Life of a star: Go to a party, and get paid for it

Levine was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, which calls itself the "crossroads between commerce and creativity." She was 18. After her father died, her mother remarried and moved to Florida, but Levine stayed put in New York, living with her sister and going to school, working as the manager of a clothing store to help pay her bills.

She soaked up the party life and thought about glamour, the kind of glamour she loves in "Gigi" and "My Fair Lady."

"I knew everything about pop culture. It's what I was interested in and then a friend of mine was producing a show for Bill Cosby and said, `Can you come work here?'"

It was the Cosby spinoff and 1992 flop starring Malcolm-Jamal Warner called "Here and Now." The NBC show lasted only one season and Levine moved on, landing in 1998 at "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" and towering 30 Rockefeller Plaza, home to NBC smack in the middle of Manhattan.

"I thought this was it. I looked at 30 Rock like it was THE best address. I loved it, loved it, loved it, and then you grow not to love it anymore."

So with her contact list expanding, Levine branched out on her own, learning to dissect contracts like a lawyer. In the early days, she brokered retainers and fees for wrangled celebrities about 25 percent of the time. Now, it's more like 50-50.

"Can you pay us in cash? It's the stupidest question I get," Levine said "Cash? I know, because we work at a casino and it's 1950. ... This is corporate America. We're going to pay you by check and you're going to have to pay taxes on it, just like everybody else."

Much of what she does also depends on educating her clients.

"Everyone calls and wants Nicole Kidman. Please. Really. OK, let me explain to you what she goes to and why," Levine said. "We try to be as realistic as possible and say, `Look, this is who you're getting, this is who makes sense, this is how we get them.'"

So what would Audrey Hepburn think about all of this, and about her own mass-produced Ikea image as office decoration?

"I love the idea that Audrey Hepburn at her Breakfast at Tiffany moment, in this kind of shadow is so attainable by so many," Levine said. "It's just kind of perfect. It's just like my life."

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