The Lazars had planned to go to a birthday party for the King of Greece, a party to which numerous Windsors were coming, including the Queen and the glamorous young Princess of Wales. Sara and her mother, Diana Ossana, now my screenwriting partner, happened to pass through on short notice on even shorter notice (an hour, approximately), I called Irving and suggested dinner. Irving and Mary were in London, ensconced in their accustomed suite at Claridge’s, a suite the King of Spain was allowed to use when Irving didn’t happen to be in town. A dying, impoverished European woman got the credit-then minimal-for selling “Lonesome Dove.”Ī few years later, Irving’s eye for quality instantly spotted this elusive element in the appearance and demeanor of a much younger woman-my goddaughter Sara Ossana, then 12. Irving deferred to it, and behaved impeccably. He treated Dorothea with the distinguished courtesy he bestowed on those who possessed what he called quality.ĭorothea Oppenheimer had quality, even in the dusty apartment on York Avenue, and unto the hour of her death. In the three painful years that it took her to die, Irving, with uncustomary discretion, quietly did the work of agenting me. Dorothea was born in a castle on the Danube and died in a one-room apartment on York Avenue, in New York City. At the time, and for many years afterward, I had an agent, Dorothea Oppenheimer, a wonderful if eccentric woman who got through life on an intricate balance of beauty and bravura. ![]() When I read the Perelman interview I had no suspicion that the man named Irving Lazar, who stepped off planes on the preferable continents with his hands in his pockets, would someday be my agent. Who’s to say that too-tight English shoes shouldn’t introduce the finale? Irving’s devotion to fine European footwear rotted his feet and contributed its jot to his demise but, then, we are all going to demise some way. Our styles tend to make us then, if we last long enough and nothing beats them to it, they break us. ![]() But there is a Catch-22 to great styles: the higher you wind them, the tighter the catch. Well, so he did-and he had an evolved style, too. It was engraved with the following tribute: “You have that rarest of things, an evolved heart.” When we returned home he wheeled himself around his house for a while, looking for some object or other to give me while he wandered and considered, remembering the shop off Bond Street where he picked up his bone china, or the gallery in Nice where he secured the little Matisse, I happened to open a silver cigarette box given him by Walter and Carol Matthau. A mere six weeks before Irving’s death I dined with him at Chasen’s.
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