Have you ever
read a book and actually been sad when
the book ended? That’s how I felt when I finished reading the deliciously
entertaining and gossipy new biography Sue Mengers, Can I Go Now?:
The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood’s First Superagent by Brian Kellow.
Why was I was so
affected by reading about the life of someone who, in her own words, was
nothing more than a little pisher?
Because (of course) she wasn’t a
little pisher, that’s why.
For those of you
under 35, let me give you some background.
Sue Mengers, as
book’s title says, was Hollywood’s first superagent. But, more importantly, she
was Hollywood’s first superagent during what I consider to be the greatest
period in American film history: the seventies.
Let me explain
why this is so.
The seventies
were a period that occurred after the collapse of the studio system (roughly,
the end of the sixties) and before the era of the blockbuster began (signified
by Jaws and, later, Star Wars). This meant that Hollywood's writers, directors and actors were
free to create some of their most brilliant movies: Network, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Nashville, Chinatown, The Last Picture Show, etc. (I could go on, but Peter Biskind has already
written an excellent book about this time called Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls: How the
Sex-and-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.)
Sue Mengers was
an interesting person and this is an interesting book because she was a mass of
contradictions: someone who could be warm and funny one minute and cutting and
sarcastic the next. She was indelibly shaped by two traumatic events in her
life: her distant relationship with her overly critical mother and the suicide
of her father when she was a child. This is what, I presume, made her the
attention-seeking overachiever she eventually became.
Sue Mengers lived
for what she called her “twinklies” (meaning her star clients) and,
particularly, Barbra Streisand, with whom she had a spectacular falling out
when a movie Mengers’s husband directed and Streisand starred in (Jean-Claude
Tramont’s All Night Long) bombed at the
box office.
By the time she
was 54, Mengers was essentially retired. Although she would later sign a
three-year contract with William Morris, she had already done her best work.
The New Hollywood
was typified by bottom-line M.B.A. types like CAA’s Mike Ovitz, people who were
essentially bean counters and didn’t espouse the schmoozy, dinner party
lifestyle that Sue Mengers practically invented.
A few years ago,
Mengers’s larger-than-life persona was captured on Broadway by another
larger-than-life performer, when Bette Midler portrayed her in the play I’ll
Eat You Last by John Logan. (The fact that
Midler wasn’t nominated for a Tony Award for her performance is one of the most
egregious omissions in Broadway history.)
From the
perspective of 2015 chain store-and hipster-laden New York City, Los Angeles in
the 1970s seems like an impossibly glamorous time and place and Sue Mengers
seems like an impossibly glamorous character.