The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up by David Rensin Read Free Book Online Page B

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