Free The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up by David Rensin

middle class from the streets of New York, always looking for an edge.
    SHAPIRO: After the army, my brother, who had become a salesman in El Paso, said I could work with him. He offered me two hundred dollars’ draw a week against commission. I tried to imagine working with him, but I had seen Death of a Salesman and I didn’t want to be Willy Loman in El Paso. I also applied to the management training program at Household Finance. That job paid eighty-five to start. A third possibility was the William Morris Agency. Carl Reiner, who was married to my aunt Estelle, suggested it. I liked that idea, and Carl made the call.
    WEST: In the 1950s the college grad of my generation got a starting salary, depending on the company, of between $100 and $125 a week. But there were two industries that said, “We’re glamour industries. You want in? You work for less.” One was advertising, the other was entertainment. You got from $38 to $45 a week and needed a lot of intestinal fortitude to swallow hard and believe you’d potentially love it enough to live on that money, because when you’re in your twenties, how the hell do you know what you’re going to love or not love?
    BERNIE BRILLSTEIN: In every job you’ve got to start someplace, even show business. You’re young. You think, I think I know talent, but I’ve never done it. No one is going to hire me. I’m not good enough. But I want in. You could become a network page, go to a record company, work at a studio. But the place where all those roads intersect is the agency.
    Most of the mailroom guys I worked with came from Brooklyn or the Bronx. My roots were Manhattan. I grew up going to the Stage Deli and the Stork Club. My father, who sold millinery in the garment district and was president of his temple, took me to Madison Square Garden, Murray’s Sturgeon Palace, Barney Greengrass, the Polo Grounds. I went with him to Fifty-second Street, where his friends from Harlem, the connected guys, owned the jazz clubs in which you could hear music like nowhere else in the city.
    My uncle Jack Pearl was a successful comedian who’d been with the Ziegfeld Follies and went by the name of the Baron Munchausen. He showed me Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, the Stork Club (where you could see Ethel Merman and Walter Winchell), the Harwyn—and Toots Shor’s. There I saw presidents, movie stars, ballplayers. Jackie Gleason. Joe DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Jack Benny. George Burns. My favorite spot was the Copacabana. I was comfortable around celebrities.
    My friend Billy Rubin told me he thought I’d make a great agent and set me up with Lou Weiss, a cigar-smoking TV packager who handled NBC for William Morris. Weiss sent me to Sid Feinberg, a civil-servant type. His first question was “Can you type?”
    I told him I’d learned in the army.
    “Do you know anyone in show business?”
    “Yes, my uncle.” He probably thought my uncle had set up the interview. He hadn’t.
    Feinberg said, “You’re terrific. There’s only one problem. You’re too old.”
    “For what? I’m only twenty-four.”
    “That’s too old to put up with the crap in the mailroom.”
    Maybe he was testing me. I didn’t want to take no for an answer. I told him how much I loved and understood show business. “I can put up with anything,” I insisted. What I didn’t say was that I didn’t plan on staying in the mailroom long enough for my age or the crap to matter.
    He said he’d call me.
    I went home that night not knowing what to do next. To my surprise I had a message from Sid Feinberg. “You got the job.” I’d start on Monday, June 6, 1955. I still have my first paycheck. I made $38 a week—or $32.81 after taxes.
    Good thing I wasn’t in it for the money. I got into show business for the thrill of it all, not the thrill of having it all.
    MIKE ROSENFELD SR.: I was born in 1934 in Philadelphia and grew up in a pretty much all-Jewish neighborhood called Strawberry