Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [108]
Lazar made his first trip to the West Coast in 1936. He claimed that it was by accident, but there were no accidents in Lazar’s life. It’s true that he accompanied two vaudeville clients out there because he didn’t trust them to pay him his commission—he preferred to divide up the take at the end of every day himself—but it’s likely that he had been looking westward for some time. In New York, show business took a backseat to the bigger, more serious worlds of finance, media, old money, and society. In Hollywood, show business was everything; society, class, and finance all revolved around the studios. Still, there was never any question of Lazar’s becoming a 10 percenter. Lazar’s roots remained in New York, and he kept them there. What’s more, he cleverly avoided becoming a mere flesh peddler. He made deals for such people as Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, Cole Porter, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Garson Kanin, and Ernest Hemingway. He sold books, plays, ideas, and people by going to the top from the very first—a feat made possible not only by his toughness and determination but by the simple fact that he was an outsider, a New Yorker.
Lazar understood instinctively that the prevailing ethos of West Coast movie people was then (as it is now) fear and envy of New York. New York was where the money came from; it was where the owners of the studios were—the bosses to whom men such as Mayer and Zanuck actually reported. New York was, above all, where talent, ideas, culture, and fashions came from, and in the days when it took nearly four days to cross the country, a person arriving from New York was greeted the way a traveler from Saint Petersburg was hailed upon arriving in some remote provincial town in nineteenth-century Russia.
In the late forties, Lazar decided to move to Los Angeles permanently, and he quickly established himself as the connection between New York and Hollywood, first imitating, then replacing, Leland Hayward. Not a reader himself (he was notorious for not bothering to read the books he was selling), he cultivated writers, publishers, and playwrights and brought the studio heads projects they could never have found by themselves, for prices they would never have dreamed of paying to anyone else. In New York, Lazar became known as the man who could get you bagfuls of money from Hollywood; in Hollywood, he was known as the man who could bring you the hottest properties before anybody else on the Coast had heard of them. In the days when a transcontinental telephone call was a big deal, Lazar was in touch constantly, perfecting his peculiar blend of gossip, news, and sales pitch, and a lot of people didn’t know whether Lazar was speaking to them from his poolside in Beverly Hills or from around the corner on Fifth Avenue.
Lazar once half jokingly promised to grant a publisher not “world rights” but “universe rights.” A certain grandeur was part of his manner, and Lazar rapidly became more famous than most of his clients. Even total strangers who knew little or nothing about book publishing and the movie business picked up the party trick of raising one trouser leg above the knee and putting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses against the kneecap to simulate Lazar’s physiognomy.
Early on, Lazar hit upon three rules that stood him in good stead for over fifty years. The first was that he could always reach anyone, anywhere, any time. His secret weapon was the world’s largest address book, full of the private, unlisted numbers of people whom nobody else can reach. The second rule was always to go directly to the top. His last rule was to insist on a quick answer, as I was quickly to learn.
MY FIRST lunch with Lazar at “21” did not lead to any immediate results, but he soon called with a new proposition: “Garson Kanin,” he said. “How would you like a book by him? I’m giving you the first crack at this, so don’t let me down, kiddo.”
Fortunately for me, I was not obliged to ask who Garson Kanin might be or express amazement that he was still alive, since nothing was more certain to infuriate