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    Jay Kanter, Agent for Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, Dies at 97

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    Later a studio executive, he was among the last of the power brokers who dominated Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century.Jay Kanter, whose long career as an agent to the stars — including Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly — and later as an influential studio executive made him one of the last of the generation of power brokers who dominated Hollywood in the late 20th century, died on Aug. 6 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 97.His son Adam Kanter confirmed his death.An acolyte of the superagent Lew Wasserman, Mr. Kanter was renowned as much for the career he led as for the stories people told about him.He was a junior agent at MCA, Mr. Wasserman’s agency, in 1948 when he was asked to retrieve Mr. Brando from the train station.Mr. Kanter took Mr. Brando to his aunt’s house, and the next morning to a meeting with the director Fred Zinnemann, who wanted to cast Mr. Brando in his next movie, “The Men.” Apparently Mr. Kanter made a good impression, because when he suggested that they proceed to MCA to meet some of its agents, he recalled, Mr. Brando replied: “I don’t have to meet anybody. You’re my agent.”Mr. Brando’s Hollywood career was on the verge of stardom. And now, so was Mr. Kanter’s.“Suddenly I was getting all these calls from these heads of studios,” he recalled in a 2017 interview, and within a few years he represented a long line of A-list talent.The Kanter-Brando story became a bit of Hollywood lore, so much so that it provided the inspiration for a 1989 sitcom, “The Famous Teddy Z,” about a Hollywood star who picks out a mailroom clerk (played by Jon Cryer) as his agent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Richard Leibner, Agent for Top Broadcast Journalists, Dies at 85

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      His negotiations led to Dan Rather’s elevation from “60 Minutes” to anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and sent Diane Sawyer from “60 Minutes” to ABC.Richard Leibner, a powerful agent whose firm brokered contracts for many of the biggest names in television news, including Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Anderson Cooper, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer and Steve Kroft, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.His son Jonathan said the cause was kidney cancer.Mr. Leibner’s firm, N.S. Bienstock — named for one of its founders, Nathan Bienstock — represented hundreds of anchors, reporters, producers and others in network and local television news.The negotiation that grabbed the biggest headlines was for Mr. Rather, then one of the star correspondents of the CBS News program “60 Minutes.”Between late 1979 and early 1980, Mr. Leibner (pronounced LEEB-ner) parlayed interest in Mr. Rather as the evening anchor from all three network news divisions: ABC News, whose president, Roone Arledge, was trying to raise his third-place division’s profile; NBC News, where the evening anchor John Chancellor was hoping to change to a commentary role; and CBS News, where Walter Cronkite had been the evening anchor since 1962.“The Rather situation was tough and sensitive because CBS News knew something had to happen after Cronkite,” Mr. Leibner told Manhattan, inc. magazine in 1986. “Cronkite had told them, contrary to what anybody had ever inferred, that he wanted off. He was tired of it.”Mr. Leibner surprised Mr. Rather by telling him that he thought it was possible to get him as much as $6 million over five years. In the end, CBS agreed to pay him what has been variously reported as $2.2 million a year and $8 million over five years. He succeeded Mr. Cronkite on the “CBS Evening News” in early 1981.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Norby Walters, 91, Dies; Music and Sports Agent Who Ran Afoul of the Law

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      He ran a highly successful booking agency, but his secret contacts with college athletes led to convictions (later reversed) for racketeering and fraud.Norby Walters, a booking agent for some of the country’s top disco, R&B, funk and hip-hop artists whose aggressive leap in the 1980s into signing college athletes to secret contracts before they turned pro led to legal problems, died on Dec. 10 in Burbank, Calif. He was 91.His son Gary confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility.Mr. Walters found his footing in show business through his ownership of restaurants, pizzerias, mambo joints and nightclubs, including the Norby Walters Supper Club on the East Side of Manhattan, near the Copacabana, which he opened in 1966.He walked away from the club business two years later after a customer at the supper club, shot two mobsters dead in front of about 50 people.“Everybody hit the floor,” Mr. Walters told The New York Times in 2016. “And this guy was very calm about it. He sat down at the bar, put the pistol down and waited to be taken.”Mr. Walters closed the club soon after.He switched to booking musical acts into nightclubs, lounges and hotels, which proved lucrative. Over the next two decades, the client list of Norby Walters Associates (later called General Talent International) included Gloria Gaynor, Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Commodores, Luther Vandross, the Four Tops, Run-DMC, Kool & the Gang, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy.In the early 1980s, Mr. Walters glimpsed a new opportunity in the top tier of college football players. With a partner, Lloyd Bloom, he established World Sports & Entertainment. From 1984 to 1987, the two men signed dozens of athletes to secret contracts that included inducements like cash, loans and cars in exchange for giving their agency exclusive rights to handle their future negotiations with N.F.L. teams, according to the 1988 federal indictment against them.Most of the inducements violated National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations and would have rendered the athletes ineligible to compete had their schools known about them. But Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom said their lawyers had assured them that the contracts were legal even if the players were still with their college teams.The indictment charged Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom with conspiring with the athletes to conceal the payments by having them agree to postdated contracts that appeared to have been signed after their last collegiate games.“The crime alleged that he conspired with students to steal their educations, which was preposterous, since the schools had little concern about whether they got an education,” Gary Walters said in a phone interview. He added, “Norby wasn’t doing anything different in the sports business than he did in the music business: giving fair compensation to players who had been denied it.”The government also charged that the contracts were backed by threats of violence, some involving the mobster Michael Franzese, a member of the Colombo crime family. When most of the athletes decided they did not want Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom to represent them but kept the cars and the money anyway, the indictment accused them of threatened to have their legs broken and threatened their families with physical harm.Gary Walters said his father denied having threatened anyone and also denied that Mr. Franzese had any involvement in his sports business.Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom were convicted of mail fraud and racketeering in 1989. Mr. Walters was sentenced to five years in prison and Mr. Bloom to three, but neither served a day.An appeals court reversed the racketeering convictions in 1990, ruling that the trial judge had not instructed the jury that the two men’s actions had been guided by their lawyers’ advice that the signings were legal.In 1993, the mail fraud convictions were also overturned.“Walters is by all accounts a nasty and untrustworthy fellow,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in the 1993 ruling, “but the prosecutor did not prove that his efforts to circumvent the N.C.A.A.’s rules amounted to mail fraud.”Mr. Bloom was shot to death at his home in Malibu, Calif., later that year.By then, Mr. Walters had retired from his music and sports businesses, which had been damaged by the federal investigation, and remade himself as the host of celebrity parties and poker games.Norbert Meyer was born on April 20, 1932, in Brooklyn. His father, Yosele Chezchonovitch, a Polish immigrant, served in the Army (where he changed his name to Joseph Meyer) during World War I and later became a diamond courier and the owner of a nightclub in Brooklyn and a sideshow attraction at Coney Island. His mother, Florence (Golub) Meyer, was a homemaker.“I traveled all over the country with my father’s freak shows,” Mr. Walters told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It was all a scam. There were no freaks, the alligator boy was a poor fellow with a horrible skin condition, the girl with no body was done with mirrors, the turtle girl was a dwarf with a costume.”Norby studied business at Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1951 and served in the Army until 1953. He and his brother, Walter, took over their father’s club that year and renamed it Norby & Walter’s Bel Air.On opening night, when Norby greeted customers by saying, “Hello, I’m Norby,” some responded by asking, “Oh are you Norby Walters?” When the brothers stepped outside, they saw that the neon sign outside the club did not have the necessary ampersand. It said, “Norby Walters Bel Air Club.”“I’ve been Norby Walters ever since,” he told The Atlanta Constitution in 1987. “My brother hated me for it.” His brother, who became known as Walter B. Walters, died in 2004.Norby Walters carried the name — which he eventually changed legally — through his restaurant, club, music and sports careers, and into his final chapter.From 1990 to 2017, he organized an annual Oscar viewing party, which he called Night of 100 Stars, in hotel ballrooms in Beverly Hills. It drew stars like Jon Voight, Shirley Jones, Charles Bronson, Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau. He was also the host of a regular poker party at his condos in Southern California, where the regulars included Milton Berle, Bryan Cranston, Richard Lewis, Jason Alexander, James Woods, Charles Durning, Mimi Rogers and Alex Trebek.The final chapter of Mr. Walters’s life included a regular celebrity poker party. At one such party, the attendees included (standing, from left) his wife, Irene; his son Gary; the actors Dan Lauria, Lou Diamond Phillips and Bruce Davison; and Mr. Walters himself, as well as (seated) the actors Ed Asner, Mimi Rogers, Jason Alexander, James Woods and Kristanna Loken.via Walters Family“It was $2 a hand,” Robert Wuhl, the actor and comedian, said by phone. “So the most anybody lost was $250 and the most anybody won was $300 to $400. It was all about the kibitzing. Buddy Hackett would come to kibitz.”The Oscar party was not as hot a ticket as those hosted by Vanity Fair magazine or Elton John, but it was more accessible. In 2016, for $1,000 a seat or $25,000 for a V.I.P. table package, a civilian without show business credentials could be admitted and hang out with celebrities.In addition to his son Gary, Mr. Walters is survived by two other sons, Steven and Richard. His wife, Irene (Solowitz) Walters, died in 2022.Nearly 30 years after his legal problems caused him to retire, Mr. Walters said he understood his place in the Hollywood pantheon.“As I always say to my wife,” he told The Times in 2016, a few days before his penultimate Oscar party, “‘I used to be important.’” More

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      The Managers Who Helped Make Travis Kelce a Celebrity

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      In the only recent year in which Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs weren’t playing in the Super Bowl, the N.F.L. star was driving around Los Angeles in early February with his business managers, André and Aaron Eanes, marveling at billboards featuring Dwayne Johnson, the actor and entertainer better known as the Rock.“Man, I don’t think I’ll ever be as famous as the Rock,” Mr. Kelce said.His co-managers looked at each other. “We’re like, Yes, you can,” André Eanes said.The twin brothers had known since Mr. Kelce was at the University of Cincinnati that the 6-foot-5 athletic star with the Marvel-character physique, blue eyes and affable charm had crossover potential.But let’s be honest. Nobody imagined this.This was a year even The Rock might envy. Mr. Kelce, a tight end, won the Super Bowl (his second) in February. In March, he hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He’s starred in seven national television commercials. The podcast he co-hosts with his brother, Jason, is among the most popular on Spotify. He launched a clothing line with his team.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Rich Paul, N.B.A. Power Broker, Growing Up and Finding Peace

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      When Rich Paul considers his life now, he sometimes thinks how far it seems from his childhood, growing up Black in a particularly dangerous part of Cleveland.For the past two decades, Mr. Paul, 42, has been a polarizing force in basketball. A power broker in a specialized world, he is slim, 5-foot-8 and sharply dressed, often appearing on the margins of photos snapped at marquee events.Many saw him as LeBron James’s confidant, and later as his agent. But as he built a sports agency, Klutch Sports Group, that rivaled and irritated more established companies, he has worked to separate his identity from that of Mr. James’s.Mr. Paul is now a courtside fixture at N.B.A. games. He collects art. He lives in Beverly Hills. And he is in a yearslong relationship with the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Adele. Mr. Paul has helped N.B.A. players shift power away from teams and to themselves, like when he maneuvered a 2019 trade that sent Anthony Davis to the Los Angeles Lakers to join Mr. James.On Tuesday, Roc Lit 101, an imprint of Random House, will publish his memoir, “Lucky Me.” It is a bid by Mr. Paul to both own his past — growing up with a mother who battled addiction and acknowledging his own drug dealing — and celebrate the way his difficult upbringing, and in particular his father, prepared him for his future.Recently, at a restaurant in a five-star hotel in Midtown Manhattan, with sculptures of tropical birds in the light fixtures, Mr. Paul mused about his hope that athletes would focus on the peace of mind that can come with real financial security, not the fleeting pleasure of social media attention and the temporary financial windfalls that come with it. The idea of finding peace set off another thought.“I come from a place where every day is chaotic. Every. Day,” Mr. Paul said, his voice rising as he began tapping hard on the table to emphasize his words. “Sirens, all day long. You have to wear headphones. I should have been the inventor of Beats, as many sirens as I had to listen to, and yells and cussing outs and everything.”After a moment, he returned to his original point.“These kids, they just want clout,” Mr. Paul said. “I don’t understand it.”One of the main themes of the memoir is the influence Mr. Paul’s father had on him.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIt’s why, he said, he was so passionate about becoming an agent. He had heard so much about players being broke despite initially getting lucrative contracts.“There’s no line down the street to get to knowledge,” Mr. Paul said. “It tells you a lot.”In thinking about Mr. Paul’s memoir, Chris Jackson, the publisher and editor in chief of Roc Lit 101, said he was interested in Mr. Paul as part of a generation of Black men “whose formative experiences were during that period that was defined by crack cocaine and the post-civil rights cocktail of white flight, urban abandonment and families that really struggled to stay together.“And how out of that kind of experience of survival, so much was created, and how the entire country was shifted by people who were kind of forged in that.”The broad strokes of Mr. Paul’s back story have been recounted before, the way his mother had struggled with drug addiction and his father, who had another family, raised him in the family’s corner store. How a chance meeting with Mr. James at an airport in Akron, Ohio, turned into a partnership that changed the course of his life.In the memoir, which was written with the journalist Jesse Washington and features a foreword by Mr. James, Mr. Paul goes further than ever before. He depicts in heartbreaking detail the ways his mother’s absences forced her children to act older than their ages, contrasting those stories with her energy and charisma when she was clean.“It was therapeutic for me, but at the same time I wanted to make sure that people understood it wasn’t all bad,” Mr. Paul said.He writes that his father taught him discipline and how to run a business. Not all of his father’s business dealings were strictly legal, but Mr. Paul said he always ran them with honor. His father’s advice is sprinkled throughout the memoir, as are the ways Mr. Paul learned to make money and earn respect. Dressing well was always a big part of that.He writes of the devastation he felt at losing his father, whom he calls his “moral compass,” in 2000, which led to him selling cocaine for the first time. He shares his unease at selling hard drugs, which had shattered his mother, but said that he was swept up by a desire to compete and win.During lunch in Manhattan, Mr. Paul said he hadn’t felt comfortable publicly sharing stories about selling drugs before, though he knew drugs weren’t exclusive to his community.“I’ve talked about it with clients, just in conversation, and they resonate with it because when you grew up how we grew up it’s in your family,” he said. Two days later, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn, a car picked Mr. Paul up outside a townhouse to take him from one podcast taping to another. (Near the end of the first show, Mr. Paul had been asked to name his favorite Adele song, but, having some editorial control, he requested a different question.)“I try to keep it as private as I possibly can,” Mr. Paul said of his relationship with Adele.Lauren Bacho/NBAE, via Getty ImagesDuring the drive, Mr. Paul made phone calls. He pitched a client to a shoe company, and then called a friend to plan where they would watch the Cleveland Browns game later that day.Suddenly his eyes widened in happiness as he looked at his phone.“A couple got married in my shoes!” he said. Mr. Paul, who has a shoe collaboration with New Balance, showed a photo to a Klutch employee acting as his chief of staff.He FaceTimed with Adele to see how her morning had gone. Then he chose a different watch and different Klutch Athletics sweatshirt, the clothing brand he has created with New Balance, for the next taping.Asked if he has a stylist, Mr. Paul proudly said no.“I used to style LeBron his rookie year,” he said, adding: “I could be anything. I could be a stylist, music executive, coach.”Mr. James was a teenager when he met Mr. Paul, who had a jersey resale business sometimes run out of the trunk of his car. Soon, Mr. James was paying him $48,000 a year, confident Mr. Paul was worth the investment. Mr. Paul watched Mr. James’s career unfold. Then, when Mr. James hired Creative Artists Agency, one of the most powerful agencies in sports and entertainment, Mr. Paul began working for the agency. He helped recruit clients, saying he knew most agents “couldn’t do it.” Mr. Paul was dismissed by some who believed his success came solely because of his friendship with LeBron James.Jim Poorten/NBAE, via Getty ImagesHe met business moguls, from Warren Buffett to Jay-Z, and asked plenty of questions. His friendly boldness attracted people.“Flawlessly confident,” said Rich Kleiman, the longtime manager for the N.B.A. star Kevin Durant, and a founder of Mr. Durant’s media company, Boardroom. Mr. Kleiman was working with Jay-Z when he met Mr. Paul, and saw in him hints of Jay-Z’s self assurance. “There’s a way to be confident where you can make anyone believe you.”When Mr. Paul started Klutch Sports in 2012, nine years after Mr. James’s N.B.A. career began, Mr. James and three other players immediately became clients.Chatter quickly followed — in the news media, primarily anonymous — from other agents questioning Mr. Paul’s qualifications. He had never received a college degree and they viewed him as a lucky member of a star athlete’s entourage.Maverick Carter understands. He grew up in Akron with Mr. James, has handled his business affairs for years and is the chief executive of The SpringHill Company, an entertainment and production company he founded with Mr. James. For a while, he said, it could seem like his “first name was ‘LeBron’s’ and my last name was ‘friend.’” “It’s straight-up disrespectful when they say, ‘Rich Paul is only successful because he’s doing this with LeBron,’” Mr. James wrote in the foreword to Mr. Paul’s memoir. “That’s like saying I don’t demand the same excellence from my partners that I demand of myself, or that Rich’s other clients don’t think for themselves.”Mr. Paul doesn’t argue that he didn’t benefit from his friendship with Mr. James. He just thinks that if he hadn’t been a young Black man getting career help from a powerful friend, and an athlete at that, his story would have been framed differently.Still, Mr. James is entering his 21st N.B.A. season, which means life after LeBron James is in the not-too-distant future for Klutch Sports Group.The agency now has 198 clients between the N.B.A., W.N.B.A., N.F.L. and athletes looking for deals related to their name, image and likeness. Klutch has partnered with United Talent Agency, and Mr. Paul is the co-head of UTA’s sports division.The agency still attracts defectors from other agencies, but it experiences ebbs and flows. Three prominent players’ relationships with Klutch ended this year — Ben Simmons of the Brooklyn Nets, Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves and OG Anunoby of the Toronto Raptors.Some N.B.A. agents have quietly admired what Mr. Paul has accomplished, while others find him too aggressive in pursuing clients from other agencies.Mr. Paul said he was proud that many of his clients began their careers with other agents. He sees it as a sign of his superior ability to connect with players.“This is one thing my dad always taught us: No matter what somebody else is doing to you or done to you, that don’t mean you follow suit,” Mr. Paul said. “You stay the course. You do what you know is right.”There are those who don’t like the credit he gets for fostering an era of player empowerment in the N.B.A. Mr. Paul is known for aggressively advocating for his clients’ interests, even if that means demanding a trade while they are under contract, but he doesn’t shy away from telling them to pull back when he finds their wishes unrealistic.Mr. Paul’s Klutch Sports Group has nearly 200 clients.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAs he navigates the current landscape of athlete management, he worries about the way players and their parents think about branding.“There’s nothing wrong with being a great basketball player and make all the money you can being a great basketball player,” Mr. Paul said. “Because I look at it this way: Being a great basketball player, being able to make four or five, $600 million playing a game of basketball is no different than building a business and selling it.”Mr. Paul’s career has kept him close to superstardom. But recently, his relationship with Adele has thrust him into a spotlight that isn’t always comfortable.“I try to keep it as private as I possibly can,” he said. When he and Adele began attending N.B.A. games together, dozens of search engine optimized headlines followed, asking: “Who is Adele’s boyfriend, Rich Paul?” Last month she even referred to Mr. Paul as her husband while speaking to a fan.“I’m in a place now where I’d rather she be happy than me,” Mr. Paul said. “Not that I don’t want to be happy, I want it to sound the right way. Just understanding the importance of someone that you are involved with, that you’re dating and that you’re spending your time with, that you may love. You understand the importance of them and their happiness.”Love has never been an easy subject for him. His parents never told him they loved him, though he says he has no doubt they did.Now, he said, he makes a point to tell his three children he loves them. It is one lesson he didn’t learn from his father because vulnerability was dangerous when he was growing up.It is one illustration of how different his life is from the one he lived growing up. But he doesn’t want anyone to forget how it started. More

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      in Movies

      George Shapiro, Talent Manager Who Pushed for ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 91

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      He left his job as an agent in the 1970s to guide the careers of Jerry Seinfeld, Carl Reiner and other comics.George Shapiro, an ebullient Hollywood talent manager who nurtured and oversaw the careers of comic personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman and Carl Reiner, died on May 26 at his home in the Beverly Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 91.His family announced the death in a statement.Mr. Shapiro was most closely associated with Mr. Seinfeld, whom he signed as a client soon after watching him perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1980. He lobbied NBC to build a series around him and was an executive producer of the hugely popular “Seinfeld” sitcom.“He was the only person to read every draft of every episode of the series and was very critical as they went from first draft to shooting draft,” Mr. Seinfeld said in a phone interview. “He was the only one who really knew what we were doing.”He added: “The bond between George and I was, we thought show business was the greatest thing invented by man, and we couldn’t get enough.”Mr. Shapiro was also an executive producer of Mr. Seinfeld’s Netflix series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” which is on hiatus.A schmoozer who loved to be on sets, Mr. Shapiro was a partner for more than 40 years with his childhood friend Howard West in their talent management firm Shapiro/West & Associates.As managers, they oversaw and protected their clients interests by being executive producers of various projects, including “The Last Remake of Beau Geste” (1977), starring and co-written by Marty Feldman; “Summer Rental” (1985) and “Sibling Rivalry” (1990), which Mr. Reiner directed; and two TV specials starring Mr. Kaufman.Mr. Shapiro first watched Mr. Kaufman perform at the Improv comedy club in Los Angeles in 1975 and was impressed by his bizarre, idiosyncratic act. He soon signed him and persuaded him to join the cast of the sitcom “Taxi” in 1978, despite the comedian’s reluctance.“They already had the character of Latka. And, of course, Andy did this Foreign Man character, so it was a perfect match,” Mr. Shapiro told Newsday in 1999. “Taxi,” too, was a hit.Mr. Shapiro and Mr. West were executive producers of “Man on the Moon” (1999), which starred Jim Carrey as Mr. Kaufman. (Mr. Kaufman died in 1984 at 35.) Danny DeVito, a producer of the film, played Mr. Shapiro, and Mr. Shapiro had a role as a club owner who had once fired Mr. Kaufman.Early in the film, Mr. DeVito tells Mr. Carrey, “You’re insane, but you also may be brilliant.”Mr. Shapiro’s other clients included Robert Wuhl and the producer and writer Bill Lawrence, who is known for the TV series “Spin City” and “Scrubs.”George Larry Shapiro was born on May 18, 1932, in the Bronx. His father, Ira, was a furrier. his mother, Sylvia (Lebost) Shapiro, was a social activist. George’s time at P.S. 80 in the Bronx, where he met Mr. West, was the subject of two documentaries, “The Bronx Boys,” in 2003, and “The Bronx Boys Still Playing at 80,” 10 years later.As a youngster, he loved comedies, including those made by Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. “I sat in the theater and felt like someone was tickling me,” Mr. Shapiro said in a Television Academy interview in 2007.He got a stronger whiff of show business as a teenager while working as a summer lifeguard at the Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos, where writers like Neil Simon; actors like Dick Shawn, Carol Burnett and Pat Carroll; and the director and choreographer Herb Ross created revues and other shows. Agents traveled from Manhattan to scout talent on weekends — the sort of future that appealed to Mr. Shapiro.“I said, ‘This is your job?” he said in the Television Academy interview. “To watch the show, to have a nice dinner, to come to a resort with a lake? I have to look into that.”After graduating in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree from what is now New York University’s College of Business and Public Administration, Mr. Shapiro served in the Army for two years. He considered a career in social work and sales — his older brother, Don, was a salesman in Texas and offered him a job — but got a mailroom position at the William Morris Agency in Manhattan with help from Mr. Reiner, his uncle.He was soon promoted to agent, with a salary of $38 a week, before eventually moving to the company’s Los Angeles office, where he specialized in packaging mid-1960s TV series like “Gomer Pyle — USMC” and “That Girl” with the actors, writer and directors represented by William Morris.But Mr. Shapiro disliked being responsible for so many clients, and so in 1973 he started his own management firm to focus on a few preferred ones. Mr. West, with whom he had worked at William Morris, soon joined him, and they ran Shapiro/West & Associates until Mr. West’s death in 2015.To push for a sitcom for Mr. Seinfeld, Mr. Shapiro sent numerous letters to Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment. The nudging eventually led to a meeting with Mr. Tartikoff and other network executives at which Mr. Seinfeld laid down a firm rule.“Jerry made one thing clear,” Mr. Shapiro told the Television Academy. “He said, ‘I’m not going to play a shoe salesman or an accountant or a father with a job.’ And he came up with the premise of the series, that he would play himself.”In recent years, Mr. Shapiro produced “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast” (2017), a documentary in which Mr. Reiner talked to nonagenarians like Betty White and Dick Van Dyke, and “The Super Bob Einstein Movie” (2021), about the comic actor and writer known for his ongoing television portrayal of Super Dave Osborne, a hapless parody of a daredevil.Mr. Shapiro is survived by his former wife, Melody (Sherr) Shapiro, from whom he was divorced; his daughters, Carrie Shapiro Fuentes and Stefanie Shapiro; a son, Danny; five grandchildren; and his brother. His marriage to Diane Barnett ended with her death in 2005.Mr. Reiner’s son Rob Reiner, the actor and director, said Mr. Shapiro had been a nurturer, professionally and personally.“He loved my dad, he looked up to him — he was like a father to him,” said Mr. Reiner, whose company, Castle Rock Entertainment, produced “Seinfeld.” “George loved being around my dad, and when he started getting older, he’d come over to the house and walk him around the block. That’s the thing you need to know about George: He took care of everybody.” More

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      in Television

      Marvin Josephson, Who Scored Big Deals for Stars, Dies at 95

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      He started small as a talent agent in 1955, with an unknown kiddie TV performer who would soon become Captain Kangaroo.Marvin Josephson’s beginnings as a talent agent in the mid-1950s were humble, to say the least. His main client — practically his only client then, in fact — was Bob Keeshan, the children’s television performer who, with Mr. Josephson’s help, would become known far and wide as Captain Kangaroo.It wasn’t much of a foothold, but it was enough to start a career that would make Mr. Josephson a major behind-the-scenes force representing actors, directors, authors and more. In 1977, 22 years after he started his personal management agency and two years after his thriving company established a subsidiary called International Creative Management, which became an industry giant, a newspaper headline neatly summed up his reach: “Want to Make a Million? Hire Marvin Josephson.”He died at 95 on May 17 at his home in Manhattan. His daughter Nancy Josephson said the cause was complications of pneumonia.In a field where Michael Ovitz and other super-agents became almost as famous as the people they represented, Mr. Josephson kept an aggressively low profile. In 1991, when Newsday published a profile of him, he agreed to provide a photograph to go with it only if the article specified that he had declined to be interviewed in depth for the piece.“I am not someone who believes that an agent should get lots of publicity,” he told the newspaper, about the only thing he did tell it. “As a general rule, I believe the clients deserve the attention.”As his business grew, Mr. Josephson negotiated personally on behalf of only a select few of those clients, although he was adept at doing so. The “Want to Make a Million?” article in 1977 was occasioned by an estimated $5 million deal he had just struck on behalf of Henry A. Kissinger for his memoirs. He also personally handled deals for Steve McQueen, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, Margaret Thatcher and others.Mr. Josephson was equally adept at acquiring other firms, some of them much larger than his own.“He’s more sponge than agent,” a 1969 article in The Los Angeles Times began, reporting about Mr. Josephson’s acquisition of the Ashley-Famous Agency — “a case of an ant eating a lion,” as the article said.He was also skilled at anticipating public tastes. Josephson Associates, his umbrella company, represented the producers, the director (Steven Spielberg), the writer and the screenwriter of “Jaws,” the top-grossing film of 1975. And, as The New York Times reported in June 1977, the firm had high hopes for another movie, released weeks earlier, that had been written and directed by another Josephson client, George Lucas. The movie was “Star Wars.”“Marvin is clearly one of the most important people in American entertainment,” the publisher Peter Osnos told Newsday in an interview for that 1991 profile, “but unlike many of the great powers, he has managed to protect his privacy.”Marvin Josephson was born on March 6, 1927, in Atlantic City, N.J. His parents, Joseph and Eva Rivka (Rounick) Josephson, ran a dress shop.He graduated from high school in Atlantic City, served in the Navy at the close of World War II, earned a bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and, in 1952, obtained a law degree at New York University. He went on to work in the legal department at CBS.“Three years of writing contracts convinced him that the pickings would be greener if he represented talent,” as Newsday put it, and in 1955 Mr. Josephson started his own personal management company. One potential source of business, he thought, might be the broadcast journalists he had come to know at CBS: When walking in Manhattan with one or another of them, passers-by would often stop to say hello and sometimes ask for an autograph.“They thought of themselves as newsmen,” he told The Miami Herald in 1984, “but they were becoming celebrities, or stars.”Charles Collingwood, the CBS newsman, became his first client, and others followed, including Chet Huntley and, years later, Barbara Walters. Then there was his other foundational client, Mr. Keeshan.At the time, 1955, Mr. Keeshan was on a local kiddie show, “Tinker’s Workshop,” on WABC-TV in New York. Mr. Josephson wanted to move him and the show to CBS, but WABC argued that the station, not Mr. Keeshan, owned the program.“Marvin went and saw the station manager and played him beautifully,” Mr. Keeshan, who died in 2004, told Newsday in 1991. “He said to him, ‘You know that the talent isn’t important, so what if Keeshan gives you the rights to “Tinker’s Workshop” and you let him go?’ The station manager said, ‘Gee, do you think Keeshan will go for that?,’ and Marvin said, ‘Maybe.’”The deal was struck, and “Tinker’s Workshop” was soon a footnote. At CBS in October 1955, Mr. Keeshan started “Captain Kangaroo,” which became the touchstone children’s program of generations.Marvin Josephson Associates, as Mr. Josephson’s company came to be called, didn’t stop growing for decades. In 1971 the company went public and was renamed Josephson International Inc. In 1975 it established ICM Artists to represent classical musicians; Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman were among its clients.Mr. Josephson took the company private again in 1988, and through the 1990s his subsidiaries represented countless A-list actors and writers. In the 1990s, he handed off many of his management duties to others, including his daughter Nancy. A controlling interest in the company was sold in 2005 to a private investor, Suhail Rizvi.Mr. Josephson married Ingrid Bergh in 1950. They divorced in 1970. In 1973 he married Tina Chen, who survives him. In addition to her and his daughter Nancy, who is from his first marriage, he is also survived by two other children from that marriage, Celia Josephson and Claire Josephson; two children from his marriage to Ms. Chen, YiLing Chen-Josephson and YiPei Chen-Josephson; a brother, Jack; 16 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another son, Joseph, from his first marriage, died. More