NO DUMMY

Bernie Brillstein--manager extraordinaire, former studio head and now coauthor of a memoir called “Where Did I Go Right?”--can be arguably said to have reinvented the career of the modern manager. From the most prosaic of beginnings in the William Morris Agency mail room, where he booked early television variety shows, he ultimately transformed himself into a show business entrepreneur. He sold his eponymous company twice, ran a studio and became a creator, owner and producer of movies and television.

Brillstein sophisticated his craft into the mogulizing bundle of conflicts ironically personified today by his arch-nemesis, Mike Ovitz. Today’s managers act as agents, producers, development executives and financiers. In fact, it is the job Ovitz created for himself during his recent self-invention. (This gives Brillstein no end of pleasure; he quotes Willow Bay on CNN: “And now it seems that Mike Ovitz wants to be Bernie Brillstein.”)

But unlike the widely feared Ovitz, Brillstein is the picture of avuncular affability, all bushy white eyebrows, Buddha-like belly and smiles for the cameras. He existed for years as the sole bunkhouse counselor of a grandiose web-like fraternity of comedic talents, spanning three generations of American comedy. At his peaks, and there were many, he represented the biggest comic movie star in the world, John Belushi, practically the entire cast of “Saturday Night Live,” its producer Lorne Michaels, its erstwhile competitor on ABC, “Fridays”; Jim Henson and his “Muppet Show” and its erstwhile network competitor, “Alf.” He was father figure to the artist-anarchists, consigliere to their employers. It takes a very likable guy to pull this off.

“Where Did I Go Right?” has much to offer the budding manager. Many of us have never entirely understood why and how they existed apart from agents. How much advice can an actor follow? Brillstein explains: “It takes a lot for an agent to admit to a client that he needs a manager, because that’s like admitting they’re not doing their job.” (You can see why agents have a problem with this.) “I’m part-time shrink, coddling fragile egos and calming chronic fears of never working again,” he adds. There is apparently no end to the amount of coddling required by talent.

But though Bernie Brillstein holds grudges and can both tactically and unstrategically lose his temper, he is beloved. Bernie is in many ways the kind of guy Willy Loman dreamed of being. His friends keep a list of whom he hates and whom he loves every day. This trait is the antidote to the bloodlessness of the modern baby mogul--we’ll call them the New Breed--all cocktail without liquor, cigar without a fire. Bernie Brillstein is one of the last practitioners of what we like to think of as the Old Breed, somewhat a la the old moguls we didn’t get to meet but about whom we suspect much and envy more. We know that they had much more fun than we do and gambled and drank and skanked around like a bunch of movie people should.

Brillstein lived the high life in two (arguably three) generations. He did the country clubs, the comedy clubs, the Comedy Aid balls. He disapproves of many of the “kids” running the studios now, these new-minted mealy-mouthed safety-freak boomers in their Beemers for whom deals are a religion. They never double down. He falls in love with married people. They never get messy. He is charming. He signs clients because of his laugh and seals the contractless deal with a wink. This is the essence of the Old Breed.

The most compulsively readable parts of this raw, heartfelt and personally revealing memoir chronicle the remarkable early days of “Saturday Night Live” and their tabloid late nights. It was the ‘70s. Bernie was Santa Claus, offering tickets to the big time, and funny people were practically falling from the sky. Jim Henson walked into his office with a bunch of puppets that he called “muppets.” Kids were pouring in from Toronto’s and Chicago’s “Second City” comedy groups, and Bernie knew who was funny. He’d send them to Lorne Michaels, or Lorne Michaels would send them to him. He could sign anyone. (In one signing, the client said that he’d heard many pitches before, but he signed with Bernie for his laugh.)

In the heady days Brillstein was proud papa, ensconced in “SNL” baseball jacket and Blues Brothers Ray-Ban sunglasses, an advisor-enabler to Danny Ackroyd, Gilda Radner and anarchist apotheosis John Belushi. But the end of the party came with Belushi’s death and its legendary denouement at the Chateau Marmont. At this point we read how Bernie, pacing the corridors of Cedars-Sinai, spun like a top as he awaited the secret ambulance with Belushi’s body that never came and its squalid tragic anticlimax. Here he is at his most confused, both denying responsibility and beating his breasts, mea culpa, the whole sordid episode still stinging, unresolved. He alone must travel with the body bag back to Martha’s Vineyard, and he alone must clean up the sad rubbish at the Chateau, always the grown-up taking care of the children’s unpleasant business.

Months later, he finds himself in self-imposed exile in gentrified Connecticut with wife No. 2, where he is unable to sit still and contemplate his sins for longer than six weeks. He’sback to La-La Land. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. And if you’re Bernie Brillstein, you’ve got to get new acts and hustle. Or you won’t be Bernie Brillstein anymore. Really.

From what I can gather, being Bernie Brillstein means being more than a guy with a particular set of wives, clients and deals. Bernie Brillstein is a way of being in work. It is rapture in work. This is, I think, what he sees as the difference between his generation and the classic modus operandi of the new guys, those “foot soldier” types who care more about their annual bonus checks than about checking out the tables backstage at the club. They care more about the deal points than the right flowers in the right room on opening night in Vegas.

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Though Bernie is an unabashed proponent of the Old Breed, he found himself a New-Breed partner. In choosing a successor, he wasn’t sentimental. From the moment he met the soft-spoken and nonconfrontational Brad Grey, he spotted his shrewdness, his strategic skills and the enormous advantage his youth affords him in this youth-driven enterprise. Grey is unabashedly the co-star of this book.

In Bernie’s hagiography, Brad is the “good guy” version of the New Breed and Ovitz and his “goons” (I think they’ve been disbanded if they ever existed) are the bad ones.

Here’s how you can tell them apart:

The Old Breed: Doors open, candy jar filled. All welcome.

The New Breed: Doors closed, privacy. Secrets here.

The Old Breed: Grudges are held forever in the face of perceived betrayal.

The Good New Breed: Brad Grey, Bernie’s partner, maintains alliances with both warring parties. Why let a little war get in the way of work?

The Good Old Breed: A good shark. A client called Bernie

“a good shark” because he doesn’t kill for sport.

The Bad New Breed: A sporting one.

I found it riveting that the reason behind the celebrated contretemps between Brillstein and Ovitz was that Bernie felt undervalued by Ovitz when he discouraged him from selling his services and company on the open market. Brillstein was hurt. Playground time. When Bernie privately sold his management company to Lorimar anyway, he did so without telling Ovitz, out of spite. This began an all-out war. Significantly, through the brutal battles between Brillstein and Ovitz, Grey remained a confidant and ally of Ovitz’s. New Breed Thinking: Why cut off your nose to spite your face? This was the very wily New-Breed kind of thinking that Bernie had safely sought in Grey. Therein lies their difference. Grey could negotiate these poles without the high drama and personal betrayal. It’s just business.

Most of what the New Breed and the Old Breed Mogul have in common relates to women. As Brillstein admits: “Show business has always been a great trade-off, a way to get laid because most men in that line of work are, let’s face it, not that attractive.” He said it, not me.

In fact, I am forever grateful to Bernie for straightening a few things out for all of us women who toil in the trenches with these guys. These were things about which we have endlessly speculated, confirming why we often feel like strangers in a strange land.

Things Bernie admits about guys in Hollywood once and for all:

1) Almost all men are in the business for the ----- (substitute feline diminutive for female anatomy here). Brillstein describes an age-old Hollywood trade-off between short and balding unattractive men who can finally score the women of their fantasies by paying for the -----, explicitly or implicitly.

2) The reason men in Hollywood covet floor seats at Lakers games is not for the superior view of the game but to be better seen by one another. (They don’t see enough of each other during the day?)

3) Perhaps he would have made a better studio head if he cared more for the movies he made and less about the power and competitive game of making them.

(Chicks in flicks hate the game part. We wish we could just make the movie and go home to dinner.)

Brillstein loves the process of scrambling, of getting there, of reaching for it and touching it. He chronicles his scariest falls and catapulting highs with great generosity. He has learned that the rise is the ride, and the terror comes from actually getting “there.” Once there, “there” has to be held on to, reproven, rewon, reclaimed over and over. Once there, you can only lose, fall down, fail. He describes with unexpected vulnerability the fear he feels at the impending loss of it all--the money, the prestige, his very sense of self. This terrible feeling Bernie experiences in the pit of his stomach can only be somewhat assuaged by tuna fish and French fries at the Carlyle (preferably with football), a prescription I intend to try.

But mostly what Brillstein admits, with great pathos occasionally bordering on bathos, is how inconceivably hard it is for a player to give up his seat. Even when he’s exceeded his personal goals, when he’s picked his own successor and profited in his company’s sale. Even when he’s still recognized wherever he goes. For all of Bernie’s loves, battles and passions in and out of work, the most dramatic and involving relationship of his life is with Grey, his partner, surrogate son, protege, confessor. The book intermittently reads as if it were a letter to him.

From Page One Bernie is bleeding. He feels useless from the lack of being needed, and he is in mourning for the fray. He rises out of his gloom only when Grey is in crisis and goes to him for advice. Brillstein at 65 is finally wise, full of piss and vinegar and experience, and he can’t bear feeling sidelined, irrelevant, marginalized in a younger person’s business. It is all of our fates, and it is not pretty to watch.

So for Bernie Brillstein, handing it all over to Grey (and on April Fool’s Day, no less) is the saddest, hardest, most romantic thing he can do. He’s ambivalent about it (he calls it looking long-faced), but we feel him working hard to reconcile himself to a different, cozier kind of future. By the end of the book, he works himself into a froth of faith, a valentine: “I signed the papers giving Brad everything. I took my money, Brad’s assurances that he loved me, and a very nice employment contract, back to my office where no matter how much I legitimately believed it was Brad’s time and that his love was true, the reality of no longer being king hit me all at once and my world came crashing down.” This plaintive song to his new-breed successor is like an old country chant--a lament. Need me, Brad, it intones, Need me. I have so much still left to give.

Last week I received a change of name card from the former Brillstein/Grey Management Company. Brad Grey Management, it read. Gone, but never forgotten.