Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [103]
I didn’t think a conversation about height with Lazar was likely to lead anywhere—and I was sensitive about the fact that I was the shortest member of my family—so I said nothing.
Lazar picked up the menu, took off his glasses, removed a gold-rimmed monocle from his breast pocket, put it in place, and studied the menu, holding it an inch or two away from his nose. “I want breakfast,” he said. “Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon.” He turned to me and said, “I got a late start this morning.” I wondered whether this was his way of apologizing for being late, but nothing in his manner suggested that it was. “I mixed up my pills,” he explained. “I took my wake-up pill last night and my sleeping pill when I got up this morning.”
He turned toward the captain, who was hovering beside me. “He’ll have a ‘21’ burger, medium,” he said, dismissing him with a wave while I was still looking at my menu. Lazar, as I was to learn, hated people who can’t make up their minds about what they want to eat (or anything else), and was very likely to order for them if they weren’t quick enough to suit him.
He settled himself down, sipped his virgin bullshot—the first time I had ever heard of this drink—and looked at me warily, as if he was wondering who I was and why I was sitting there. Behind thick glasses, his eyes were shrewd and penetrating, with the kind of beady stare that a macaw might bring to bear on you just before lunging to bite your finger. His head was completely bald—I wondered if he shaved it every day. It also looked as if he polished it, perhaps with something like Butcher’s Wax. “You’re younger than I thought,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning down suspiciously, as if I had somehow deceived him on that score. “Do they let you make deals over there?”
I said they did, though they weren’t deals of the kind that Lazar was famous for.
He nodded, then leaned conspiratorially toward me. “I’m going to give you a piece of advice you’ll thank me for the rest of your life, kiddo,” he said. It was the first time anybody had ever called me kiddo—a word I had until then associated only with tough-guy movies.
I stared back at him, eager for any piece of wisdom.
“Never forget this,” he told me, his expression making it clear that I was not to take his advice lightly. “The first couple of million bucks you make—put it away! You don’t ever touch that, you hear me? That’s your ‘fuck you’ money. That way, anybody ever tries to make you do something you don’t want to do, you can tell ’em, ‘Fuck you.’ ”
Since at the time I was making a couple of hundred dollars a week and had zero in my bank account, Lazar’s advice seemed of doubtful utility, though it clearly represented a deeply felt credo on his part. Over the years, he was to give me much more advice from his personal experience, ranging from “Always try to have fun, kiddo” to “Be a mensch when you tip.” This last I received at that first lunch, when Lazar rose from the table at the end of the meal to continue table-hopping and, forgetting that he had invited me to lunch, left me with the check.
In some mysterious way, however, I must have passed some sort of test, for our lunch together placed me firmly on Lazar’s daily list of people to call, and I remained there for thirty years. Once a day, I picked up the phone and heard him rasp, “Lazar here. What’s cookin’, kiddo?” or “What have we got going, kid?”—followed by a bewildering series of high-speed sales pitches. These, too, were sometimes interrupted by advice or reflections on life, my favorite being “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and there’s nothing doing, so I decide to make something happen by lunch.”
This, in fact, is as close as anyone has come to explaining Lazar’s way of doing business. The moment he awoke, he got on the phone and proceeded to make something—anything—happen, mostly by trolling a series of celebrity names until whatever editor