Swifty’s Last Deal : On the delicate task of choosing one’s biographer : SWIFTY: My Life and Good Times, <i> By Annette Tapert (Simon & Schuster: $24; 288 pp.)</i>

Garson Kanin may have been the first invited to the ball. “There are only three people qualified to write my memoirs,” the legendary deal maker and socialite Irving (Swifty) Lazar reportedly told him decades ago. “Noel Coward, Irwin Shaw and you--and I’m asking you first.”

None of the three would dance with the late deity of Oscar party hosts. But Lazar lined up a small parade of would-be collaborators before Annette Tapert reached the finish line last month with “Swifty: My Life and Good Times” (Simon & Schuster). No one really knows just how small--or large for that matter--the parade was, how many lunches and gossip column items Lazar orchestrated to test the waters. But aside from prep work done by Lazar’s longtime assistant Linda Jones, there were three main players who agreed to do what threatened to be largely un-doable--to tell Swifty’s tale.

The mating ritual had actually begun a decade earlier, when the literary and show-business agent was 77 and ready to settle down to the business of fixing his place in the Hollywood firmament. His story had a fine brew of characters--Mafiosi, publishing and movie stars such as Moss Hart and Frank Sinatra, and of course, his own highly idiosyncratic self.

Lazar, who preferred to go by Irving despite the catchy nickname bestowed on him by Humphrey Bogart, summoned Betty Ford collaborator Chris Chase out of the blue in November, 1984. He said that Jean Kerr had told him Chase was “the funniest girl she’d ever met.” If Lazar ever wanted to do a book, Kerr had told him, he should contact Chase.

He did. And he did. They met in New York over lunch at Le Cirque. “He was very bossy in an amusing way,” says Chase. “He said, ‘We’ll have the fish and no butter.’ I said I didn’t like fish and I liked butter. He said, ‘She’ll have no dessert.’ I ate the whole tray of pastries.”

Lazar and Chase got together six times in the next six months to tape and talk about the agent’s colorful life--until it got too colorful. “He would tell you a fabulous story about Humphrey Bogart, and I’d say, ‘We’ve got to use that.’ And he would say, ‘I can’t tell that.’ There were people who were still alive. It was very important to him that he be popular and loved by all these people.”

Chase says she produced 15 pages but their paths parted in July, 1985, ostensibly because Chase’s cable-TV work meant she wouldn’t be available as soon as Lazar would have liked. So Lazar gave her the boot--rather gallantly, actually, if it’s possible to fire someone with elan.

Lazar sent Chase a note: “You were patient, professional and I respect you enormously both as a co-writer and as a person, but I am too eccentric for anybody, even myself. . . . Love, Irving.”

Lazar’s next collaborator, Michael Shnayerson, had a different take on Chase’s departure. “I think the problem with Chris Chase was that she was an attractive woman and (Swifty’s wife) Mary Lazar didn’t like that.”

Lazar had called Shnayerson in the fall of 1989 to say he loved Shnayerson’s biography of Lazar crony Irwin Shaw, that he’d really captured the guy--even though Lazar was reputed to be that special kind of literary agent who rarely read. “As it happened, he called me a day after the review in the L.A. Times,” Shnayerson says. “I don’t think he read my book at all.”

There was a smidge of irony there--Lazar was just about the only friend of Shaw’s who wouldn’t talk to Shnayerson. But Shnayerson was intrigued anyway. “His life story in a funny way was a larger story about the rise of the agent in Hollywood--his early days as a scuffling Broadway agent in the ‘30s and then the war and then eventually creating this image for himself in Hollywood--there was a great book to be told.”

Simon & Schuster had paid Lazar $400,000, which was supposed to cover his collaborator’s fee, according to Shnayerson. Lazar offered him $100,000, and Shnayerson flew out to L.A. for a few weeks in the spring of 1990.

“He would usually greet me in a jogging suit with these glasses of his, like a little elf. And we would go to a little room at the end of the hall, and he would say, ‘OK, kid. So what do you wanna ask me?’ ”

By then, Lazar’s star was dimming. He was 80, semi-retired and mostly handling actors’ autobiographies. “He would do his usual thing of calling a publisher and saying, ‘So. Cher. What do you think? Three million?’ And the publisher would say, ‘Yeah. Great.’ So he’d call Cher and say, ‘They’ll give you $3 million. Will you do it?’ ”

But as life was winding down for Lazar, he wasn’t just concerned with immortality, cementing a place for himself in Hollywood history via the book. His attention was shifting to his mortality--he was frankly getting spooked by it.

“Doing this memoir was a way of trying to stave off death,” Shnayerson says. “It almost got to the point where if he kept working on this book, he would still be alive. But if it was finished, he was finished. I got the strong feeling that that was the operating motive behind having one writer after another work on it. It also put him in a position of power, like the Hollywood producer hiring and firing screenwriters.”

One hundred pages later, Shnayerson was out the door.

Lazar’s next collaborator, Annette Tapert, ended up with the prize, a finished book. Lazar had cornered her at a dinner party in the spring of 1992. Tapert was another writer who’d memorialized a friend of Lazar’s, this one Slim Keith, whose memoirs she’d co-authored. “You made Slim sound . . . like an intellectual,” he told her, obviously hoping she’d repeat the favor.

In Tapert’s case, she felt her attractiveness worked in her favor. “He liked me,” she says. “I’m not going to lie. He also thought, ‘She’s attractive and it’ll feel good when I have to sit across the room from her.’ For Lazar, appearances made a big difference.”

Still, Tapert also had the sense that she would have been dispatched like her predecessors if Lazar’s life-sustaining project had done the job and kept him going. Tapert finished the book after Lazar’s death in December, 1993.

Says Tapert: “Maybe Swifty thought his life would end (if the book were finished). Once that’s done, where do you go from there? To do your autobiography is sort of the summit. And I have to tell you I’m not so sure if he had lived, the book would be out now.”