Notes on a Cowardly Lion (22 page)

One of the reasons for Lahr's anxiety was that the show was going badly on the road. White's friends had suggested he close it in Boston, but instead of chalking it up to experience, White doubled his bet and sent for Joseph Urban, the famous designer, to create a completely new set and costumes for the show. White himself took over the direction, and, being an old dancer, also took charge of the choreography. He not only suffered with the show, he also staged it, helped rewrite it, and kept the cast and production staff in their places. His iron will and staggering egotism managed to shape
Flying High
into a delightful evening. It was so eagerly awaited in New York that the show was the first to command a $6.60 seat on Broadway.

One sketch in the show caused McGowan and DeSylva quite a lot of annoyance. DeSylva had suggested a medical examination scene, and McGowan protested the gag on the grounds of bad taste. White liked it, and the joke remained in the show. McGowan, however, bet his collaborator five dollars that the bits of business DeSylva had conceived would not get laughs. This was his usual custom, and on opening night a lot of cash changed hands.

In
Flying High
Rusty Krause (Bert Lahr) is the exuberant and incompetent mechanic who gets up in the air and wins the race because he cannot get down. (Krause's trepidation is minuscule in comparison to Lahr's own fear of heights and planes.) The scene that McGowan was betting on took place at the end of the first act of
Flying High
, when Rusty is lured into the doctor's office by the wise-cracking, freelance photographer, “Sport,” who sees the possibility of a good story and a better laugh in Rusty's plight. Rusty does not want to go, but with a love-lorn Amazon chasing him, he sees no alternative. “Lindbergh wouldn't take his cat,” he shouts to Pansy who wants to come with him in the previous scene. She chases him off the stage for an explanation. In the next scene, Rusty finds himself in the doctor's office, trading quips with him. “Nationality?” asks the doctor summarily. “Scotch by absorption,” Rusty replies. The doctor tries to push Rusty into a spinning machine or, as he describes it, a “tail-spin test.”

McGowan lost his bet. He handed his five dollars to his mother-in-law who sat between him and DeSylva on opening night. “When she laughed, I knew it had to be funny.” The scene he thought would be
offensive to the audience became the biggest single laugh in the history of the American stage. Ray Henderson, who watched from the wings, saw people actually stuffing handkerchiefs in their mouths to keep from laughing. The next number could not continue and had to wait on stage until the laughter was low enough for the music to be heard. De Sylva clocked the laughter at sixty-two seconds. Robert Littell of the New York
World Telegram
wrote:

George White's new musical is chiefly remarkable for three items, Bert Lahr, a fat girl named Kate Smith, and a very physical medical joke … Bert Lahr as a would-be aviator being examined by the doctor makes the farthest north yet reached on the stage by jokes about the human body. It was outrageous, but also, I must admit, very funny. When Bert Lahr presented the Doctor with a tall glass vessel into which he had poured some whiskey from his pocket flask, the house, especially the galleries, roared and screamed as I have seldom heard them scream and roar.

Lahr's comic moment played on the buffoon's innocence in the face of experience. The fact that he could pull off a joke which trod so thin a line between the heights of humor and bad taste illustrates his comic sensitivity as early as 1930. He articulated his knowledge of an audience many decades after he had capitalized on it:

There are tricks in this business. If you play beneath an audience, if your character is a lowly character, do you see, the audience, although they like you, doesn't take you too seriously. “Oh, he's a schmo,” they'll say, but they let you get away with it, you know what I mean. I have done things on stage that I don't think any other actor has ever done, and the audience never resented it … In “Flying High” I had this skit … Now if a wise guy were to do that, a fellow with the wrong personality or that the audience did not respect, they could resent it very much, and it could be shocking. It all reverts back to how the audience feels about you out there, if they accept you as a guy that bumbles into something—that's in the writing and in the playing.
It's a matter of maintaining an air of innocence. You can do almost anything on stage, if you do it as if you haven't the slightest idea that there's anything wrong with what you're doing
. Some comedians can do that particular thing, but a lot of comedians make it vulgar and dirty, and the audience won't accept it.

Actors Talk About Acting

Flying High
proved that Lahr was not a one-show success. Yet his
wild ambitions and his blindness to his own private actions are embodied with some irony in a song Rusty Krause sings after he has broken the world's flying record. Lahr never saw the irony. The song, “Mrs. Krause's Blue-Eyed Baby Boy,” is sung with six girls who throng around him.

Who'll be known from coast to coast?

Who will be the nation's boast?

Mrs. Krause's blue-eyed baby boy.

Who'll be rich before he's through?

Own his rolls—and coffee too?

Mrs. Krause's blue-eyed pride and joy.

And when the girls cry,

“Some guy. Just think what he did.”

I'll say, “Hey, hey,

Oh boy, some fun, eh, kid?”

Who will rise and conquer men,

Then become the bum again?

Mrs. Krause's blue-eyed baby boy.

Through his triumphs in the show, Lahr has buried his failures. On April 27, 1930, Mercedes was committed to a sanitarium in Connecticut. He says that he was out of the house when they took her away. “It was just too sad.” But the reports from the sanitarium indicate that he and Anna drove Mercedes to the hospital:

Mrs. Lahrheim was brought to the sanitarium by her husband and sister. On admission she was silent but apparently did not wish to remain because she made an attempt to run away as soon as she arrived. She was assigned to a room, and night and day attendants were appointed. She showed no marked emotional reaction when left by her relatives and seemed apathetic and indifferent
.

Lahr had always protected himself with one maxim: “I'll throw it out of my mind.” On stage, as he sung about the success of Rusty Krause, he was able to forget his failures as Bert Lahr. His coarseness and his betrayal of his family he understood, but felt compelled to continue. There is no justification for his attitude; he has an ethical naiveté that is paralleled in his stage roles. The baby and the nurse stayed in his apartment; but he usually spent the night with Rachel. “Sometimes I'd come home and go into the child's room. I'd look at him, but I couldn't pick him up. I felt dirty.”

Lahr's allegiance to Mercedes in the early months of her
confinement was genuine. He called her and tried to visit her. Sometimes when he arrived she did not recognize him or talked with a marked deterioration. At other times, she was completely lucid.

He had not wanted to commit her, but nothing he had tried brought Mercedes out of her condition. “She was a good woman, and even though I fell out of love with her when she became ill, I had a great respect for her.” There was no alternative but to commit her; even her child was alien to her.

If Mercedes's goodness haunted him, Rachel made him appalled at his weakness. “When I was with her, I'd say to myself, ‘How can I unload this girl?'” But whatever his doubts, his flesh gave enough reasons for remaining. “I could have become a drunkard,” he maintains when he thinks of what could have happened to him if he had stayed with Rachel. There was an alcoholic haze over their experience. “She was something new in my life. All I thought of before was work and Mercedes.”

Rachel and he fought continually. Sometimes their grievances took on surrealistic proportions. Once when Lahr was out of town, Rachel called him and said she was going to commit suicide. There was a gun shot, and the voice on the other end of the phone stopped. Lahr called a friend in New York and asked him to go to Rachel's apartment and see if she was all right. He cautioned the friend about the possible suicide. When the man got to the apartment, he found Rachel passed out on the floor, with a blank-gun lying on the bed.

It is hard to think that my father, a man whose life reflected such singularity of purpose, ever allowed external situations to confuse him. But Mercedes and Rachel and the new child left him numb with uncertainty. “I was all mixed up. Success, disaster—I had everything.”

Near the end of the New York run of
Flying High
, in 1931, he returned to Rachel's apartment after a visit to Mercedes. He was late.

When he entered the room, Rachel turned to him sardonically.

“Where were you?”

“I was at the sanitarium.”

“With that
bitch
again?”

That word broke the spell. “
Bitch
. How could she call Mercedes a bitch?” In a matter of ten seconds, two years of humiliation were suddenly resolved. “The whole thing with Rachel left me just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that.”

Scandals and Follies

IF THE NATION
floundered in economic chaos in the early thirties, Bert Lahr's career was not so precarious. His talent was in the hands of Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, two producers who had placed their indelible stamp on musical comedy and whose names were still golden theatrical currency. The difference between the two men can be seen in Lahr's reaction to them. He still refers to Ziegfeld as “Mr. Ziegfeld,” while White he casually calls “Georgie.” Lahr remembers Ziegfeld as part of theatrical history—a Broadway demigod who had carved out of lavishness a kind of entertainment to which every comedian aspired. White, on the other hand, was the renegade—a dancer who had quit the
Ziegfeld Follies of 1919
, stealing its equivalent of fire—Ann Pennington—to start his own brand of musical revue. When Ziegfeld wired him to return to the
Follies
after his debut, offering two thousand dollars a week, White wired back that he would pay Ziegfeld and Billie Burke three thousand dollars to go into his next
Scandals
. With that, their feud was on.

Lahr was impressed by the overwhelming success of the
Scandals
. White's personal flamboyance and street fighter's arrogance shocked Lahr into admiration. White was a showman; he had made Lahr a believer with his overhaul of
Flying High
in Boston. Above all, Lahr respected White's ability to please an audience and manipulate it to fullest advantage. “He knew something that Earl Carroll and Ziegfeld never did. He knew something of comedy sketches. He knew how to routine a show, where to put a sketch. If you played a jumbo comedy scene, he'd follow it with a fast number. If you got into a dramatic sketch, he'd put a love scene in front of it.”