Background People
BACKGROUND PEOPLE
If you want to know what Queen Elizabeth was saying to her best friend, ask the woman holding her train.
—ONE WHO HELD IT
1989–1991
The first time Beanie had heard about background people was eight years earlier, in 1981. Locked in a windowless office in Central Files, she’d come out for a stretch and met an older man, perhaps in his mid-seventies, sitting in Ollie’s outer office.
“They killed Marilyn, you know,” the man had said conspiratorially.
“I’m sorry, what?” Beanie replied, not sure if he was speaking to her or himself.
“Marilyn,” he’d said, annoyed that she wasn’t following, and then continued, telling her that he knew Marilyn, he knew all the players, he knew the score. He’d seen it all. “Including the corpse,” he’d added, explaining that this was hours before anyone had called the cops.
Beanie didn’t know what to think as he rambled on about the young starlet who had been worshiped by many but misunderstood by more. He said he genuinely liked her, and Marilyn liked him, confiding that when she couldn’t get Bobby or Jack or Peter on the phone, she’d call “Greenie”—that was her nickname for him, he’d explained, and they’d talk until she fell asleep. He nudged Beanie. “How ’bout that?” he snickered. “Marilyn Monroe called me to put her to sleep.” He shook his head and told her the whole thing was a travesty, everyone had done everything they could, but once she’d threatened to go to Jackie, well… The implication hung heavy. He seemed sad and small, and assuming she was Ollie’s secretary, handed her his card and asked that she let Ollie know he’d come by.
“Who’s Billy Greenjeans?” Beanie asked later after Ollie had come back from lunch. She handed him the card with his name, phone number, and an illustrated caricature. “He seemed like a lonely old man.”
Burns smiled and told her that there was a time when a business card from Greenjeans would open any door, and not just at Light. “Billy Greenjeans was in the background of many lives,” he told Beanie, explaining that he had been a big manager handling talent.
“Are managers different from agents?” she asked.
“Managers usually hire the agents,” he told her, explaining that they were the people closest to the client. “And no one was closer to his clients than Billy Greenjeans,” he said. “He represented big names like Red Skelton and Joey Bishop.”
Beanie nodded, clueless as to who either was.
“And a lot of the guys in the Rat Pack,” he continued, explaining that Greenjeans connected Hollywood to Washington, and vice versa. “So, Billy Greenjeans became the guy you went to in order to get to the guys you wanted.”
Ollie brought a thick encyclopedic reference book over and opened it to the index where he traced his finger down the tiny print until he found Billy Greenjeans’s name.
“There,” he said, “and there, and there, and there…,” pointing out at least ten mentions of the small man with the big stories. Burns flipped from one page to the next where Beanie saw photographs of Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr, and Angie Dickinson during random moments at fancy parties and intimate dinners.
But it wasn’t the stars she was looking at. It was the man on the periphery of the stars.
Background people, Ollie had called them. “The ones you never notice, but they notice you. Look, see,” he said, pointing out a particular photograph, “he’s looking straight at the camera.”
She held the book closely and saw what Ollie meant. There, in the deep background of every photograph, was a younger version of the man she’d met. Sometimes he was looking at the camera, challenging the photographer, but more often he was looking off to the side, surveying the action.
“He was the real deal,” he told her. “Inside the circle, protecting their secrets.”
Suddenly Beanie stopped and looked at Ollie. “He said they killed Marilyn,” she told him.
Ollie shrugged. “He would know.”
Beanie was dumbfounded. “It’s the people on the periphery of the famous who become the authors of their legacies,” he told her, then put the book and “Greenie” back on the shelf.
Either by Ollie Burns’s parables in the outer offices of Personnel, or Sheila Day’s strategy sessions about signing the spouse, the universe had been conspiring to give Beanie a direction. She needed to look at the people behind the people.
“Managers,” she said aloud.
The way through the wave wasn’t distancing herself from Ella, it was supplementing her, she realized. Beanie needed to establish a relationship with a manager so she could show how smart she was, how loyal she would be, and perhaps build a future where she could be number one. But in order to interest a manager, she needed a client of her own, someone they might want to represent. After all, she couldn’t expect that a manager would seek her out.
It was a catch-22—until destiny caught it and intervened.
Adrienne Seabergh, who had once upon a time helped Beanie meet Nicolas Cage, was earning a reputation as one of the rising stars of the ’80s. Often described as “Michelle Pfeiffer with a side of Madonna,” Adrienne was beautiful, quirky, and spectacularly talented. While not a member of the Brat Pack, she was almost as hot, having done supporting and featured roles in Desperately Seeking Susan, Footloose, and St. Elmo’s Fire. Every agent in town was after her, but she’d been loyal to the man who’d represented her since she was eleven. Her loyalty, however, did not extend to the agency where he worked, so when he retired, her thoughts went to a young woman she’d met a few years earlier.
Less than two weeks after Beanie had devised her plan to court a manager, providence, dressed as a free spirit in cut-off Daisy Dukes, cowboy boots, and a button-down white shirt, showed up at the Sylvan Light offices, asking for Beanie Rosen.
You could feel the excitement as Adrienne strolled down the halls like a beautiful thoroughbred, uninhibited, unassuming, asking for directions to the shabby-chic office where Beanie sat, reading a script and eating an egg salad sandwich from Salami ’N’ Cheese.
It was lunchtime, so Hawkeye had been out when reception had called, and Adrienne, who was on the cover of the magazines being delivered by the mailroom, told the receptionist she’d just make her own way.
Secretaries stealing some personal time came out of their bosses’ offices to gawk, say hello, and walk with her. They weren’t so bold as to ask for autographs but were thrilled nonetheless to know that Adrienne Seabergh was in the hallway.
“Beanie, someone’s here for you,” Randall Fink’s secretary said, knocking on the door, then pushing it gently open.
Beanie looked up, and there was Adrienne Seabergh, all arms and legs and teeth and hair.
“I’m looking for an agent,” she said to a stupefied Beanie, who hadn’t seen her since she’d brought Beanie to Nick Cage’s apartment. “Think you can help me?”
Beanie was flabbergasted. Light was thrilled. And all the other agencies were blindsided as a week later Beanie Rosen from the Sylvan Light Agency announced the signing of red-hot Adrienne Seabergh.
“I’m not the shit anymore,” she told Ella.
“Damn straight,” Ella said, proud and quite relieved.
“I’m going to do this on my own,” she said, “without backup.” Beanie was afraid if she got a number two, they would perhaps take credit or take over. She was flying solo, quite certain she could handle Adrienne and all her other responsibilities.
But as it turned out, she had her hands full.
Adrienne Seabergh was a wild child, testing the limits of her fame, living on the edge of life for the fuck of it. She needed less an agent and more an air traffic controller, navigating the speedbumps, helping her fly.
“Get her a job,” Sheila advised in the weekly motion picture meeting, as Beanie announced that Adrienne was passing on yet another script.
“I just want something as great as her talent,” Beanie said as Sheila made a giant jerk-off gesture.
“Honeeeey,” she said, “her kooze is her talent, and even that, I hear, isn’t anything to write home about.” The agents, howling, loved when Sheila made derogatory comments and gestures.
Beanie, proprietary, didn’t, and she continued to cull through scripts, looking for material with enough weight to show her client’s talent.
A few weeks later Sheila called Beanie into her office. “You passed on a movie starring Dice?” she asked.
“It’s crap,” Beanie told her. “It’s beneath Adrienne.”
“Listen, Ingmar Bergman,” Sheila said. “She’s not exactly Sarah Bernhardt.”
But that’s where they disagreed. Beanie deeply believed not only in Adrienne’s talent, but in her unselfconscious ability to peel away layers, her fearlessness to expose the truth underneath.
Sheila dismissed Beanie’s idol worship and worried that Beanie was alienating studio heads and filmmakers, warning that if she wasn’t careful, Adrienne would get cold, and Beanie would get blackballed.
“No one will hire your clients,” she warned her, “out of spite.”
But Beanie knew that nothing would burn Adrienne out quicker than a box office flop, so she continued her amorphous search for something that was both commercial and compelling.
And then, abracadabra, she found it.
Kaleidoscope , a film to be directed by Jonathan Demme, had a brilliant script about a paranoid schizophrenic who spends half the film in her delusion as a wealthy socialite and the other half in a mental institution. Described as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Three Faces of Eve, Kaleidoscope was the project Beanie had been waiting for. Though it was not a big payday, she urged Adrienne to take the role, which resulted in a tour de force performance, garnering her an Oscar nomination and a number-one film at the box office.
It changed the course of both Adrienne’s and Beanie’s careers.
Suddenly, at twenty-eight years old, Adrienne was untouchable. The free-spirited artist who had never sought fame had it in abundance. There were new publicists and new attorneys and new friends and new apartments. Fearless, feckless, and curious, she was out of control, giving wild parties, spending recklessly, and beginning to get a reputation for being unreliable.
It was time for Beanie to consider her next move.
“Adrienne Seabergh needs a manager,” she told Sheila, who thought it was a terrific idea. She felt that Beanie was spending far too much time with Adrienne and needed to leverage Adrienne’s heat to sign other stars, preferably this time with Sheila.
Beanie, flattered, said, “We can be gold together.”
“Fuck gold,” Sheila said. “We can be platinum.” Then she got to the business of helping Beanie choose a manager, suggesting Sylvan Light loyalists like Ray Katz, Sandy Gallin, or Larry Thompson.
But Beanie wasn’t looking for managers who had been loyal to Sylvan Light. She wanted a manager who would be loyal to her. She needed to build her own army with someone so good that they would make Beanie better.
“Who are you thinking of?” Sheila asked.
“Stevie Lanzetti,” Beanie told her.
Assuming she was kidding, Sheila rolled her eyes. “C’mon,” she said. “I don’t have all day.”
But Beanie told her she wasn’t kidding, explaining that she had thought about it a great deal and believed that Stevie Lanzetti, who represented everyone from Kevin Kline to Matt Dillon to Matthew Broderick to Jamie Lee Curtis to Emilio Estevez, would be a perfect fit. “They’d like each other,” Beanie told her, explaining that Adrienne was about to move east, and Stevie was New York based.
Sheila looked at Beanie like she was nuts. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Sheila screamed. “She’s probably sucking Stieglitz off right now.”
Beanie, remaining calm, told her she knew how close Stevie and Stieglitz were, but she reasoned that if Stevie got Adrienne through Beanie, Stevie would protect Beanie against Stieglitz. Ever since Kaleidoscope, the Alliance Group had been all over Adrienne anyhow, calling her weekly, sending gifts. And while Adrienne wasn’t tempted, at a certain point she might be. Beanie reasoned that putting Adrienne with Stevie Lanzetti was a smart, proactively defensive move, saying that she’d have someone on the inside, telling Stieglitz to just stop it.
“Oh, yes,” Sheila said sarcastically, “tell him to just stop it. That’ll do the trick.”
Sheila wasn’t sure if Beanie was deliberately trying to sabotage herself or the agency or just being provocative. Is she kidding? she wondered, but then Beanie told her that she’d heard Matt Dillon and Matthew Broderick recently switched agents within Alliance, which was always a signal that a client was unhappy.
“And your point is?” Sheila asked.
“My point is, once Stevie gets to know me and likes me, presuming she does and she will, maybe she’ll bring the Matts to me.”
Sheila countered. “What if she doesn’t? What if Adrienne gets unhappy and Stevie brings her to Alliance?”
Beanie shrugged. That could happen. But it was a chance she was willing to take, because if she was right, she would be the only person that Stevie trusted outside of Alliance. And that could be huge. In time.
It was a gutsy move and Beanie needed Sheila’s endorsement. “Will you back me?” she asked.
Sheila considered. It was moronic, for sure, but Sheila needed Beanie’s loyalty more than the office needed Adrienne Seabergh. Either way, it was a win-win for Sheila Day, and since she was collecting wins while waiting on the board seat, Sheila agreed. “Okay,” she said. “It’s the worst idea in the world, but I’ll back you.”
“Great,” Beanie said, thanking her, and immediately headed for her office where she had Hawkeye put in a call to Stevie Lanzetti.
Stevie, whose real name was Stefanie, was a hands-on, brutally honest, tough-as-nails manager who didn’t make small talk and didn’t suffer fools. She read every script and manuscript, claiming that just reading a synopsis was for idiots and didn’t encourage gossip, games, or bullshit. With her short black hair, and all-black ensemble, Lanzetti was a bit of a New York–based enigma. In her early forties, she was a creature of habit, driving her own car around New York City, eating at the same diner every day, ordering the same food, and wearing versions of the same clothing, no matter the season or occasion. Originally from the North Shore of Long Island, she detested travel, and other than monthly trips to Los Angeles on the MGM Grand Air, where the same car and driver would wait and take her to the same room at the Chateau Marmont, she rarely broke from her routine.
So, this request for a meeting with a Sylvan Light agent was out of the norm, if not her comfort zone.
Even using Adrienne’s name as a calling card, it had taken Beanie three weeks to get the meeting.
“How can I help you?” Stevie asked suspiciously over coffee at the Chateau Marmont.
Beanie took a deep breath and shot her straight.
“I like your loyalty,” she said. “Even if it is to the Alliance Group. I respect the fact that it’s unfaltering.”
Stevie looked at her. What the fuck, she thought, still not sure what Beanie’s angle was. “I’m not interested in your clients,” Beanie said. “I mean unless they’re leaving. I’m interested in you,” she told her, explaining that she was looking to strike up a relationship with someone whose loyalty was beyond reproach.
Stevie lit a cigarette and smiled. This chick has balls, she thought. She had to give her that. “What do the boys on the first floor think about you reaching out to me?” Stevie asked, eyes narrowed, weighing the truth in Beanie’s candor.
“They think I’m nuts,” she said. “But I told them that Alliance was already going after Adrienne, and I needed a linebacker who was great with material, who shot straight, and whose integrity wasn’t limited to one company.”
Stevie lit a cigarette. “What makes you think it’s not?”
“Instinct,” Beanie said. She was banking on the belief that if she brought a client to Stevie, Stevie would back her even against Stieglitz and Conroy. Beanie knew that she and Stevie were similar in many ways. Stevie had worked for Light in New York in the late ’70s and, like Beanie, she wasn’t recognized for her talent. “They judged you,” Beanie said. “And my guess was, they were unkind.”
“That’s an understatement,” Stevie told her. Unlike Beanie, Stevie left Light after a few years, began managing actors, and brought them all to Matthew Stieglitz and David Shipp at Alliance, vowing never to work with Sylvan Light again. She had found a way to survive in spite of them.
Over the course of their lunch, Stevie found that she not only liked Beanie, but admired her moxie and direct approach. That day at the Chateau Marmont, Beanie Rosen signed Stevie Lanzetti, and Stevie Lanzetti, a few weeks later, signed Adrienne Seabergh.
Over the next few years, these two background people guided Adrienne as she surpassed all the girls, the boys, and the benchmarks, inventing and reinventing what was possible for actresses, agents, and businesswomen who stood on each other’s shoulders to reach new heights.