![]() ![]() Lazar had called to say that he would be on his way shortly. ![]() From time to time, as I ate the rolls, a captain arrived bearing bulletins from Lazar. I was swept to a red-checked table downstairs, opposite the bar, and given a bowl of celery and olives on ice and a basket of rolls. When he is finished speaking to you, he goes on to his next call without a pause.Īt “21,” I had only to mention Lazar’s name to be treated like royalty. As I was to discover, this was his trademark. I said goodbye into a dead telephone, for Lazar had already hung up. “ ‘21,’ for chrissakes, where do you think?” Lazar said. Editors rolled back from lunch on a sea of Martinis at three o’clock in those days, but where they’d been I had no idea. My publishing lunches had so far consisted of sandwiches at my desk. “Where?” I asked, reminding myself not to call him Swifty. “I don’t know why I’m not doing any fucking business with Simon & Schuster,” he suddenly snapped, as sharply as the crack of a whip, reverting to his natural accent, an impatient Brooklyn Jewish growl. “I do lots of business with Tom Guinzburg, at Viking.” His voice was full of slow, rolling English vowels, as if he were making a speech in the House of Lords. ![]() “I do business with Bennett Cerf,” he said, with a trace of irritation. He seemed to be affecting an English accent, and for a moment I thought he might be making fun of me. “I’m not doing any business with your shop, and I want to know why.” I found it hard at first to decipher his meaning. “Meet me for lunch, my dear boy,” he said grandly. He was shouting into a telephone.Ībout eight years later, I had just begun work as an editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster when one day Lazar called me on the phone. He was wearing white shoes, a blue blazer, and white trousers so perfectly pressed, despite the heat, that he looked like a shiny, expensive beach toy that has just been unpacked from its box beneath the Christmas tree by some lucky child. He was totally bald, and his face, or what could be seen of it below huge, glittering gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, was tanned to the color of a well-cared-for crocodile handbag. (He had been christened Swifty by Humphrey Bogart after making three deals for Bogart in one day on a bet.) Lazar was standing on the other side of the pool, an incongruous, diminutive figure among all the half-naked, oiled, and bronzed bodies. “He hates the bloody name.” Lazar was then in his forties, I suppose, and was already an internationally famous superagent in the Myron Selznick-Leland Hayward tradition. “Nobody who matters calls Lazar Swifty,” my Uncle Alex warned me. The first time I remember hearing Irving Lazar’s name was in 1950, at Eden Roc, on the Cap d’Antibes. ![]()
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