"I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers”

By Clover Lalehzar

“You want to be that thing, make yourself that thing.”

One of the many quotables that “super agent’ extraordinaire, Sue Mengers, spouted out during her three decade reign as chief power-broker representing and presiding over Hollywood’s elite. In the stuff of movies, Mengers pulled herself up from her bootstraps, first emigrating from Hitler’s Germany with her family, learning the literal and figurative language of her new home in the US, suffering the suicide of her father, and transforming herself as the self described “fat little German Jewess,” into an iconic larger-than-life Queen Bee that jimmied the lock on Hollywood’s old Boy’s Club. This was a woman who wasn’t having any of that. In her decades representing the likes of Barbra Streisand, Bob Fosse, Mick Jagger, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Gore Vidal, Sidney Lumet, and Ali MacGraw, to name a few, she would go to seismic lengths to get her clients nothing short of everything. In other words, in the dog eat dog world of Tinseltown, Mengers would always eat you last.

For the first time in thirty years, another larger-than-life Hollywood doyenne or “twinkly” (in Mengers’ lingo), Bette Midler, resurfaces on Broadway, as megawatt Mengers, in a star performance. And, just as an aside, I think Sue would think the casting is spot-on. Tony Award winning playwright John Logan’s one-woman show “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers,” is a ninety minute invitation to a straight talk-show-down-sit-down, where Midler’s Sue double fists joints and cigarettes, dishes delectable gossip on the stars, and serves up her unique brand of moxie in getting the job done. In the course of “conversation,” Midler makes sure to underline that Sue never took “no” for an answer. After all, it was aggression that got her noticed, and placed her on top, then it was reputation with a little aggression that kept her intact for years.

Under the expert direction of Joe Mantello, Midler’s Mengers is a joy to watch. This fast-talking, sassy broad that took her formative cues from the likes of Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis in the flickering images of the movies, turned the Hollywood system on its head. In one revealing story, Midler’s Mengers recounts how she was just a little “pisher” from Germany that didn’t speak the language. In the schoolyard, Mengers would gaze upon the popular girl, and toil over how she was to introduce herself. She practiced and practiced the following: “Hello, my name is Sue Mengers,” without a German accent. One day she crossed the schoolyard and introduced herself, with no accent, and perfect diction to the popular girl, and lo and behold, the popular girl was nice and welcoming. Mengers took that lesson well into her adulthood, and into her transformation as super-agent to the stars. The foul-mouthed go-getter often asked herself time and time again what she was doing and how she was doing it. In her own words: “What was I doing? I was crossing the playground.” Everyone - say hello to Sue Mengers.