An Accidental Career

Abstract

By the 1960–1961 Broadway season, Audrey Wood had been a successful agent for almost 25 years. Her morning routine rarely varied. Whether she was traveling from her house in Westport or from the Royalton Hotel on West Forty-fourth Street, she arrived at her office at MCA where she put down her briefcase filled with scripts that she had read the previous evening. She returned “urgent” calls, read letters and contracts demanding her “immediate” attention, and noted “requests” for meetings during the day. The most time-consuming of these routines were the contracts that required careful study. She read and initialed each page and promptly returned them to the agency’s legal department. Then she turned her attention to her clients’ productions that were in various stages of preparation for Broadway.

But I have been an agent for a long time now and I intend to continue for as long as my sense of humor stays with me.¹