Cathy's World: Worm's-Eye Hollywood

LOS ANGELES, April 30 (UPI) -- "I want to be the Studs Terkel of the 21st century, all due respect to Studs," veteran interviewer David Rensin told me the other day. He may just get his wish.

Rensin's latest book, "The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up," breathes new life into the oral history technique Terkel made famous. And Rensin is just as exhaustive.

Beginning with William Morris chairman emeritus Lou Weiss, who got a job there as an office boy in 1937 through his uncle George Burns in 1937, the author interviewed 250 current and former Hollywood talent agents and managers about their grueling early starts.

As Weiss tells Rensin in the book's opening line: "My recollection of all this is unfortunately perfect."

These ranged from having to read and summarize a nine-foot-high stack of scripts in record time, to making sure that the toilet paper in former über-agent Mike Ovitz's bathroom was always white, never pastel.

Rensin even tracked down the famous stool sample story, which I had always assumed was an urban legend.

"It happened," agent Jack Rapke, who was a lowly agent's assistant at the time (the mid-'70s), tells Rensin. "We were there."

It seems that Rapke, Bruce Brown and Gary Randall were working in the William Morris mailroom when a call came in to deliver something from an an older agent named Sol Leon to the hospital.

As Brown recalls the story, when Randall discovered what was in that small paper bag, he put it on Leon's desk and said, "I'll eat sh**, but I won't deliver it."

Alas, not quite true. Instead, Randall delivered the item and felt humiliated but philosophical. Part of his errands that day had included the bank run to Beverly Hills, where mailroom assistants regularly deposited multi-million-dollar checks.

"It struck me that ... I had held the absolute bottom and the absolute top of the entertainment industry in my hands simultaneously," Randall tells Rensin. "In terms of a metaphor for mailroom existence, nothing prior or since comes close."

Too bad he didn't think of Rapke's suggestion: "You could have dumped it out and put some dog sh** in there, and Leon would have gotten a call that he has worms."

Of course, delivering stool samples in an entry level job is a metaphor for life-at-the-bottom in any career. And Rensin sees "The Mailroom" as less a book about Hollywood than a story of successful people and how they got that way.

"It just happens to be the confluence of show business and the American dream, but a book about the IBM mailroom might not have been so interesting," he noted.

And as "The Mailroom" (unlike other tales of Hollywood woe) makes clear, nasty scut work at the bottom actually serves a purpose: it prepares aspiring agents and managers for what they'll have to deal with when they get to the top.

Mike Rosenfeld, who began at the Creative Artists Agency mailroom in the '80s, tells Rensin: "The absurdity of putting raw cashews in the jar in Ovitz's office helps you prepare for the absurdity that you later encounter every day as an agent. ...

"In the mailroom you'd go, 'Oh, my GOD. I have to go out to Malibu AGAIN today and deliver a chocolate bunny to Sam Elliott?'" Rosenfeld continues. "You just think that's crazy. But it prepares you for when some actor says, 'I'm not taking this two-million-dollar-deal unless my makeup person is taken care of."

Agents are famously loath to speak on the record, but Rensin got access partly because his focus on their worm's-eye-view beginnings meant no questions about current deals.

He also maintains a close relationship with legendary manager Bernie Brillstein, whom he collaborated with on Brillstein's 1999 memoir "Where Did I Go Right?" One call from Brillstein opens many doors in Hollywood.

Rensin never inserts himself between his subjects and their remembered reality. He's honed this technique over 30 years by doing around 125 interviews for Playboy, more than any other writer at the magazine.

"You have to make it sound like it's spoken, even though it's written," Rensin said of his Playboy work. "You squeeze the air out, and then if you're lucky, some little actress you made sound smart runs up to you later and throws herself on you."

"The Mailroom" contains all the stories you'd expect about the mistreatment of lowly assistants - sometimes from those who've done the mistreating. Still, it manages to be a basically positive (and often even sentimental) tale of life in Hollywood.

"The truth is, I wasn't out to get anybody, so if they get themselves that's their problem," Rensin said. Most of his subjects were quite happy. In fact, "The Mailroom" is currently being developed as a documentary for HBO.

"The comment I get repeatedly is, 'I can't believe you actually reported what I said!'" Rensin noted.

"I like voices, and to be honest, I don't like to give my opinion," Rensin said. "I don't go into anything thinking anything, which makes it very hard to do book proposals."

But oral histories can be a hard sell. He was working on one about infidelity, but dropped it when the publisher balked at the format.

"They wanted a prescriptive book on infidelity -- 'Ten Ways To Tell if My Wife is Cheating' -- and I just thought it wasn't a positive contribution," Rensin said.

"The Mailroom," on the other hand, is a useful guide on how to make it. And despite its many entertaining stories of lousy misbehavior, this book is basically a positive contribution.

"I still have my first paycheck. I made $38 a week -- or $32.81 after taxes," Brillstein, who started in the William Morris mailroom in 1955, tells Rensin. "Good thing I wasn't in it for the money. I got into show business for the thrill of it all, not the thrill of having it all."