Swifty Lazar: Evolved Heart, Evolved Style

The first reference I can remember seeing to Irving Paul Lazar was in S. J. Perelman’s Paris Review interview. Mr. Perelman, himself a notably stylish and fastidious traveler--I believe he drove a Mercedes along the Silk Road as far as Tashkent--mentioned in passing that the only man he knew who could step off an airplane anywhere in the world with his hands in his pockets was Irving Lazar.

I was a youth when I read that passage, and did not understand what a resonant tribute it was: a compliment paid by one great stylist to another. As a wordsmith S.J. Perelman was impeccable; as a traveler, like most of us but unlike Irving, he tended to get frazzled.

Irving Lazar’s style, at home or abroad, did not tolerate frazzlement. He stepped off the plane with his hands in his pockets--excellently turned pockets, too--minus such impediments as the suit bags, claim checks, diaper bags, crumpled tickets and lost composure that burden most mortals when they travel.

A mere six weeks before Irving’s death I dined with him at Chasen’s. He was in a wheelchair then. When we returned home he wheeled himself around his house for a while, looking for some object or other to give me; while he wandered and considered, remembering the shop off Bond Street where he picked up his bone china, or the gallery in Nice where he secured the little Matisse, I happened to open a silver cigarette box given him by Walter and Carol Matthau. It was engraved with the following tribute: “You have that rarest of things, an evolved heart.”

Well, so he did--and he had an evolved style , too. But there is a Catch-22 to great styles: the higher you wind them, the tighter the catch. Our styles tend to make us; then, if we last long enough and nothing beats them to it, they break us. Irving’s devotion to fine European footwear rotted his feet and contributed its jot to his demise; but, then, we are all going to demise some way. Who’s to say that too-tight English shoes shouldn’t introduce the finale?

When I read the Perelman interview I had no suspicion that the man named Irving Lazar, who stepped off planes on the preferable continents with his hands in his pockets, would someday be my agent. At the time, and for many years afterward, I had an agent, Dorothea Oppenheimer, a wonderful if eccentric woman who got through life on an intricate balance of beauty and bravura. Dorothea was born in a castle on the Danube and died in a one-room apartment on York Avenue, in New York City. In the three painful years that it took her to die, Irving, with uncustomary discretion, quietly did the work of agenting me. He treated Dorothea with the distinguished courtesy he bestowed on those who possessed what he called quality.

Dorothea Oppenheimer had quality, even in the dusty apartment on York Avenue, and unto the hour of her death. Irving deferred to it, and behaved impeccably. A dying, impoverished European woman got the credit--then minimal--for selling “Lonesome Dove.”

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A few years later, Irving’s eye for quality instantly spotted this elusive element in the appearance and demeanor of a much younger woman--my goddaughter Sara Ossana, then 12. Irving and Mary were in London, ensconced in their accustomed suite at Claridge’s, a suite the King of Spain was allowed to use when Irving didn’t happen to be in town. Sara and her mother, Diana Ossana, now my screenwriting partner, happened to pass through on short notice; on even shorter notice (an hour, approximately), I called Irving and suggested dinner. The Lazars had planned to go to a birthday party for the King of Greece, a party to which numerous Windsors were coming, including the Queen and the glamorous young Princess of Wales.

Irving instantly changed his plans. “I see those people all the time,” he said, and an hour later Sara and Diana and I were dining with Irving and Mary in the grand ballroom of Claridge’s. Irving spent the evening admiring Sara’s haircut--a world-class haircut she had given herself, only the day before--and harassing the captain to rush yet more delicacies to Sara’s plate. On the basis of an excellent haircut and a few minutes conversation, Irving took Sara up and was unfailingly generous to her from then on. She was one of the few young women of her generation allowed to bring her boyfriend to the Oscar party; to the end, Sara loved Irving and Irving, Sara.

T. S. Eliot once made a famous remark about Henry James, who, Eliot said, had a mind so fine that no idea could penetrate it. Irving’s mind was not unlike Henry James’. The texts that he agented rarely, if ever, penetrated it, except by osmosis. For years, once he became my agent, I waited for some chance statement that would indicate that he had read at least a page or two of the many books he agented for me; the statement never came.

Life, in the Scott Fitzgerald sense, was always glimmering out there somewhere: drinks, fine women, dancing, French food, exciting talk, and the endless parade of the great and famous, the beautiful and bold, were Irving’s texts. Not for him the contemplative hour with Horace or Virgil; despite which he was, in his bones, a literary man. He honored writers and never, to my knowledge, allowed himself to confuse the work of literature with the subliterary bestseller. He reaped millions off bestsellers--in the way of the street--but his first and fiercest loyalties were to those who attempted literature, and, Truman Capote excepted, he didn’t expect to find them at Spago or Le Cirque.

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As a man of the cafe and the boulevard, Irving lavished his energies on not a few people who were spoiled well past the point of putrefaction; he was sometimes careless when it came to separating the wheat from the chaff. But manners--what he called “the correct thing”--mattered to him to the end. If Irving really cared about you, as he cared, for example, for Dorothea and Sara, it was necessary that you do the correct thing. With Dorothea this meant dying with her courage intact. With Sara, it meant exacting discipline in the matter of haircuts. When people abandoned their standards, and proved unable, in the difficult situation that life is sure to bring us, to do the correct thing, Irving’s judgment was immediate, and, frequently, final. Lady Keith could tell you.

In his year of bereavement, after Mary’s death, Diana and Ossana and I saw Irving often. On our last visit, a few weeks ago, he rose out of sedation and talked lucidly and lovingly, for almost an hour, about Bogart and Hemingway. He spoke about Bogart’s death, and Hemingway’s torment. But then he began to reminisce about their good times--he ceased to talk about them as if they were dead and spoke as he might speak of people who were traveling, people whom he would probably see again, as it might be, when he was passing through Paris, or lunching at “21.”

In humans the grace that lasts is probably always moral, and always tragic. Irving and Mary are gone, and the community of the arts is diminished. Irving was a larger-than-life figure in a town that, but for the great magnifying glass of the screen, would be in most ways smaller than life. His intelligence and his taste brought an element of refinement to a culture in most ways crude. His taste reached back to the Europe of the great West Coast emigres: Mann, Stravinsky, Renoir.

There are few links to that time left, and none who sustained the range of contact and reference that Irving Lazar commanded. With his passing, in the words of Thomas Nashe, the Renaissance poet, a brightness has fallen from the air. Irving himself, at his 85th birthday party, lamented the devaluation of glamour, as he saw it, in a town where movie stars seldom take the trouble to be movie stars anymore.

Once, speaking of President Reagan, whose memoirs he didn’t get to agent, Irving consoled himself with this reflection: “That’s all right--pretty soon he’ll be where Franco is.”

As it happened, Irving took ship first. The prince of agents, the man who could step ashore, or out of a plane, or off a train with his hands in his pockets, is traveling now. We can be sure that a car will be waiting, at the dock, or the airport, or the station. The best suite will be his, at the best hotel; the clothes will have been unpacked; the captain will be waiting deferentially at the best table in the best restaurant, where the best company will soon gather to dine and drink till eternity cracks.

He won’t be sitting with Franco, though. Irving will be traveling in that greatly peopled borne where Mr. Kafka dines with Mrs. Woolf, and Papa breaks bread with Baudelaire. And should it be that either the Lord of Light or (better yet) the Prince of Darkness is ready to sell his memoirs, Irving Paul Lazar will get right on the phone.