A Seat at the Table
A SEAT AT THE TABLE
Rewriting our history is how we deal with the horror of our truths.
—SOMEONE IN HOLLYWOOD
1988–1990
Power erodes, amplifies, emboldens, and changes, and like a drug, it seeds itself, creating a yearning, a need for more. But power can’t be owned, transferred, or even bought; rather, it’s something that is given, and conversely, something that’s taken away.
The shift, at first, is imperceptible: a call dropped, a dinner missed, an accidental oversight. “How did that happen?” “Please forgive us.” “We’ll have to do it again, soon.” But “soon” is a nicety, something to say until the new reality takes hold. It can take weeks, sometimes months, but eventually, the oversight becomes the norm, requests for meetings go ignored, underlings ask if they can help, invitations to dinners are no longer extended until quite suddenly you are an anachronism, living in a world that has shifted just enough to put you on the outside of it.
“It’s not kill or be killed anymore,” Sheila once joked, “it’s kill or become irrelevant.” And irrelevance for Sheila Day was not an option. In a business hungry to marginalize women, Sheila believed that a female agent was only as valuable as her proximity to power. “Lose the power, lose the dame,” she’d say, citing the fact that while the boys’ club protected their own, there was no girls’ club in Hollywood to stand together, to look out, to huddle close against the dicks. Sheila knew that if she lost her clients, or worse, if she kept her clients and they lost their heat, she’d just be the shell of a person who used to represent people who used to be famous. On her rise, she hadn’t thought twice about pushing aside those who were hanging on to a memory of who they’d once been. “Honeeeey,” she’d say, hugging them, “you’re a legend!”
And then, out of earshot, “At the Motion Picture Home.”
Sheila had been ruthless, dismissive, and ageist, never considering that one day she might be on the other side of that coin, which was why she intended to play defense in anticipation of the inevitable. Fuck anyone who tried to kick her to the curb. She had seen the future splayed out at lifetime achievement ceremonies, where ancient powerbrokers who missed the deference that their power once yielded put on fancy jewels and sat like wax figures, if only to remind the world or themselves that they still mattered.
But Sheila Day, who would not go easy into that glittery night, intended to chart a different course, but not by signing stars. Clients were fickle, and fame was fleeting; to rely on either was a fool’s whimsy.
Sheila was no fool.
She sought the power and security that came with a seat on the Sylvan Light board. Once you had the seat, there was no need to sign new talent. “Clients are for pishers,” she’d told Jamie Garland when Garland and Lesser had approached her to join the agency. And she’d held out until she got it. It was the carrot they had dangled, the pot of gold at the end of the bullshit.
But she wouldn’t get it until 1995. The board had bought themselves time. Namely hers.
But by 1989, she reasoned, circumstances had changed. Sheila Day had presumed that Sam Lesser would still be alive to co-pilot, co-lead, and share the burdens if not the spoils, and his right-hand Garry Sampson would be there to take up the slack. But they were both gone, and this was a whole new set of balls she was juggling.
As such, she wanted to be rewarded with an accelerated board seat. “I want that board seat next year,” she told her attorneys.
Worried that her expectations were too ambitious, they counseled her to be patient.
She decided she’d rather be smart and found new lawyers, demanding a new deal before the tables turned, as tables do, and she would find herself in her sixties, free-falling without a parachute, golden or otherwise. She knew that the double standard for women was never clearer than when it came to ageism, money, and power. While men in their sixties were still in their prime, women in their sixties were dried-up grandmas. And grandmas did not sit on the board at the Sylvan Light Agency. But shrewd businesswomen might. She needed to claim that seat before they pulled it out from under her.
Her new attorneys went to the board, pointing out what she had done for the agents and the agency. “Without her, the agency would have sunk,” they told them. The board effusively expressed their wholehearted gratitude but were inflexible on accelerating the board seat—until they heard the attorneys say something that gave them pause.
“The agents love her too,” they said. “They’d follow her anywhere.”
It was a highly calculated statement; a veiled threat with the power of absolute truth behind it. Sheila Day had been curating less a client list, and more an agent list, endearing herself to the power behind the power, and—save for Ella Gaddy—building an army of loyalists who with each day were becoming more devoted for one reason.
She overpaid them.
By contract, Sheila had been entitled to determine the salaries and perk packages of every agent in the motion picture and television departments, and she always added more than the board recommended, making sure the agents knew what the board had wanted to give them, and what she was going to pay in spite of their recommendation.
“I’m overruling them,” she’d say. It was a strategic move intended to build both a singular loyalty to Sheila, and a division between the boys on the first floor and the woman holding the purse strings.
With a wink, a nod, and a “Honeeeey, I got you,” she solidified her troops, giving them pep talks, advice, and loads of cash. She’d help them sign, always taking second position so the agent got the credit and she’d get the agent. Oblivious to her motives, the board had granted her, if not the kingdom, then at least the keys to it; and she had used those keys to turn the villagers against them.
“You wouldn’t want her to leave,” her attorneys said, doubling down and backing the board into a corner.
In April 1990, the board agreed to accelerate her seat by three years, giving it to her at the end of 1992. While it wasn’t what she wanted, it was, finally, within reach.
All she had to do was keep the agents happy.