The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  AS SOON AS you talk to Mengers, you can imagine that on the phone, making deals, she must have been formidable. Her voice is a pebbly alto with a little tremor that snags on a syllable now and again. She has a powerful way with a pause. She speaks deliberately, stamping everything she says with plain, braggy boldness. She didn’t learn English until she was six years old, after her family escaped the Holocaust and emigrated from Hamburg to New York; the pause and the deliberateness may not be purposeful affect so much as the result of elocution lessons she was given as a child to banish her accent. She is small, rounded, with a sweet smile, a doll’s nose, tiny feet, and a head of silky blond hair. Being a blonde is a theme in her personal history. A lot of her stories are punctuated this way: “And here I was, this blonde . . .” “They weren’t expecting this blonde . . .” When she got out to Hollywood, in 1968, after working as a theater agent for CMA in New York, the only blondes were in the movies, not making deals. She eventually made it into the movies, only she was played by a blonder blonde—Dyan Cannon, who portrayed Mengers in the 1973 movie The Last of Sheila.

  NO ONE EVER ASKED her to the movies. “I would have Jack and Anjelica over,” she says. “It was for a purpose. They were not my friends. It was never ‘Oh, Sue, it’s Anjelica, let’s go have dinner, let’s go out and see something.’ ” She knew everyone. She would bully her way through a day of meetings, storm out of a few of them. Then she would put on a little party. “It was my power base. A man in this business would not have had to put on a party. Someone with another power base would not have had to entertain.” She didn’t make an issue of it—and she even declined a request to help organize Women in Film. She just gave more parties, the best parties. People clamored to come to her parties. “They didn’t come because they were my friends,” she says. “They didn’t come because they were so impressed with my warmth as a hostess.” Her parties were celebrated—perfectly cast, staged, and choreographed. “I never had too many actresses who would feel competitive, and I would have enough studio heads so the actors could meet the important people. I never invited anyone who wasn’t successful. I was ruthless about it. It was all stars. I would look around my living room at all of them, and even I’d be impressed with myself. The parties were great.” But the parties were chores. “The parties were always given to accomplish something. I never just had people over. I had them over for a reason. I never had a good time for a minute.”

  She was incurably starstruck. “I was this kid from New York who had never left the city, who had never been to California, who had no plan, who thought she would end up as, possibly, a secretary. I came to Hollywood, and it was magic, absolute magic. There were stars everywhere. They were exactly as they appeared in the movies.” She still managed to be an inflexible snob. “I had no interest in unknowns. Anyone can sign an unknown. Only a big agent can sign a big star. I was sent Dustin Hoffman when he was starting out. My attitude was: What do I want with this short, inarticulate, mumbling actor? I sent a sarcastic note to that effect. I was only interested in superstars.”

  For a long time, she was in love with her business. “I thought being an agent was better than being president of the United States,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine more to life than getting a good part for Nick Nolte.” She now believes she wasted her life on her business. “I never had children,” she says. “I didn’t think I could both be a great agent to Barbra Streisand and be a mother to a kid. I chose Streisand. I wouldn’t choose Streisand if I could do it again.” She was naïve and was finally betrayed. “I never thought of it as work. I loved it. I was good at it because I loved it so much. I never imagined that any of these actors and actresses would ever get old. I never imagined they would ever leave me.”

  The most fun she had was working with Barbra Streisand. “It was totally time-consuming but totally stimulating,” she says. “We did What’s Up, Doc? and A Star Is Born. How can I get a dig in on Jon Peters? Let’s just say that much of the time I spent on Barbra was spent trying to control Jon.” Mengers had arranged for Streisand to star in All Night Long, directed by Jean-Claude Tramont, who is Mengers’s husband, and also starring Gene Hackman, another of Mengers’s clients. It was rumored that Streisand was furious when the movie failed, and decided, in 1981, to leave her. Other clients followed. Mengers’s ruthless exclusivity failed her. She had no one in reserve once her big clients left, because she had never had time for anyone other than big clients. She says, “I overdosed on the industry. I lost it. I lost my enthusiasm. It got to be less fun. The actors stopped being movie stars. I found myself becoming irritable. Suddenly, all anyone could talk about was hardware. I wasn’t a visionary, like Mike Ovitz. I never was interested in producing, or in sitting in a room with a group of Japanese businessmen talking about the sale of Sony. I wanted to help the stars. I’m not so knocked out by Mike Ovitz. What he does isn’t being an agent. If Mike Ovitz quit the business and opened a chain of karate schools tomorrow, there is not one picture that would stop shooting. It just wouldn’t matter that much. Maybe it was my age that made me burn out. Maybe because I did what I did so intensely. Men usually work as agents and then move on to the studios, because they find nurturing people and servicing them too demeaning. When I started, everyone was hot—Redford, Streisand, Jack Nicholson. But then it becomes harder. It’s hard to force yourself to be an agent, because you have to get it up all the time to assure your client that he’s not cold even when he is.”

  Once her exodus of clients started, Mengers began to be less useful. She says she felt underappreciated. She quit ICM in 1986. “I never missed it, I swear to you.” She managed to stay away only two years. She returned for a disastrous three years at William Morris, during which none of her old clients would come back to her. “I genuinely tried to sign people, but the reputation of William Morris was such that people would flee from it. I had no idea. Many of my past clients, like Christopher Walken and Farrah Fawcett and Jonathan Demme, had fled in horror from William Morris and weren’t interested in coming back again. I managed to sign Richard Pryor, and that was it. I tried to play the part of the enthusiastic agent, but the juice was gone. My specialness was always my total love of talent. That thing was gone.”

  She left the industry in 1991, undoubtedly for good. She says, “I do wish I’d gotten richer. But otherwise Hollywood doesn’t owe me shit.”

  SHOOT THE MOON

  WHITE MEN IN SUITS FOLLOW FELIPE LOPEZ everywhere he goes. Felipe lives in Mott Haven, in the South Bronx. He is a junior at Rice High School, which is on the corner of 124th Street and Lenox Avenue, in Harlem, and he plays guard for the school basketball team, the Rice Raiders. The white men are ubiquitous. They rarely miss one of Felipe’s games or tournaments. They have absolute recall of his best minutes of play. They are authorities on his physical condition. They admire his feet, which are big and pontoon-shaped, and his wrists, which have a loose, silky motion. Not long ago, I sat with the white men at a game between Rice and All Hallows High School. My halftime entertainment was listening to a debate between two of them—a college scout and a Westchester contractor who is a high school basketball fan—about whether Felipe had grown a half inch over Christmas break. “I know this kid,” the scout said as the second half started. “A half inch is not something I would miss.” The white men believe that Felipe is the best high school basketball player in the country. They often compare him to Michael Jordan, and are betting he will become one of the greatest basketball players to emerge from New York City since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. This conjecture provides them with suspended, savory excitement and a happy premonition. Following Felipe is like hanging around with someone you think is going to win the lottery someday.

  At the moment, Felipe is six feet five. He would like to be six feet seven. His shoes are size twelve. He buys his pants at big-and-tall-men stores. His ears, which are small and high-set, look exaggeratedly tiny, because he keeps his hair shaved close to his skull. He has blackish brown eyes and a big, vivid tongu
e—I know this only because his tongue sometimes sticks out when he is playing hard, and against his skin, which is very dark, it looks like a pink pennant. His voice is slurry; all his words have round edges. He is as skinny as a bean pole, and has long shins and thin forearms and sharp, chiseled knees. His hands are gigantic. Walking down the street, he gets a lot of looks because of his height, but he is certainly not a horse of a kid—not one of those man-size boys who fleshed out in fifth grade and whose adult forms are in place by the time they’re thirteen. He is all outline: He doesn’t look like a stretched-out average-size person—he looks like a sketch of a huge person which hasn’t yet been colored in.

  On the court, Felipe’s body seems unusually well organized. His movements are quick and liquid. I have seen him sail horizontally through thin air. High school players are often rough and lumbering, and they mostly shoot flat-footed, but Felipe has an elegant, buoyant game. He floats around the edge of the court and then springs on the ball and sprints away. When he moves toward the basket, it looks as if he were speed skating, and then, suddenly, he rises in the air, lingers, and shoots. His shot is smooth and lovely, with a loopy arc. Currently, he averages twenty-six points and nine rebounds per game, and he is within striking distance of the all-time high school scoring record for New York State. He has great court vision, soft hands, a brisk three-point shot, and the speed to take the ball inside and low. He is usually the fastest man in the fast break. He can handle the ball like a point guard, and he beats bigger players defensively, because of his swiftness and his body control. When he is not on a court, though, the way he walks is complicated and sloppy. He seems to walk this way on purpose, to make light of his size and disguise his grace.

  Before I met Felipe, people told me I would find him cuddly. Everything I knew about him—that he is a boy, that he is a teenage boy, that he is a six-foot-five-teenage-boy jock—made this pretty hard to believe, but it turns out to be true. He is actually the sweetest person I know. At some point during our time together, it occurred to me that he could be a great basketball hustler, because he seems naïve and eager—the ideal personality for attracting competitive big shots on the basketball court. It happens that he is not the least bit of a hustler. But he is also not nearly as naïve and eager as he appears. He once told me that he likes to make people think of him as a clown, because then they will never accuse him of being a snob. He also said that he likes to be friendly to everyone, so that no one will realize he’s figuring out whom he can trust.

  Felipe spoke no English at all when he moved to New York from the Dominican Republic, four years ago, but he quickly picked up certain phrases, including “crash the boards,” “he’s bugging out,” “get the hell out of the paint,” and “oh, my goodness.” Now he speaks English comfortably, with a rich Dominican accent—the words tumble and click together, like stones being tossed in a polisher. “Oh, my goodness” remains his favorite phrase. It is a utility expression that reveals his modesty, his manners, his ingenuousness, and his usual state of mind, which is one of pleasant and guileless surprise at the remarkable nature of his life. I have heard him use it to comment on the expectation that he will someday be a rich and famous player in the NBA, and on the fact that he was recently offered half a million dollars by people from Spain to put aside his homework and come play in their league, and on the fact that he is already considered a seminal national export by citizens of the Dominican Republic, who are counting on him to be the first Dominican in the NBA, and on the fact that he is growing so fast that he once failed to recognize his own pants. Sometimes he will use the phrase in circumstances where his teammates and friends might be inclined to say something more dynamic. One night this winter, I was sitting around at school with Felipe and his teammates, watching a videotape of old Michael Jordan highlights. The tape had been edited for maximum excitement, and most of the boys on the team were responding with more and more baroque constructions of foul language. At one point, Jordan was shown leaping past the Celtics center Robert Parish, and someone said, “Yo, feature that, bro! He’s busting the Chief’s face.”

  “Busting his fucking face,” another one said.

  “Busting his goddam big-ass face.”

  “He’s got it going on. Now Jordan’s going to bust his foul-loving big-ass mama’s-boy dope black ass.”

  On the tape, Jordan slammed the ball through the hoop and Parish crumpled to the floor. While the other boys were applauding and swearing, Felipe moved closer to the television and then said, admiringly, “Oh, my goodness.”

  FELIPE’S LIFE IS unusually well populated. He is very close to his family. He is named Luis Felipe, after his father. His older brother Anthony is one of the managers of the Rice High School team. Anthony is a square-shouldered, avid man of twenty-five who played amateur basketball in the Dominican Republic and in New York until his ankle was badly injured in a car accident. Until last month, when he was laid off, he worked at a Manhattan print shop and had a boss who appreciated basketball and tolerated the time Anthony spent with the team. Anthony is rarely away from Felipe’s side, and when he is there he is usually peppering him with directions and commentary in a hybrid of Spanish and English: “Felipe, mal, muy mal! Cómo estás you go so aggressive to a layup?” A couple of times a month, Anthony makes the rounds of Felipe’s teachers to see if his B average is holding up. “If he’s not doing well, then I go back and let my people know,” Anthony says. “It’s nice, it’s beautiful to be a superstar, but if he doesn’t work hard he doesn’t play.” Once, Felipe’s father forbade him to travel to a tournament because he had neglected to wash the dishes. This made Felipe cry, but in hindsight he is philosophical about it. “He was right,” he says. “I didn’t do my dishes.” Felipe is also close to Lou DeMello, his coach at Rice, and to Dave Jones, his coach with the Gauchos, a basketball organization in the Bronx which he plays for during the summer, and to Louis d’Almeida, the founder of the Gauchos. Felipe says he sometimes gets basketball advice from his mother, Carmen, and from Maura Beattie, a teacher at Rice who tutors him in English. Neither of them plays. “You know what, though?” Felipe says. “They know something.” His primary hobby is sleeping, but his other pastime is talking on the phone for hours to his girlfriend, who is an American, a resident of Brooklyn, and a basketball fan.

  Sometimes his life seems overpopulated. He has so far received four crates of letters from college coaches and recruiters pitching woo at him. Some make seductive mention of the large seating capacities of their arenas. Basketball camp directors call regularly, saying that they would like Felipe Lopez to be in attendance. Officials of Puerto Rico’s summer basketball league have requested the honor of his presence this summer. There are corporate marketing executives who would very much like to be his friends. Not everyone crowding into his life wishes him well. There are people who might wittingly or unwittingly mislead him. Felipe has been warned by his father, for example, never to have sex without a condom, because some girls who pretend to like him might really have appraised him as a lucrative paternity suit. Last year, Felipe and another player were invited to appear in a Nintendo television commercial, and the commercial nearly cost them their college athletic eligibility, because no one had warned them that accepting money for a commercial was against NCAA regulations. There are people who are jealous of Felipe. There are coaches whose hearts he has broken, because they’re not at one of the colleges Felipe is interested in—Florida State, Syracuse, St. John’s, Seton Hall, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, UCLA, Indiana, Arizona, Ohio State, and Kansas. There are coaches who put aside all other strategy except Keep Felipe Lopez Away from the Ball. Some opponents will go out of their way to play him hard. There are kids on his own team who have bitter moments about Felipe. And there are contrarians, who would like to get in early on a backlash and look clairvoyant and hype-resistant by declaring him, at only eighteen and only a junior in high school, already overrated. His response to all this is to be nice to everyone. I have never seen him angr
y, or even peeved, but when he isn’t playing well his entire body droops and he looks completely downcast. It is an alarming sight, because he looks so hollowed out anyway.

  “Wait till this kid gets a body,” Coach DeMello likes to say. During practice, DeMello will sometimes jump up and down in front of Felipe and yell, “Felipe! Make yourself big!” The best insult I ever heard DeMello hurl at Felipe was during a practice one afternoon when Felipe was playing lazily. DeMello strode onto the court, looked up at Felipe, and said acidly, “You’re six-five, but you’re trapping like you’re five-eleven.” Anthony Lopez can hardly wait until Felipe gets a body, so sometimes during the offseason he will take him to the steep stairway at the 155th Street subway station, in the Bronx, and make him run up and down the hundred and thirty steps a few times to try to speed the process along. Felipe is less than crazy about this exercise, although he appreciates the advantages that more bulk might give him: “When I first came here, I could tell the guys were looking at me and thinking, Who is this skinny kid? Then they would say, ‘Hey, let’s’—excuse my language—‘bust his ass.’ ”