Robert Lantz, a talent agent whose clients ranged from Bette Davis to Leonard Bernstein to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, has died in Manhattan. He was 93.
He died Thursday of heart failure, said his wife of 57 years, Sherlee.
Mr. Lantz worked from a small office overlooking Central Park, filled with his books, photographs by Richard Avedon (who was a client) and caricatures by Al Hirschfeld (an old friend).
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His clients included writers James Baldwin, Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers; actors Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Yul Brynner, Montgomery Clift, Myrna Loy and Liv Ullmann; photographer Arnold Newman, film director Milos Forman, playwright Peter Shaffer and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner.
“I have been very lucky not to represent anyone crazy,” Mr. Lantz told an interviewer for a Czech weekly newsmagazine in 2003. “Crazy artists are very difficult.”
He consoled and cajoled his clients in person or on the telephone. Many became lifelong friends.
Born in Berlin, on July 20, 1914, Mr. Lantz dreamed of being an author like his father, a screenwriter in the silent-movie era. He moved to London in 1935, after Hitler came to power, and worked as a story editor for American film companies. Following World War II he came to New York and began a new life representing creative artists: stars of the stage and screen, literary lions and, occasionally, public figures who thought they had a book in them.
In addition to his wife, Sherlee, Mr. Lantz is survived by a son, Anthony.
Mr. Lantz was one of the last members of an old school: he did not use e-mail or computers. He took 10 percent of his authors’ earnings, not 15 percent, hewing to a tradition widely abandoned in the late 20th Century. He made his deals with handshakes.
“I don’t believe authors and directors or other artists should be tied up by contracts,” he said in the 2003 interview.
He showed an early talent for proximity to talent. At 7, he dined with Albert Einstein in Berlin; a colleague of his father had married Einstein’s daughter. As he told the story, he announced that he was studying math at school. “Einstein stood up, opened his drawer, took out his book of mathematics and said: ‘Why don’t you use this book?'”
The next day in class, he raised his hand and said: “As Albert Einstein explained all this to me last night …”