What’s Next?
WHAT’S NEXT?
The greatness of our lives is not so much in what we leave behind, but in what we send forward.
—SOMEONE WHO MIGHT HAVE HEARD STEVE JOBS SAY THAT TO SOMEONE ELSE
1992
“Right this way, Miss Rosen,” said the hostess at the Polo Lounge as she led Beanie through the main dining room toward her table on the outside terrace.
There wasn’t a person she didn’t see, or who didn’t see her. In just a few years, Beanie had transformed into a version of whom she’d always wanted to be: a power agent with her own stars, her own table, and her own secretary. The girl who used to wear red jumpers and clogs was now in custom-made Donna Karan power suits, with statement gold jewelry and a man’s Rolex—which communicated strength, she guessed, or perhaps equality, if only around her wrist. Beanie Rosen entered into the ’90s with power, class, clients, style, and a hunger for more. She no longer looked up to Jamie Garland and Sheila Day: she looked over to them.
Emancipated from the chains of those who’d tried to stop her, Beanie Rosen, confident and self-assured, navigated the room, greeting stars and directors, making small talk and big deals.
Jamie Garland, who was lunching with Don Simpson, one of the producers of Top Gun, had promised him that Beanie would stop by. Jamie had already given Beanie the heads-up that Simpson had a script for Adrienne Seabergh that he wanted Beanie to reconsider. He knew that Adrienne trusted Beanie’s judgment, and he hadn’t been able to get Beanie on the phone.
Strange how the tables had turned. A few years earlier, Beanie had tried to get a meeting with Don, and even with Jamie’s help she could only meet his head of development. Now Simpson needed Jamie to get to Beanie.
Hollywood is funny that way, she thought. Ignore people at your own peril, and then when you need them, find mutual friends to smooth over the insults caused by your arrogance.
Jamie watched as Kevin Costner joined Beanie. They stopped at Sherry Lansing’s table to chat with her and Michael Douglas. Sherry, the new chairman of Paramount, was old friends with Douglas and new friends with Beanie. The two women warmly embraced while Douglas stood, greeting Beanie first, then shaking Costner’s hand, pulling him in, whispering something private the way Johnny Carson always did on The Tonight Show, implying to anyone present, and everyone was, that there was intimacy, that they were connected.
And they were, in a way, since Beanie represented them both.
Originally, Beanie hadn’t even been a number two on Douglas’s team, but she had ingratiated herself to Gil Amati, his agent, and then to Douglas, recommending material she was reading for Westman but that she thought might be better suited for him.
Douglas was impressed, not just by her taste, but by the breadth of her capacity to absorb available material. Beanie read four newspapers a day and several magazines, scouring them for articles that could be optioned, reviewing unpublished manuscripts, screenplays, and projects that were still in the nascent idea stage. That’s how she’d found a lurid tale about murder, sex, and manipulation that she knew only Douglas could do: Basic Instinct. Written by Joe Eszterhas, it would be, she believed, the kind of film you’d discuss around the watercooler Monday mornings; the kind you’d see once, then go back again because you just had to; the kind that would keep Douglas on top of the top tier of the top stars.
Gil Amati told him to pass. Beanie Rosen told him to take it. He took her as well.
While Costner and Douglas carried on their conversation, Beanie made her way to Jamie’s table where Army Archerd, the big columnist for Variety, was holding court.
“What’s Costner got coming up?” he asked Beanie, looking for a tip, a scoop, or if it merited, a headline.
Beanie, always guarding her words and her clients, simply replied, “Lunch,” and then turned her attention to Simpson, assuring him that she was going to look at the script again for Adrienne.
While Simpson explained everything he would do in the rewrite, you could feel a distraction coming from somewhere behind them; a murmur that became a stir that became a noise so palpable it stopped Simpson mid-pitch.
Ella Gaddy had arrived with Scott Westman, and the room—already top-heavy with Douglas, Costner, and a few other luminaries—toppled over.
“It’s a good day to be at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Jamie quipped, pointing out to Archerd that three-quarters of the stars present were Light clients. Add to that the fact that Scott Westman, who rarely frequented eateries such as the Polo Lounge, was there, it certainly was worthy of a mention.
But Archerd wanted more. “You cooking up a project maybe for them to do together?” he asked as Beanie smiled, excused herself, and walked over to Ella, who with Westman and Costner was already seated in the corner booth.
Being neither intimidated nor boastful, Jamie was impressed with how smoothly Beanie handled the columnist. She looked over at her protégé, so skilled and adroit, giving just enough to keep them curious but never revealing her hand. At that precise moment, as the two former secretaries huddled with the superstars, Jamie realized Beanie Rosen and Ella Gaddy were what’s next. The baton she used to twirl as an adorable high school cheerleader had been passed without ceremony, but with a forward momentum that put her and Sheila Day in the rearview mirror.
Remnants of a past generation, Sheila and Jamie still played to the boys’ club in order to play with them. Before this Anita Hill mess, Jamie liked to joke that she’d fucked her way to the middle, tolerating a pinch on the ass, or an off-color joke, all the while advancing without threatening, achieving without emasculating. Much like Sheila, who’d also fucked when she could and joked when she couldn’t, the women not only survived but thrived because they never tried to be the men.
But that was the ’60s, and this was the ’90s, when you didn’t dare joke about fucking or sucking or sexitarial favors. Because if you did, you’d be judged or perhaps ostracized by the Beanie Rosens or the Ella Gaddys or the newest breed of power women who set themselves apart from the generation that had come before. While Sheila and Jamie played to their femininity, Beanie and Ella and their acolytes played against it. And it wasn’t just the Armani men’s suits, or the Doc Martens, or the push for equal pay which of course they would never get; it was the realization that women in industry were no longer the exception, they were the rule, and the rules were changing. Fast.
For dinosaurs like Sheila and Jamie, the aperture was closing. If they didn’t leave their mark soon, they would become relics or fossils, celebrated perhaps in memoriam. But if they could be insulated against irrelevance, they, like the men, might go the distance, working through their seventies and eighties, their images cast in bronze, reminding all that they, too, mattered.
And the only thing that would ensure their immortality was a board seat. For Sheila, at sixty-one, it was not only the next move, but it was also the only move; the last stand, the finish line, the glass ceiling for every woman in power who looked up and still saw a pair of men’s loafers.
In the history of Sylvan Light there had only been seven seats on the board, so to think that there would now be an eighth, and that that extra seat would go to a woman, was preposterous. But it was also true: in six months’ time, Sheila Day, per her contract, would be sitting shoulder to shoulder alongside them at the only table that mattered. And then once Sheila got in, maybe Jamie could follow, maybe others, and the power, the real power would finally shift. That board seat was a benchmark, and everyone from Sherry Lansing to Gloria Steinem to Beanie Rosen knew it.
If Sheila won, they won.
And Sheila Day was determined to win. She had worked hard to placate the boys on the first floor, while supporting all the female agents and file clerks and secretaries who’d looked up to her; presenting herself as their leader, their mentor, their role model, and their quarterback.
“If I can do it, you can,” she’d say, all the while hiding her contempt for this younger group of aspirants with big hair, big attitudes, and big phones that weren’t just in cars anymore but traveled with them, allowing anyone to reach them any time. The world had gone mobile, but not Sheila. She wasn’t about to put a phone in her pocketbook and take it with her to restaurants, or the hairdresser’s, or on vacation. She thought that was garish and desperate and uncouth. This younger group—the agents, the trainees, even the secretaries who suddenly insisted on being called assistants—were irritating and entitled, and as far as she was concerned, beneath her.
But she never told them how she felt. Because it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the board seat. And in order to get that she needed the men, the women, all the key players who held her in place to stay put through the end of the year. It was a condition the board had made, an addendum to her contract. “Maintain the status quo,” it read, and it was nebulous enough that she wasn’t concerned. That is, until June of 1992, when suddenly, the alarm sounded.
“Moze Goff is in play,” Jamie Garland said, coming into Sheila’s office and closing the door.
“What the fuck?” Sheila screamed, balling up her fists in midair. She had been navigating speed bumps for years, but she didn’t expect one so close to the finish line. All she needed was stability. There were just six months left before she got the board seat. “Six fucking months,” she said, “and the cocksucker couldn’t have waited?”
Jamie tried to calm her. “There’s always rumors about him,” she reminded her, which was true. There were always rumors about Moze Goff, who was flying with Geffen and Diller and private equity honchos. He was big time. Really big time, and Sheila had worked hard to befriend him, to help him, to promote him.
“Why the fuck is he doing this to me?” she asked, sucking the life out of her French cigarette. She really believed they were in good standing. “I fucking backed him in his fakakta idea about getting the office computerized,” she reminded Jamie, who didn’t need reminding. She’d heard Sheila complain endlessly about his request and his sense of entitlement.
Moze had come to her three months earlier, asking her to not only back him but help him convince the board to purchase one hundred and fifty computers for agents east and west. And even though the request was for half a million dollars, she rallied the board and urged them to listen.
“What’s ‘Next’?” asked Harvey Khan, studying a pamphlet that Moze had handed out for a prototype of the new computer system he’d wanted them to purchase.
“This is,” said Moze dramatically, removing the cover off a large square machine with a three-dimensional “Next!” on the home screen.
Gathering around the conference table, the old men studied the new technology and listened as Moze waxed poetic about a superhighway of information, explaining that NeXT computers were the brainchild of Steve Jobs, who had recently been ousted from Apple and had started his own company.
“Sylvan Light will be the first company to try it,” he said with pride. Moze and Jobs, both outsiders in a system they didn’t respect, had bonded over their future vision of a world they were determined to create.
The board seemed dubious. The idea that each agent should be assigned a personal computer for electronic mail felt extravagant.
“It’ll pay off in spades,” Moze promised as they watched him type an email to Jobs in Silicon Valley and get a response seconds later.
“How about that?” Moze asked, turning to the board, expecting jubilation.
Instead, he was met with confusion.
“Why is this any better than a call?” Harvey Khan asked, uncomfortable that Sheila had put him in a position to turn the boy down. He liked Moze a great deal and recognized his value as a leading agent, but the idea that he expected them to shell out half a million dollars on one hundred and fifty machines that sent messages seemed frivolous. “There’s only so much mail a person can take,” Harvey Khan said, shaking his head in either disagreement or defiance of a future to which he refused to subscribe.
But Sheila, true to her word, argued with them over the next few weeks until she got what she considered a victory. “They’re going to buy twenty-five computers as a test case,” she told Moze, explaining that this was a huge win. “Honeeeey, give it a year, then you’ll have computers coming out of your ass,” she joked. She thought she had done a good thing. But, in truth, Moze flew back to New York and began questioning if he wanted to put his future in the hands of an archaic group of men who held on to the past as if they were holding on to their youth, and a woman who justified their pitiful offering as a win.
Moze understood that Sheila, wanting him to be grateful for the crumbs, didn’t so much have a vision for the future, as she did a fear of it. She needed to keep the status quo, and he needed to disrupt it. So, while Sheila had thought she’d earned his loyalty, if not his respect, quietly he began to make other plans.
Three months later, suitors were lining up, and rumors were heating up. Some said Moze was down the line with Stieglitz, others said he was meeting with Sony chairman Norio Ohga to perhaps run Sony. Either way, there was enough smoke to motivate Sheila to fly to New York with a fire extinguisher; to reassure herself that Moze was stable, and to reassure Moze that come January 1993, she’d get him whatever he wanted, including all one hundred and fifty of his fucking computers.
Transparent about the board seat, but confident that he would understand that there was muscle to her promise, Sheila offered him complete autonomy if he stayed put.
He told her he respected her for her honesty and promised to think about it. Moze knew that he had her over a barrel. Sheila knew that Moze knew. And she hated him for it with every ounce of her being. But the finish line was within striking distance, and there was too much on it to lose a crucial player. She needed everyone to be happy. Until year’s end…