Mr. S (4 page)

Lazar had already had me completely checked out. He knew precisely what I was making at the Pacht firm and offered me a 15 percent raise, to the princely sum of $100 a week. His office was just down the block on Beverly Drive, but he had much more in mind for me than office work. Lazar was a curious mix of totally confident and totally insecure. He had to make me acknowledge to him how cool it was that he found out all about me, from my naval record to my father’s murder. Wasn’t he a genius? He had to hear the answer. Then he gave me a list of all his famous clients, starting with Moss Hart, and going through George S. Kaufman, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Cole Porter, all the giants of the New York stage whom he was now selling for top-prestige dollar to the class-starved studios. But then he had to list all of their credits, as if to prove how great they were. Either that, or how ignorant he thought I was. Yet if the latter were the case, why was he hiring me, except maybe to do some Pygmalion number? Whatever the reason, I looked at the whole thing as a wild adventure, Man Friday to the world’s leading writers’ agent. From Call Me Bwana to Call Me Shakespeare. Suddenly I was a man of letters, or at least next to one. In Hollywood your fate could change in the blink of an eye. That’s what made it so exciting.

I soon learned that Irving Paul Lazar was not much more literary than I was. He rarely read his clients’ works, he merely sold them. What a massive bluffer, what a masterful bullshit artist he was! And
what a nutcase. Lazar lived in a two-bedroom duplex garden apartment on Wilshire and Beverly Glen that he rented from Loretta Young’s mother. Frank would take an apartment here in 1952, when it became increasingly clear that he and Ava could not coexist under one roof without killing each other. Lazar’s friend, director Billy Wilder, had lived here before Lazar and had put him on to it. Audrey Hepburn had lived here, too. Everything that wasn’t part of the furnished flat had Lazar’s initials,
IPL
, on it, the towels, the sheets, the napkins, the salt shakers, his English underwear. Lazar was a total Anglophile, which was about as far from his roots in Brooklyn as he could go. He had all his clothes made in England, and he sent all his shirts back there to be laundered in some ridiculous cleaner in Mayfair that charged him more than new shirts would have cost. But he was terrified a local cleaner might crease the collars. He had more towels than the Beverly Wilshire. I soon understood why. Lazar refused to walk barefoot on Loretta Young’s mother’s carpet. He was convinced it was infested with deadly germs, so he laid towels on the carpet to protect himself, and he insisted on changing these towels at least twice a day, and more often, whenever he had company.

“Company” often consisted of sultry large-breasted hookers, who were the type little Lazar preferred. How anyone so phobic about cleanliness and illness could consort with prostitutes was bizarre to me, but bizarre was Irving Lazar’s real middle name. “I need them to help me relax,” he would explain. “I have to be content. I can’t deal from anxiety.” For a man who was afraid to take pills or even aspirin for fear of rare side effects, sex was the drug he was willing to mainline. He never had a girlfriend, though his occasional dates, starlets like Barbara Rush, whose big break was
It Came from Outer Space
, tended to be dark and voluptuous just like the hookers. Regardless of her identity, he always made me throw the sheets away whenever a
woman would lie on them, which was rarely longer than fifteen minutes. No one was allowed to spend the night, including me.

I would arrive around eleven, when Lazar would wake up, lay out the towels so he could pace the apartment and talk on the phone, then drive him in his Rolls-Royce to Romanoff’s for lunch at one, after which he would walk down to his office and work the phones for the rest of the day until it was time for another meal at Romanoff’s, or maybe Chasen’s, or one of his many parties. Other times I would cook Italian food for Lazar, deliver scripts to producers and studios, and do all sorts of errands, delivering gifts to everyone he wanted to cultivate. He would often send me to Nate ’n Al’s, the celebrity New York delicatessen on Beverly Drive, to buy huge supplies of caviar. “Be careful with that stuff,” he would warn me. “Blacks can’t digest caviar. It gives them gout.” The idea was that blacks lacked a special enzyme to digest the sturgeon roe, and the caviar could make us deathly sick. How nice Lazar pretended to be on that point, how concerned about my health. That enzyme was called cheapness. For such a big spender, Lazar could be like Uncle Scrooge. He was only a big sport if the object of his generosity could do something for him or was his social superior.

Most of my job was standing around waiting, usually in the Rolls outside restaurants and parties. But sometimes the waiting could get interesting. I got to know George Raft, who lived in a fancy European-style apartment building across from Romanoff’s restaurant where Jill St. John would later live. Raft used to stand in the street flipping silver dollars as if they were worry beads. He’d come over and talk to me. He had the very best clothes in Hollywood, spats, waistcoats, like Legs Diamond. He knew I admired his outfits, and one night he came out with a pair of amazing patent leather shoes that were just my size. “Learn to dance the rhumba in these,” he said as he gave them to me.

My first falling out with Lazar was when he insisted I wear a livery uniform to chauffeur him in his Rolls, which he had acquired in lieu of a commission in a deal as a way to avoid income taxes. He was always on the prowl for the clever scam. I had hated looking like a lawn jockey at the catering events, but they were only part-time. To wear a monkey suit full-time was flat-out unacceptable. I refused to wear these “Nazi costumes” with the leather jackboots that went with them, I told Lazar. I would rather go back and serve process. But every other driver wears them, he pouted. Why can’t you? Because I’m not like every other guy, I told him, and I didn’t think you were, either. That shut him up. So he let me keep dressing in the collegiate, Brooks Brothers-style blazers and tweeds that I liked to wear. And he helped me buy a sporty used MG-TD convertible to drive from my new apartment in Hollywood to work for him. He wanted me to seem as English as possible, even in my off hours, during which I got too lazy to keep up with my singing lessons. I think, deep down, Lazar might have gotten to me a little bit. The singing business was rough. Maybe I would become an agent myself.

The work seemed amazingly glamorous, especially when Lazar began taking me on trips with him, to drive him, carry his many bags, prepare his outfits, and do all the little errands, the real-life stuff, that he was clueless about doing himself, like going to the drugstore or the post office. Again, things here began on a rocky note. On our first road trip, to Palm Springs, Lazar was going to the Racquet Club to work on some deal with the producer Charlie Feldman, who had previously been one of the biggest agents in town and helped Lazar fill his shoes. Lazar worshipped Feldman, as the model of what an agent could become. Feldman, another obsessive Jewish Anglophile, had a Goetz-like mansion in Coldwater Canyon and a wife who had been a showgirl in the
Ziegfeld Follies
. He later divorced her to be with the French beauty Capucine, who dumped him for William Holden,
and was one of the few women who wouldn’t give Frank Sinatra the time of day. Such is the game of Hollywood musical beds.

When we got to the desert, Lazar announced to me that I couldn’t stay at the Racquet Club, that there were no servants’ quarters. I wasn’t expecting the presidential suite, but when I saw where blacks were allowed to stay, a kind of outhouse/stable near the Indian reservation, with fleas and bugs that looked as if they came from outer space, I got disgusted and said I would drive back to L.A. and pick up Lazar whenever he was ready. But he couldn’t live without me. The Racquet Club was totally restrictive, but there was a nice place called the Bon-Aire down the street where Lazar made a reservation for me. When I drove up in the Rolls-Royce, they thought I was Ralph Bunche. The red carpet treatment I got was amazing. Whenever Lazar ordered me around too much, I would begin talking right back to him. “Abraham Lincoln fixed it so we wouldn’t have to live like this,” I protested to him one night. He sat back in the back seat of the Rolls and started whistling “Dixie.” It wasn’t your typical master-servant relationship. It was actually more like a sitcom. The trick to getting along with Lazar was never to take him very seriously and to know that he liked to be abused.

Our next trip together was to London, for Lazar to do some deals for Noël Coward, but mostly it was an excuse to go to Savile Row to get suits made, to John Lobb for custom shoes, and to Turnbull & Asser on Jermyn Street for his precious shirts. We were to stay at Claridges. The English were a lot more civilized than America was at that time about race relations. I was supposed to stay in a maid’s room on the top floor of the snooty hotel. But when we got there, they put Lazar in the maid’s room and gave me a huge suite. They thought I was some kind of African prince, and they treated me like royalty. There were a lot of other African princes staying there, and they all bowed and greeted me like I was one of them. I bowed back.
I only knew one word from my extra days: “Ungawa.” I used it and it seemed to work. Lazar was fit to be tied, but it wasn’t the style of the English gent he aspired to be (he’d even start talking with an accent the minute we got off the plane, and call everyone “lovey” and “cheerio, old chap”) to throw a temper tantrum, so he let me keep my suite and keep up the charade that he was traveling with royalty for the whole week.

We went to Europe a lot, to see Lazar’s client writer Peter Viertel, who later married Deborah Kerr. We skied with him in Switzerland, ate with him at Tour d’Argent in Paris, went to a bullfight with him and Ernest Hemingway in Málaga. Hemingway drank more than anybody I had ever seen. Even Dean Martin couldn’t have matched him. He was also more bloodthirsty than Attila the Hun. He just loved it when the matador stabbed the bull, and the blood went flying all over the place. Hemingway had a big Sinatra-style entourage of beautiful girls, who doted on his every word, though Hemingway paid much more attention to the bottle, the bull, and the blood than to the broads. He left the girls to Lazar, who’d put on his biggest fake English accent and try to impress them with how much he knew about bullfighting, which was all bullshit. Hemingway was polite to me but drunkenly distant. After the bullfights, Hemingway would throw these all-night dinners, which I skipped and went off to the fancy brothels Lazar had showed me. In Spain you could be thrown in jail for being caught in bed with a woman who wasn’t your wife, but the whorehouses, which were like elegant men’s clubs, were totally protected.

Wherever I went with Lazar, I was rarely left out. In London, Noël Coward took me to the theatre when Lazar was too restless to sit through the plays. He hated stage drama as much as he did reading novels. Musicals were okay. The thing that surprised me most about this very fast world was how gay it all was. “Gay” wasn’t the word
then. It was “queer,” but you never said it. You never said anything, and you weren’t supposed to say no, for fear of offending these great creative geniuses. Both Coward and Cole Porter made passes at me. Coward brazenly held my hand at the theatre, while Porter kept giving me this funny handshake where he’d tickle my palm, which was supposed to be a code or something. Here was the man who wrote all our greatest romantic songs, “Night and Day,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and he was completely gay. Lazar told me he wrote “I Get a Kick Out of You” after being beaten up by some truck driver he’d picked up. My illusions were shattered, but that came with the territory of going backstage in show business, and this was merely the beginning. I had so many surprises that my life in entertainment was a two-decade shock treatment. But, for the moment, I played for time by telling people like Coward and Porter that I was almost engaged to some wonderful girl that I was making up. “How quaint,” Coward sniffed.

For the first two years I was with Lazar, I never laid eyes on Frank Sinatra. They were in two different orbits, winners and losers. Lazar was packaging such movies as
An American in Paris,
which won every Oscar, while Frank was in bombs like
Double Dynamite
, with Groucho Marx, another has-been by now. There were no more hit records, no more screaming bobbysoxers. The only time you heard of Frank Sinatra was if you opened
Confidential,
the top scandal magazine. Then you could read what a shit he was to leave his loyal wife Nancy for that Jezebel Ava Gardner, and how he was getting payback by being dumped by MGM, by Columbia Records, even by Ava, who was reputed to be having affairs with every costar and every Spanish matador who crossed her path. Every few months there seemed to be a story about another Sinatra suicide attempt. I’m not sure if any of this was true. It sold magazines. But Irving Lazar certainly seemed to believe it. “He should go back to New Jersey,” Lazar would say, as if
Hollywood could only be inhabited by the currently successful, which, sad to say, is pretty much the case.

The first time I met Frank Sinatra while working for Lazar was at a party where I was keeping the Rolls warm for a quick getaway. Lazar would sometimes go to five events a night. This obviously wasn’t an “A” party; if it were, Lazar would have been staying. I was keeping to myself. The other drivers, all in their Nazi uniforms, were giving me a wide berth. I didn’t dress like them. And I was black, which they weren’t. So there wasn’t much common ground. I did, however, feel like a cigarette, which was forbidden in the presence of the phobic Lazar, and I didn’t want to give the other drivers the satisfaction of saying no to me. So I decided to ask the first guest who came up the street. And that guest was Frank Sinatra, who had just parked his own car. I asked him for a smoke. He said, sorry, but he didn’t have one. I thanked him, and I assumed that was that, and waited for the next partygoer to ask. But ten minutes later out comes Sinatra with an entire gold bowl of cigarettes. I was shocked. I took one cigarette, but he said to keep the whole bowl. He patted me on the arm and went back into the party. From that moment on, I knew I liked the guy.