Sue Mengers, 1932–2011

As an agent to Hollywood’s brightest stars, Sue Mengers often counseled her clients with a famously blunt sense of humor. One of them came to her in a panic after followers of Charles Manson butchered the actress Sharon Tate. “Don’t worry, honey,” Mengers said. “Stars aren’t being murdered, only featured players.”

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Mengers immigrated to the U.S. with her family to escape the Holocaust, and grew up in Utica, N.Y., and the Bronx, said the Los Angeles Times. She began her career as a talent agency receptionist in New York, then worked for theater agents Baum & Newborn and William Morris before becoming an agent herself in 1963. Her first client was “accomplished Broadway star” Julie Harris, for whom Mengers managed to get a specially written episode of the TV show Bonanza.

Mengers’s “next step up” came in 1967, said Variety, when she landed a job at top Hollywood agency Creative Management Associates. She moved to Los Angeles and began representing some of the “mainstays of the New Hollywood of the period”—stars such as Michael Caine, Steve McQueen, and Barbra Streisand, and directors Sidney Lumet and Mike Nichols.

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By the mid-1970s, Mengers wasn’t just the most powerful female agent in Hollywood, said Graydon Carter in VanityFair.com. “She was the town’s most powerful agent, period.” She threw grand parties where studio bigwigs and media moguls could rub shoulders with “single-name stars” like Warren, Jack, Barbra, Elton, Ali, Anjelica, and Bette. It was as if you were “stepping into a Hollywood you imagined, but almost never experienced.”

But Hollywood became more “buttoned-down” in the 1980s, said The New York Times, and the “freewheeling” Mengers suffered for it. She lost some of her biggest stars, including Streisand. Mengers retired in 1986 but remained “the center of a lively show business social set” until her final days. Breaking into the male-oriented world of 1960s Hollywood had required unladylike toughness, Mengers recalled. “I rolled in there like a tank,” she said. “But in any revolution you have to do something to get their attention. Women don’t have to act like that these days.”