BERNIE Brillstein, who died Thursday at age 77, did a thousand things in show business, but he was one of a kind: agent, manager, producer, executive, raconteur, confidant, great source for lowly reporters in search of a good quote or a great tip.
I first met him years ago on the set of a movie that was going down the drain, but you'd hardly know it from Bernie's demeanor. He always had an easy smile, a funny remark and the attitude that whatever was going wrong couldn't possibly spoil his day.
When I started writing a column, he'd take me to lunch or call me with suggestions, quips and encouragement, as in: "Hey, you haven't written anything bad about Mike Ovitz for weeks. What are you waiting for?"
For years, Bernie had a regular monthly lunch at Hillcrest Country Club with two old pals, Jerry Seinfeld's managers George Shapiro and Howard West, who got their start, with Bernie, in the William Morris mailroom in the mid-1950s. I was occasionally invited as a guest. Everything was off the record -- although, ironically, they had a tape recorder on the table, saving everything for posterity. As Bernie joked: "We're getting so old that soon this will be the only way we'll be able to remember all the stories." I hope the tapes are being well preserved -- they'll be a treasure trove for some future showbiz historian.
At lunch, Bernie always had plenty to say about the current state of affairs, firm in his opinion about which studio chief was a total moron, which agency was in total disarray and what network chief wouldn't know a hit show if it bit him on the tuchis. But I especially loved hearing tales from the Morris mailroom, which for decades was the launching pad for all of Hollywood's kingpins, including David Geffen, Barry Diller, Ovitz, and current CAA barons Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane. (With loads of help from Bernie, David Rensin wrote a fabulous book in 2003, "The Mailroom: Hollywood History From the Bottom Up," that is an oral history of the chicanery and escapades that occurred on the premises.)
Every day in the mailroom was an adventure, whether you were delivering a package to Zsa Zsa Gabor's apartment (she would often come to the door in a negligee) or rushing across the street -- as Bernie once did -- to buy the young Elvis Presley a sweater when he was stuck in a chilly dressing room waiting to appear on a variety show.
Back in the 1950s, WMA mailroom flunkies made a pittance, but somehow Bernie managed to live like a prince.
