Gloria Safier

Gloria Safier, Agent For Writers and Actors OCT. 10, 1985 New York Times

Gloria Safier, a longtime theatrical and literary agent, died yesterday at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 63 years old.

Born in Cleveland, Miss Safier grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1939.

The daughter of a movie distributor, she had show business in her blood at an early age. I was raised on Variety instead of Mother Goose, she once said. My arithmetic was the grosses in Cleveland. At age 17 she worked as a $25-a-week press agent for Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, eventually moving to Hollywood, where she served an apprenticeship with the agent Myron Selznick, her cousin.

Miss Safier opened her own office on Broadway in 1948, where she specialized in discovering talented unknowns, including Wally Cox, who went on to star as Mr. Peepers. Her clients eventually included Mary Astor, Diane Cilento, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Constance Ford, Arlene Francis, Robert Shaw, Elaine Stritch and Gloria Vanderbilt. In 1959, Time magazine described her as Broadway's leading agent and one of the most remarkable operatives in the 10-percent business.

Miss Safier became a literary agent about 15 years ago. Her clients included Sumner Locke Elliott, Tom Harris, Susan Isaacs, Lee Israel, Ethel Merman and Liz Smith.

Miss Safier is survived by her mother, Rose Shumofsky of Fairfield, Conn., and by her sister, Joan Kulok of New York.