Boot camp -- Hollywood style

When Sue Naegle first went to the United Talent Agency in the early 1990s, she interviewed for an assistant’s job with Gavin Polone, then a UTA partner. “If you make one mistake, I’ll fire you,” Polone told her. “Does that scare you? Are you going to act like a little girl? Are you going to cry when I yell at you? Are you going to complain to your mom?”

If Charles Darwin were around today to test his theory of evolution, he could skip the Galapagos Islands and head right for a Hollywood talent agency mailroom, which for decades has been the ultimate boot camp for showbiz survival skills. One of the revelations of David Rensin’s new oral history, “The Mailroom: Hollywood History From the Bottom Up” (Ballantine Books), is how many of the industry’s Best and Brightest got their start on the lowest rung of the showbiz ladder.

The list of mailroom alumni includes media moguls David Geffen and Barry Diller, Universal Studios Chairman Ron Meyer, ex-Creative Artists Agency czar Mike Ovitz, managers Bernie Brillstein, Sandy Gallin, George Shapiro and Howard West, producers Jack Rapke and Gary Lucchesi, Miramax co-production chief Meryl Poster, Wally “Famous” Amos and a host of today’s top agents, including UTA’s Jeremy Zimmer and Nick Stevens, CAA’s Kevin Huvane and Bryan Lourd, Endeavor’s Tom Strickler and Steve Rabineau -- and let’s not forget legendary Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown, who started out as an MCA secretary in 1942.

“Mailroom” is a fascinating document of cultural anthropology. Unlike most entertainment reporting, which focuses on celebrities and mighty media lords, “Mailroom” views Hollywood from the bottom up, with a big emphasis on the maxim that what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. It provides a glimpse of a rough-and-tumble world where young trainees learn that when it comes to pampering celebrities or placating your boss, no chore is too demeaning, whether it’s returning a bra for Barbra Streisand or delivering a senior agent’s stool sample to the doctor. Perhaps that’s why the mailroom has spawned so many industry titans: It provides a bracing lesson in the acquisition and exercise of power.

Anyone arriving with a feeling of entitlement is in for a rude awakening. When Adriana Alberghetti, now a motion picture literary agent at Endeavor, went to work in Endeavor partner Ari Emanuel’s unit, she blithely told him, “As long as you and I can keep an open line of communication, I think we’re going to be just fine.” He looked up from what he was doing and said, “Get out of my office.” He later explained: “We have an over/under bet on how long you’re going to stay. I want you to know, I bet against you.”

Alberghetti survived -- and flourished. Not everyone can handle the tough love (if love is the word for it), but it comes with the territory. It’s no wonder outsiders rarely succeed in Hollywood, an insular world with arcane rules and cloudy moral codes. Geffen didn’t learn only to read memos upside down, he learned to read the room, quickly grasping that when you’re surrounded by ambitious rivals, you’ll just have to step your ambitions up a notch. Or as he put it: “If you want to succeed, you’d better not care too much about what other people think about what you’re doing.”

‘A Dickensian world’

Rensin ended up interviewing nearly 250 mailroom alumni. Only a handful of the people approached, including Ovitz, wouldn’t talk. “I was amazed by how many people had started in the mailroom, but no one had done a book about it,” says Rensin, who has co-written books with Tim Allen and Chris Rock, as well as the Brillstein memoir, “Where Did I Go Right?” After hearing a series of mailroom epics from Brillstein, Rensin figured he’d stumbled onto a gold mine of showbiz war stories.

“It’s absolutely a Dickensian world,” he says. “You have to develop a thick skin, but it’s a badge of honor to show you have what it takes.”

If racehorses are bred for speed, agents are groomed to hustle. When TV producer Gary Randall interviewed for a Morris mailroom post, he boasted that he’d sold life insurance to college kids for beer money. Challenged to prove his salesmanship, he discovered that the agency didn’t have policies for its senior executives. He not only got the mailroom job, he sold Morris a blanket key-executive retirement package.

Rensin carefully avoids making judgments, preferring to let us draw our own conclusions about the values and behavior on display. Still, it’s obvious that most of his interviewees were drawn to show business not by art but by glamour and high-roller gamesmanship.

The book is organized in chronological fashion, beginning with old-timers from the 1940s through today’s young sprouts. Tellingly, every generation in this male-dominated business has the same erotic fantasy of delivering a package to an actress’ Malibu hideaway and finding her clad in a negligee or naked by the pool. From Shelley Winters to Yvette Mimieux to Sharon Stone to Uma Thurman, the names may change, but the negligees stay the same.

“Mailroom” also illustrates Hollywood’s increasing insularity. The older generation of trainees was made up for the most part of sons of insurance salesman and furniture store owners, and most of the recent initiates are well-born offspring of agents and executives. Minorities are still few and far between.

There’s little mention of highbrow film culture. One of the rare times a film title pops up in the book is in an anecdote about the trainees sneaking into the “Star Wars” premiere by printing up bootleg tickets, causing a furor when Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty showed up and couldn’t get seats. The atmosphere in the mailroom is somewhere between a frat house and a debtors’ prison. Diller once glued someone’s shoes to the floor; one CAA trainee was so scarred by the pressure of shopping for pristine fruit for the agency’s morning meetings that, to this day, he can’t buy melon at the market.

Lessons were learned that can’t be taught in college. When Zimmer interviewed for a job working in Fred Milstein’s unit at William Morris, he noticed the agent’s chair wobbled because the ball bearings were broken. When Milstein went to lunch, Zimmer dismantled a chair in the mailroom and replaced Milstein’s ball bearings, leaving him a note saying he’d fixed the chair. He got the job.

‘Always do it’

When Diller was a 19-year-old Morris mailroom trainee, he took the job nobody else wanted, photocopying files in a dank basement, and used it to absorb the agency’s voluminous showbiz archives. “I’d hole myself up for most of the day reading through the history of the entertainment business as seen through every deal, every development, every contract.... I mean, you go to college to read, and that’s what I did at William Morris.”

Endeavor partner Tom Strickler didn’t just encourage trainees to read scripts; one recruit had to read enough scripts to make an 8-foot-high stack. When an assistant wore a watch Strickler found especially unattractive -- and didn’t promptly get rid of it -- Strickler flushed it down the toilet. “When I tell you to do something,” he said, “you always do it.”

Attention to detail counts. Meyer always reminded his charges that if their boss ordered a tuna on rye with ketchup from Louis’ Deli, they should peek in the bag to make sure there was ketchup, not mayo, on the sandwich when they picked it up. “Your boss isn’t going to blame Louis,” he says. “He’s going to think you’re an idiot. Do what you say you’re going to do. People may not always appreciate that you do, but they will always remember that you didn’t.”

Sometimes the behavior is heartless and demeaning, but this form of rough justice is refreshingly free of cant. You can score a mailroom gig by being some big shot’s kid, but you won’t last long if you don’t cut the mustard. When it comes to hazing, basketball coach Bob Knight has nothing on CAA founding partner Bill Haber, who tortured his young charges so much that Michael Menchel, the agency’s first mailroom employee, says he would rather “have been in Vietnam walking on land mines.”

One day, when Menchel had a bad stomach flu, Haber called him at home and asked if he had diarrhea.” “Yes, Bill.” “You throwing up?” “Yep.” “You doing it in the bathroom?” “Yes.” Haber curtly advised him: “Put on a suit and tie and be here by 2 o’clock or don’t ever come back. You can throw up in our bathroom.”

CAA TV agent Mike Rosenfeld Jr. (the son of a CAA founder) began his career filling Ovitz’s candy dishes with raw cashews and Hershey’s Kisses, but as he views it now, it prepared him for the absurdity of dealing with an actor who’d walk away from a $2-million deal unless his makeup person was taken care of too. When I finished the book, I asked Zimmer, who comes from an old showbiz family, to explain this boot-camp tradition.

“Our business attracts a lot of smart, ambitious, well-educated people who expect the world is going to be a very luxurious experience,” he says. “And we have to disabuse them of that. To be successful, you have to put your ego aside and realize it’s about the client and the agency, not you.”

But where does that only-the-strong-survive mentality come from? “Who knows?” Zimmer asked, laughing. “Maybe we saw it in a movie.”

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