Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [101]
As if they didn’t have to lunch out enough as it was, editors even formed their own lunch club that met once a month, though many avoided it on the grounds that no editor had anything much to gain from having lunch with another, and anyway, it was full of fossils and has-beens. For the latter reason, I rather liked it—some of the older members were certainly curmudgeonly and fossilized, but I found it interesting to talk to people such as John Farrar (one of the founders of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) or Ken McCormick, the editor in chief of Doubleday, both of whom had been editors for at least fifty years at that point. What struck me most was that while neither of them was rich—it’s always been hard to get rich as an editor—they still had a certain joie de vivre and a keen interest in what was going on. Here, at any rate, was a profession in which age, if it was not treated with respect, was at least tolerated. Besides, allowance being made for Farrar’s extreme testiness, they both still seemed to be having fun, thus proving Dick Snyder and Bennett Cerf right.
FUN WAS about to enter my life on a grander scale than that, however, and was to remain in it for over thirty years in the person of one remarkable (and diminutive) agent.
West Coast agents had long been an unknown quantity to most East Coast publishing people, who tended to look down on them as mere “10 percenters,” knuckle draggers of no culture and no interest in books, who made their living peddling flesh and something called “screen treatments” and who appeared in the offices of New York publishers only from time to time in sweaty pursuit of original stories that could be made into movies. There had been a very few exceptions over the years—there was Myron Selznick, David’s brother, a flesh peddler if ever there was one, but also a sophisticated and well-read man, and Leland Hayward, whose urbanity and sophistication had made him welcome on both coasts, as well as in those parts of Europe that mattered. Hayward was a man of taste and charm. Supremely elegant and something of a celebrity in his own right (he married two international social stars, Pamela Churchill and Slim Keith), Hayward was more interested in serving as the link between Broadway and Sunset Boulevard than in books, but when in New York he paid his respects to the more socially acceptable publishers, chiefly Bennett Cerf, who moved—or yearned to move—in the same social circles as Hayward, and the Knopfs, who were celebrities in their own way.
Hayward seemed at home almost everywhere except Los Angeles, although he lived there for years. He went out of his way to build a New England–style house in Beverly Hills, complete with clapboards, shutters, and a shingled roof—even a barn that would not have looked out of place in rural Connecticut or Vermont, except that it contained, among other luxuries, a completely equipped, lilliputian soda fountain for his children, the countertop low enough that they could serve themselves and their friends.
There was yet another West Coast agent, one who had modeled himself to some degree in Leland Hayward’s image (except for the soda fountain), and that was Irving Paul Lazar. Lazar had been around, it sometimes seemed, since year one, a more or less permanent fixture in international society, the movie business, and, since the 1950s, the book business.