Video Age International January 2016

6 Book Review January 2016 V I D E O A G E A talent agent perhaps more famous than the clients she served, Sue Mengers is the larger-than-life focus of Brian Kellow’s absorbing new biography, Can I Go Now?: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood’s First Superagent (Viking, 2015, 326 pgs., $17.25). Kellow, whose previous biography subjects include singer and actress Ethel Merman and famed New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, paints a vibrant picture of the brash, big-boned, bizarrely baby-talking Mengers as a wheeling- and-dealing, lavish-party-throwing celebrity- obsessive perpetually surrounded by star clients and a cloud of pot smoke. Mengers, who died in 2011, was the first powerful female agent to infiltrate theHollywood boys club in the 1960s and 1970s. Kellow’s book perfectly captures the spirit of a woman who only understood life in terms of A-listers vs. B-listers. While Kellow praises Mengers for the strides she made for women in the movie biz, he also makes sure to bring attention to her many negative characteristics. Mengers was rude. She was racist. She was mean to everyone, from underlings to up-and-coming actors to her own mom. The book’s title, Can I Go Now? was a phrase the brazen Mengers often used if she wanted out of a boring conversation. And if Kellow is to be believed, quite a lot of conversations bored her. Mengers was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1932 to a father addicted to gambling and amother who wasn’t ever satisfied. Mengers emigrated to America when she was five. They settled in Utica, New York, where Mengers struggled to learn English and lose her accent, and her parents just struggled. Her father, George, took a job as a traveling salesman, and her mom, Ruth, worked as a salesclerk. George worked hard, but his gambling habit put him deeper and deeper in debt, and in September, 1946, he checked into the Times Square Hotel and swallowed a bottle of pills. “George’s suicide had an enormous effect on Sue’s already aggressive personality, on the confidence she had shown from childhood: it triggered in her an unexamined, and at times sadistic, anger,” writes Kellow. “For the rest of her life she would often astonish friends and colleagues with the intensity of her prejudice and intolerance. From now on, sometimes consciously, often not, she used anger as her own personal weapon, her own defense.” After her father’s death, the young Mengers and her mom relocated to the Bronx in New York. Sue, who’d always been fascinated by all things Hollywood, decided she wanted to be an actress, and even took classes with famed acting teacher Betty Cashman in 1950. “By now, Sue was a very pretty blue-eyed blonde, with thick lustrous hair and luminescent skin,” writes Kellow. “But try as she might to glamorize herself, she could not conform to Hollywood standards of beauty; she was simply a bit too zaftig to prolong the fantasy of becoming a leading lady.” While many felt that she could go the way of becoming a character actress, the lead’s best friend, this was not something Mengers imagined for herself. “Even at this early age, she had her heart set on becoming an above- the-line star in some field, although her sense of how to accomplish it was amorphous.” Her mom urged her to go the stable, practical route and become a secretary. Sue bristled at the idea of doing something as pedestrian as sitting behind a desk all day typing up memos for men in suits. She eventually caved, though, but only because she’d be working as a receptionist for the Music Corporation of America (MCA), a talent agency and media company. This way, she was at least tangentially involved in the show business she so loved. After MCA, she worked, still as a receptionist, for theatrical agency Baum & Newborn, and later, the WilliamMorris Agency. Finally, in 1963, a former colleague formed a new agency, Korman Associates and, recognizing how valuable she was, hired Mengers as a full-fledged agent. She would eventually move on to the big-time, with boutique agency Creative Management Associates (CMA), which would later become International Creative Management (ICM). She made a name for herself quickly, and amassed a roster of what she called “twinklies” that would one day include Candice Bergen, Cher, Faye Dunaway, Ryan O’Neal, Gene Hackman, Ali MacGraw, Cybill Shepherd, and her shining star, Barbra Streisand, a woman she was borderline obsessed with. But despite being the trusted representative of so many of Hollywood’s best and brightest (Mengers is even credited with playing a large part in helping star salaries rise into the stratosphere, securing an unheard of $1 million payday for Hackman for a 1975 picture called Lucky Lady ), she was an odd character. Calling herself “Baby Sue,” she’d often conduct negotiations or just have regular conversations entirely in a baby voice. “A combination of bawdy barmaid andprecocious brat,”writes Kellow, “Sue would call a client and bawl into the telephone, ‘Tell him Baby Sue is calling! Hi, honey! How are you doing? You gotten laid lately?’” Mengers was so good at what she did—she was tough-talking and shrewd and always seemed to know just how far to push to get her clients what they wanted—that people didn’t care how eccentric she was. She threw extravagant parties towhichHollywood types clamored to be invited, since it was known that deals were closed at her dinner table. Kellow described British actor Michael Caine’s first time at one of these soirees. “I was putting sugar in my coffee and [Mengers] said, ‘Don’t touch that. It’s cocaine.’ A bowl of cocaine—on the table! That’s how it was then.” Mengers was amazing with established stars, but seemed incapable of understanding that all stars had once been nameless nobodies. She passed up the opportunity to work with a number of actors and actresses who’d eventually go on to great success, including Julia Roberts, whose star quality she just couldn’t see, and John Travolta, whom she dismissed as “that f--ing sweathog.” As the years went on, Mengers’ strange yet effective way of doing business became more and more “irrelevant in a Hollywood that was becoming dominated by an infusion of MBA candidates with no particular passion for the movies but simply an interest in making money,” writes Kellow. Her clients abandoned her, slowly at first, and then all at once. The author does a remarkable job showing how shafted Mengers felt by these young upstarts, showing her spiraling deeper and deeper into a depression that resulted in her sometimes refusing to leave her house—or even her bed— for days at a time. The golden age of Hollywood was over and so was Sue Mengers. Kellow conducted scores of interviews with everyone fromMengers’ assistant toWoody Allen to Barry Diller to learn about this wildly weird woman, and paints a vivid picture of an odd duck who found success in the business she’d longed to be a part of since she was a kid. I’d never heard of Sue Mengers before picking up this book. Now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget her. LHR Sue Does Hollywood: The Life and Times of the First Great Female Agent