Another Life

by Michael Korda

  It was probably a yearning for class that prompted Lazar to go to law school instead of joining the neighborhood gangsters or staying in the family business. He graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1931, but he soon figured out that as the lawyer for vaudeville star Ted Lewis (Mr. “Me and My Shadow”) he made a hundred dollars a week, whereas M.C.A. was taking 10 percent of Lewis’s ten thousand dollars a week. When he was faced with lawyers, he seldom failed to point out that he was a lawyer himself, and he did practice bankruptcy law for a few years after law school. But, like Billy Rose, he seemed to have made his mark mostly as the quick-witted and ambitious assistant to older men, taking shorthand (a man’s job in those days), running errands, establishing a name for himself as a bright young man around the courthouse. A good head for numbers and an already legendary amount of chutzpah brought him into the talent business when it was still in its infancy and consisted of booking musicians and acts in the Catskills, on the still flourishing vaudeville circuit, and in the mob-owned nightclubs, speakeasies, and jazz joints of New York’s East Fifties. Lazar might have regarded all this as a step toward some more respectable profession, but it didn’t take long for him to discover that he was good at what he was doing—for already he was fiercely competitive, unhappy at being a subordinate, and absolutely fearless. In later years, people wondered at Lazar’s ability to stand up to studio heads, publishers, and difficult clients, but the fact is that his early experience was with people who were perfectly willing to have him beaten up or killed—and, in fact, he was beaten up and even stabbed in the course of business, yet he never felt intimidated. In an industry in which it has become fashionable for agents and executives to flaunt tough-guy talk, though, Lazar rarely indulged in gangsterisms—he had done business with guys who never said that kind of thing unless they meant it.

  Lazar made his first trip to the West Coast in 1936. He claimed that it was by accident, but there were no accidents in Lazar’s life. It’s true that he accompanied two vaudeville clients out there because he didn’t trust them to pay him his commission—he preferred to divide up the take at the end of every day himself—but it’s likely that he had been looking westward for some time. In New York, show business took a backseat to the bigger, more serious worlds of finance, media, old money, and society. In Hollywood, show business was everything; society, class, and finance all revolved around the studios. Still, there was never any question of Lazar’s becoming a 10 percenter. Lazar’s roots remained in New York, and he kept them there. What’s more, he cleverly avoided becoming a mere flesh peddler. He made deals for such people as Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, Cole Porter, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Garson Kanin, and Ernest Hemingway. He sold books, plays, ideas, and people by going to the top from the very first—a feat made possible not only by his toughness and determination but by the simple fact that he was an outsider, a New Yorker.

  Lazar understood instinctively that the prevailing ethos of West Coast movie people was then (as it is now) fear and envy of New York. New York was where the money came from; it was where the owners of the studios were—the bosses to whom men such as Mayer and Zanuck actually reported. New York was, above all, where talent, ideas, culture, and fashions came from, and in the days when it took nearly four days to cross the country, a person arriving from New York was greeted the way a traveler from Saint Petersburg was hailed upon arriving in some remote provincial town in nineteenth-century Russia.

  In the late forties, Lazar decided to move to Los Angeles permanently, and he quickly established himself as the connection between New York and Hollywood, first imitating, then replacing, Leland Hayward. Not a reader himself (he was notorious for not bothering to read the books he was selling), he cultivated writers, publishers, and playwrights and brought the studio heads projects they could never have found by themselves, for prices they would never have dreamed of paying to anyone else. In New York, Lazar became known as the man who could get you bagfuls of money from Hollywood; in Hollywood, he was known as the man who could bring you the hottest properties before anybody else on the Coast had heard of them. In the days when a transcontinental telephone call was a big deal, Lazar was in touch constantly, perfecting his peculiar blend of gossip, news, and sales pitch, and a lot of people didn’t know whether Lazar was speaking to them from his poolside in Beverly Hills or from around the corner on Fifth Avenue.

  Lazar once half jokingly promised to grant a publisher not “world rights” but “universe rights.” A certain grandeur was part of his manner, and Lazar rapidly became more famous than most of his clients. Even total strangers who knew little or nothing about book publishing and the movie business picked up the party trick of raising one trouser leg above the knee and putting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses against the kneecap to simulate Lazar’s physiognomy.

  Early on, Lazar hit upon three rules that stood him in good stead for over fifty years. The first was that he could always reach anyone, anywhere, any time. His secret weapon was the world’s largest address book, full of the private, unlisted numbers of people whom nobody else can reach. The second rule was always to go directly to the top. His last rule was to insist on a quick answer, as I was quickly to learn.

  MY FIRST lunch with Lazar at “21” did not lead to any immediate results, but he soon called with a new proposition: “Garson Kanin,” he said. “How would you like a book by him? I’m giving you the first crack at this, so don’t let me down, kiddo.”

  Fortunately for me, I was not obliged to ask who Garson Kanin might be or express amazement that he was still alive, since nothing was more certain to infuriate Lazar. Oddly enough, the name not only rang a bell, it chimed a whole chorus of them, for Gar Kanin was an old friend of my mother’s, having directed her on Broadway in at least two plays. In addition, his wife, Ruth Gordon, had worked with my mother in Katharine Cornell’s Broadway production of The Three Sisters in which my mother had played Irina, the youngest sister, and Gordon the awful sister-in-law. I said that I’d be interested.

  “How interested?” Lazar asked sharply.

  That would depend, I said, on what Gar planned to write.

  “He’ll write anything you want him to,” Lazar snapped impatiently. “What I want to know is how much you’ll pay.”

  This was my first experience of doing business with Lazar. I didn’t want to disappoint him by seeming like a timid small-timer, but on the other hand I wasn’t used to putting down money on anything quite as slim as this—usually an agent sent over at least a few chapters of manuscript or, if the writer was well known, an outline. Lazar was asking me to buy a pig in a poke, and I hadn’t a clue what to say. Besides, there were people I’d have to talk to before making an offer, and most of them would certainly ask what it was that Kanin planned to write about.

  Could Gar not be persuaded to put a few words on paper? I asked.

  He would put as many words as I liked on paper the moment we had a deal, Lazar said abruptly. First, he needed a number.

  There was no way of faking my way past this, I decided. I explained how interested I was, pointed out that I knew Gar of old, and promised to call Lazar as soon as I had talked to my colleagues.

  “I can see you’re not interested, sonny,” Lazar said, more in sorrow than in anger. “I’ll try Bennett. He’s dying to have Gar on the Random House list.” With that, Lazar hung up, leaving me feeling as if I’d made a fool of myself and perhaps lost a great opportunity. Only later did I discover that Lazar hadn’t called me about Kanin until Cerf—and practically everybody else in publishing—had already said no.

  At the time, of course, I assumed that Lazar was so disappointed in me that he would take me off his call list, but the very next day I heard the familiar voice say, “Lazar here,” and he was off and running on someone new—Fernando Lamas, perhaps, someone else from his B list, or Gene Kelly, who was on Lazar’s A list but bored everybody else because he was such a nice guy that people feared he’d have nothing to say in his memoir
s. Before the week was out, he had tried me on Gar Kanin again as if he had never mentioned the subject before. Many years later, Lazar actually did persuade me to buy a novel by Kanin, Moviola, which turned out to be a million-dollar bomb, setting something like a new record for expensive failure in the high-powered fiction stakes, so perhaps the gods were watching over me the first time he was offered to me.

  WITH LAZAR, I felt somehow that I had reached the big time, because if Lazar was anything it was big-time. He had the ability to make one feel that simply by being on his call list one was an important person, because Lazar wouldn’t call anyone who wasn’t important. I took it as a good sign that Lazar had singled me out for his attention, however eccentric—he wasn’t a man to waste time on young people with no future. Besides, at S&S, Lazar talked only to me. Most important agents spread their business out among several editors or executives at the same firm, but Lazar was, if nothing else, absolutely loyal. “I dance with the person who brought me,” he once said, and even if it wasn’t completely true in his personal life—he had a notorious roving eye—it was always true in his business life (not that the two were easily separated). Once you were his friend, he did business with you and you alone, and that was that.

  CHAPTER 15

  It was no thanks to Lazar that I once met Fannie Hurst. An old friend of mine from school in Switzerland, Peter Wodtke, then on his way to becoming a major figure in the financial world, had called out of the blue to ask if I was interested in meeting a famous writer. Since that was, after all, my profession, I said I was indeed interested. Fine, he said, we’ll meet at Fannie Hurst’s, tomorrow at seven.

  I had a moment of panic as I agreed. I hadn’t a clue who Fannie Hurst was, though the name sounded familiar, and I hadn’t wanted to sound like a schmuck to my friend, particularly since it involved something to do with my own profession. What kind of editor doesn’t recognize the name of a famous author, after all? Somewhere in the back of my head was the idea that Hurst might be the author of Stella Dallas, but I wasn’t even sure that it had ever been a book before it became a movie. Whoever she was, I knew she was not young, so I called Irving Lazar and asked him what he knew about her.

  “Forget it,” he said. “She’s dead.”

  I objected. She could hardly be giving a cocktail party in her apartment from the grave.

  Lazar was not convinced. “Trust me, kiddo, she’s been dead for years.”

  I asked if he could remember any of her titles. “She was a journalist,” he said. “Wrote for William Randolph Hearst, I think. They were big pals. She did books too, though.… Something Street … Easy Street? Nah. Wait a minute, I’ve got it: Back Street. Big best-seller, way back in the twenties, I think.… Got made into a movie.” There was a pause, while he switched gears. “Listen, how about Gar Kanin?” he asked. “I’m not getting what I want from Bennett. Give me two-fifty and he’s yours. No, make that three-fifty, and I’ll throw in foreign. They love Gar in London.”

  I did not have an opportunity to read any of Hurst’s works before her party, so when I met Wodtke in the lobby of her building I was still ignorant of her. Everybody recognized her name all right, but that was it. Most people, like Lazar, assumed that she was dead.

  The Des Artistes is one of New York’s most famous apartment buildings, a spectacular, towering Gothic fantasy on West Sixty-seventh Street just off Central Park West, where the lobby looks as if Count Dracula was about to descend in the elevator, and the exterior of the building makes you look up expecting to find Quasimodo perched among the stone-carved spires, buttresses, and gargoyles. Constructed during the 1920s as a kind of artists’ cooperative because of the shortage of studio space in New York, the Des Artistes had its own restaurant, with sprawling murals by Howard Chandler Christy of naked nymphs cavorting in the woods, perfectly embodying the spirit of luxurious bohemian decadence and contempt for the bourgeoisie in which it was built, in the years before the Crash wiped out most of the people who had intended to live, paint, and sculpt there.

  The ancient elevator bore us up to Hurst’s floor at a glacial pace, as if rising from a crypt. It creaked and groaned like a ship under full sail. An ancient majordomo ushered us into a dark vestibule as if he had just risen from his coffin to answer the bell and showed us into a big, glassed-in living room–studio, two stories high, dimly lit by twenty-five-watt bulbs (in what had once been ornate gas fittings) and enough candles for a major funeral.

  The windows were immense—two stories tall and filling one whole wall of the room—but they were draped in many square yards of black velvet, trimmed in faded gold, that came all the way to the floor. Against the other wall was a minstrel’s gallery in dark wood, with a narrow carved-wood stairway leading up to it and false windows in stained glass. Everywhere, standing in sheaves in tall vases under the dim light, were calla lilies, hundreds of them, giving off a sickly, sweet, cloying odor.

  Swimming in the gloom were our fellow guests, dwarfed by the furniture and, for the most part, even older than the butler, who announced us in a low, croaking whisper, like a rusty iron gate swinging in the wind. It was difficult to believe that only a few floors below us was contemporary New York City. It was as if we had stepped straight out of the elevator into the gloomiest of haunted castles, peopled by ghosts. The men were small, ancient, dressed with a certain old-fashioned elegance not at all of this epoch; the women lavishly, if eccentrically, sported long evening dresses in dark, velvety fabrics, richly patterned, old-fashioned material that might have served as the upholstery in a nineteenth-century Venetian gondola. Their jewelry was on the heroic scale: many strands of beads, massive gold chains, much amber. Several of the women carried gloves. Almost everybody was smoking with a cigarette holder as they stared at us. One elderly woman was actually peering in our direction through a lorgnette.

  An elderly waiter appeared out of the darkness, like a fish rising out of the depths of an aquarium, and offered us champagne from a silver tray. The flutes were green and shaped like the calla lilies.

  There was a buzz among the guests, and they parted for a small, slim, elderly woman with imperious features and an aura of energy. She was wearing one of the most extraordinary dresses I had ever seen, a floor-length, skintight, high-necked garment of black velvet, rather like that worn by Jane Avril in Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous poster, around which curled embroidered calla lilies, the stem of one of them curling around her slender neck like a noose. Her complexion was not just pale, it was white, like that of Pierrot, against which she had slashed, with reckless abandon, scarlet lipstick and much eye shadow. This, clearly, was our hostess. My friend introduced himself and explained who I was, at which Hurst fixed her gaze on me intently. Did she understand, she asked, that I was a book publisher? Modestly, I assented. Her voice was penetrating, but despite her curious costume there was nothing particularly formidable about it. If one had heard it on the subway, one would not have thought twice about it. It electrified the other guests, however, who seemed to have been brought back to life by simply hearing Fannie Hurst speak. Hurst put her arm in mine and led me through her living room, introducing me to a few of her friends, who looked very jealous indeed that she had singled me out for contact.

  Would I like to see the rest of the apartment? she asked. I was dying to, of course—who could resist the offer? Hurst took me into the dining room, where a lavish buffet was laid out on a rough-hewn table, like that in a monastery. The food was displayed on elegant silver platters, a presentation spoiled only by the presence of a bottle of ketchup. The dining-room chairs looked as if they might have been designed by or for trolls or dwarfs. And indeed, the whole room itself was like something out of The Lord of the Rings: narrow, windowless, and very low ceilinged, the walls covered in dark, carved wainscoting, such illumination as there was coming entirely from candles. At the table sat three elderly women, one of them wearing what appeared to be a velvet, hooded cape. Hurst ignored them and drew me back through the living room to a stairwa
y that was uncommonly narrow and steep and lit by elaborate lanterns clenched in fists at the end of muscular, patinated bronze arms fixed at intervals along the wall. I could not help staring at them. “A present from Mr. Hearst,” she explained, as we ducked through a low doorway into a gloomy passage.

  “I’m only showing you this because you’re a publisher,” Hurst said enigmatically. Now that I was alone with her in the dark, I was beginning to feel sorry that I had accepted the house tour. The atmosphere was certainly sepulchral downstairs, but here it was thoroughly eerie. I was to experience much the same feeling of claustrophobia and apprehension many years later when, on a visit to Egypt, I climbed the steep, narrow passageway inside the pyramid of Cheops to visit his burial chamber. Here, Hurst’s presence, pressed up against me in the dark, was strangely disconcerting. Her perfume may have had something to do with it. It carried a certain odor of calla lily—everything in the house did—but it was at the same time sweet and sharp, so that it brought tears to one’s eyes.

  We groped our way to the end of the passageway, where Hurst threw open an ironbound oak door that could have held off a determined attack by Saracens. “This,” she announced, “was my husband’s bedroom. It’s kept just as it was when he was alive.”

  It was a large though gloomy room, with the drapes shut tightly. On the dresser were her late husband’s toiletries—silver-backed hairbrushes, a manicure set, various expensive masculine bits and pieces in tortoiseshell, ivory, and morocco leather, as well as an ornate silver-framed photograph of Hurst, taken at a considerably earlier point in her life. On the floor were his slippers, neatly placed, as if he might appear at any minute to put them on. The most noteworthy thing in the room—indeed, it was impossible to take one’s eyes off it—was a large bed covered in black velvet, at each corner of which burned a big candle on a tall, wrought-iron pedestal, like those in a Spanish cathedral, as if a body was lying in state. But the bed, thankfully, was empty. Or almost so, for I noticed that it was covered in envelopes, a whole pile of them, as if somebody had dumped their mail here every day, except that all the envelopes looked similar. On the pillows rested a sheaf of calla lilies.