Notes on a Cowardly Lion (17 page)

Present Illness

About four years ago when her mother was ill, she began to worry a great deal. When doing her act on the road she would become almost hysterical, and it was necessary for her husband to be very stern with her. Her sister states that she began to have peculiar spells in which she would tremble and become faint and stiff. She also had attacks of uncontrollable laughter and crying. On one occasion she smashed everything in her dressing room and also complained of someone peeking at her. Her husband observed that her pupils were widely dilated.

The case record runs from 1931 to 1936. Lahr never read it thoroughly. If he had, perhaps, the late months of 1926 and the following year would have been more comprehensible. As it was, there was a kind of theatricality about Mercedes's actions, a stubbornness that perplexed and angered him. A month after the death of her mother, she smashed their dressing-room mirror during a performance in Los Angeles. Lahr returned to the sound of crashing glass. Mercedes sat slumped in her chair. She was holding her hairbrush in her hand. But she did not speak.

Lahr grabbed her and brought her face up to his. It registered no emotion. “What happened, Babe?”

“Nothing.”

“You broke the mirror. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Forget it. I don't know. It just happened.”

“Is something wrong with you? We'll get a doctor. Do you hurt any place? Do you want me to get something? What's wrong, for chrissake?”

He could never get an answer. She just looked at him and stared. Although a better educated man might have seen mental disturbance in these incidents and sought a way of dealing with them Lahr viewed them simply as an expression of grief about her mother and Sonny. He believed the purpose of the team was to perform, and Mercedes loved the theater no less than she had before the deaths. She was fine in front of an audience, so he could overlook the curious off-stage behavior. “She always acted peculiar, but I didn't help matters any, I guess.” He is more compassionate now than he was then. He loved her, but his lack of understanding bred contempt and frustration. Why could she not talk about what was bothering her?

Lahr was a victim of his own energy and resilience. He could not conceive how personal sadness combined with constant performing could force such a change. Mercedes shared his dream; and, in his mind, she shared his stamina. Each new town was a challenge, a step closer to their goal. Doctors assured Lahr that Mercedes's actions were the logical effects of depression, nothing more. She had been lucid prior to 1926, when they began the Orpheum tour. Now the schedule was more difficult and demanding than Lahr would ever acknowledge. The stage, which held his only hope, was offering its first bitter fruit.

In New York, two weeks after the conclusion of the circuit, Lahr returned to his hotel room to find Mercedes in front of her dressing table, her beautiful black hair sheared from her head. She looked like a monk. “Why, Babe?” was all he could say. She looked at him in the mirror. She said nothing.

Harry Delmar got in touch with Lahr again at the end of his tour. He had raised the money and assembled a sparkling cast. Lahr was impressed, but worried. He could not see where his talents fit into such a bill. Delmàr assuaged his fears. Lahr was especially impressed when he learned that Billy K. Wells had been commissioned to write the comedy scenes. Lahr along with Mercedes was signed as the “unknown quantity” to a two-week contracts while the others players had run-of-the-play agreements.

Harry Delmar's Revels
was scheduled to open in the first week of November 1927. After the first few tryouts in Hartford, nothing, not even the four hundred-dollar-a-week paycheck, could keep Lahr from
wanting to quit. “Harry, I'm telling you this material just isn't funny enough.” Delmar countered every argument and prevailed upon him to stay with the show. Lahr finally agreed when Delmar promised to provide some new sketches for him.

Besides his anxiety about his part, there were other minor annoyances that the Broadway show created. Frank Fay, who was one of the nation's finest stand-up comedians and whose style was later adopted by such favorites as Bob Hope and Jack Benny, was suave, handsome, and monumentally egocentric. He did not like Lahr's brand of comedy or the energy and intensity with which he roamed the stage.

Fay, who was, in comparison to Lahr, glib and sophisticated, would unnerve Lahr at the theater, greeting him with “Well, what's the low comedian doing today?” Once, when they played a benefit at Madison Square Garden, he introduced Lahr saying, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm going to introduce you to one of the funniest persons on the stage. A man who will keep you in stitches for forty-five minutes. Bert Lahr.”

“After an introduction like that, I was dead,” Lahr admits.

The ploy of referring to other comedians as “low comic” actually originated with Bert Wheeler when he and Fay played the Palace. Fay had been held over nearly ten weeks; he was a phenomenal success. Fay asked Wheeler to do a “bit” with him. Wheeler agreed, but wanted to know what skit they would do.

“We're just going to go out there and ask the audience to stay after the show and see the afterpiece, which we will do.”

“Why does it take two people to go out there and do that? Let's rehearse something.”

Fay's reply was typical. “Don't you know I'm probably the busiest and most popular comedian in this town and I haven't got time to rehearse.”

Wheeler remembers the moment vividly. “I knew what I was in for. I get out on the stage with him and he starts on me. And I'm telling you he must have popped nine or ten gags off my head and the people are falling out of their seats laughing at this man. He expected me to answer him, but if I had answered him, he would have killed me double. He was just laying for me there. For once in my life I got smart. I let Fay run out of material, like a fighter out of steam. He got so mad because I wouldn't answer him he said, ‘Aren't you going to do something for the folks?'

“‘Yes' I said, ‘When you get through getting those titters …'

“Fay says, ‘Titters?'

“I say, ‘Fay, you have your method of getting laughs, and I have mine. What you consider a big laugh would be a snicker to me.'

“‘Well, go ahead,' Fay said, looking at me; I had been leaning against the backdrop while Fay performed. ‘The hall is yours.'

“I said, ‘Now would you like to see me get a laugh like you've never gotten in your whole life?' Fay nodded; and then I smacked him in the puss.

“Fay just stood there while the audience howled. When the laughter died down, he turned to the audience and in his dead-pan delivery said, ‘That's what you get for mixing with low comedians.'”

When Fay used the term to describe Lahr, it rankled him. Despite the fact that Lahr respected Fay's ability and would in time become good friends with him, he got his revenge when the show came to Broadway by getting most of the good reviews.
Billboard
heralded the revue as “extravagant as anything Ziegfeld could offer.” Lahr and Mercedes were singled out for their slick comedy skit.

But what your correspondent wanted to see was more of Bert Lahr. The grotesque we seem to remember from a dim past of burlesque and small-time vaudeville. Lahr is terrifically funny, but he didn't have enough to do.

New York Post

Lahr's caricatures were vivid in their wild brashness; his gestures were daring to a Broadway audience, whose taste leaned toward a more controlled, acceptable form of laughter. Lahr appeared in a few skits besides the cop act, and took part in a quartet by Billy Rose called “The Four Horsemen—Don Quixote, Paul Revere, Ben Hur, and Jesse James.” He, of course, was the man outside the law, Jesse James. All of Lahr's old gags were there, but the difference was a new polish and sophistication for the $5.50 crowd.

The Broadway audience responded well to the anarchy he created on the plush stage of the Shubert Theater. Lahr was shocking and funny. One critic reflects the insularity of the Broadway comic stage and those who wrote about it at the time Lahr entered it:

And then there is Bert Lahr. His name should be writ in gold on the programme. He is an extremely amusing comedian, new to me. I suppose he comes from where I never go—from vaudeville. Everything that is good in these affairs, I'm told, has been annexed from vaudeville. However, Mr. Lahr is excellent no matter whence he comes, and he is the real comedian of the ‘Revels.'”

Harry Delmar's Revels
not only introduced Bert Lahr to Broadway, it was also the showcase for one of the great musical standards of this century, “I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” As Lahr recalls it, “Delmar wanted a ‘jewel number' where the showgirls would come down in bizarre costumes. He wanted to do it in a different way. So Lew Brown (of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson) came up with a song title, ‘I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby.' I went with Delmar over to a music publishers, a place called Kalmer and Puck. Delmar gave Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields the idea. ‘Two young kids in front of a jewelry store. One says to the other, “I can't give you anything but love, baby.”'They took the title and wrote a song. The number didn't do much in the show at all. It wasn't done by important people; and the public didn't consider
Harry Delmar's Revels
a hit show. They put it into
Blackbirds of 1928
and it became one of the biggest hits of the country.”

Despite approving reviews, Delmar's spectacular did not do well at the box office. Lahr was faced with an important decision. “I realized that this was my first show on Broadway, and in order to be seen, I'd have to stay there. The show was a flop. It would have closed. We needed money. Frank Fay put in some cash; and I invested five thousand dollars—which was all of my vaudeville savings. In the end, I was the only person who benefited by the exposure. Since we had put money into the show, we were also part owners. As performers we had taken a cut in salary. We weren't able to pay the writers. Billy Rose, who wrote some songs for the show, sued us for his money. Being part owner, I resented it. He sued me for forty dollars. I said to myself, ‘How could he do this to people in this position.' So I went to the Pacific Bank on Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue. I said, ‘Give me forty dollars worth of pennies.' I was irate, incensed. Now, that's four thousand copper pennies. I carried them on my back down to the Loew's State Building where Rose's manager worked and threw it on his desk. I said, ‘Here, you give it to the son-of-abitch.' He said to me, ‘You better take it back, Bert. It's not legal tender.' So I had to lug the pennies back five blocks, four thousand copper pennies!”

His name sizzled in lights above the Shubert marquee for only sixteen weeks. Frank Fay was the headliner, but Lahr had been promoted to second place on the billing. He had seen his name on marquees before, but this was grander and larger than he had ever imagined. Thrilled, he kept a picture of that first Broadway marquee in his scrapbook.

“We opened the show with a trial scene,” recalls Delmar. “Lahr was the judge. I used to know what kind of a house we had just by watching his face when he stuck his head over the bench.” Usually, Lahr's face was not too jovial, but whatever his hopes for a full house, there were other things that pleased him about being on Broadway. The new celebrity he had achieved was reflected ironically in the National Shirt Shop Window on Broadway. The buffoon had suddenly become dapper. A picture of him with arms crossed, staring maturely into the camera in a well-tailored three-piece suit, filled the window. A placard read:

“LAHR”

A New Color Combination Neckwear

as Worn by Broadway's Best Dressed Comedian

He had a picture taken of the window display. It represented the way he imagined himself—opulent, genteel, and smooth.

If people began publicizing him in an image he had always desired, he also was delighted to find his name in the critical vocabulary. A clipping describing another comedian in 1928 reflects his new fame:

Billy Bann, of the Bert Lahr school of funny men, is frequently funny …

Five years after
Harry Delmar's Revels
, doctors explained the process Mercedes was exhibiting off stage as “blocking.”

She smiled when answering these questions. When certain other questions were asked, she “blocked” very decidedly, did not reply, paid no attention to the next two or three questions and then answered the first unanswered question pointedly. Q. What are your plans? Would you like to go back to the show business? (late answer): There is room for me in the act when I get ready.

Lahr never understood her evasions of his questions and her silence, made more annoying to him by her elaborate facial responses, as if she were enjoying a private joke with herself. Mercedes had never been more stunning or effective in the act than she was during their only Broadway exposure. Lahr watched her move from the wings, waiting anxiously for the wink to come when he would proclaim himself her Uncle Succotash. She was still lively and crisp in her delivery. The only difference between her present performance and the ones in vaudeville
was that her lovely mantilla and fine Spanish comb had been replaced by a scarf, which hid her short, unkempt hair from the audience. When Lahr watched her on stage, he thought of the inexplicable impulses that seized Mercedes and made her alien not only to him but also to herself.

“
There is room for me in the act when I get ready.
” Mercedes always believed that the stage would accept her again. Her evasions about the theater, her performance, and her husband appeared in the mental barrier, the blocking, she put up to her emotions. Lahr could not keep the questions from his face, but he refused to speak them to her directly. How long could Mercedes remain on the stage? He feared for the worst.