Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [104]
This was basically Lazar’s way of getting his day started, very often from the breakfast table by his pool in Beverly Hills—the equivalent of finger exercises for a concert pianist. Only if he got a good, solid bite would he actually call Cary Grant or Gregory Peck or Gene Kelly—or, later, Madonna, Cher, Sharon Stone, or Jessica Lange, for Lazar always kept up with the rise and fall of stars. If nobody bit, the names shuffled to the bottom of his list for the next day’s calls. Only large, round numbers were mentioned, and one also learned that, as at auctions, it was dangerous to express polite interest. Lazar was only too likely to interpret anything less than an emphatic “not on your life!” as agreement and would then angrily insist that you had made an offer and hold you to your word.
When I began, tentatively, to make a few deals with Lazar—Garson Kanin, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre—I learned that his client list apparently included everyone, even people who had other agents—Oscar Levant once remarked, “Everybody who matters has two agents: his own and Irving Lazar.” But Lazar did not consider himself an agent at all; he described himself as a deal maker and thus did not feel bound by the normal rules of agenting. Lazar would make a deal for anyone and later on work out a more or less amicable arrangement with the agent. Sometimes he took his 10 percent from the buyer, sometimes from the seller—sometimes, it was rumored, in the old days, from both. He frequently offered me authors who, to the best of my knowledge, were happily placed with rival publishers and were represented by more conventional agents.
“Truman Capote,” Lazar said. “Wanna do a deal with him?” At the time, Capote was one of the bright stars at Random House, while I was an editor at a house not then famous for fiction. It seemed to me unlikely that Capote would want to leave Random House or that Random House would let him go, and I said so. “I can see you don’t have the guts for this kind of thing, sonny,” Lazar sniffed—he always called me sonny when he was pissed off—and he hung up, no doubt to offer Capote elsewhere. (Capote was a Random House author until his death.)
I learned that such offers often came about because Lazar was having a feud with a certain house or editor. If he wasn’t happy with Random House, he would offer Capote around, probably without telling Capote; if somebody at another house had offended him, he would try to steal Vladimir Nabokov away. This practice didn’t change over the years; it gave Lazar a chance to test the waters and check the market value of an author—a tactic that drove more sedate agents wild, since Lazar often told their clients that he could get them a better deal.
Capote was the accidental centerpiece of one of my more memorable lunches with Lazar some years later. I had made a date to meet him at the Grill Room of The Four Seasons at one o’clock and begged him to be on time, since I had a meeting at two-thirty. “Sure, sure,” he said, with the slightly offended tone of a man who is never late. “One o’clock on the dot, kiddo.” Needless to say, at one-thirty I was still waiting for him, while bulletins of his progress were brought to me. Finally, he arrived, did his tour of the room, sat down, and looked at me. “You ought to relax more,” he said. “A young guy your age, you shouldn’t look so stressed.”
I was about to point out to him that he was the cause of my stress, but just as the captain was handing Irving