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

building directory. I stared up at the names of all the agents and visualized my own there. They were listed alphabetically. One agent was named Sol Shapiro. I thought, Soon my name is gonna be just above Sol Shapiro’s. That was a big thing for a kid from the Bronx. Every day I’d walk in, look up at the names, and imagine.

     
QWERTYUIOP
     
    BRILLSTEIN: My first day I wore a suit—my only suit—a tie, and a white shirt. Sid Feinberg told me, “Your object is to get out of the mailroom and become an agent’s secretary. Not all of you will succeed. It’s up to you.” At first I was a bit nervous, but after a couple of days it was just like being in basic training: I knew everyone, we were all pals, and I couldn’t remember being any other place.
    LITKE: Feinberg explained that if we wanted to work for an agent, we’d have to take typing and shorthand lessons.
    BRILLSTEIN: Every morning from 6 to 8 A.M. I went to Sadie Brown’s Collegiate Secretarial Institute. But all Sadie wanted to do was fix me up with the rich Jewish girls and yentas who went there. Even worse, William Morris wouldn’t pay for it, so I had to foot the bill.
    SHAPIRO: Lucky for me, when I was in high school, my mother had said, “Typing always comes in handy.” So I had a little step up. But I didn’t have shorthand. Bernie Brillstein recommended I go to Sadie Brown’s. Fortunately the GI Bill of Rights gave me an allotment of one hundred dollars a month while going to school, and Sadie Brown’s was fifty dollars a month, so I had fifty dollars left over in addition to my thirty-eight-dollar-a-week salary, which enabled me to eat.
    BRILLSTEIN: There were other ways to get by. Sometimes managers would send their clients’ record albums to the Morris office. We’d clip them and take them to the record store, where the exchange rate was eight promotional copies for one new record. But we did that for records, not money. That would have been stealing [ laughs ].

     
HUMILITY TRAINING
     
    BRILLSTEIN: A young black guy, Lloyd Alene, ran the mailroom and had a little office inside, surrounded by smoked glass. Along the wall were mailboxes and shelves. Our mail carts were like little metal shopping carts with file folders labeled for every agent and executive. Each floor had its own cart. Our routine was simple. Each employee had a mailbox; when the mail came, we put it in the right slot. Three times a day we’d deliver whatever was in the slots and collect outgoing mail, pushing our carts down the hallways. At first I tagged along with a couple of more-experienced guys. Because I had a college degree, I remember thinking, Oh, how thrilling.
    SHAPIRO: Some found it humiliating. I didn’t. It seemed like honest work. However, I did learn humility by filling the paper towels in the men’s room. Or mixing chemicals for the Photostat machine and worrying that my hands would get damaged. I also had to fill Nat Lefkowitz’s fountain pen. Lefkowitz, an accountant, ran the New York office. Every morning I’d go in with a bottle, put down a towel, and very carefully fill his pen to the brim.
    LITKE: My first day I learned to water the plants and change the toilet paper.
    WEST: I thought it would be glamorous, but it was the furthest thing from it. I was a schlepper. It was a lot of garbage work.

     
SORRY, WRONG NUMBER
     
    SHAPIRO: One day a trainee named Tony Fantozzi and I were sorting mail, when Lloyd Alene said, “Tony. There’s a phone call for you. It’s Mr. Lastfogel’s secretary.” Neither of us could believe it: Abe Lastfogel, the chairman and owner of the William Morris Agency, calling Tony Fantozzi—a kid who’d just started in the mailroom?
    Fantozzi listened for a moment and then said, “Of course I’m free to have lunch with Mr. Lastfogel on Thursday.”
    After he hung up, he turned to me and said, “Abe Lastfogel wants to have lunch. What a great place to work! The head of the company calling a guy in the mailroom? I