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

come in handy. I once booked a club in the Village, and the owner confirmed the deal with me. A couple days later he changed his mind. I said, “I’ve already written it up. You can’t do that. The deal’s made, and a deal’s a deal.”
    “Are you telling me what to do?” He was a tough guy.
    “No, but you can’t do that. I confirmed it.”
    “You calling me a liar?” He was really edgy. “I’m going to come up there and throw you out the window.”
    I went into Wood’s office after he hung up. I said, “George, this guy’s mad as hell and he’s full of shit. He confirmed an act and he’s changing a deal. He wants to come up here and hit me.”
    Wood told his secretary, “Get this guy on the phone.” I sat there, ready to get out of town for a month, but he said, “Listen, you blank-blank-blank son of a bitch, you threaten Lou Weiss over here, I’ll break your fucking neck and your fucking legs,” and so forth and so on, and then slammed down the phone.
    Maybe a half hour later I got a call from the club owner. “What are you so upset about, Lou?” He knew that Wood had relationships with people that the club owner didn’t want to cross.

     
AGENTING THE AGENT
     
    AUERBACH: I used to bump into Lou Weiss, who is eleven years older than me, on the train to the city from Brooklyn. Because of his uncle, Lou had the golden spoon, a charmed life. He came in at strange hours. He was in the nightclub business. We got to know each other a little bit, and I realized that’s who I wanted to work for. We weren’t best buddies, but I could communicate with him. He was a comer; he traveled in better circles than me. I thought he might be able to teach me something.
    Weiss had a secretary named Shirley and was happy with her. She was a nice person, but I only wanted what I wanted. I told him I could do better, and plotted to get the job. I said I’d put in more hours, that I wanted to learn. Whatever bullshit I said, he bought it and I got her desk. I also got a raise. It was the summer of 1947. I was nineteen.
    ELKINS: My sense of what I had to do was simple: Get out of the mailroom as fast as I could. In fact, at the risk of being self-serving, I think I made the fastest transition from office boy to secretary: seven weeks.
    One agent, Lester Hamill, was very good at what he did—he handled King Features Syndicate—but he was ungrammatical and monosyllabic, in both his verbal intercourse and his dictation. I knew that if I could get his desk, I could get o f that desk because I’d stand out by improving his correspondence. He picked me by virtue of my making sure, to the extent that I could, that I was the only mailroom person he saw on a regular basis. I also did a little homework, and I learned about his operation so that when we came across each other, I could talk about his current deals. He noticed I was not only aware of what he did, but I understood it.
    I worked for Hamill only four or five weeks. The guy who really interested me was Marty Jurow, head of the Theatrical and Motion Picture Department. I adored Marty. When you worked as a secretary, you pulled Saturday duty once a month. I pulled Jurow. He called me into the office and started to dictate a memo on the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; it was lousy with percentages, and I knew it would go on for about nine pages. I did my best to write quickly, but I knew I couldn’t do it. About halfway through the first page I put down my pen. He said, “What are you doing?”
    “Mr. Jurow,” I said, “there’s a problem.”
    “What’s the problem?”
    “Well, I don’t know enough dictation to take this memo.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No, sir.”
    He said, “What am I to do with you?”
    I said, “Well, sir, you have two choices. You can fire me or promote me.” He promoted me. That Monday I became his assistant. Three months later I was an agent. When I eventually left to go into the service, Lenny Hirshan, my secretary, got my