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

Mansion. My dad was a state senator for eight years. When my parents could finally afford it, we moved out to the Main Line. I went to Penn State as a music major and put on two shows a year.
    Eventually I graduated, got married, and moved to a dump on Eighty-seventh and Amsterdam in Manhattan. I knew I had talent, but I began to wonder if I had enough talent. By then my dad had passed away and I didn’t have him to talk to about it. I figured I should probably get a job. Two close friends had a friend, Sid Kalcheim, whose father and uncle, Harry and Nat Kalcheim, were at William Morris.
    Nat Lefkowitz interviewed me. He said, “You’re married, your wife’s pregnant, you’re a college graduate. Are you sure you want to do this?” Good question. I didn’t really want to be an agent. I thought it was pretty much a piece-of-shit job: forty dollars a week to deliver mail and schlepp stuff around town in the snow. But I have no regrets. I do things for a reason and I don’t look back. That’s how—twenty years later—Ovitz, Meyer, Perkins, Haber, and I started CAA.
    MARTY LITKE: I graduated from Brooklyn College with a B.A. in speech and theater and English, but I wasn’t clear about what to do next. So I pushed my draft up to get it over with but forgot that I’d had rheumatic fever. The doctors told me to go home. My uncle was a critic for the New York Times . He said, “You’ve always been interested in the business”—I used to discuss his reviews with him—“so why don’t you go work in an agency?” He said I should apply to the biggest one, William Morris.
    HARRY UFLAND: I played baseball in the army and at one time thought I’d go pro for the Yankees. But when I left the service in 1958, I applied to CBS and to William Morris because I had this big fantasy about being a producer. I had already worked in the Paramount mailroom for a couple of summers, because my aunt, who worked for the Shuberts, had arranged an introduction. CBS and William Morris both asked me to start in their training programs. I chose the Morris office because after being in the army, I liked that you didn’t have to get in until ten o’clock.

     
BIG CITY, BIGGER DREAMS
     
    BRILLSTEIN: A few years earlier the Morris office had moved to 1740 Broadway, in the Mutual of New York Building. It took up one square block between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth. The Park Sheraton Hotel was behind it; Jackie Gleason had a triplex apartment there. Sometimes the William Morris guys met after work in the hotel bar, which was right next to the barbershop where, in 1957, Albert Anastasia of Murder, Inc. was killed in a mob hit.
    Everything that mattered was in the neighborhood. ABC was on Sixty-sixth Street. NBC was at Fiftieth and Sixth Avenue. CBS was at 485 Madison. Radio City Music Hall was at Fifty-first and Sixth. Both the Ed Sullivan Show and the Jackie Gleason Show were broadcast from the Ed Sullivan Theater (then called CBS Fifty-third Street, now home to David Letterman’s show) on Fifty-third and Seventh. Steve Allen’s Sunday program came from the Colonial Theater, at Sixty-sixth and Broadway, which is now Lincoln Center.
    The Stork Club was at Fifty-second, off Fifth. Toots Shor’s was at Fifty-first, between Sixth and Fifth. Food: The Stage Deli was on Seventh Avenue, between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-third; the Carnegie Deli was between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-fourth, but the Stage was more popular. Danny’s Hideaway was on Forty-sixth, between Lexington and Park Avenues. Los Angeles Scala was at Fifty-fourth and Seventh. We’d eat there Fridays because we got paid—that is, if we had any money left over after the lazy Friday-afternoon floating craps games at work.
    In other words, the show business life was all encompassing. There was something for everybody.
    SHAPIRO: I walked into 1740 Broadway on my first day, wearing a suit and tie, and looked around the lobby. There were two sets of elevators, and nearby on the wall was the