Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me...

by Stevie Phillips

  Using the phones at my desk, we called the heads of every single studio, men whose names were mentioned in hushed whispers like Frank Wells, Richard Zanuck, David Brown, and Robert Evans, with whom Sue later became close after signing Ali MacGraw. We blindsided their secretaries with our name-dropping, and once we got their bosses on the phone, we put them on notice. Deal with us—and not Freddie and David—or forget about our clients. Honestly, I don’t know what recourse to action I would have had if Zanuck called Freddie thereafter instead of me. But he didn’t. He didn’t want to find out what would happen any more than I did.

  *

  Sue was funny. Typical of her wit was the conversation she had that day in my office with Lenny Lightstone, right-hand man to Joseph E. Levine, the clothier who founded Embassy Pictures and had become one of Hollywood’s most colorful characters. We reached them together just by luck. Sue flirted with Lenny recklessly. She had a little-girl way of making shocking statements sound cute. “Lenny, I just love the way you talk dirty about movies. Let’s talk about movies together. Talk dirty to me!” What did she just say? I could never. She made Lenny and Joe laugh while I made it clear that if they wanted our clients, they would have to deal directly and exclusively with us.

  F&D of course found out what we were doing. How? We told them once all the calls were made. I remember David slamming his fist on the table (I had never seen that before). Freddie simply shook his head and said, “You shouldn’t have done that.” And then, remarkably, the conversation shifted in the opposite direction—pouring oil on the fire. Freddie: “You know that we always take care of you.…” David: “You two are the best.…” Uh-huh. Show us the money.

  They were aggravated, to be sure, but what could they really do? We had them by the short hairs. It was Freddie who had said, “He who has the clients calls the shots,” I reminded him. Change the “he” to “she.” Susie and I were calling a lot of the shots now, but only about our clients, not the ones who belonged to any other agent in New York or LA.

  Once we launched our campaign, we never looked back. We wouldn’t let Freddie and David talk for us anymore, and they could do nothing more than grin and bear it. We had become too valuable. They couldn’t afford to lose us. In 1968 I became a senior vice president and head of film in New York, and poor Harvey was kicked upstairs, which was the same as being kicked around. Sue was vice president and head of theater, which was highly successful and earned her a lot of money—more than Harvey—but not ever as much as she thought she deserved. Whatever!

  I believe our persistence opened the floodgates for those women who became important film agents following us. I raise my hand and say that we were there first. I don’t mind us taking that credit. While I was doing these things completely out of self-interest, I finally became aware of the repercussions my actions were having in the industry. By the end of the sixties the women’s movement was in full swing, and sisterhood was in the forefront of our minds.

  *

  Sue never stopped making me laugh. “I think I’ll sleep with Redford tonight!” Since all two hundred-plus pounds of her had bedded some of the top names in Tinseltown (I refuse to tell who), I worried as I laughed at her teasing. I didn’t need her messing in my backyard, but then I knew Redford had the cold reserve of an infantry sergeant. It was unlikely she would get near Bob’s zippers. Who knows? She may have tried. But then one day she told me he had too many moles on his face, and I understood immediately that she had gotten nowhere with him.

  She was a card-carrying member of the gay theater mafia, and accordingly was invited everywhere the Broadway gays went. With her outrageous irreverent wit, she kept gay men in stitches, endlessly demeaning everyone on the straight side of the fence.

  My favorite story starts with Jerry Herman, at that time the hottest composer on Broadway, who had a wonderful house in The Pines, the gay community on Fire Island. It was the only house there with a swimming pool, and Sue could be found there regularly on summer weekends lolling naked in the water. None of the guys were offended. They didn’t care; they loved having her around. Oh, but it must have been a sight to behold! Humor by the pound; everything added to her vitriolic charm.

  One day Melina Mercouri and Jules Dassin, then the toast of Broadway, showed up at the empty house and came out to the pool looking for Jerry or any other sign of life. Sue was the only living, breathing person around, and there wasn’t a towel anywhere in sight. Without taking so much as a beat, she climbed out of the pool, wringing wet, her rolls of fat jiggling aplenty with each step as she ran up to the stellar couple. How I would have loved to see their faces as Sue made her approach. Grabbing Jules’s hand and then Melina’s, she gave each a vigorous pumping handshake and said, “Oh, Miss Mercouri, Mr. Dassin—I’m such an enormous fan. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Stevie Phillips.”

  Sue told this story to Vanity Fair, and it appeared there first in a Sue Mengers puff piece. Sue loved the press. I used to walk into her office and find her on the phone with gossip columnists all the time. I was horrified. I thought press was for the clients, but she was forever burnishing her image and trying to get her name in the papers. She was a publicity hound, and I was naive. I never imagined having my name splattered all over would help me sign anyone, and when there was a photographer present—and there were plenty when I accompanied my clients to an event like a premiere—I moved out of the picture. Sue, on the other hand, moved in. It was the right decision for her, and it served her well.

  Sue moved on to California in the late sixties, where for many years she triumphantly dominated the social scene in the film business. She was a brilliant hostess, and I doubt that many turned down her invitations lest they become the butt of her jokes. She wanted me to come to one of her dinners, and she invited Billy Wilder as my dinner partner. I was beyond flattered, and I had a good time. It was great bitchy fun. But I didn’t need to go again (and who knows if another invitation would have been forthcoming). It wasn’t for me. The dinner felt a little desperate, and after what I’d been through with Judy, mean was simply mean.

  I did have lunch with Sue a few times at the house, of course (Sue didn’t go out). I was thrilled that she used the Wedgwood I’d given her as a wedding gift. She said she loved it, and that made me very happy. Jean-Claude never joined us. It was not a loving household.

  I was also asked to move to Los Angeles. Freddie approached me early, and David did so later on, but the longer I remained an agent, the less LA interested me. To me Los Angeles was a place where you looked in the mirror and no longer saw yourself; you saw what others were saying about how you looked, how you dealt, whom you were sleeping with, what you earned. Life in a fishbowl! It reminded me of the Sardi’s plan, the plan that Freddie had encouraged me to follow when I first went to work in theater, and it had made some sense then. But as I got older, I discovered that the Sardi’s plan was no longer my style, and Los Angeles was too easy a place to lose oneself in. I didn’t want to dine out on the business at every meal. I didn’t want to walk into the greengrocer and meet actresses I represented, or those I didn’t. I didn’t want to feel bad about parties I wasn’t invited to, or attend the parties where I was asked and didn’t want to attend. None of it was to my liking, so in spite of the fact that I thought it might be helpful to my career, in spite of believing that life on the West Coast was gracious and beautiful, I never gave it serious consideration. I was flattered when Columbia Pictures put out a feeler to me. I may have been the first woman they considered for studio head of production. It was not for me.

  I was thrilled that Sue was a star in Southern California. She enjoyed her reputation. She got everything she wanted—except from Freddie Fields. When he sold the agency in 1975, she felt she deserved a big cut. Living in California, she’d persuaded herself it was she who built the agency, and there were enough yes-men around to feed her ego. Freddie gave her nothing from the sale. And I did not get a penny, but I was making $250,000 a year by then, and had been f
or a while. I was satisfied I’d been treated well, and had no complaints. Sue resented Freddie, and he knew it, for she complained bitterly to anyone who would listen. She was angry and unhappy, but then she was that all the time. Her wonderful wit came from a place of vitriol.

  In the end she became by far a more famous agent than I, deserving her remarkable reputation. She had worked hard to develop a high profile. I didn’t want that and found a way to continue signing important clients like David Bowie and Cat Stevens without it. Privacy has always been important to me. When I think of her, and I do very often, I remember a brilliant schmoozer and a fond friend.

  *

  There is a sad postscript to the Susie (I called her that) chapter in my life. After an unsuccessful stint at William Morris, where Sue was unable to meet expectations, she was forced into retirement—that is to say, she was fired. It was early in the nineties, and we had spoken only sporadically over the years. One day she called me and said, “Sue is depressed. What should I do, Stevie?” I did not hesitate: “Stop smoking those awful Gauloises and get the fuck out of bed.” Sue loved to sit in the middle of her bed all day talking on the phone and smoking pot or those short, fat, foul-smelling French cigarettes. “Help me,” she begged. “I need help.” So I did some research and found her a trainer. Personal trainers were just coming into vogue, and I looked all over LA (on the phone) to find one tough little girl with enough strength to withstand Sue’s mouth.

  When I finally located someone I thought had the perfect personality, I sent her to Sue’s front door with instructions: “See if you can get her to walk around the house. After a week, see if you can get her to walk around the block. Then drive her down to the beach and have her walk there. She hasn’t smelled fresh air in years. Price is no object,” I assured her. The trainer called me to say Sue fired her after only two days. I never heard from Sue after that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Crazy

  Freddie signed Peter Sellers, the great comic actor, at the peak of Peter’s career in the early sixties. He was just about to start a film with George Roy Hill, The World of Henry Orient, which was to shoot mostly at the Astoria Studios in Queens. At Freddie’s suggestion Peter phoned and asked me to locate a sizable estate he could rent on Long Island within reasonable traveling distance to the studios. Although we had never been introduced, Peter moved right past that and dealt with me as if we had been friends for years. Everything was “darling” this and “darling” that. He advised that he was intending to bring his family: two children, their nanny, his valet, and some pets. He required an “extremely gracious home.” A swimming pool was a must; tennis courts optional.

  I found the perfect place in Sands Point, and at the appointed time Peter and his troupe moved in. They were thrilled with the house and its lovely grounds, and for at least two problem-free summer months they enjoyed it.

  Then, early one morning around three a.m., Peter rocked me out of deep sleep (why do stars always feel it’s necessary to call at ungodly hours?) to tell me that the house had poltergeists. I didn’t have the slightest idea what a poltergeist was. Steven Spielberg had not yet popularized the word, and no need for it had entered into my experience. “Uh-huh” I said. (David Begelman had taught me this all-purpose response long before. He said it could be used with many intonations and various voices. It could sound concerned, acquiescent; it didn’t have to sound stupid.) “Disembodied feet are walking up and down the stairs, Stevie darling. Pictures are changing places on the walls. My man Bert is sitting right next to me, and he can attest to all of this.” Peter then must have pushed the phone into Bert’s face.

  “It’s terrible,” Bert said. “Isn’t it, Peter?”

  “Terrible, yes,” and Peter pressed on.

  “Windows are going up and down by themselves.” I then heard windows slamming shut. By this point the poltergeists and their talents were all too clear. “Uh-huh,” I responded again, waiting to hear what my marching orders would be.

  “By noontime I would like to be ensconced [“ensconced”?!] in the interlocking suites in the penthouse of the Regency Hotel. I mean all the suites in the Regency penthouse. You know the place, don’t you? On Park Avenue.” I got lucky. We often used the Regency for clients in from LA, and I had struck up a professional friendship with the hotel’s wonderful manager, a lovely Englishwoman, Mary Homi. I even had her home telephone.

  “By noon and not a moment later!”

  “Certainly, Peter.” Notwithstanding that stars feel just fine about phoning at outrageous hours, propriety dictated that I wait until at least 7:00 a.m. before making the call to Mary. I caught her on her way out the door.

  The English are all so stiff-upper-lipped that they don’t react with shock and awe to anything. Tell an American hotel manager that you wish to dislodge his or her clientele, and I reckon that if they don’t hang up on you their reactions are bound to be more aggressive or even slightly more animated than Mary’s was. “How do you think we can go about getting rid of our clientele?” she calmly asked me. “The penthouse is rather fully booked.” Her tone was as cheery as her “Good morning, Stevie.”

  “Make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

  “How much are you willing to spend?”

  “Money is no object.” We discussed her picking up the evacuees’ entire tabs in order for them to accommodate Peter. “Bribe them,” I said. “Whatever it takes!” for that’s what Peter had told me. “I don’t need to know. Just present the bill to Mr. Sellers when he leaves the hotel, and that will be that.” I knew that Peter had an accountantmanager type who could be difficult. He would probably give Freddie Fields a heart attack over this one, but not my problem. Besides, the hotel cost would turn out to be the least of the expenses.

  What I did not know on the night of the poltergeists was that it was Peter’s first night back from a weekend in Miami, where he had gone to judge the Miss Universe contest. While there he had fallen under the spell of all the beautiful blond misses from Scandinavia, and had invited Miss Denmark, Miss Sweden, Miss Norway, and Miss Finland to return with him to New York for a wonderful time. (Indeed, the only thing that had been wrong with the house in Sands Point is that it had not come with sexy blond housemaids.) The voluptuous Scandinavians had all accepted Peter’s invite, and by noon that day they were all comfy in the Regency penthouses, ready to enjoy a wonderful week of partying with Peter in glorious NYC.

  Sadly all good things must come to an end, but I can only imagine each of the women rejoicing, for as Peter kissed each statuesque blond beauty good-bye she was presented with a large ruby ring encircled by diamonds. Harry Winston, the exclusive Fifth Avenue jeweler, rolled out a red carpet for me when he heard what Peter had ordered me to select for him. Each ruby the size of a dime, and the circlet of ten diamonds looked to be a half carat each. My popularity at the jewelry store didn’t net me more than a thank-you, which is more than I got from Peter.

  Peter eventually married the Scandinavian of his choice. Britt Ekland was as sweet as she was beautiful. Without any real estate help from me, the newlyweds found one of the swankiest flats in all of London and decorated it with the most exquisite furniture, occasional antiques, and the finest objects that money could buy. Peter was a rich man, and Britt had superb taste. One night in a fit of pique, or in the pique of passion, all their objects, including the artwork, became weapons. There was an epic fight in which lamps were smashed, tables thrown: assault by antiques—not exactly weapons of mass destruction. However, the destruction to their apartment was massive; not a whole lot could be salvaged, including Peter’s reputation as a sane man.

  *

  I signed David Bowie hot off the Ziggy Stardust album (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars). I’d been campaigning to get music clients in London, but I had never met Bowie’s manager, Tony DeFries. He called me out of the blue. Bowie was a rising star in the early seventies—unique, hot, and everyone producing concerts wanted his firs
t American tour.

  Bowie not only dominated the music scene when he arrived here, he totally changed it. Who was this person in these strange outfits with these off-the-wall lyrics? He created a new world, a whole universe of his own. I thought he was amazing. The manager was pretty amazing as well; a Bond Street guy in a Lower East Side world, a cool cat with shoulder-length hair as wide as it was long, not one inch of which went with his three-piece Savile Row suits and his conversations about arbitrage.

  My understanding with DeFries was that I would try hard to get David work in the film arena, and in return we would book his first American tour. It was a coup. Bowie’s upcoming tour was making entertainment headline news. It also made the head of the music department of the now-very-large CMA extremely happy because it would make his department very profitable for an entire calendar year.

  *

  Back in the day (and maybe it’s still true today), when an important client had a personal manager, an agent mostly spoke to the manager; however, I knew that having a separate but equal relationship with the client was a good thing because of the volatility of stars. Anyone can be in one day, out the next. It felt, however, quite impossible to befriend David because I was far from being a part of his scene. I never became a groupie, never did strange piercings or body paintings, and never hung out backstage. My one real meeting with David was the day he personally delivered the representation contract to me at my apartment. We had “tea and sympathy” and precious little conversation. In the half hour we spent together he impressed me with his sweetness and his intelligence. Well traveled and aware of the political scene, he seemed to be a man of the world at a very tender age. He was soft-spoken and exceedingly kind and polite. That was the real meeting. The next was unreal.

  While I was talking up Bowie to anyone in Hollywood who would listen, CMA’s music department went to work to produce an eye-popping tour, breaking lots of ground by creating new perks and precedents the likes of which promoters hate agents for. The tour made geographic sense, financial sense, and all kinds of sense to Tony, the manager.