FOR SEVERAL YEARS, in the 80s and early 90s, Irving gave his famous Oscar party at Spago, the celebrated restaurant just above Sunset Boulevard. I took Sara and Diana to the last two. At the penultimate Oscar party Mary Lazar was alive and Irving still a power: not in the studios, of course, but in the world of celebrities. To this next-to-last one Madonna came and the fact of Irving Lazar’s drawing power was still obvious.
At the final Oscar party, though, the force of his social fame was abandoning Irving Paul Lazar. Mary was dead, and though the party was crowded Madonna didn’t come. In the main only the loyalists came: Elizabeth Taylor, fresh from her moving AIDS speech on the Oscarcast. Jack Nicholson came and a few other real stars but without Madonna, the biggest star, a brightness seemed to have fallen from the air.
Sara, Diana, and myself sat at the oldies table—why waste a valuable seating on the likes of us? Opposite sat George Burns and beside us James Stewart, as silent as statues, although, as George Burns was being led out, this apparently lifeless old man winked at Sara Ossana and gave her a cigar.
That was the high moment of the evening for me. I think of it as sort of the end of the Old Hollywood, a Hollywood where stars were still more important than agents. Soon even the little men in the yellow shoe were seen on the streets no more.
The color faded out and Irving’s last party began the fade.
Now I no longer see the likes of Irving Paul Lazar, whose housemate, Frank Sinatra, greatest pop singer of his era, had the grace to come to his funeral.