He seemed to be affecting an English accent, and for a moment I thought he might be making fun of me. “I’m not doing any business with your shop, and I want to know why.” I found it hard at first to decipher his meaning. “Meet me for lunch, my dear boy,” he said grandly. He was shouting into a telephone.Ībout eight years later, I had just begun work as an editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster when one day Lazar called me on the phone. He was wearing white shoes, a blue blazer, and white trousers so perfectly pressed, despite the heat, that he looked like a shiny, expensive beach toy that has just been unpacked from its box beneath the Christmas tree by some lucky child. He was totally bald, and his face, or what could be seen of it below huge, glittering gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, was tanned to the color of a well-cared-for crocodile handbag. (He had been christened Swifty by Humphrey Bogart after making three deals for Bogart in one day on a bet.) Lazar was standing on the other side of the pool, an incongruous, diminutive figure among all the half-naked, oiled, and bronzed bodies. “He hates the bloody name.” Lazar was then in his forties, I suppose, and was already an internationally famous superagent in the Myron Selznick-Leland Hayward tradition. “Nobody who matters calls Lazar Swifty,” my Uncle Alex warned me. The first time I remember hearing Irving Lazar’s name was in 1950, at Eden Roc, on the Cap d’Antibes.
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