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By Root 844 0

usually aware of fatigue in others.) “Why not take a nap?” he suggested, and I gratefully bedded down on a sofa in his dressing room. I awoke to find the room in darkness. Stumbling to the nearest door, I opened it and realized that I was looking at Lazar’s closet. Row after row of clothes were hanging there—yachting outfits, dinner jackets, blazers, sports clothes. At my feet, tiny shoes were lined up, each pair with its own wooden shoe tree. There seemed to be hundreds of pairs, for every possible social and sporting occasion. In glass-fronted cupboards against one wall, Lazar’s shirts were arranged by color and pattern—hundreds of them. I felt like an intruder, but I was also reminded, inevitably, of Gatsby, and especially of the scene in which Daisy bursts into tears at the sight of his shirts.

It is no accident that the very worst thing Lazar could say about anyone is “he’s got no class.” This was invariably said more in sorrow than in anger and with a certain judiciousness, as if Lazar were the final arbiter in the matter. Class, of course, meant more than making una bella figura. Class in Lazar’s eyes was an attitude and usually centered on lavish generosity, coupled with being a man of one’s word. His house was full of symbols of that special lavishness that passed for class during his heyday as a Hollywood agent. Every surface was covered with silver cigarette boxes engraved with effusive messages of thanks and affection from Lazar clients, and there were enough desk fittings and clocks to stock Asprey or Tiffany. Then, autocracy and largesse were the rule. Lazar dealt as an equal with titans such as Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Darryl F. Zanuck: men who not only were worthy opponents but could make their own decisions and didn’t mind paying for what they wanted; men who were not, in a favorite phrase of Lazar’s, “nickel-and-dimers.” Those days, as Lazar never ceased to lament, were long gone, and he had to deal with book editors and movie executives who reported to committees, bid cautiously, and never sent anything to celebrate a deal.

It was probably a yearning for class that prompted Lazar to go to law school instead of joining the neighborhood gangsters or staying in the family business. He graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1931, but he soon figured out that as the lawyer for vaudeville star Ted Lewis (Mr. “Me and My Shadow”) he made a hundred dollars a week, whereas M.C.A. was taking 10 percent of Lewis’s ten thousand dollars a week. When he was faced with lawyers, he seldom failed to point out that he was a lawyer himself, and he did practice bankruptcy law for a few years after law school. But, like Billy Rose, he seemed to have made his mark mostly as the quick-witted and ambitious assistant to older men, taking shorthand (a man’s job in those days), running errands, establishing a name for himself as a bright young man around the courthouse. A good head for numbers and an already legendary amount of chutzpah brought him into the talent business when it was still in its infancy and consisted of booking musicians and acts in the Catskills, on the still flourishing vaudeville circuit, and in the mob-owned nightclubs, speakeasies, and jazz joints of New York’s East Fifties. Lazar might have regarded all this as a step toward some more respectable profession, but it didn’t take long for him to discover that he was good at what he was doing—for already he was fiercely competitive, unhappy at being a subordinate, and absolutely fearless. In later years, people wondered at Lazar’s ability to stand up to studio heads, publishers, and difficult clients, but the fact is that his early experience was with people who were perfectly willing to have him beaten up or killed—and, in fact, he was beaten up and even stabbed in the course of business, yet he never felt intimidated. In an industry in which it has become fashionable for agents and executives to flaunt tough-guy talk, though, Lazar rarely indulged in gangsterisms—he had done business with guys who never said that kind of thing unless they meant it.