MOVIES : Recovering From Deathblows : In shifting landscape of Hollywood talent agencies, the Agency for the Performing Arts survives back-to-back loss of two partners

In the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 25, talent agent Marty Klein had awakened in his West Hollywood condominium and gone to the refrigerator for a bottle of Evian water when he collapsed and died of a massive heart attack. He was 51 and left behind a wife and two daughters.

Before the sun had risen over the city, before the obituary had gone out over the wire services, phone calls were placed to the homes of employees of Klein’s firm, Agency for the Performing Arts, informing them of the news.

Ironically, some employees had been expecting such a call for days. As the telephone pierced the stillness of a Sunday morning, they thought they knew what it would be about: John Gaines was dead.

At that very hour on North Wetherly Drive in Los Angeles, the man who had been Klein’s longtime partner at APA was indeed dying. Eight days before, life support had been removed from Gaines and now it was just a waiting game. In four weeks, the 54-year-old motion picture agent would be dead as a result of AIDS.

It was, someone later said, as if a tornado had torn through APA. The agency, which had prided itself on taking stand-up comedians from nightclubs--such as Steve Martin, Harry Anderson and the late Andy Kaufman--and creating “crossover” careers for them in movies and television, now saw its two most visible agents gone. APA’s West Coast office had always been “the John and Marty show” and some studio chiefs said they dealt with no one else at the agency.

In the past few months, the talent agency business--that small world of stylishly dressed deal-makers who represent actors, directors and screenwriters--has been rocked by unprecedented mergers. The venerable William Morris Agency swallowed Triad Artists. Intertalent was disbanded after a dozen or so of its people went to International Creative Management, while others left for United Talent Agency. Still other agents who had remained loyal to their firms for years suddenly found themselves out of work and facing uncertain futures as Hollywood came to grips with the recession.

For tiny APA, the tremors were a not-so-distant reminder that forces beyond its control were at work, shaping and reshaping the entertainment business, consolidating power in fewer and fewer hands.

The third partner at APA, sitting at the right-front terrace table at the posh Sunset Boulevard eatery Le Dome, where Gaines had regaled and often embarrassed patrons for 16 years and just across from the left-front table where Klein had held court, reflected on their legacy.

“I think Marty was one of the great agents and also a great person,” said Roger Vorce. “Marty cared about people. I think he was certainly one of the most well-liked members of the (entertainment) industry.”

Then Vorce chose his words more carefully. “John, I don’t think, was particularly liked in this town. He was certainly a good agent.”

The deaths had an immediate impact on one of APA’s biggest clients. On the day after Klein died, Steve Martin had a conversation with Vorce. For 22 years, the comedian had been represented by Klein, remaining loyal to the man who guided his career from the days when Martin was an opening juggling act with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to his current status as a full-fledged movie star. During all that time, Martin had resisted offers from other agencies. Now, a bidding war had begun.

“He said to me, ‘I have been approached by every office,’ ” Vorce recalled. “He said, ‘I want you to know, I’m going to talk to them.’ I said, ‘Steve, to me, if you decide to stay or leave, you’ve been a fantastic client. We’ve made hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions.’ He was a very loyal client.”

When Martin signed with ICM--as did fellow APA client Rick Moranis--many in Hollywood thought a death notice had been signed for APA itself.

“Now they have no stars at all,” one studio executive said. “They have no major directors. It’s all a business of personal relationships and perceived clout (in Hollywood). There’s no reason for anybody to sign with them right now. There isn’t anybody there with a high profile.”

Vorce acknowledged that APA is struggling to maintain a presence in films, and to that end he has launched an industry-wide search for an agent with high-profile clients. But if that doesn’t happen, he said, APA will continue with its stable of music and TV clients, including such cash cows as the hit ABC series “Home Improvement,” for which APA is the packaging agent.

“I have been told I’m going under since the day Marty died,” Vorce said. “I suppose I could just liquidate the company but I think we have great manpower here. Great clients.”

Eddie Kerkhofs, the owner of Le Dome, called them his “two statues.”

Since opening his restaurant 16 years ago, Marty Klein and John Gaines had become such fixtures at his restaurant that it was almost as if they went with the decor.

There was Klein, a genial man who loved life and whose personal credo had always been: Let’s have fun. And then there was Gaines--outrageous, flamboyant and demanding, disliked by some, feared by many.

“To me, it’s still hard to believe I don’t see them for lunch anymore,” Kerkhofs said. “Marty, to me, was one of the sweetest, dearest clients I ever had in my life. He was the same way with me that he would treat his best clients at the agency. John was the opposite of Marty. John was very fussy and choosy.”

Within 10 days of his death, Klein had had a complete physical checkup. “Except for high blood pressure, which I never knew he had, he had a clean bill of health,” Vorce said.

“Marty was into health foods for the last year,” Kerkhofs said. “He stopped smoking. He stopped eating spicy food. He had fruit plates. He said to me: ‘Eddie, I wish my mother could see me eating fruit plates. She won’t believe me.’ ”

As for Gaines, he would only dine on the terrace. Once a week, he demanded a steak or veal chop dinner. “But just plain, plain, plain,” Kerkhofs recalled.

A cleanliness freak, one little spot on his floor at a party would drive him crazy. “We called him Mr. Clean,” Kerkhofs said. “Sometimes Mr. Clean and sometimes Mr. Pain-in-the-Ass.”

Over and over, the word that his friends used to describe Gaines was “outrageous.” “He would say outrageous things and turn his voltage up when he was in a group of people,” said Stan Newman, his friend of nearly 20 years. “John was always volatile. He could be outrageous in public but sweet and kind in private--and always worked very hard.”

At Le Dome, Gaines would occasionally grab the pastry trolley and go from table to table, pointing to the nightly offerings and intoning: “This is no good! This is no good!

He relished embarrassing people in public. “He would yell at you across a restaurant the most outrageous, obscene things,” producer Ned Tanen recalled. “In a room, John Gaines would scream out something so personal and so outrageous (that) I’d want to kill him.”

“You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth,” one studio executive said. “He would call and tell you how handsome you looked at lunch today. He was very playful. Or, on the other hand, he would say, ‘Where did you ever find that sports coat!?’ ”

Klein also liked to pull practical jokes on people, even if they were tamer in tone.

At APA, Klein once gave a raise to a secretary and then her supervisor, without knowing this, walked in and said it would be nice if Klein could give a raise to his secretary. No, Klein responded, quickly developing his plan, “We can’t afford it now.” The supervisor, desperate to keep her, began paying the woman out of his own pocket. She, in turn, was in on the joke and passed the money along to Klein.

This continued for months and the entire office was soon in on it. At one point, Klein even told the supervisor not to worry if the secretary departs because Klein’s wife had a cousin who was coming from New Jersey to live with them and she could do the job. This only further depressed the supervisor. The woman even had him post-date checks to her before he was to go into the hospital for a minor matter, saying she was just afraid that he would check in and not check out.

The week before Christmas, Klein pulled out a large envelope with all the money he had collected from the secretary and handed it to the supervisor. Nobody had squealed.

Two days after Klein’s death, Roger Vorce called a meeting of his casting and literary agents to discuss the future of APA.

At 62, Vorce had contemplated the day when he would retire from the talent agency business that he had loved for more than three decades and turn the reins of power over to Klein in a natural order of succession.

The months preceding Klein’s death had been turbulent at APA. In July, Gaines had been ousted from his post as director and executive vice president after a stormy period that saw his health steadily decline. Although the obituary in the Hollywood trade publication Variety said Gaines died from complications of spleen surgery, the death certificate attributed it to cardiac arrest as a result of AIDS dementia and AIDS.

Few in the town, however, knew Gaines had the disease. One studio executive recalled Gaines telling him that he was going into the hospital for hemorrhoids.

Gaines was extremely bitter at his ouster, friends said.

“John and (Klein) didn’t get along for a long time,” Newman said. “They were different kinds of personalities. They worked with each other because each had different strengths.”

Gaines’ relationship with Vorce also deteriorated in his final years.

“John and I never got along particularly,” Vorce said. “The first years we did. The last few years we didn’t.” He said only that Gaines would become “quite violent.”

“I feel sorry for him because he never knew gray,” Vorce said. “Certain people in life judge everyone else in black and white. Most of us are gray. I feel badly for John because he never really enjoyed life.”

Vorce himself had had a successful career (he was Liberace’s agent from 1961 until the pianist’s death in 1987), but Vorce was a New Yorker at heart and always worked out of the APA’s East Coast office. As a result, he was not on the same first-name basis with Hollywood movie-makers that his partners in Los Angeles were on.

Vorce’s expertise was in personal appearance, always a strongpoint with APA from the earliest days when it signed its first big client, Harry Belafonte. APA went on to become a powerhouse in rock music, signing such groups as Jefferson Airplane and the Doors because of a close relationship the agency had developed with the late rock promoter Bill Graham. Today, its singers range from Patti Austin to Johnny Cash.

But as he sat through that somber October meeting wondering what would become of the movie side of the agency that he helped found in 1962, Vorce listened to the comments coming from the younger agents around him. And, to his surprise, there was not a hint of defeat in their voices.

“They were a genuine inspiration to me,” Vorce recalled. “They were like a group of young tigers.” It was at that moment, Vorce realized, “Marty and John and the legacy they left were these fantastic people.”

“When everybody thought in the industry that we’d be out of business, we all knew that was not the case,” said James Gosnell, the APA vice president in charge of the West Coast personal appearance office. “The industry viewed APA on a certain level, basically John and Marty. But there are other wonderful people who actually put the deals together, brought them to the table and made them happen.”

The hurdles are nonetheless daunting.

To begin with, APA has always been publicity-shy. It had been an enduring remnant of the 1950s, when the nucleus of founders worked at MCA, the talent agency that in those days controlled the careers of most of Hollywood’s leading entertainers. MCA agents adhered not only to a strict dress code (gray suits or navy blue jackets with white shirts), but young agents knew they could be canned if their quotes turned up in the press. The stars should get the publicity, as MCA thinking went, not the agents.

Those walls are now beginning to come down at APA, in part because the town has changed so dramatically.

“Most people don’t know what APA stands for anyway,” Vorce said. “If you ask most of our clients, they don’t know what the name is.”

“Our larger competitors have acquired a taste for coverage in the press,” said Stuart Miller, a senior vice president who oversees the Los Angeles literary department. “To remain competitive, people (here) are not going to just roll over. We have to speak up and tell people our story. And it’s a great story. We have a lot to say.”

APA was born after MCA dissolved to avoid anti-trust problems. Hundreds of MCA agents and clients were suddenly left without representation. David C. Baumgarten, then the executive vice president of MCA’s personal appearance division, believed that he could do as well as any other existing agency, so he gathered together some of his fellow agents from MCA and they pooled their clients.

It found success in comedians.

“We put Rodney Dangerfield from clubs and concerts onto ‘Saturday Night Live,’ which was a springboard for him to go into films,” said Danny Robinson, who heads APA’s comedy division on the West Coast. “We worked with Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman) when he was a member of the Groundlings--a Los Angeles improvisational comedy theater group--and put him into television.”

Today, APA represents such actors as Bernadette Peters, Ned Beatty, Hal Holbrook and Ian McKellen. Along with “Home Improvement,” it is the packaging agent for “Roc” on the Fox television network.

Steve Martin’s film “The Jerk” brought the agency its biggest single commission, Vorce said, although he declined to be specific.

“He could have made ‘Jerk II,’ but instead he made something completely different, ‘Pennies From Heaven,’ ” Vorce said. “I think it finally paid off but he lost a lot of money at the beginning. To me, he’s one of the most innovative people ever to hit motion pictures.”

“They built (Martin’s) career,” said one studio executive. “They represented him well. They had him up to $6 million a picture and Steve Martin is not a guaranteed draw. Look at ‘Leap of Faith.’ ”

Vorce said that with Klein and Gaines gone, APA agents will have new or expanded duties in the Los Angeles office--agents such as James Gosnell in personal appearances, Danny Robinson in comedy and Deborah Miller in casting. In other moves, senior vice president Burton M. Taylor will be responsible for finding special projects and new clients on the West Coast, reporting directly to Vorce. Stuart Miller will continue to head the West Coast literary division. Each has counterparts in New York.

“It gives everybody here a chance to step up and show what they are about,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, an APA motion picture agent.

“We do not want to become that large that we cannot give the talent that we represent the attention we feel we should give,” Taylor said. “We can still have a Kevin Costner (who is represented by Creative Artists Agency) and do the job for him without getting another 15 Kevin Costners.”

Concerned that the agency lacks big names in film, Vorce has set out to find an agent outside the firm who already has a stable of established stars.

“If I can find that person, we will represent some of the major names in this town,” Vorce said. “He can become president, he can become chairman of the board, anything--or she can--it doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m looking for someone whose background is in motion pictures, who controls several important names in that area.

“I’m looking for someone who is considered to be like John (Gaines)--in his own way.”

Vorce said that over the years, there have been offers to buy APA but he stresses that he will never do that “unless I can protect the people, both agents and clients.”

“The philosophy of our offices, as long as I’m part of it, is I don’t ever want to own the world,” he said. “I want to be of the size that we can still help our clients, including clients we believe in who may be relatively unknown and develop their careers and nurture them.”

It is a philosophy that echoes from the agency’s past. As Marty Klein often put it: Let’s have fun.