Being an (extended) account of the astonishing life and career of Sue Mengers, Hollywood's first superagent. Original version first published in Empire Magazine, 2019
Two moments in the astonishing life of Sue Mengers.
It is the tail-end of the 1950s and Sue and her mother are walking together on the boardwalk in Atlantic City where they are on vacation. Sue, then a lowly secretary at the William Morris Agency in New York, was the only child of a pair of reasonably well-off shopkeepers who had escaped their native Hamburg in 1938 settling first in Utica, upstate New York, and then in Brooklyn. Their reversal of fortunes there was dramatic and tragic. Her father, who had failed to earn a living as a door-to-door salesman, had committed suicide when Mengers was a teenager and her mother, a domineering, fearful woman with whom Mengers had a difficult relationship, earned a modest living working as a bookkeeper.
They were in most respects a typical family of Jewish emigres, struggling, just about surviving, in their adopted country.
But Sue was deeply unhappy. Every day at the William Morris Agency she would see the agents, all male, shouting on the phone, closing deals, dining their clients on expense accounts, living a life that Sue envied, but which seemed completely inaccessible to her.
That day, on the boardwalk, she suddenly burst into tears in front of her bewildered mother. Later she would remember: “When the only people you know are your family, who have no connections, or your friends who are working as typists at the General Cigar Company, you wonder, ‘how am I ever going to climb out of all this?’ I was like someone with their nose pressed against the bakery window with no money to buy a cake.”
Her mother suggested seeing a shrink. She did, but at the same time, some inner steel had been tempered. And she began to plan.
It is twenty years later, January 1979, and here Sue is, sitting in the business end of a hijacked Boeing 747. Things have changed dramatically for Mengers in the preceding two decades. She has become one of Hollywood's most powerful players. And while her crying on boardwalk days are well behind her, she might be about to shed tears of rage.
Three things were simultaneously infuriating her. The first was that this whole event was making her late for a business lunch with an important client. “I’m keeping Candy waiting at Elaine’s!” she complained loudly to nearby passengers as their captor ranted about a new religion of technology and the nitroglycerin she supposedly had in her handbag.
The second was that famed folk singer Theodore Bikel, a fellow passenger, had decided that the spirits of the hostages, many of whom were by now mildly stewed on a case of booze broken open by one publicly-minded traveller, would best be lifted by a rousing rendition of ‘Hava Nagila’. Mengers hated Theodore Bikel. And booze had never been her thing. ”I’m gonna fuckin’ die here, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to go without being stoned,’” she later said. “So I lit up a joint. Theodore Bikel started striding up and down. And he wouldn’t fucking sit down and shut up.”
But these two irritations were nothing in comparison to the real source of her mounting ire.
Among their hijackers' demands was that her entire 25-page manifesto was read out live on television by a major Hollywood figure: Lindsey Wagner, Jack Lemmon or Charlton Heston.
This revealed them to be the kind of lowballing, visionless amateur Mengers wholeheartedly despised.
“They wanted Charlton fucking Heston,” she had spluttered to her worried colleagues after the FBI had stormed the plane.
“I could have got them Barbara Streisand,” she said.
Sue Mengers. Always working the angles. Always closing the deal.
The world’s first superagent.
By the mid-1970s Sue Mengers was, without qualification, one of the most powerful figures, male or female, in the film industry. She sat, spider-like, at the centre of a vast web of talent. Her ‘sparklies’ as she called them, included the hottest of the New Wave directors: Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn; while the most succulent of the decade’s A-listers – Michael Caine, Robert Redford, Ryan O’Neil, Candice Bergen, Ali MacGraw, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, Cybil Shepard, Barbara Streisand, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway – all relied on Mengers to power their careers and secure ever more lucrative deals.
“It was pretty much impossible to get a movie made without her,” Warner executive John Calley later remembered. “When you’d have a problem, you’d go to her, and she would make it go away. She was The Man.” She was a ‘homicidal deal-maker’, as a New Yorker profile described her in 1975, deploying her caustic honesty, weaponized wit and Machiavellian strategizing to devastating effect. She was the master of the package, shoehorning multiples of her clients into projects, controlling the deal from beginning to end – and garnering massive paydays for all concerned.
“She created her own personality,” her longtime friend Alice “Boaty” Boatwright tells Empire. “She was just ruthless in what she would say. She didn’t, excuse my language, give a shit. But she was so smart and evil and funny. She attracted the most interesting people.”
Boatwright and Mengers had met in New York when both were on the way up. Boatwright, later to become a legendary agent in her own right, had been dining with Roddy McDowall at Sardi’s when Sue made an entrance that was, typically, difficult to ignore. “So you’re Boaty Boatwright. You’re the one who’s been fucking my boyfriend,” Sue had announced. “I said ‘no, he’s never even asked me. But I wish that he would,’” Boatwright tells Empire. “She said ‘well stay away.’” Then she called me the next day and said ‘let’s have lunch. I think we’re going to be friends.’”
Mengers’ mouth would become legendary, and feared. Her wit was a deadly amalgam of calculated outrageousness and stiletto contempt: Groucho Marx via Mae West. In New York, Constance Benet, a troublesome fading star, had once nixed a lucrative deal since it did not guarantee that her name would be highlighted in a box on the poster. On observing the coffin at her funeral shortly after Sue remarked, “Well, I guess Constance finally got her box.” When her panicked star client, Barbra Streisand, called the day after the brutal murder of Sharon Tate, Sue reassured her, “Don’t worry honey. They’re not murdering stars, only featured players.” On walking into a party populated by elderly Jewish people welding zimmer frames and walking sticks she loudly guffawed: “Schindler's B-List.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that at her agency CMA (later to become ICM) she was a divisive figure. “She was smart, clever, devilish but dismissive,” remembers Mike Medavoy, a fellow agent who would later go on to head both Orion Pictures and United Artists, and who clashed with Mengers often. “She had no finesse. She had no problem saying anything to anybody. Which in a way is good, but there are some diplomatic skills needed when you talk to people in this industry.”
Medavoy was particularly struck by her lack of interest in developing clients who were on the rise, but yet to make any impact. “I remember her coming to me and I was working on someone’s career and she said ‘you have all these great clients,’ ‘why are you bothering with this?’ I said ‘because I want to’. She looked at me with such disgust, I thought, ‘go fuck yourself.’”
So it came as something of a relief to at least some at CMA’s New York office when, in 1968, CMA co-boss Freddie Fields, ordered her out to the West Coast. At first nervous about the move she soon found that Hollywood not only suited her; it was the promised land.
In Los Angeles, the groundwork for Mengers’ success was laid with two deals. The first was to solely represent Barbara Streisand, who she had been cultivating since seeing her since her time in New York. She was among the first to spot her potential to dominate not just in music and on Broadway, but in Hollywood too.
“I think Barbara was Sue’s idea of what a Hollywood star should be,” says Medavoy.
“They were very similar in many ways,” Boaty Boatwright remembers. “They were funny and they were smart. Both had had terribly sad upbringings.”
Sue doted on Streisand, encouraging her to consider a wider variety of film roles than the Broadway adaptations she had previously agreed to, as well as signing her then-unknown husband Eliot Gould. They became, as onlookers remarked, like sisters. Then, in 1968, after spotting that young directors were a locus of power in the newly coalescing industry, she started pursuing Peter Bogdanovich, who was in the middle of shooting his breakout hit The Last Picture Show.
“There had been this article about me and Targets, my first picture, in the New York Times,” Bogdanovich tells Empire. “And soon after I get a call from Sue Mengers who said she wanted to meet me. She was funny, she liked to gossip, she really could make you laugh. And she told the truth, which is rare in this business. My first impression was that she was a real character. Very Hollywood, but unlike anybody I had ever met.”
Mengers set to work immediately leveraging him, Streisand and her client Ryan O’Neal (whom she had wooed with a typically forthright “When are you going to dump your asshole agent?”), who was then conveniently having an affair with Streisand. She talked the reluctant director into letting her screen an early cut of The Last Picture Show for Streisand.
“Barbara saw the picture and flipped over it,” remembers Bogdanovich. “She decided she wanted to do a picture with me. She had a drama set up, but she didn't want to do it. I went to see John Calley, who was the head of Warners and he said ‘OK, you don't want to do this, but if you had to do a picture with Barbara Streisand, what would it be?’ And I said ‘I dunno, a screwball comedy, daffy dames, uptight professor.’ He said, ‘well go ahead, make it.’”
What’s Up Doc?, as it became, might, nominally, have been a Warner Bros. picture but, deep in its DNA, it was a Sue Mengers production. It would become a template for her subsequent modus operandi, and shape the way the agency business would work for the next three decades. The film had its roots not in a screenplay, one would not be written until less than a month before shooting, but as a package, and one all but irresistible to the studio. “Streisand, O’Neal and Bogdanovich, that was pretty sexy at the time,” says Bogdanovich. “It was a deal that kind of made her career. When it became a huge moneymaker everybody wanted to sign with her.”
Mengers’ insight was that the power in the industry lay not in having the money to make movies, but control over the combinations of talent that made them possible. She didn’t invent the package, but she refined it, placing herself at the heart of the entire process. And when she couldn’t put a package together she worked like a demon for her individual clients. She called William Freidkin three times a day and harassed him into casting Gene Hackman in The French Connection, essentially inventing his career. She shoehorned Faye Dunaway into Chinatown over producer Robert Evans’s preferred choice, Jane Fonda. She elbowed Jack Nicholson out of the way in favour of her client Robert Redford for The Great Gatsby in 1974.
Chief among her weapons of choice were her exclusive dinner parties which she threw at her house. “People didn't entertain in the 70s like they had in the 60s, except Sue,” remembers Boatwright. “Those parties were legendary. You never knew who might be there.”
“I met a lot of people there,” says Bogdanovich. “I met Spielberg there and Scorsese.”
Amid the wafts of pot smoke from the joints always Mengers kept within reach in a little silver box, Hollywood’s A-List, actors, writers, directors, would mingle and the foundations would be quietly laid for future deals. (Stimulants, as well as soporifics, were available. Michael Caine, fresh off the boat from the UK, remembers being stopped by a panicked Sue who informed him that he was about to spoon a generous measure of cocaine into his coffee.) “I wouldn’t have let my own mother into one of those parties if she was outside in the pouring rain,” she once said.
In the meantime, she continued cementing her position as Hollywood’s most in-demand power broker. She spearheaded a rise in star salaries that alarmed some industry-watchers, negotiating for Gene Hackman an unprecedented $1.25 million deal for Lucky Lady, performing the same trick for Ryan O’Neal for his role in A Bridge Too Far, for only five days’ work. (Negotiating for her client George Seagal on Rollercoaster she tried the same, declaring that since his character carried $1 million in a briefcase, he should receive an identical amount – on this occasion the studio baulked but he still got a career high of $750,000.) She continued perfecting the art of the Hollywood package, putting her clients Michael Caine and Nancy Allen alongside her hot new director Brian De Palma in Dressed to Kill.
It seemed, like it always does, that it would never end. But the wheel was turning yet again.
The seeds of Mengers’ fall were planted, oddly for a woman with a reputation for a steely lack of sentimentality, in her affection for her husband. Jean-Claude Tramont, a Belgian director, whose Hollywood project, All Night Long, became troubled. Sue stepped in transforming it into a typical Mengers package by replacing unknown Lisa Eichorn with Streisand, at the eye-watering salary of $4 million, to star opposite Gene Hackman. But All Night Long was a costly, embarrassing flop when it was released in 1981. Streisand, furious with Mengers for forcing her into it, and angry at her lack of support for Streisand's passion project Yentl, took her revenge and fired Mengers.
“Their parting was acrimonious,” remembers Boaty Boatwright. “She was fired by Barbara, she did it over the phone. It was devastating for Sue. David Geffen lent them his house at the beach on Fire Island. And Sue spent a week there. She didn’t go out or talk to anybody. Those things take a long time to get over.”
Making matters worse Bogdanovich had already canned her after the failure of his musical Nickelodeon, which had been a humiliating catastrophe which all but put an end to Bogdanovich’s career. “She pushed me into using Burt Reynolds. This was a musical and Burt couldn’t sing or dance,” he says. Others drifted away, and the weakness that Medavoy had spotted back in New York, became fatal. “She wasn’t interested in new people at all. She was only interested in people who were established,” remembers Bogdanovich.
With no new talent replacing the departing stars, the magic began to dissipate as quickly as it had been conjured. And, as the go-go 80s began to hove over the horizon, the industry was changing again. CAA, led by the ferociously ambitious Mike Ovitz, was the new powerhouse agency in town. Ovitz’s Armani-clad shock troops flooded the business, brandishing MBAs along with their mobile phones, and taking the model of the package Sue had refined, but driving down deep into the arcane details of the deal: the backends and first-dollar participations that she had often contemptuously neglected in favour of the headline figure. Business was done at discreet power lunches rather than at dope-tinged dinners up in the hills. Talent was managed by teams rather than individual agents. The corporatism that was defining Reagan’s America asserted itself ever more strongly in Hollywood, and Mengers became a woman out of time. Applying the tin lid to Mengers’ professional collapse, Barbara Streisand signed with CAA.
“The industry changed,” says Bogdanovich. “The informality that Sue brought to the game soon went away. She was very funny, she made fun of things, but it all got more serious.”
“If she could have adapted she could have been great,” says Medavoy. “But this business is filled with ego and jealousy. And the problem was she had no problem badmouthing people.”
In March 1986 she called her clients with the news she was retiring. “It’s not fun anymore,” she told Michael Caine, whose career she had looked after for nearly 20 years. “I’m going.” A brief return a few years later, to Willaim Morris, was a disaster. Phone calls to her previous clients, many of whom she had expected to re-sign, went unanswered, or she was politely declined. “She called me but I wasn't going to go there again,” says Bogdanovich. “I don’t think she was too happy about it.”
She withdrew to her house where the parties continued, but slowly became smaller affairs, a few people, arranged around a pair of couches, in her living room. She could still attract the A-List. Sean Penn, Jennifer Aniston, Jack Nicholson, Tina Fey, Warren Beatty, Carrie Fischer, and Robert Downey Jnr. were among the attendees. But the events had the air of being a slowly misting window looking onto a Hollywood that had all but ceased to exist.
“The last time I spoke to her I was with Gore Vidal,” says Bogdanovich. “He had been a close friend. Gore wanted to see Sue so I called and said we’d like to go over for a chat. She just said she couldn’t handle that right now. And I never saw her again.” “I remember the last time I saw her very clearly,” says Medavoy. “I went to her house for lunch. We talked for a little bit and she said ‘do you mind if I pull out a cigarette?’ Obviously, it was weed. She said ‘you know, I need to lie down’. So we went to her bedroom and I stayed for about 15 minutes and then left. And that was it. Shortly thereafter she died. I felt sad for her. But I felt I didn’t really know who she was, with her it was kind of all about fiction. It had been a totally male-dominated industry and she absolutely had to fight her way to the top. But was the character she’d created real? I don’t know. I know she’d be really happy you were writing a piece about her. I wouldn’t want to deny that for her.”
On October 15th 2011, Sue Mengers, who had once burst into tears on a windy Boardwalk in Atlantic City, wondering how she could ever climb out of all this, and who had then become, for a while a least, one of the most powerful, divisive, coruscating figures in Hollywood, and had proved that women could succeed, and then flame out just as spectacularly as men, died. Boaty Boatwright and a few of Sue’s former clients, her sparklies, took her ashes to Paris, where she had had happy times with Jean-Claude, and scattered them. “It took a while,” Boatwright later said, adding, in a sting worthy of the deceased, “Let’s face it, she was a big girl.”
In every sense, she was.
But then, maybe it was the pictures that got small.
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