Notes on a Cowardly Lion (39 page)

The script was finally rewritten to give Lahr a song and a sentimental scene where the old comic shows the young one how to be a professional.

Off camera, the same struggle was taking place. “Berle was watching the picture very carefully—it was his picture.” This attitude led to conflicts. The first was the day in which Lahr's “sentimental scene” in a hospital took place. “We shot all morning. I came in early to see what I was going to do. I look out by the camera, and there is Berle. He stayed there all morning watching my scene. I was so upset I blew my lines. The only way it got into the picture was that I convinced him there were no laughs in the scene. I don't think he knew the difference at that time. It's just as much value getting interest and sympathy as it is to get laughs.”

In another scene, where Lahr and Berle did a song and dance routine together, Berle protested and almost brought the two performers to blows. “When we were doing this song and dance together, I had on a Sulka tie with a little design in it. Berle objected to the tie because he
said I was trying to take attention away from him.” Lahr capitulated, but the experience remained “one of the most unpleasant situations I've ever had in pictures.”

When Lahr came to Hollywood to do a remake of
Rose Marie
(1954) with Ann Blythe, Howard Keel, and Marjorie Main, he found that he had again been “oversold.” He had a fine part—a Mountie who never got his man—and the picture was being directed by his good friend Mervyn LeRoy. LeRoy called him to his office when he arrived in California.

“You're riding in this one, Bert.”

“Riding?” replied Lahr, already upset. “I get dizzy sitting on a foot stool. I don't want to get on one of those things. I don't know how to steer 'em.”

“Louis Shurr said you were up every morning in Central Park riding.”

“To feed the pigeons. I don't go near animals.”

“Well, Bert, you're riding in this one. Go out to the back lot and learn to ride a horse.”

Lahr's first confrontation with the Wild West was painful. “To a cowboy, if you don't know how to ride a horse, you're a square. When I got to the back lot, the cowboy in charge kept me on a horse for fully two hours. Well, I have a fear of heights, you know. When I got off, I could hardly walk. I came home and my posterior was completely raw from saddle sores.”

The next day Lahr hobbled into LeRoy's office.

“I can't get up on a horse. The only way I'll do it is if you get me foam rubber and put Malibu tights on me so I can sit on the horse without getting sore.”

Lahr became the first member of the Canadian Mounted Police to have foam-rubber underwear. The results were astonishing. “When we did the picture, of course, they got a double for me because I had to ride very fast. But I did have to come in on a horse, and then go out on one. They'd cut to my stand-in, who would be speeding away. They tell me the biggest laugh in the previews was my exit on horseback. I came in all right, but going out, the camera stayed on me a little longer. I couldn't hold the saddle. With rubber underwear, I bounced about a foot off the saddle.”

The part required even more athletic prowess. Lahr was chased by
a woman of low-comic aplomb, Marjorie Main. Their song and dance number was an athletic jaunt that required Lahr to evade Miss Main's aggressive passes. Technical problems proved disastrous.

“In motion pictures, you've got to be on your mark to be photographed because of the lighting. There were certain places in this number where we had to hold and sing the lyrics. Marjorie was not adept at it, and, of course, song and dance is my business. When we were rehearsing I was always on my marks, but when the cameras rolled she'd always get me off it. There was a big oak mantlepiece, and I was supposed to fall back against it. They had to cut out a large chunk of the mantlepiece and insert rubber, painted to look like the wood. I kept getting off my mark every time. Finally, Mervyn said, ‘Don't worry, Bert. I'll come around and get you in a close-up.' We started shooting again; I did the song, and then fell back against the mantlepiece. I missed the rubber and cracked my head against the oak. I finished the song with a gash in my head. When I looked out at the camera, I saw Georgie Stoll, the musical director, rolling on the floor with laughter. It wasn't funny.”

While on location, Lahr wanted to take advantage of the fine fishing in the Rocky Mountains. Despite his fear of heights and loathing of horses, he set off with some friends and a guide to find fresh streams at higher altitudes. The cowardly mounted policeman in
Rose Marie
was never as full of trepidation as Lahr on a mountain trail. “The trail was five feet wide. I was petrified. I remember each turn. And on the way down it was harrowing. The horse looked around at me as if to say ‘Who is this bum?'” Lahr cranes his neck to the side and points his nose arrogantly in the air, nostrils flaring. “When we got to level ground, the horse made a beeline for the corral.”

There were some consolations. “You know I can make noises like a moose.” Lahr makes a moose noise. “On the way up the mountain, we saw a deer. I gave my moose call. It started to move toward me. The guide offered me twentyfive dollars a day to call deer.”

Lahr's last completed movie,
Ten Girls Ago
(1962), was an experience that confirmed his cynicism about films, and left him with a special sadness about the inevitable change in comic tastes. The film was never released. But Eddie Foy, Buster Keaton, and Lahr, who provided comic relief for the rock 'n roll love story, were a significant part of the American comic tradition.

The trio met at Grand Central Station. It was like a family reunion. Lahr had almost grown up with Foy; and while he had not known Keaton until 1931, he had seen his original family act, “The Three Keatons,” at Hammerstein's Forty-second Street while waiting for work in his pre-burlesque days.

Lahr first met Keaton on the back lot of M-G-M, when the flamboyant figure was riding the crest of his popularity. Keaton's dressing room was called “Keaton's Kennels”; his personality paralleled the name of his quarters—carefree, playful, and exuberant. Lahr's company had been requested at a dressing-room banquet of venison steak. His price of admission was a barrel of beer. This first raucous evening cemented a relationship that was carried on intermittently through the years.

Keaton's fall from stardom was as famous as it was precipitous. Like all of them, he had tried commercials, TV, grade-B films; but he had not weathered the changes in entertainment fashion. His stoic face, once silent in survival, now looked like a gutted building. Yet what amazed Lahr was not Keaton's history, which was part of theatrical legend, but his tranquillity. He envied Keaton's contentment. “He never bemoaned the fact that he'd lost stature. I remember him telling me that he went to Berlin where they were running his pictures, and that he was still a big star. He seemed very satisfied. He had a lovely wife and a nice house in California. He talked a lot about gardening. Years ago, when he was married to the Talmadge girl, he was kind of a playboy, but by now he was a solid citizen. He used to drink a lot; but, with us, he'd only have an occasional beer. He talked about his pantomime—he was very theater wise. In the last years, he was making a pretty good living.”

Keaton's body seemed brittle; in his youth, Lahr had watched, amazed, when Keaton, wrapped in a gunny sack, was thrown around the stage. The instincts were still there; but his body was no longer as agile. Keaton brought along his ukelele, and accompanied himself when he entertained his friends.

The three comedians, together after three decades of association, seemed to counterpoint one another. Foy was already baiting Lahr about an old stage humiliation. While the others stood immobile and tired, Foy was ready to spring into a buck and wing. With arms extended, he did a pantomime of a soft shoe. Keaton, unlike the others, was distinctly rumpled, tired, and uncommunicative except for an occasional carefully considered sentence.

Lahr did not make the movie out of pure artistic considerations. “
They came to me. I read the script. It wasn't good. They were giving me a three-week guarantee for a tremendous amount of money. When I read the script, I realized they couldn't get it done in twenty weeks. It was a real amateur situation. Everything was a montage shot when one scene fades into another. It takes a long time to set up a montage and light it. They had at least one hundred of them. So, right away, I knew. They needed somebody to play the other comic part—I suggested Foy.”

What Lahr did not realize was that Foy, typically nonchalant, would accept without reading the script.

“Eddie read it on the train. He phoned me from Albuquerque. ‘I don't want to do the picture!'”

On the train to Canada, the three comedians discussed ways they could improve the film. “You should do the hanger bit,” Lahr told Keaton. “You know, the one where you get mixed up with the paper and glue and everything. You can invent something.” They laughed about ad-libbing, with Foy reminding Lahr of the quick talking he had had to do when he followed the Hickey Brothers in Texas. “We had a hell of a time,” says Lahr. When the customs inspector came through at the border, Lahr turned to Keaton: “Did you bring the cocaine?” Keaton's face held its deadpan. “The customs man looked around quick and realized who we were; I don't think he liked it too much.”

The picture was as much of a fiasco as the three men had expected. Although the company hired an “ace” cameraman, Lee Garmes, who filmed
Gone With the Wind
, it had not found a director until the last minute. There were only to be two sets: a park and a delicatessen. The story involved a show that was going to be put on in the delicatessen. “One day during the first week,” recalls Lahr, “the writer got in a fight with the scenic designer. The writer was yelling, ‘It needs red paint in this scene.' The scenic man kept saying, ‘The red will clash with the costumes.' That night the writer snuck onto the set and splattered the scenery with red paint.”

Dion, the popular singer who struck out on his own after a series of successes with a group called “Dion and the Belmonts,” also had a three-week guarantee; but unlike the other performers, he was signed to do a coast-to-coast tour after his picture contract ended. The miscalculation about the time it would take to direct and light the sets meant that by the time Dion's three weeks were up, the love interest's role was not complete. The answer: change the script. In the end, Lahr had to sing the title song—a love song to the young girl.

The three comedians tried to put order into a full-blown disaster. There were moments of nostalgia only they could understand. There was a tacit sense of expertise between them. A reporter on the Toronto
Telegraph
recorded an incident with a naïveté that must have read strangely to the three veterans:

At one point, Dion, who seems to worship the old-timers, came over carrying a policeman's night stick. Lahr took it from him. Then he remembered a line from an old vaudeville (or possibly burlesque) routine.

“Stop in the name of the station house, stop,” he said with a mock snarl. Then he turned to Foy, “Remember that?”

The film took six weeks to make, during one of which Lahr was bedridden with pneumonia. “They kept calling me up and asking me when I would be out to the studio. Finally Mildred said to them, ‘Do you think you could be funny with 104º temperature?'”

On the fifth week, the comedians' salaries were not delivered on time. Lahr called his New York agent, who tried to pressure the production company. They were always elusive. Finally, Lester Shurr called Mildred. “Go out there and tell Bert and Eddie not to shoot.”

It was a ten-dollar cab ride to the studio, and when Mildred arrived Lahr and Foy were in the middle of a scene. “I saw a woman in the back waving. I yelled ‘Cut,'” recalls Lahr. “I said to Eddie, ‘Who's that?' I yelled, ‘Whaddya want Mildred?' She says, ‘Get off, get off.'”

Foy still laughs at the incident. “If you could have seen Mildred standing there as belligerent as a policeman, yelling for us to stop work, you would have laughed too.”

Luckily for Lahr, the assistant director, sizing up the situation, called a lunch break; otherwise, the production company could have taken legal action against him. Lahr, Keaton, and Foy received their money that day, but they were never paid for the final week's work.

Despite the debacle, there were memorable moments. Lahr played a few scenes with a Bassett hound—one of his most pleasant memories. “The trainer evidently trained him with a whip. I'd come on the set with a pocket full of meat. When the dog could hear my voice, he'd start to whine. I wanted to buy him, but they wouldn't sell. He got to love me, you know. The dog just looked at me with loving eyes, and his tail would wag all the time. He really loved me.”

Back to Broadway

There is no place in the adult musical plays for the extravagant clowning of Bert Lahr … The shows in which Bobby Clark, Ed Wynn, Willie Howard and W. C. Fields used to appear could not compare artistically with Oklahoma! (or Annie Get Your Gun). In point of fact, the clowns generally appeared in revues which have become victims of technical obsolescence since America became swamped in television
.

By abandoning buffoons, the musical stage has lost one of its most legitimate assets. They belonged to the musical stage because they, too, were larger than life and inhabited a fantasy world. They were as legitimate as the music, dancing and decor
.

Brooks Atkinson
,

Introduction to

The American Musical Theater
(1967)

LAHR
'
S EXPERIENCES IN
Hollywood after
The Wizard of Oz
and
DuBarry
crystallized his love of the stage and his faith in Broadway. However, the Broadway to which he eagerly returned in 1944 was already changing. There had been fifty-three new musicals in 1927, when Lahr made his Broadway debut; three years later the number had dropped drastically to twenty-seven, and by the year of
Seven Lively Arts
, 1944, there were only eleven. Musical
comedy
, Lahr's métier, was in decline. Like Hollywood, Broadway was beginning to concentrate on romantic fantasy.