Good Mourning
GOOD MOURNING
Hollywood is a place that wishes you well when you are terminally ill.
—NED TANEN
1986
The largest chapel at Westwood Village Memorial Park was overflowing with heads of state, filmmakers, movie stars, Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, studio chiefs, foreign dignitaries, and the powerful men who ran Hollywood. Swifty Lazar, Lew Wasserman, Frank Yablans, Matthew Stieglitz, Stephen Ross, David Schwartz, David Shipp, and Freddie Fields offered condolences to the Sylvan Light board of directors.
It’s like a scene out of The Godfather, Beanie thought, watching from the cheap seats. All five families were paying their respects while silently divvying up the spoils.
A little after eleven o’clock, everyone took their seats. From a distance Beanie observed the dance as the once powerful old guard gave way to newer, younger versions of themselves; all running too fast, laughing too loud, spending too easily to notice that their futures were sitting just across the aisle. The ex-agents, the ex-studio heads, the ex-wives, were now nothing more than footnotes in a chapter of a book nobody had read for ages. Beanie watched Sheila, who was watching Stieglitz, who was watching Stallone, who was offering condolences to Johnny Merritt, who was weeping openly.
It’s a dance of knives, she thought.
Almost everyone at the memorial had been represented by Sam or Sheila or both, and a good majority of them had left the agency. Or were planning to. It was brutal, but Sheila put on a good show, never betraying how frightened she was.
But she was frightened. She didn’t need this. She didn’t want it.
“They’re not paying me enough,” she had told Jamie Garland after she’d heard the news about Sam. She’d come out of retirement to put a cherry on top of her career, and now she had a target on her back. She did everything she could to act like it was business as usual, but inside she was terrified. It was just a matter of time before the friendly smiles and reassurances turned to clandestine dinners and letters of termination.
She tried her best to prepare herself and the board, calling an emergency meeting a week after the memorial, and asking Beanie to take notes.
Gathered in Sam’s offices alongside his longtime secretary, Anita Lejos, and Moze Goff, were hand-selected senior agents, including those from the East Coast who’d flown in to join Harvey Khan, Jamie Garland, Gil Amati, and Garry Sampson, in figuring out next steps.
It seemed disrespectful to Anita to hold the meeting in Sam’s space, but Sheila, trying to lighten the mood, said, “Honeeeey, it was disrespectful that he died. Besides,” she told her, “we need access to his files, his Rolodex, and his magic.” Her voice cracked, more from fear than from sadness.
Moze, who had been praised for the way he’d handled things, had been quietly promoted to agent in the hopes that he, under the supervision of Garry Sampson, could keep a few of the hotter, younger clients like Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine—who’d been a recent signing.
“We can’t lose them,” Sheila said to Moze, less a concern and more an edict.
Moze plus Garry equaled Sam, in Sheila’s eyes, and that was how they had to sell it.
The irony that Moze was not only an agent, but now in the inner circle while Beanie, on the periphery, was still taking notes, had not been lost on her. But the whole company was in survival mode, and Beanie had to put aside all personal issues. It was as if she and Moze never were.
Perhaps we weren’t, she told herself. But then her thoughts would drift to the way he’d become a staple at holiday dinners with her family, the way Miriam would look with pride at him, and by association, at her daughter.
Landing Moze had signaled that Beanie wasn’t a loser who would end up alone with a hot fudge sundae and a cat—or seven. And it wasn’t just her mother who’d embraced “her fella”; Dr. Spitz invited Moze for golf at Hillcrest, and even the skinny twins sought him out for advice. They were all awaiting a formal announcement or proclamation cementing Moze as one of their own. And she would disappoint them. Again.
Beanie supposed she could have granted their wish, as long as she closed her eyes when he fucked the caddy or the pool boy or any random port in the storm that suited his fluidity.
“Whatever makes you happy, darling,” she should have said when she’d walked in on him and Barry. Or maybe she should have been nonchalant and simply put a sheet down so they wouldn’t get lube on what was once Mercedes’s pastel couch. Moze had told her, after all, that he was untraditional, and she had moved her lines as best she could. But this line was outside any picture she’d imagined of a life, even one with blurry lines. And then to add insult to blow jobs, after the Beanie interruptus, Barry moved out from Beanie and into Moze, so to speak, falling into his life as if he’d never leave.
But he would, eventually. Everyone did.
Moze was a live-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy, and there were a whole lot of seats and pants on the horizon. Barry, like Beanie, would find out the hard way.
Sheila’s rising voice snapped Beanie back to reality.
“Clients either take meetings or take advantage, asking for reduced commissions, which is unacceptable.” It was a pep talk that had turned into a tirade. Sheila had seen this before. Turnover, defections, deaths: it was all low-hanging fruit to the competition.
In the immediate, the agency was able to hang on to their anchors, the clients that kept the lights on. But the trades and gossips, and even the nightly news, were spinning a different tale. “An Agency Under Siege,” they reported, as they lay in wait for their stories to self-fulfill.
“What the hell?” Harvey Khan said to Mercedes Baxter as he read article after article, throwing them across the room in frustration. After Redford, no one had left the agency, not yet, but with this kind of scrutiny they would. The press was presuming and perhaps craving a bloodbath, and it was only a matter of time, he feared, before clients, perceiving their agency was in trouble, would look elsewhere to find a more stable home.
Khan was worried about the future of the agency, and Mercedes was worried about the future of Khan. Eight years older than Lesser, he was starting to have issues with his blood pressure. Mercedes had already been the accommodating lover of a wealthy man in an unhappy marriage, and didn’t want, God forbid, to end up again with the short end of a wife’s vitriol.
This time she tended to both the husband and the wife, monitoring Khan’s stress levels and Grace’s growing addiction to drugs and alcohol. She had neither conscience nor guilt that she had been the person to whom Grace had turned when seeking advice. Having been burned years earlier, Mercedes angled to be on the inside; guiding, advising, solidifying all ends toward her means. And after she’d checked Grace into the relatively new Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol abuse, she was able to be with Khan practically every night, all the while encouraging his wife to focus on herself.
Sam’s passing had been a reality check, putting Harvey’s life and life choices top of mind. Mercedes, wanting to calm the seas, urged Khan to work in tandem with Sheila Day to help steady the ship, pointing out that Sam, brilliant as he was, had marginalized Khan, often keeping him outside of his deals and away from his clients. But Sheila wanted to include Khan, and Mercedes believed they could work together in a way that Harvey and Sam never had.
“It’s going to be better in the long run,” she told him.
And handing the reins to Sheila, at Mercedes’s behest, he began to think so, too.
With Khan’s endorsement and support, Sheila went to work changing the narrative. “They have the young turds,” Sheila would say to the press, purposely mispronouncing “Young Turks”—the name given the newest crop of Alliance agents. “We have the old broad,” she’d add, turning their criticism of her on its ear.
Her humor saved them from bleeding out. She knew she couldn’t beat the competition in terms of aggression or youth, so she leaned into legacy, experience, and wit, making the oldest agency in the world the underdog. People not only began rooting for Light, but they also began rooting for Sheila. They wanted her to win.
Reinforcing that narrative, Sheila advised that agents take clients into their confidence, asking for time to prove they could do the job. That tactic not only made the clients stand with the agents, but it undercut the sincerity of their other pursuers. The competition looked like bullies, picking on the beleaguered agency, trying to sign everyone and anyone, less out of passion and more out of a need to destroy. It became a sign of solidarity to stand with the old guard.
Sheila and her inner circle worked tirelessly, meeting each client, and each client’s demands, empowering her lieutenants, encouraging them to take on more. Moze Goff seconded Garry Sampson on many of Sam’s stars, while Sheila partnered with Gil Amati on the legacy clients such as Goldie Hawn, Stanley Kramer, and Warren Beatty.
Additionally, Sheila and Jamie Garland reinforced Candice Bergen’s representation, which had been in question and, equally significant, they managed to secure the representation of Debra Winger, one of the biggest female stars in the world, signaling to the industry that Light wasn’t just playing defense.
Sheila had magnificently steered the ship clear of danger, but with blinders on; she failed to recognize other obstacles—namely, the competition’s pursuit of her key agents.