A few years ago, I received a call from Lazar from the pool of Oscar de la Renta’s house in the Dominican Republic. (Lazar’s year is organized in the form of a series of regularly scheduled progresses, like those of Queen Elizabeth I: he moves from Christmas at Oscar de la Renta’s, with the Kissingers, back to Los Angeles for his Oscar party, then to the bullfights in Spain with Peter Viertel, and ends—or did in the old days, before Irwin Shaw’s death—with skiing in Switzerland.) “I’ve been talking to Kissinger,” he told me. “He wants to write a big book on diplomacy. I haven’t told this to anyone else yet, so talk to Dick and get back to me with an offer right away. And make it good. I told Henry you guys would give me a terrific deal, so don’t let me down.”

Lazar had apparently told Kissinger across the de la Renta dinner table that he could get him twice as much money as Kissinger thought the book was worth. Honor was now at stake, and it was up to us, as Lazar’s friends, to prove him right. As it turned out, Dick Snyder and I came up with exactly the number Lazar had promised Kissinger, so everybody was happy. The day I got back to the office, however, I received a call from Marvin Josephson, the courtly head of International Creative Management (my own agency for many years), asking what was all this about his client wanting to write a book on diplomacy. The contract, Josephson explained, would have to be drawn up with I.C.M.

I called Lazar in the Dominican Republic. He was unruffled. Of course Kissinger wasn’t his client—he had never said Kissinger was. He was just putting together a deal for a friend, in the spirit of Christmas. I should draw up the contract with I.C.M., he said. All he wanted out of it was his ten per cent. I saw a gulf opening up before me. “What about I.C.M.’s ten per cent?” I asked.

“What about it?” Lazar said impatiently. Of course I.C.M. would get ten per cent. They were Kissinger’s agents.

“But that adds up to twenty per cent,” I pointed out. “Who pays the extra ten?”

“You do, kiddo,” Lazar said. “You think Henry’s going to pay two commissions? I get ten per cent for bringing you the deal.”

I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain this to Dick. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to split the commission?” I suggested hopefully. “Five for you, five for I.C.M.?”

There was a long silence, and for a moment I thought the line had gone dead. “You’ve still got a lot to learn, sonny,” he said.

Oddly, it never occurred to me that Lazar was old, even when he reached his eighties and began to gallop toward his nineties. Since in his view I was either “kiddo” or “sonny,” our relationship was a constant—he the grownup, I the child. As I became more successful (and branched out into writing, as well as editing), Lazar’s attitude toward me never varied. He was delighted for me, but I was still “kiddo” and always would be. Nor did Lazar seem to age. His energy was—and is—phenomenal, even frightening. No amount of parties, including his own, can exhaust him, or can blunt his appetite for sociability.

I had always thought of Lazar as a kind of finished product—born somehow already wearing his Savile Row suit and gleaming handmade shoes—so it came as a surprise to me when, one day in 1975, I was having a sandwich with him at his house in Beverly Hills and saw in his den a framed photograph of him as a boy, with a full head of hair, standing in front of a nineteen-twenties delivery truck and looking remarkably self-possessed.

“Is that you?” I asked.

Lazar glared at me. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Now sit down and eat.”

There was also a photograph of Lazar as a brash young M.C.A. agent, already bald, but pudgy, not at all the trim figure I was accustomed to; one of Lazar in uniform, a serious expression on his face; and even one of him as a baby. Of course, one knew he had been a baby, but over the years he has so cocooned himself in legend that his past has become almost indecipherable. It’s not, one suspects, that Lazar has any secrets to hide, or even that he is ashamed of his past. It’s just that, unlike the present, the past is no longer in his control. That his father was a relatively prosperous Russian-Jewish butter-and-egg wholesaler in Brooklyn (who did a little modest loan-sharking on the side) is nothing to be ashamed of, and Lazar isn’t ashamed—he just wants to establish his own version of events. He seems, in fact, to have had a happy childhood—three brothers, a doting mother, and a father who served as a role model.

In his later years, Lazar looked back on his childhood with the kind of nostalgia that successful self-made men always develop for their roots. He has a whole repertoire of childhood anecdotes: stories about how he had to learn to be tough, because he was the smallest boy in school; stories about how he fought full-grown teamsters for the best parking place at the market every morning for his father’s truck; stories about how he learned to dress elegantly from the neighborhood gangsters. This was the era of the Jewish gangster, when guys like Abner (Longie) Zwillman, Jake (Greasy Thumb) Guzik, and Legs Diamond controlled the streets and the rackets. Two themes dominate all of Lazar’s stories about growing up: fighting back and standing out from the crowd, and a longing for a richer, more genteel way of life, apparently inspired by summer visits to more prosperous relatives who lived in the country.

Lazar has always been obsessed by class. I sometimes used to fly out to California and back the same day, and once I stopped off at Lazar’s house before going on to lax to catch the red-eye home. On this particular occasion, I had apparently overdone things, and even Irving noticed that my eyelids were drooping. (Never tired himself, he is not usually aware of fatigue in others.) “Why not take a nap?” he suggested, and I gratefully bedded down on a sofa in his dressing room. I awoke to find the room in darkness. Stumbling to the nearest door, I opened it, and realized that I was looking at Lazar’s closet. Row after row of clothes were hanging there—yachting outfits, dinner jackets, blazers, sports clothes. At my feet rows of tiny shoes were lined up, each with its own wooden shoetree—there seemed to be hundreds of pairs, for every possible social and sporting occasion. In glass-fronted cupboards against one wall, Lazar’s shirts were arranged by color and pattern—hundreds of them. I felt like an intruder, but I was also reminded, inevitably, of Gatsby, and especially of the scene in which Daisy bursts into tears at the sight of his shirts.

It is no accident that the very worst thing Lazar can say about anyone is “He’s got no class.” This is invariably said more in sorrow than in anger, and with a certain judiciousness, as if Lazar were the final arbiter in the matter. “Class,” of course, means more than making una bella figura. Class in Lazar’s eyes is an attitude, and usually centers on lavish generosity, coupled with being a man of one’s word. His house is full of symbols of that special lavishness which passed for class during his heyday as a Hollywood agent. Every surface is covered with silver cigarette boxes engraved with effusive messages of thanks and affection from Lazar clients, and there are enough desk fittings and clocks to stock Asprey or Tiffany. Then autocracy and largesse were the rule. Lazar dealt as an equal with titans like Sam Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer and Darryl F. Zanuck: men who not only were worthy opponents but could make their own decisions and didn’t mind paying for what they wanted; men who were not, in a favorite phrase of Lazar’s, “nickel-and-dimers.” Those days, as Lazar never ceases to lament, are long gone, and now he has to deal with book editors and movie executives who report to committees, bid cautiously, and never send anything to celebrate a deal.

It was probably a yearning for class that prompted Lazar to go to law school instead of joining the neighborhood gangsters or staying in the family business. He graduated from the Brooklyn Law School of St. Lawrence University in 1931, but he soon figured out that as the lawyer for a vaudeville star like Ted Lewis (Mr. “Me and My Shadow”) he made a hundred dollars a week, whereas M.C.A. was taking ten per cent of Lewis’s ten thousand dollars a week. To this day, when he’s faced with lawyers, he seldom fails to point out that he is a lawyer himself, and he did practice bankruptcy law for a few years after law school. But, like Billy Rose, he seems to have made his mark mostly as the quick-witted and ambitious assistant to older men, taking shorthand (a man’s job in those days), running errands, establishing a name for himself as a bright young man around the courthouse. A good head for numbers and an already legendary amount of chutzpah brought him into the talent business when it was still in its infancy, and consisted of booking musicians and acts in the Catskills, on the still flourishing vaudeville circuit, and in the mob-owned night clubs, speakeasies, and jazz joints of New York’s East Fifties. It may be that Lazar regarded all this as a step toward some more respectable profession, but it didn’t take long for him to discover that he was good at what he was doing—for already he was fiercely competitive, unhappy at being a subordinate, and absolutely fearless. In later years, people have wondered at Lazar’s ability to stand up to studio heads, publishers, and difficult clients, but the fact is that his early experience was with people who were perfectly willing to have him beaten up or killed—and, in fact, he was beaten up, and even stabbed, in the course of business, yet he never felt intimidated. In an industry in which it has become fashionable for agents and executives to flaunt tough-guy talk, though, Lazar never indulges in gangsterisms—he has done business with guys who never said that kind of thing unless they meant it.

Lazar made his first trip to the Coast in 1936. He claims that it was by accident, but there are no accidents in Lazar’s life. It’s true that he accompanied two vaudeville clients out there because he didn’t trust them to pay him his commission—he preferred to divide up the take at the end of every day himself—but it’s likely that he had been looking westward for some time. In New York, show business took a back seat to the bigger, more serious worlds of finance, the media, old money, and society. In Hollywood, show business was everything; society, class, finance all revolved around the studios. Still, there was never any question of Lazar’s becoming a mere “ten per center,” one of those despised Hollywood talent agents who figured so largely in the movies and popular fiction of the period. Lazar’s roots remained in New York, and he kept them here. What’s more, he cleverly avoided becoming a “flesh peddler.” He made deals for such people as Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, Cole Porter, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Garson Kanin, and Ernest Hemingway. He sold books, plays, ideas, and people by going to the top from the very first—a feat made possible not only by his toughness and determination but by the simple fact that he was an outsider, a New Yorker.

Lazar understood instinctively that the prevailing ethos of West Coast movie people was then (as it is now) fear and envy of New York. New York was where the money came from; it was where the owners of the studios were—the bosses to whom men like Mayer and Zanuck actually reported. New York was, above all, where talent, ideas, culture, and fashions came from, and in the days when it took nearly four days to cross the country a person arriving from New York was greeted like a traveller from St. Petersburg arriving in some remote provincial town in nineteenth-century Russia.

In the late forties, after the war, Lazar decided to move to L.A. permanently, and he quickly established himself as the connection between New York and Hollywood. Not a reader himself (he is notorious for not bothering to read the books he is selling), he cultivated writers, publishers, and playwrights, and brought the studio heads projects they could never have found by themselves, for prices they would never have dreamed of paying to anyone else. In New York, Lazar became known as the man who could get you bagfuls of money from Hollywood; in Hollywood, he was known as the man who could bring you the hottest properties before anybody else on the Coast had heard of them. In the days when a transcontinental telephone call was a big deal, Lazar was in touch constantly, perfecting his peculiar blend of gossip, news, and sales pitch, and a lot of people didn’t know whether Lazar was speaking to them from his poolside in Beverly Hills or from around the corner on Fifth Avenue. (Interestingly, Lazar remains on the cutting edge of communications technology, despite his age. He was the first person I knew to own a portable cellular telephone, and to this day he always carries the latest, lightest, slimmest version; he also remains the only man I know who is able to make call forwarding to his car phone work.)

Early on, Lazar hit upon three rules that have stood him in good stead for over fifty years. The first was that he could always reach anyone, anywhere, any time. His secret weapon is the world’s largest address book, full of the private, unlisted numbers of people whom nobody else can reach. Who else can pick up the phone and call Mrs. Norton Simon, Jack Nicholson, Barry Diller, Larry McMurtry, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Nixon, Cher, Gregory Peck, or Henry Kissinger, and get through immediately? The second rule was always to go directly to the top. Lazar doesn’t deal with underlings. The last rule was to insist on a quick answer. Even now, if I tell Irving that I want to think something over or discuss it with someone else he will snap, “Never mind, I can see you’re not interested, I’ll talk to Phyllis Grann.”

Lazar once half jokingly promised to grant a publisher not “world rights” but “universe rights.” A certain grandeur had become part of his manner, and Lazar rapidly became more famous than most of his clients. Even total strangers who knew little or nothing about book publishing and the movie business picked up the party trick of raising one trouser leg above the knee and putting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses against the kneecap to simulate Lazar’s physiognomy. But it was his marriage to Mary Van Nuys, thirty years ago, that gave him, at last, the stability without which his remarkable career could never have unfolded—or sustained itself for so long.

Lazar’s bachelor days were famous, and he is still a professional flirter—he manages to combine a kind of old-fashioned chivalry with a frank come-on that gives new meaning to the phrase “a wandering eye”—but marriage tamed him somewhat. Mary, who had an enigmatic beauty that reminded one of Louise Brooks in her heyday, had been a model—she even appeared in advertisements as a “Coca-Cola girl”—and later became a television and motion-picture producer and an editor, but her real job was keeping Lazar on an even keel. It was not just a love affair. Mary—who died in January, after a long and painful illness—was Irving’s best friend, his severest critic, and his strongest supporter.