Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [102]
I had never met Lazar, but I had been hearing his name since 1950, when I first saw him, at Eden Roc on the Cap d’Antibes. Lazar was then in his forties, I suppose, and already something of a legend. My Aunt Alexa and I had been swimming and had been joined by Uncle Alex for lunch. Looking across the pool, Alex shaded his eyes with his copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and waved. “It’s Irving Lazar,” he said to Alexa. “We must ask him to dinner. By the way, nobody who matters calls him ‘Swifty.’ Bogart gave him the name after Lazar made three deals for him in the same day, on a bet,” Alex explained.
The person in question was standing on the other side of the pool, an incongruous, diminutive figure among all the half-naked, oiled, and bronzed bodies. He was totally bald, and his face—what could be seen of it below huge, glittering, gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses—was tanned, like his pate, to the color of a well-cared-for crocodile handbag. He was wearing tiny white shoes, a blue blazer with gold buttons, and white trousers pressed so perfectly, despite the heat, that he looked like a shiny, expensive beach toy that has just been unpacked by some lucky child. He was shouting into a telephone.
He was shouting into a telephone some thirteen years later when he called me, out of the blue, at S&S. “Lazar here,” he said, as if there were none other. The voice was unknown to me and difficult at first to decipher. He seemed to be affecting a rich, even plummy, upper-class English accent, of the Lord Haw-Haw type, with every syllable accentuated, and for a moment I thought he was making fun of me. “Have lunch with me, dear boy,” he went on grandly. “I want to pick your brain.”
In what area, I asked suspiciously. “I’m not doing any business with your shop,” Lazar said, still apparently aping a toff’s accent for my benefit. “I do a lot of business with Bennett Cerf at Random House. I do a lot of business with Tom Guinzburg at Viking.” He paused, perhaps for breath. “I don’t know why I’m not doing any fucking business with Simon and Schuster,” he snapped suddenly, as sharply as the crack of a whip, his voice changing to what I presumed was his natural accent, a grainy, impatient Brooklyn Jewish growl.
“Yes, all right, where?” I asked.
“ ‘21,’ for chrissakes, where do you think?” Lazar said. “One o’clock. Don’t be late.”
At “21,” where I arrived a good ten minutes early, I had only to mention Lazar’s name to be treated like royalty. 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. From time to time, as I ate the rolls, a captain arrived bearing bulletins of Lazar’s progress. Mr. Lazar called to say that he would be on his way shortly. Mr. Lazar’s secretary called to say that Mr. Lazar was just leaving his apartment. Mr. Lazar’s secretary called again to say that Mr. Lazar was actually out the door. Mr. Lazar’s California office called to ask Mr. Lazar to phone as soon as he arrived. Three quarters of an hour later—by which time I had emptied the basket of rolls—there was a bustle at the entrance of the bar, and Lazar appeared, dressed faultlessly, as ever, in a checked suit of the kind worn in England for attending the more fashionable race meetings. I waved to him, but he was busy scanning the room like a theater manager counting the house before raising the curtain. He plunged off to shake hands with everybody he knew, moving around the room in a slow, counterclockwise semicircle.
What I was witnessing was table-hopping as an art form. At some tables he paused for only a few moments, at others he stayed for a few minutes, at one or two he actually sat down to chat. There was hardly a table in the room at which there wasn’t somebody Lazar recognized or from which somebody didn’t wave to him. It was two o’clock when he sat down next to me, glanced at the table, and snapped