When superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar was alive, he was notorious for never reading the works of famous writers that he hawked. His memoir, however, surely would have held his attention. Written in collaboration with Annette Tapert, it is literate, entertaining and touching.
Many Hollywood legends were Lazar clients—Ira Gershwin, Moss Hart, Humphrey Bogart. Other notables of the time, such as producer David Selznick and studio heads Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner, were regularly buttonholed by Lazar. (He kept pitching even if they didn't happen to have a buttonhole at the moment: When Jack Warner balked at making Joshua Logan the director of the film version of Camelot, the agent cornered him as he emerged from the shower at a Palm Springs spa. The naked Warner relented.)
Lazar had two rules of dealmaking: Always ask for the moon and know when to compromise. Producer David Wolper once called to ask what he wanted for the rights to a book. Lazar told him $200,000. Wolper declared the price too high—he only had $20,000. Lazar announced that they had a deal.
More than a mere agent, Lazar was a friend to the stars. Bogart had nicknamed him Swifty for making several deals for him in a single day. After Bogie's death, Lazar hung out with his widow, "Betty" Bacall. But that friendship nearly ended after Lazar told a gossip columnist that Bacall and Frank Sinatra were engaged. Sinatra was so embarrassed by the newspaper account that he broke off the engagement. "But I couldn't feel bad," Lazar writes, "because she and Frank were so ill-suited for each other."
Although he was out of Hollywood's inner circle in his later years, the consummate host and social climber found his greatest personal happiness after marrying, at 56, the willowy former model Mary Van Nuys. Together they launched an annual Oscar party at Spago that quickly had all of Hollywood clawing for invitations.
In 1993, Mary, then 61, died of cancer and the grieving Lazar welcomed his guests alone. By year's end, the 86-year-old legend had died of kidney failure. Asked in his last days whom he'd choose to play him in a movie, he rejected Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise and Robin Williams before settling on Jack Nicholson. (Simon & Schuster, $24)
by Harry Stein
A dose of this highly touted but clunky medical thriller won't leave you feeling much more energized than before you started treatment. Dr. Dan Logan, a fresh-faced research whiz, discovers (gulp) that the egos running the fictitious American Cancer Foundation are greedy, jealous and ruthless. (Can you believe it?) When Logan runs trials of a promising chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer, some of the top guns sabotage his work, his career and his life. There's a murder, along about page 300 (Horrors!), to keep things perking and a Very Important Person (the First Lady, no less), who eventually beats the disease with Dan's drug (Hooray!). Along the terminal corridors of this predictable tale, Stein injects an anemic love story and enough lab-babble to flummox those who flunked organic chemistry. The only real magic here is how Bullet manages to stay off life support. (Delacorte, $22.95)
by Elinor Lipman
For 12 years, writer manqué Harriet Mahoney has been looking for love in all the wrong places—that is, in the arms of Kenny Grossman, a self-absorbed bagel baker who suddenly dumps her for a younger woman. Frizzy-haired, frazzled and still unpublished at 41, Harriet flees Manhattan for Cape Cod, Mass., taking the job of ghostwriter for the infamous Isabel Krug, who wants to turn her headline-grabbing affair with a paunchy billionaire (he was caught flagrante delicto and shot dead by his wife) into a juicy best-seller.
Isabel is a pistol—a sexy, earthy blonde with a big heart, who can teach timid Harriet a thing or two about going for the gusto. Then there is Isabel's curious con-artist husband, Costas, and cutie-pie handyman Pete and the house they all share—a high-tech marvel with cylindrical rooms on the dunes of Truro Beach. Navigating in this new world, Harriet comes to understand her head and heart.
Lipman (The Way Men Act) shows a sure touch chronicling the women's budding friendship and their everyday rituals—soothing baths, visits to the hair salon and intimate conversations over late-night peanut-butter sandwiches. The prose is spare and breezy, but there's wry wisdom beneath the chuckles; this is a warm, affecting tale about one smart woman letting go of her dumb choices and fumbling toward love. When Harriet gets her man—and finds her real calling—you don't begrudge her a thing, not even a bagel crumb. (Pocket, $20)
by William Maxwell
As a fiction editor at The New Yorker for 40 years, William Maxwell polished the short stories of John Cheever, Eudora Welty and John Updike. The precise language that marks their fiction distinguishes his own on view in this impeccable collection of stories.
Maxwell was born in Illinois in 1908, and most of his fiction draws upon childhood memories, rendered with neither nostalgia nor sentiment. In "The Front and the Back Parts of the House," the departure of the family cook just before his mother's death allows Maxwell to portray racial divisions of the day. In "The Man in the Moon," an uncle disdained by the family for passing forged checks becomes a sympathetic man. By reserving judgment, Maxwell shows understanding others have withheld.
The drama in these stories can be as simple as a couple's search for the perfect dinner at the end of a vacation in France, as subtle as a family's daily life in Manhattan or as mysterious as the 21 "improvisations" that close this collection. Like the young man in "The Patterns of Love," Maxwell sees the invisible "tracks" people leave behind, traces of their love and dependency, and he deftly captures their complexity. (Knopf, $25)
by Katherine Mosby
Eccentric heroine, decaying gothic mansion, intolerant townsfolk—can these well-worn elements be refashioned into something new? Vienna Daniels, an educated, well-bred Yankee, is brought as a bride to Winsville, W.Va., in the 1920s. With little affection for the local society that Willard, her southern-bred husband, has charmed, she manages to alienate everyone except the town's outcasts: the black servants and the two men who secretly love her, boozy Dr. Barstow and the Daniels' reclusive neighbor John Aimes.
The birth of their daughter Willa sours the Danielses' relationship, and Willard's drinking and carousing culminate in a final, violent domestic argument. After it, Willard leaves with a shoulder full of buckshot and Vienna takes to her bed for seven weeks.
Our heroine stays on at the mansion to raise Willa and Elliot, the son born after the separation. She also gets to work on a 12-volume epic poem, while the protective world she has built begins to fracture. Mosby, a poet herself, writes with fluid grace but fails to give fresh life to the southern gothic form. Her images are magical, but her narrative has no momentum, and her central characters are too ethereal to have any real bite. (Random House, $21)
>Annette Tapert
PARTY ANIMAL
"IRVING LAZAR WAS AN ORIGINAL, there was no carbon copy," says Annette Tapert, who collaborated on the agent's memoirs during the last year of his life. "He was an immensely witty man, very smart, very charming, but he was also an egomaniac, arrogant and difficult." Tapert, whose work includes Slim, the memoirs of social gadabout Nancy Lady Keith, was reluctant to work with the tiny (5'3") titan. "I thought he would make my life miserable," she says. "He was grieving over his wife, and he was beginning to fail." As it turned out, Lazar had been keeping careful track of his past for decades. And, when he turned over a cache of neatly organized documents—daily notes dating back to 1949, files with headings like "People I Don't Like," letters, transcripts of conversations he had taped with such celebrated pals as Kate Hepburn—Tapert came to know and care more deeply about her subject. "Someone said to me, 'Don't remember Irving Lazar for being a great literary agent, remember him for being a great host,' and that's really what he was," says Tapert, the mother of two, who lives in Manhattan with her husband, writer Jesse Kornbluth. Three months after Mary's death, Lazar hosted his final Oscarfest. "I remember his walking into that room leaning on his cane, very feeble but perfectly tailored," says Tapert, "and I got this big lump in my throat. He walked from table to table like he was on automatic pilot. For him, the show had to go on. When the party was over, the reality of Mary's death hit him. He didn't feel he had anything else to look forward to."
- Contributors:
- Clare McHugh,
- J.D. Reed,
- Paula Chin,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Louisa Ermelino,
- Kristin McMurran.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
