Swifty Lazar was a great negotiator.  No story about him illustrates his negotiating skills more clearly than the tale of how Iriving Lazar became “Swifty Lazar.”  As told in Lazar’s autobiography, he was having lunch with the actor Humphrey Bogart [1].  Bogart asked him, “How many deals do you think you can make for me and in what period of time?”  Swifty replied, “I could make you three deals in one day.”  Within 24 hours, Lazar proceeded to do exactly what he had promised to Bogart, booking the actor with enough motion picture work for the subsequent three years and leading the actor to give Lazar the moniker “Swifty.”

“Swifty” was a sobriquet that accompanied Iriving Lazar through most of his storied career as a literary agent in New York and Los Angles.  His career was bookended by negotiating deals for Henny Youngman in the 1930s and Madonna in the 1990s.  Today’s post focuses on Irving Lazar the negotiator.

Swifty Was On Your Side

There is a professor Adam Grant at the Wharton School who has advanced the idea that helping others is the key to creativity and productivity [2].  Swifty was an original practitioner of the Grant philosophy.  As described by Lazar, when he started out as an agent, “Writers had never heard of an agent giving dinners for groups of eight to twenty in the most fashionable restaurants and picking up the check.  But I did it on a regular basis—what the hell, it was all tax-deductible.  My clients became my friends.  My friends became my clients.”

But, he didn’t limit himself to organizing salons, as he said, “I tried to make myself indispensable.  When I brought writers out to work in the movies, I organized everything for them—apartment, car, servants.”

By being the indispensable man, Lazar grew a fantastic network of friends and acquaintances that he could draw on when trying to make a deal.

Swifty Represented Everyone

The screenwriter Harry Kurnitz had an oft-quoted line about Swifty, “Everybody has two agents, their own and Lazar.”  This line is a little mysterious without some basic facts about talent agents.  Talent agents and literary agents negotiate movie deals and book deals for a 10% (more recently 15%) commission.  The agent typically receives the payments from a studio, takes their commission, and passes the remainder on to their client.

For most of his career, Swifty operated as a one-man talent agency, and he was working essentially all of his waking hours.  Starting at 11 in the morning he would begin calling various high level entertainment executives to test the waters on possible projects.  In the evening, he was socializing and gathering intelligence.  When he found an interested executive, he might make a deal for a studio to purchase a book by a prominent writer to be made into a movie.

The catch was that the writer was often already contracted to an agent other than Lazar.  Swifty made his money by taking 10% of the deal on top of the 10% that the writer’s own agent would make.  The writers were always impressed by the high dollar value of the deals Swifty put together, and as a result, they did not complain about Lazar’s fee.  The other agents were often embarrassed that Swifty put their deal together for them, but their embarrassment was salved by the receipt of their full 10% of the deal.

Lazar summed it up this way, “Sure, I had some charm.  But the reason I was able to poach so successfully was that I knew more, negotiated harder, and made better deals.”

Round Numbers And A Handshake

Lazar put together deals using two basic strategies:

1. Information:  Lazar had better information than anyone in Hollywood (and later when he moved back East, than anyone in New York City).  He knew what type of projects executives were looking for, and critically, what a given deal should be worth.
2. The Lazar Technique:  Swift would open with a strong offer, the most that a deal would conceivably support—a big round number ($150,000, $1,000,000, whatever was appropriate).  He was setting an anchor.  Once he had opened the negotiation, Lazar wanted to move quickly to an agreement, as he said, “When I’m negotiating, I prefer as brief a meeting as possible.”  The deal would be concluded in old Hollywood style based on a handshake.  Interestingly, Lazar rarely had contracts even with the writers he officially represented.  His role was framed by trust—trust from studio executives that he was bringing them good projects and trust from his clients that he was getting them a good price for their work.

Lazar operated in the middle—a risky place to be, but a place that he relished.  He wrote in his autobiography about a conversation with an acquaintance who had become disillusioned by his agency work in Hollywood, “What my colleague was missing was the obvious reality:  this is the greatest time in the world to be an agent.  As the studios have weakened, the agents have become more powerful.  They’re showmen, or they at least have the power to be. [1]”

Swifty Knew Which Way The Wind Was Blowing

Irving Lazar’s career was extraordinarily long by the standards of the entertainment industry.  He made two smart moves in his career.  First, he opened The Irving Paul Lazar Agency in 1947 to represent East Coast playwrights, and to a lesser extent songwriters, lyricists, costume designers, and directors, in Hollywood.  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Hollywood studios were constantly on the lookout for new script ideas and new production talent—a need that Swifty could fulfill with his numerous personal connections within the literary and theater worlds.

But, as the 1960s progressed, the Hollywood studio system began to break down.  This affected Lazar’s business in two big ways:  1) as the churn of studio executives accelerated, it was harder to go to the head executive to get a deal done and 2) financial oversight at the studios became more pronounced, so it was harder to get the kind of quick meeting deals done that Swifty preferred.

So, in the 1970s, he made the second smart move of his career and moved back to New York from Hollywood to focus more on book deals.  The 1970s and 1980s were a time of interest in celebrity biographies.  Fortunately for Swifty, his long list of friends and acquaintances proved a fertile ground for the kind of book deals that led to best sellers.  By leading the pack out to Hollywood, and then back to New York, Lazar was able to define a unique kind of representation within the entertainment industry—the literary agent.

Swifty Could Be Tough

Lazar started out as an agent in New York City in the late 1930s, a time when organized crime played a significant role in jazz clubs, bars, and restaurants.  Because of that experience, Lazar could be the hard guy when he needed to be or wanted to be.

He wrote about an incident from the late 1930s when he was in his early 30s and just getting started as an agent.  He had put Count Basie’s band into the Famous Door, but he felt that the club’s owners were keeping too much of the take for themselves.  He rectified the situation by showing up late at the club several evenings and shoving his hand into the till, pulling out a few thousand dollars each time.

As life went on, Swifty—at least in his telling—developed a thick skin.  This makes sense, given his position in negotiations and in Hollywood.  Producer David Selznick once said of Lazar (at a dinner from which Swifty was absent), “There is one man who is not here who is single-handedly ruining the motion picture business as we know it.  The ridiculous prices he demands for books and plays and writers will surely be the end of us all [1].”

Lazar understood that as the man in the middle of the deal, he would be a magnet for any regret or hard feelings that developed during the negotiation or after, and he was capable of letting some of that criticism pass without need to say or do anything in response.  However, some of the most notorious incidents in Lazar’s life occurred when he did not let things pass.  Once when Swifty was in his late 50s, he got in a dustup with Otto Preminger at the New York restaurant 21.  Preminger held it against Swifty that Preminger had failed to secure the film rights to the novel In Cold Blood.  Some alcohol was involved, words were exchanged, tempers flared, and Preminger ended up being photographed with his head streaming blood from a gash caused by a glass that Lazar had smashed against Preminger’s skull.  Lazar ended up with a court appearance and a conviction on a misdemeanor, reduced from felony assault.

Conclusions

Irving Lazar was born in 1907 in New York City and died at his home in Los Angles, California in 1993.  In the intervening 86 years, he created a place for himself in negotiations on both coasts, making wealth for his clients and enjoying a special status as everyone’s second agent in Hollywood and in Manhattan.

[1] Lazar, I.  Swifty:  My Life and Good Times, Simon & Schuster (1995).

[2] Dominus, S.  “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?” New York Times, March 27 (2013).

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