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Daily Mail
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
‘I was handed a $4,000 bill': ELAINE GOLDSMITH-THOMAS on being a Hollywood agent in the 1980s
A s a junior Hollywood agent for the William Morris Agency, in 1987 Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas was told to look after one of its clients, the suave Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, for an evening. 'He suggested dinner and chose Perino's, the most expensive restaurant in Los Angeles,' she recalls. 'Then he started calling friends who joined us. There were pre-dinner drinks, dinner, more drinks, champagne, caviar. By the end there were about 11 people at our table and we closed the restaurant. When the bill finally came it was $4,000, which was a fortune back then. And he just handed it to me and said, 'Thank you.'' This is only one of the stories Goldsmith-Thomas amassed as she worked her way to becoming a high-profile agent in La La Land in the 1980s and 90s, when excess was the norm. She represented Madonna, Julia Roberts, Spike Lee and Nicolas Cage, before become the producing partner of close friend and former client Jennifer Lopez. Now she has written a novel, Climbing In Heels, about a trio of pioneering shoulder-padded female agents vying to sign movie stars in a milieu rife with sex, drugs and harassment. The book was snapped up before publication and sold as a blockbuster series to the US streaming service Peacock by another old friend of Goldsmith-Thomas's, Darren Star, creator of Sex And The City and Emily In Paris. The scandalous happenings it features – from swimming-pool shags to office blowjobs, ruthless client-poaching to cocaine binges – are, it seems, mostly real. As is its depiction of the predatory sexism that pervaded the 'boys' club' of talent agencies back then. 'I didn't want to write a feminist manifesto, that wouldn't be true,' says Goldsmith-Thomas of the book's non-judgmental tone. 'Some of these things happened to me, some I invented, but if anything it's understated – I actually took stuff out because I thought, 'Holy f**k, what am I doing?' If you look at Weinstein and people like him now paying the price, they were trained in the 80s. 'Weinstein was not the exception – he was the rule. It was a wild, wild west, and I didn't know it was bad because that was the world I was in. There were women who were older than me who mentored me but if you complained to them [about sexism or harassment], they'd say, 'Grow a pair.' One used to joke that she'd f**ked her way to the middle.' (Goldsmith-Thomas won't tell me her age but she is now mid 60s.) Early in her career she was dissuaded by a senior woman from delivering a contract to the hotel suite of comedian (and sexual predator) Bill Cosby. She later got into trouble when another client, French-Canadian actor Robert Goulet, began ad-libbing about his ex-wife instead of delivering his opening lines in a play, before telling the 5,000-strong theatre audience in Ohio to 'go f**k yourselves' and walking offstage. The famous people she's prepared to dish dirt on tend to be dead, like Goulet and Sharif, or convicted criminals, like Weinstein and Cosby. About others she's more tight-lipped. The famously eccentric Nic Cage was 'incredibly sweet, brilliantly talented and recognised great material', while the notoriously demanding Madonna was also 'brilliant'. 'People who have achieved greatness,' she adds, 'it tends not to be by accident.' The one person she's open about is Lopez, who she represented as an agent from 1998 before joining her company Nuyorican Productions in 2012, going on to produce movies such as Hustlers. 'When I had breast cancer in 2004, Jennifer flew in for every chemo session and rubbed my bald head,' she says. Goldsmith-Thomas and her husband of almost 30 years, lawyer Daniel Thomas, spent the days before last Christmas with Lopez and her children (the couple don't have kids, partly due to Goldsmith-Thomas's cancer treatment, she says), four months after Lopez's divorce from Ben Affleck. 'She is happy. She is focused and we are shooting a comedy. She's a great mother to her kids and stepmother to Ben's with Jen [Jennifer Garner].' In a recent Instagram post to promote a book-signing, Goldsmith-Thomas tells Lopez she can ask her anything about her career. 'And she goes, 'How much blow [cocaine] did you do?'' the author says, laughing. In her novel, three women – sometimes friends, sometimes frenemies – hustle their way to the top of the agenting tree in diverse ways. Waspy Ella Gaddy rises despite refusing to conform to the norms of her upper-class upbringing, the era's sexual orthodoxy or the agency game. Illegitimate, impoverished Brit Millicent Baxter reinvents herself as exotic Mercedes and seduces her way up the ladder. Jewish Valley girl Beanie Rosen is the most driven and the one whose relationships, while sometimes unwise (and in one case defined by a singular sexual practice), are heartfelt rather than cynical. 'There is a lot of Beanie in me,' admits Goldsmith-Thomas, herself born into a Jewish family in the San Fernando Valley. Beanie's route into showbiz mirrors her own. 'Before I went to college I had a very short actor boyfriend who wanted an agent,' she says. 'I worked in a card shop in the Valley and had the girls who worked there compile a list of agents – 5,000 of them – then spent summer trying to get him signed. I wanted to deliver that 'yes'. You had to befriend the receptionist to get to the secretary to get to the agent. And when they turned me down, I'd invent reasons to keep him on the hook – I was afraid he'd leave me. 'I paid for his headshots, doled out sexual favours to him, eventually got him signed – and he dumped me. It broke my heart, but I never forgot how good it felt when I got that 'yes'. So I applied to the William Morris Agency as a secretary, and when I eventually became an agent the first call I got was from him.' She didn't sign him. Now, 'I see his little bald head on real-estate signs.' In the 1980s, talent agencies were a man's world and a straight white man's world at that. Gay men's careers were curtailed, non-white employees were hired as window-dressing to make non-white clients feel comfortable, and all young women were seen as fair game. 'I don't think we knew it was sexist,' she says. 'We were, 'Wow, they're letting us into the club!' Whatever the rules, we had to play.' Since she was 'curvy' and 'probably reminded them of their moms or sisters', Goldsmith-Thomas relied on drive rather than sex appeal. 'Helping somebody attain their dreams fulfilled me in a way I can't explain. Was there a lot of sex there? I was in monogamous relationships – though, you know, not completely.' She snickers. 'And yes, there were drugs; a parking attendant at William Morris was the biggest dealer.' The book shows the three women growing almost as monstrous as the men; and after a decade at both William Morris then ICM, Goldsmith-Thomas quit agenting to become a producer. 'Was I monstrous? Sure. I was bull-headed. I was strong. I had to be. But I only stopped being an agent because I really wanted to write.' She'd done uncredited script polishes for years, but it was Lopez, 'a dancer who became an actor who became a singer who became a brand, who doesn't see the sky as the limit but as a resting place', who persuaded her to go for it. 'I wanted to write a soapy Valley Of The Dolls, Peyton Place kind of book that would be fun reading yet was true,' she says. The first person she showed the unfinished manuscript to was Darren Star, who she'd known since he was a junior publicist and she was an agent's assistant in the 80s. Four days later he said, 'I'm optioning this.' And four days after that it was sold in a six-figure deal to Universal (with whom Star has a multi-year producing and development deal), then seized on by Peacock. 'We're gonna start writing it in May,' says Goldsmith-Thomas. 'We've had calls from some very big stars.' There has also been a positive response from a demographic that surprised her. 'I'm hearing so much from young women, 21-year-olds who are fascinated by the times and what we did and how we did it, and I guess the sex,' she says, slightly aghast. 'They're going, 'God, it seems so great.' I guess they look at it that way because everything now is so hard and so corporate. Isn't that funny?'
Daily Mail
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Jennifer Lopez's producing partner shares shocking information on Marilyn Monroe's 'murder' in tell-all book
Jennifer Lopez 's producing partner is sharing some of Hollywood's darkest secrets in a new book. Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas has drawn from her years in show business to write her debut novel, Climbing in Heels. On Tuesday she talked to People about the page turner as she offered excerpts. And one of her stories has to do with the death of Marilyn Monroe at age 36 in 1962 as she offered a Hollywood insider's take on it. 'I was working in the theater department and one day an old man came shuffling up and said he was here to see my boss,' she recalled. 'He said to no one in particular, "They killed Marilyn." I said, "Excuse me?" 'He said, "I didn't want it to happen. I really liked the kid. She called me Uncle Milty." But she was just getting out of control ... so they killed her.' When Goldsmith-Thomas later asked her boss who the man was, she showed her a book with photos of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis and JFK's brother-in-law, Peter Lawford and told her. 'Milt Ebbins. There was a time when his name could open any door in Hollywood. He was Peter Lawford's manager. He was the keeper of their secrets,' she said. Milton Keith Ebbins was an American trumpeter, bandleader, songwriter, talent manager and movie/television producer. He began his career as a trumpet player and bandleader in the early-1930s. He died in 2008 at the age of 96. Elaine used to be a secretary before she started producing movies. Her book follows three young women working at one of Tinseltown's biggest talent agencies and some of its biggest stars including Julia Roberts, Madonna and Nicolas Cage. Goldsmith-Thomas, who began her own career at the William Morris Agency in the early 1980s, told Page Six it was like working in the 'Wild Wild West.' 'You know, people like Harvey Weinstein were not the anomaly, they were the norm,' she told the outlet. Details in the book include a male assistant who is allowed to listen in on his boss while he is having sex with actresses auditioning for a role. 'That was a story I had heard from a trainee who was allowed to listen in as his boss, that was his bonus … his little treat. His boss let him listen in as he f***ed actresses.' Goldsmith-Thomas recalled her own close call when she met Bill Cosby. The Cosby Show star threw a luncheon for all the William Morris secretaries to show his thanks for the success of the sitcom. During a brief encounter, the Emmy winner asked her about her future plans. She had recently graduated from college and Goldsmith-Thomas told the comic she would love to represent him one day. 'Later, I got a call from the executive secretary on the first floor saying, "Mr. Cosby was very impressed by you. And we're going to give you contracts to sign, bring them over to his hotel, The Beverly Wilshire,"' she explained. 'And I went into the bathroom, I was really excited getting ready — oh my God, I felt seen, I felt really seen. 'And my friend who worked for the president of the agency happened to be there. I told her and she said, "Don't do it." I said, "Why?" She said, "Don't do it." 'Now she didn't say anything bad would happen … there was just something about the way she said it that frightened me enough that I didn't go.' Cosby has been accused by some 60 women of drugging and raping them. He was convicted of aggravated indecent assault in 2018. The conviction was later overturned, and Cosby, who has denied all the allegations, was released in 2021. Writing the book 'made me look back,' she recalled, revealing that when she was still fresh in the business when agents in Los Angeles would have their secretaries send cocaine cross-country in something called the 'New York pouch that went back and forth to New York overnight.' Sexual harassment was common in the workplace when the Second Act producer was still new in the business. 'I mean the guys in the mail room, they'd go, "Hey, could I have a little keppy?" — meaning, "Can I have a little [oral sex]?" I'd go, "How can you ask me that? We're friends" … "Well, you don't ask, you don't get," they'd say.' Lopez and her future producing partner met when they were both attending a performance of Cabaret starring the late Natasha Richardson in 1998 and the two connected 'on a very visceral level.' Together they have worked on more than a dozen projects together including Hustlers, Kiss of the Spider Woman, which will be released in October, and Office Romance, in which Lopez is starring with Ted Lasso's Brett Goldstein. It was the Hustlers star who insisted Goldsmith-Thomas write the book. 'Jennifer is extraordinary because here's a dancer who became an actor, who became a singer, who became a global brand, who is probably one of the biggest stars on earth and she's incredibly kind,' she said of her friend. 'I felt when I worked with Jennifer that I had a partner — that she put her shoulder next to mine and we'd push. It sounds funny, but the sky wasn't the limit; it was a resting place.'
