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Summary
Summary
No star burned more ferociously than Judy Garland. And nobody witnessed Garland's ferocious talent at closer range than Stevie Phillips. During the "Mad Men" era, Stevie Philips was a young woman muscling her way into the manscape of Manhattan's glittering office towers. After a stint as a secretary, she began working for the legendary duo of Freddie Fields and David Begelman at MCA under the glare of Lew Wasserman.When MCA blew apart, Fields and Begelman created CMA and Stevie went along. Fields convinced Garland to come on board and Stevie became, as she puts it, "Garland's shadow", putting out fires - figurative and literal - in order to get her to the next concert in the next down-and-out town. Philips paints a portrait of Garland at the bitter end and, though it was at times a nightmare, Philips says "She became my teacher" teaching her "how to" and "how not to" live. Stevie represented her fiercely talented daughter Liza Minnelli, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, George Roy Hill, Bob Fosse, Cat Stevens, and David Bowie. She produced films and Broadway shows, had a disastrous affair with Begelman and counted her colleague, the legendary agent Sue Mengers, among her closest confidantes. And, now she tells the whole story in Judy and Liza and Robert and Freddie and David and Sue and Me a tough-talking memoir by a woman who worked with some of the biggest names in show business. It's a helluva ride.
Author Notes
Stevie Phillips began her career traveling with Judy Garland on the way to becoming head of the theater and the motion picture departments of CMA (now ICM) in NY. She represented Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Liza Minnelli, George Roy Hill, Bob Fosse, Cat Stevens, and David Bowie and was involved with multiple award-winning theater productions - Doonesbury, Loose Ends, The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, Nuts, Open Admissions and films. She lives in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This tiresome, self-involved semi-tell-all and memoir of one of the first women to break into the boys' club of theater and film talent management inadvertently reveals too much when Phillips, in one of many wheezy asides, observes that "an agent is someone who believes his or her own bullshit and can convince others of its value." This compendium of gossip from a half-century ago begins with Judy Garland's early 1960s comeback concert tour, with Phillips dishing the fading star's devastating addictions, episodes of self-mutilation, and violent rages. What Phillips doesn't offer is any great insight into Garland, though she unconvincingly asserts that the star was her greatest influence. Phillips's lack of personal appeal comes through to the reader in the value she places on lengthy episodes of dated name-dropping. There are glimmers of self-awareness, such as her own self-critical assessment while holed up with Garland in a Las Vegas hotel as the star recovered from a pill-doused accident, or Phillips's own brush with the women's movement "as the world of show business grew smaller to me." However, this ramble through the Baby Boom decades of the entertainment world will only appeal to true devotees of the period. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
At just 24 and fairly innocent of show business, Phillips was tasked with stage-managing Judy Garland on her 1961 U.S. comeback tour, working for new agents Freddie Fields and David Begelman and she was determined not to fail. Never mind that her college degree in literature hadn't prepared her for handling every aspect of Garland's cross-country concerts. Phillips learned fast (in part, about alcoholism, drug addiction, and eyes-averted enablers). Even so, as for her being a part of show business, she says it was all in the stars. Readers may be as unprepared as Phillips was for Garland's pills, self-mutilation, fits, and more, prompting Phillips to finally leave Judy in Sid Luft's capable hands and move on to being an agent herself. Phillips' voice is tough and smart, just as she was, and post-Judy, she worked with Liza Minnelli, Robert Redford, David Bowie, and many others, learning through failures and successes much about herself, all of which she openly shares, resulting in quite an inspirational turnaround. Readers might need nerves of steel for parts of this memoir, but the hopeful, smart ending teaches much about humans, stars or not.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHO QUALIFIES AS an icon? What deserves to be called iconic? In matters of Hollywood, a designation that originally pertained to religious imagery is now regularly applied to subjects as secular as "Animal House," Sandra Bullock, "Vertigo," W.C. Fields and that scene in the original "Friday the 13th" where Kevin Bacon is stabbed through the neck with an arrow. One army of admirers may think the title ought to go to "This Is Spinal Tap" ; for a different platoon, Judy Garland deserves the title for life. That's why, years ago, the top editor at the magazine where I wrote about movies banned the word "icon" from its pages. More often than not, he said, the writer just means, I think so-and-so is cool. Let me tell you why and how. By way of saying, let me tell you why and how the implications of iconography - or its provocative opposite, iconoclasm - shape each of six books on a theme of Hollywood that arrive in the season of heat, superheroes and blockbuster-size declarations of pop-cultural opinion. I have ALFRED HITCHCOCK: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $20) to thank for providing focus. More specifically, I salute the branding savvy of the publishers, who have packaged this small, engaging, intellectually agile study by the cultural scholar and author Michael Wood in a roster marketed as the Icons Series. Others who have gotten the nod include Edgar Allan Poe, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Stalin and Jesus. A whole bookshop, preferably booby-trapped, could be stocked with all the volumes written (saving shelf space for those yet to come) about Hitchcock, whose exquisite understanding of suspense defined his filmmaking career. (In a Hitchcockian world, we who were outside the shop would know of the traps, but the innocent book buyer who happened to enter would not, so that we could roil with pleasurable anxiety until the wrong thing happened to the wrong man.) Wood relies on a reader to know the basics about the director: his Britishness, which he clung to through his years in Hollywood; his famous movies; his close creative collaboration with his wife, Alma Reville; and even his rotund and dour physical profile. And with the confidence that he is among well-read friends, the author - a fellow Englishman transposed to America, and a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton - wanders at a lively pace through intriguing and subtle observations about this great artist, "a frightened man who got his fears to work for him on film." Developing the subtitle of his study, Wood proposes that "in Hitchcock's films, it seems, there are only three options: to know too little, to know too much (however little that is), and to know a whole lot that is entirely plausible and completely wrong." The author, by the way, never whispers the word "icon." Nor does he ever refer to his subject as "Hitch." For that kind of familiarity and self-confidence in all opinions, try KEEPERS (Knopf, $26.95), by Richard Schickel. "I came to know Hitch in his later years, and I am here to testify that no man ever took movies more seriously than he did," Schickel writes - not entirely a compliment. This redoubtable movie critic and historian began reviewing films in 1965, and served as a film critic for Time and Life magazines for 44 years; he calculates that he has seen some 22,590 movies in his 82 years. He has full rights to subtitle his 38th book "The Greatest Films - and Personal Favorites - of a Moviegoing Lifetime." In "Keepers," Schickel thumbs through his notes and comes to a conclusion. "The truth, very simply, is that most movies are lousy or, at best, routine," he declares with characteristic bluntness. (The cumulative footage of 22,590 movies can do that to a fellow.) His plan, therefore, is to linger on movies that have given him pleasure over the decades, domestic productions for the most part, because "movies being movies, they exist, first and foremost, to entertain - especially those made in America." Although he doesn't label them as such, Schickel's personal lists of icons and (even more interesting) false idols are easy for a reader to assemble. Fun, too: With his assertively chatty, you-and-me-pal narrative style and his "Frank Capra told me this, Bette Davis told me that" connections in the business, the veteran takes on all comers. His favorite golden-age movie star? Errol Flynn. The 1939 French masterwork "The Rules of the Game"? "I still don't get it." His favorite movie? "Fargo." And for good measure, the word on the influential film critic Pauline Kael? "Basically a bully, and a relentless one when she sensed weakness. Her trick was to pretend she was telling the brutal truth, which everyone else was too cowardly to do." Raise 'em up, knock 'em down, pilgrim ! Schickel's declarations are models of gravitas compared with the pronouncements flung with aggressive bro swagger by Adam Rockoff in the horror of it all: One Moviegoer's Love Affair With Masked Maniacs, Frightened Virgins, and the Living Dead ... (Scribner, $24). The author is a passionate fan of the horror genre in all its forms, the bloodier and more gruesome the better. To him, the whole genre is iconic! Previously, Rockoff wrote "Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986"; he also wrote an adaptation of the exploitation film "I Spit on Your Grave." He really really really loves the stuff, and has since he was a kid. He is a proud "fear junkie," and a connoisseur exacting enough to specify that Tom Savini's "makeup effects in 'Friday the 13th' are iconic." For good measure, he frequently reminds readers that he is also a solid citizen, i.e., married, with two small children. He dedicates his book to Grandma Gladys. This is a good place for me to disclose that I do not like horror movies. I hate slasher pics. I am a confirmed gore sissy. And that's O.K. We do not share the same tastes, but I am genuinely interested in hearing about the fine points of Rockoff's fervor. Except that the man won't stop shrieking with disdain, middle finger raised at those who are not members of his clubhouse. "The Horror of It All" twitches with manic, foulmouthed, bloggy energy about the pleasures of getting "freaked ... the [expletive] out." Rockoff revels in his list of slasherdom's "greatest kills." He is prone to the one-upmanship of negative compliments: Gary Sherman is one of the horror genre's "most underrated directors"; "Event Horizon" is "a criminally underrated film." But I can tolerate the fanboy grammar. In my business, I'm used to it. What wears this sissy out, though, are the trollish provocations spouted in the name of iconoclasm. Rockoff hates film critics - no big surprise there - and pours vitriol on the "pompous blowhards" Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, mostly because they, too, had the audacity to dislike slasher films. He "can't stand the French": He went to Cannes once, and declares that "it stunk of fish and looked like Massachusetts." Also, "Alien" is "boring" and a "snoozefest." The blood on the floor is mine, from biting my lip in exasperation. But before I reach for a mop, I might as well sweep up the shards of bitterness left on the ground by Stevie Phillips in her disgruntled showbiz book, JUDY & LIZA & ROBERT & FREDDIE & DAVID & SUE & ME ... : A Memoir (St. Martin's, $25.99). The title hints at some of the problems. Who are these people? And who is "Me"? Well, two names we know at first sight: That's Judy Garland (an icon!) and her daughter Liza Minnelli (an icon's daughter!). The bemused reader learns that Phillips, now 78, is a former talent agent and producer who began her career working with Freddie Fields and David Begelman when those two once-powerful agents left their even more powerful Hollywood boss, Lew Wasserman, to open their own shop. Judy was their client, and Liza was a teenager in 1960 when Phillips, then a "Mad Men"-era gal around the office, got a leg up on her career climb as a kind of minder and body woman to Garland, watching her take pills and covering up suicide attempts. Later, Phillips represented Minnelli. Robert is Robert Redford, whom Phillips signed as a client in the mid-1960s. Sue is the late, colorful agent Sue Mengers, who also joined the agency, by then called C.M.A. In the guise of love and admiration for Garland, Phillips trashes her former idol repeatedly with every sad tale of bad behavior she trots out. Then again, while alternately preening and justifying, she also dumps on her own New York City upbringing (her father was "a vain, vile-tempered man," her grandfather "a world-class philanderer"), runs roughshod over two of her three ex-husbands and disdains Begelman, with whom she had an affair - as did Garland. Ensnared in an embezzlement scandal in the late 1970s, Begelman committed suicide in 1995. Decades after the fact, Phillips feels compelled to note that "'revolting' is the only appropriate word to describe sex with David." The same word applies to too many parts of this memoir, as the memoirist feeds on the (iconic!) fame of others. The character slashing here might make even horror fans go, Ick. There is a way, though, to do a memoir right. Candice Bergen shows how in A FINE ROMANCE (Simon & Schuster, $28). Readers of "Knock Wood" will not be surprised: The self-possessed, witty and down-to-earth voice that made Bergen's first memoir a hit when it was published in 1984 has only been deepened by life's surprises. And the actor who, for the decade between 1988 and 1998, created the influential (iconic!) television sitcom character Murphy Brown freely shares her surprise, first at finding love and marriage with the French filmmaker Louis Malle; then at giving birth to their daughter, Chloe, now 29; then at the phenomenal success of "Murphy Brown." Bergen addresses challenge and loss, too. The success of the TV show kept Bergen and her daughter apart from Malle for stretches at a time; he didn't like Los Angeles, and one can only guess that marital and parental adjustments were even more difficult than the author - honest yet discreet about the privacy of others - lets on. Then, 15 years into their marriage, Malle died of what Bergen reveals was a brain inflammation. Grief hit mother and daughter hard. Bergen faced a post-"Murphy Brown" career re-evaluation. She fell in love with the real estate developer and philanthropist Marshall Rose, a widower, and in 2000 she married him. Her mother died. Bergen tells all this with aplomb and a sense of humor. She is also plain-spoken. Much has been made of the fuss-free way in which she has written about her weight gain in recent years. "Fat holds your face up; my skin is stretched to the max. Wrinkles don't stand a chance." But she is equally forthright about her experience with antidepressants, psychotherapy, Botox and the changes that accompany aging. "In my 60s, I seem to have gotten somebody else's hair. I think Golda Meir's." She conveys her particular challenges as a mother - and those of Chloe as the only child of such a famous couple - without crowding her daughter. And she is revelatory in her contemplation of finance. "I have made a lot of money," she declares with no coyness. "Most of this is the incomparable TV Money. Nothing like it." Then again, "the first year of 'Murphy,' they paid me peanuts, in part because I was far from their first choice for the role; they'd wanted the younger, juicier Heather Locklear." As a fictional newswoman, Murphy Brown was iconically brassy. As a memoirist, Candice Bergen is flesh-and-blood classy. That leaves one final icon up for consideration, a biggie. Indeed, Orson Welles loomed so large - in talent, in contradictions, in girth - that, in the end, his multitudes could not be contained. When he died, he was still working on a project that has been called "the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen." As of today, the work remains mostly unseen, for reasons as outsize as the man himself. And in ORSON WELLES'S LAST MOVIE: The Making of "The Other Side of the Wind" (St. Martin's, $26.99), the journalist Josh Karp applies enthusiastic scholarship, with vivid narrative writing and just the right touch of can-you-believethis-stuff ? marvel, to chronicle what did and didn't happen, and why. The extensive endnotes and bibliography are reassuring, considering the boost Karp gets out of recreating historically important dialogue - and even offhand comments - among real people. What a mad tea party it was among those Frank Marshall, at the time the project's line producer, would call "volunteers in service to Orson Welles," or Vistow. Welles, who also wrote the screenplay, began working on the movie in 1970, having returned to Hollywood after years of European self-exile. He continued to shoot, on and off, for some half-dozen years to tell the story of the last day in the life of an aging movie director, played by John Huston. The day on which he dies, drunk and a possible suicide, is his 70th birthday, July 2 - which is also the anniversary of the day Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the head. Did the movie emerge from autobiographical impulses? Did Welles ever really want to finish it? No answers are forthcoming, and that's beside Karp's point. We've never seen "The Other Side of the Wind," Karp says, for reasons that "involve everything from the Iranian revolution and runaway egos to greed, petty long-held grudges, bad accounting, corporations based in Liechtenstein, complicated ownership disagreements, self-destructive behavior, and an ever-expanding list of individuals who believed they had a legal, financial, moral or artistic right to the film itself." Along the way, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, George Lucas and Clint Eastwood passed on trying to complete it. Word is, another attempt is underway right now. "Who do I have to [expletive] to get out of this picture?" Welles reportedly said, five years into the making of the thing. That's how icons talk when they're just humans. LISA SCHWARZBAUM, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.
Kirkus Review
Adventures among the stars. Agent and producer Phillips begins her candid debut memoir by recounting three miserable years as assistant to Judy Garland, "a demented, demanding, supremely talented drug addict," a self-destructive drunk who lived on a cocktail of pills downed with limitless bottles of liebfraumilch. Enraptured with Garland from childhood, Phillips quickly became disillusioned with the woman she was charged to travel with, minister to, dress, feed, and, most of all, manage to get on stage. Despite feeling exploited and angry, Phillips admits that Garland served as "the lens through which I have seen, lived, and dealt with my life" and gave her "the armor to face the world." As this sometimes-venomous and often very funny memoir shows, there were many deep chinks in that armor. After leaving Garland, the author became an agent at Creative Management Agency; her first client was 16-year-old Liza Minnelli, Garland's "brilliant and lovely" daughter. Phillips took her under her wing, starting her on a dazzling career. After seeing her perform on TV variety shows, producers and directors clamored to hire her, and Phillips saw her own reputation rise. Along the way, she signed Robert Redford ("an actor who has both good looks and real ability"), Peter Sellers, David Bowie, and Barbra Streisand, among others. Planning to represent Liza exclusively, she resigned from CMA, where she had worked for 15 years. But Liza suddenly, and without explanation, dumped her, leaving her stunned, depressed, and unemployed. When friends invited her to see a musical production at the Actors' Studio, she reluctantly dragged herself out of the house. That evening changed her life, and she decided to reinvent herself as a producer, starting with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. An unsparing look at the dark side of show business. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Agent and producer Phillips's memoir is a very entertaining and easy-to-read story of her life thus far. She shattered gender roles and rose from a secretary to an agent in a time when no woman had done that and later became a producer of hit Broadway shows such as Doonesbury, Loose Ends, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Along the way, she had a complicated working relationship with Judy Garland. Garland was emotionally fragile and Phillips thoroughly details the heartbreak of working for her, saying that the actress remains the lens through which she has seen, lived, and dealt with her own life. Phillips also was agent to superstars Robert Redford, Al Pacino, and Liza Minnelli, and was extremely close with Minnelli, helping her obtain many of her famous film roles, including Sally Bowles in Cabaret. The author is a great storyteller, and her descriptions of interactions with her colleagues, stars such as her clients, and also -Peter Sellers, David Bowie, and Burt Reynolds are fascinating. VERDICT Recommended for people who love autobiographies and stories about the entertainment industry. [See Prepub Alert, 12/15/14.]-Sally Bryant, Pepperdine Univ. Lib., Malibu, CA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Part 1 Beginnings | |
| 1 Who the Hell Is Stevie Phillips? | p. 9 |
| 2 What Do You Do with a Jewish Princess? | p. 13 |
| 3 Girl on the Bottom | p. 16 |
| 4 Can I Tell You About "Menial"? | p. 20 |
| 5 The New Kids on the Block | p. 25 |
| 6 How Good Is Real? | p. 30 |
| 7 Have You Heard of Haddonfield? | p. 39 |
| 8 Boston | p. 47 |
| 9 Reality Checks | p. 53 |
| 10 Love-or Something Like It | p. 61 |
| 11 Vegas | p. 70 |
| 12 Back in New York | p. 83 |
| 13 A Vacation | p. 89 |
| 14 One Kind of Husband | p. 111 |
| 15 Endings, Beginnings, and Endings | p. 118 |
| 16 A Very Sad Day | p. 126 |
| 17 Sometimes | p. 131 |
| Part 2 Success | |
| 18 The Liza Start-up | p. 137 |
| 19 Flying Solo | p. 147 |
| 20 Starring Liza | p. 151 |
| 21 What Is an Agent? | p. 158 |
| 22 Moving On | p. 170 |
| 23 Crazy | p. 183 |
| 24 Fun in the Sun | p. 192 |
| 25 The Success Effect | p. 204 |
| 26 Betrayal | p. 213 |
| Part 3 Maturity | |
| 27 A Different Kind of Whorehouse | p. 229 |
| 28 Broadway Gets a Whorehouse | p. 241 |
| 29 Hollywood Gets Another Whorehouse | p. 247 |
| 30 My Last Marriage | p. 255 |
| 31 The Pieces | p. 260 |
| 32 TGIF (Thank God It's Finished)! | p. 271 |
| 33 Climbing the Mountain | p. 274 |
