The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (13 page)

The next time she came in, she said, “So, what are you doing here?”

“I’m just doing this temporarily.” I explained that I’d been promoted to an assistant’s desk, but there had been nowhere to go in the department, so I was just floating until something came along.

She said, “Do you take shorthand?”

“I take it as good as anybody does,” I said—which was both a lie and the truth.

“Well, sometimes I want to blow out of here early and Mr. Lastfogel still needs things done. Maybe you can sit at my desk after I leave.”

I told her I’d love to.

LIEBERSON:
I’m not sure why she picked me. Maybe because I chatted with her when I delivered the mail. Maybe it was luck. I certainly had no plan. You don’t plan to work for Mr. Lastfogel.

My being chosen right out of the mailroom caused a huge reaction within the company. The first day everyone who came by said, “Where’s Eleanor? What are you doing here, kid?” I think the last male secretary Mr. Lastfogel had was Sam Weisbord, twenty-five years before. The mailroom guys were also amazed; they couldn’t figure out what I’d done.

“You have to remember two things,” Eleanor said before she left me alone. “One, listen in on the phone conversations so that if anything has to be done, you know it.” The first conversation I listened to was with Spencer Tracy. “And two, make sure you chill the glass he has his six o’clock whiskey in.”

The whiskey was a ritual when the agents would come by to check in at the end of the day. It was a chance for them to promote themselves and for him to find out what was going on. From my secretarial desk I could see into Mr. Lastfogel’s office and hear the conversations. I could tell who he liked and didn’t, who got his eye. People with enthusiasm and ideas got his attention. You didn’t have to look a certain way, but you had to have a little flair. Lenny Hirshan was an incredibly ambitious agent who would work eighteen hours a day. Stan Kamen was one of Mr. Lastfogel’s favorites. And Norman Brokaw. They were all committed to William Morris, to being there for Mr. Lastfogel, to being part of the family.

DEBLASIO:
My visibility grew on Mr. Lastfogel’s desk, which was a good thing because no one had really noticed me before. Now everyone could see how I dressed, how I answered the telephone. And I got to know the agents: who was nervous, who was insecure, who bucked the line. Mr. Lastfogel didn’t say much to me, but he appreciated the fact that I knew whose drinks belonged to whom, like Sinatra.

One day Sinatra rolled in a little late for a meeting. I poured him a Jack Daniel’s. Mr. Lastfogel was down the hall. As Sinatra waited an agent from a nearby office stopped by and said, “Hey, Frank.” Then, perhaps because he couldn’t resist trying to buddy up to the great Sinatra by proving he was in the know, he said, “Didn’t you know?
She’s
here. At the Beverly Wilshire.”

Sinatra immediately understood. Ava Gardner, the love of his life, was in town. And she hadn’t called him. He put down his drink and said to me, “Tell Abe I’ll see him later.” Then he threw the “Wee Small Hours of the Morning” trench coat over his shoulder, grabbed his hat, stuffed one hand into his pocket, and walked down the hall, a dejected guy.

Little by little Eleanor left earlier and earlier. Sometimes she’d take a day off and I’d sit there morning to night. When Eleanor died, they held the mass at Saint Vibiana’s in Los Angeles. Only a few of the high-rankers from the Morris office came down; I think no one wanted to appear as if he was choosing Eleanor over Frances. But Frances was there. She felt her husband’s pain and wasn’t afraid to show it. She and Mr. Lastfogel sat together in the front row, weeping.

PERKINS:
Some agents would call a mailboy to pick up their laundry. That was the worst job. It wasn’t what I was there for. I could spend the same time picking up a letter from a lawyer. At least that was part of business.

DEBLASIO:
When we delivered, we used a company car or one belonging to a lesser agent who had his car expense taken care of by the agency. This was before they had their little fleet. You knew which cars were good and which weren’t, and you always tried to stick one of the other guys with the Volkswagen that always fucked up someplace, or the Chevy that overheated, or the car that had bad air-conditioning. You also wanted the best delivery run so you didn’t end up searching for some little house on Woodrow Wilson Drive at four o’clock in the afternoon. And you always tried to get back in front of the dispatcher faster than anybody. The dispatcher’s office was right next to the personnel director’s, so if you worked quickly, there was the chance someone who mattered would hear the dispatcher saying, “Gee, Ron, you’re already done!”

LIEBERSON:
I once had to deliver a script to Elaine May up in Laurel Canyon. I knocked at the door and there was no answer. I walked around the side. She was sitting by the pool, reading a script, wearing full body makeup from head to toe—so she looked tan.

MARDIGIAN:
I once met James Michener. He was in Los Angeles meeting with his agent to talk about his new assignment. He asked me if I’d like a drink. I took water. He asked me what I was reading, and I said, “Thomas Wolfe.” He said, “Really? What do you think?” I said, “Well, the sentences are very long.”

PERKINS:
Sometimes you’d hear things in the building that you couldn’t believe. Once, I walked into an agent’s office to get something, and there was another agent with him. They were talking about the actress Debra Paget. The first guy said, “Oh, boy, what a dumb cunt.” The other guy said, “Well, she’s nice enough, but Jesus . . .” Then the phone rang and the secretary said, “It’s Debra Paget.” The first agent answered and said, “Hi, honey, we were just talking about you.” I thought, Okay,
now
I get what this is all about.

PERKINS:
Phil Weltman was a big TV agent, rough-hewn, maybe five ten, who also oversaw the trainees. He had a bit of big-screen top sergeant in him. He was demanding, but not unreasonably so; the things he wanted from you were things you
should
do. When I was young, he’d make me give him reports of what I did almost every hour. There was a method to it: he wanted you to stay conscious. Call him a tough guy, but he truly cared.

WIZAN:
I don’t know why he cared so much. Maybe because he didn’t have family of his own until he married late in life—but Phil Weltman was the world’s greatest mentor.

SHAPIRO:
He cared about the trainees because he wanted to build the agency. He wanted bench depth, to use a baseball analogy. He thought the Morris office was the best, and he wanted it to stay the best. He would literally, I believe, have killed for the agency. It was his life. Weltman was a hard taskmaster. He had his rules. Something Jeff Katzenberg said years later was also true of Weltman: “If you’re not prepared to come in on Saturday, don’t bother to come in on Sunday.” Weltman worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If he worked, you worked. There were no hours. Sometimes I would curse him for it and want to quit, but he instilled a great work ethic in me.

DEBLASIO:
Weltman came from New York, but he understood what the West Coast was all about. A lot of agents who came out from the East Coast didn’t quite get it. Everybody says we’re looser in Los Angeles than in New York, but that’s wrong. New York is a little more rough-and-tumble: “Hey, gimme that fuckin’ pack of cigarettes there, buddy. You heard what I said.” Los Angeles is actually tighter. It’s a company town. You never know who’s listening. The artists live here. This is their home. You’re always seen.

In New York you walk down the street, the guy next to you works in a market, somebody else works in the garment district, somebody else works in securities. Here, you go down Rodeo Drive today and yell, “So-and-so just lost his deal at Fox,” and half the people in those stores will come out and say, “When?” They know what you’re talking about.

SHAPIRO:
Everybody wanted to be on Phil Weltman’s desk, and so did I, but I didn’t try to engineer it. Frankly, I would have been happy to be on Attila the Hun’s desk, just to get out of the mailroom. The day they told me I’d be working for Phil, I was thrilled. And this much was clear: I hadn’t gotten it because he’d been at my bar mitzvah and knew my family. I never forgot that the day I started in the mailroom, he had said, “Forget your father. This is you. You want this?
You
have to perform.”

Weltman was the CBS guy. He went to the network every day and walked up and down those halls. He knew every show, every director, every actor. He prided himself on booking the most and knowing the most. If you covered a studio and you
didn’t
know what was going on, you’d be reprimanded. You
had
to know.

I went with him to CBS lots of times. I wasn’t assigned to do it, but whenever I had a chance to see him in action, I took it. He was dynamic. Selling today is different. Now most agents don’t leave their desks; it’s all done on the telephone. These days you can talk to people for two years and not even know who they are, let alone recognize them. When I became an agent, Weltman would never let me get away with that. If we were out at night together and we ran into some producer who didn’t say, “Hi, Bob,” he would take me aside and say, “How do you not know this guy? He’s producing a show.”

Weltman would put you right on the carpet. You could hate that or you could say, “You know what? It’s teaching me to be thorough. I may not choose to do my business that way someday, but I’ll know.” To him it was teaching someone right from wrong.

WIZAN:
When there was a message to call Phil Weltman, I would shake. To this day, forty years later, I remember the knot in my stomach: What did I do wrong? How did I fuck up? Usually it was nothing—but you never knew that. He was fair, but when he ripped you, he really ripped you.

PERKINS:
I remember Weltman yelling at George Shapiro. It was almost like a cartoon. Weltman said, “I ought to fire you for doing this.” Shapiro said something like “You can’t fire me, I quit!”—and he stalked out of the office, slamming the door. Then he stopped dead in his tracks, realizing this momentous thing he’d just done. He turned around, knocked meekly on Weltman’s door, and said, “I was just kidding.” Then they laughed and talked. Somebody lesser would have kept walking. Somebody lesser would have let him.

WIZAN:
After the mailroom I worked on Gene Houston’s desk in Literary, but I wanted to be in TV. One morning there was a message: “See Phil Weltman.” I stated to shake—as usual. Howard Rubin was Weltman’s assistant, and Bob Shapiro was his secretary. Weltman had fired Howard the night before. I thought Shapiro was going to move up, and I hoped maybe I’d take his place.

I was wrong. Weltman said, “You’re going to be my assistant.”

I said, “What about Bob?”

He said, “Bob’s not ready yet.”

SHAPIRO:
That was a defining moment for me. I felt strongly that I deserved the promotion; so did others in the company. I couldn’t conceive that the job wouldn’t be mine. When I didn’t get it, I could easily have said, “I’m outta here.” I would have had no problem getting another job. But I asked myself if I wanted to let my ego get the best of me, or if I wanted to keep my investment and continue. I had to fight my every instinct not to quit. I stayed because above all else I loved and respected Weltman. I also liked Joe Wizan; he was a friend. I was happy for him—just devastated for myself.

Here’s how Weltman handled it: He took me to lunch and told me to be patient. He said I had great potential and I should continue to work hard, absorb everything, and my time would soon come. He urged me not to get discouraged. Actually, if you knew him, you could say it was more of an
order
that I not get discouraged. I swallowed my pride and stayed. And Weltman was true to his word. After about six months I was promoted to junior agent and went to work as Norman Brokaw’s assistant. I had a terrific rise at William Morris and never regretted my decision to stay.

DEBLASIO:
Even though I never worked on Phil Weltman’s desk, I went to him more than anybody. You could say exactly what you felt; that’s why Ovitz and Ron Meyer and Rowland and all those guys loved him. Yet years later the company started giving Weltman shit that he wasn’t one of them, and let him go. In the end he was a better one of them than they were, and his boys, the guys who started CAA, left soon after.

WIZAN:
The way William Morris treated Phil Weltman helped create CAA.

PERKINS:
Over the years Weltman and I talked a lot. There’s not very much I didn’t say to him, or he to me. At one point he made a big push for me to be president of William Morris. Traditionally they waited until you were eighty and then handed you the baton, and he told them they shouldn’t do that. This was at the time when Sid Sheinberg, at thirty-nine, was made head of MCA, under Wasserman. But Weltman was trying to convince a bunch of guys, all of whom were older and had aspirations of being president themselves, and there wasn’t a chance his idea was going to fly. He had no ambition of being president himself. Phil Weltman was really pure of heart.

SHAPIRO:
Phil Weltman got to be very proud of us. He had me as the head of Warner Brothers, Joe Wizan as the head of Fox, and Barry Diller as the head of Paramount. All of us his trainees, all of us from his desk.