After the party, Lazar had to face up to his grief. So the 1993 Oscar party became something else: a metaphor for Lazar’s survival. Rather than have him weeping at her bedside, she instructed him to do what he’d done nearly every night for the last 50 years-go out for dinner with friends. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” It said something about their 30-year marriage that, despite her unrelenting pain, Mary continued to put her husband’s needs first. “I can’t reconcile myself to the fact that she’s going to die,” he told friends. But incurable bone cancer had changed all that diagnosed in November 1992, Mary died two months later.īy every account, she faced her death squarely. That’s very gallant.”įor what had happened in Irving Lazar’s carefully ordered life that year was the ultimate violation of his great plan: he had lost his wife, Mary, 25 years his junior and, in his words, “my guiding light.” In his scheme, he had always meant to live long enough to celebrate the millennium, and she had been meant to survive him. What, I had asked him a few days earlier, was the most telling thing about Lazar? “What he’s doing right now,” Nicholson had said tenderly. For those who knew him only through the media, it was a star’s entrance-Moses parting the waters.
He made his way from table to table, handshaking, hugging, kissing. He entered slowly but confidently, supported by a cane, wearing perfectly tailored dinner clothes and the trademark black-rimmed glasses that had always made him a caricaturist’s dream.
But just as Marisa Tomei was approaching the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept the award for best supporting actress, Irving Lazar strolled into Spago. to munch Wolfgang Puck’s Alaskan salmon with horseradish crust and watch, as if they were going to be quizzed later, the Academy Awards on one of nine television screens. “I have no intention of sitting down,” said Lazar.įive nights later, Hollywood royalty and New York society dutifully seated themselves at Spago at the ungodly hour of six P.M. Irving,” she said, “where are you going to sit?” “Otherwise, we’ll never get this party seated. “I’m going to get this chart out of here so he can’t tinker with it,” one assistant whispered. “But she wanted to sit next to Sherry Lansing and the Norman Lears,” the assistant noted gently.Īt last, all 150 dinner guests had been placed. His focus had turned to Carol Matthau he thought she should sit next to the veteran screenwriter Ivan Moffat. Ten years ago-”Īs Lazar finished cutting that one dead, one of his assistants had a head-shaking epiphany: “My God, Dennis Hopper went from the main table to the corner in one year.” Lazar couldn’t have been less concerned. His biggest dream is to come to the party. The voice of a secretary at the Irving Paul Lazar Agency blasted over the speakerphone: “Irving, I’ve got on the phone. “Unless he’s going to give you another six figures, I wouldn’t worry about it.”Ī phone call interrupted this game of musical power chairs. DeMann is Madonna’s manager, and Lazar had profitably shoehorned himself into the negotiations for her recent book, Sex. “Because I just earned a great deal of money from him,” said Lazar.
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