Three things were simultaneously infuriating her. The first was
that this whole event was making her late for a 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,
seated nearby, 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. “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 Mengers’ mounting ire. One of the hijacker’s
demands was that her entire 25-page manifesto be read out live
on television by a major Hollywood figure: Lindsay Wagner,
Jack Lemmon or Charlton Heston.
This revealed her to be the kind of lowballing, visionless
amateur Mengers wholeheartedly despised.
“She wanted Charlton fucking Heston,” she spluttered to
her worried colleagues after the FBI stormed the plane. “I could
have got her Barbra Streisand.”
Sue Mengers. Always working the angles. Always closing
the deal. The world’s first super-agent.
y the mid-1970s, Sue Mengers was, without
qualification, one of the most powerful figures, male or
female, in the film industry. The only child of a pair of
Jewish shopkeepers who had escaped Hamburg in
1938, she had once worked as a lowly secretary at the William
Morris Agency, watching unhappily as agents, all men, shouted
on the phone and closed deals. The life she envied had then
seemed inaccessible. Now, though, 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, Arthur Penn —
while the most succulent of the decade’s A-listers — Michael
Caine, Robert Redford, Candice Bergen, Ali MacGraw, Paul
Newman, Steve McQueen, Cybill Shepherd, Barbra Streisand,
Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway — all relied on Mengers to
power their careers.
“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 dealmaker”,
according to a New Yorker profile in 1975,
deploying her caustic honesty, weaponised
wit and Machiavellian strategising 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 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,” Mengers
announced. “I said, ‘No, he’s never even
asked me. But I wish that he would,’”
Boatwright recalls. “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 behighlighted in a box on the poster. On
observing the coffin at her funeral shortly
after, Mengers 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, Mengers reassured her,
“Don’t worry, honey. They’re not
murdering stars, only featured players.”
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. “I remember her
coming to me when I was working on
someone’s career and she said, ‘You have
all these great clients — why are you
bothering with this?’ 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.n Los Angeles, the groundwork
for Mengers’ success was laid with
two deals. The first was to solely
represent Barbra Streisand; Mengers
was among the first to spot Streisand’s
potential to dominate not just in music
and on Broadway, but in Hollywood too.
“They were very similar in many
ways,” Boaty Boatwright remembers.
“They were funny and they were
smart. Both had had rather terribly
sad upbringings.”
Mengers 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 Elliott
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, ❯