Another Life (29 page)

The thought that the new youth culture was going to change most of our lives in all sorts of unforeseen ways had not yet penetrated either. We were still living the great middle-class dream, unaware that the ground was already shifting beneath us.

O
F COURSE
, the future did not seem clear at that time, not to me nor to Dick. It never does. One thing, however,
was
clear enough to me: So long as major agents weren’t sending me books, I was going to find it hard to build up a personal list of authors important enough to make the company take me seriously—more seriously than as a hardworking book doctor and jack-of-all-trades. This clearly wasn’t going to happen by combing the fringes of the listings for agents in
Literary Market Place
or cultivating the Jacques Chambruns of the world.

The major agents (nearly all men) in those days were hard to reach and notoriously capricious. But a few women, themselves the survivors of countless battles on the publishing front of the war of the sexes, were more tolerant of newcomers, more adventurous, and themselves contemptuous of the older male agents. Some of them had come out of the
tough world of major movie-studio story departments, such as Phyllis Jackson and Helen Strauss. Both of them were—no other phrase will do—“tough broads,” more than capable of holding their own with the movie moguls who had once been their bosses, let alone with easy prey like book editors and male literary agents. Jackson, in fact, when she had been a movie company “scout” in New York, had been the first person to bring
Gone with the Wind
to David Selznick’s attention—it was still in manuscript—and urge him to buy it. She brought to the book business some of the flair, toughness, and drama of the movie business.

Phyllis was passionately loyal to her authors in a way that would have seemed excessive and in poor taste to men such as Paul Reynolds and Harold Matson—she took
everything
personally and looked, above all, for the kind of real enthusiasm and personal devotion in an editor that she felt herself. Her favorite editor, not surprisingly, was Bob Gottlieb, but perhaps because of my movie background she occasionally sent me a manuscript, and gradually we became pals. Through her—and because Colin Turnbull’s
The Forest People
was being made into a play—I met Kay Brown, the famous theatrical agent, and through
her
Robert Lantz, who specialized in the theater and the movies but sometimes handled books and who had known my uncles and my father in Berlin before the Nazis.

There were plenty of younger agents to get to know too, among them Candida Donadio, whose authors included most of what was then the Jewish
nouvelle vague
: Joseph Heller, Wallace Markfield, and Bruce Jay Friedman, a close friend of Bob’s. There was also Lynn Nesbit, somewhat easier to approach, then working for the urbane and dapper Sterling Lord. Nesbit combined not only brains and beauty but also taste and energy and was already building a list of remarkable writers. She lived in a garden duplex downtown, and the party she gave there for her friend and English counterpart Deborah Rogers was the first publishing party I had ever been to that wasn’t dull and stiff (except for those in which one waited breathlessly for Ray Schuster to say something awful). In fact, Lynn gave me hope—she was elegant, witty, and to all appearances self-assured—that publishing didn’t have to be a dowdy business. When I finally worked up the nerve to take her to lunch at the Italian Pavilion, then the mecca of the younger publishing set (the meccas of the older publishing set were “21” and the Café Louis XIV), she was absolutely certain that I was going to publish a lot of her authors and become her client myself.

“What makes you think I want to write books?” I asked.

“I can tell,” she said, with characteristic impatience. “The sooner you start, the better.”

A
CCORDING TO
the hallowed tradition of book publishing, it was necessary to have lunch with all these people, and many more, as often as possible. For editors, in fact, having lunch is regarded as a positive, income-generating, aggressive act, and a certain suspicion is extended toward those few who can be found eating a sandwich at their desk more than once or twice a week. Publishers have been known to roam through the editorial department at lunchtime to catch editors who are “not doing their job” in the act of unwrapping a tuna sandwich from the nearest deli. A large expense account is very often perceived as proof of ambition and hard work. Publishing might, in fact, be the only business in the world in which it is possible to be criticized for expenses that are too
modest
.

There were some exceptions, of course. Bob Gottlieb later became famous for not going out to lunch. Agents who wanted to see him had to come to his office for a sandwich. Everybody else in the world of book publishing, at least at what we in the British armed forces called “the sharp end of the stick,” could be found from twelve-thirty to two-thirty at some midtown restaurant with a napkin in his or her lap.

Nobody has ever done a poll to see whether the agents—the putative beneficiaries of this largesse—really
want
to be taken out to lunch every day of the workweek. It is simply one of the basic assumptions of book publishing that he or she who lunches with the most agents gets the most books. In the fifties, and even the early sixties, such lunches used to be preceded by a couple of cocktails and often dragged on well past three o’clock, leaving both parties with bad headaches and tendencies to nap during the rest of the afternoon. In those days, editors did indeed give their all for their company—cirrhosis of the liver and cardiovascular failure only too often went with the profession and were assumed to be work-related illnesses. By the mid-sixties, as younger agents who limited themselves to water or one glass of white wine came to the fore, lunches tended to become more spartan. Still, drunk or sober, the average editor faced five lunches a week for the sole purpose of trying to charm comparative strangers into sending him or her manuscripts
that in all probability would turn out to be no good, thus calling for another lunch to apologize for rejecting it—for not every agent takes rejection well, particularly if that agent has spent two hours rhapsodizing over the manuscript in question during lunch, while the editor nodded away as if agreeing with every word.

As if they didn’t have to lunch out enough as it was, editors even formed their own lunch club that met once a month, though many avoided it on the grounds that no editor had anything much to gain from having lunch with another, and anyway, it was full of fossils and has-beens. For the latter reason, I rather liked it—some of the older members
were
certainly curmudgeonly and fossilized, but I found it interesting to talk to people such as John Farrar (one of the founders of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) or Ken McCormick, the editor in chief of Doubleday, both of whom had been editors for at least fifty years at that point. What struck me most was that while neither of them was rich—it’s always been hard to get rich as an editor—they still had a certain joie de vivre and a keen interest in what was going on. Here, at any rate, was a profession in which age, if it was not treated with respect, was at least tolerated. Besides, allowance being made for Farrar’s extreme testiness, they both still seemed to be having fun, thus proving Dick Snyder and Bennett Cerf right.

F
UN WAS
about to enter my life on a grander scale than that, however, and was to remain in it for over thirty years in the person of one remarkable (and diminutive) agent.

West Coast agents had long been an unknown quantity to most East Coast publishing people, who tended to look down on them as mere “10 percenters,” knuckle draggers of no culture and no interest in books, who made their living peddling flesh and something called “screen treatments” and who appeared in the offices of New York publishers only from time to time in sweaty pursuit of original stories that could be made into movies. There had been a very few exceptions over the years—there was Myron Selznick, David’s brother, a flesh peddler if ever there was one, but also a sophisticated and well-read man, and Leland Hayward, whose urbanity and sophistication had made him welcome on both coasts, as well as in those parts of Europe that mattered. Hayward was a man of taste and charm. Supremely elegant and something
of a celebrity in his own right (he married two international social stars, Pamela Churchill and Slim Keith), Hayward was more interested in serving as the link between Broadway and Sunset Boulevard than in books, but when in New York he paid his respects to the more socially acceptable publishers, chiefly Bennett Cerf, who moved—or yearned to move—in the same social circles as Hayward, and the Knopfs, who were celebrities in their own way.

Hayward seemed at home almost everywhere except Los Angeles, although he lived there for years. He went out of his way to build a New England–style house in Beverly Hills, complete with clapboards, shutters, and a shingled roof—even a barn that would not have looked out of place in rural Connecticut or Vermont, except that it contained, among other luxuries, a completely equipped, lilliputian soda fountain for his children, the countertop low enough that they could serve themselves and their friends.

There was yet another West Coast agent, one who had modeled himself to some degree in Leland Hayward’s image (except for the soda fountain), and that was Irving Paul Lazar. Lazar had been around, it sometimes seemed, since year one, a more or less permanent fixture in international society, the movie business, and, since the 1950s, the book business. He handled a good many writers who were all major celebrities. As a rule, he dealt only with heads of houses, mere editors being beneath him.

I had never met Lazar, but I had been hearing his name since 1950, when I first saw him, at Eden Roc on the Cap d’Antibes. Lazar was then in his forties, I suppose, and already something of a legend. My Aunt Alexa and I had been swimming and had been joined by Uncle Alex for lunch. Looking across the pool, Alex shaded his eyes with his copy of the Paris edition of the New York
Herald Tribune
and waved. “It’s Irving Lazar,” he said to Alexa. “We must ask him to dinner. By the way, nobody who matters calls him ‘Swifty.’ Bogart gave him the name after Lazar made three deals for him in the same day, on a bet,” Alex explained.

The person in question was standing on the other side of the pool, an incongruous, diminutive figure among all the half-naked, oiled, and bronzed bodies. He was totally bald, and his face—what could be seen of it below huge, glittering, gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses—was tanned, like his pate, to the color of a well-cared-for crocodile handbag. He was wearing tiny white shoes, a blue blazer with gold
buttons, and white trousers pressed so perfectly, despite the heat, that he looked like a shiny, expensive beach toy that has just been unpacked by some lucky child. He was shouting into a telephone.

He was shouting into a telephone some thirteen years later when he called me, out of the blue, at S&S. “Lazar here,” he said, as if there were none other. The voice was unknown to me and difficult at first to decipher. He seemed to be affecting a rich, even plummy, upper-class English accent, of the Lord Haw-Haw type, with every syllable accentuated, and for a moment I thought he was making fun of me. “Have lunch with me, dear boy,” he went on grandly. “I want to pick your brain.”

In what area, I asked suspiciously. “I’m not doing any business with your shop,” Lazar said, still apparently aping a toff’s accent for my benefit. “I do a lot of business with Bennett Cerf at Random House. I do a lot of business with Tom Guinzburg at Viking.” He paused, perhaps for breath. “I don’t know why I’m not doing any fucking business with Simon and Schuster,” he snapped suddenly, as sharply as the crack of a whip, his voice changing to what I presumed was his natural accent, a grainy, impatient Brooklyn Jewish growl.

“Yes, all right, where?” I asked.

“ ‘21,’ for chrissakes, where do you think?” Lazar said. “One o’clock. Don’t be late.”

At “21,” where I arrived a good ten minutes early, I had only to mention Lazar’s name to be treated like royalty. I was swept to a red-checked table downstairs, opposite the bar, and given a bowl of celery and olives on ice and a basket of rolls. From time to time, as I ate the rolls, a captain arrived bearing bulletins of Lazar’s progress. Mr. Lazar called to say that he would be on his way shortly. Mr. Lazar’s secretary called to say that Mr. Lazar was just leaving his apartment. Mr. Lazar’s secretary called again to say that Mr. Lazar was actually out the door. Mr. Lazar’s California office called to ask Mr. Lazar to phone as soon as he arrived. Three quarters of an hour later—by which time I had emptied the basket of rolls—there was a bustle at the entrance of the bar, and Lazar appeared, dressed faultlessly, as ever, in a checked suit of the kind worn in England for attending the more fashionable race meetings. I waved to him, but he was busy scanning the room like a theater manager counting the house before raising the curtain. He plunged off to shake hands with everybody he knew, moving around the room in a slow, counterclockwise semicircle.

What I was witnessing was table-hopping as an art form. At some tables he paused for only a few moments, at others he stayed for a few minutes, at one or two he actually sat down to chat. There was hardly a table in the room at which there wasn’t somebody Lazar recognized or from which somebody didn’t wave to him. It was two o’clock when he sat down next to me, glanced at the table, and snapped at the captain, “Why aren’t there any rolls on the table, for chrissakes?” He shook my hand. “You don’t look like your uncle,” he said, eyeing me. “He was a big fellow.”

I didn’t think a conversation about height with Lazar was likely to lead anywhere—and I was sensitive about the fact that I was the shortest member of my family—so I said nothing.

Lazar picked up the menu, took off his glasses, removed a gold-rimmed monocle from his breast pocket, put it in place, and studied the menu, holding it an inch or two away from his nose. “I want breakfast,” he said. “Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon.” He turned to me and said, “I got a late start this morning.” I wondered whether this was his way of apologizing for being late, but nothing in his manner suggested that it was. “I mixed up my pills,” he explained. “I took my wake-up pill last night and my sleeping pill when I got up this morning.”