The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (45 page)

TOM STRICKLER
is a founding partner of Endeavor.

DONNA CHAVOUS
is a personal manager who runs her own company, Undercover Entertainment. She also coproduced the film
The Wash,
starring Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.

MARC WAX
is the owner of the Wax Agency and handles talent for television and motion pictures, writers, and directors.

JANE BERLINER
recently left CAA to become head of production at Hand-print Entertainment.

JON KLANE
owns the Jon Klane Agency in Beverly Hills, a motion picture and television literary agency. He is both president and an agent representing writers and directors.

JOHN UFLAND
is head of the Literary Department at Don Buchwald and Associates.

MARTIN SPENCER
is a literary agent with CAA.

DOUG ROBINSON
is a producer with Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions.

MICHAEL WIMER
is a motion picture literary agent and partner at CAA.

ADAM KRENTZMAN
is an agent at CAA working in international film financing and packaging.

BRAD WESTON
is copresident of Dimension Films.

TED MILLER
is an agent at CAA.

MICHAEL GOLDMAN
is a partner and producer at Tollin/Robbins.

JEANNE WILLIAMS
is a motion picture literary agent at CAA.

AS THE MAILROOM TURNS

OUTPOST ON SIXTH AVENUE

William Morris Agency, New York, 1981–1986

KEVIN HUVANE, 1981 • MIKE MENDELSOHN, 1984 • ADAM ISAACS, 1984 •
ADAM BERKOWITZ, 1984 • GERRY HARRINGTON, 1985 • STEPHEN SANDS, 1985 •
MICHAEL GRUBER, 1985 • MERYL POSTER, 1986

At
the
time,
there
was
no
other
major
agency
in
New
York.
To
the
uninformed—like
I
was
when
I
started—William
Morris
could
act
like
they
were
the place.
William
Morris
in
New
York
was
about
their
office
like
the
British
are
about
their
country.
“Forget
these
upstarts.
We’re
William
Morris.
We’ve
got
a
hundred
years
of tradition.” But
it
was
a
sinking
ship.

—Gerry Harrington

KEVIN HUVANE:
I grew up in New York City. I went to Regis High, a Jesuit school where I guess they were training nice young Catholic men to be doctors or lawyers or on Wall Street. But they also had a huge arts program. I took a class called “Theater in New York,” and every week we went to see something different. I loved the theater.

In high school and college I worked summers at the Wyndham Hotel, on Fifty-eighth Street. It’s a great place where many actors stayed long-term. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy lived there. Henry Fonda, Laurence Olivier, Peter Falk, Ben Gazarra. Milton Goldman, the great ICM theater agent who represented Meryl Streep, lived there for a time. The hotel was warm and personal, like a family.

As the elevator operator and bellman, I was in the lift every day with a legend, and I talked to everybody. Martin Sheen gave me tickets to see him in
Death of a Salesman
. Diana Rigg gave me tickets to
The Misanthrope
. The Cronyns always gave me tickets to whatever they were in. John Cassavetes, who lived there when he and his wife, Gena Row-lands, were filming
Gloria
, invited me to the set. He even sent a production car.

In college I worked at the hotel as the owner’s assistant. One day a star complained about his suite. After I talked him into taking another suite, a woman I didn’t know walked up and said, “You should be an agent.” Her name was Cynthia Freeman. She was the Jewish Barbara Cartland and wrote books like
Come Pour the Wine
. She lived in San Francisco but was doing research in New York and staying monthly at the hotel. That night she went out to dinner with Nat and Sally Lefkowitz, from William Morris. The next day I got a call from his office. Lefkowitz said, “I hear you want to be an agent.”

I said, “Yeah, sure, thank you,” and hung up. I thought it was a joke. I guess he could tell because he sent me a note that afternoon: “It’s not a joke. Cynthia Freeman is one of my wife’s closest friends and she said you’d be a great agent. Why don’t you come in and talk to me?”

I started at William Morris on St. Patty’s Day, 1981. Being an Irish American, I thought that was a good-luck sign.

ADAM ISAACS:
I always wanted to act, and when I graduated from Harvard I decided to pursue it as a career. I moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles and lived with Tom Strickler, my best friend from college. He was in the CAA mailroom.

It soon became clear that acting was a bad idea; the life just wasn’t for me. I didn’t like feeling I wasn’t the master of my own destiny. One Saturday Strickler sat me down and said, “You’re smart, you’re great—why are you doing this?” Within a day and a half I had booked a flight back to New York with the intention of becoming an agent.

People wonder why I didn’t just ask Tom to get me into CAA. Simple: That was his place—and it sounded awful. Some nights Tom came home in tears.

Stuart Griffen’s aunt who worked at William Morris, as well as my former personal manager, who knew Robert Gottlieb, helped me get an interview at William Morris with Ed Khouri. But Khouri thought that because I’d gone to Harvard my ego would be too big to push the mail cart. I said his reasoning was ridiculous: “So what are you going to do? Hire somebody from Ed and Fred’s College just because you think their ego
can
handle it?” I really wanted the job and nothing they could throw at me would scare me.

GERRY HARRINGTON:
I was never very career-minded and had no dreams about being in show business. After college at Georgetown, I went to Europe for a couple of months, then figured I’d work on Wall Street. I took a job as a stock analyst at Value Line. After two weeks I hated it, so I quit.

My best friend then—and we’re still close—was James Spader, the actor. He’d done a couple of small movies and been signed by William Morris. We were walking down Madison Avenue and went into a store that sold Italian-designed gabardine gangster suits for nine hundred dollars. We both wanted to buy one; only Jimmy could afford it.

He said, “Johnnie Planko”—a big William Morris agent—“can walk in here and buy twenty of these suits anytime. You’re perfect for that business. Why are these guys becoming gazillionaires and you can’t even buy a suit? You’ve got to go to fucking William Morris and become an agent.”

Spader called his agent, a very sweet woman named Katie Rothaker, and told her about me. She explained there was a six-month wait to get in, but she agreed to arrange an interview with Ed Khouri. She also told Spader to tell me to schedule my interview in the morning because Khouri, a mild, unassuming clerical sort, was much less receptive after lunchtime. I called Khouri, and sure enough, he said, “Do you want to come in tomorrow afternoon?”

“I’m not free in the afternoon,” I lied. “I’ll come in the morning.”

When I did, as expected, Khouri said, “We don’t have any openings for six months. Will you hang loose until then?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I appreciate it, but I need to start earning money. I need to get on a career path.” I shook his hand and left.

By the time I got home to Bronxville, forty minutes on the train, I had a message: “Can you start tomorrow?” The waiting period had been bullshit, a way to separate the men from the boys.

MERYL POSTER:
As a sophomore at Tulane, I was in a program called Directions that brought in speakers. I was hospitality chairman, which gives you an indication of my personality. One speaker was Alexander Haig. He came to dinner at the university president’s home, and I was seated next to his aide, Woody Goldberg. We talked for a bit and then he asked what I’d be doing when I finished school. Woody said, “I think you’d make a terrific agent. I know someone at William Morris. I can put you in touch with her and maybe you can work there during the summer.”

He gave me Carol Bruckner’s number. She ran the speakers bureau. She told me that William Morris had already filled their summer jobs, but I should stay in touch.

That summer I studied at Lee Strasberg, and then I called Ruthanne Cionne, head of Personnel at William Morris, to ask if I could have an informational interview. It wasn’t normally that easy, but as she was new, she accommodated me. She told me that I was very nice, but to be honest, their summer hires were the children of William Morris employees or were otherwise connected. “But stay in touch,” she said.

I went to Europe and sent her postcards from London, Scotland, Ireland. I came home for Christmas and saw her. Nothing was available but, again, stay in touch. I studied in Florence and sent postcards. I called that summer and still nothing was available.

I didn’t give up. At Christmas break during my senior year I went to see Ruthanne. She said she’d love to give me a job when I graduated from college.

She had me meet Ed Khouri. He liked me but said I really needed some pull to get in. I asked my parents, “Don’t you know anyone?”

Amazingly, they came up with this: The cantor of my temple, the Fort Lee Jewish Center, was good friends with Lee Solomon, from William Morris. The cantor put me in touch with Lee. We had a fivesecond meet. I got the job.

ADAM BERKOWITZ:
My father’s first cousin, Nat Lefkowitz, was the president of William Morris. At a family function, he and his wife, Sally, said, “You should work in the mailroom.” I was still in high school. I didn’t know what the mailroom was. I thought William Morris was an advertising agency. Nat told me he’d started in his early twenties. At first he didn’t get the job, so he went around the corner and shined his shoes, then came back and met with someone else, who hired him. He’d worked his way up and had been there over fifty years. He still came in every Saturday and believed that hard work would make you successful. It was quite inspirational. I made an appointment to speak to Ed Khouri.

Khouri kept me waiting about thirty-five minutes, then said, “It’s very hard to get into the mailroom. Very few people do it. It’s a grungy job. And we won’t know until the beginning of June if there’s a place for you.”

I needed to know much sooner. Khouri scanned my application and said, “I see you were referred by Mr. Lefkowitz. How do you know him?”

I said, “He’s my cousin.”

Khouri said, “So, let us know when you want to start working.”

That was my first lesson about how the business works.

MIKE MENDELSOHN:
I wanted to go to law school. A woman I worked with three days a week teaching learning-handicapped children how to read recommended me to her husband, a Harvard law graduate in the litigation department of Henry Bushkin’s firm. Their clients included Johnny Carson, John Travolta, Bill Cosby, Olivia de Havilland, Cheap Trick, Foreigner. I was sixteen. They gave me a job in their mailroom. It paid four dollars an hour. I remember making several copies of Johnny Carson’s new deal with NBC. But ultimately the job did not make me want to be a lawyer. The deal makers were rarely in the office, but the regular lawyer was in the office from morning till night. He did not have a wonderful lifestyle. He was constantly under the pressure of putting out more and more paper.

Instead I moved to New York and ended up at Salomon Brothers. The lady on my right made nearly half a million bucks a year. She was single. I asked if she’d gone to any concerts or movies. No, she never left the office. Any cool restaurants? Not really; she ate in. The guy on my left was twenty-eight and pulling down a million a year. I said, “Going to any ball games?” No. “Got any chicks you’re fucking?” “No. I don’t really get out much.”

I went into the managing director’s office and quit.

Show business seemed interesting. I’d interned for Jonathan Dolgen at Paramount one summer after college, so I applied at the talent agencies. Also at MGM Home Video. Rather than give me an executive position, they asked me how I would feel about standing on a street corner in Manhattan, doing surveys on what movies people would like to see. I could get a clipboard and a pencil sharpener, and they’d have a position for me right away. Fortunately, William Morris gave me a job.

MICHAEL GRUBER:
My father is a toy manufacturer and my mom a theater fan. We went to musicals and the opera. Once I met Ben Vereen backstage. I grew up in New York; went to college in Maryland; moved to Colorado after graduation, skied, and tended bar. When I came back to New York I applied for three jobs: at Shearson Lehman, Levi Strauss, and William Morris.