A New Day
A NEW DAY
The picture I will keep is of her seated on a sofa at a party shortly before the Oscars two years ago, her hair and dress perfect, a vision of serenity until you got close enough to hear her intone the word “cocksucker.”
—ANNE STRINGFIELD, THE NEW YORKER
1985
The first staff meeting at the top of every year was less a strategic exchange of information and more a call to arms to renew, reinforce, and reinvigorate the troops. A catered breakfast from Nate ’n Al’s would be served as agents, trainees, and secretaries gathered to hear an inspirational speech from CEO Stuart Lonshien projected from New York via the new telecom system onto a giant screen in the second-floor conference room.
Lonshien addressed the staff worldwide like Moses from the mountain, proclaiming that they were not just the chosen people, but the chosen family; brothers and sisters united to support and help one another. It was important to reinforce familial unity at the beginning of the year in order to wipe away the stink from the year-end bonuses given a few weeks earlier.
Most agents, bruised and underwhelmed, felt like the agency always gave them enough to keep them there but never enough to make them happy. A choice few got perks such as stock options or new cars with official initials on the license plates. Sylvan Light had adopted that practice from Alliance. HK SLA was Harvey Khan in his Cadillac, GA SLA, Gil Amati in his Jaguar, SL SLA, Sam Lesser in his Mercedes 450 SL Coupe. Sylvan Light was the only company to purchase cars, but lease furniture.
“Leave the car, take the client,” competitors would chide, referencing the famous cannoli line in The Godfather, when Sylvan Light clients began jumping ship to Alliance at an alarming rate. While Lesser had signed Cage, thanks to Beanie, he’d lost Swayze, Ackroyd, and Stallone. It was a bloodbath, and the industry held its breath to see how Sylvan Light could stop the bleeding.
There were rumors about a merger, which put everyone on edge since mergers meant redundancies and redundancies meant casualties. You couldn’t have two heads of the television department, for example, so one would have to go. Mergers bred in-house competition, suspicion, and gossip, but they also seemed the only way to stay alive in a business that was quickly consolidating.
So, when Lonshien asked Sam Lesser, who was fond of neither speechifying nor hyperbole, to make an announcement at the worldwide staff meeting, the worldwide staff held its breath.
“The Sylvan Light Agency is legendary,” Lesser said, his voice strong, his eyes piercing. “So it makes sense that a legendary agent has agreed to join our ranks as my partner.”
There was palpable relief and excitement as the staff realized it wasn’t a merger after all. It was a new hire. But it had to be someone big enough to make a difference.
People sat up straighter, leaning in. All that was missing was a drumroll as projected across the giant screens in New York, Memphis, London, and live in Los Angeles, Sam Lesser proudly announced that the one and only Sheila Day had agreed to come out of retirement and join him as co-head of the Sylvan Light Agency.
At first there was stunned silence, and then, with microphones on, resounding cheers from around the globe. This wasn’t an announcement; it was an earthquake, a seismic shift in the bedrock of the industry. Short of a merger between Light and Alliance, nothing seemed bigger. And the best news was, no one would be fired.
Or so they thought.
The Light Agency was back, thanks to a five-foot-four-inch blond ballbuster who didn’t play fools and didn’t mince words.
“The Messiah has come,” Sheila Day said as she waltzed into the room, dressed head to toe in Chanel, with heels high enough to lift their spirits.
Beanie Rosen was in awe. This was the woman she had seen on 60 Minutes, the one who’d ignited the flame inside her. “She’s a legend,” she whispered to Ella, who while curious, wasn’t quite as enamored.
Sheila Day, fifty-three years old, had essentially been Sam Lesser before her retirement four years earlier. She was brilliant, funny, flirtatious, strategic, and irresistible. Everyone in the industry worshiped at the altar of Sheila Day. To get a phone call from her was a treat. To get a lunch, a prize. And an invite to one of her exclusive dinner parties was an honor you would talk about for the rest of your life. With an impeccably cast guest list seated and served, her dinners were elegant, interesting, and the best seat in town. They were filled with “twinklies”—her famous word for stars, dignitaries, and scholars.
And to get her to come to one of your events was like entertaining royalty. Her approval, doled sparingly, meant everything, and her criticisms, plentiful and sharp, could cut to the core.
“Honeeeey,” she’d say to an agent who wasn’t dressed appropriately, “next time we’re signing schleppers, I’ll be sure to invite you.” There were no comps when it came to Sheila Day. She put men on a pedestal and women on alert. “We want to play in their pen,” she’d say. “We gotta look prettier, be smarter, and make them think that whatever we want was their idea.” There was only one way with Sheila, and it was hers. If you tried to block her, she’d tear you up, mow you down, and never look back.
Born in 1931 in Düsseldorf, Germany, Chavala Gittleman immigrated with her mother, father, and baby sister to New York City. Chavala became Shavala who became Sheila. Her father chose the surname Day to distance himself from what he feared was global anti-semitism.
“But we’re still Jews,” he reminded his children, lest they forget from whence they came. He’d intended to move the family to California, but they never got farther west than Washington Heights. He wanted to give his daughter the world. Instead, he gave her his dreams of who she would be in the world.
“You can do anything,” he told her.
And she believed him.
Her father never made it to Hollywood, but his daughter did.
In 1955, Sheila Day got a job as a file clerk in the New York office of the Sylvan Light Agency where she met and charmed producer Billy Rose. He taught her how to dress, talk, and what real style was. “He had class,” she recalled in later years. She became his secretary, his wife, his ex-wife, then his agent.
“Honeeeey,” she’d say, “I tried on a lot of shoes until I found the one that fit.” Sheila Day Incorporated, a one-woman operation, opened its doors just off Broadway and Forty-fifth Street in October 1957 with a roster of mainly comedians and nightclub acts, all whom she’d met through Billy.
People in the business were rooting for her to win. They loved her moxie, her humor, and her fearlessness as she charmed her way to a reservation at the hottest restaurant, or a booking at the swankiest club. By 1959 she’d built a roster impressive enough to have one of the biggest agents on the West Coast call her when he was in town.
His name was David Schwartz. They had dinner. She signed him by dessert.
Sheila, whose ambition often eclipsed her client list, and sometimes her talent, was suddenly moving to “the coast,” and working alongside Schwartz at STC saying she represented Judy Garland, Jackie Gleason, Gregory Peck, Liza Minnelli, and every other client on Schwartz’s roster.
“Team player,” she’d say, when he questioned her motives, and he’d laugh.
They became friends and ultimately partners. He signed Alana Campbell King, multitiered Grammy, Tony, Oscar–winning singer, actress, and director who was an industry within the industry.
He asked Sheila to help him. Instead she helped herself.
The two women became inseparable, unstoppable, redefining the female triple threat. Schwartz held up his hands in surrender.
“I give,” he said. And Sheila took.
With Alana as her number one, she became a partner at STC and built a client list that was unparalleled. Even bigger than Sam Lesser’s. Those she didn’t represent, she’d court with not-so-innocent invitations to one of her legendary dinner parties, always strategically cast.
A voracious reader, Sheila would invite a writer or two, and then mix up her dinners with politicians, artists, socialists, socialites. People like Ryan O’Neal, Jackie Collins, Henry Kissinger, Jack Nicholson, Tom Wolfe, Bella Abzug, and the pièce de résistance, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The mere fact that someone with that pedigree would come to her home, someone so beautiful and well bred, and Waspy, made Sheila, by proximity, pedigreed, well-bred, and, she hoped, Waspy.
“A gal can dream,” she would say.
She was ballsy and loud, with a sharp wit and a sharper tongue; quick to make judgments and slow to make apologies unless it got her the client.
“If you don’t sign with me, I’m going to blame him,” she’d say, pointing to a random agent, “and he’s going to blame her,” she’d say, pointing to someone else. “And we’ll all tell each other what we could have done better. So, spare them the blame and just let us know: How do you like me so far?” The potential client would laugh and relax and sign.
Always.
Sheila had the golden touch until 1980 when Alana left her for Sam Lesser.
“Honeeeey,” she joked to anyone who asked, “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” Then she’d put on one of Alana’s albums.
She retired a few weeks later.
She was done.