Lazar’s Oscar party may have been the flashiest affair, it wasn’t the only exclusive one. Friend said in a recent interview, “It was the beginning of velvet-rope culture.”īut while Mr. “To secure an invitation was tougher than getting a ticket to the Academy Awards themselves,” Richard Zanuck, an Oscar-winning producer, told Vanity Fair in 1994. Johnny Carson and Barry Diller, the entertainment mogul who throws his own annual Oscar bash, were there, too. Raquel Welch and Walter Cronkite supped on duck, salmon and pizza. Andy Warhol documented the festivities with his 35-millimeter camera. He and his wife, Mary, presided over a celebrity-packed party from the mid-1960s until his death, in 1993. One of those was Irving Lazar, known as Swifty, a Brooklyn-born deal maker with a voracious appetite for literary culture who represented writers and Hollywood royalty, including Humphrey Bogart, Truman Capote, Ira Gershwin, Lauren Bacall and Cary Grant.
Carter, the former Vanity Fair editor, wrote “ Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties.” “Everybody was watching.” “You didn’t want to be seen losing,” said David Friend, who, along with Mr. Cosgrave said.īut it was perilous, too, for stars and their fragile egos. “It sparked everyone having a party in their living room,” Ms. With television, Oscar viewing parties emerged. Then, the ceremonies were held simultaneously on both coasts: at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood and at the International Theater in New York.
Glamour had returned in full force by 1953, when the Oscars were first televised, on NBC. In 2008, parties were canceled altogether after Hollywood writers walked out in late 2007 and the subprime-mortgage meltdown threatened the global economy.) (Austerity would re-emerge from time to time, most notably in the early 1990s, when Americans were in the thrall of a grueling recession. Organizers who planned after-parties tightened their belts, in line with Americans rationing sugar, coffee and meat. Big bands and opulent celebrations were scrapped as the cultural mood darkened. The ceremonies were moved to auditoriums.
Limato was so insulted he threw a glass of vodka in the editor’s face at - where else? - another Oscar party. Gibson’s project “The Passion of the Christ” had recently been criticized as anti-Semitic. There was the time Richard Johnson, then a Page Six editor, published an item claiming that celebrities planned to boycott the Oscar party of the agent Ed Limato because of his client Mel Gibson. On more than one occasion, the evening has ended in fisticuffs.
A decade later, Sean Young, who starred in the movie “Blade Runner,” was arrested at the Governors Ball, reportedly after she crashed the party and slapped a guard. Carter’s gatekeepers refused to let her manager in.
What was revealed then would hold true for generations to come: Oscar parties have always been far more entertaining than the awards show itself.Īt the Vanity Fair party in 2001, for example, a tipsy Courtney Love marched over to a group of photographers and shouted an expletive after one of Mr. Long before Swifty Lazar corralled celebrities to join him at Spago or Graydon Carter reigned over Vanity Fair’s soiree, the Academy Awards were a party held on May 16, 1929, in a ballroom at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.It all began with a dinner dance. of Georgia Libs., AthensĬopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. This anecdotal entertainment, rich with legendary names, is recommended for larger public libraries. Never modest and with a penchant for hyperbole, Lazar here offers a life story that belies his obsession with class trappings, but the hardboiled chutzpah of his youth still shines through. In December 1993 he died after clinching his final deal: the sale of his own autobiography.
In the 1970s, Lazar introduced glitterati to the publishing world and went on to launch the TV mini-series phenomenon with Rich Man, Poor Man. Lazar's clients included Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Clifford Odets he hobnobbed with legends such as Bogie, Sinatra, and Gershwin and sold ideas to studio titans Goldwyn, Mayer, and Warner. Dubbed "Swifty" by Bogart after he had made three deals in one day, Lazar graduated from his Brooklyn beginnings as a lawyer not above occasional loansharking to become a talent and literary agent extraordinaire. The personal story of Irving "Swifty" Lazar describes his friendships with such figures as Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and how he rose from Brooklyn poverty to Hollywood fameįor Lazar, life was an anecdote and, appropriately, his autobiography reads like one.