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.
A year or so later, when he moved into the apartment complex, I knew Lazar wanted me to give him the swerve, to avoid him, but how could I? Here was a man in pain. Sometimes I would see him wandering on Beverly Glen, down to Mapleton Park, head down, all alone. Where were all those screaming teenagers now that he needed them, I’d think to myself. Where was anybody? If I ever made eye contact, I’d smile at him, and no matter how down he looked, he’d always pull it together and smile back. I’m not sure he remembered the cigarette incident. He was just a naturally nice guy. “Everybody’s nice when they’re down and desperate,” was Lazar’s take on the situation. “Losers have the time to be nice.”
Lazar may have been the worst cynic in the world. Actually most of his friends were nicer than he would give them credit for being. My favorite was Humphrey Bogart. The world-famous tough guy was the softest touch in the world. The first time I met him was one night outside of Romanoff’s. Lazar was down the block having drinks and would be coming to Romanoff’s for dinner. I, of course, was there to wait. Then Bogart came up. He had seen me with Lazar, knew the Rolls. “Come on, kid, we’re gonna get you something decent to eat,” he said out of the blue. And he took me into Romanoff’s, sat down with me and ordered me a fabulous dinner, which we were in the middle of eating when Lazar finally came in. You should have seen the look on his face! And it got even worse when Bogart stuck him with the check. Bogart loved playing jokes like that on Lazar, he loved giving him the needle. And nothing needled Lazar more than the nickname “Swifty,” which Bogart gave to him. He wanted to be perceived as an English aristocrat, and Bogart rechristened him as who he really was, a sharpie hustler. Yet just because Bogart had Lazar’s number didn’t mean he didn’t like the guy. Bogart was the best friend Swifty had.
Humphrey Bogart and Betty Bacall (Lauren’s real name was Betty Perske) were Lazar’s favorite couple, the most glamorous star marriage in the business. They lived a few blocks away from his apartment in Holmby Hills, near the Goetzes, which thus stamped the area as the place to live in Lotusland. Also nearby was another Lazar intimate, the great director Billy Wilder, who was extremely nasty and unforgiving and never once said hello to me or thanked me when I’d bring him a drink or a cigarette. He always made me feel like hired help, but Lazar told me that he acted that way to everyone. Another member of this group was a depressed screenplay-rewrite guy, one of the original script doctors, named Harry Kurnitz, a Lazar client, who everyone said was a comedic genius but always seemed to be whining about not having a girl. And there was the debonair David Niven and his Scandinavian wife. Niven was so smooth, so slick, he never seemed real to me, but because he was Central Casting British, Lazar had to be around him. Niven was exactly what Lazar wanted to be.
Lazar and these people seemed to be the “youth group” at the frequent parties held at Ira and Lenore Gershwin’s house, where there was, as might be expected, fabulous Broadway music being played or sung by people like Judy Garland or Oscar Levant or Kitty Carlisle, many of whom were, or would become, Lazar clients. This crew, who never liked to go to sleep, would continue the evening at the Bogart house, where they would drink until two or three in the morning. They would be joined by Mike Romanoff after he closed his restaurant for the night. Romanoff was a phony prince, an ex-jailbird and the biggest bullshit artist in the world, and because his lies were so outrageous, he somehow got away with it. Lazar thought he was the greatest man on earth. He admitted that his own lies were nothing compared to Romanoff’s, hence his deep respect for him. I could see why an agent would admire the con man, though I never saw why Bogart embraced him as well, maybe because Romanoff would always bring great wines, and salmon and foie gras that he hadn’t sold at the restaurant. I guess he did tell great stories, even if none of them were true. Other late nighters at the Bogarts were the genuinely clever writers (and actress) Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, as well as the incredibly nice Spencer Tracy, who came most of the time without Katharine Hepburn, so she wouldn’t get on his case about his heavy boozing. This became the core of what got to be known as the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, which, five years later after Bogart died, was taken over by Frank Sinatra and his own crew.
It was only when Frank started being considered for the Maggio role in From Here to Eternity in the fall of 1952 that he simultaneously began being invited to the Gershwin parties, and, later, those of the Goetzes. When your stock starts going up in the business, your social stock will rise as well. Even though they were apparently at war with each other most of their brief marriage, which had taken place in late 1951, Ava wanted to have children with Frank, but only if he had a career that could support them. Consequently, she began her own campaign with her friend Joan Cohn, the beautiful, longsuffering wife of the ogre who ran Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, the guy who invented sexual harassment, to get Frank the supposedly classy, serious role that might restart his dead career. The casting process seemed to go on for months, and whether or not Sinatra got the part became everybody’s favorite cocktail party bet. Lazar bet against Frank, though to his face, he’d tell him that he would get this big shot or that to put a word in with Harry. He didn’t do a thing. I’d hear him talking about how ridiculous it was for Sinatra, whom he called a nonactor, to try to compete for the part with the front-runner for it, the “real” Broadway actor Eli Wallach. The only thing Sinatra had, Lazar would say, was that he was Italian, as was the character, and he was a loser, as was the character.
Nevertheless, Ava, and good sense, prevailed. Frank got the part. Of course Lazar began low-rating this as well, saying it was only a supporting role, and it was no big deal, and, besides, he doubted that the movie would be a hit. Yet Lazar hedged his bets. He sent Frank congratulatory champagne and flowers, and began inviting him to join his parties and those at the Bogarts’. “Maybe we can get him to sing,” he’d justify his neighbor’s presence. The minute he got cast, Frank Sinatra was a changed man. The gloom lifted. He was all smiles. He walked differently. Even though shooting wouldn’t start in Hawaii for six months, all of a sudden he had a future again. He could hold his head up.
Frank Sinatra loved hanging out at the Bogarts’. That may have been the best perk of all of being back in the film game. A lot of times I’d play late-night bartender, so I could see the pack in action. Sinatra was like a starstruck kid, in awe of Bogart, and watching his every move. With all the people around, it was hard to be alone with Bogart, but Sinatra tended to shadow him, following him into the kitchen or out into the garden, hanging on everything he said. Sinatra saw Bogart as his mentor, though I doubt that he ever told Bogart that. Bogart would have laughed at him. Be your own mentor, kid, or you’ll never get anywhere, he’d probably have said. This time Bogart was wrong. Sinatra learned his lessons with straight A’s.
The two men had a lot of natural attributes in common. They were about the same size, short and skinny, and both men were losing their hair, though Bogart’s was in much deeper retreat than his younger fan’s. Bogart had fabulous clothes, cashmere jackets, Italian shirts, and velvet slippers, and a certain cool and grace in the way he’d smoke, in the way he’d put away the Jack Daniel’s, eventually a trademark taste Sinatra acquired from Bogart. Bogart had an effortless physical grace, which Sinatra only had when he sang. Otherwise, Sinatra was tense and jumpy, and remarkably insecure for someone used to playing to screaming fans. That they had stopped screaming was probably what made him this way. The Jack Daniel’s definitely helped loosen him up. I noticed that he was much more “on” around Bogart than he was when I saw him at other gatherings.
Even though he played the tough guy in films, and had a tough-guy growl in his voice, Bogart was really an East Coast aristocrat-type with a top background and a polish he got at prep school at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. His father was one of the leading surgeons in Manhattan; his mother was a well-known illustrator. They were accomplished, as well as pillars of society. It was an unusual background for a movie star, most of whom came out of nowhere, or from Hoboken. But that pedigree was just one part of the whole Bogart mystique. Another was his enormous talent and success (he had won the Oscar that year for The African Queen), and the third part of what made Bogart Bogart was his fabulous wife, Betty. Even though she was a head taller than him and looked like a sleek, tawny lioness, and had this deep sophisticated voice, Betty was just a young girl from the Bronx, as in awe of the whole scene as Frank was. Bogart was in his fifties, Betty was in her early twenties, and when he called her “kid,” he meant it. Frank was about thirty-seven at this time, but around his idol he seemed like a kid, too.
Mr. S Page 4