Sweet and Sour Sue

Get me Steiger, Candy and Boh Evans, in that order . . .

Hi, Rod darling. On our project, they're playing with McQueen, but I don't think they can pay the money . . . Candy, my angel. Do you want to come to dinner Thursday? Here's who I'm having: Bogdanovich, Evans, maybe Nicholson . . .Oh Bobby, hi, sweetheart. You want us to negotiate a deal right now? $500,000 against 10% of the gross--no. $250,000 plus 10%.

The dialogue is straight from the old B movies about backstage Hollywood, but nobody is laughing at Agent Sue Mengers, who carries on such phone conversations nonstop from a desk piled high with scripts. "They never laugh at success," Mengers notes dryly. As a vice president of mighty Creative Management Associates, Sue Mengers is, in the rueful words of one of her ex-clients, "more powerful than the stars she handles." An overestimation, perhaps, but Mengers' list of personal clients is largely above-the-title: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Ali McGraw, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Tony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Directors Herb Ross, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse and Writer Gore Vidal, to name a few.

Although her clients are mostly "new" Hollywood, Mengers, 36, is a throwback to the more flamboyant, flesh-peddling days of the studio moguls. At 5 ft. 2 1/2 in. and 160 Ibs., usually billowing in a sea of muumuus and caftans, she is sometimes seen as a cross between Mama Cass and Mack the Knife. She has the soft, breathy voice of a little-bitty girl, the vocabulary of a mule skinner and the subtle approach of a Sherman tank. She often compares herself to Eve Harrington, the calculating and ruthless climber in All About Eve. In fact, a character based on Mengers will soon appear in a new film called The Last of Sheila. Director Herb Ross describes the character as "human, gamy, but not common."

Her enemies--there is an ample supply--dismiss her as vulgar, venal, vindictive and untrustworthy, a puffball of bluff. Even some friends regard her with the affectionate respect that they might accord a pet barracuda. "The first time she asked me to a party," remembers Client Dyan Cannon, "she said, 'Will you wash your face before you come? I want people to see what you look like.' I was intimidated by her dictating, pontifical ways at first, but now I just don't let her be my mother." Her fans find her clever, charming when she tries--and above all, honest. Adds Actor Dick Benjamin: "She never lies. She'll tell you if they don't want you and if she has gone as far as she can go. But I've seen her sell past the resistance."

Mengers was born in Hamburg, Germany, to Jewish parents who fled to Utica, N.Y., in 1938. Her father committed suicide when Sue was eleven, and she and her mother moved to The Bronx. She went to a lot of movies, developed fantasies about becoming a star. Once, she attended a drama class. "Everyone there was better looking and more talented. My practical streak told me 'there goes that dream.' "

Still starstruck, she got a secretarial job at the William Morris talent agency. "Then it dawned on me that I could handle people better than the schmucks in the agency making $100,000." In 1963 she formed a partnership with Agent Tom Korman, "and I've never ridden in a public conveyance since." Swathed in a pay-as-you-go mink, she set out to steal stars from the big agencies. "We preyed on people who were out of work," she laughs. "In those days I was so driven I would have booked Martin Bormann."

One night she spotted Tom Ewell dining alone at Sardi's. "Hi, I'm Sue Mengers, and I wish you would answer my calls," she twittered gaily, dropping her business card in his soup. Giggles, apologies--and before the evening was over Ewell had signed. She wined and dined Tony Perkins for eight months until he hired her. She pursued Paula Prentiss and Husband Dick Benjamin even through Paula's nervous breakdown, visiting her at the hospital "when no one else would," recalls Benjamin; five years later they signed. Grins former Partner Korman: "She would have made the best Electrolux salesman of them all."

She no longer has to worry about booking Martin Bormann. After two years with Korman, she joined C.M.A., where her salary is now close to what those others at William Morris used to make. She also has an expense account that runs to some $8,000 a year just for the all-important parties she throws in her outrageously rococo Beverly Hills "palazzo."

The parties are the essence of the Mengers technique, fertile fields to be sown with actors, writers and directors and plowed for possible deals. "On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say that entertaining has contributed 5 to my success. It is harder for someone to screw you if they've had dinner at your house."

While success has not spoiled her ambition--she still lusts after glittery names like Clint Eastwood, Mike Nichols and George C. Scott, all, so far, impervious to her blandishments--it has mellowed her somewhat. "It's easy to be nice when you're successful," she explains. "People are nicer to you, too. Hell. If I had it to do all over again I'd still rather be adopted by Henry Ford."

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