The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business

(By Frank Rose)

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Author	Frank Rose

“Book Descriptions: The unauthorized account of the rise and fall of Hollywood’s greatest talent agency

The story of the William Morris Agency is the story of show business itself. For decades, hidden from the public eye, Morris agents made the deals that determined the fate of stars, studios, and television networks alike. Mae West, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand—the Morris Agency sold talent to anyone who would buy it, from the Hollywood moguls to the Madison Avenue admen who controlled television to the mobsters who ran Vegas. While the clients took the spotlight, the agency stayed behind the scenes, providing the grease that made show business what it’s become.

But in the 1970s, when a key executive at the agency bru­tally sac­rificed his own best friend—the man who’d brought Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz out of the mail­room—Mor­ris gave birth to its own nem­esis: Ovitz’s new shop, Cre­at­ive Art­ists Agency. Through­out the ’80s and ’90s, as Mor­ris made, and lost, such major stars as Kevin Cost­ner, Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, and Julia Rob­erts, Ovitz’s power grew in­exorably as Mor­ris’s waned.

Lulled by the phenomenal success of Bill Cosby on television and the upward spiral of the Beverly Hills real estate market, Morris’s board failed to act as death and defection thinned the agency’s ranks. Not even the last-minute hiring of the legen­dary Sue Men­gers—“the superagent who ruled Hollywood with sex and booze,” as a New York Post headline once put it—was enough to re­vive the Mor­ris office. Finally, with its flag­ship motion-picture depart­ment at the brink of collapse, Mor­ris was faced with the stark reality of having to buy its way back into the busi­ness it once owned.”