Swifty lazar biography of donald

The New Yorker, March 21, 1994 P. 174

POSTSCRIPT about Irving Paul (Swifty) Lazar who was an agent who represented writers, composers, and actors. The little man whose head was as big as the Ritz loved style more than money. Writer imagines Lazar in heaven at a never-ending party at Los Angeles's celestial hangout, Spago, with St. Peter at the gate as Security to bar those boring and virtuous enough to ascend to the outer reaches of Paradise but not witty, elegant, or accomplished enough to make the Spago list. Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Moss Hart would surely be there but would probably arrive late. Writer remembers when he and his wife had lunch with Lazar and his wife, Mary, one sunny day at Chez Frederic, on the island of Saint-Honorat, near Cannes. Lazar invoked a lyric of his client Alan Jay LernerOs--"What do the simple folk do?" Except for Billy Wilder, Lazar was the last player of Hollywood's golden age, when the music was by Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin; stars were not afraid to come out at night and studio heads were marvellous primitives. Lazar championed only those writers, composers, and actors he found acceptable as dinner and travel companions. Writer remembers when he was an executive at Twentieth Century Fox and got a strange phone call from Darryl F. Zanuck. Zanuck said Lazar sold him the rights to OCan-CanO for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but he didn't remember any of it (he was too drunk). But it was true. Lazar owed his success following the Second World War to the introductions of studio heads to the star players of the Algonquin set, Broadway, and the West End. Lately, he had enjoyed a curious celebrity: book deals had become his mainstay. He was terrified of death. Photograph by Richard Avedon.

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So the 1993 Oscar party became something else: a metaphor for Lazar’s survival. It was, in fact, his last hurrah. After the party, Lazar had to face up to his grief. As he looked back, he realized that he had nothing to look forward to. At 86, he had done it all. On December 27, 1993, he made the decision to discontinue his dialysis. Three days later, he died peacefully at home.

Nine months earlier, on a cool spring afternoon in Los Angeles, the fire had been lit in Irving Lazar’s library. The room had an English feel: 19th-century antiques, 20th-century art, a wall of shelves laden with books and photographs. There was a family feeling in the air, for though Irving and Mary Lazar had been childless, their clients and friends were like family: here in pictures were the Lazars on holiday in Klosters with Irwin Shaw, in Spain with matador Luis Dominguín, grinning alongside Noël Coward, Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier.

You settled in, feeling distinguished by association with a past you’d only read about, a world defined by the best of everything. And here, in the center of it, in a smart blue blazer, gray flannels creased to military perfection, and the most exquisite pair of tiny, custom-made alligator boots, sat a man who said he vividly remembered a very different life, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. But could he, I wondered, recall what made Swifty run?

Until recently, Lazar had always resisted questions about his early life. But as the years multiplied, he had learned the value of highlighting the Horatio Alger aspects of his story. “I was born in the ghetto,” he proclaimed. “My three younger brothers and I were street kids like everybody else. Fights were an everyday occurrence. Because I was small, I was natural prey. You couldn’t say, ‘Excuse me, I don’t feel like fighting today.’ To survive, I had to be tough, so I learned to catch my opponent unaware and deal him an instantaneous blow. Then I’d run like a son of a bitch.”

Lazar’s parents, who ra

The beautiful lady and the reporter sit facing each other on wicker sofas in the lady’s small but elegant Los Angeles office. They are silent, sheepish, like schoolgirls who have been collared in the hall by a teacher and sent to the principal’s office with no idea of the offense they have committed. The two of them were chatting for ten or fifteen minutes about movies, screenplays, stars, options, and the lady, who runs her own independent production company, was gracious, animated, opinionated, down-to-earth. Then the phone rang. It was the beautiful lady’s husband, and so she left the room to take the call in another office. When she returned, she looked confused. “Irving said the strangest thing just now,” she said. “He said. ‘Don’t talk to that girl! Don’t tell her anything!’ Isn’t that strange?”

So the beautiful lady and the reporter stare at each other for a while. Finally, the beautiful lady speaks. “I think,” she says, “he must be crazy.”

The beautiful lady’s husband is Irving Lazar, at 76 still the most renowned literary agent in the world—the tiny, manic, lone-wolf deal-maker, self-styled dandy, bi-coastal commuter, globe-trotter, connoisseur, agent and friend to Irwin Shaw and Truman Capote and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Teddy White and Ira Gershwin and Comden and Green and Neil Simon and Josh Logan and Betty Bao Lord and Lauren Bacall and Herman Wouk and Richard Nixon and, formerly, Noël Coward and Moss Hart and George Kaufman and Cole Porter, among others.

What is peculiar is not only that Irving lazar knows that the reporter has come to California on a story about him but that he has met with her twice, has been speaking to her on the phone for weeks, calling her—sounding cheerful, excited—when he thinks of a “distinguished” or “amusing” person for her to talk to about him, giving her scores of celebrities’ home phone numbers and beach-house numbers and hotel phone numbers, reminding her of the many books in which

Irving Paul (Swifty) Lazar, Hollywood’s best-known literary and talent agent whose tenacious deal-making and star-studded client list made him a pioneer in the packaging of modern motion pictures, died Thursday night.

The agent died at his Beverly Hills home of kidney failure, according to friend and social secretary Teresa Sohn. He was 86.

Dubbed Swifty after he accepted a dare and made five movie deals in one day for his friend Humphrey Bogart, Lazar had since the 1940s commanded record-setting fees for hundreds of writers, producers, directors, choreographers, composers and lyricists around the world.

For more than three decades, Lazar’s famed Oscar night party--held most recently at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant--had made him a celebrity host as well.

Distinguished by his shiny, bald head and black-rimmed Mr. Magoo glasses, the 5-foot, 2-inch Lazar had a giant reputation as a tough, sometimes brazen negotiator. He liked to say he could assemble the essential elements of a movie from his clientele--all except the actors, whose constant need for reassurance, he said, usually made them too time-consuming to have as clients.

“Packaging is what I do a lot of. Except for the actors,” he told Joseph Heller in 1963, just before he sold the motion picture rights to Heller’s novel “Catch-22.” “I’m what you might call a catalytic agent.”

Indeed, Lazar’s career traced the arc of ascendancy of the agent in America.

“The town will be much poorer without him,” said dancer Gene Kelly, a Lazar friend for 50 years. “A lot of towns, including London, New York and Paris.”

Serving as a liaison between disparate talents and the studios or publishers who sought their help, Lazar was among the first agents to shape entire productions--a job he found satisfying as well as lucrative. When he sold “The Seven Year I