Notes on a Cowardly Lion (37 page)

Since the supermen should be beyond criticism, it must be confessed regretfully that music hall comedians as a lot do not have such range. Victor Moore's teetering walk and quavering voice, Jimmy Durante's steamy ferocity, Ed Wynn's lisp and giggle are, respectively, their stock in trade—excellent in kind but not continuously inventive. If you are a producer or author, you dutifully concoct a show around their characteristics; and since repetition
rubs the ecstasy from an act, an appearance once in two seasons is probably enough … As an actor, [Bert Lahr] can follow the convolutions of a plot with considerable ease. If he wears the loud costume of a washroom attendant in the first act, he also wears the intricate costume of King Louis in the dream sequence, not in the hang-dogged absurdity of a low comedian, but with an actor's assurance …

What Bert Lahr has accomplished this last decade rests on a solid footing.… It is the burlesque background which gives depth and richness to his comedy. Toward the end of “Du Barry” he reverts to type with uproarious exuberance. He is singing Cole Porter's travesty on sentimental balladry in “Friendship” and he decorates the choruses with all sorts of old-time clowning—mugging, quick steps, and finally a series of nonsensical capers at random. It has the liveliness of burlesque revelry—taking falls for a laugh … always with the grimace of satire.

Burlesque as it operates today does not train comedians. Perhaps we shall never again have comedians who can run and jump like Bobby Clark and Bert Lahr
.

September 1940

In spite of this high praise, Lahr had little faith in himself as a legitimate performer. The low comic still pressed for laughs. As the show wore on into the 1940 season, Lahr took liberties with the script. His excesses were always to preserve the fun at the core of the musical. “I'd get away from the script. I'd clown. I'd kid. It was really the laughter in
Du Barry
which made it. The love interest was a disagreeable one, in the show each character wanted a divorce and couldn't get it, and already the story line wasn't too tasteful. Even with that situation, the audience could imagine a clandestine romance. When you come to think of it, the production, songs, Ethel, and myself put the show over, not the story.”

Lahr's deviations from the script did not please DeSylva. But the producer, already involved in another show, had little time to monitor Lahr's performance. “The author and stage manager would tell him the things I was doing.” Lahr refers to the informers as “spies,” and, although the term may be laughable, the results were not. Lahr received a long, acerbic letter from DeSylva, in nearly the same spirit and length as the telegram Ziegfeld had sent him eight years before.

The letter was not DeSylva's intention alone, although Lahr always assumed it was. Many people associated with the DeSylva enterprise, including A. L. Berman, had a hand in it. The letter was written on
DeSylva's letterhead and signed in his absence. Because DeSylva rarely put pen to paper, Lahr did not notice any discrepancy in the signatures. But, whoever the original author, the letter overwhelmed its recipient. Lahr was chagrined at its charges and annoyed at the implication of unprofessionalism.

Dated April 26, 1940, the letter made clear that the customers as well as the executives of the theater had complained about Lahr's performance. DeSylva accused him of clowning and playing parts of the show lackadaisically.

He had spoken to Lahr privately about this before, but now he was angry. Emphasizing his reputation for keeping his word, DeSylva went straight to the point: either Lahr shaped up immediately or DeSylva would close the show at the peak of its profitable run—$29,000 a week.

To be sure, the implications were clear; DeSylva spelled them out. Indicative of DeSylva's understanding of his star, he anticipated Lahr's dollars-and-cents reaction to such a threat. If DeSylva closed the show when it was so popular, the blame would fall on Lahr; if, however, DeSylva let the show dwindle on its current haphazard course and then closed it, the blame would be laid on him. DeSylva stressed that he would not let this happen.

DeSylva ended his indictment by adding an appreciation of Lahr's talent and pointing out how lucky Lahr was to get
Du Barry Was a Lady
at such a crucial time in his career.

Lahr offered to hand in his notice, but DeSylva would not accept it. “DeSylva was a great admirer of mine. I never had words with him, but the letter created sort of a rift. We saw each other during the show, but it wasn't the same. I was very hurt by his accusations. I thought he was perfectly right in what he said, but there was no vicious intent in my ad-libbing. I did it just to keep the show in good spirits.”

The friendship was patched up in California, two years later, when the trust Lahr felt had been betrayed was symbolically restored by an oil painting DeSylva did of his comedian in
Du Barry
.

1941-2 was a time of excitement and nostalgia for Lahr. It did not begin that way. When he returned to California in the spring of 1941, he was haggard and feeling old after a year with
Du Barry
. In the quiet of his garden, he had time to ponder his forty-six years, his expanding midriff, and an immense disappointment. Red Skelton, a younger comic, had been given his role in the movie version of
Du Barry
, a disastrous choice for the film and a perplexing one for Lahr.

Moreover, Lahr's continual brooding about his career was mixed with more ominous thoughts. The talk of the movie capital was of war. Lahr had not been touched by the First World War, and now, suddenly, his friends were leaving their jobs to go into the service.

Then, a few weeks after his return, Mildred told him he was to be a father. Amid a sense of death came the hope of life; and in the face of disaster (real or imagined) grew a strange peace.

Bert Lahr did not begin his life as a new father—my father—on the strongest footing. My mother was scheduled for a Caesarian operation at 8:30 a.m. on July 12 and had been taken to the hospital two days in advance. The night before the operation, the expectant father, nervous and always squeamish, had dinner at Chasen's with his good friends Julia and (later Senator) George Murphy. He drank too much and awoke on July 12 at 10:30, his head aching from the previous night's drunk and already two hours late for the birth of his second son.

Lahr rushed to the hospital. When he arrived, Mildred was recovering from the anesthetic. One look at his unshaven face, and she knew what had happened. She was not pleased. Lahr was ushered out to see his son. He remembers the conversation with the nurse who led him to the New Arrivals room.

“What are you going to name him?” the nurse asked casually as they walked.

“I think we'll wait until he's eighteen—maybe we'll have to call him Lillian.”

Lahr's feeling about his second son was much the same as Jacob had shown for him. “You looked like a prune—the ugliest kid I've ever seen. Even uglier than me.” But the most unnerving part of the birth was not the sudden appearance of another mouth to feed or his throbbing head.

An old lady with a Bavarian accent approached him and smiled. “Oh! the grandpapa's very happy.”

In March 1942 Lahr was chosen to take part in the Hollywood Victory Caravan, a three-week whistle-stop junket, involving Hollywood's biggest names, to raise money for the war effort. The Caravan was symbolic of the curious foothold the professional actor had carved out in American life, a denizen of a dream world respected and relived in
every town in the nation. At a time when the movie industry was handing him only Bscripts, Lahr was thrilled to be included, because a Screen Actor's Guild poll of the sixty most popular entertainers had not listed him. The organizers of the tour realized that seasoned performers would give an audience more pleasure than the insipid starlets the public demanded on their polls.

The array of talent was astounding. The Caravan amassed the largest number of entertainers ever to tour the country. The performers who began the tour included Bing Crosby, Laurel and Hardy, Groucho Marx, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Jimmy Cagney, Pat O'Brien, Frank McHugh, Jerry Colonna, Desi Arnaz, Charles Boyer, Merle Oberon, Claudette Colbert, Joan Blondell, Joan Bennett, Faye McKenzie. For Lahr, it meant seeing and meeting many performers. As stars, most of them, like Lahr, operated in their own orbits and rarely mingled with a wide range of people. The keynote of the trip was fellowship—an emotion strangely alien to most of Lahr's relationships. He could speak with disdain of one of the famous actresses on the trip. “She had the ‘star' feeling—very aloof.” No one was more aloof, ordinarily, than Lahr; but surrounded with other performers, he had an unaccustomed opportunity for camaraderie that he rarely sought himself.

Each actor had a compartment on the train, with chaperones dutifully separating the men's section from the women's. The train was equipped with a barber shop, a dining room, and an observation car where the performers, along with the band, passed the early morning hours. When the Caravan came into a town, the actors made their way to a hotel in the town, and rested during the morning. A parade through the streets in the afternoon was a usual part of the ceremony; and the show in the evening—a three-hour extravaganza—ended with the stars and starlets going out into the audience to ask for donations. “The show was so big,” recalls Frank McHugh, “that someone like Marlene Dietrich could join us for a few days as she did in Washington and you wouldn't know she was there.” At the end of the day, the performers returned to the train. Dinner was served at midnight, and “good times” really began with the early-hour libations. “We hardly got any sleep,” Lahr recalls. “We had a doctor on the train who gave us sleeping pills to calm us down at night, and Benzedrine to wake us up in the morning.”

The trip held many highlights for Lahr. Perhaps the most vivid was his entrance into the White House with Groucho Marx.

Although Lahr had held the scepter of royalty in
Du Barry
, had mocked every form of authority in his early burlesque days, and would later impersonate Queen Victoria, he felt there was something both hilarious and marvelous about being invited to a White House garden party.

Lahr might have made it through the day unscathed, if he had not chosen Marx as his companion. Groucho, dressed in a seersucker suit and white-rimmed glasses, looked more like an Ivy League professor than the court jester he became on the Caravan. Lahr was a perfect foil for Marx. Groucho's quick, acerbic wit would defer to no one; too insecure and timid for this kind of humor, Lahr was a fine audience for his cigarsmoking friend.

The tenor of the day was proclaimed when Marx, McHugh, and Lahr stepped into a car driven by a well-dressed member of the American Women's Voluntary Service.

“Where would you gentlemen like to go?” the lady asked in upper-class tones.

“Is there a cathouse in the area?”

“We were a bit uncomfortable,” recalls Lahr, laughing. “But Groucho would overpower you. Maybe three or four of those jokes wouldn't hit, and then one clobbered you. He was always gagging. Groucho was never at a loss for words. He had tremendous confidence. If you weren't sure of yourself, he'd skewer you.”

Lahr was on his best behavior at the White House, and wishing he were not. Standing behind Groucho in the receiving line, both comedians had time to watch the attaché ask each member of the troupe his name and then announce it to Mrs. Roosevelt, who in turn would say, “It's a pleasure to have you here, Mr. ———.” When it came Groucho's turn, the attaché announced his name to Mrs. Roosevelt, who proceeded in her formal greeting. “I'm very happy to welcome you here, Mr. Marx.” “Are we late for dinner?” Groucho said.

The joke nearly reduced Lahr to tears of laughter; he cannot remember shaking hands with Mrs. Roosevelt, although he recalls biting his lip to maintain decorum in the receiving line.

The chandeliers and the shaded colonnades impressed Lahr with their splendor, but also with the irony of their lavishness. The White House was conservative enough, but to Lahr as well as Marx, there was a touch of Hollywood about the place—a world fitting itself to its own image. The spectacle was amusing, and the actors mingling with attachés and military leaders longed to deflate the self-conscious importance
which filled the House. Lahr kept his tongue; Groucho did not.

“I remember a general coming up to Groucho and me and asking where Mrs. Roosevelt was. You wouldn't have believed him—medals all over him. ‘She's upstairs filing her teeth,' Groucho said. The general walked away.”

At the garden party the Marine Band was part of the scheduled entertainment, and their music was a source of great amusement, especially to Lahr. “These Marine bands are always the same—and the one which played for us was composed of old men. They must have been in the band for half a century. They were God-awful.” Lahr cringes and cups his hands over his ears. “FDR wasn't there that day, and when the band began to play, Groucho turned to Mrs. Roosevelt and said, ‘No wonder the old man didn't come.'”

On the White House lawn, the performers had their picture taken with Mrs. Roosevelt. The photo is a curious one—all of these actors, so used to being photographed in public, are clustered together with the nonchalant anxiety of a high school class. Even Lahr, who professed to being indifferent about coming to the White House, is struggling to make himself visible from behind a starlet's wide-brimmed hat. “I was in the last row. Everybody was in front of me. Nobody knew who the hell I was.”

The problem of positioning was even more conspicuous in the parades. Lahr was a Broadway star, a face whose most popular image had been distorted beyond all recognition by a lion's mane. While McHugh recalls “parade time” as a general “bedlam” and a scramble for any car a performer could find, Lahr was always placed carefully between the cars conveying Cary Grant and Pat O'Brien. “You've never seen so many people. They'd be lined up—perhaps five feet from the cars. We'd round a corner and there would be a tremendous cheering. You'd hear ‘Hurray!' Then my car would pass, and suddenly, there would be a hush. Everybody was saying, ‘Who's this bum?' And then five or ten seconds later, you'd hear ‘Hurray.' That was Pat O'Brien.'”