Sue Mengers: Hollywood's First Superagent
Why 70s superagent Sue Mengers inspired a character in my book about Hollywood, Where Are You, Echo Blue?
About 90 percent of the characters in Where Are You, Echo Blue? (coming out July 16 —in just two months!) are based off of real characters. I don’t usually do this when I’m writing a book. But because I’m a self-described celebrity gossip scholar, I kept coming back to moments in Hollywood history that fascinated me. One of those stories was about the legendary agent Sue Mengers.
Mengers broke the glass ceiling in the boy club that very much dominated the agent world in the 1970s and 1980s. Her client list included: Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, Barbra Streisand, Dyan Cannon, Gene Hackman, Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen, Peter Bogdanovich. A biopic about her is being made into a show for Apple with Jennifer Lawrence at the helm.
As an agent, Mengers also made a statement with her wild fashion sense. She always wore a caftan and big round sunglasses. What agent wears a caftan and huge sunglasses to work? Even in the 70s they were all business. Not Sue Mengers.
But when she fell from grace in the early 80s after a rash of clients left her, including Barbra Streisand who was the “linchpin” of her client list and her best friend, her career never recovered.
When Vanity Fair wrote about Sue Mengers in 2012 after her death, they pulled this delicious, yet deeply disturbing quote:
According to a chapter about Mengers in the late Paul Rosenfield’s book The Club Rules, when Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family in 1969, Mengers reassured Streisand, “Don’t worry, honey, stars aren’t being murdered. Only featured players.”
According the New York Post: “She had no qualms about sleeping with clients or would-be clients — at one point, she was known as “F–ker to the Stars,” a nickname she was reportedly fine with.”
I knew Echo Blue, my young star whose life I follow in the book from the time she’s 10-19 years old, had to have an agent. Someone who was obsessed with her career. I had read about Tatum O’Neal’s relationship with her agent Sue Mengers and knew that her father, Ryan O’Neal was also her client. It made perfect sense that someone larger than life, a legend like Sue Mengers, would guide Echo’s career. Hazel needed to loved Echo as a person—but love Echo as a commodity more.
So Hazel Cahn, the agent, was born. I created Hazel with the same flare as Mengers. For example, this is how Goldie Klein, the obsessed journalist, describes Hazel Cahn in the beginning of Where Are, You Echo Blue?:
I read everything about Sue Mengers. EVERYTHING. The biography about her: “Can I Go Now?” Clips of the Bette Midler’s one-woman play about Mengers, “I’ll Eat You Last.” I watched the movie “The Last of Sheila,” a whodunnit movie from 1973 where Dyan Cannon plays Sue Mengers. (It’s a great old campy Hollywood movie. Highly recommend.)
I knew the relationship between Echo and Hazel had to be complicated. Hazel was Jamie Blue’s —Echo’s dad—agent as well. Jamie Blue is a troubled figure, based on Ryan O’Neal.
This photo below of Ryan O’Neal wearing a “Tatums Father” t-shirt sitting next to Mengers with her big glasses and caftan, always haunted me. Looks adorable, right? Not so much. Ryan O’Neal was famously jealous of his daughter Tatum’s talent. When he learned that Tatum was nominated for an Oscar, she wrote in her book that he punched her. A classic narcissist. Everything was about him—even his daughter’s fame.
I had to write about it for my book and explore the dangerous thread in this relationship.
But I really needed to focus on Hazel and Echo’s relationship. Echo was Hazel’s client, but Echo was also a child. Here’s Echo talking about her first movie and how her dad showed up with Hazel for a photo shoot wearing the famous t-shirt.
There’s a scene towards the end of Echo Blue, where it’s clear Hazel cares about Echo. Maybe the only adult who ever really did? She’s motherly in a way to her that Echo needs. But it’s a fleeting moment. Someone that star-hungry can’t stay true to you because stars fade and their hunger lives on.
Thanks for reading.
Hayley