The Last of Swifty

Protected by his enigmatic paid companion, Lazar lived his final days in a bizarre tangle of misunderstandings and whispered rumors

Below, during Irving "Swifty" Lazar's last months, Sunset Boulevard began its run at the Shubert Theatre. At 1840 Carla Ridge, the house atop Beverly Hills where he had lived for 25 years, a variation in reverse seemed to be playing itself out. Here was the scrappy old superagent, a self-made star in his own right, battling desiccation and death. Here with him was a younger woman hired as his paid companion. And in the gallery: a private audience of famous old stars, celebrity clients, and social friends, wondering which of these characters was taking advantage of the other. By the time Lazar expired, on December 30, 1993, his last year had become a cautionary tale of death in Hollywood, inspiring less pity than curiosity and a swirl of scandalous rumors.

For Irving and Mary Lazar, after a long, childless marriage, the beginning of the end came with a shock in mid-November 1992 on a trip to New York. Michael Caine, a friend and client, was publishing his autobiography; the Lazars were to throw him a party.

"He shouldn't have had that par ty~ He should

Only a few close friends knew the other reason for this New York visit. Notoriously squeamish about pain and illness, Irving, at 85, was having to face his own mortality at last. Already, high blood pressure had led to kidney problems that required the surgical insertion of a catheter for daily hookups to a dialysis machine. Now his doctors demanded that Irving undergo an angioplasty procedure to clear the arteries of his heart. Mary visited him daily at New York Hospital. A calming presence, she was also, in her early 60s, still striking enough to remind friends that she had once been a professional model.

To one of Irving's doctors, Mary mentioned having sharp back pains; the jolting rides in New York taxis had become excruciating. An M.R.I. scan confirmed the doctor's worst suspicions: Mary had a tumor on her spine, a cancer that in all likelihood had spread from some internal organ. Her reaction spoke volumes about her marriage. "Don't tell Irving," she pleaded. "He can't deal with it."

Both too ill to attend the Caine party, the Lazars flew back to Los Angeles the next day on Marvin and Barbara Davis's private plane. Mary remained vague about why an ambulance would be meeting her on the tarmac and taking her directly to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Instead, she asked one of her doctors to break the news to Irving up at the house. Irving was overwhelmed. "I can't handle this," he kept saying. "I can't handle this!"

A sympathetic listener might have heard in his anguish profound sorrow for his suffering wife. A somewhat more detached listener might have said that Irving Lazar, from whom the milk of human kindness had not often been known to flow, was also crying for himself.

As a couple, the Lazars had always stirred speculation. Irving had a certain pugnacious charm, but he could be brutally cold, even cruel. Not to mention that he was a bald-headed gnome a foot shorter and a quarter-century older than Mary; couldn't she have found a powerful husband with more winning traits? Confounded, friends often speculated that the marriage was an

arrangement. But the two did share a real fondness for each other. Married twice before, Mary had learned to compromise. She also loved Swifty's life of first-class friends and travel.

After a series of intense chemotherapy treatments, Mary was brought home to rest in her room—for years, she and Irving had had separate bedrooms across a wide hall from each other. At the end of the hall was a third room, which now became a nurse's station. Months before, a nurse named Ellen had been hired through an agency to help Irving with his dialysis, and Mary had come to adore her. Ellen was the nurse she wanted now, and so Irving arranged to

rehire her. This time he bypassed the agency, paying her her salary less commission, and pocketing the difference— a wily agent to the end.

Ellen was a wonderful nurse, but she couldn't have come from a world more at odds with Swifty's own. At 51, with long dark hair and high cheekbones, she was part Native American, a handsome woman who'd come of age in the early 60s. Ellen had helped set up what would become the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, a bastion of the hippie movement. Eventually she became a nurse for the Hell's Angels during their beatific period. In the early 70s, when the Angels started asking her to tend gunshot and knife wounds, Ellen left, covertly, with a boyfriend and her six-year-old daughter. Neither Mary nor Irving knew any of this.

In her white uniform, Ellen looked like any other nurse. That, early on, was Irving's only objection. Set on keeping up appearances, Irving made her dress in street clothes, and put her on his office books as "driver." Amused, she asked him one day, "What do you think is more important, Irving, the way things look or the way things are?"

"The way things look," Irving snapped, which after a lifetime of agentry made a certain sense: for Irving, the way things looked became the way they were.

No one knew this better than Mary, who now devoted much of her time in bed to applying the right makeup so that Irving wouldn't think she looked sick. To ease her pain, she smoked marijuana; when even the effort of expanding her rib cage to inhale became an agony, Alan Nevins, a young man who had first worked for Mary and later helped run the agency for Irving, went off in search of a water pipe at L.A. head shops.

Ill, Mary shut her door to all but a few close friends. One was journalist Karen Lemer, who came out from New York to spend half of December with her. Another was Audrey Wilder, whose longtime friendship with Mary had cooled after Irving broke with her husband, the legendary Hollywood director Billy Wilder. Lemer had brought the two women together again, and now Audrey came to visit every day. But Irving was no comfort at all. He either sat on the edge of the bed and cried or hit the wall with his fist in rage. It was almost as if fate had dealt him a personal affront. This wasn't what he'd bargained for; Mary, so much younger, was supposed to take care of him.

Evenings were the worst time. Restless and eager for diversion, Irving had gone out almost every night of his adult life, escorting a friend when Mary begged off. Now he paced the halls like a lost soul. In part out of sympathy, in part out of growing irritation, Mary insisted he leave her in the nurse's care and go out on the town. Author Barbara Howar became his most frequent companion, driving him to parties, into which Lazar walked with the help of an upturned golf club as a cane. Lemer was pressed into service, too. And so, on several of those late-fall evenings, was an intriguing woman named Theresa Sohn.

Sohn was a demurely attractive Asian woman of about 50 with dark hair in a Prince Valiant cut; more than one friend of the Lazars' would say she looked like Mary. She came recommended by Ahmet Ertegun, the Atlantic Records mogul, who had been one of Lazar's closest pals for more than two decades. Ertegun was brilliant, rich, suffused with Continental charm and a great sense of humor. At the same time, several of his friends felt he had a dark side, though they couldn't quite define what that dark side might be. Maybe it was just that Ertegun had one elegantly shod foot in high society and the other in rock 'n' roll. Theresa Sohn, he would later explain, had once dated one of his rock 'n' roll artists, and called after having been out of touch for several years to report that she was working as a paid companion for elderly people. Ertegun thought she could help the Lazars.

have hung it up.

Though Sohn would claim to have known the Lazars socially prior to her employment, many of their friends seemed not to know her. They learned that she had been married for about three years to a man 12 years her junior who worked for AT&T, and that she lived with him somewhere in "818 land," as one Lazar friend put it. At some point she had had problems with cocaine, and her work with the elderly, along with attending A.A. and C.A. meetings, had helped her deal with the problem. It seems fair to assume that for Sohn, as for Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, being ushered into the Lazars' home on Carla Ridge brought unexpected opportunities: first a new home, and then a place at the tables of the Hollywood Old Guard. Then, too, there might be a considerable payout at the end.

Irving may have hoped that Sohn's job description would include sexual favors. Already, he had made several passes at Ellen.

•"You know," he told her one day while Mary was still alive, "Florence Nightingale gave total patient care."

"I know, Irving," Ellen shot back. "She died of syphilis, too."

"Well," he said grumpily, "I guess you'll never have to worry about that."

Later, Ellen would allude, without elaboration, to having told Irving early on, "You can't expect me to watch."

Mary herself said that she approved of Sohn because Sohn was "discreet," and had indicated to Ellen that she had long since lost any sense of indignation about whatever sexual adventures, active or passive, Irving might wish to conduct. Sohn denies that sexual episodes ever took place, however, and blames such rumors on resentful observers.

When Sohn arrived in the early evening, she would sometimes find herself pressed into valet service. One night, as Karen Lerner sat by Mary's bedside, they heard Irving across the hall shout, "No! That's not what I want to wear! Those are not the right shoes! Come over here on your knees!"

Mary looked at Lerner. "Can you believe the way Irving is talking to that woman?"

Yet when Sohn wasn't there, Irving seemed to miss her. On the evenings some other friend took him off Mary's hands, he would call up Sohn when he got back home and speak with her, observed one, "as if they were courting."

By Christmas, Mary knew she would not recover. Irving knew it, too, but he didn't know if she knew, and couldn't bear to discuss it. And yet, for all his anguish,

he seemed reluctant to pay the cost of Mary's care. Perhaps it was just the time of year: his office staff had come to expect panicked calls from him about money, how there wouldn't be enough to get by, certainly not enough for Christmas bonuses. By early January, when the fall commissions came in, the panic would ease. But for a man whose estate would be valued at around $10 million, his Stinginess about nursing care was disconcerting. "I'll kill you if you tie my name to this," one friend said, "but Mary hated his guts toward the end. She pulled me down to her wheelchair, and the last thing she said to me was 'Get him out of here!' "

Mary died in her bedroom at about seven P.M. on January 14, 1993. Alan Nevins and Cindy Cassel from the office had come for a quiet dinner with Irving, having been told by the doctors that Mary wouldn't make it through the night. Still, when Ellen emerged from Mary's room with the news, it seemed to drive Irving into a state of shock from which he may never have completely recovered.

Karen Lerner stayed in Mary's room for the week after her death, and found Irving utterly bereft. "What am I going to do with everything?" he said of Mary's clothes and jewelry. "You've got to help me deal with it all." Lerner agreed to assist him—and thus began the unpleasantness Irving's friends would come to call "the necklace story."

Mary had appended a handwritten codicil to her will, directing that three of her best pieces of jewelry be given to Lemer, Janet de Cordova, the wife of former Tonight Show producer Fred de Cordova, and an old friend from her Chicago modeling days, Heather Croner. By the terms of Mary's will, and at Irving's insistence, Lemer accepted a diamond necklace that would later be appraised at $60,000. Other pieces Irving bestowed upon social friends to whom he felt close: two gold bracelets to Gloria Vanderbilt, a diamond butterfly to Ahmet Ertegun's wife, Mica, Cartier watches to Annette de la Renta and Glenn Bimbaum, and more to Casey Ribicoff, Oscar de la Renta, and Nancy Kissinger.

Soon after Lemer's return to New York, Irving called to say his accountant had informed him he would have to pay a gift tax on the diamond necklace, and it would have to be appraised. Lemer offered to have the appraisal done in New York, but Irving was adamant: the necklace would have to be returned to him. He seemed to have changed his mind about wanting Lemer to have the necklace at all. Various friends, including Ahmet Ertegun, advised Lemer to hold her ground; why should she be bullied by Irving into returning a necklace that Mary had expressly given to her? To avoid a confrontation on the phone, Lemer told Irving she would see what she could do, and stressed how much she looked forward to helping him, as she did almost every year, with the preparations for his Oscar party at Spago. On the eve of her flight out, Irving asked again if she was bringing the necklace with her. No, she said.

"Well then, don't bother to come at all," Irving barked.

hould he or shouldn't he? That was the question endlessly asked by guests of years past. Whether to give the Oscar party and suffer the slings and arrows of those who would say it was too soon after Mary's death, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them. Irving had chosen to give the party. In the event, it would seem a mistake.

Over the two decades that Irving had orchestrated Hollywood's party of the year, he had always been an imperious host. Most single women weren't allowed to bring dates. Guests were made to watch the televised ceremony from their dinner tables, and drew furious stares if they stood and mingled before the end of the telecast. As for crashers, famous and powerful though they might be, they were tossed out on their ears. It was Mary who brought warmth to the gathering, and a shrewd flair to the seating. Her presence was everywhere missed. "He shouldn't have had that party," said one habitue who attended. "He should have hung it up. That last year, the seating lacked Mary's touch. Everybody hated it; nobody left their seats."

Now, as he seemed to lose judgment in his personal affairs, Irving felt his business start slipping away, too. In his panic about money, he had cut the salary of his office manager, Alan Nevins, and Nevins had begun to look else-

where. He told Irving about his offers, and asked how serious Irving was about maintaining the agency. From day to day, Irving's answer varied. Eventually, Nevins and two partners formed a new agency, Renaissance. But leaving wasn't as easy as he'd hoped.

Nevins suggested that the Lazar Agency be linked to Renaissance. The phone lines and bookkeeping would be separate, but Nevins, who had dealt directly with Irving's clients for some time, would be there to help—presumably in return for having those clients ease into Renaissance someday. Irving, never one to share the spoils, declined. At about the time of Nevins's departure, Joan Collins's lawyer informed Irving that his client would be leaving; two weeks later, she joined Renaissance. Irving was stunned. "Can you believe it?" he exclaimed over the phone to a friend in London. "Joan Collins has run off with my file clerk!" Half a dozen other Lazar clients soon followed.

By summer, Theresa Sohn had begun spending more time each week at the house. Sometimes she and Irving went out—to restaurants, to the racetrack—and the anticipation of these outings did much to boost his spirits. Like Norma Desmond, Irving bought elegant clothes for his younger companion; unlike Norma, he often made her pay half. Sohn also bathed and dressed him, and administered his dialysis, having been trained how to do so by Ellen. But relations between the two women began to fray. When Irving included a bequest in his will to Sohn, Ellen felt that Sohn's attitude changed. One day, Ellen recalls, one of Irving's relatives visited. When he left, Sohn muttered that the relative's only interest in Irving was financial.

"It sounds like you, Theresa," Ellen said.

The comment reportedly infuriated Sohn, and from then on, the women regarded each other as antagonists.

Ertegun, meanwhile, called almost every day to inquire about Irving. In July, the reports grew more somber. While hospitalized for pneumonia, Irving suffered a slight stroke, which temporarily slurred his speech but did not affect his mind. When he got home he seemed to have undergone a sort of spiritual conversion. The luxuries of a material life suddenly seemed unimportant. Briefly, he even fired his staff, only to rescind the edict.

Irving was now confined to a wheelchair. Deprived of exercise, his arteries grew constricted, and his feet began to lose circulation. At Irving's and Ertegun's requests, Sohn moved into the house full-time in October.

The move stirred keen interest among Irving's many social friends, especially because Sohn had recently separated from her husband. Producer George Schlatter and his wife, Jolene, were among those in the pro-Sohn camp. "[Irving] told me several times, 'I wouldn't be here today without Theresa,'" Jolene recalls. It was Sohn who enabled Irving to enjoy his last evenings out, as when he and Sohn joined the Schlatters and the Sinatras for dinner at an Italian restaurant. Irving looked frail, and his friends weren't sure he was following the conversation. "Suddenly his little body lifted up," Jolene recalls. "And he said, Trank, you're the only guy that I can still beat up in this town.'" Others worried that Sohn was an opportunist, and began predicting she would inherit the (Continued on page 185) (Continued from page 164) bulk of Irving's estate.

p .c I "Can you li~êve it ioan Col1i~s has i~in~o~with m~file clerk!"

Those who came to visit found Irving in a sentimental frame of mind, inclined to give them possessions as keepsakes. Later, Ahmet Ertegiin would say that Irving's generosity had been induced by his medication, and that Sohn had tried to curb his excesses because she knew he'd regret them later. Ellen, who saw Irving every day, felt otherwise. She thought that Irving knew exactly what he was doing, and that giving away treasured pieces to his friends was perhaps his last real pleasure. In a Rashomon-like way, the conflicting views would produce utterly opposite versions of an episode involving the novelist Larry McMurtry.

McMurtry was Irving's prize, the biggest client of his last years, a writer whose novels he endlessly admired (but had not necessarily read), and whose million-dollar deals made him feel he was still the grand panjandrum of Hollywood agents. The two men were also close personal friends, and Irving was cheered immensely by McMurtry's several visits that fall from Arizona. One day Irving called to say that in gratitude he wished to give McMurtry and Diana Ossana, McMurtry's girlfriend and screenwriting partner, some china; would they take it on their next visit?

According to McMurtry, he and Ossana arrived, with Ossana's 16-year-old daughter, Sara, to find the kitchen table heaped with stacks and stacks of china settings—a hodgepodge from the Lazars' European travels. "I want you to have all this," Irving announced.

The visitors were stunned, McMurtry says, but more so when Sohn, whom they were meeting for the first time, pulled Sara aside and whispered that Irving's mind was clouded by his medication; they should really only take a few dishes. Ossana says that when she began to act on Sohn's instructions, Irving demanded she take some silver. "But what are you going to use when we're entertaining?" Sohn exclaimed. Instead, the maids brought out Irving's "bachelor silver," a Georg Jensen set from his Rat Pack days with Sammy Davis Jr. and Sinatra. While Sohn fumed, McMurtry and Ossana packed up two stacks of china, the silver, and a silver box from Moss Hart which Irving also wanted McMurtry to have. That night the group reconvened at Spago. Ossana says

Irving's first words to her were "Lovey, why didn't you take the rest of the china?" She hesitated, then said, looking directly at Sohn, "Because Theresa told us not to." According to McMurtry and Ossana, Irving was enraged.

Not long after, Irving's doctors determined that his left foot would have to be amputated unless he underwent an operation to install a synthetic artery in his leg. Yet so arduous was the procedure that a man in his condition had only a 50-50 chance of surviving it. Irving underwent it, and survived. That was when, befuddled by painkillers, he took the action that made McMurtry realize Irving could no longer handle the novelist's business.

Already, McMurtry had taken the precaution of having Cindy Cassel from Irving's office listen in on his business calls with Irving, keep notes, and follow through. Still, Irving had begun to call publishers in the middle of the night, making wild demands on McMurtry's behalf, and to call the author with goodnews bulletins that turned out to be fantasies. The last straw came with Irving's jubilant announcement that he'd persuaded a certain publisher to pay $5.2 million for McMurtry's next novel. Thrilled, McMurtry wrote the publisher a note of thanks. The publisher thought it was a joke. In frustration and sorrow, McMurtry mailed Irving a sevenpage letter detailing mistakes made, and advising Irving to retire—a letter Sohn would characterize as "cruel." Then he flew out to visit his old friend again,

to deliver the message in person as well.

"Irving had simply faded into incompetence," McMurtry says. "Which is exactly what I told him when I went to see him. I told him about my father the cattleman, who when he reached Irving's age refused to admit it. He went out to rope a new calf and was gored by the mother cow. I said, 'There's no disgrace in retiring,' and told Irving he would be likely to fall into professional disgrace if he didn't. I don't think any reader would think it cruel."

By now, McMurtry had come to view Sohn with unalloyed suspicion. "I told Irving plainly, 'This woman is a menace, you should not trust her. And if she meddles in my business I'm going to do something about it.' " McMurtry believed that on his visits Sohn had overheard his conversations with Irving. He was sure that she faxed his seven-page letter to Irving's lawyer Martin Singer, to whom McMurtry did not wish it sent. And he felt she'd come to see him as an enemy. "The people who were there said that Theresa was constantly trying to get him to leave her more money in the will," McMurtry says. "I told Irving that."

Theresa had told several of Irving's friends, such as Barbara Howar, that McMurtry and Ossana had absconded with Irving's china and silver. It was a story she elaborated upon after McMurtry and Ossana took—at Irving's insistence, they say—six more china settings.

Not long after, McMurtry says, he went to visit Irving on his own, and spent a painful afternoon working through the issues of the letter. That evening, he took Irving out for a sadly ceremonial dinner at Chasen's. Because McMurtry refused to socialize with Sohn, Irving told her the dinner was business. Instead, Cindy Cassel went along. The three left Theresa at about seven P.M.

When they returned, at about nine P.M., Ellen let them in. "Irving was in beautiful shape, he had really enjoyed himself," she recalls. "And he said to Larry, 'There's some artwork I want you to have.' It was hanging in Mary's bedroom, so we went back into the hallway, and Cindy opened the door, and there was Theresa—sound asleep. Cindy closed the door and said, 'Maybe we should just not do this tonight.' Irving said, 'The hell with it, this is my house, I want to give these things to Larry!' So she opened the door, and Larry and Cindy and Irving and I all went in; she had no idea we were there.

"Under Irving's direction, Cindy took one painting off the wall at the head of the bed," Ellen continues. "Then there was a whole group of small flower paintings that Irving wanted Larry to have. There were about 11 in all, not worth very much—a thousand dollars in all, perhaps. They were just something that Mary had loved. I helped Cindy take those off the wall under Irving's direction. Irving was clearheaded; he wanted Larry to have them.

"The next morning, when Theresa woke up, she thought somebody had robbed the house! And she took it from there. . .. I was there for the reality of what really happened, and I found it very touching."

"The news flashed around that Irving had given me a painting," McMurtry claims. "In fact it was an etching by a French artist of the 30s named Marcel Gromaire. I looked Gromaire up after being accused of having stolen a $300,000-to-$400,000 painting, and determined it was probably worth about $9,000." (Both Sohn and Ertegun deny spreading any such rumors.)

A bout three weeks before he died, Ir-Zl-ving said to Ellen, "You speak Italian, don't you?"

"Yes," she said, "but my Italian could be better."

"How's your French?"

"Could be better."

"How's your ass?"

"Perfect."

Irving laughed. "You'll be O.K."

Irving's health was failing fast, but he still adored women. In these last weeks, rumors spread of private sex performances arranged for him. "He liked to see breasts, he liked to see naked women, he liked to be titillated," acknowledged one close friend. "And, yes, he was watching sex shows at the end." According to Ahmet Ertegun, however, "Irving, since Mary died, was not able to walk across the room, much less engage in any shenanigans!"

In his final months, Lazar reportedly asked at least three women to marry him: Ellen, another nurse, and Theresa Sohn. Sohn says that there was never a serious proposal from Irving; in any event, her unconcluded divorce might have prevented any precipitous action. But according to a well-placed source, one night Sohn did urge Irving to leave her a million dollars. When he refused to comply, she stormed out of his bedroom and into Mary's room, slamming the door behind her. Irving rolled across the hall in his wheelchair and tapped pathetically at her door with his cane, trying to get her to

forgive him. At one point, he called his office and asked one of the employees in a feeble voice, "Do we have a million dollars to give to Theresa?"

The office wouldn't have had a million dollars on hand, and if Irving intended to give Sohn such a sum, it would have appeared in his will. More likely, Irving was playing her for a sucker: even on his last legs, the legendary Swifty wasn't about to get bested in a deal. "Theresa is not the villain," one observer suggested. "She was led to believe there would be something more there for her." (Theresa denies ever asking Irving for a million dollars.)

On the final Sunday night of the year, Irving asked Ellen to put him in his wheelchair. He'd spent most of his last days in bed, but now he wanted to move about. Ellen felt he was reviewing his whole life, and had come to some painful conclusions: mistakes made, paths not taken. "He went through every single room in the house," Ellen recalls. "He just wanted to sit there and ponder."

The next morning, Ellen observed that Irving's right foot was turning blue. That was the sign that this leg, too, must now be subjected to the same arduous operation he had undergone on his left leg. When his doctor came to the house to confirm the diagnosis, Irving declared that he would go off dialysis—a relatively painless form of suicide—rather than endure the suffering and uncertainty of the operation. Ahmet Ertegun, who was in the Dominican Republic for the holidays, spoke frantically to Irving by phone, trying to change his mind, but to no avail. Irving was firm.

Only a small inner circle was told the news. Among the intimates were Gene Kelly and his wife, Patricia, who came by on Tuesday evening. Kelly, himself in frail health, soon had to be taken home by his wife. Would it be all right, she asked Ellen, to return alone later? Ellen said of course, and so Patricia drove back in the middle of the night. Patricia knew that Wolfgang Puck, Spago's owner and chef, had hoped to pay his last respects, so at this late hour she called him and his wife, Barbara Lazaroff, to suggest they come over. In the previous month, Puck had driven up often from the kitchen with his apron on to bring Irving a favorite meal and chat with him as he ate. Now Puck and Lazaroff drove up a final time, at 5:30 A.M.

Puck had to leave sometime later to catch a plane to New York, but Lazaroff elected to stay until the end. All that Wednesday she remained at the bedside. That night, she lay by Irving with her hand on his arm. The next morning, Sohn

worked the phone, calling one after another of Irving's longtime friends and putting the phone to his ear when they came on the line. "He couldn't talk," says Lazaroff, "but as Barbara Walters and Oscar de la Renta and the Kissingers came on, his eyebrows went up, and he had a little crook of a smile." In those last moments, Lazaroff says, "we kept telling him, 'You're in charge, Irving. You decide when to go.' He needed to know that Irving Paul Lazar was still in control of the party."

When death came, late Thursday afternoon, the phones were hung up and the friends departed. Ellen bathed Irving, an orderly shaved him and gave the bald head one last razor cut, and then Ellen dressed him in a pair of pink-and-white pajamas she had made for him the previous spring.

Irving Lazar's work was over. Martin Singer's had just begun.

XT'or years, Singer had served as Mary F Lazar's lawyer. In gratitude for his solicitous help, Mary always added him to the Oscar-party list. Every year, reports one close observer, Irving tried to cut him off; every year, Mary had to plead for his reinstatement. "He's done so much for us, Irving," she would say, and finally Irving would relent.

In the last six months, Singer had drawn close enough to Irving to be named executor of his estate and to be given the responsibility of organizing his funeral service. But when Sohn faxed Mo Murtry's letter to Singer, Irving was furious, according to the novelist and his partner. "We said to Irving, 'We understand from Theresa that Singer is your personal attorney,' " Ossana recalls. "And Irving promptly wrote Singer saying, 'You are not my personal attorney!' Irving had respect for him as an attorney, but he never talked about the man to us."

The day after Irving's death, Singer called a meeting of two women who had helped run the agency office, along with Theresa. By the terms of Irving's will, he reportedly told them, each of the three would receive $75,000, with lesser but significant amounts to the household staff.

If the size of Theresa Sohn's inheritance was smaller than she had hoped, she betrayed no sign of it. Nor did she express dismay at the news that the bulk of Irving's estate would go to U.C.L.A. Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai.

When Irving's memorial service was held the next week at the very private Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Chapel, more than a few of his friends and colleagues were (Continued on page 189) (Continued from page 186) stunned to find themselves uninvited—Karen Lemer and Alan Nevins among them.

The limousines and Rolls-Royces with tinted glass rolled up to the chapel a little before one P.M. on January 6 and disgorged the famous and near-famous guests. It was, as one guest put it, Martin Singer's hour to shine. The Old Guard was out in force, but there was something askew about the whole thing. Once again, Mary was missed.

"There was Theresa, in a Chanel suit like the grieving widow, in the front row," observed one guest. "The flowers were good but not great—not like Babe Paley's funeral, which is how Swifty would have wanted his to be. The music wasn't great, either. They started off with 'April in Paris,' and I looked over to see Henry Mancini rolling his eyes."

Lazar's old friend Peter Viertel had sent a statement from Spain, but was told by Irving's camp that one sentence was offensive and would have to be changed. The sentence read, "Irving Lazar was not without faults, but this is not the time to mention them."

Larry McMurtry delivered one of the six eulogies, observing that Irving "reaped millions off best-sellers—in the way of the street—but his first and fiercest loyalties were to those who attempted literature." At that, Jackie Collins and Dominick Dunne exchanged a wry look.

Two days later Ahmet Ertegun, ensconced in a suite at the Peninsula hotel, bristled at questions about Sohn. "What can anyone have against someone who did a very, very tedious job?" Ertegun said of her. "What she went through was not easy; she protected Irving, and she protected the household. She's really the one who kept him alive, perhaps eight months longer than he would have lived."

But then why the persistent questions about her?

"Look, it's very simple," Ertegun said. "People see Irving Lazar, they've known

him for years. Then suddenly they see a lady whom he's very close to. . . . They don't know where she came from ... so they . . . start to imagine."

Sohn, reached by phone at the Lazar house on a Sunday morning, seemed tom between wanting to hang up and wanting to set the record straight. "When I first came on the job," she said, "there were a lot of jealous people, and a lot of things were said when Mary was dying. . . . My whole job was to protect this man from things like this."

Sohn was living in the house with one of the maids while Sotheby's inventoried the Lazars' belongings; when the house was sold, she would presumably return to

"Irving told me several times, 1 wouldn't be here today without Iheresa.

the life she'd led before. "The saddest story in the end is hers," McMurtry says. "Theresa had this chance to emerge from the shadows. I think Irving was so lonely and desperate and grief-stricken he might have married her. [But] she'll go back to the shadows."

What did Sohn think of McMurtry? "McMurtry is a whole different story," she said bitterly. "I do have proof that, maybe not necessarily him, but the Ossanas . . . they hurt Lazar. Larry McMurtry wrote a very cruel letter to him when he left the agency." As to the allegedly indiscriminate taking of household goods, she said, "I have staff who witnessed it. And Martin Singer knows all about it."

Unfortunately, Singer advised Sohn not to sit for an interview. But he did relay her account of the china and silver gifts.

According to Sohn, Irving never offered McMurtry and Ossana all of his china, only one set. Greedily, she claims, they asked for more, as well as for silver that might match it. Singer himself acknowledged that McMurtry's letter had been faxed to his office, but added that Irving was upset only by its content, not by its transmission to the lawyer. He said that he had been both Irving and Mary Lazar's lawyer whenever needed. Also, he said, "I was one of their closest friends."

/^Vn a bright-blue Saturday morning, Irv_/ving Lazar's ashes were laid to rest beside his wife's in Westwood Memorial Park, and a gathering of friends, including Sohn, placed flowers atop the small box. A self-made life had come to its end after decades of high flying with many of the world's most glamorous people, in all the world's most glamorous places. Lazar hadn't made himself the legend he was by acting generously, and yet many felt generous toward him. He had enriched the world despite himself. Above all, he had fought alone from start to finish, rising from genteel poverty in Brooklyn to be, for a while at least, Hollywood's most colorful agent. His passing was the passing of an era: the end of the solo agent, doomed by the very package deals of talent that he had helped pioneer. Now Michael Ovitz ruled, along with a whole new generation of corporate agents. About all they had in common with Lazar were smarts and a love of good suits.

In the end, in that last dark year, Irving "Swifty" Lazar had lost his ally in Mary, and then his power, and finally even the appearance of power, and so began his precipitous decline. "What's sad," said a friend, "is that a man who invented himself from shoes to accent, who controlled his image even while dying, cannot control the perception of how he went out."

Was there, perhaps, a lesson in the tale, a better way to grapple with death in Hollywood? "My advice to anyone," Peter Viertel said, musing on Swifty's last year, "is try not to die there."