The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up by David Rensin Page A
Authors: David Rensin
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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.
THE MONEY
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.
TRAFFIC
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.
THE MAN IN CHARGE
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.
I’d been working for MCA for approximately two weeks when someone pointed him out to me in the hallway. A couple of days later he and I passed each other in the hall, and he said, “Good morning, Rick,
THE MONEY
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.
TRAFFIC
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.
THE MAN IN CHARGE
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.
I’d been working for MCA for approximately two weeks when someone pointed him out to me in the hallway. A couple of days later he and I passed each other in the hall, and he said, “Good morning, Rick,
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