10% for GIo

"Happiness is just a thing called Glo," warbled Elaine (Goldilocks} Stritch, her eyelashes wobbly. "Sometimes the cabin's gloomy and the cupboard's bare. Then she books me and it's Christmas every -wheeere!" It broke up the audience: 200 showfolk packed into a tiny Manhattan restaurant one night last week for a boozy, rollicking party that lasted until dawn. The guest of honor: slim, chic, tough-talking ("Let's get the squares out of here") Gloria Safier (pronounced sapphire), Broadway's leading woman agent and one of the most remarkable operatives in the 10% business.

In a day when many talent agents are organization men peddling flesh in "packages," Agent Safier thrives ($50,000 last year) on warm, personal friendships. "The nicest agent in the business," says Theatre Guild Director Lawrence Langner. Client Geraldine Fitzgerald does not even have a written contract with Gloria: "I have to remind myself to send her a check."

Mother Variety. To keep things so. Gloria limits herself to 30 hand-picked clients, many at first too obscure to interest such giant agencies as William Morris and M.C.A. (Music Corporation of America). Her specialty is to spot unknowns and maneuver them toward the top with the patient strategy of a prizefight manager, often turning down quick big money for smaller deals until she can find her client the right spot in the big time. Explains Gloria: "Anyone can get Marilyn Monroe a job. There's no fun in that."

At 37, Gloria has been in the business 20 years (last week's party celebrated the anniversary). She grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of a movie distributor: "I was raised on Variety instead of Mother Goose. My arithmetic was the grosses in Cleveland." At 17, Gloria was pressagent for Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, fattened her $25-a-week salary by a giggling conspiracy with Billy's star show girl, Mary ("Stuttering Sam") Dowell; when well-heeled marks took Sam and Gloria to the race track, peeling off $100 bills for them to wager, the girls carefully kept most of the cash.

Her cousin, the late, brilliant Agent Myron Selznick, hired her at $75 a week and told her: "The day you get barred from a studio, you're a great agent." The day soon came; Gloria enraged Fox by advising Client Geraldine Fitzgerald to turn down a part. Says Gloria: "I felt like I'd made Phi Beta Kappa."

Father Gloria. With a borrowed $5,000, Gloria in 1948 launched her Broadway office (still herself and one secretary). She bought a mink coat, went to work for nobodies. She got obscure Dancer Valerie Bettis a smash part in Inside U.S.A., rescued Singer Russell Nype when he was flat broke, and landed him in Call Me Madam. Nype soon signed up with M.C.A. (which paid Gloria $30,000 for his contract), has never again matched his Madam part. For Comedian Wally (Mr. Peepers) Cox, another Safier discovery, she got an eight-year contract with NBC that pays him $50,000 yearly whether he works or not. Gloria is also a has-been's hope: it was she who helped sober up Actress Mary Astor, lent her money, took her on as a client and sold her autobiography, My Story, to the publisher.

Gloria has never married or come close. Her interest in "my people" takes up so much of her time that last year she opened a restaurant called Brown's on Manhattan's 61st Street (last week's party site) just so "we could have our own place to meet." There she holds day-long confessionals, deflating outsize egos or nursing bruised ones. Says Gloria in her tumbling, still vaguely Brooklynese accent: "To me agenting is not selling lamps at Macy's."

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