Salami ’N’ Cheese
SALAMI ’N’ CHEESE
BEANIE
The sandwiches were beside the point.
—BARRY LICHT TO BEANIE ROSEN
1980
It was the place where the people who worked for the people gathered and talked and dreamed of the day when they, too, would be people.
“So, you’re trying to get a job at Light to fuck him?” Barry Licht asked after hearing Beanie’s story about Fish Zuko and her quest to get him an agent.
She hadn’t really thought about Fish in a while. Like Darrin on Bewitched, they’d replaced Fish on Happy Days. They never said why, and no one other than Beanie seemed to notice that suddenly Potsie’s troubled cousin Josh was another short, disgruntled wannabe. She pondered the question.
Without Beanie, Fish had gone belly-up.
“Maybe to show him,” she said finally, biting into the pastrami sandwich they were sharing, careful not to get mustard on her high-collared shirtwaist.
They were at the on Charleville, a little joint around the corner from the fancy agency in the fancy city where the people who worked for the people who ran it came to eat or smoke or gossip. Nestled between an overpriced boutique and a nail salon, was a deli all the support staff went to for their requisite one-hour respite. Beanie, recognizing this was a whole new world, needed to learn the whole new world order.
Quickly.
“What do you want to show him?” Barry asked.
“That he missed the best there ever was,” she said, eating the one pickle between them.
He liked her. She was funny. Ballsy. Outspoken. Driven. Everything he wasn’t but hoped to be.
So, who was he?
Barry Licht, the great-nephew of Sylvan Light, Sr., was being fast-tracked through the training program.
Those around him knew he was connected, but no one knew quite how. And since Barry’s grandfather had changed their name from Lichtenstein to Licht, as opposed to Light, the nepotism, while no less direct, was less apparent. Barry’s father, William Licht, had tried his hand at the Sylvan Light Agency in the late ’50s, only to hit brick walls, flop around for almost a year, and through an army buddy get a job in sports, which he considered a much more manly profession.
“The agency business is unreliable,” he had warned his son, “full of fairies and fairy floss.” He approved of neither. Rising to become the CMO of the NFL, he expected his son to follow suit, and Barry obliged, attending Northwestern and studying business. His only detour, if you could call it that, was his minor in cinema, which he kept under wraps along with his weekly outings to the midnight show of Rocky Horror, where he’d go, dressed in drag, with like-minded zealots. Privately, Barry rationalized his proclivities as simply having a flair for the dramatic. What’s a little makeup and a boa say to the world except that you’re hip, expressive, and idiosyncratic? After all, it was the 1970s, and punk and Kiss were the vibe. So, he lived this double life until his minor focus became his major obsession.
“I want to work at the Sylvan Light Agency,” he told his father after graduating with an MBA. Barry had hoped to intern at Light during the summers when he was in college, but his father had always steered him away.
This time he couldn’t.
“If I don’t try, I’ll always wonder,” Barry said, trying to agent his way to at least an interview with the venerable agency. “If I don’t become an agent in two years,” he offered, “I’ll come back to Chicago, and the NFL.”
Bill Licht considered. I’d have given him three, he thought, more certain than ever that if this was a sample of Barry’s negotiating prowess, he had nothing to worry about. The next day Bill put in a call to Harvey Khan, the agency president, and Barry was on a plane a week later.
“Wow, so you’re related to the actual Sylvan Light,” said Beanie, having digested the whole story and half the sandwich. She felt like she’d struck gold. Of all the mailroom guys she could have befriended, she’d found someone cute, Jewish, and related to the name on the door. “You’ve got an in,” she told him.
“Everyone does,” he replied, telling her that Harvey Khan, the agency president, was married to Adolph Zukor’s daughter. “That’s how he got started. Everyone knows someone,” he continued.
“And now I know you,” Beanie said with a smile.
He smiled back. He liked her, she could tell. And he was on his way, already out of the mailroom in less than four weeks, and in Dispatch, which was one step closer to securing a desk. But he despised Dispatch.
“In Dispatch,” he explained, “you’re essentially a messenger taking the company’s piece-of-shit car, to deliver the agent’s piece-of-shit script, or contract, or stool sample, all over Los Angeles, from Malibu, to Burbank, to Culver City, to La Canada.” And since he wasn’t a native and didn’t know the back roads, he had to drive everywhere with a Thomas Guide map. Grunt work, he called it. “But the worst part, by far, is that you’re never in the office long enough to get to know the agents, or, more importantly, let them get to know you.”
That, apparently, was the goal of the training program. You needed facetime with the agents, which was a conundrum, since messenger runs kept trainees out of the office. So, the trainees had to figure out a way, either before work, after work, on weekends, and/or holidays to make inroads, to make contact, to make connections. A trainee would do just about anything: read scripts, walk dogs, babysit children, mistresses, whatever it took to get an in, an edge, a leg up. A trainee just wanted to stay close.
Barry confided that he had found a way.
“How?” Beanie asked, instinctively understanding that, like herself, he was a strategist.
“I made friends with Ollie Burns, the head of Personnel,” he told her, explaining that Burns, a quirky guy obsessed with Willie Nelson, had just lost a file clerk. So Barry quickly struck a deal that he would forfeit the morning Dispatch run and work instead in Central Files to help Ollie out. This was a temporary fix for Ollie until he could hire a full-time clerk, but it kept Barry in the office and close to Sydney Lonsdale, the agent he’d been targeting. Barry knew that Lonsdale’s trainee was interviewing at Fox, and he was able to make inroads when no one else could. Naturally, it pissed off the other trainees who not only would be out of the office delivering packages all day, but also had to absorb Barry ’s morning runs while he stayed close in Central Files.
“Is that allowed?” Beanie asked.
Barry shrugged. “You want to run the maze, you better study the rats.”
She couldn’t wait to study them.
“So, how does a secretary become an agent?” she asked.
“She doesn’t,” he told her, throwing away the wrapper and heading for the door.
“Never?” she asked, following him.
“Never,” Barry said, adding that if Beanie told them that she wanted to be an agent, they’d throw her résumé in the garbage. This was confusing. How could she show them how good she was if they didn’t want to see it?
“So, how do I do it?” she asked.
He looked at her, as if debating a truth he wasn’t sure she could handle. “You really want to know?”
She nodded.
“You’re not going to get this job.”
They were on the corner of El Camino and Charleville, Sylvan Light’s three-story stately brick building in their sights. She had fifteen minutes until her interview.
He could tell she was upset. “I’m not saying it to be mean,” he told her, “I’m saying it to be honest. They don’t want girls who look like… you.”
Beanie wasn’t bad looking, she knew it. Some would say she was pretty, with her long dirty-blond hair and brown eyes. She had great legs, too; you just couldn’t see them in her midi-length gaucho skirt.
“What do I look like exactly?” she said, trying not to sound as offended as she felt.
“Their daughters,” he told her. “Their sisters. Their first wives. Everything they’re running from. Nice Jewish girls with smart mouths and thick ankles.”
“My ankles aren’t thick.”
“You know what I mean. They want girls who like the catcalls, not the Shiva calls. Like her,” he said, pointing to a woman in a short skirt and high heels with big curly brunette hair, and breasts that led the way across the street. “That’s who they want answering their phones, serving their lunch, massaging their balls after their clients crush them.”
Beanie nodded. “If their wives can’t look like that,” he told her, “then their sexitaries need to.”
“Wait,” she said. “What did you call them?”
“Sexitaries,” he replied. “That’s what everyone calls them. And any girl inside who isn’t called a sexitary won’t last,” he said, watching as the tall woman in the short skirt and high heels walked into the building. She could even be interviewing for the same job Beanie was interviewing for. “But maybe a different position,” he said, joking that hers would be on her back or her knees depending on the day.
Beanie was speechless.
“Don’t look so glum,” he told her. “She won’t get it either. You know why?”
She shook her head.
“Too tall. Mike Barron likes spinners, you know, someone small, who—”
“Spins,” she said. “I get it.”
He shrugged. “But she is good-looking, so they’ll keep her on file for someone else.”
“Jesus,” she said, exasperated, “it sounds like a fucking beauty contest!”
“It is a fucking beauty contest,” he told her. Then immediately felt bad. It was a lot to take in. “Hey,” he said, trying to look at the bright side, “you don’t want to work for Mike Barron. He plows through sexitaries every few months.”
“And this is allowed?” she asked, shaking her head.
“Technically, no,” he told her, confidentially. “The agents get warnings, a slap on the wrist, but behind closed doors people like Barron remind the alter cockers what it was like when they could get laid three times a day by three different women.”
When she made a face, he said, “You want the truth, Beanie Rosen? Here it is. They not only like it when he’s bad: they dine out on it. Get it now?”
Sadly, she did. Mike Barron would never hire her. She shouldn’t even bother interviewing.
“What about the other opening?” Beanie asked. “The receptionist said they were interviewing for two positions?”
Barry nodded. “Billy Zepnik, a TV agent, with a wife and four kids, specifically asked for a leggy blonde.”
“Wow,” Beanie said, facing a wave that was tidal. “It’s like they’re picking off a menu.”
“They are,” he said, matter-of-factly, “and if they hear that you’re a college graduate, man, they run the other way.”
“They don’t like smarts?” she asked.
“Not in their women,” he said. “They equate it with ambition. When a girl gets a job as a sexitary,” he told her, “at least at the Light Agency, she has to say that’s all she wants to do. She has to assure them that she’s not looking for a promotion, or a husband, or even a raise. They want to hire you, admire you, and if they’re unhappy—”
“Fire you,” she said before he could.
“There’s enough ambition and backstabbing in this building as it is, the agents don’t need secretaries vying for their jobs. And by the way,” he added, “same goes for the trainees. They’d be fucking furious, after working their way through the mailroom and Dispatch, if a sexitary got promoted to an agent. I would be,” he told her truthfully. “A trainee is required to have a college degree; a secretary is encouraged not to. How’s that for a double standard?”
“Fucked up,” she said. “It’s the eighties, for God’s sake,” she said, pointing out that the Equal Rights Amendment had nearly passed, and these guys were still living in the 1960s.
“They liked the sixties,” Barry told her. “They miss the sixties.”
It was a lot. Even for a strategist. How do you get into the mousetrap when you’re not the cheese they like?
“Go somewhere else,” he said. “Get promoted there. Make a name for yourself. Then come back if you want. Lots of places have women agents, we have women agents, but they had to leave to come back.” He said it all with a finality that was hard to ignore. “You need a plan B,” he told her.
But she didn’t want one.
They were at the entrance to Sylvan Light. Barry had to go on messenger runs to the valley in an unair-conditioned car, and she had to go to a job interview upstairs that she’d never get. He gave her his number.
“Let’s stay in touch,” he said, walking toward the parking garage.
Beanie nodded, quickly working the tumblers in her head.
“There has to be a way!” she shouted to him as he walked down the street.
“There’s no straight line,” he shouted back.
Lucky for Beanie Rosen, life had already prepared her for curveballs.