The Rise of the Secretaries
THE RISE OF THE SECRETARIES
Behind every successful executive is a loyal and diligent secretary. Until she gets promoted…
—UNKNOWN
1987
“Beanie Rosen’s office,” said the familiar voice with a confidence, nay, pride that comes only from a true friend or fellow traveler. In this case, both.
Hawkeye was now Beanie’s secretary, which surprised the hell out of, well, everyone. She had been a fixture at reception for almost ten years; a well-paid, well-regarded, trusted employee who answered to no one. So this new position, working for a junior junior who got in on a pass, looked like a demotion, a bad decision, a misstep.
But to Hawkeye, it was a springboard to a future no one else would guarantee. Not even the boys on the first floor. Sure, they liked her fine to be the greeter, the one they’d make passes at, make jokes with, off-color, about color, and then take liberties because, hey, she was one of them.
But now it was time for her to test the limits of those liberties by piggybacking onto the jet stream of a woman who would reinvent the standard. Hawkeye had had plenty of offers to work for more senior agents. But what the men never understood was that it wasn’t the status of the agent that had held her back from a job change, it was their ego—namely, would they be threatened by her ambition?
Beanie Rosen would understand Hawkeye’s need for more, and she believed, if she tied her strings to Beanie’s feathers, together they’d fly higher than either would alone. For many years, Hawkeye had been looking for someone she could trust to carry her over a line she couldn’t reach because of the color of her skin. In the history of the big three agencies, there had only been one African American agent, and he’d lasted less than a decade.
Wally Amos started in the New York mailroom of the William Morris Agency in the late 1950s and quickly rose through the ranks by discovering a heretofore unknown folk duo from Queens called Simon an eternal flame, burning down the barriers she’d spent her life resenting—would help her get there. Hawkeye predicted that Beanie Rosen would be one of the greats, gaining a reputation for breaking ground, breaking rules, breaking ceilings. And she also believed that, if she worked for her, Beanie would clear the way for her as well.
“Ella wants to know where you want to have lunch,” Hawkeye said, interrupting Beanie, who was surveying her newly decorated office.
“I don’t care. Maybe the Ivy,” Beanie told her, taking in her new surroundings. She had been in temporary offices in the plaza across the street and was pinching herself to think this was all hers. She felt a sense of pride and accomplishment. As a starting agent they had given her a generous budget of $7,500 for furnishings, art, and accessories. It had taken her two months to decide on a style, and four months to get it all done.
Ella, who had assumed Garry Sampson’s old office, had no interest in redecorating it. Frills and fuss were a part of a past she had long since buried, and the mismatched furniture and chaos reinforced her individuality, and that gave her comfort. But Beanie, less concerned with individuality, was more focused on appearance, and had taken note that the way you curated your office informed not only who you were but more importantly, at least at Sylvan Light, who you wanted others to think you were.
In an abracadabra universe, it was all about perception. Say it. See it. Be it.
From Phil Carter to Samuel Lesser to Jamie Garland to Sheila Day, Beanie had watched as they carefully constructed images from the outside in, portraying themselves to be chic, manly, glitzy, hip, famous, classy, irreverent, or all the above.
In Beanie’s case, she decided that the shabby-chic vibe would show people that she was both cozy and Bohemian. Her office was filled with everything from an overstuffed floral chair that appeared both new and worn, an ecru loveseat that was slipcovered with mismatched floral pillows, and a distressed wood coffee table with books on English country cottages, though she’d never been to England nor anywhere near a cottage. Her desk was an old barn door, sanded and whitewashed, which coordinated with the reclaimed pale blue wood floor-to-ceiling bookshelves against the back wall. With the remaining funds, the decorator bought old books from the Rose Bowl flea market, picture frames, and knickknacks, giving the office a warm, homey effect. It was, thought Beanie, the most beautiful space she had ever been in.
But the pièce de résistance was that the office they’d given her used to belong to Mike Barron. She and Hawkeye had burned sage before the demolition.
Beanie had naively assumed that the agents who had once been fans when she was a departmental trainee would welcome her, if not as their partner then perhaps as a second, a junior on their teams. Instead, they guarded their turf against Beanie and Ella, as if they’d been hoodwinked by two women circumnavigating a system designed to keep them outside at the secretarial desks, or inside under theirs.
“It’s the circumstances by which you were promoted,” Barry Licht told her. “Once a secretary always a secretary,” he said, pointing out that disgruntled colleagues not only resented their promotions, but the accolades and attention from the industry. “They don’t like it,” he warned as article after article came out characterizing them as the girls against the machine. Usurping the news that Garry Sampson had left to run Orion was the revelation that Scott Westman had chosen two secretaries to be his representatives.
Sheila, forgetting that Beanie had once been her protégé, lumped Beanie and Ella together with her spiteful dissatisfaction.
But never publicly.
When Los Angeles Magazine wrote an article entitled, “,” saying that one of the biggest stars in the world who could have been represented by Sheila Day or Matthew Stieglitz chose to be represented by two former secretaries, Sheila, conscious of the eyeballs hungry for drama, praised them both publicly, and giving an exclusive to Liz Smith, embraced the “girl power” angle. With that endorsement, the optics, already hot, caught fire. Suddenly Beanie Rosen and Ella Gaddy were symbolic of a kind of Horatio Alger success story with a feminist twist.
Jane Pauley, who was a client, requested an interview. “From apron strings to boardrooms,” her segment producer pitched, saying that Beanie and Ella would be featured as a new generation of female entrepreneur who might just reach or at least scratch the glass ceiling. “Here’s a debutante from the South and a yeshiva gal from Pacoima making room for themselves in the boys’ club,” the producer said, giving them a preview of how they’d be featured. “It would be a six-minute interview,” she continued, but neither Beanie nor Ella heard the rest of the pitch.
No one had called Ella a debutante, even when she lived at home. It disgusted her and was antithetical to everything she stood for, everything she wanted to be. So the fact that someone had researched her background and found that out was appalling. Beanie was equally as mortified. Like her mother, she had erased all mentions of Pacoima from her bio and was deeply offended that they had somehow been able to reveal the truth beneath Miriam’s Zamboni. And even though Harvey Khan personally represented Pauley, both women firmly refused to participate. Finally, the producer of the segment came to see Beanie personally and apologized, saying they would omit all mention of both ladies’ backgrounds and urged them to reconsider, reassuring them both how much it would mean to Pauley. And that made Beanie soften.
“She’s a client,” she told Ella, suggesting they just do it and get it over with. “They won’t say anything about where were from, or any of that,” she told her. In truth, Beanie had been surprised to have learned about Ella and her lineage, having no idea that she came from money, much less pedigree. But Ella was resolute, saying that she’d walk if Sylvan Light insisted. Beanie, under no illusion that Light would keep her without Ella, knew that they had to say no to the interview.
But Khan wouldn’t accept no. “Tell them to just fucking do it,” he told Mercedes, who called Rose Liu and tasked her to be the messenger.
Rose, who had long ago forgotten that she and Mercedes had once been friends, accepted her subservient role, but she still got nervous when Mercedes Baxter called, especially since Mercedes’s position in Harvey’s life had become somewhat elevated. Ever since Grace Khan’s untimely death on the French Riviera, Mercedes had stepped in on behalf of the family to ensure that the police investigation surrounding her accidental drowning was free from scandal.
Several tabloids, circling, implied that Grace, fresh out of rehab, had fallen off the wagon and into a pool, but Mercedes skillfully buried the headline and the innuendo. It was important to Cheryl and Todd, Grace and Harvey’s children, that their mother’s reputation remain unsullied, and it was important to Mercedes that her reputation with Cheryl and Todd remain the same. But the children stayed measured and distant. Respectful, they kept their gratitude in check. While they knew for years that Mercedes Baxter had been their father’s companion, and they understood that their parents had been living separate lives, something about this woman seemed obsequious and inauthentic.
Perhaps it was the fact that less than four months after Grace’s passing, Mercedes quietly moved into Stone Canyon, and not so quietly redecorated the entire home, wiping away any trace of all that came before.
Including them.
“Hi, Rose, I hope you’re well,” Mercedes said, not waiting for a response, and plowing ahead relayed Mr. Khan’s insistence that the Jane Pauley interview take place. Mercedes asked Rose to make sure that Beanie and Ella complied. The relationship between Mercedes and Rose was polite but frosty. Rose understood that she was there by Mercedes’s grace, and in that way was able to keep her job, which paid extremely well, if not her man, while Mercedes was able to maintain control over a situation that, had Rose left, she might not have been able to manage. It was a symbiotic relationship with a benign acceptance between the two; an implicit understanding of each woman’s turf that kept the scales balanced. “Please let them know that Mr. Khan is insistent,” Mercedes said, and then hung up.
So Rose, choosing the path of least resistance, informed Beanie that Mr. Khan requested that they do just this one last interview. Then they would put it all to bed. Everyone knew that Ella marched to her own drum, and that while Beanie tried to curry favor with the hierarchy, Ella didn’t.
“Please pass that on to Ella,” Rose said, knowing that Beanie would cushion the blow better than she.
“What do I do here?” Beanie asked Jamie Garland, explaining that she was caught between a rock and a Gaddy. “If I ask her to do the interview again, she might just walk out of spite,” she said. “Do you think you can speak to Mr. Khan and tell him that we shouldn’t push this interview on Ella?” Beanie asked Jamie. But Jamie shook her head and told her that Khan loved Jane Pauley, and the only person who could influence him to shut it down was Sheila Day.
“You need to speak to her,” Jamie said.
Knowing that Jamie was right, Beanie approached Sheila with trepidation. Ever since the double promotion Sheila had been cool, and not just to Ella. Beanie, feeling her anger by association, had kept her distance.
Now she stood before Sheila, asking a favor for a woman who had been disrespectful and dismissive toward her.
“What the fuck is she so afraid of people finding out with this interview?” Sheila asked, staring daggers at Beanie. “Is she hiding something?”
“No,” Beanie said, honestly believing that wasn’t it. “She just wasn’t expecting this publicity. Neither one of us were,” she told her.
But instinctively Sheila called bullshit. “You don’t dress with your cooch hanging out, then shy away when people look,” she told Beanie, sucking the life out of her cigarette.
While others cut a wide berth around Ella, Sheila cut to the quick, stating that she thought Ella was full of crap on a multitude of issues, starting with the fact that she was publicity-shy. “She wants people to look,” she told her, circling back to the idea that Ella was, in fact, hiding something.
They all are, Sheila thought, suspecting a collusion between Westman, Ella, Beanie, and perhaps even Moze.
She didn’t buy that Scott Westman had come up with the idea of Ella being his guardian agent on the spot. Sheila believed that it had all been premeditated and choreographed. They were all fucking in on it, she thought, and kept her distance as best she could. Sure, she worked with Moze because she had to. He had taken many of Lesser’s clients and some of Sampson’s, but Sheila didn’t trust him. The Westman decision had been a slap in the face, an insult she’d tried to shrug off. But her gut told her that she’d been played.
And that it was the lanky goy with the bad bleach job who’d been the mastermind.
And now Sheila Day was being asked to do her a favor.
“What’s in it for me?” she said finally.
“Anything,” Beanie replied. “Name it.”
Sheila smiled, turning over a myriad of possibilities in her head.
“All right,” she said finally. “Invite me to the Costner dinner.”
Beanie blanched. How the hell did Sheila know about the Costner dinner? It was all happening in real time. They had just planned it. Costner and Westman were friends, and Westman had been the one who had set up the meeting. He wanted to help Beanie and Ella build their profile, if only to reinforce his decision.
“Okay,” Beanie told her, “I’ll see what I can do.”
By the time Beanie walked back to Ella’s office, the Pauley interview had been shelved.
But Ella, rather than grateful, was annoyed. “How the hell did she know about the Costner dinner?” she asked, suggesting that perhaps their phones were bugged.
Beanie told her that Sheila had probably heard from Costner’s business manager or lawyer. “People talk,” she said, and then, pivoting, told Ella straight out that they should invite Sheila to the dinner. “Kevin will probably like her,” she said. “Most people do.”
Ella thought about it. Beanie was probably right. They were all on the same team, ish.
But that woman rubbed Ella the wrong way. Maybe it was shades of Eve Lynn, who’d tried to control the way Ella looked and spoke and acted.
“Let’s start with a lunch,” Ella said, “then we can talk about a dinner.”
Beanie hugged Ella hard, believing that finally they were moving forward.
Baby steps, she thought.