The world’s most fabled agent, Lazar was just over five feet tall. Humphrey Bogart (who dubbed him Swifty, after Lazar made five movie deals for him in as many hours), once said his agent was the only man alive who cheated at croquet by walking through the hoop after the ball. Bogart was one of the few actors Lazar represented; he preferred writers, who liked working in solitude, whereas actors needed constant, time-consuming reassurance. He conducted most of his business over the telephone. “Some day he’ll have to have an operation to have the phone removed from his ear,” his client Garson Kanin said. The dapper agent’s clientele also included Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Billy Wilder, Neil Simon, Richard Rodgers, Lerner and Loewe, Lillian Hellman and Ernest Hemingway.
Irving Lazar
