All About Stavros

For the last hour Stavros has been working the phone like a Nautilus machine. He’s confirmed a screening for later this morning and penciled in something for early next week. He’s confirmed a lunch at Harry Cipriani with an Ogilvy & Mather group head and canceled lunch (he always books two) with an SSC&B producer. And he’s recommended a Doyle Dane art director for a lucrative freelance job.

Sometimes Stavros has his calls while pacing in front of his desk. Other times he bounces up and down in his seat, chewing a fingernail, as his foot taps in the air at a thousand tics a minute. Now and then, he plucks a tissue and blots his brow. “This business eats at me like a disease,” he sighs. “It’s a misery.”

Him with his troubles and his miseries. It’s not what you expect from the city’s most famous advertising rep – Malamudian dialogue – especially not from a twenty-seven-year-old wearing a Gianni Versace suit, Bennis Edwards shoes, and a black-faced Rolex. But since Stavros arrived as the boy wonder of Johnston Film six years ago, he’s never been like any other rep in New York, or for that matter like any other person. No, there is only one Stavros, him with his Euro-trash curls and his one-word name.

And yet if you put yourself in Stavros’s shoes for a day, you’d have to admit that the life of an advertising rep can be a pretty sorry thing. All day long you drag your $450 Hunting World bag across town from Geer, Du Bois to Lord Geller. Down endless corridors you go, and like a wandering video minstrel you screen your directors’ reels for every writer, art director, and producer who will spare you ten minutes of his precious time. And for what? Nine times out of ten, nothing.

But how can you feel sympathy for a young man who makes several hundred thousand dollars a year, has lived with actress Phoebe Cates, and is married to fashion model Hayley Mortison? And even if he did have leukemia as a teenager, how can you pity on a man who’s barely contrite about having caused another’s death, and who took the job of the very woman who went out on a limb to give him his start?

Stavros is a beguiling conundrum. He’s long on all the seductive qualities most admired in mavericks – outside energy, ambition, charm, and cojones. Starting from the very bottom, without a college education, Stavros has made himself wealthy and powerful at an age when most kids are still figuring out what they want to do. On the other hand, Stavros isn’t missing any of the negative traits so often a part of the package – cynicism, ruthlessness, and apparent lack of conscience, the dark side of the entrepreneurial spirit. “Stavros is certainly a unique personality,” says one of his only young rivals, David Zander. “He’s sharp as hell and he’s thick as hell. He’s sweet and he’s an animal.”

Advertising agencies almost never make their own advertising. Copywriters and art directors come up with the words and the design and maybe a rough sketch to get it past the client, but when it’s time to actually produce something, the work is broken down into pieces and parceled out to tiny, highly specialized suppliers: one company writes the jingles, another shoots the film, a third does the editing, a fourth rigs the special effects. Each one of these little concerns can make staggering amounts of money. But of all the suppliers, the most outrageously overpaid are the directors.

A competent director gets a shooting fee of $6,000 a day. And if he’s the principal owner of his production profit, based on the standard 35 percent markup, can push his daily earnings to $20,000. So a director who can shoot fifty days will gross $1 million a year. But with six hundred directors from all over the world competing for New York assignments, getting work is harder than doing it. That’s where the reps come in.

The way Stavros sees it, there are three levels of reps. At the bottom are “the everyday schlub reel carriers.” A pretty face, a nice suit. They start at about $30,000 a year.

Next are the professionals. They’re bright and personable and know what they’re about, and can make $150,000 a year. If they switch directors, they’ll get a line in Back Stage. A good number of creatives have heard of them, but their directors are almost always better known than they are. “They’re good,” Stavros says. “They’re just not killers.”

Then there’re “the Icons,” half a dozen names known by every important creative in New York. These are reps, often more talented that their directors, who can make a career by hustling up work no one else would do. Depending on their deal with their production companies, they make between a quarter and a half million a year. The group includes Phil Suarez (who launched Giraldi), Barney Melsky, Ray Lofaro, Chuck Pfeifer, Frank Stiefel, and Stavros. And though some would quibble with the list, there’s no controversy about Stavros. Stavros is definitely a killer.

“Stavros is all the clichés you think of as a rep, but I like him,” says Oligvy & Mather copywriter David Apicella. “He’s incredibly slick, is an impossible name-dropper, and whenever we eat lunch he’s called away from the table or given three phone messages…. It’s crossed my mind that he’s doing the whole thing for my benefit, that maybe he’s just calling the weather.”

Stavros is the first to admit he plays it a little broad. He calls it “the aura,” consciously turning himself into something like the coolest kid in high school: the guy who always gets the prettiest girls, goes to the wildest parties, and hangs out with the older crowd – the guy everyone wants as a friend.

Because all Stavros is trying to do is make as many friends in the business as he can. “And eventually, when I have the right director for the right project, I know one of my friends is going to come through for me.” Admittedly, Stavros uses the word loosely. If Stavros has ever eaten lunch with you, you’re a dear friend. If he’s eaten with you twice, you’re an old friend. Three times or more makes you his best friend.

If you know how to look for them, you can find friends almost anywhere. Award shows are good bets, particularly if you want to befriend a talented junior before he becomes a star. “So when it’s time for their first commercial, who’re they going to think of as a friend? The rep who’s suddenly all over them, or the guy who was there last year when they were still doing print?”

He walks the corridors and he schmoozes. He comes into your office, pulls his chair so close he’s practically sitting on your lap, and in a sweet, gentle voice, he gossips and commiserates. He listens and he cares. That’s right, he cares. So sue the guy.

The fact is, Stavros can be a valuable friend. He knows about every new client before it’s in Dougherty and every big job before the headhunters. And when he hears of an opening, you can be sure he has a friend to recommend. “It’s not as simple as, ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.’ But obviously if I can get a friend in a position of power, I’m better off than with someone I barely know.” For Stavros, the best friend of all is someone who owes him a huge favor.

To “place” friends takes other friends, powerful ones, and Stavros’s most remarkable achievement as a rep may be the relationships he’s cultivated with some of the biggest names in advertising. Jay Chiat calls Stavros and his wife, Hayley, “one of the few special personal relationships I have right now.” Ed McCabe says, “Stavros reminds me of me when I was a kid…. He has this eagerness to get somewhere, this sense of need, but all in a very nice way. We’ve gotten very close. I talk to him almost every day about football, women, the things all friends talk about.” Stavros calls his best friend “the Edster.”

Yet for all his efforts, searching high and low for friends Stavros never knows if it’s going to pay off. Repping is an act of faith. “You bust your a-- and there’s no satisfaction. Yesterday, I might have had the best day of my life, but even if I did, I might not know for six months when that art director I befriended when he was nothing gets promoted to creative director. But you just can’t be down in the business,” he sighs. “It’s a misery.”

A guy like Stavros defies biography. At twenty-seven, he’s already had a rich life, full of precocious highs and catastrophe, and yet nothing in the whole picaresque saga seems things along the way, there’s nothing like a turning point, or even a formative period, because people like Stavros are born with their adult personalities almost entirely intact.

Consider the fact that Stavros Merjos grew up quite comfortably in one of two small West Village apartment buildings his grandmother, Rose Schaines, had the shrewd sense to buy in 1948. His Greek father, a bassoon player who gave up his chair with the Sadler’s Wells orchestra to publish a racing sheet called The Beard, and his Jewish mother had enough money to send Stavros to Little Red School House, a private school in the neighborhood. But Stavros was born to claw himself up from the streets, and nothing, not even his well-off parents, was going to interfere with his destiny.

By the time Stavros was eight, he had made a wooden cart and was selling beads of Seventh Avenue. “On a good day, I’d make a quick five or ten bucks,” Stavros says, “which is quite a bit for a kid in the third grade.” Later he sold wire flowers, candles, and comic books, and he did a nice little business decorating old jean jackets with copper rivets. “Stavie was always hyper, always crazy, and incredibly precocious about business,” says his younger brother, Timothy.

When Stavros was twelve, his mother sent him uptown to the McBurney School for a little discipline. At the start of his second year there, he was diagnosed as having leukemia. “The first thing I did,” Stavros says, “was get myself transferred back down to Little Red. I said, ‘Ma, I’m sick, I’m dying. Give me a break.’ Actually I never felt like I was going to die, but it was a real drag arriving back at my old school in this very obvious wig.”

Inevitably his leukemia is what people seize on to explain Stavros’s compulsive hustling. Director Jim Johnston, probably the man who’s benefitted the most from Stavros’s representation, says, “Because Stavros underwent chemotherapy, I think he realizes he may not live…to ripe old age. Maybe that’s why he’s burning so much brighter and hotter now.”

As much as Stavros appreciates the sympathy the news of his illness always gets – “I’ve used the leukemia a lot; I still use it” – he feels compelled to set the record straight. “[Johnston] doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I was hustling long before I got sick.”

After his recovery, no one sent Stavros anywhere for more discipline. He smoked a lot of pot, and when his hair came back, he grew it down to his shoulders, where it’s stayed. He wore high-heeled boots and lots of leather and cultivated the look of a glitter-rock star.

In 1977, near the end of his senior year, Stavros was going along in his usual fashion, playing his old man’s tips at OTB parlors and running a thriving ticket-scalping operation, when he realized the same charismatic hustling that had launched his many business ventures could also work in his personal life. And the time he discovered a dance club called Hurrah. “Till then my idea of New York nightlife was some guy puking in the corner of CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas City. Hurrah’s was filled with beautiful women, famous models, actresses.” But it was tough to get into. So Stavros did the same thing he now does every day: he set out to make himself some friends. He ingratiated himself with a group of well-connected gays who always got passes to all the parties.

“ I was this skinny boy with long hair and they thought I was cute,” he says. “I’d go over to someone’s apartment, smoke a joint, listen to records, and then we’d all walk over to the club.”

Just as Stavros was beginning to establish himself, Studio 54 opened, and all the regulars at Hurrah got invitations. “As soon as I got my membership, I dropped my gay friends and started going to Studio every night.”

By now Stavros had graduated from high school and, in need of a summer job, he got himself hired at Studio as a busboy. His first night in uniform – tiny black shorts and no shirt, six beautiful women pinched him. “Up till then I had never been the type of person who thought he could go out with beautiful women. I was really skinny. I had leukemia… My hair fell out and I had to wear a wig… I’m thinking after all these years I finally landed in nirvana.”

And so Stavros commenced his incredibly successful career with women, which would include living with Phoebe Cates and rampages through every modeling agency in town. Like his leukemia, Stavros would later incorporate his womanizing into his aura and put it to work making friends and influencing people.

One night in April 1978, Stavros left Studio with Rita Tellone, a young model who was soon to be on the cover of Penthouse. A week later he called his parents from Vegas and told them he and Rita had gotten married.

The nineteen-year-old newlyweds moved into one of Rose’s apartments and Stavros got a job selling sportswear. He couldn’t have been happier, but Rita could. After she left him around Christmastime, Stavros announced that he was moving to Hawaii for the rest of his life.

He moved in with a cousin who lived on Maui and figured he’d spend four years pretending to get a college education. But two weeks after he arrived, Stavros had to abandon even these modest plans. On February 2, 1979, he went out to dinner with a friend and his wife, then drove home. “It was one of those times when you see this couple that’s so happy you feel very sorry for yourself. Whatever is was, I wasn’t thinking and I ran a stop sign.”

There was a terrible crash, but when he peered through his shattered windshield, he says, there was no trace of what he’d collided with. So Stavros, cut from the broken glass, drove home and called the police. Five minutes later they arrived and arrested him for leaving the scene of an accident. Stavros’s Toyota had been struck by a motorcycle and the driver, twenty-one-year-old Joseph Smith, was in critical condition. An hour later, Smith died, and the state added the charge of negligent homicide.

Stavros’s mother hired a good local lawyer who Stavros says painted a sad picture of a skinny kid with leukemia who never had a girl in his life. After a brief trial, the state dropped the charge of negligent homicide, and Stavros pleaded guilty to hit-and-run, a felony.

But the felony came with what’s called a one-year dag. “It just shows how ridiculous the law is,” Stavros says. “If for one year I’m not convicted of another felony in that state, which I left the next day, my slate is clean. At the end of the year, I got my fingerprints back. I’ve kept them as a souvenir.”

Back in New York, Stavros returned to his old life at Studio, where be befriended Kathy Lambert, an ex-model, who was the rep for Johnston Films. One night Lambert offered to help him get a job and a couple of days later Stavros got a call from Noel Campbell, the company’s executive producer. Campbell wasn’t enthusiastic about hiring Stavros. Her few conversations with him when he had called the office for Lambert had left her with the impression of an obnoxious, condescending teenager. But since Stavros was the only person Lambert had ever pushed for a job, Campbell didn’t see how she could turn her down.

Campbell started Stavros as a production assistant, but after Johnston kicked him off the set for being too loud, she dropped him to the lowest rung in the company and maybe in New York – messenger. “I distinctly remember the first time I had any kind of positive feeling about Stavros,” Campbell says. “I was rushing to finish a bid, and as soon as I did, I handed it to him over my shoulder. A couple minutes later, I noticed he was still there, so I started yelling at him. He’d already delivered it.”

Between trips Stavros began asking questions about the office. When he learned that there was one job, called actuals, that was universally loathed, he volunteered. It was a tedious task, accounting for every actual expense on a production, but Stavros mastered it so quickly that within three months he persuaded Johnston and Campbell to let him start doing estimates. Soon, Stavros was doing them more quickly than any other bidder. “Stavros seemed to have been born with an understanding of how the business works,” Campbell says. “It was like a book he didn’t have to read to know the contents.”

Now Stavros began badgering Lambert to let him quote his bids directly to the client instead of turning them over to her. “The effect was that Kathy was losing some of her contact with her clients,” Campbell says. “Stavros was literally taking her job away…. Kathy knew what was happening, and I knew what was happening, and personally, I felt awful.”

“Kathy’d say to me, ‘I know what you’re up to,’” Stavros says. “And I’d say, ‘I don’t want to be a rep. I’d hate being a rep.’ Of course I was lying. I was dying to be a rep. Being a rep, you visit your friends all day, you eat at great restaurants. It’s a great job. It’s like Studio all over again.

“I’d do some brownnosing, like taking Jim’s reel and getting it to people who’d never seen it before,” he continues. “Plus Jim and Noel were being very encouraging. I’m not dumb. I know when a door is being opened for me.”

“Kathy’d been with us since the beginning,” says Campbell. “She was the one who put Jim on the map. But finally, I took her to lunch one afternoon…. She said, ‘I guess Stavros is getting my job.’ I said, ‘He’s already doing your job.’”

“When I finally got the job, I was jigging,” Stavros says. “Jim and Noel took me out for a bottle of champagne, and then I went out and celebrated some more.” It was the summer of 1980 and Stavros was twenty-one.

At a salary of $25,000, Stavros was an absurd bargain. So anxious was he to meet people that he did two lunches a day – Japanese at noon, French at one. From the start he has his knack for making friends and converting those friendships into business. He attended award shows, pored over awards manuals, and turned himself into an advertising aficionado.

The next year Stavros added to his network of friends and pulled in more work. He got particularly close to the young creatives at Doyle Dane, and when they sold their first commercials, Stavros was there to make sure Johnston got some prestige assignments. With his wily ways and his inhuman lunch calendar, Stavros was quickly becoming one the best-known reps in the city.

Over the next few years Johnston Films expanded its business and Stavros’s reputation grew even faster. He ran ads in Back Stage that consisted of full-page photographs of himself. He began his annual pilgrimages to Cannes for the international advertising festival, where he cruised the boulevards with his dear friends McCabe, Chiat, and Barry Day. He outgrew Armani and switched to Gianni Versace, and he abandoned Ruelles for Harry Cipriani.

Every year Stavros’s pay jumped dramatically, and last year his total compensation, including the lease on his 1983 black Jaguar sedan, was worth a quarter of a million dollars. But Stavros was growing restless and was tired of waiting for Johnston to make him a full partner.

Early this summer he resigned. By August, he had lured director Henry Holtzman away from N. Lee Lacy/Associates, rented space on West 18th Street, and opened Holtzman/Stavros. Holtzman is a top commercial director, best known for his work for Pepsi-Cola and New York Telephone, but for an opportunity to work with Stavros he agreed to an equal partnership.

Sitting at their still-raw loft, Stavros maintains that he and Holtzman broke off from their former companies primarily for artistic reasons. “The philosophy is different here. We’d rather not shoot a week than shoot a board we don’t feel strongly about. We’re not in this to make a lot of money. We just want to do great work and have fun.”

At last word, Stavros wasn’t having any trouble finding boards up to his standards. Within two weeks, the young company was awarded spots for United Air Lines and Hallmark Cards, and had thirteen bids still out. “I’m working twice as hard as I used to for Johnston,” Stavros says. “I’m working like an animal. Ask her.” He gestures to his wife, the tall, incredibly thin Hayley, who makes her living being tall and incredibly thin. She takes a bite of her frozen yogurt and agrees that Stavros is indeed working like an animal.

At eight o’clock, when all the other reps have long since fled midtown, Stavros is at Harry Cipriani, off the lobby of the Sherry Netherland Hotel, doing a dinner. Stavros does almost as many dinners as lunches. The only difference, he says, is dinners are “heavier.” Although Stavros must tire of eating at the same restaurant half a dozen times a week, it’s where he has a regular table, where the Italian waiters dote on him, and Harry himself comes over to say hello.

Tonight’s guests are Larry Dobrow and his wife, Carol, a couple in their fifties, both wearing oversize plastic glasses. Stavros met Larry and Carol on the beach in Cannes at an advertising party. “Stavros made a pass at my wife,” Larry recalls jokingly. “I told him he couldn’t afford her. He said he could, and I was very impressed.”

“I think it’s Larry who wants to run off with Stavros’s wife,” Carol says.

It’s about the last thing Carol gets to says, because Larry, who just took a senior management job at Bozell, spends the rest of the evening talking about everything he’s accomplished there already. It’s one thing schmoozing a thirty-year-old art director with a funky poster on his wall and reggae on his box. Sitting through an hour-long monologue is another. But Stavros is in shape, and nothing in his tiny jet-black eyes or dark pocked face suggests he’d rather be somewhere else.

His gangly adolescent frame hunched over the table, Stavros stares straight into Larry’s eyes, and Larry’s eyes, twinkling behind thick lenses, star straight back. When Larry pauses to chew on a piece of salmon or to assure himself of his listener’s rapt attention, Stavros jerks his head off his hand to say, “That’s fantastic” or “That was a brilliant idea” or “Where do you get the time to do all that, Larry? You must have a staff of twenty.” And all the while Stavros is filing away more names and information about Bozell. With his best friend Larry in management and his other best friend Bill Appleman the new executive creative director, the agency promises to be one of his biggest sources of new business.

After charging the meal on his American Express platinum card, Stavros embraces Larry and kisses Carol, then steers his Jag through the park. As the heavy car swishes through the curves, he explains how, after a day of calls, screenings, and long lunches, he can subject himself to more at night.

“This is not work for me,” he insists, as if for the twentieth time. “This is pleasure. We didn’t discuss business. I didn’t ask for work. I love Larry. You see how much he loves this business? I enjoy this more than when I used to spend my time with my so-called friends.

“Hayley and I, we get dressed up, we go out, it’s fun. What’s so wrong with that? You have to understand this is my life. When I got home tonight, I’ll know I’ve worked absolutely as hard as I can. And tomorrow I’ll do it again.”

So how does Stavros relax when he’s finally back in his loft after a hard day’s night befriending men old enough to be his father? He stretches out in his maroon-and-black art deco living room with its view of the Empire State Building, and then advertising’s most amazing operator reads comic books. X-Men. Captain America. Fantastic Four. Be he savors most the adventures of his favorite superhero, the skinny web-slinger with the “spidey sense,” who protects his friends and always finds a way to overcome the uncontrollable forces of a hostile city, Spider-man.