The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (7 page)

Along the way I was offered a studio to run; a network contacted me about being president. I always said no. I wanted to stay at William Morris because I respect and love the company. I appreciate what they did for me. We’re the oldest company in the business, and the sky was always the limit. Even now, nearly sixty years later, I still put in seventeen hours a day. I’ll stop by the office on Saturdays and Sundays, try to catch up on calls, read my mail, make deals.

Once an agent, always an agent.

THE THRILL OF IT ALL

TRAFFIC

Music Corporation of America, Los Angeles, 1942–1958

HELEN GURLEY BROWN, 1942 • JAY KANTER, 1947 • ROBERT SHERMAN, 1952 •
FRED SPECKTOR, 1956 • RICK RAY, 1957 • MIKE FENTON, 1958

Let’s
face
it,
we
were
the
world’s
best-educated,
best-dressed,
lowest-paid
messenger service.

—Rick Ray

HELEN GURLEY BROWN:
I started working the instant I got out of high school. I got six dollars a week for answering fan mail at radio station KHJ in Los Angeles, and with that money I attended Woodbury Business College and learned how to take shorthand and type so I could make eighteen dollars a week. All my job moves were about earning a little more money to take care of my injured sister and a mother who didn’t work. My next employer was MCA, where I worked as a secretary for Larry Barnett in the Band Department for twenty-five dollars a week.

MCA was quite seductive in terms of decor. Their building at 9300 Burton Way had chandeliers and winding staircases and antique English furniture. It was glorious. Of course, if you were a secretary, you were treated like hired help and used the back entrance. The mailroom then was manned by girls who never became agents, but it wouldn’t have entered my furry brain at the time to think about doing something better with myself. We’re talking 1942, and the most a woman could hope to be was a secretary to somebody wonderful or maybe work as a clerk in a department store. To expect more would have been like hoping to change your sex or be president of the United States— not a possibility. You didn’t even think about it.

JAY KANTER:
The main building, across from the Beverly Hills City Hall, was a beautiful colonial mansion commissioned by Jules Stein, who owned the agency, and designed by Paul Williams. It opened in 1938 when Lew Wasserman came out from Chicago, and it housed the agency until 1962, when Wasserman, under a Justice Department edict, chose to run Universal Studios over agenting.

I enlisted in the navy when I was seventeen, to be a pilot; after the war I was put on inactive duty and studied business at USC. I lived in a little apartment on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills. Coming home at night from dates, I was curious about guys I’d see in the windows of a building on the corner of Wilshire and Palm, on the phones at 11 P.M. I found out the place was MCA, a theatrical agency, and went to the receptionist and asked for a job. She said, “We don’t hire anybody here. This is just the Band and Act Department.”

At the main building I was introduced to Virginia Briggs, from Personnel, who said that the only thing available was a messenger job in the mailroom, which was called Traffic.

ROBERT SHERMAN:
I went to the College of the Pacific, in Stockton, California. They had a great football team, and I teased myself into believing I could play, but was never eligible: too much
cerveza
and chicks. You get away from home and you go nuts, you know. After three years I quit to surf in Hawaii. I was twenty.

Eventually I got a call from my father—an agent with his own company—saying, “Come on home. You’ve got an interview at MCA.” I didn’t know what MCA was, even though I lived three blocks from the building. But I did know that surfing was not a career, beer wasn’t a career, and getting laid wasn’t a career. Maybe being an agent was; I’d get to wear a suit and then maybe get laid.

I interviewed with Taft Schreiber, third man in the company after Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman, and one of the coldest fish I’d ever met. Schreiber knew my father, and he said, “Just remember: Your father is in some respects an ally, but in some respects he’s a competitor. What you hear here you’re not supposed to take home. Remember: Blood is thicker than the
Hollywood Reporter
.” Schreiber referred me to Earl Zook in Traffic. He did all the hiring.

FRED SPECKTOR:
I grew up in Beverly Hills, on Bedford Drive. My father owned various stores at different times: dry goods, furniture, liquor. He was a hardworking guy, and we were solidly middle-class. My closest entertainment connection was a friend whose father was head of the Legal Department at Paramount Studios, which was really no connection at all. After college and the army a girlfriend asked me what I planned to do. I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “Why don’t you go to work for MCA? A couple guys you went to school with work there.” I called a fraternity brother, and he set up an appointment for me with Earl Zook.

RICK RAY:
I considered graduate school after UCLA, but I didn’t think I could be a lawyer because I didn’t have a good memory, or a doctor because I’d throw up on my first patient, or an engineer because I can’t add. Teaching sounded gratifying, but while I never lusted after being very rich, I wanted even less to be very poor. That left me unable to identify a specific talent that might drive me in a particular direction. My ambition was amorphous. I had no idea what the hell I was going to do.

One day, walking through Beverly Hills, I ran into a very dear friend from UCLA who I hadn’t seen for close to a year: Fred Specktor. We went to lunch, and it was the most serendipitous moment of my life. Had I rounded the corner thirty seconds earlier, I would never have wound up in the entertainment business.

In retrospect, going to MCA was the single most important decision I’ve ever made, and I’m fascinated that I made it. It fits into my personal philosophy: people who succeed are capable of recognizing an opportunity when it occurs and can quickly evaluate whether the opportunity is good, bad, or indifferent. I wouldn’t have put it that way then. I only knew it felt right and seemed like an exciting way to earn a living.

I met with Earl Zook. He was a wonderful man. But there was a problem. Even though I passed the test with him, MCA evidently had difficulties with some of his earlier selections. Some people he hired had gone through the usual nine months plus of penal servitude in the mailroom, but when it was time for them to be absorbed as junior agents, nobody wanted them. So I had to be not only accepted by Earl Zook but interviewed and accepted by every single department head at MCA. I met eight different guys—among them Jay Kanter and George Chasen—all of whom were quite brilliant, all of whom were angry that they had to waste time with me. They wanted to see me like they wanted cancer.

The first agent, I forget who, asked, “Why do you want to be an agent?” I’m sure I answered, “It’s an exciting, challenging business.”

He said, “A salesman can say that. Why do you want to be an agent?”

Time to give a real answer. “Because it seems to me that to be a good agent, you have to be creative like your clients. In doing so, you can help them and help yourself.”

He sat back and said, “That’s absolutely right.” The tone of the meeting changed immediately. Every subsequent guy asked me the same question. I gave them all the same answer.

To check out all my options, I also went to the William Morris Agency. I was interviewed by Morris Stoller, may he rot in hell. He also asked me the same question. I gave him the same answer. And he said, “That’s bullshit. We’re not here to be creative. We’re here to sell clients. Just sell them and get the money.”

However, William Morris offered me a job, which I was thrilled to turn down, and I accepted MCA’s offer instead.

MIKE FENTON:
My father was a multimillionaire before he was twenty-six; he had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. My older sister grew up with a chauffeur and a nanny and a maid, all in a huge house. Then the crash came and he lost everything. I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment on Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. My father leased a gas station from Standard Oil of California in downtown Los Angeles, and then another at a different location, and began to recover.

I went to USC film school to study cinematography and directing but afterward couldn’t get work in the industry. I went to law school for one year but didn’t like it. I went into the army for six months and didn’t like that either. My sister had worked at MCA, so she said, “Why don’t you apply to William Morris and MCA and become an agent?”

I said, “What’s an agent?”

She said, “Don’t ask such stupid questions. Just go to work in the industry.”

SPECKTOR:
We had to wear suits. There were two acceptable colors, blue and black. Also a white shirt and a blue or a black knit tie.

KANTER:
On Saturdays we could be a lot less formal and wear a sport coat.

BROWN:
My standard dress was secretarial clothes. Nothing provocative, ever. I had a nice little figure because I padded my bra, but nobody knew about things like that. Most of the women wore sweaters and skirts; there were not too many suits. One day all the girls decided to wear red. But by the end of the day none of the men had said a word. We might as well not have bothered, we were so invisible.

FENTON:
Guys would get axed for what seemed to me the silliest of reasons. A kid in the mailroom named Jack was sent home one day by Arthur Park. It was 110 degrees out, and the kid came to work in a tan-colored suit. He never came back.

KANTER:
The salary was one hundred dollars a month, paid on the first and fifteenth. I delivered mail and went to the studios on Wednesdays and Thursdays to pick up checks for our clients: the writers, directors, producers, actors. The envelopes were unsealed, and I was astounded at what I saw: checks for Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly. And the money was out of sight: a thousand a week, fifteen hundred.

SHERMAN:
One client had over $300,000 sitting in a checking account at the Bank of America. After deductions I cleared $26.40 a week.

RAY:
My first day a guy who looked like a hood walked out the back door, followed by a spindly old man badly dressed in a floppy suit. Several days later I found out that the “hood” was a major executive and that the old man had an office on the second floor that seemed as big as my entire condominium today. In fact, every time I walked down the hall, I tripped over fourteen world-famous people. It was all pretty awesome for a hick from West Los Angeles.

SPECKTOR:
In most ways the MCA mailroom seemed benign and slow, just like the rotary phones we used then. It was a small operation. A couple Teletype machines. Nobody hazed you. There was no game. You just did what you were told or you got fired.

There were six guys in Traffic. You started as number six and worked your way up, and ran the mailroom. The two newest employees were outside guys and made deliveries in their cars. I would go to the market and get the special hundred-proof vodka that Joan Crawford liked, and put the milk in the icebox for the agents who had ulcers. We did everything from drop off scripts to old-time movie stars like John Payne, Montogmery Clift, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant, to deliver spaghetti to Pier Angeli’s mother or take soup to June Allyson when she was sick. She lived all the way over in Mandeville Canyon. I also loved driving the owner’s, Jules Stein’s, incredible Mercedes 300 Gullwing to be fixed.

SHERMAN:
We were always asked to do strange extracurricular things.

One afternoon Mario Lanza’s agent asked if we wanted to make fifty bucks on the weekend. Lanza’s furniture was about to be attached by the Internal Revenue Service. He couldn’t hire professionals, so somebody had to do it. We hid the stuff at an actor’s house in the San Fernando Valley. Another time an agent’s secretary told me, “We’re going for a ride.” Fine. Also, “You’re sworn to secrecy.” Fine. This was during the heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee, when the trick was to avoid being called to testify, because if you were called, they pressured you to name names or go to jail.

We drove to the house of one of the world’s most beloved screen entertainers—and I mean beloved. The secretary had a key and we went inside. Turned out this beloved star had a stash of books on Communists three feet long in his basement. I crawled around in my dark suit like a marine slithering under barbed wire, fished out his books, and gave them to the secretary.

I don’t know what ever happened to the stash, but at least the guy never got called to testify.

RAY:
It was clear from the get-go that at MCA there was plenty of room for all of us to be successful; I didn’t have to kill the guy next door to get ahead. At the William Morris Agency, if you weren’t one of Abe and Frances’s “kids,” then you weren’t going anywhere. It was not the same kind of social bullshit. Wasserman was one of the genuinely smartest men I’ve ever known.