I was born in New Orleans in 1927 with show business in my blood. Actually, the blood was on the show business. My father had a nightclub called the Joy Tavern, near the old red-light district of Storyville. He and my mother were divorced when I was three. She became a cook and housekeeper for a rich white family in the Garden District. I had a split-personality childhood, living with these plantation aristocrats by day, visiting my daddy and his hepcat jazzmen at night. My uncle was a cornet player. He introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved the life I saw these guys leading, with the music, the booze, the girls. It was bad, and it looked good. But my mother warned me that bad was bad and to stay away from it and anything to do with my father. Because my mother was half Jewish and half Creole, and my father also had a Jewish grandfather, hence our last name (New Orleans, being a port city, was one big gumbo pot), ethnically I wasn’t quite sure what I was. These were the days of Plessy v. Ferguson, the “separate but equal” Supreme Court case that kept blacks in the back of streetcars. Even if you were an octaroon (one-eighth black) and had blond hair and blue eyes, in the eyes of the law, you were as black as tar. I didn’t have blond hair, and while a lot of people thought I was Italian, I never tried to “pass.” I was what I was. Whatever that was.
One thing I was for certain was patriotic. In 1945, as soon as I was old enough to enlist, I joined the Navy, and sure enough, I saw the world. I enrolled in the Cooks and Bakers School in Bayonne, New Jersey, where I was the valedictorian of my class. If you learn anything in New Orleans, it’s how to eat and drink, and my mother’s Creole recipes put me in good stead. From Bayonne I went to Portland, Maine, where I saw snow for the first time, and then to Naples, where I became aide to Adm. Charles Beatty of the Mediterranean Fleet. I traveled throughout Italy, Greece, Spain and France and learned how to cook the entire range of the Mediterranean Diet, even though few of us realized how healthy it was at the time. I also had no idea that my acquired skills with Italian food were going to be my passport into the stomach, and hence the heart, of a skinny paesano from Hoboken whose music I wrote off as white-boy stuff for silly screaming white girls. My favorites at the time were Herb Jeffries and Billy Eckstine. Everyone said I resembled the latter, which I took as the ultimate compliment, so much so that I developed delusions of becoming a singer just like Billy once I got home. By 1947, I was one sophisticated gentleman. I had seen the Colosseum, the Parthenon, the Eiffel Tower. I could say courtly things in three foreign languages. I thought I was some kind of boulevardier, a black Maurice Chevalier. It took coming home to New Orleans after learning that my father had been shot to death to bring me back to earth.
I was on a tour of duty on an aircraft carrier in Korea when I found out. My commanding officer called me in, offered me a cigarette, and told me to sit down. What did I do wrong, I asked. Your father’s been murdered, he told me, and I fell apart. It got worse when I arrived in New Orleans. I went to police headquarters, where I was told that Dad had been putting out Coke bottles one morning after closing time at his Joy Tavern when two robbers riddled him with bullets. “Why?” I asked. “Your father acted like a white man,” one officer said. “My father is a white man!” I shot back, as if Dad were still alive. I was lucky they didn’t book me. I did some sleuthing and found out Dad had been killed, not in a robbery as the police had put down, but for not having paid protection money to a racket of which the police were a key part. Dad had been ambushed in a back alley by two contract killers the cops had sprung from Angola Prison. He ran away down an alley, trying to get to safety inside a neighbor’s house, but the neighbor refused to open his back door. My father was executed, gangland style. I was so furious at the police, the neighbors, the whole rotten system that I decided never to set foot in New Orleans again. I was too upset, too angry, even to visit Dad’s grave.
I married my high school sweetheart Dorothy Pasley, who had lived across the railroad tracks from us in our mixed black and Italian neighborhood called Girt Town, on the edge of the French Quarter. Dad had liked Dorothy, and that had meant a lot to me. Luckily, given the way I had come to hate New Orleans, Dorothy had a father in Los Angeles, which was where my mother and stepfather, a Pullman porter who was one of the most elegant men I had ever met, were just moving. After the war, the West was seen as the Promised Land, with the prospect of good jobs and fresh starts. There was a big Louisiana contingent in Watts, which was supposed to be the Los Angeles ghetto. But it was a ghetto with palm trees and night-blooming jasmine and perfect weather; it wasn’t Harlem by any means.
Dorothy had only seen her father once every few years and had never visited him in California before we arrived there. We were both surprised by what we encountered. Chick Pasley had left Dorothy’s mother and come to L.A. in the midthirties. He had prospered there. Like my stepfather, he was an elegant guy, with gorgeous clothes and diamond stickpins. He was also a big-time pimp, sending his beautiful mulatto girls to see white movie stars at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Beverly Wilshire. Chick lived in high style in a huge house at the corner of Western and Jefferson. He had three Cadillacs. For all the luxury around us, Chick’s mansion didn’t seem to be the best place to start a family. I quickly found us a little apartment in Watts. Chick was delighted that I was getting Dorothy out of the house, and he never suggested I join him and his brothers in the “family business.” In fairly short order we had three kids, two boys, George Jr. and Rene, and a girl, Brenda, whom I had to figure out how to support, by legal means, which proved not to be so easy in the Promised Land.
For all my naval spit and polish, the best first job I could get was as a gardener in Beverly Hills, which made the Garden District back home look like Harlem. I had never seen mansions like these. Beverly Hills was a small town then, the nicest small town in the world, where people rode their horses down Rodeo Drive, your neighbors were people like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, and the pink palace that was the Beverly Hills Hotel was the town clubhouse. Still, I was a lowly servant. None of whatever skills I had were being utilized, nor did I have a particularly green thumb. Luckily, the garden belonged to a powerful lawyer named David Tannenbaum, who quickly upgraded me to a process server in his firm, Pacht, Tannenbaum, and Ross, at the corner of Roxbury and Wilshire. I was the only black guy in the office, or in the entire office building, for that matter.
The patriarch of the firm, Judge Isaac Pacht, was a true pillar of the Jewish community, and he represented a large number of the stars of the day. One of my first assignments was to serve some papers on Ingrid Bergman, who was scandalizing the world by leaving her Swedish husband for the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. I caught her at the airport just before she was to get on a plane. I never saw so much icy venom in anyone’s eyes. That was my first lesson that stars were real people and not perfect, happy gods and goddesses, though Ingrid Bergman resembled one until you got up close. I also met Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth, who were renting one of the several houses the Tannenbaums owned in the hills. Khan was not only Hollywood royalty, but world royalty, my first genuine prince. His father, the Aga Khan, was the ruler of a vast Muslim sect, though his son, who was a world-famous playboy, didn’t seem spiritual at all. There were champagne bottles all over the house, and he and Rita Hayworth were constantly screaming at each other and smashing furniture, which Mr. Tanenbaum would send me up to replace.
My wife Dorothy was much less impressed by, or even interested in, this world of fame and fortune than I was. She had a job at a Brother Sewing Machine store on Crenshaw Boulevard and couldn’t understand why I didn’t get a “normal” job in Watts, too. Aside from our childhoods in Louisiana, we didn’t have much in common, and our interests grew further apart the longer we stayed in L.A., a place I loved, because of how different it was from where we came from, and she didn’t, because, to her, there was no place like home. And that’s exactly where she went in 1953, taking our kids with her and remarrying with disastrous results for her and our children. But that came later.
M
eanwhile I began taking singing lessons, courtesy of the GI Bill, at the Westlake College of Music above a shady place called the Bimini Bathhouse on Vermont Avenue in Hollywood. My teacher had taught Scatman Crothers, so I figured the place must be all right. At nights I would hang out at the jazz clubs on Central Avenue, places like the Club Alabam, the Downbeat, the Jungle Room and the Bird in the Basket, where I’d hear people like Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, and Miles Davis, whose lady worked at a hamburger stand I went to near Beverly Hills that served blacks, mostly servants to the stars. The Central Avenue scene was a hot one, kind of seedy, with lots of pimps, whores, and dealers, but it reminded me of New Orleans. Stars would come slumming here with their Cadillacs parked outside. I saw Cesar Romero, and Alan Ladd, and one night at the Jungle Room there were Aly and Rita, drinking and fighting. I worried for a second about losing my job if I spoke to them, then I said, what the hell, and came up and said hello, and Aly bought me two rounds of drinks.
I was so starstruck from being in Los Angeles (who wasn’t, except for my wife?) that I also began auditioning to be an extra in the movies. I did get a few parts; unfortunately, they were all nearly identical. I was cast as a restless African native in some cheesy MGM Tarzan knockoffs. We all had the same one line: “Ungawa!” Whatever, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Here I was, George Jacobs, a prince, if not the king, of the jungle. I was in pictures! I was on the MGM lot! I was going places! Thus bitten by the Hollywood bug, I looked for other ways to get inside the business. One way I found was to work for a caterer who did the Hollywood party circuit. As it turned out, I was just the man for the job. I’m not sure whether it was inspired by Gone With the Wind or by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson on The Jack Benny Show, but Southern black manservants were highly in vogue in Beverly Hills. They had far more cachet than an English butler or a French maid. The bottom line was that I immediately got a lot of work as a waiter at all the best parties.
The best of the best were those of Bill and Edie Goetz, whom Frank Sinatra came to idolize. In the early 1950s, the Goetzes would have been unlikely to have Frank Sinatra in their house, even as entertainment. Even when they were young (they were barely around forty then), they were that grand. “Whatever Edie wants, Edie Goetz,” was the line on her. Propelled by his father-in-law, Bill Goetz had run 20th Century-Fox during the war and now was the kingpin at Universal. Their mansion in Holmby Hills was filled with more French Impressionist paintings, Renoirs, Monets, Cézannes, than the Louvre. The décor was all original furniture by Billy Haines, the preeminent decorator to the stars. There was a staircase grander than the one in Tara. A Toulouse-Lautrec covered the projector in the living room; a Gauguin covered what became the screen, on which would be shown movies months before they were released. The food was by a French chef they were said to have hired away from Maxim’s in Paris, and every menu at every place setting was written by hand. Edie, followed by Doris Warner, had been the most eligible girl in Hollywood (Frank Sinatra would hold on to an awful crush on her for years), and I wondered how Bill Goetz, who was a sweet guy who cracked awful vaudeville jokes that he learned from his idol Al Jolson, had beaten out every other ambitious Jewish suitor in the business for the hand of the ultimate princess. The answer, I observed, is that he paid an inhuman amount of attention to her, and she ate up every iota of it. In contrast to Aly and Rita, Bill and Edie were always hugging, kissing, stroking each other’s hands and back. For the two decades I knew them, they stayed like lovestruck kids. The staff called them “the Snoogies,” because “Snoogie” was each one’s pet name for the other. “I love you, Snoogie. I love you even more, Snoogie. Oh, no, Snoogie, you can’t love me more than I love you.” And on and on. Anyone who says that Hollywood romance is a big fake obviously never saw the Goetzes in action. Theirs was the genuine article.
I saw every big star at the Goetzes, Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, old legends like Marion Davies and Gloria Swanson, directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, Broadway icons Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin, and a weird dwarfish man with huge eyeglasses and very dapper English-cut clothes who kept staring at me as if I looked equally as weird as he did. I was kind of self-conscious about the livery I was forced to wear, and I tried to get out of the dwarf’s line of vision, but he kept stalking me around the Goetz palace, out into the formal gardens, wherever I was serving drinks. And then he disappeared. I thought nothing more of it until, a few weeks later, I was browsing at a record store in Beverly Hills at the corner of Charleville and Beverly Drive, when the dwarf reappeared, looking at me through the window. This time he came into the shop, and without asking my name, he introduced himself as Irving Paul Lazar and said, without the slightest possibility that I might have an opinion in the matter, “You’re coming to work for me.” The time was late 1950.
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.
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