Give Me Ten Minutes …
GIVE ME TEN MINUTES…
BEANIE
… and I’ll give you a star…
—BEANIE ROSEN WITHOUT TRAINING WHEELS
1977
If Beanie was going to get Fish an agent, she needed all the tools at the ready. She studied Fish’s headshot, paid for with money she’d taken from Dr. Spitz’s sock drawer. It was unconventional in that it was a full-body photograph with Fish leaning against a wall, cigarette in his mouth, his hair shaggy around his face. Taken from a low perspective, it was specifically designed to make Fish look tall. Or at least taller. Underneath, it said “Fisher Braverman,” with his height, five foot eight (Zambonied), his hair color, eye color, and age.
“I’m not sure about it,” Fish said, holding the headshot.
“I like it,” Beanie told him, hoping she didn’t have to take more money from Dr. Spitz’s sock drawer to pay for more photographs. “It’s sexy, and different enough that it makes you stand out.”
Fish agreed, he did look hot, but something was off. “It’s the name,” he said, telling Beanie he’d been thinking of changing it for a long time. “Makes me sound like an old Jewish man,” he explained, and she laughed because he was right. It did. “I mean, most people look at me and they think I’m Italian,” he told her. He turned to Beanie and asked, “What do you think of Fish Campisi?”
Beanie made a face and shook her head, it wasn’t right. “How about… Fish Zuko?” she offered, doubling down again on how good he was as Danny Zuko.
He said it aloud, then smiled. He liked it.
And so, Fish Zuko was born, and he would be bigger than Fish Braverman, if not in actual size, then in legendary stature.
“Sheila Day retired,” Fish told Beanie the following week after he’d done some research.
Beanie, nonplussed, acted like she’d known. “Yeah,” she said nonchalantly, “she’s going to recommend someone else. Don’t worry.”
But Fish wasn’t worried. Beanie was. At first. But then it occurred to her that maybe it was a blessing in disguise. She was never going to get Sheila Day to be Fish’s agent. That was a fool’s errand. But surely she could find someone else who would see how amazing Fish was, and they would scoop him up. There were hundreds and hundreds of agencies out there; she just needed one agent who believed in him as much as she did.
Beanie, who would start UC Berkeley in the fall, had only eight weeks to find the person lucky enough to represent Fish Zuko. And so, a woman on a mission, she went first to the venerable Sylvan Light Agency with Fish’s old headshot and new name.
Confident that she could at least get him a meeting, Beanie walked up to the receptionist. “Hello, I have an appointment with Mr. Light,” she said officiously.
“Try Memorial Park mortuary,” the receptionist replied, referring to the cemetery where industry heavy hitters were laid to rest.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Beanie responded, momentarily flustered. “I just need to see someone if you could let me in. Sheila Day personally recommended I come here,” she added, thinking they’d believe her. But, of course, they didn’t. These were new waves, and she needed to learn how to navigate them. Quickly.
Determined and desperate, she got a list of franchised agents from the Screen Actors Guild, about one thousand names in teeny-tiny print on both sides of the paper. Organizing them based on locale, Beanie would take the Swinger on her days off from her part-time job at a card store in the Northridge mall and hit the agencies on the fly: ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty a day with Fish’s portfolio under her arm, trying to get in.
At each agency she went to, she gathered bits of knowledge, a shorthand, an understanding of the ropes. You had to get friendly with the receptionist to get to the secretary, and friendly with the secretary to get to the agent.
Six weeks passed, and she couldn’t even get to a secretary. But nothing deterred her. Every day off, she’d drive to Hollywood, hitting makeshift offices off of Vine where photographs of famous people hung askew, intimating an association that was, in truth, as thin as the agency’s shabby walls.
And every night she’d come home and lie to Fish, “The agents Sheila recommended are out of town, on vacation, on the moon…” She was running out of excuses, running out of time, and Fish was running out of patience.
“This is bullshit,” he said, threatening again to call Shalom.
Finally, one day in August she went to an office in West Hollywood, the Drysdale McClaren Agency. She couldn’t get past the receptionist and was about to turn away when she saw the agent behind a scrim.
Out of time, out of excuses, out of her mind, Beanie started jumping up and down, screaming the name of every short actor she could think of. “Excuse me, I have Al Pacino in this portfolio. Dustin Hoffman. Steve McQueen. Can I see you for one minute?”
The agent, curious, came out to the reception area. “What’s going on here?” he asked.
Beanie opened the portfolio to Fish’s old headshot with his new name. “Fish Zuko,” she said. “He’s what’s going on. And he’s brilliant,” she told him, adding that he was young and hot and in demand. “And I swear to God if you don’t meet him,” she said with a conviction that only comes from truth, “you’ll see his name on billboards, on stage, on movie posters and remember that you could have signed him. Once. Fish Zuko. The one that got away…”
He smiled.
She smiled.
It was like great sex. Or what she imagined great sex would be like. She could intuit the climax. He was right there. Get the yes. Get the yes.
“It’s ten minutes of your time,” she said. “What do you have to lose?”
“Ten minutes,” he answered.
“But if I’m right, it’ll be the most valuable ten minutes of your life,” she responded.
He looked at her and shook his head in surrender. “All right, I’ll see him.”
Beanie zipped up the portfolio, extending her hand.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Drysdale.”
“I didn’t say thank you,” he said.
“You will,” she told him, then left.
It was the beginning of Beanie’s signature style. Knowing how to end a signing on a high.
And make no mistake, that day, in that office, she’d signed Roy Drysdale.
“She’s good,” Drysdale said, after Beanie had left. But he was wrong. Beanie Rosen was great.
Her heart was in her throat as she reached for the pay phone on Sunset and Laurel. “Roy Drysdale wants to see you,” she said to Fish, never explaining how hard she’d had to work to get the meeting, or that Drysdale was more interested in Beanie than Fish. And though Fish was reticent, citing that Roy Drysdale was hardly Sheila Day, he begrudgingly took the meeting.
By the time Beanie had settled at Berkeley, Drysdale had signed and booked Fish in his first professional acting role playing a juvenile delinquent who takes on Ponch on CHiPs.
“ What are you gonna do about it, Pig? ” Beanie said, quoting and then requoting his one line to anyone who’d listen. She had watched it with reverence in her dorm and tried to call Fish immediately after it had aired. Ignoring the long-distance rates, she phoned in the morning, at night, during peak hours, trying to congratulate, celebrate, commemorate his brilliance, but Fish was never home, and never returned the repeated attempts.
She tried to see him at Thanksgiving when she heard he got a commercial for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, the new “E” ticket ride at Disneyland, and again at Christmas after he landed a semi-regular role on Happy Days, playing Potsie’s troubled cousin Josh, but her calls and letters and efforts seemed to fall away.
It’s said that fish, like guests, stink after a few days. For Beanie it was more a matter of months, and while the sting and the stench ultimately faded, she never forgot the thrill she had in selling Fish not just to Roy Drysdale but to Shalom Rubin, and to anyone else who stood in her way, whoever questioned his talent.
I can do this, she thought, and after graduating early from Berkeley, she set her sights on a place too good for Fish, but not too good for her.
Beanie Rosen would be an agent at the Sylvan Light Agency.
It was, she decided, her destiny.