The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up Read Online Free PDF

Baker was not quite Sophie Tucker, but she was an important client who’d made a name for herself in vaudeville. She had an apartment on Central Park West. I had to get her to sign a contract. Her little dog yapped the whole time I stood in the vestibule. When I went out, the dog bit me. I stood there, my leg bleeding, afraid to go back in. At the office I told Morris Stoller what had happened.
    He sent me to a doctor, who said the board of health had to get the dog. But Belle Baker had left town. They found her working in Atlantic City. They grabbed the dog and checked it out for hydrophobia. Thank God it was clean.
    AUERBACH: By 1944, Sid Feinberg, a lovely man, oversaw the trainees. He was deathly afraid of Nat Lefkowitz, his boss. There was a cutout window between their offices, and when Nat would open it and say, “Sid!” he’d jump. Sid had the tough job of telling us when we did things wrong, and what to do. One day he told me the company wanted to paint the office walls but didn’t have the money. Would I be interested in putting together a group of kids and whitewashing the walls? You bet. Then one guy stood on William Morris Jr.’s desk to reach the ceiling and broke the glass top. Of course we denied it was us.
    HIRSHAN: According to tradition, on my first day I was taken in to meet William Morris Jr. He looked up at me from behind his desk and said, “Ah. Another capitalist.” I thought, I’m making $38.50 a week. What is he talking about? But he was right. I didn’t understand. He was saying that in the agency business if you become successful, you make a good living. My game plan was if I didn’t get out of the mailroom in a year, I would go back to law school. If I got promoted, loved what I was doing, but didn’t make agent in two years, I’d also leave. But I was willing to give it a chance because almost immediately show business had seduced me.

     

DRESS THE PART
     
    ELKINS: One joke around the mailroom was the way I dressed—considering the salary. I did that on purpose. Everybody had to wear suits, but there are suits and there are suits. I went over the edge. I was very chic.
    One of my first delivery runs was to the Berle show. Milton, at that time, was Mr. Television. He ran the rehearsals a little bit like Auschwitz, but he got the goddamn shows on. I came in with a package, and he said, “Who are you?”
    “Hilly Elkins.”
    He looked at my clothes. He said, “And what do you do?”
    “I’m one of your agents,” I said. I don’t think he believed me, but he said nothing.

     
READ EVERYTHING!
     
    AUERBACH: A college education wasn’t yet required to get into the mailroom then. All you needed were street smarts and the ability to deal with a situation on your feet. There was no book to read, no school to go to that would tell you how.
    The mailroom was my school. I made it my business to read every piece of paper I could get my hands on. Booking sheets. Internal memos. Meeting minutes. I memorized important telephone numbers. I sopped up information. They didn’t tell you to do that or not do that, but only a schmuck wouldn’t read stu f before he delivered it . It was very glamorous to learn about the money the performers received. Some got paid so much, the salaries read like telephone numbers, and it’s still that way, only now the numbers include area codes. I thought these people must have been like God to get that kind of money.
    ELKINS: An early assignment was to take Abe Lastfogel’s New York bankbooks in for interest to be recorded. I went to ten banks, each with the maximum of $100,000, and I had them stamped. I figured if his New York money alone was a million bucks, it’s got to be a good business.

     
A MATTER OF DEGREE
     
    WEISS: Everybody wants to be in show business. Today a thousand college graduates show up every June to go into our training program, when there’s room for just a few. We eventually drew the line at college degrees to thin out the