Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [105]
Lazar looked up impatiently. “I’m not speaking to you,” he said.
Capote sat down. He looked as if he was about to cry. “Don’t be angry with me, Irving,” he said. His voice was as high-pitched as a bird’s.
Lazar glared at him unforgivingly. “You turn up late for a sit-down dinner at my house. You bring along some piece of rough trade you’ve picked up from a gas station along the way as your date. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“I said I was sorry.”
It was beginning to dawn on me that I might as well not be there. Lazar did not introduce me to Truman Capote. Capote ignored me completely. It was nearly two o’clock, and we still hadn’t ordered.
“All right, all right,” Lazar said gruffly. “I forgive you, but it’s the last time.”
“I promise. Let’s get together while you’re in New York.” The two men pulled out identical Hermès pocket diaries and Cartier gold pencils, put on their reading glasses, and peered at the week ahead, where, it turned out, neither of them had a free moment.
“Lunch with Jackie, cocktails with the Paleys, dinner at the Bombolanas—you know them, Irving, surely. That’s it for Tuesday,” Capote said.
Lazar studied his own diary as if it were the Rosetta stone. “Lunch with the Princess Borbón y Parma, cocktails with Marietta Tree, dinner at Lenny Bernstein’s—that’s it for Wednesday.”
At last, after spirited negotiation, they managed to settle on a date for dinner and, with even greater difficulty, on a place, and Capote finally took his leave. Lazar sat back contentedly. I guessed that he felt his social schedule had one-upped Capote’s, though the two seemed to me equally star-studded. “You know who that was?” he asked. “That was Truman Capote.”
“So I gathered.”
Irony was wasted on Lazar. He leaned close to me and whispered. “I’m going to tell you something about Truman that not many people know,” he said. He paused significantly. “Truman’s a fruit.”
THERE WAS, I discovered over the years, a curious innocence about Lazar, despite his cynical exterior—a romanticism that came to the surface by fits and starts. It was not just his occasionally old-fashioned slang—surely nobody had used the word fruit to describe a homosexual since the thirties—but a certain innocent attitude toward his friends. He refused to believe the worst about anyone he knew. People who everyone else agreed were totally loathsome, Lazar professed to like. Couples who were on the brink of angry divorce he stoutly maintained were devoted to each other. Eventually, I came to understand that Lazar simply refused to believe that people close to him could be upset or miserable or unpleasant. Like the Sun King, he believed that his presence made people happy and therefore took unhappiness as a kind of lèse-majesté.
Lazar was a famously generous host, his generosity exceeded only by his unpredictability. He once invited me to a black-tie dinner at his home—a sit-down dinner for sixty people, many of them the kind of stars about whom it’s often said, “You’re kidding, I didn’t know he was still alive!”
“I’ve got a surprise for you, kiddo,” he said to me. “You’ll never guess who you’re seated next to.”
My heart sank. Francis X. Bushman, maybe? Was he still alive? Just as we were about to sit down, a glamorous woman appeared and sat down on my right. Lazar called for silence and said, “This is a special moment, because Merle Oberon is going to be sitting next to her nephew, Michael Korda, and they haven’t seen each other for years!”
Poor Merle stared at me in horror as everyone applauded, not so much because we didn’t like each other as because the notion of having a thirty-year-old publisher as a nephew hardly fit in with her youthful public image.
For a long time, I thought that Lazar had a taste for practical jokes and that my reintroduction to Merle after twenty years might be one, but I eventually came to the conclusion that it was part of his innocence.