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. 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 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.
“Barbra 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, ‘Okay,
you don’t want to do this, but if you had to do a picture with
Barbra Streisand, what would it be?’ And I said, ‘I dunno... a
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 Friedkin 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’ 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. “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 Mengers
always kept within reach in a little silver box, Hollywood’s A-list
would mingle and foundations 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 Mengers, 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 Hackman an unprecedented $1.25 million deal for
Lucky Lady, and 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 Segal 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 got a still 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.he 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, was working
on a troubled Hollywood project, All
Night Long. Mengers stpped in, 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 Barbra 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.”
Making matters worse, Bogdanovich
had already canned her after the
humiliating failure of his musical
Nickelodeon. “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 toClockwise from top: Gene Hackman and
Barbra Streisand in flop All Night Long
(1981), directed by Mengers’ husband
Jean-Claude Tramont; Streisand, Mengers
and Ryan O’Neal on the set of 1979’s The
Main Event; Tramont and Mengers in 1980.