Zibby interviews Elaine Goldsmith Thomas, longtime film and TV producer and agent to some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, about her debut novel, CLIMBING IN HEELS, a smart, sexy, and entertaining story about the rise of three secretaries at the hottest agency in 1980s Hollywood. Elaine reflects on her own experience navigating the cutthroat world of Hollywood, her transition from agent to writer, and the wild stories—both real and imagined—that shaped her fiercely ambitious protagonist, Beanie Rosen. They discuss personal reinvention, women’s friendships, the background players in fame, the influence of mothers, and the long journey to owning one's creative voice.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Elaine. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibby to talk about Climbing In Heels, a novel. Congrats. 

Elaine: Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. This is my first podcast on Climbing In Heels. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Elaine: So yeah, you're gonna get all the good stories.

Zibby: Oh,.. 

Elaine: And then it'll be, well, I already said that. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Elaine: So I'm gonna have to really dig into the treasure chest. 

Zibby: You'll just refer everybody back to this episode. 

Elaine: Absolutely. 

Zibby: As I said, absolutely my episode. But you can just highlight that. 

Elaine: I'm a little obsessed with you, Zibby Owens. I've gotta tell. I, I, I love, I love, I did a little deep dive on you.

I'm a little obsessed with you, so I'm excited to be here. Anyway, here we are. 

Zibby: Very sweet. Thank you. Especially coming from you. This is very nice. 

Elaine: Aw, thank you. 

Zibby: Okay, Elaine? 

Elaine: Yeah. 

Zibby: Climbing in Heels. Take it from the top. 

Elaine: You know, I've been a writer my whole life, but I had the good fortune of doing other things.

And when I, you know, when I began my climb in flats, because I've always had bad feet. Um, I mean, sometimes clogs, but rarely heels, you know, I wanted to be an agent so badly. I really felt like I had found my calling. The, the, the, the drive of, of turning a no into a yes, and knowing how that felt. And there are a few stories in the book.

I mean, the book is fictional. It's not me. I keep having people. Who are reading in advance going, oh my God, I'm at that place in the book where so-and-so is going down on so-and-so when you walk in and I go, it's not me, but, but there is, there is a story, a few, many stories in there that are and, and, and, and I did.

I was in love with a boy who wanted an agent, and I did go. Agency to agency to try to get him just to deliver. You know, I, I was the cat delivering the mice, whatever this guy needed, I just wanted to fulfill it somehow. And, and I did that one summer. I worked my magic and, and got him an agent and nothing felt as good.

As convincing that agent that he was talented. See, I knew early on that, you know, heat is not, it's not, it's amorphous. People put their fingers in their mouth to hear, to, to, to see which way the wind is blowing, and I knew how to blow the wind. 

Zibby: Amazing. 

Elaine: I knew because it came from passion, because it came from my truth, which was.

You're amazing and I need the world to see it. So it really drove me. It somehow equated to my value, right? If I could get the yes, then I was worth more. What does that say about me? Um, but well,.. 

Zibby: It's like, um, it's like beanie's father, right? The insurance salesman who teaches her early on, like, this is how you get a platinum policy.

It's because you have to convince people that, that they need something they didn't even know that they needed, and they have to see you and believe in you and what you can offer them. 

Elaine: You really have to care. It's not about bullshit. It's about finding your passion and trying to spread it. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: You really have to care and I really cared about this boy, I, I, I wanted to deliver.

I was certain that his picture would be sort of. Carved in the Mount Rushmore of Hollywood. And, and when he got, uh, happy days, I was, you know, oh my God, how will I live without him? But of course I did, but I never forgot the experience of going to, the first place I went to for him was the Willie Morris Agency, and I went to the receptionist there and I said, you know, I have, you know.

Al Pacino dusted, every short actor I could think of. And she said, try Forest Lawn. And isn't it funny that four years later, 'cause it was before college, four years later, I went back and she was still there. Of course she didn't remember me, but I remembered her and I imagined that maybe she remembered me.

I imagined I had left my imperator on all of these people and, and I knew. Because of that experience that I had found a calling, but the truth was it wasn't my only calling. I have always been a writer, and once I became an agent, my clients didn't necessarily want their agent to be a writer. So I would read scripts and then I would call.

The writers or the directors, and I'd go, you know, if you did this at the end and I became, it became my, you know, Zamboni, I would, um, polish them in my mind or give them ideas. And there was one writer who was very gracious to me in the nineties, his name's Ron Bass. He wrote My Best Friend's Wedding. He's written countless, sleeping with the anime, countless movies.

And I had given him an idea for a movie and he was so kind to me 'cause I was an agent and yeah, I was a big agent, but he gave me final draft. He set me up, this was in the nineties when still computers were like, you know, ginormous and, and he showed me how to use it. He said, you should be writing. And so I've always kind of been a closet writer and um, it's just a sign that, you know, you don't have to only be one thing.

Right. Zibby Owens, I mean, you can be an agent or a producer or a writer, or in Jennifer's case, a singer and a dancer and an actor. You don't have to just stay in one lane. You have one life. Right? 

Zibby: Totally. 

Elaine: They say you only live once, but the truth is you only die once, you know, live. So.. 

Zibby: And per your book, you know, try to go out on top.

Elaine: Always Beanie had impeccable timing. So while I was at William Morris in the eighties as a secretary, and I, you know, I was running the, the, the maze in a mouse trap where I was not the cheese that they wanted. I was chubby and I was loud and I smoked, and gosh, I probably reminded them of their ex-wives or their girlfriends or the Yeshiva girls or whatever.

But I wanted in so badly. It became, it became my focus. I was laser focused and I really believed in talent. And I also wanted to show that jerky guy who dumped me after I got him an agent. Ha ha, see what you missed. But it never felt the same, by the way, after I arrived and. While I was, you know, those, those years were my early twenties.

I graduated early, so it was all my twenties and you know, I fell in love when I was there. We broke up. I, the relationships you make in your twenties, especially if you're professionally climbing, can last a lifetime. And they, they left such a mark on me and there were people. That, um, made such a difference to me.

There's a character in my book, Ella Ga, who wears her dress is too short, whose hair is too blonde and who doesn't give a fuck. And she was based loosely on someone I knew who was funny and smart and um, you know, some people might have called her white trashy and she'd have laughed in their faces because she was brilliant and rose to the top.

And, um, she allowed me to stand on her shoulders. And there was, um, there were other people who I didn't know, but I'd imagine their backgrounds so. I'd say 90% of this is imagined, maybe 80% of it is imagined. And some of it is based on things I saw, people I knew, crazy experiences I had. You know, it's hard to, it's hard to believe that, you know, how wild it was for women, how difficult it was for women, and um, why we needed the shoulder pads.

You know, so in 2019, I, I have all of these stories, these crazy stories about what happened to me and those are, you know, legit stories. And then I kind of thought about other things. And so at the, actually in 2020, I, I, I called, um, Kevin Huvane, who I had worked with at William Morris, and then he left and went to CAA and we had sort of risen together.

And I said, you know, I've got these stories. I don't know, I, I, I might like write this fictional novel. It's not a memoir, it's, I wanna do like a Valley of the Dolls, which, you know, I loved those, those books, those once is not enough. Or the Jackie Collins or ..

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: Any of them. And I said, and it's fun and I wanna give people a little peek into what it was like, and he hounded me about it.

You know, I, I said it to him, maybe at lunch I said it to him or dinner and he hounded me. When are you doing that? How are you gonna do it? And finally, he had, um, a literary agent, Molly Glick call me and she said, look, just put together a little pitch and we'll go around to the publishing houses and, and so I really thought about it and I went, okay.

I mean, I was in between movies, you know, I have. Many other hats that I wear, but I, I sort of wrote like a, I don't know, a 10 page pce maybe, you know, just like a overview of what I thought of who I wanted to investigate, you know, and I thought, God, wouldn't it be fun if it's the eighties and you can explore their backgrounds in the sixties, in some cases, the fifties.

And how hard was it for them and who were they? And I realized pretty quickly that all of my characters were kind of formed and informed by mothers. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: Who either had their own dreams or their fears, and that also kind of jelled to make these women who they were, because in truth, their mothers were their, their fuel and their kryptonite.

Zibby: Hmm. So interesting. I love Beanie's mom. She is. So, you know, you're, when you talked about Zamboni, which sort of goes through the book all the way to the end, this notion of erasing the parts of yourselves that you don't necessarily love and just, you know, let me just shorten my last name and let me just, you know, change my address as smidge and all these things. 

Elaine: She polished her life. She polished it like, like Botox and you know that I, I was so afraid, you know, my mom knew I was writing a book. Well, so what happened is in 2020 I went to the publishing houses and I just told stories. I said, let me tell you about Beanie Rosen. Let me tell you about Ella Gaty, Mercedes Baxter, and let's not forget Sheila Day.

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: Or Jamie Garland. All of these women from from different decades who have scaled their way to the top, you know, and some of them became very much like the monsters they worked for. You know, it's, it's hardly a feminist manifesto. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: It was just a slice of life. And, um, though I didn't know it at the time, it was a great life.

I was too busy climbing sometimes to notice, and I ended up having a bidding war. So I thought, holy fuck, what do I do now? Like, I really have to write it. And we were pitching it at the dawn of the pandemic. 

Zibby: Mm. 

Elaine: Like I, who knew the world was gonna shut down. But the world shut down. So there was every reason to do this book.

Every reason, and I'd wake up every day and dream of beanie's life, importing some things that happened to me and amplifying them. I mean, yes, my mother, we, I was born in Pacoima. My mother called it Arleta. Then we moved to Sepulveda. My mother called it Northridge. I never knew where I lived. I just knew I was, it wasn't good enough.

But you know. And I think my mother was terrified about this book. Like, what is she saying? Like, you know, she thought I was like a mommy dearest and I kept saying, no, mom, this book isn't about you. It's because of you. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: You gave me the power and the confidence to do it. I mean, you know, she died before if she died in 21 while I was still writing, rest her soul.

But, you know, I dedicated it to her and, and Miriam Rosenswag is not my mother, but there's little elements of it. And all of them, you know, Ella Gatty has a mother who was an ex debutante and held onto that crown and didn't know what to do with her daughter. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: Her rebellious, outspoken daughter whose legs were prehensile and wrapped around themselves for punctuation and, and Mercedes Baxter was, you know, finds out that her, um.

Her sister was her mother, and it's the way we climb out of our life circumstances, creating and then recreating the lives we want. Right? And it poured outta me z it it, it poured outta me. It was like, because, you know. I'd say about nine months. I wrote it from, I'd say March of 20 till October of 21. I had my very first draft, and then I kept.

Rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and pulling out, and St. Martin's kept saying more sex. I just wanna put that on them. 

Zibby: There's a scene in the beginning during Beanie's, mom's remarriage, where this offensive. Boy takes his pants down essentially. In what? Uh, some greenhouse or, I don't know, somewhere behind the wedding and in this very vivid scene until she finally is like, okay, no, I'm leaving.

I feel like that's such a good sendoff for like the career, what you get, how to say no, when to say no, how much you can take all of it. 

Elaine: And also being titillated and nauseated simultaneously, she, it was, um, in the terrace of the, uh, sportsman's lodge where The Schnitt, The Schnitt, who's older than she is and quite hormonally, uh, ready, reveals himself to her.

And she is sort of sickened into and transfixed. And, um, it's her first sexual experience and again, kind of tied to the fact that, you know, I'm pretty, somebody wants me and I guess I was sort of afraid that everybody would think I'm Beanie I'm not beanie, and that, oh my God, how do you show this? But there's such a humanity.. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm.

Elaine: To, I think, to her journey. Even in her desperation, desperate times where I went back and forth on that line where, uh, where. She tries to convince fish her the boy that she meets after The Schnitt, she tries to convince him how great he is and quell his anxiety and, and assure him that he's going to make it and she's gonna help him make it.

And when he's, and she pays for his pictures, his headshot, she takes money from her stepfather's sock drawer, pays for his head shots. And when he is anxious, uh, she lets him fuck her up the ass. Not true, but. 

Zibby: An explicit warning on this. Uh, yeah.

Elaine: I mean, or you can cut that out. Yeah. L lots of blow and blow jobs.

Sorry. It's the eighties. It's the eighties and there were no, no holes barred. Certainly not, um, Beanies. So yeah, it's a fun journey back at a woman trying to find her self-worth. And the hard part was for Beanie that. If she lost a client, it would somehow affect her self-worth. She didn't have enough stability, so it was always about hanging on.

And as she watched, you know, in, in this world with these women, it wasn't killer be killed, it was killer or become irrelevant and, and none of them. Not Beanie, not Sheila Day, not Jamie Garland. Not Meredith Baxter Khan. And not Ella Gadi wanted to become irrelevant. They wanted to mean something. And maybe this book is their journey to self-love.

Zibby: And do you think it's your journey to self-love? 

Elaine: Mm. Yeah. I think coming out and saying, yes, I'm a writer, and standing in the truth of that, you know, it was always easier to sell someone else's dream. You know, this is a book really about background people. I have a really interesting story. I was a secretary working for in, in the theater department, and this old man daughters up.

I wrote about this in the book actually. It happens to Beanie this old man. And it's true. He walked up to me and he was probably in his late seventies, maybe early eighties, and he said, um, he sat down opposite my secretarial desk and he said, you know, they killed Marilyn. I said, what? He said, they killed Marilyn.

I said. Oh, okay. And I kept typing and he said, you know, I, I didn't want them to, I mean, I, she loved me. She kept calling me Uncle Melty, and like, she'd call me and we'd talk and, you know, we, we ate cookies together a lot. Oh, good. Yeah. But, you know, we couldn't stop her. She was spinning. We couldn't stop her.

I said, yeah, well that happens, you know, and I'm just sort of entertaining him until he goes in to see my boss. About 20 minutes later, 25 minutes later, he leaves. Walks down the hall. I said to her, my boss, Gail Nala, who was that guy? So she pulls down, um, one of those books, maybe an MGM book, it was before Google.

And she said, and she goes to the index and she finds his name. And she looks at the pages and there he was there, he was there. He was there. He was in back of every famous picture you could imagine, um, Marilyn Monroe, the Rat Pack, Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra. She said he was the guy you used to go to to get the guys.

And I said, oh, she said, he's a background person. You know the background people. They're the ones, they're the keepers of your legacy. Suddenly I looked at her and I said, wait a second. He was saying to me that they killed Marilyn and she shrugged and she said he would know. And that's what this book is about.

In a way, the background people who may be for a second, because they stood close enough to fame, got a little bit of fame themselves, they pictures of themselves with famous people in their office as if their fame would rub off on them as if it somehow gave them power. It's about that. I. I think and other things.. 

Zibby: And family.

Elaine: I've been talking too much relationship. 

Zibby: No, no, it's, it's really amazing. And then,.. 

Elaine: Thank you. 

Zibby: In addition to this, now it's like circling back because it will be a movie as well, right? So now it's like you can't series a television from yourself. 

Elaine: Series. A television series. 

Zibby: Series. A television series. 

Elaine: Yeah.

What happened is I gave it to a few people when it was kind of still, mm, you know. Perform. I gave it to Darren Star, who I used to represent as an agent. I just, I kind of wanted to set the table. I was so nervous about people judging me, and I was scared to come out with it. And so I gave it to him and he inhaled it and he went, I, I, I love it.

I said, oh, thanks. He said, I wanna option it. I said, oh, well, you know, you don't have no, I wanna option it. I said, um, okay. I, we're not going out with it yet. No, no. I'm optioning it. And really, I, it, I was so gobsmacked by it. I went, uh, okay. Um, well, let's talk about it. He said, look, you'll write it with me.

I'm optioning it. I just made a huge deal at Universal. He sends it to Universal. In a week, they read it, they went, oh my God, we're taking it off the table. I had the, they haven't read the corrected version yet. So I said, um, okay. I talked to my agents. They went, no, this is great. And I mean, who wouldn't wanna do it with Darren Starr?

Right. I mean, and then Peacock read it and they, they, they gave us an order direct to series. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Elaine: So we have an order. We'll start writing it this summer, I guess. I mean, it's, it's nutty, right? It's nutty. 

Zibby: So, I mean, don't you feel like after all this, you deserve to have your dreams come true? Also..

Elaine: It's not that my dreams didn't come true, it's that I have a lot of dreams, and I guess that's what I would say.

It's not that I was going, oh, I wish. It's that you don't only have to dream in one lane like Zibby. If you wanna be a director, go for it. I'll produce you. You know, like, like in other words. Yeah, this is happening and I am pinching myself and it is crazy and I am scared and I, I, I don't have a, I don't have a thick skin.

I remember one of my clients going, you know, look what they said about me in this magazine. And I went, oh, stop. Then I read something they said about me, and I was like, hiding under the, you know what I mean? It's, I can say, oh, stop until it's about me. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: So. Yeah, I mean, I, I think that my dreams are coming true, and I think that it's a lesson that the best is yet to come. The best doesn't live in the rear view. You can take the rear view and let it inform where you wanna go. And I have to thank Jennifer for that because man, here I am running her company, producing with her, writing a book, promoting the book, gonna write a series, you know, and, and people go, how do you do it?

I go, I don't know. I guess I'll figure it out. But it's a reminder that the only thing stopping you in life. Sometimes is you right? 

Zibby: Such important messages that you're sharing. 

Elaine: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, again, I don't take it or myself too seriously. I think it's a fun romp in the eighties. 

Zibby: I don't see why anybody would object to the book at all.

It is fun. It's poignant the whole mother, daughter, the, the, this hilarious stuff about dieting and eating, which like people today are like, wait, what? It used to be like, what? And they're like. It was like this for everybody. Like all of these things, so many people will see themselves in one slice of a character or another that it will be hard to not sort of fall in love with some of the characters.

Elaine: Thank you. I, I'm, I am, I am hearing that from people as they read it, that they, that they are touched by beanie, which touches me. 

Zibby: The voice is great. Like that's really something. You can't, you can't teach, you can't. Sorry, there's a siren, but, um. You know, you can't manufacture a, like a great voice and your voice is unique and it's entertaining, and then you like wrap everything up at the end and it's, it's great.

It's very satisfying. 

Elaine: I, I, my book company was, was mad at me about the way I was ending it. Like, you know how I began and I, I don't, can I say it? Well, I begin it that way, so I guess I can say it right. Yeah. That one of my characters dies. But, you know, the thing about this character is she always had perfect timing.

Mm-hmm. She, she knew how to sign a client, she knew how to end a meeting. And you know, when she did the math in her head, if you die on top, that's a legend because you can only stay up so long. Right? And that was her rationale. So I so appreciate your enthusiasm. I so appreciate your words. I'm, I am excited for people to read it.

I'm excited to make it into a show, and I've really loved. Writing the book I really loved. It was like I would. Visit these women, these men and women. And whenever I'd go, I'd, I'd, I'd, I'd carve out time. I started to get up at four or five in the morning to do it so I could do my other job. And it was so fun because I went into their world and I imagined it, and I'd research, 'cause I didn't remember all that stuff from the eighties.

So I'd have to do research and then I'd look it up and then I'd, I, I could do anything because I was imagining it. And that was fun for me. 

Zibby: That's amazing. Well, you can tell that it's fun. You can always tell if something is, is. Done with love and done with energy and excitement, and I definitely got that from this book, and I'm very excited for you and..

Elaine: Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you for talking to me today about climbing in heels and just so excited to see it come out into the world and all the good stuff. So congrats. 

Elaine: Thank you Zibby Owens. I'm a little obsessed with you too, and I will refer to you more because you're Zibby and I hope the next. Book party you have, you'll invite me because I hope I can be on one of the two coasts.

Zibby: Please come. Yes. Yes. Okay. A hundred percent. 

Elaine: All right. All right. 

Zibby: Thank you. Bye bye.