In Memoriam. Inarguably the most flamboyantly
famous talent agent of his time, he was born into poverty as Samuel
Lazar, morphed into Irving Paul Lazar and through the wit of his
occasional client Humphrey Bogart, became known
as “Swifty.” He was a tiny man, remembered visually
for his entire bald head and enormous black-rimmed glasses. He
was a tremendous snob who prided himself on his ability to get
huge commissions for his literary (or acting) clients without having
seen or read their work. The clients stretched from Noel
Coward and Cole Porter to Joan
Collins and Madonna and Truman
Capote.
In his early days, when he acquired the name Swifty, he was something of a joke
amongst the set he palled around with, including Frank Sinatra and
Bogart. In his later days, he acquired a beautiful and elegant wife named Mary (who
read the books he made the big movie sales with) and every Oscar night gave a
big party (for stars only – his definition of course) at Spago when it
was located on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Lazar liked stars and was
unabashedly (a gentle word for his brand of chutzpah) a snob. He kept
a house in Beverly Hills and an apartment in New York where he liked socializing
with names — movie stars in Hollywood and celebrities and society names
in New York. And royalty of course any old time they happened along.
He was reptilian in countenance, immaculate in grooming (he took a nap every
afternoon and had his sheets changed everytime his body touched them; he also
washed his hands after everytime he touched a doorknob that had been touched
by another’s hand), his suits were bespoke. He likened his style to Cary
Grant and Fred Astaire. He had an elegant inflection
to his speech, belying any roots in the lower East Side of New York when it was
the Jewish ghetto.
The first time I met him was at a Thanksgiving dinner in the mid 1980s in Beverly
Hills at the home of David and Gladyce Begelman (Mrs. B was
the mother of Beth Rudin DeWoody).
There were about thirty dinner guests and the opportunity for introduction came
only at the very end of the evening when I happened to be standing behind him
and his wife as we waited at the front door of the Begelman house for the valet
to bring the cars. Janet (Mrs. Freddie de Cordova)
was standing next to Mr. Lazar and seeing me, said to him: “Irving, I want
you to meet David Patrick Columbia.”
Without
turning his head so much as a half inch to see my face, looking
straight ahead toward the street, he extended his right arm
behind himself so that I, sight unseen, could shake his hand.
It was a remarkable display of what I call the I-Am-And-You’re-Not
attitude that permeates the spheres of the arrivistes, and
so rude that it was actually funny.
Not surprisingly the next few times I saw him, he didn’t recognize me
although I came to know his wife Mary fairly well. She went out and did a lot
of the legwork looking for talent for her husband. So it did not come as a
surprise one Saturday afternoon when I got a phone call and the voice on the
other end of the line said: “Mr. Columbia, this is Irving Lazar. I want
to introduce you to Mrs. Barbara Sinatra because I’m
going to make a book deal for her and I think perhaps you should write the
book.”
Okay. I followed instructions and went the next morning, Sunday, to meet Mrs.
S. Nothing came of the matter except that Irving called the next morning to
find out what I thought and how I liked her. After reporting, he thanked me
and that was that. He couldn’t have been nicer.
Now largely forgotten, although he’s only been dead for twelve years
this December, his legacy lives on in the name of the restaurant — Swifty’s,
in New York — named after a pug owned by the late Glenn Birnbaum,
who owned a restaurant called Mortimers that Irving Lazar frequented (because
of its chic clientele). The dog had been a gift to Birnbaum and he named it
after the tiny mega-agent because it was small and ugly, just like Irving.
But cute too.
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