LOREE'S BOYS

Mega-haired Loree Rodkin is the den mother to the Brat Pack

Hollywood

LYNN HIRSCHBERG

Loree Rodkin arrived in Los Angeles when she was nineteen. She had moved from Chicago, where she was restless and bored, and L.A. seemed to her "like one big Disneyland."

People will tell you that back then, around 1971, Rodkin was "a groupie" or "a shameless hustler," but people only use those tags, which are untrue, because they need a way to explain why Rodkin—who is pretty but no great beauty, and smart but no terrific intellect—was such a sensation from the start. She's been romantically linked with a Who's Who of L.A. names —ex-boyfriend Don Henley of the Eagles wrote the quintessential Los Angeles song, "Hotel California," about her—and she's been a professional success, first as an interior designer and since 1980 as a personal manager to the likes of Robert Downey Jr. and Judd Nelson, another ex-beau.

"Loree has always been a bit of a mystery," says a close friend. "She's like a lot of girls that come to L.A., only she was tougher and she knew how to surround herself with men—rich men, powerful men, young men—and still do her business. L.A. has a lot of gorgeous, sexy girls, and they all blur. Loree has something else. She knew how to live for the man in her life, get her work done, and, when the time came, walk away without a scratch. That's her secret."

'You know what's always worried me," Loree Rodkin is saying. "I don't mind being a character, but I don't want to be a caricature." We're having lunch, and she's leafing through the pages of her black ostrich Filofax. She is wearing white lace leggings to mid-calf, low white boots, and an expensive, loose-fitting forties dress in a floral print—a typical Rodkin ensemble, half sexy, half demure. She's tan and slender, but you don't immediately notice her body or manner of dress. Instead, your eye goes straight to the hair: Rodkin is famous for her hair. In a town full of big hair, her hair is huge—long and curly and streaked blond. It hangs almost to her waist and always did, long before manes were the rage. "She's like Medusa," says Judd Nelson admiringly. "Or Samson. Do you think if we cut Loree's hair she wouldn't be able to make a decision?"

Rodkin uses her hair like a prop—pulling the curls forward onto her face, flicking one half back over her shoulder, arranging it just so. "People used to say I hid behind my hair," she confides. "So I cut it once. To my shoulders." She shakes her head. "They were right. It was awful. I couldn't wait for it to grow back." With that, she dramatically tosses it from the back to the front. The motion, like a lot of Rodkin's moves, is sexy on purpose, an act of perfected self-consciousness. "She knows how to sell herself," says an ex-boyfriend. "She's confident about what works. Where other people are all over the map, Loree just knows, whether she really knows or not. That's her power."

Rodkin picks up her Filofax again. "I want to show you something," she says. There are baby pictures and photos of her dogs, Elvis and Lucy, and then, pasted on page after page, in the manner of a yearbook, photos of the men in Loree Rodkin's life. There's Alexander Godunov ("my first client") and Don Henley ("my guardian angel") and Bernie Taupin ("I almost married him") and Sting ("I love pirates") and Judd Nelson ("so smart") and Kiefer Sutherland and more. "Here's what I wanted you to see," Rodkin says, pointing to a quotation she has glued under one of the men. "This explains a lot."

The quote is from Melina Mercouri: "In love, I like men to dominate me as long as the affair lasts. To me, to be free means free to choose whose slave I want to be. I always want to enslave myself and I always hope it's forever." As she reads the quote aloud, Rodkin looks intense. "That's the story of my life," she says. "That's what I want. That's what I've always wanted."

Rodkin puts the Filofax back in her bag. "Men," she says. "It's always been men. When I first came to L.A., I didn't meet doctors and lawyers. I met rock V rollers." She was lucky: she first met Don Henley, who introduced her to the music scene, which then revolved around a club called the Troubadour. Despite the company she started keeping, Rodkin didn't take drugs or even drink ("Nobody ever invited me to the bathroom," she says). She had a way of interviewing everyone she met. "She'd ask you a million questions," says a close friend of Henley's. "And she'd remember what you'd said, even the smallest detail." This mode of flirtation was very seductive and quite shrewd. "Loree has a great memory and she was a quick study," says her friend Patti D'Arbanville. "Almost instantly, she knew everyone and everyone knew her."

Rodkin left Los Angeles for two years to study film at the New School in New York. "I remember John Lennon coming to my apartment," she says. "He was trying to pick up this girl, one of the first black models in Vogue, that we were with, and 1 remember thinking, He is a Beatle, I should be really impressed. But he wasn't the cute Beatle. If he had been the cute Beatle, I probably would have been nervous. Anyway, he turned on the radio and he couldn't get the station he wanted, so he pulled it out of the wall and threw it out the window. He did send me a stereo the next day, but I remember thinking, I'm sure this will be an amusing story to tell someday, but why am I not impressed?"

Around 1975, Rodkin moved back to L.A. to be with Henley (she'd seen journalist Mitchell Glazer in the interim), and he encouraged her to study interior design, since she'd always collected Art Deco and Art Nouveau. Victor Drai, then the paramour of Jacqueline Bisset, gave Rodkin her first job. "He would buy property on spec—old houses—and then fix them up and resell them for massive amounts of money." Word spread, and Rodkin became L.A.'s interior designer of choice—Deco-izing everything from Rod Stewart's mansion to the two abodes of the nephew of the King of Kuwait. "For him, I spent about three and a half million dollars in two hours," Rodkin says. "But 1 was getting bored. It was at the point where I could walk through a house in an eighth of a second and know one way or another."

By then she and Henley had split up, but not before he wrote nearly all of Hotel California about her. " 'Victim of Love,' 'Wasted Time,' 'New Kid in Town,' and, of course, 'Hotel California' were all songs about Loree," says a friend of Henley's. "What's the line? Oh, yeah—in 'Victim of Love' Don sings, 'Some people never come clean. I think you know what I mean.' That was Loree. She always held something back, and that kept him interested—that, and the fact that she was a real eye-opener in the sack. But Don really loved her. It made him crazy that she was always the first to leave."

Henley and Rodkin remain very close, which is a trademark of Rodkin's relationships; she's great pals with nearly all her ex-boyfriends. And Henley was always encouraging; when she became tired of interior design, he suggested she try management. In February 1980, Victor Drai took her out for a birthday lunch—Rodkin won't say exactly how old she is, but she's around thirty-six or thirty-seven—and she spied Alexander Godunov, who had just defected from Russia, across the restaurant. "I thought he was really attractive," Rodkin recalls, "and Victor knew it. He invited Godunov to my birthday party, which was that evening, and we became friends."

Apparently, there's more to the story than simple friendship. "When he met Loree, Godunov said, 'What color are your lips?' " says a close friend of Rodkin's. "She said, 'What do you mean? You're looking at them.' He said, 'Not those lips.' She was appalled, but he asked her to the ballet and told her she reminded him of his wife in Russia, and then he asked her to manage him. They became quite the item, and she was great for him careerwise.''

Rodkin, along with a partner, hired an agent for Godunov, enrolled him in acting class, arranged his finances, and organized ballet tours around him. "Someone was offering me the opportunity, kind of on a high level, to fall on my face,'' she says. "1 had to take it."

Rodkin was then seeing Bernie Taupin, who also wrote songs about her— "I'm Still Standing" and "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues." "Bernie and I had a very rich lifestyle," Rodkin says. "I had the servants and the Rolls and the diamond bracelets. But I'd rather go to Magic Mountain than Tiffany's, and it didn't make me happy.'' Taupin allegedly wanted to marry Rodkin, but she resisted and took up with Godunov instead.

In early 1981, she went to New York and met Judd Nelson at a wedding reception for Melanie Griffith ("I've known her since she was a child") and Steven Bauer. Despite the difference in their ages, Rodkin and Nelson fell in love. "Nearly instantly," Loree says. By this point, she had gone into partnership with a more experienced manager named Phyllis Carlyle, and was bankrolled by a loan from Don Henley. Nelson decided to forgo a job teaching tennis at a summer camp in Maine to visit his new girlfriend in Los Angeles. "I made the wrong choice," Nelson says now, half joking. "I thought I'd stay a couple of weeks. I was a trained stage actor, and I thought movies were not my medium."

In one month, Nelson was offered three films and Rodkin became his manager. "I never said, 'Will you be my manager?' he recalls, rather defensively. "I don't like the idea of a manager. Certain people might need to be taken care of, but I don't really need anyone. But there's not much room for failure in this business, and Loree knows that. It's good to have another person on your side."

Nelson moved to L.A. and moved in with Rodkin, and his career took off. Parties at her house with Barbra and Cher and Don Johnson and the rest of what Henley termed her "been-around-theworld friends" didn't hurt Nelson's luck.

Or Rodkin's. She had ended her partnership with Phyllis Carlyle after only two months, and was on her own. In rapid succession she signed up Virginia Madsen, Robert Downey Jr., Sarah Jessica Parker, Scott McGinnis, and a mess of other beautiful boys. No one she signed was accomplished. Yet. But Rodkin had an eye for talent, an eye for a look. She found them agents— usually David Schiff at CAA—read their scripts, introduced them around, worked on their style, coached them through interviews, bought them clothes, ordered them to dye their hair, study their lines, show up on time. She made herself indispensable, and she helped to make them known. All for an estimated 15 percent.

After five years together, Nelson and Rodkin parted ways, although she's still his manager. She was having an affair with Kiefer Sutherland, who wanted to marry her. "At the end, it was awkward," says Nelson. "There was so much business in the home. It was a little myopic to me." Rodkin seems to have some remorse about the breakup with Nelson, for her affair with Sutherland ended badly. They do not speak. He married another woman on the rebound, and is now a father. The baby is named after Sarah Jessica Parker, whom Sutherland met through Rodkin. It all goes round and round.

"lam the sum total of the men in my life," Rodkin says, flipping her hair back over her shoulders. She has recently been seeing Terence Stamp, and, as always, is out on the town with a veritable conga line of young actors. "In other ways, I know I can be tough. But when it comes to men, I see myself as Bambi.'' She laughs, knowing this must sound a bit ridiculous.

"Loree can go ballistic on people for the sake of one of her clients."

BEEP. Hello. This is Virginia Madsen, and I'm calling about the infamous Loree Rodkin. And I'm telling you right now, I don't like her. She's a mean, vicious bitch, and that's all I have to say. (Laughs) No. No. Cancel that. Sorry. What I really mean is. . .NO COMMENT. That's what I mean: No. Comment. Anyway, if you'd like to hear more, you can call me and I'll give you the real lowdown on Rodkin. . .

Madsen is, of course, joking, although all of Rodkin's clients do have Loree-stories to tell. It's a bit like a cult—they all wear the same heavysoled black shoes with metal tips from Roppongi, a hip L.A. store that Rodkin favors, and they all dress a la Loree, in jeans or baggy Japanese or thrift-shop chic. By signing the very young, Rodkin is able to have maximum impact. They may have talent and looks to begin with, but Rodkin's faith in them combined with her connections eases their way. "1 see myself as the architect," Rodkin says. "And they're the busy workers. "

Her clients all work constantly. Sarah Jessica Parker co-starred in NBC's A Year in the Life; Nelson hit in The Breakfast Club; Scott McGinnis is the 7-Up man; Robert Downey Jr. is currently shooting Life After Life opposite Cybill Shepherd; and Virginia Madsen has four movies coming out in the next year.

Rodkin's currently keen on a recent addition to the brood, an actor named Peter Berg. Downey gets uncharacteristically quiet when he hears this. "We all get jealous of one another," says Parker. "We want Loree's undivided attention." Like competitive siblings, they swap tales of Rodkin's influence on their lives. For instance, the time she didn't want Madsen, who Rodkin felt was twenty-five pounds overweight, to eat a piece of chocolate cake. "She said, 'You're not going to eat that,' " Madsen recalls. "I called her a fat pig," Rodkin counters. When Madsen picked up her fork to take a bite, Rodkin covered the cake with salt. Madsen took the hint and lost the twenty-five pounds.

"Loree pushes hard," Madsen says, "but she rewards you too. I was from Chicago, and she got me a foot in the door. She found me an agent and introduced me to every casting director. When I didn't like my house, she found me a new house and moved me while 1 was away on location. When I was making Heart of Dixie, she sent me three bags full of clothes. My friend said, 'Why does your manager do this? How does she even know what you like?' I said, 'We have the same taste, and I think we even wear the same size bra.' Madsen laughs. "Without Loree, 1 probably would have made it, but—well, who knows how long it would have taken? I call her 'Manager Dearest.' Loree takes that as a compliment. And it sort of is a compliment. I mean, the woman is fearless.

Rodkin is driving her black Mercedes to her office on Melrose Avenue, talking on the phone. "No billboards, no point of purchase," she is saying. "And I want $300,000." Rodkin is discussing a deal for Judd Nelson and Virginia Madsen, some potential ads that would appear in Japan. She makes thirty or forty calls like this a day, usually in the morning at home, and a hundred or so calls come in to her office. Her relationship with her clients and their agents, whom, more often than not, she has found for them, is so collaborative that Rodkin usually dictates the terms of the deal. "Loree has a potentially antarctic exterior," says Downey. "She can get people to do things they might not do, because they don't want to deal with her wrath. She can go ballistic on people for the sake of one of her clients. She just dons her quote [the fee an actor is paid] armor, jumps on an Art Deco horse, and goes into battle."

Rodkin is unconflicted about work— she doesn't look for approval from Hollywood moguls the way she does from the men in her life—and there's something precise and almost effortless about the way she does business. "Nobody's a star for me," she says, hanging up the phone and neatly executing a left turn into the parking lot behind her office. "I know it's all done with Scotch tape and mirrors. Most people look at celebrities and think. They have more power than I do. I don't think that way. And as for industry types, well, they're just a bunch of people walking around saying, 'My dick is bigger than yours.' That doesn't intimidate me."

The agents and publicists who deal with Rodkin have, even when they despise and loathe her (and many do), a grudging respect for her business acumen. "She has no qualms about being the bitch," says one top agent. "She's jarring and abrasive, and she'll say, 'That is an embarrassment to my client,' and hang up on practically anyone, but she usually gets what she wants in the end, and you have to admire that."

"It's like you're working for her," says the publicist on The Billionaire Boys Club, which starred Judd Nelson. "When, in fact, she was actually working for me. I represented the entire movie, and although Judd was the star, he wasn't as important as the entire movie. But Loree has a way of always being the boss. She'd request extra invitations to screenings and make up her own press list. She drove me crazy, but the movie did a lot for Judd's career and she knew it was an important opportunity. Loree doesn't leave anything up to chance."

The only valid criticism of Rodkin's managerial technique is that, for the most part, her clients star in rotten films. It could be that they aren't offered the meatier roles or that great scripts don't come their way, but Robert Downey Jr., for example, is immensely talented and has yet to appear in anything other than duds like Less than Zero and Johnny Be Good. "You always hear, 'All of Loree Rodkin's clients are terribly busy,' says one top agent. "But they're busy making awful movies. I mean, did you see Creator? That was the film Loree thought would make Virginia Madsen a star, and it was virtually unreleasable. Since Loree screens their scripts and advises them what to do, a mistake like Creator is at least partially her fault."

Rodkin doesn't dwell on mistakes or mishaps, preferring instead to accentuate the positive and get on with the next project. "Regrets are pointless in this business," she says, parking the car. "You can go insane worrying over what you might have done."

She locks the car door and walks toward her office. The office contains two desks, notebooks full of slides and stills of her clients, four large Rolodexes, a couch, two wall-size Deco posters, framed photographs of Loree with Judd and Loree with Virginia, stacks of magazines, and many telephones, which are constantly ringing.

"Rodkin Management is a small dictatorship," Rodkin says as she settles behind her desk. "I don't like being told what to do, but I'm good at telling other people what to do." Cynthia Pett, Rodkin's associate, who used to work at William Morris, chortles at this remark. "We have business to discuss," she says. "Tracy called and said Bugle Boy Jeans is doing a campaign. They want to do it with Scott McGinnis. Basically the same thing—a James Dean guy gets seduced. They want to know if we're interested."

"Only if it's big bucks," says Rodkin.

"Fifteen hundred a cycle," says Cynthia.

"No," says Rodkin. "If it was Levi's, yes, but Bugle Boy, no. Beer, wine—any of that is O.K."

"Are we getting snobby here because it's not a brand name you buy?" Cynthia asks.

"Yes," says Rodkin. "I'm not having my clients promote geekwear."

And so it goes. There are two movies to tell Judd about. Cosmopolitan wants Madsen to model evening wear ("Hooker clothes," tsks Rodkin). A casting agent wants to see pictures of Leslie Bega, who is featured on ABC's Head of the Class. Just as Downey is calling from the set of Life After Life, in walks Tom O'Brien, a newish client, to say hello.

"You cut your hair, Tom," Rodkin says, somewhat sternly.

"Uh-huh," says Tom nervously.

"I like it," Rodkin says.

Relieved, O'Brien, who played Dennis Quaid's younger brother in The Big Easy, plops on the couch and makes a phone call. He hangs up, sticks around for fifteen more minutes reading a magazine, and then stands up to leave.

"Nice seeing you, Tom," Rodkin says as he is halfway to the door. He walks over and kisses her good-bye. It would seem that Rodkin hasn't paid attention to O'Brien since his arrival, yet she could probably repeat his entire phone conversation verbatim and recall the color of his shoes, as well as whether or not he was wearing socks. During his visit, she never stopped fielding phone calls and inquiries from Cynthia, but her antennae were up. She has a connect-the-dots brain: she can remember who said what to whom back in, say, 1979 and how it will affect her and her clients in 1988.

"You need to talk to Tracy about the Bugle Boy thing,'' Cynthia is saying, her hand cupped over the phone. "She wants to talk to you directly."

Rodkin picks up her line and expertly kills the deal. She looks pleased, almost serene. "Someone once told me," she says matter-of-factly, " 'Loree, no one goes over you. They may go around you, but they don't go over you.' "

Robert Downey Jr. is bobbing up and down in Loree Rodkin's pool. It's almost a hundred degrees in L.A., and Downey is conducting our interview while he soaks. He borrowed some boxer shorts from Rodkin to use as swim trunks ("Who knows where these have been?"), and she's currently fixing him some lasagna in the kitchen.

Rodkin's house, which is in Benedict Canyon, is Art Deco throughout. It feels plush; there are enormous sofas and thick carpeting and lots of silver picture frames and music—currently George Michael singing, "Put your tiny hand in mine"—wafting through the rooms. Her two dogs are running around the pool, and they start to yip when Rodkin emerges from the kitchen, wearing black leggings and a sleeveless T-shirt and carrying a plate.

"Your dinner, Mr. Downey," she says. Rodkin met Downey four years ago, when he was in a film called Tuff Turf. "I played the hero's punk-rock friend," Downey recalls. "And Loree asked me to lunch. I had an agent, and I thought, I don't need a manager. But I went to lunch and met this exotic-looking person dressed like the epitome of everything I wanted to be. And the rest is history."

Rodkin sits on the edge of a chaise near the pool. "How's the house coming?" Downey asks. Rodkin helped him find a Spanish Deco house, and now she is renovating it for him. "Do you mind?" she says with mock annoyance. " 'Can you pick out some paint and some carpets for me?' has become a total decorating job. I've been working on that house for two months." Downey bobs up and down. "What about the pool?" he says with exaggerated brattiness. "I want the pool to be just like this, only I want waterfalls too. And did you get those glass bricks, or am I going to have to go ballistic?"

Rodkin gets up. "Do you want a towel?" she asks. "It's funny," says Downey, "because I was just starting to think towel." "I'll get you one," Rodkin says. "Do you want a cigarette? Do you want some Jell-O?"

Downey says yes to the cigarette and yes to the Jell-O, and Rodkin quickly returns with both in hand. "Look at him," she says. "Spoiled. Do you want me to get in there and hold your Jell-O?' ' Downey laughs. "Have you seen fish boy yet?" he asks her. "No," says Rodkin, "let's see it." Downey floats back in the pool and slaps his cheeks. "You look like Judd when you do that," Rodkin says.

She stares at Downey for a moment. "You're so pale, Robert," she says. "You should get some UVA sun. You can even make phone calls from the UVA sun machine. I would call people from the UVA sun and they would know I was laying there naked. I'd go, 'I want Robert's next price to be. . . ' and they'd say, 'Loree, what are you wearing right now?' I'd say, 'Shut up.' It's hard to negotiate when you're naked."

Downey likes this idea and decides he wants a UVA machine of his very own. "No," says Rodkin. "There's no room in your house for a UVA sun machine." She pauses. "I'm just glad you didn't go to the Calvin Klein party with me last night."

"Why?"

"Because you would have been selling your house to try and buy this guy's house that's being sold for $20 million. You would have said, 'I'd like one of these.'

"Was it amazing?" asks Downey.

"No," says Rodkin. "It was like the museum of contemporary fucking art."

"Oh," says Downey, emerging from the pool. "That would have been the ultimate club space."

Rodkin laughs and hands him a robe. "I get the robe too," Downey says enthusiastically. "How many others have worn this?"

"It's been washed, O.K.?" says Rodkin. "Some of the best, O.K.? It's been Sting-ified."

Downey laughs. "In other words, that means Loree has fucked Sting. Just for the record."

Downey heads off to the bathroom, and Rodkin collects the empty dishes and takes them into the house, the dogs following at her heels. She leaves the plates for her housekeeper, walks into the living room, and sits on one of the sofas. Dwarfed by the enormity of the couch, she suddenly looks very small and almost shy. "Loree's like the boxer in the ring," Judd Nelson has said. "Like him, she can be so sweet—you wouldn't know that that guy's a killer."

Tonight, Rodkin says, there's a party for Sarah Jessica Parker's birthday that she helped arrange, and next week there's an art-gallery opening and a party at a new club. After that there's a party for eighty she's throwing at Don Henley's three-acre spread. She's busy every night. At this moment, though, all that hoopla seems far away.

"What's up, Loree?" Downey says, returning from the bathroom.

"I was just thinking,'' she says. "You know what I'd really like? I'd like to be the girl in the Ralph Lauren ads." She looks around the room, at the pastels, at the Deco, at the L.A.-ness of it all. "Maybe in my next life," she says, visibly brightening. "Or maybe in five years. Anything's possible."