Biography & Autobiography |
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Summary
Summary
"To call Sue Mengers a 'character' is an understatement, unless the word is written in all-caps, followed by an exclamation point and modified by an expletive. And based on Brian Kellow's assessment in his thoroughly researched Can I Go Now? even that description may be playing down her personality a bit." --Jen Chaney, The Washington Post
* A NY Times Culture Bestseller * An Entertainment Weekly Best Pop Culture Book of 2015 * A Booklist Top Ten Arts Book of 2015 *
A lively and colorful biography of Hollywood's first superagent--one of the most outrageous showbiz characters of the 1960s and 1970s whose clients included Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Faye Dunaway, Michael Caine, and Candice Bergen
Before Sue Mengers hit the scene in the mid-1960s, talent agents remained quietly in the background. But staying in the background was not possible for Mengers. Irrepressible and loaded with chutzpah, she became a driving force of Creative Management Associates (which later became ICM) handling the era's preeminent stars.
A true original with a gift for making the biggest stars in Hollywood listen to hard truths about their careers and personal lives, Mengers became a force to be reckoned with. Her salesmanship never stopped. In 1979, she was on a plane that was commandeered by a hijacker, who wanted Charlton Heston to deliver a message on television. Mengers was incensed, wondering why the hijacker wanted Heston, when she could get him Barbra Streisand.
Acclaimed biographer Brian Kellow spins an irresistible tale, exhaustively researched and filled with anecdotes about and interviews more than two hundred show-business luminaries. A riveting biography of a powerful woman that charts show business as it evolved from New York City in the 1950s through Hollywood in the early 1980s, Can I Go Now? will mesmerize anyone who loves cinema's most fruitful period.
Author Notes
Brian Kellow is the author of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark; Ethel Merman: A Life; The Bennetts: An Acting Family and the coauthor of Can't Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell . His articles have appeared in Vanity Fair , The Wall Street Journal , The New York Observer , Opera , and other publications. Kellow lives in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kellow, who specializes in biographies of accomplished women (Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark), turns his attention to Sue Mengers, Hollywood's first female "superagent." She was already a chain-smoking, caftan-wearing, coarse-mouthed legend in 1973 when client Dyan Cannon parodied her in the movie The Last of Sheila. Menders, raised in humble circumstances in Utica, N.Y., and the Bronx, promoted herself with hard work, chutzpah, and an eye for good material, and became a vital force in male-dominated 1970s Hollywood. With renowned friends (Gore Vidal, Robert Evans), superstar clients (Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Peter Bogdanovich), and headline-making deals (getting Gene Hackman an unheard-of $1 million salary for the box-office turkey Lucky Lady), Mengers became a feminist trailblazer, though she had no interest in the movement. But when the `70s ended and Hollywood switched from star-driven pictures to special effects blockbusters, her career, for all intents and purposes, was over. She led a life worthy of a Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susann novel, but Kellow's writing is more dutiful than inspired (and dogged by errors, such as misidentifying NYU grad Martin Scorsese's alma mater as UCLA). Kellow fails to fully bring to life this larger-than-life character whose ultimate undoing was her desperate need to shine brighter than her clients. Agent: Edward Hibbert, Donadio & Olson. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Though her name might not be as well known as the stars she represented, Hollywood power-agent Sue Mengers' behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing helped shape many of the hit movies, as well as some of the misses, of the 1970s. As show-biz biographer Kellow (Pauline Kael, 2011) reveals, Mengers was the daughter of German Jewish immigrants to New York in 1938, whose youth was marked by her father's suicide and her tumultuous relationship with her mother. She got her start as a secretary at a powerful talent agency, where her brash, ballsy attitude got her noticed and promoted to talent agent at a small agency. At the end of the 1960s, Mengers made the leap to a larger agency in Los Angeles, where she represented such luminaries as Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, and Faye Dunaway. A vivacious hostess, tireless advocate for her clients, outspoken character, and sometimes cruel critic of those who crossed her, Mengers was a complicated, powerful trailblazer, one who barged down doors for women and changed the nature of the talent-agent business. Kellow's absorbing biography not only peels back the layers to reveal the true nature of this fascinating individual but also delves deeply into the film industry in the latter half of the twentieth century.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVEN THE BRIGHTEST star is occasionally eclipsed by a moon. Sue Mengers was a moon. Photographs from the 1970s show her looming, lipsticked and luminously coifed, at the elbows of the A-list movie actors she represented (considering television and theater somewhat lesser forms, for losers): Faye Dunaway or Ryan O'Neal or her especial favorite, Barbra Streisand. For a time beaming brighter even than Swifty Lazar, with his bald head, black-rimmed glasses and parties at Spago, Mengers inspired characters in "The Last of Sheila," the shadowy cult movie with a screenplay by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim; and very likely also in the novels "Myra Breckinridge," by her pal Gore Vidal, and "The Love Machine," by Jacqueline Susann. If that previous paragraph, with its larding of famous names, reads like an item in a gossip column, this is no accident. Mengers was animated by her associations. Indeed, she was sometimes quite literally propped up by them, her innate languor amplified by heavy marijuana use. She tended to sink into the sofa cushions. A new biography by Brian Kellow, "Can I Go Now?," raises the question of whether she can stand on her own two feet as a subject, and the answer, I am happy to report, is an emphatic "Yup!" This is hardly the first time the ultrafemme Mengers, for many years a curiosity in a mostly male field, has been singled out for journalistic scrutiny. She was interviewed, tapping ash with polished talons and poolside with Robert Evans, by Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes"; and after her career had waned, by Susan Orlean in 1994 in The New Yorker. Even posthumously she was portrayed in full bonbongobbling glory by Bette Midler in "I'll Eat You Last," a one-woman Broadway show co-produced in 2013 by yet another chum, Vanity Fair's editor, Graydon Carter. But Kellow is the first to pull back the caftan, to consider what really made Mengers Mengers. He has made a specialty of forceful showbiz women - previous subjects include Pauline Kael and Ethel Merman - and she fits easily into that pantheon, with a noir background on which he doesn't linger overlong (per its title, actually, the book as a whole has an appropriate, welcome efficiency). Her German Jewish parents fled the Holocaust with their daughter, settling in Utica, N.Y., where they both worked in sales. Daddy's gambling problem led to suicide by pills in a Times Square hotel, aggravating a mother-daughter enmity with shades of "Mildred Pierce." An only child, Susi, as she was first known, developed a creepy habit of referring to herself, in vulnerable moments, as "Baby Sue." She came of age as the moving pictures, and seemingly the world, burst into Technicolor. Kellow vividly renders this time of alliterative rat-a-tat names begat of the typewriter - Boaty Boatwright, Freddie Fields, Lionel Larner, Maynard Morris - and restaurants that treated regulars like family: Downey's and Lindy's and Sardi's. Mengers, however, preferred to entertain at home, first in the rented pink guesthouse of the flamboyant decorator Tony Duquette, on Dawnridge Drive in Beverly Hills, where Michael Caine recounts mistaking a bowl of cocaine for sugar (those were the days), and later more grandly in Bel Air with a loyal husband from the Continent, Jean-Claude Tramont. Her parties were filled with "twinklies," a.k.a. celebrities, and phone calls were how she forged her success. It is difficult to read "Can I Go Now?" without suffering profound nostalgia for the dramatic potential of the desk telephone: the clip-on earring whipped off to accommodate the receiver, the curling cord twisted around the finger like a tendril of hair, and Mengers's feet propped on her desk as she conducted business variously for MCA, WMA, CMA and I CM (but not chilly, corporate CAA), displaying her disdain for underwear to all and sundry. Paula Weinstein, the producer, blames ambivalence for the agent's eventual fade, but the rise of the personal computer must have been responsible in equal measure. Certainly the Sony hacking scandal would have sunk Mengers, if age and poor health habits hadn't first. She was a champion bad-mouther, or "negative seller," as Barry Diller calls it, in one of the many priceless Hollywood euphemisms cataloged herein. The dish was what made her bashes fun (certainly it wasn't the gloppy goulash), but you can see how actors with their endemic insecurity might have eventually come to prefer a quiet soldier of Ovitz in an Armani suit to this sweet-faced back-stabber in billowy muumuus. Even Kellow's climactic anecdote of Mengers surviving a plane hijacking in 1979 has her managing to dis both Theodore Bikel, who was trying to calm passengers by playing "Hava Nagila" on the guitar, and Charlton Heston, whom the hijacker wanted to read a message on TV. (Why not Streisand, her client at the time, Mengers wonders.) She was discreet in one important regard, though, ordering her entire business archive destroyed before her death in 2011. This forces Kellow to rely heavily on interviews, probably resulting in a more reflective and soulful book than he might have produced otherwise. "She seemed to know the lonely heart of an actress," Tuesday Weld tells him, "because I feel that she had a lonely heart, also." A paper moon, perhaps. ALEXANDRA JACOBS, a domestic correspondent for the Styles sections of The Times, is writing a biography of Elaine Stritch.
Kirkus Review
The life of the influential Hollywood agent.From the 1950s through the 1980s, Sue Mengers (1932-2011) represented some of the most famous names in show business, including Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw, Ryan O'Neal, Michael Caine, Gene Hackman, Elliott Gould, and, most notably, superstar Barbra Streisand. Not only did she admire the singer's talents, but the parallels of their livesgrowing up poor, losing their fathers while still young, battling judgmental mothersmade her feel they were kindred spirits. As Opera News features editor Kellow (Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, 2011, etc.) amply shows in this gossipy, star-studded biography, Mengers considered Streisand her "alter ego." Chain-smoking, often with a Gauloises cigarette in one hand and a joint in the other, hard-drinking, and outrageously vulgar, Mengers was smart, savvy, and manipulative. "After a little while with her, people thought they were her best friends," writes the author. New talent didn't interest her; stars did, and she pursued them relentlessly until she gained their trustand business. Unlike agents who kept a low profile, Mengers promoted herself as well as her clients, throwing parties for "top, above-the-title Hollywood stardom." Those coveted gatherings, her bawdy appearances at premieres and nightclubs, and a profile in Vanity Fair made her as recognizable as her glamorous roster of actors, and she worked tirelessly to promote themnot just to get them parts, but also higher and higher salaries. In the 1970s, movie stars' earnings were modest; by the time Mengers retired, they had grown to millions of dollars per picture. The author rightly points to Streisand's defection as a turning point in Mengers' career. Streisand had been "the closest and most powerful reminder to Sue of her own exalted stature in Hollywood," and when she left for another agent, Mengers was devastated and bitter. Kellow, an admirer of Mengers' spunk and achievements, serves her well in this deft, entertaining biography. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Kellow's chatty (and sometimes catty) biography of the contrarian 1970s Hollywood agent to the stars Sue Mengers (1932-2011) delivers on entertainment value. Mengers rose from the secretarial pool to break the glass ceiling at a time when talent agencies gained more power after the collapse of the studio system. She was also noted for her pot-filled, A-list parties as well as for her trenchant wit and brutal bluntness. According to Anjelica Huston, Mengers was "unparalleled in her honesty." (The book's title comes from her impatient sign-off after a drawn-out conversation.) Kellow describes her as "a combination of bawdy bar maid and precocious brat," with plenty of examples to prove his point. Throughout, he keeps the narrative flowing thanks to primary sources Barbra Streisand (Mengers's prized client, with whom she had a spectacular falling-out), Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen (her "glamorous shiksa goddesses"), Michael Caine, and other marquee names. VERDICT Effortlessly readable, especially for Vanity Fair enthusiasts and film buffs who remember such actors as Lisa Eichhorn and Nancy Allen.-Kent Turner, School Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.