Eileen Lizer Is a Know-It-All and She’s Good at It

Need a straitjacket? Want to know when the most recent sighting of the rare nurse shark occurred? The last time the Ikeya-Seki comet flew by? Looking for information about an obscure disease? A vintage rickshaw? An out-of-print book about Vietnam?

Call Eileen Lizer.

“A production company will call me up,” Lizer said, “and say, ‘Help! My project is due tomorrow, or in eight days, and I need to know what the weather was like in a little tiny town in northern China in the year 605 AD. In addition, I need to know who was in power at the time, and what kind of shoes that they wore!’ Well, I find out.”

She really does too--the more esoteric the request, the better. Some call her a “wizard of information” or a “findologist.” Others--like KABC Talk Radio institution Michael Jackson, for whom Lizer booked guests for seven years--term her “extraordinary at what she does.” Actress June Lockhart said Lizer is “somewhere between a researcher and a private eye.” Susan Wilcox, personal assistant to John Ritter, said the woman tracks things down with a “single-mindedness that’s unique.”

Clients like Alison Holt of Berkemer and Klein public relations, refer to her simply as “Rolodex Head.”

Lizer takes it as a compliment.

“We call her that because she has so many phone numbers memorized, “ Holt said. “You’ll say to her, ‘Eileen, do you know this particular source?’ And she’ll know his direct number, home number and personal information, so you can call and say, ‘Oh, I hear you just had a baby’ and that sort of thing. I don’t know anyone else who does just this. I mean, a lot of times researchers are in just one category--like they only do sports or entertainment or whatever. Eileen can do anything.”

Public relations firms and movie production companies and just plain folks regularly call upon Lizer.

It’s true that Lizer routinely rattles off phone numbers from memory--often supplying (with permission) a person’s two separate home phones, two or three separate work numbers and the mobile phone. It isn’t just that she has a photographic memory. She’s utterly dedicated to her work. She revels in the challenge of it all--or, as Lockhart put it, “she loves the chase.”

This effervescent, ebullient thirtysomething woman lights up at the prospect of answering any question.

Lockhart, who first met Lizer while a guest on the Jackson program, explained: “I needed some research work done on a story that I was interested in for a movie about a turn-of-the-century murderess in Indiana--a very colorful character who did away with lots of husbands. I was sort of stymied as to where to find it and got Eileen on the case, and she did it in five hours. Got the books, newspaper clippings about the trial--everything. I mean, it was really just amazing. She just has this dogged determination, and she loves the chase! And I think with this kind of a profession, that’s what you really need to have, somebody who just has to find the answer. Has to have it. To be fully satisfied, you know? She’s a gem.”

It all started on the “Ken and Bob Company,” the popular KABC morning radio program (now “Ken and Barkley Company”) that Lizer helped produce. One day, co-host Ken Minyard decided to track down old girlfriends of the program’s staff--most of whom had not been seen or heard from since about 1940. Lizer found all eight in one week.

“It was amazing how fast she did it,” co-host Bob Arthur said. “And a little embarrassing too. It seemed she had a talent for this sort of work.”

“We got them on the air,” Lizer said, “and Ken and Bob were so thrilled that, afterward, Ken came to me and said, ‘Have you ever thought about doing this for a living?’ ”

No, she hadn’t. But the former welfare worker with an undergraduate degree in childhood education started thinking about it. And after leaving her career in radio in the late ‘80s, she started doing it.

How does she do it? Is it as simple as making a couple of lucky phone calls? Not really. Lizer’s years of booking guests on the Jackson show--finding people who could speak authoritatively on issues of the day, at a moment’s notice--proved an invaluable course in research. Sure, other professional researchers effectively tap into computer data banks and library files--but if stymied there, many often either give up or spend months in the search. Lizer’s international network of contacts--filed mostly in her head--made while working in radio give her an immense backup system.

Add to this the fact that she is a charismatic speaker--strangers routinely find themselves comfortably revealing personal information--and obscure information doesn’t really seem to stand much of a chance of staying obscure. This is, after all, the woman who managed to come up with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s entire U.S. itinerary in about an hour as a favor to a public relations firm that had an idea for using Gorbachev in a promotion. (Is the Secret Service reading this?)

Good finders, she insists, are hard to find.

“Look, I do know that there are such things as information brokers,” Lizer said. “That’s what they call themselves. That’s not what I call myself. They are all probably computer wizards--with modems and this, that and the other--and they charge from $60 to $100 per hour. I charge--actually my rates just went up--$50 an hour, plus expenses. I feel comfortable charging that because I’m fast. I can do things in four or five hours that it takes maybe days for somebody else to do.”

It’s true. Consider the time she was asked by Time magazine (where she assisted the Los Angeles bureau) to perform the odd task of finding a housewife who used an overnight mail service more than 20 times in a year. She flipped through the old cerebral Rolodex and came up with Tracy Laffer, wife of economist Arthur Laffer. Then there was the time a movie studio needed five straitjackets. Lizer found that they are no longer manufactured; they’ve been replaced by “restraints.” Still, she came up with all five between an obscure medical supply house and a costume company.

Then there was the time a kosher Chinese restaurant had her locate an antique rickshaw. There was the time she was asked by a Hollywood producer to come up with an out-of-print war history book published only in Germany. The producer’s assistant gave up after seven months of searching. Lizer found the book in three hours.

“They weren’t incompetent,” she said. “It was obscure and hard to find and out of print, and they looked at all the foreign language bookstores here. I found it in the public library in a less well-used branch in the Pasadena area. I just started calling. One of my sources tipped me off and said that you’ll find things in these smaller branches where you think nothing exists.”

There there was the time she was asked by a private investigator to find a hit-and-run driver. The private investigator had given up after weeks.

“I asked him if he ever uses people who don’t have a P.I. license, and he said, yes, as long as I don’t do things that require a license. He said he’d give me $30 to find this person’s address. And a half-hour later, I had the address. I went to the post office at the federal building in Westwood, asked a postal worker behind the counter to supply me with information under the Freedom of Information Act. I called the P.I. back and he was just blown away.”

Yet, Lizer said, she does not aspire to be Philip Marlowe’s gofer. Most of what she does is more lighthearted and off the cuff. John Ritter, for example, once commissioned Lizer to find out what she could about a rare disease called synesthesia. His assistant, Susan Wilcox, stalled out after a couple of phone calls that yielded nothing.

“John read an article about it,” Wilcox said. “It was about cross-connection of the senses, and it was called synesthesia. Usually, babies outgrow it, but a few grown-ups continue to experience it, like Rimsky-Korsakov. John was intrigued by it. I called the media lab at MIT, and they’d never heard of it. They gave me the title of a book that might explain it, and I went to a bookstore and looked that up, and there was nothing about synesthesia. So I called Eileen Lizer. And that evening she had two pages of computer printout--including a list of the contacts that she had made--I think about eight different professors at various branches of the University of California. Had the name of a book, author and resume of the subject matter. It was amazing.”

Lizer is more modest about her accomplishments. “Certainly there’s no special genius involved. I’ll tell you what it is--I love doing it. I will not stop until I find it. It’s as simple as that.”