Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [109]
“How interested?” Lazar asked sharply.
That would depend, I said, on what Gar planned to write.
“He’ll write anything you want him to,” Lazar snapped impatiently. “What I want to know is how much you’ll pay.”
This was my first experience of doing business with Lazar. I didn’t want to disappoint him by seeming like a timid small-timer, but on the other hand I wasn’t used to putting down money on anything quite as slim as this—usually an agent sent over at least a few chapters of manuscript or, if the writer was well known, an outline. Lazar was asking me to buy a pig in a poke, and I hadn’t a clue what to say. Besides, there were people I’d have to talk to before making an offer, and most of them would certainly ask what it was that Kanin planned to write about.
Could Gar not be persuaded to put a few words on paper? I asked.
He would put as many words as I liked on paper the moment we had a deal, Lazar said abruptly. First, he needed a number.
There was no way of faking my way past this, I decided. I explained how interested I was, pointed out that I knew Gar of old, and promised to call Lazar as soon as I had talked to my colleagues.
“I can see you’re not interested, sonny,” Lazar said, more in sorrow than in anger. “I’ll try Bennett. He’s dying to have Gar on the Random House list.” With that, Lazar hung up, leaving me feeling as if I’d made a fool of myself and perhaps lost a great opportunity. Only later did I discover that Lazar hadn’t called me about Kanin until Cerf—and practically everybody else in publishing—had already said no.
At the time, of course, I assumed that Lazar was so disappointed in me that he would take me off his call list, but the very next day I heard the familiar voice say, “Lazar here,” and he was off and running on someone new—Fernando Lamas, perhaps, someone else from his B list, or Gene Kelly, who was on Lazar’s A list but bored everybody else because he was such a nice guy that people feared he’d have nothing to say in his memoirs. Before the week was out, he had tried me on Gar Kanin again as if he had never mentioned the subject before. Many years later, Lazar actually did persuade me to buy a novel by Kanin, Moviola, which turned out to be a million-dollar bomb, setting something like a new record for expensive failure in the high-powered fiction stakes, so perhaps the gods were watching over me the first time he was offered to me.
WITH LAZAR, I felt somehow that I had reached the big time, because if Lazar was anything it was big-time. He had the ability to make one feel that simply by being on his call list one was an important person, because Lazar wouldn’t call anyone who wasn’t important. I took it as a good sign that Lazar had singled me out for his attention, however eccentric—he wasn’t a man to waste time on young people with no future. Besides, at S&S, Lazar talked only to me. Most important agents spread their business out among several editors or executives at the same firm, but Lazar was, if nothing else, absolutely loyal. “I dance with the person who brought me,” he once said, and even if it wasn’t completely true in his personal life—he had a notorious roving eye—it was always true in his business life (not that the two were easily separated). Once you were his friend, he did business with you and you alone, and that was that.
CHAPTER 15
It was no thanks to Lazar that I once met Fannie Hurst. An old friend of mine from school in Switzerland, Peter Wodtke, then on his way to becoming a major figure in the financial world, had called out of the blue to ask if I was interested in meeting a famous writer. Since that was, after all,