Michael Caine Sue Mengers
Three things were simultaneously infuriating her. The first was that this whole event was making her late for a lunch with an important client. “I’m keeping Candy waiting at Elaine’s!” she complained loudly to nearby passengers, as their captor ranted about a new religion of technology and the nitroglycerin she supposedly had in her handbag.
The second was that famed folk singer Theodore Bikel, seated nearby, had decided that the spirits of the hostages, many of whom were by now mildly stewed on a case of booze broken open by one publicly-minded traveller, would best be lifted by a rousing rendition of ‘Hava Nagila’. Mengers hated Theodore Bikel. “I’m gonna fuckin’ die here, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to go without being stoned,’” she later said. “So I lit up a joint. Theodore Bikel started striding up and down. And he wouldn’t fucking sit down and shut up.”
But these two irritations were nothing in comparison to the real source of Mengers’ mounting ire. One of the hijacker’s demands was that her entire 25-page manifesto be read out live on television by a major Hollywood figure: Lindsay Wagner, Jack Lemmon or Charlton Heston.
This revealed her to be the kind of lowballing, visionless amateur Mengers wholeheartedly despised.
“She wanted Charlton fucking Heston,” she spluttered to her worried colleagues after the FBI stormed the plane. “I could have got her Barbra Streisand.”
Sue Mengers. Always working the angles. Always closing the deal. The world’s first super-agent.
By the mid-1970s, Sue Mengers
