Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [106]
Dirt was Lazar’s only fear and his legendary obsession. If there is any truth to the Freudian notion that people who suffer from a germ phobia and wash their hands constantly are afflicted with unbearable feelings of guilt, Lazar must have been the guiltiest man on earth, yet guilt was absolutely foreign to his spirit. Once when he was being driven to East Hampton for the weekend by his hostess, he surprised her by producing a carefully typed list of the hospitals along the route—not, as she supposed, because he was afraid of having a heart attack, but in case he had to go to the bathroom. Hospitals, he explained, had clean bathrooms; he couldn’t use a bathroom in a gas station. It’s said that in the forties Lazar was discovered one night trapped in the men’s room of Chasen’s with Howard Hughes, another germphobe. They had both washed and disinfected their hands and were waiting for someone to come along and open the door; neither one of them was willing to touch the handle.
Oddly, it never occurred to me that Lazar was old, even when he reached his eighties and began to gallop toward his nineties. Since in his view I was either “kiddo” or “sonny,” our relationship was a constant—he the grown-up, I the child. As I became more successful, Lazar’s attitude toward me never varied. He was delighted for me, but I was still “kiddo” and always would be. Nor did Lazar seem to age. His energy was phenomenal, even frightening. No number of parties, including his own, could exhaust him or blunt his appetite for sociability.
I had always thought of Lazar as a kind of finished product—born somehow already wearing his Savile Row suit and gleaming handmade shoes—so it came as a surprise to me when I was having a sandwich with him at his house in Beverly Hills one day and saw in his den a framed photograph of him as a boy, with a full head of hair, standing in front of a 1920s delivery truck and looking remarkably self-possessed.
“Is that you?” I asked.
Lazar glared at me. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Now sit down and eat.”
There was also a photograph of Lazar as a brash young MCA agent, already bald but pudgy, not at all the trim figure I was accustomed to; one of Lazar in uniform, a serious expression on his face; and even one of him as a baby. Of course, one knew he had been a baby, but over the years he had so cocooned himself in legend that his past had become almost indecipherable. His father was a relatively prosperous Russian-Jewish butter-and-egg wholesaler in Brooklyn (who did a little modest loan-sharking on the side). Lazar seems, in fact, to have had a happy childhood—three brothers, a doting mother, and a father who served as a role model.
In his later years, Lazar looked back on his childhood with the kind of nostalgia that successful self-made men always develop for their roots. He had a whole repertoire of childhood anecdotes about how he had to learn to be tough, because he was the smallest boy in school; about how he fought full-grown teamsters for the best parking place at the market every morning for his father’s truck; about how he learned to dress elegantly from the neighborhood gangsters in the era when guys such as Abner (Longie) Zwillman, Jake (Greasy Thumb) Guzik, and Legs Diamond controlled the streets and the rackets. Two themes dominated all of Lazar’s stories about growing up: fighting back and standing out from the crowd, and a longing for a richer, more genteel way of life, apparently inspired by summer visits to more prosperous relatives who lived in the country.
Lazar was obsessed by class. I sometimes flew out to California and back the same day, and once I stopped off at Lazar’s house before catching the red-eye home. On this particular occasion, I had apparently overdone things, and even Irving noticed that my eyelids were drooping. (Never tired himself, he was not