can’t do that. I confirmed it.”

“You calling me a liar?” He was really edgy. “I’m going to come up there and throw you out the window.”

I went into Wood’s office after he hung up. I said, “George, this guy’s mad as hell and he’s full of shit. He confirmed an act and he’s changing a deal. He wants to come up here and hit me.”

Wood told his secretary, “Get this guy on the phone.” I sat there, ready to get out of town for a month, but he said, “Listen, you blank-blank-blank son of a bitch, you threaten Lou Weiss over here, I’ll break your fucking neck and your fucking legs,” and so forth and so on, and then slammed down the phone.

Maybe a half hour later I got a call from the club owner. “What are you so upset about, Lou?” He knew that Wood had relationships with people that the club owner didn’t want to cross.

AUERBACH:
I used to bump into Lou Weiss, who is eleven years older than me, on the train to the city from Brooklyn. Because of his uncle, Lou had the golden spoon, a charmed life. He came in at strange hours. He was in the nightclub business. We got to know each other a little bit, and I realized that’s who I wanted to work for. We weren’t best buddies, but I could communicate with him. He was a comer; he traveled in better circles than me. I thought he might be able to teach me something.

Weiss had a secretary named Shirley and was happy with her. She was a nice person, but I only wanted what I wanted. I told him I could do better, and plotted to get the job. I said I’d put in more hours, that I wanted to learn. Whatever bullshit I said, he bought it and I got her desk. I also got a raise. It was the summer of 1947. I was nineteen.

ELKINS:
My sense of what I had to do was simple: Get out of the mailroom as fast as I could. In fact, at the risk of being self-serving, I think I made the fastest transition from office boy to secretary: seven weeks.

One agent, Lester Hamill, was very good at what he did—he handled King Features Syndicate—but he was ungrammatical and monosyllabic, in both his verbal intercourse and his dictation. I knew that if I could get his desk, I could get
o f
that desk because I’d stand out by improving his correspondence. He picked me by virtue of my making sure, to the extent that I could, that I was the only mailroom person he saw on a regular basis. I also did a little homework, and I learned about his operation so that when we came across each other, I could talk about his current deals. He noticed I was not only aware of what he did, but I
understood
it.

I worked for Hamill only four or five weeks. The guy who really interested me was Marty Jurow, head of the Theatrical and Motion Picture Department. I adored Marty. When you worked as a secretary, you pulled Saturday duty once a month. I pulled Jurow. He called me into the office and started to dictate a memo on the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; it was lousy with percentages, and I knew it would go on for about nine pages. I did my best to write quickly, but I knew I couldn’t do it. About halfway through the first page I put down my pen. He said, “What are you doing?”

“Mr. Jurow,” I said, “there’s a problem.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Well, I don’t know enough dictation to take this memo.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, sir.”

He said, “What am I to do with you?”

I said, “Well, sir, you have two choices. You can fire me or promote me.” He promoted me. That Monday I became his assistant. Three months later I was an agent. When I eventually left to go into the service, Lenny Hirshan, my secretary, got my job.

HIRSHAN:
I was always aggressive, ambitious; I’d volunteer to work seven days a week. I loved it.

In 1952 I worked for George Morris, who handled theater. It was a year or so after our merger with the Berg-Allenberg Agency. We had accumulated a lot of agents and clients, but there was a recession that year and a lot of people were let go—including Morris. I went to see Nat Lefkowitz and said, “Where do
I
go now?”