The Exit Plan
THE EXIT PLAN
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
—ELLA GADDY TO BEANIE ROSEN
1992
“We should look at office space,” Barry Licht told Ella Gaddy, Beanie Rosen, and Howie Mishkin over dinner at Morton’s. It was July of ’92, two weeks after Sheila had flown to New York to meet with Moze and five months before she was supposed to be getting that board seat.
None of them knew about Sheila and her board seat nor did they particularly care, except Beanie. And Beanie was overwhelmed by the reality that they, herself included, were actually talking about leaving Sylvan Light and forming a management company. They’d been discussing it since January of that year when Barry and Howie had first approached Beanie and Ella.
Howie Mishkin, who had started in the mailroom just after Moze, was now a big television packaging agent, representing the creators and in some cases the stars of television shows including Mad About You, Murphy Brown, and Home Improvement . Because the Light Agency took a packaging fee from the networks, they could earn anywhere between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars per episode of any given show. So, Howie Mishkin brought in more commissions than Ella and Beanie combined. Barry also had hefty bookings now representing touring musicians such as Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, Elvis Costello, and most recently New Kids On The Block.
Slick, ambitious, and keeping to the straight and narrow—with an emphasis on straight—Barry Licht had grown restless at the Light Agency. This idea to leave had been gestating for a while and arose quite organically when Howie casually mentioned over lunch how much money the television packages that he’d put together were making for the agency.
“It’s close to five million dollars,” he’d said, which stopped Barry mid-chew.
Barry knew that packaging agents brought in a lot, but this was something else. Howie, who pulled in two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, plus car and bonus, had been happy with his salary as long as he didn’t think about what he was leaving on the table. But Barry did think about it, and then started calculating how much Rod Stewart’s last tour brought in—and New Kids On The Block. The office was making millions off the two agents, and the agents were settling for peanuts, a limited expense account, and a fancy car that Sylvan Light owned.
“It’s bullshit,” Barry said, and by January of ’92 he’d invited Beanie and Ella into the conversation over drinks at his sleek new hacienda just off Kings Road in West Hollywood. It was a renovated Spanish bungalow he’d purchased for half a million dollars with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a pool, and an outdoor spa with a view of where he wanted to go.
Beanie was in awe of his luxurious lifestyle.
“That’s the problem,” he said, beginning to sow the seeds of her discontent, “you shouldn’t be.” He laid out this idea of a management company, a cooperative, that would have a triad of categories: Personal Appearance, which he would run, Television, which Howie would run, and Motion Pictures, which Beanie and Ella would co-run.
“And,” he added, “a production component.” While agents were prohibited from producing, managers were not. To him, that was the kicker. He referenced Shapiro/West, the managers for Andy Kaufman and Jerry Seinfeld, who were making a fortune producing Seinfeld’s hit series which was now in its third year. “You don’t get rich being an agent,” he told them, citing Geffen, Gallin, and Freddy DeMann, who represented Madonna.
Barry wanted to make a splash, a statement, enough noise to announce their presence with an authority that would attract other A-list stars in search of career management. But he needed Ella and Beanie for their smarts, their pedigree, and their stars. “If the four of us leave together, it would be seismic,” he told them.
Ella, who’d been desperate to ditch the ten-percentery, totally got it. Her loyalty was to her clients—and to Beanie, of course. Besides, a less structured lifestyle suited her now. Her relationship with Westman was strictly professional, as he was rumored to be dating Uma Thurman, and she’d been quietly seeing a venture capitalist, Stirling Cowan, who owned several properties around the world, including a two-hundred-acre ranch outside of Lake Tahoe that Ella visited weekly. Thirty-two years her senior, Cowan would fly Ella up to Tahoe every Thursday in his private Cessna and back every Tuesday morning so she could attend the weekly motion picture meeting, which she began to resent. Loudly.
Finally, she just stopped attending.
Her disrespect and disregard for the rules was becoming too obvious; but Beanie, as her partner, would try to smooth things over, updating the agents on all client business.
Sheila, who feared Ella more than she detested her—and she detested her a great deal—said nothing about her absences, and the agents were forced to tolerate her rudeness.
But the truth was, Ella no longer gave a damn. For her, this idea of a new management company meant emancipation from a structure that had never truly suited her. She knew her clients would go with her, and she could work remotely if she wanted to, juggling calls, making deals, and going on set visits when necessary. She recognized the opportunity as a financial windfall, and Cowan, who was a millionaire a million times over, endorsed the move.
But Beanie was another story. Being an agent wasn’t a stepping stone for her, it was an endgame. She didn’t want to produce, she didn’t want to manage, she wanted to be Sheila Day.
Of course, that annoyed Ella as her hatred for the senior agent had only grown over the years, and Beanie citing her as an example only inflamed it.
“I meant,” Beanie said, quickly pivoting, “a legendary agent. That’s what I want to be.”
Barry knew how much Beanie had wanted to be an agent—after all, he was there at the beginning—but reasoned that no matter how good she was, they’d never recognize her. Not like she should be recognized. He was talking about the guys on the first floor, the ones who hadn’t seen her value and still didn’t. Not fully. “To them, you’re just some girl who got lucky.”
Over the next few months, Barry and Howie worked on Beanie, knowing that Ella, who was primary on Westman, would not leave without her. Beyond the fear of leaving, Beanie was concerned because she shared so many clients with Stevie Lanzetti, including Matt Dillon, Matthew Broderick, Kevin Kline, Kevin Bacon, and of course Adrienne Seabergh, who was the hottest young female star in the business. She couldn’t pull any of them and wouldn’t even try, lest someone suggest it.
They were stuck for a while until Barry had an idea. “Why don’t we ask Stevie to join us?” he said. That way they could have an East Coast presence.
“Stevie would be brilliant,” Ella agreed, urging Beanie to set a call and arrange a meeting the next week when Stevie was in town so they could all approach her.
Beanie was trepidatious, but she agreed, at least to set the meeting.
To her surprise, Stevie was intrigued. While she’d had offers before, this was different, primarily because of the television component. That, she knew, was where the money was. Besides, Barry had proposed an equitable split. “We’ll all make equal salaries,” he’d said, regardless of who represented whom.
Stevie left the meeting inclined to do it, but she called them the next day and said she felt like they needed another heavyweight in New York and suggested they go for Moze Goff. “I hear he’s unhappy,” she told them, oblivious to Beanie who was looking at Barry who was looking at the floor.
The Moze drama was water under a bridge so high neither Beanie nor Barry cared to look down. They never talked about him, or it, or what had happened afterward. Beanie knew that Barry’s heart had been broken, too, that he had spun out, rebounded, and reset, burying his proclivities with a different version of Morgan Fairchild on his arm every month. He kept them rotating so no one ever got too serious, and no one ever guessed otherwise.
The closest she had gotten to talking about their shared past was when Beanie had once asked what ever happened to Marci Goldklank.
“She got married. Finally,” he’d told her, toasting Beanie with a Diet Coke and a sigh of relief. He’d felt guilty, responsible, and emancipated from that life, but oddly chained in another of his own creation.
But she never asked him about Moze. It was too close. And now, here they both were, considering making Moze their equal partner.
“I mean, it would be huge,” Beanie said. “Massive,” Barry agreed. And it wasn’t just Moze’s clients, it was his swag, his know-how, his associations. He flew in a circle so high that studio heads had to look up. He was the whole package, and not just for a packaging agent. There were always rumors that the Alliance Group was taking a run at him or ICM or more recently Dell computers, which strangely made sense since he’d become consumed with New Age technology and had been frustrated with Sylvan Light and how slow they’d acted and reacted to the NeXT computer experiment. Maybe it was a good idea to approach him.
“I’ll do it,” said Beanie, nervous and excited to dip a toe into the Moze.