The Sherpas of the Subclause

Many a road to megabucks is paved with performance clauses, franchising agreements, copyrights, dramatic rights, first serial rights and other fine-print potholes. Thus prudent travelers have for years sought the guidance of an agent. Today the fast-talking cigar chomper of popular cliche has been replaced by a more sophisticated pathfinder, a Sherpa of the subclause who is a combination salesman, packager, legal scholar, investment counselor and spiritual adviser. The archetype is, of course, the legendary Irving ("Swifty") Lazar, still going strong at age 70, whose clients have ranged from Truman Capote to ex-President Richard Nixon.

A trio of the most successful agents and full-service alchemists following the trail Swifty blazed:

MARVIN JOSEPHSON, 50, appears to be the antithesis of the popular image of an agent, but, unlike many of the modern breed who prefer euphemisms for their trade, he readily admits he is one. Soft-voiced, genial, unhurried and conservatively dapper, he launched International Creative Management in 1955 with $100 in capital and two clients, Robert Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) and Newscaster Charles Collingwood. Since then, Josephson has built I.C.M. into a $30 million-a-year multinational company, embracing agents, a concert-booking bureau and a TV station. His 2,250 clients include Actor Laurence Olivier, Playwright Tennessee Williams, Musician Isaac Stern and Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Josephson's empire has grown so vast that he now spends most of his time delegating and supervising, although he stitches together immensely complicated deals (current project: a sequel to Gone With the Wind). "His astuteness is with procedure, and he has an accounting machine in his head," says Producer Robert Evans. A few clients still receive personal treatment, including Steve McQueen, who had left Creative Management Associates before it was acquired by I.C.M. Josephson lured him to I.C.M., suggesting the possibility of his playing a latter-day Rhett Butler. Though Josephson is often seen watering his clients at the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge, he shuns Hollywood glitter and lives quietly in a Manhattan penthouse with his second wife. He strenuously avoids personal publicity, preferring to maintain the I.C.M. image of dignity and professionalism. Says longtime client Harry Reasoner of ABC: "He's concerned about your progress, but he knows when to tell you to shut up."

SUE MENGERS, 39, is vice president and resident Hollywood flesh peddler for I.C.M., but she might as well work for Ma Bell. In her Beverly Hills palazzo, the silken-haired, avocado-shaped agent has 14 phones and a WATS line on which she curses and cajoles (in her soft little-girl voice) at least 80 people a day. After her 1973 marriage to Screenwriter Jean-Claude Tramont, Mengers reports, she spent most of their honeymoon in telephone booths on various Greek islands. 'Im a hustler," she admits, but she does not like to be called a "packager." She considers herself instead a "liaison between the motion picture community and the artist." Mengers' well-pruned roster of artists includes Candice Bergen, Peter Bogdanovich, Gene Hackman, Ali MacGraw, Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds and Barbra Streisand, whose Mengers-arranged role in A Star Is Born last year earned the Brillo-headed diva about $10 million, minus the agency's 10%. (The story goes that when a frightened Streisand wanted to leave Hollywood after the murder of Sharon Tate, Mengers calmed her down. Stars were not being murdered, Mengers reassured her, only "featured players.") Mengers slyly arranged for Director Mike Nichols to "discover" Client Ann-Margret by inviting them both to one of her frequent dinner parties. "If a person comes to my house for dinner, he has to return my call the next day," she says. A former $135-a-week secretary for the William Morris Agency in New York, Mengers now makes more than $300,000 a year, wields a $40,000 expense account, and has just about everything else she wants. Except George C. Scott as a client, and a body like Candice Bergen's.

MARK McCORMACK, 46, has a special gift: he turns muscle into gold off the playing field, for which he takes a hefty 15% to 40% of his client's earnings. His Cleveland-based International Management Group represents 250 golfers (Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player), tennis stars (Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg) and other athletes, has some 300 employees and last year grossed $35 million. Arnold Palmer, one of McCormack's first clients and closest friends, now earns about $350,000 a year, only some 5% of it from golfing. McCormack can even make financial champions out of novices --like Laura Baugh, a photogenic amateur golfer whom he sent off to Japan at age 17; that year she won no matches but earned nearly $100,000 from endorsements, product tie-ins and television appearances. Still, he is not a man of infinite patience and readily shucks clients who are uncooperative or past their prime. A former college golfer turned lawyer and the father of three, McCormack, almost singlehanded, persuaded the networks to televise professional tennis by lining up sponsors himself, and he is the promotional genius behind such TV sweat derbies as Celebrity Superstars and the N.F.L. Arm-Wrestling Championship--all of which are well-stocked with I.M.G. clients. "I'm not an agent," says McCormack. "I'm an engineer of careers."

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