Another Life (30 page)

He turned toward the captain, who was hovering beside me. “He’ll have a ‘21’ burger, medium,” he said, dismissing him with a wave while I was still looking at my menu. Lazar, as I was to learn, hated people who can’t make up their minds about what they want to eat (or anything else), and was very likely to order for them if they weren’t quick enough to suit him.

He settled himself down, sipped his virgin bullshot—the first time I had ever heard of this drink—and looked at me warily, as if he was wondering who I was and why I was sitting there. Behind thick glasses, his eyes were shrewd and penetrating, with the kind of beady stare that a macaw might bring to bear on you just before lunging to bite your finger. His head was completely bald—I wondered if he shaved it every day. It also looked as if he polished it, perhaps with something like Butcher’s Wax. “You’re younger than I thought,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning down suspiciously, as if I had somehow deceived him on that score. “Do they let you make deals over there?”

I said they did, though they weren’t deals of the kind that Lazar was famous for.

He nodded, then leaned conspiratorially toward me. “I’m going to
give you a piece of advice you’ll thank me for the rest of your life, kiddo,” he said. It was the first time anybody had ever called me
kiddo
—a word I had until then associated only with tough-guy movies.

I stared back at him, eager for any piece of wisdom.

“Never forget this,” he told me, his expression making it clear that I was not to take his advice lightly. “The first couple of million bucks you make—put it away! You don’t ever touch that, you hear me? That’s your ‘fuck you’ money. That way, anybody ever tries to make you do something you don’t want to do, you can tell ’em, ‘Fuck you.’ ”

Since at the time I was making a couple of hundred dollars a week and had zero in my bank account, Lazar’s advice seemed of doubtful utility, though it clearly represented a deeply felt credo on his part. Over the years, he was to give me much more advice from his personal experience, ranging from “Always try to have fun, kiddo” to “Be a mensch when you tip.” This last I received at that first lunch, when Lazar rose from the table at the end of the meal to continue table-hopping and, forgetting that he had invited me to lunch, left me with the check.

In some mysterious way, however, I must have passed some sort of test, for our lunch together placed me firmly on Lazar’s daily list of people to call, and I remained there for thirty years. Once a day, I picked up the phone and heard him rasp, “Lazar here. What’s cookin’, kiddo?” or “What have we got going, kid?”—followed by a bewildering series of high-speed sales pitches. These, too, were sometimes interrupted by advice or reflections on life, my favorite being “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and there’s nothing doing, so I decide to
make something happen by lunch
.”

This, in fact, is as close as anyone has come to explaining Lazar’s way of doing business. The moment he awoke, he got on the phone and proceeded to make something—anything—happen, mostly by trolling a series of celebrity names until whatever editor he was speaking to took a nibble at the bait. One learned early—I did, anyway—that these names might as well be picked out of a hat, since Lazar seldom bothered to inform celebrities and stars before offering up their names to publishers. “How about Cary Grant?” he might say. “Cary could write a great book. Give me, oh, say a million, and he’s yours, I won’t even mention him to anybody else. Well, better make that a million and a half. He’s big in England, and he’s dying to do it.… Greg Peck, how about him? Gene Kelly? I saw Gene last night. Give me half a million right now and he’s yours.”

This was basically Lazar’s way of getting his day started, very often from the breakfast table by his pool in Beverly Hills—the equivalent of finger exercises for a concert pianist. Only if he got a good, solid bite would he actually
call
Cary Grant or Gregory Peck or Gene Kelly—or, later, Madonna, Cher, Sharon Stone, or Jessica Lange, for Lazar always kept up with the rise and fall of stars. If nobody bit, the names shuffled to the bottom of his list for the next day’s calls. Only large, round numbers were mentioned, and one also learned that, as at auctions, it was dangerous to express polite interest. Lazar was only too likely to interpret anything less than an emphatic “not on your life!” as agreement and would then angrily insist that you had made an offer and hold you to your word.

When I began, tentatively, to make a few deals with Lazar—Garson Kanin, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre—I learned that his client list apparently included everyone, even people who had other agents—Oscar Levant once remarked, “Everybody who matters has two agents: his own and Irving Lazar.” But Lazar did not consider himself an agent at all; he described himself as a deal maker and thus did not feel bound by the normal rules of agenting. Lazar would make a deal for anyone and later on work out a more or less amicable arrangement with the agent. Sometimes he took his 10 percent from the buyer, sometimes from the seller—sometimes, it was rumored, in the old days, from both. He frequently offered me authors who, to the best of my knowledge, were happily placed with rival publishers and were represented by more conventional agents.

“Truman Capote,” Lazar said. “Wanna do a deal with him?” At the time, Capote was one of the bright stars at Random House, while I was an editor at a house not then famous for fiction. It seemed to me unlikely that Capote would want to leave Random House or that Random House would let him go, and I said so. “I can see you don’t have the guts for this kind of thing, sonny,” Lazar sniffed—he always called me
sonny
when he was pissed off—and he hung up, no doubt to offer Capote elsewhere. (Capote was a Random House author until his death.)

I learned that such offers often came about because Lazar was having a feud with a certain house or editor. If he wasn’t happy with Random House, he would offer Capote around, probably without telling Capote; if somebody at another house had offended him, he would try to steal Vladimir Nabokov away. This practice didn’t change over the years; it gave Lazar a chance to test the waters and check the market
value of an author—a tactic that drove more sedate agents wild, since Lazar often told their clients that he could get them a better deal.

Capote was the accidental centerpiece of one of my more memorable lunches with Lazar some years later. I had made a date to meet him at the Grill Room of The Four Seasons at one o’clock and begged him to be on time, since I had a meeting at two-thirty. “Sure, sure,” he said, with the slightly offended tone of a man who is never late. “One o’clock on the dot, kiddo.” Needless to say, at one-thirty I was still waiting for him, while bulletins of his progress were brought to me. Finally, he arrived, did his tour of the room, sat down, and looked at me. “You ought to relax more,” he said. “A young guy your age, you shouldn’t look so stressed.”

I was about to point out to him that he was the cause of my stress, but just as the captain was handing Irving a menu, Truman Capote, wearing a purple velvet jumpsuit and a matching purple hat, appeared at the table, looking like nothing so much as an aging pixie. “Hello, Irving,” he said.

Lazar looked up impatiently. “I’m not speaking to you,” he said.

Capote sat down. He looked as if he was about to cry. “Don’t be angry with me, Irving,” he said. His voice was as high-pitched as a bird’s.

Lazar glared at him unforgivingly. “You turn up late for a sit-down dinner at my house. You bring along some piece of rough trade you’ve picked up from a gas station along the way as your date. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

“I
said
I was sorry.”

It was beginning to dawn on me that I might as well not be there. Lazar did not introduce me to Truman Capote. Capote ignored me completely. It was nearly two o’clock, and we still hadn’t ordered.

“All right, all right,” Lazar said gruffly. “I forgive you, but it’s the last time.”

“I promise. Let’s get together while you’re in New York.” The two men pulled out identical Hermès pocket diaries and Cartier gold pencils, put on their reading glasses, and peered at the week ahead, where, it turned out, neither of them had a free moment.

“Lunch with Jackie, cocktails with the Paleys, dinner at the Bombolanas—you know them, Irving, surely. That’s it for Tuesday,” Capote said.

Lazar studied his own diary as if it were the Rosetta stone. “Lunch
with the Princess Borbón y Parma, cocktails with Marietta Tree, dinner at Lenny Bernstein’s—that’s it for Wednesday.”

At last, after spirited negotiation, they managed to settle on a date for dinner and, with even greater difficulty, on a place, and Capote finally took his leave. Lazar sat back contentedly. I guessed that he felt his social schedule had one-upped Capote’s, though the two seemed to me equally star-studded. “You know who that was?” he asked. “That was Truman Capote.”

“So I gathered.”

Irony was wasted on Lazar. He leaned close to me and whispered. “I’m going to tell you something about Truman that not many people know,” he said. He paused significantly. “Truman’s a fruit.”

T
HERE WAS
, I discovered over the years, a curious innocence about Lazar, despite his cynical exterior—a romanticism that came to the surface by fits and starts. It was not just his occasionally old-fashioned slang—surely nobody had used the word
fruit
to describe a homosexual since the thirties—but a certain innocent attitude toward his friends. He refused to believe the worst about anyone he knew. People who everyone else agreed were totally loathsome, Lazar professed to like. Couples who were on the brink of angry divorce he stoutly maintained were devoted to each other. Eventually, I came to understand that Lazar simply refused to believe that people close to him could be upset or miserable or unpleasant. Like the Sun King, he believed that his presence made people happy and therefore took unhappiness as a kind of lèse-majesté.

Lazar was a famously generous host, his generosity exceeded only by his unpredictability. He once invited me to a black-tie dinner at his home—a sit-down dinner for sixty people, many of them the kind of stars about whom it’s often said, “You’re kidding, I didn’t know he was still alive!”

“I’ve got a surprise for you, kiddo,” he said to me. “You’ll never guess who you’re seated next to.”

My heart sank. Francis X. Bushman, maybe? Was he still alive? Just as we were about to sit down, a glamorous woman appeared and sat down on my right. Lazar called for silence and said, “This is a special moment, because Merle Oberon is going to be sitting next to her nephew, Michael Korda, and they haven’t seen each other for years!”

Poor Merle stared at me in horror as everyone applauded, not so much because we didn’t like each other as because the notion of having a thirty-year-old publisher as a nephew hardly fit in with her youthful public image.

For a long time, I thought that Lazar had a taste for practical jokes and that my reintroduction to Merle after twenty years might be one, but I eventually came to the conclusion that it was part of his innocence. Because he never remembered the bad things about people, he was very likely to seat ex-wives next to ex-husbands, or old enemies next to each other, having no exes of his own. He also appeared to have no enemies, unless you count germs.

Dirt was Lazar’s only fear and his legendary obsession. If there is any truth to the Freudian notion that people who suffer from a germ phobia and wash their hands constantly are afflicted with unbearable feelings of guilt, Lazar must have been the guiltiest man on earth, yet guilt was absolutely foreign to his spirit. Once when he was being driven to East Hampton for the weekend by his hostess, he surprised her by producing a carefully typed list of the hospitals along the route—not, as she supposed, because he was afraid of having a heart attack, but in case he had to go to the bathroom. Hospitals, he explained, had clean bathrooms; he couldn’t use a bathroom in a gas station. It’s said that in the forties Lazar was discovered one night trapped in the men’s room of Chasen’s with Howard Hughes, another germphobe. They had both washed and disinfected their hands and were waiting for someone to come along and open the door; neither one of them was willing to touch the handle.

Oddly, it never occurred to me that Lazar was old, even when he reached his eighties and began to gallop toward his nineties. Since in his view I was either “kiddo” or “sonny,” our relationship was a constant—he the grown-up, I the child. As I became more successful, Lazar’s attitude toward me never varied. He was delighted for me, but I was still “kiddo” and always would be. Nor did Lazar seem to age. His energy was phenomenal, even frightening. No number of parties, including his own, could exhaust him or blunt his appetite for sociability.

I had always thought of Lazar as a kind of finished product—born somehow already wearing his Savile Row suit and gleaming handmade shoes—so it came as a surprise to me when I was having a sandwich with him at his house in Beverly Hills one day and saw in his den a
framed photograph of him as a boy, with a full head of hair, standing in front of a 1920s delivery truck and looking remarkably self-possessed.

“Is that you?” I asked.

Lazar glared at me. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Now sit down and eat.”

There was also a photograph of Lazar as a brash young MCA agent, already bald but pudgy, not at all the trim figure I was accustomed to; one of Lazar in uniform, a serious expression on his face; and even one of him as a baby. Of course, one knew he had
been
a baby, but over the years he had so cocooned himself in legend that his past had become almost indecipherable. His father was a relatively prosperous Russian-Jewish butter-and-egg wholesaler in Brooklyn (who did a little modest loan-sharking on the side). Lazar seems, in fact, to have had a happy childhood—three brothers, a doting mother, and a father who served as a role model.

In his later years, Lazar looked back on his childhood with the kind of nostalgia that successful self-made men always develop for their roots. He had a whole repertoire of childhood anecdotes about how he had to learn to be tough, because he was the smallest boy in school; about how he fought full-grown teamsters for the best parking place at the market every morning for his father’s truck; about how he learned to dress elegantly from the neighborhood gangsters in the era when guys such as Abner (Longie) Zwillman, Jake (Greasy Thumb) Guzik, and Legs Diamond controlled the streets and the rackets. Two themes dominated all of Lazar’s stories about growing up: fighting back and standing out from the crowd, and a longing for a richer, more genteel way of life, apparently inspired by summer visits to more prosperous relatives who lived in the country.