The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (50 page)

COHEN:
Me, David Lonner, Jordan Baer, Howard Sanders. We were a very tight group. We used to go to Hernando’s Hideaway, in the Beverly Wilshire, for happy hour on Fridays. You could eat dinner from what they put out. We’d sit around and bitch and complain. We’d say, “Anybody got any dates this weekend?” What, are you kidding? Nobody dates in the mailroom. “Anybody know any good parties?” No. It’s the best year of your life, but at the same time it’s the worst year.

JAFFA:
I wanted to wear my dress shoes the first day, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. My only others were sneakers and cowboy boots. My cousin had given me a handmade-to-order pair for graduating from business school. So I wore the boots and immediately got a hard time about it. But it set me apart, so I wore those boots every day and became the alternative kid.

WOODS:
I never used the word
mailroom.
To my parents, the idea that their son, who had gone to law school, was in a mailroom might not have been good for their health. I always said that I was in the “training program.” My own ignorance was probably also a good thing. If someone had shown me the videotape of what would be the next year and a half of my life, I’m not sure that I would have dived in the way I did. You didn’t get a two- or three-page explanation of what the hell you were supposed to do. Everything was done orally, by finding people who had done it and asking a lot of questions. Just like the early years of agenting, when you have to aggressively seek out clients and sign them, in the mailroom you have to make everything happen yourself.

ADELSTEIN:
I didn’t really believe that the job was delivering mail. Wrong. Steve Rabineau showed me around. He took me to Smart and Final for shopping, to Nate ’n Al’s to pick up deli for meetings. He explained how to set up the food, how to take extra food home, how to doctor the invoices. If you usually bought three quarts of tuna fish, you’d just change it to five and take two home. That’s how you ate on $180 a week.

TOLMACH:
Richard Feinsilber would say, “Who wants to read a script?” Hands would go up. Beth Swofford covered more scripts than anybody.

STEVENS:
She was the ultimate teacher’s pet mailroom kid—and it paid off. She did lots of coverage and is a fine literary agent now.

SWOFFORD:
I was very determined. We spent a lot of time trying to get to know the agents because so much of getting promoted was about standing out and showing you were assertive. I sometimes covered eight to ten scripts a week. But I was told to be careful how I wrote comments because you never knew if years later they might come back to haunt you. What if you end up representing that writer?

TOLMACH:
Nick and I were of the School of Cover Nothing. We analyzed the psychology of the whole mailroom thing and determined that no amount of coverage, no amount of doing things the right way, would get you to the goal of being an agent. We convinced ourselves that what the powers that be wanted to see was an
angle,
that we could come up with a different way.

RABINEAU:
After three months I felt terribly down. I’d given up a potential law career and I was basically a piece-of-shit grunt. While setting up the conference room for breakfast I knocked the cream cheese container onto the very plush carpet, facedown. I got on my hands and knees, began scraping the muck out of the carpet—and started crying. I was so dejected. Then I heard the door open and Sy Sussman walked in. He was our projectionist. He asked what was wrong. I said, “Look at me. I’m cleaning cream cheese out of the carpet. My parents are furious that I’m here. I don’t know if there’s a future for me. What am I doing?”

Sy said, “Listen. A few years ago, I had the same conversation with a guy who was doing exactly what you’re doing. I’ll tell you what I told him.”

“What?”

“Stay with it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Who was the guy?”

“His name was Mike Ovitz. If he could hang in there, so can you.”

“Mike Ovitz was doing
this
crappy job?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely he was. Sure. It’s going to be okay. This is as bad as it gets.”

That was a turning point for me. I thought if Ovitz could endure the indignity, then I should suck it up, too. I’ve never forgotten Sy for that. For all I know, maybe he made up the story. If he did, I like him even more, though I suspect he was telling the truth because Ovitz wasn’t
Ovitz
yet, just another guy who had made it through the mailroom.

KAUFMAN:
My job was to set up the food for the television and movie meetings. The instructions were on three coffee-and-junk-encrusted three-by-five cards that had been passed down through the mailroom for at least ten years. They listed what I had to get and for whom. Everything came from Nate ’n Al’s. I also had to get milk, half-and-half, bagels, cream cheese, and Danish—but no prune Danish.

When I went to Nate ’n Al’s, I always had to bring a box of number-two pencils because the guy behind the counter liked the William Morris logo on the pencil he always kept behind his ear. It was a tradition and almost a veiled threat: Bring the pencils or something bad might happen to your order. Every week I had to make a deal with the supplies guy to give me pencils. Fortunately, he was always interested in an extra pastry.

One morning I forgot the pencils. After I set up the meeting room a call came into the mailroom for me. A guy handed me the phone, shaking. Sam Weisbord was on the line. “We
told
you not to give us the prune Danish.” I went upstairs and they literally threw them at me. It was
all
prune Danish.

I was so upset that I let the coffee brew all night in the big percolator. As far as I was concerned, these guys could drink sludge in the morning. I didn’t even think about getting fired. The next morning another call came into the mailroom. Jerry Katzman was on the line. “We just want to let you know you’ve redeemed yourself. This is the best coffee anyone’s ever made.”

KAUFMAN:
The only good thing about Dispatch was that you met everybody, from studio presidents to actors and musicians. Dick Van Dyke was a big client. One time he invited me in and tried to convince me there was no Jerry Van Dyke, that he was Jerry
and
Dick.

Another time I delivered a script to Lindsay Wagner. I leaned the teleplay up against her door and the door opened. So I decided to put it on her kitchen table. The next thing I knew, she called Walt Zifkin, wanting to know why I had broken into her house. Zifkin called me in, closed his electric door, and said, “We’re taping this conversation.” I got yelled at for half an hour.

ANONYMOUS:
I saw a naked star once. Donna Dixon. It was pretty powerful, especially that many years ago. I guess I knocked at the right time. She opened the door, stood modestly behind it, but there was a mirror behind her. I tried to be as polite as possible.

KAUFMAN:
There was a guy, a lawyer and nephew of a producer, who started in the mailroom thinking he should move ahead very quickly. A nice guy, but never wanted to work that hard. We were on the Hollywood run on a Friday night. It was eight o’clock and raining. We delivered some packages to Merv Griffin’s place and were on our way to
Dance Fever
with their entire payroll. This guy seemed upset, which wasn’t unusual, given the run was cutting into our weekend. He asked me to pull over for a second, and I did. He got out, grabbed the box with the deliveries, turned it over, and poured the contents into the storm drain. Then he walked away. I said, “Where are you going?”

He said, “That’s it. I’m done.”

I went back to Griffin’s company, used their lobby pay phone, and called Mark Drucker, who ran Dispatch. “I’ve got some bad news. The guy I was making the run with just left.”

“Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know, but he took the entire box of checks and poured them into the sewer. Now he’s walking on Hollywood Boulevard.”

Without hesitation Drucker said, “What about the checks? Can you fish them out?”

I said, “They’re a hundred feet underground in fast-moving water.”

“You’d better try to get the checks.”

“There
are
no checks.”

“You guys are in big trouble.”

“The guy who did it is gone. He’s not coming back.”

“Then
you’re
in trouble.”

ADELSTEIN:
Mark Drucker called me Nightmare. I did not take to the work well—it was too menial—so I found ways to get around it. I got very good at simply mailing what I thought were nonessential deliveries. Sometimes I ran it through our postage meter; sometimes I paid for it myself. One afternoon the Dodgers were playing. It was a big game, and I really wanted to go. I mailed everything and went to the game, and I didn’t call in for about three and a half hours. I heard that Drucker threw chairs at the wall because he couldn’t find me.

Sometimes when we had to deliver to Universal Studios we’d take our cars on the tour route and get the
Jaws
shark to pop up at us. These old guys, retired policemen, would chase us all around the lot. Sometimes I had accidents.

After about my seventh crash, I got called in by the leisure-suit-wearing CFO of the company. He said, “We’re going to have to let you go.”

I said, “I don’t understand why.”

He said, “You’ve crashed seven of our cars, and we can’t have that.”

I said, “The funny thing is, you hired me to be an agent, not to be a driver. I admit I’m a lousy driver.”

They punished me by demoting me back to the mailroom. After two months one of the agents told me there was a job opening at Showtime. I told Kathy Krugel I was going to work for Peter Chernin. She said, “That’s probably good, because you’re not agent material.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

RABINEAU:
William Morris was all history and lore, and some of it was still alive and kicking. Abe Lastfogel still walked around with his hand in his shirt, like Napoleon. Sammy Weisbord was still alive. Morris Stoller, Nat Lefkowitz, and Lou Weiss had already been with the company fifty some-odd years. Norman Brokaw was very active. It all added up to a certain mystique.

On the other hand, other lifers were pretty sad characters. One guy had a stroke. He kept an office in the back and he used to wander down to the mailroom. If he found out which guys set out the food, he’d look at you and go, “Hunnnnh,” and you’d give him the two Danish you’d set aside. He’d wrap up the Danish, take them up to his office. Apparently this guy had been the Morris office “fixer”: If one of the stars got into trouble with the Beverly Hills Police Department or got busted, he’d be the person Abe would send to work it out. Now he was just a shadow. I’d look at these old guys and go, What the fuck is he still doing here? I couldn’t see myself in that life.

LOURD:
I didn’t wear the proverbial thirty-six-short suit, but I still looked around at the lifers and imagined staying at the Morris office forever. The company made so much of being a family that I believed them. I eventually learned that, at least politically, it was more the Man-son family; they were really competitive killers. The collegial atmosphere they claimed to have didn’t exist.

Many times I felt I just didn’t fit in, which is not an uncommon experience among those who leave small towns. I
was
different culturally. But I was also a closeted gay guy who didn’t know he was a closeted gay guy. Believe me, I didn’t want to be gay, but had I realized it, I still wouldn’t have come out, not even for God if He’d asked. It’s not like I noticed a lot of people running around saying, “Boy, isn’t this great! You can be whatever you want to be here.”

It was a very conservative company, and the only flamboyant, open gay was Ed Bondy. Even Ed Limato wasn’t really open. Stan Kamen was closeted beyond belief. No one talked about it. Certainly no one talked to me about it. It was still early.

But the truth is, once you made it to agent, had a client list, and were more secure professionally, it was okay. Well, it was
more
okay. It was safer.

STEVENS:
Norm Brokaw came by the mailroom one day and asked for a volunteer to come in on a Saturday and move his office. It’s the sort of thing Beth Swofford should have volunteered for, but she probably knew she was going to CAA anyway [
laughs
]. I had no interest in helping but ended up being selected for the job.

That Saturday, on my way over, wearing my Meat Puppets T-shirt and my shorts, smoking a big fat one, I decided I wasn’t giving Norm my whole weekend. So I got right to work. I moved the Cosby books while Norman emptied the desk that he’d probably used for thirty years. Then he stopped and called me over. He put his arm around me. He was like, “Son, check this out,” as he showed me letters from Abe Lastfogel, written while Abe was in the hospital and unable to speak, giving Norman the company, passing the mantle. Then Norman began to weep. I didn’t know him at all, and yet there he was, sharing a very intimate moment with me.