Notes on a Cowardly Lion (18 page)

Once during the
Revels
, he came into the dressing room before the show to find Mercedes drinking with a friend. She was drunk. Lahr could hardly control his rage. He ordered the other woman out of the room and glowered at Mercedes.

“What do you think you're doing? We've got to go on in fifteen minutes.”

“Where's my brush, Bert?”

“Did you hear me, Babe? Let me look at you.” He looked at her eyes and picked up the bottle to see how much Scotch she had taken.

“What are you trying to do to us, Babe?… What are you trying to do? I'm just starting to earn decent money and you start acting up. If it's anything I can help … You're acting crazy … unprofessional. Do you have anything to say?”

She paused; and Lahr waited for her response. Finally, she said, “If I can't find that brush I'll never be ready.”

“Mercedes, will you talk to me? Talk, goddamit, talk.”

“The brush.”

“You're drunk,” he said and struck her.

The image is still vivid in his mind. “I slapped her. It was the only time I ever raised a hand to her. She had to go on stage.” Mercedes just stared at him. She laughed, and got ready to go on.

Lahr tried to be patient. He attempted to calm her, but she would cringe from his touch as if his flesh carried destruction. What was wrong with him? The question plagued him. He felt barren and sexless. She showed little interest in him when he spoke of the act. Mercedes had always ironed his clothes and kept their small accumulation of possessions neat and well organized. He respected her for this, and took it for granted. He never thanked her or acknowledged her
actions, but it was tacitly understood, he thought, that this was part of the team effort. Now, nothing seemed to be in its place; the hotel room mirrored the confusion in her mind. He would ask for his shirts, and she could not find them nor remember where she had sent them to be laundered. He expected her to look nice for him, but, instead, he could see that the pride she had shown in her beautiful features was being forgotten. Before, she had spent hours doing her lips and combing her hair, now she dressed hastily and paid little attention to her appearance. He would scold her. “Darling, please dress nicely today. Why don't we go out and buy some new clothes? I'll come with you. Don't you want to look nice again?” She would not reply. He would buy her clothes, only to see them become wrinkled and uncared for.

For a man so conscious of the outside world and the sentiments of others, the humiliation was deep. People knew—how could they not see the difference? On stage, Lahr was free. He could run, jump, improvise with abandon. He was set apart from society. But now with money and acclaim within reach, his private world seemed strangely inflexible. Off the stage, he imagined people were judging him; worse than that, looking into Mercedes wide, dark eyes, he feared
she
was thinking things about him she would not share. He felt constricted, his freedom overwhelmed by an inarticulate guilt.

One day he answered the door to his hotel suite and found a policeman standing next to his wife.

“Bert Lahr?”

“Yes.”

“Is this your wife?”

“Of course. What's happened, Babe?”

“She couldn't remember her name, sir. She was walking on the grass with her dog. And when I questioned her, she got all confused, cursed at me. I had to write a summons, sir.”

Lahr tried to put the incident out of his mind and interest Mercedes in his next show. The
Revels
gamble had paid off. He had been signed by Vinton Freedley and Alexander Aarons, two of Broadway's most successful musical comedy producers, to a five-year contract. He remembers bringing home the announcement and pasting it in his clipping book.

Aarons and Freedley have engaged DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson to write their next musical comedy production. It will be entitled
Hold Everything
. Bert Lahr is figured to have a prominent part in the piece, and Russ Brown will be engaged …

May 12, 1928

“We were finally there. Big dough, a Broadway contract. I came back one afternoon a few weeks after the police incident and Mercedes had locked herself in the bathroom. I knocked on the door, ‘Mercedes, what are you doing in there? Open the door!' I waited. There was no answer. I pushed at the door, finally I smashed it open. She was squatting by the lavatory. She held a handful of dollar bills. I couldn't speak—that was money from our “boodle bag.” She held the money tight in her hands. She was shoving the bills one by one down the toilet …”

All the actors knew what was happening. Nobody talked about it, and even now Delmar and Foy do not want to mention it. “It was so long ago, John. It's water under the bridge.” Delmar glances at the reviews of the
Revels
laid out in front of him. He points to a name. He winks.

My father doesn't hide it. “I started playing around. Mercedes didn't want me, she didn't show any emotion toward me. Sometimes I'd stay out to two, three in the morning. When I'd get back, she didn't mind.” He would leave her and return, silently convinced that Mercedes did not care, certain she did not realize the situation of her selfabsorption. “A change came over me—I was looking for something, reaching out for something.” He repeats it. “Reaching, reaching.”

The excitement of going into rehearsal for his first Broadway musical comedy filled Lahr with a sense of urgency and anticipation. His professional concerns glossed the sadness of Mercedes's condition. Then, in September, she told him that he was going to be a father. Doctors Lahr consulted thought a child would take Mercedes's mind off the death of her mother and bring her back to reality. Lahr never told them of their Lake Hopatcong “marriage.” In his own mind, they were married. But his fantasies prevented him from realizing that Mercedes had not made the same assumption; and that to be Catholic, unmarried, and pregnant could seriously add to the traumas that already threatened Mercedes's spirit and mind.

The doctors would uncover her curious responses:

She has refused to give me the date of her birth, but when told all about her early life when a baby, she admitted it. She attended
school until 15 years of age, and then took up her profession as a singer and dancer. She took a position in a miniature revue, called “Mimic World” and after that trouped in various shows. She met her husband in one of these shows and married him (blocked on year of marriage)…

Lahr did not tell her of his discussions with the doctors. She had never wanted a child before, and now the sudden thought that one was growing inside pained her, creating complexities she could not express.

And Lahr remembers lying in bed with her thinking of
Hold Everything
and of the new child who would be born almost as a symbol of their twelve years of struggle. He tried to touch her, to kiss away her fears. He moved toward her and held her in his arms. As he embraced her, laughter rose from her throat. “She laughed at me, John. Laughed when I was making love to her.”

Broadway Beginnings

Once when I was doing Flying High, I played a benefit at the Metropolitan Opera House. Russ Brown said to me, “Do you realize that you're stepping on the same boards that Tetrazzini and Caruso trod?” I said, “Yeah, but it's a bad house for mugging.
”

Lahr in conversation

When DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson talked to me about being in Hold Everything, I asked them, “Couldn't I be a German fighter?” Buddy laughed at me. He knew I had the makings of a funny man. When I went into the part, even in those days, I said to myself—” Well, it would be sort of silly, wouldn't it.” I just fell into this character of a bellowing, punch-drunk fighter.

Lahr in conversation

BERT LAHR
'
S COMEDY
was always contemporary. In 1928, when middle-class America was still on its spree and prosperity still seemed assured, his laughter caught the pulse of the time while reminding an audience of what they had left behind. His humor was lavish and generous, boisterous and unsophisticated. Yet Lahr's good spirits and his outlandishness were the twentieth-century equivalent of the frontier tall tale—a preposterous stage language anticipating a world of success and safety. In every sketch or song, Lahr's comedy triumphed over adversity—confirming the audience's intuitive faith in the benevolence of American life.

Lahr's initiation into musical comedy was a fortuitous combination of his exuberance and the writing skills of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, a musical-comedy team whose shows reveled in the delight and wonder of the American experience.
Good News
(1927) sang about happy college days;
Follow Thru
(1929) about country-club life; and
Hold Everything
(1928), the first show they wrote for Lahr, gloried in the national fascination with prize fighting at a time when Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney were folk heroes. Their shows demanded speed and a joyous celebration of the present—two ingredients of Lahr's uncomplicated buffoonery.

DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson were living out the prophecy of their own song—

Oh Boy! I'm lucky,

I'll say I'm lucky,

This is my lucky day
.

They shared, like Lahr and other Broadway journeymen, a boisterous faith in America's profusion. They appreciated Lahr's humor, his talent, and his “meteoric” rise to stardom. He was as new as Charles Lindbergh, as solid as a Model “T.”

Just as Billy K. Wells had put Lahr into the healthiest burlesque environment, Lahr's talent, offering the howling variety of low comedy, had attracted the triumvirate at the peak of their success. Lahr could not have made his Broadway musical-comedy debut in more professional hands.

DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson called themselves “The Big Three.” Their routine for writing
Hold Everything
followed a familiar pattern. In July, they checked into the Ritz Hotel in Atlantic City. They stayed in adjoining suites for a week to twelve days, venturing outside only for afternoon walks and late meals. Twice before from their Atlantic City hideaway the men had poured out songs that charted the romantic exuberance of the twenties, and remained a part of the American musical tradition for generations. In their first “book show,”
Good News
, the team wrote “Good News,” “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” “Lucky in Love,” “Varsity Drag.” The previous year, for
George White's Scandals
(1926), they had contributed such songs as “The Birth of the Blues,” “Lucky Day,” and “Black Bottom.”

Buddy DeSylva was the organizer of the group. He left the University of Southern California after his first year in 1916 and came to New York in 1919 because, as he told his friend and collaborator Jack McGowan, “By the time I graduated, I knew I'd be a rich man.” He combined the discipline of a writer with a sense of phrase and romance that made his songs as scintillating as the decade in which they were written. He was especially effective in bridling the wild imagination of Lew Brown. DeSylva had been responsible for many famous lyrics before he teamed with Brown and Henderson. DeSylva had created such standards as “If You Knew Suzy” (with Joseph Myer), “Somebody Loves Me” (with George Gershwin), “Look for the Silver Lining” (with Jerome Kern), “California Here I Come” (with Al Jolson and Joseph Myer).

While Lahr, in an anxious limbo between vaudeville and
Broadway, waited nervously to see the script, the team had to sandwich writing
Hold Everything
between a grueling schedule of commitments for films, stage shows, and their own publishing company.

There were no axioms to producing a musical score, but there was a definite pattern to which the team adhered. Ray Henderson, the only member of the trio still living, can recall the routine vividly. “We'd start laying out a show musically in New York. We might have a couple of titles, a couple of lines; we might even have a couple of tunes. And when we thought we had enough, we
always
went to Atlantic City to the Ritz. It got to be a habit. DeSylva and Brown would go into the bedroom and knock out a lyric, and then they'd bring it into the living room to me, and we'd set it. We'd work on a song that we might have started in New York or conceived in Atlantic City. We'd stick at it. We'd stay in the suite all day. If we got enough done, we might go out for a little fresh air, and then come back and work some more. That was the same routine, day in and day out. And to show you how meticulous DeSylva was—you see these pages of foolscap. We'd finally get the verse knocked out, and Buddy would write the song neatly on a piece of foolscap and fold it in half. He put it on the right side of the table near the piano. He got the biggest kick out of that. He'd go over and pick it up and feel it and say, ‘Well, we're coming along.'”

While the score they completed in Atlantic City was not their best, it adhered to the musical recipe of the day. It was light, romantic, and tuneful. The book of
Hold Everything
, written by DeSylva and Jack McGowan, was about prize fighting—a theme that, even by 1928, had been exploited beyond its merit (there had been four shows with prizefighting scenes that year). One critic observed about
Hold Everything:

Of course there is a gymnasium scene, a dressing room episode with the sweetheart busting in, and the battle itself. The story is unimportant. This is a piece in which the clown is king.

In
Hold Everything
, the punch-drunk sparring mate (Lahr) of a championship contender fights the champion and, through a series of ridiculous twists of fate, wins. There is a love interest, and even an evil threat to the comic world in the crooked promoter, who is a springboard for the situations. The producer, Vinton Freedley, had hired Lahr to play the pug and Victor Moore the wistful, droll manager of the champion. The love interest and drama were subordinated to the extravagance of the comedy.