Notes on a Cowardly Lion (49 page)

Panel discussions about the play were held on the stage after each performance. Lahr and the other actors took part in the talks, with literary personalities and critics spicing the discussion with contemporary analysis. Myerberg felt this theatrical innovation in a Broadway theater helped sell the play to the public. The debate fermented both inside the theater and beyond it.

Variety
and Walter Winchell, the most anachronistic wings of Broadway criticism, continued their attacks on experiment and ideas on the Broadway stage, prompting
The Nation
, an intelligent journal usually above commenting on the humdrum of daily theater columns, to remark on their aggressiveness—“a savagery even for them.”

While Myerberg was pleased at the controversy Winchell tried to create, Lahr was angered at his destructive remarks. “He did everything to castrate us.” A typical broadside read:

“Waiting for Godot” the dramatic whatzit which brilliantly discusses the philosophy of so-what is returning to Broadway. The history of frammis never had anything so rillerah. Undoubtedly the controversy will be revived, Samuel Beckett, the alleged author, was recently interviewed. The reporter, seeking an explanation of
Godot
, inquired, “When you have nothing to say, do you do what others do—go right on trying?”

Beckett's gloomy reply: “There are others who threw themselves out of windows after years of struggle.” (Happy pecans and merry almonds)…

The debate had interesting ramifications. If Winchell represented vindictive ignorance, another pugilist with literary credentials added his own kind of double-talk about the play. Writing without having
seen the production, Norman Mailer tried to run the play up a Freudian flagpole.

… But at the very least, the critics could have done a little rudimentary investigation into the meaning of the title of
Waiting for Godot
and the best they have been able to come up with so far is that Godot has something to do with God. My congratulations. But Godot also means “'ot Dog or the dog who is hot, and it means God-O, God as the female principle, just as Daddy-O in Hip means the father who has failed, the man who has become an O, a vagina. Two obvious dialectical transpositions on
Waiting for Godot
are To Dog the Coming, and God Hot for Waiting, but anyone who has the Joycean habit of thought could add a hundred subsidiary themes. As for example on Go, Dough! (Go Life!)

Mailer, who had quit the
Village Voice
a week before seeing the play, returned for an unexpected encore to register his disapproval of the production, which he found chi-chi.

Lahr often took part in the theater debates, but his outlook was hardly as elaborate as Mailer's. He did not offer the press any easy answers or account for the motivations behind his performance. When Berghof was asked by reporters, “What do you think Mr. Lahr means when he says he doesn't understand the play?” the director's reply would surprise the reporters and even Lahr himself: “I think he understands it better than any critic I've ever read, better than anybody who has ever read about it, and I think he understands it better than Beckett.”

The play lasted ten weeks on Broadway. Economic confusions between the cast and the producer forced an early closing of the show, which could have run throughout the summer and perhaps toured the country. Despite the short run, Beckett, at least, had been established in America as an important intellectual force.

The play had the shortest run, and was the most unconventional and the least financially rewarding of any of Lahr's major enterprises. Yet, those ten weeks live in his memory as a much longer time. When he thinks about the play, he will walk to his bookshelf and pick out Kenneth Tynan's
Curtains
. “Did you ever read what Tynan said about me?” he asks with an air of honest amazement. Then, placing the book in front of him, he glances over the words that have become the only
chronicle of his energy. Memory cannot isolate the event, but the printed page makes his performance and his satisfaction stand still.

With a magnifying glass he reads:

Ten days ago
Waiting for Godot
reached New York, greeted by a baffled but mostly appreciative press and preceded by an advertising campaign in which the management appealed for 70,000 intellectuals to make its venture pay. At the performance I saw, a Sunday matinée, the eggheads were rolling in. And when the curtain fell, the house stood up to cheer a man who had never before appeared in a legitimate play, a mighty and blessed clown whose grateful bewilderment was reflected in the tears that speckled his cheeks, a burlesque comic of crumpled mien and baggy eyes, with a nose stuck like a gherkin into a face as ageless as the Commedia dell'Arte: Bert Lahr, no less, the cowardly lion of
The Wizard of Oz
, played the dumber of Samuel Beckett's two timeless hoboes, and by his playing bridged, for the first time that I can remember, the irrational abyss that yawns between the world of red noses and the world of blue stockings.

Without him, the Broadway production of Mr. Beckett's play would be admirable; with him, it is transfigured. It is as if we, the audience, had elected him to represent our reactions, resentful and confused, to the lonely universe into which the author plunges us. “I'm going,” says Mr. Lahr. “We can't go,” snaps his partner. “Why not?” pleads Mr. Lahr. “We're waiting for Godot,” comes the reply; Whereat Mr. Lahr raises one finger with an “Ah!” of comprehension which betokens its exact opposite, a totality of blankest ignorance. Mr. Lahr's beleaguered simpleton, a draughts-player lost in a universe of chess, is one of the noblest performances I have ever seen.

“Did I ever tell you,” he says, closing the book, “that sometimes, when I crawled off the stage, I could hear the audience. They were gasping.”

A Decade of Moments

At this stage of life, I like to do important things … No actually, I don't want to do anything. I want to fish … I don't think there's such a thing as a good fisherman. There's just stupid fish. But fishing makes me tired, hungry, and sleepy. I throw off all my worries. I'm very fortunate but I still worry … At this stage of life, what the hell do I gotta prove?

Lahr to
Newsweek,
July 11, 1966

Bert Lahr should be preserved like a fine old wine, or in one, it doesn't matter which. As the years go along his tang gets headier, his lifted pinky gets daintier, his moose call to the great beyond gets mellower and mellower, and furthermore, he is beginning to carbonate …”

Walter Kerr on
Foxy

Getting old is harrowing
.

Lahr in conversation, 1967

SURVEYING THE LAST
decade, Bert Lahr can claim a number of successes, but not satisfaction. He has grown into something of a theatrical institution during the sixties; but the America that gave him fame now eludes his comprehension. The society is changing; and although Lahr cannot cope with the shift in values, he nonetheless has had to evolve with them. The youth of today, whom he excoriates like a Jewish mother for its protest and long hair, has adopted him. Walking on Third Avenue, young girls sport his face as the Cowardly Lion on buttons with the same laughing delight with which they wear mini-skirts. And Bert Lahr, potbellied and persnickety, has become Camp.

This public nostalgia disturbs him; it lacks the moral conviction to match the style. If it has affected the art world and high fashion, it has missed the theater. In the sixties, Lahr has tried the musical, the revue, satire, even the classics. He has succeeded; but no wide popular audience has been secured. “If they value me,” he asks himself, “then where is the support?” In England, he might have hoped for a knighthood and the freedom to play a variety of roles; in America, he can be thankful that the barometer of stardom—money and public
recognition—is still there. He cannot afford to experiment, although he talks of playing Falstaff or attempting Pinter.

Money and recognition—these two cornerstones of his comic activity—have also changed. Advertisements for potato chips have made more people aware of his face (and burlesque double-take) than ever before. He invented a catchword for the product—“de-laycious”—turning his comedy easily from art to marketing. Cab drivers stop their cars to yell, “Bet you can't eat one!”; grandmothers accost him like one of their own to ask if he really eats potato chips. (Taking his cue from Abe Burrow's baseball sketch and “Sawsie Dusties,” Lahr usually replies, “Don't eat 'em, they'll kill ya.” The public once again goes away satisfied.) These commercials, amounting to work more easily measured in minutes than days, earns him $75,000 a year, far more than a season on Broadway. Financial security, Lahr's
modus vivendi
, has become superfluous in the affluent society. The money he commands is beyond his needs; and yet he still requires a limitless economic horizon. He is proud to have survived and succeeded in this newest facet of show business: the television commercial. But he is perplexed. Does the star system, to whose emotional and economic axioms he has always subscribed, reduce itself to adding “personality” to products? His laughter was meant for people, not merchandise. The paradox has been hard for him to resolve. Even though his commercials are excellent and he has devised many of their comic situations, he is suspicious. “I wonder if these ads have been good for my career? Here's the strange thing, John: after all these years on stage, the biggest success I've ever had is in these trite commercials. It's stupid.”

Success, measured by his usual dollars-andcents standard, confuses him in ways it never did. In the days when playing the Palace was the theatrical zenith, money was synonymous with quality. The struggle was grueling; the reward well earned. Today, Lahr can watch young singers or undisciplined actors project themselves to millions of viewers, earning in a year the security he could never have imagined for himself in a lifetime. “I'm a mercenary,” Lahr keeps repeating when the family suggests possible theater ventures. “I'm a mercenary.” These words have been his banner and his explanation, but they grow increasingly hollow, even to him. Yet he is too old to change; his own financial demands must ultimately limit his talent, just as unwieldy economics have begun to smother Broadway. The theater that created the star can no longer afford him. Who can pay his star's salary plus ten per cent of the gross and still meet the other spiraling costs? Who
can convince a man who has spent a lifetime in the theater that the connection between professionalism and money is dubious?

Lahr's adventures in the theater over the last decade are a testament to the society in transition, whose changing tastes mirror the emergence of new values. The shows in which he played reflected not merely the drama of his memorable survival as a clown but also the mischievousness of his materialism. He wanted to work, but only if the price was right. The paradox rests as much with him as American show business. He has given glorious life to the stage; yet recalcitrant commercialism may also have contributed, unwittingly, to its process of decay.

Ironically, Lahr's stage career was sustained into the sixties by
Waiting for Godot
, his only “uncommercial” venture. The play led him to a classical repertoire. The prestige and satisfaction of
Godot
whetted his appetite. At sixty-two, Lahr began to confront the classics—a challenge that led him (in spite of himself) to do more justice to his career than most of America's revered funnymen. His musical-comedy talents had always hinted at insights beyond the play. If he took liberties, his fidelity to the author's intentions gave the masterpieces new life. He did Molière and Shaw on television, and in 1957 he starred in Georges Feydeau's classic French farce,
Hotel Paradiso
, in the part Alec Guinness had created in England. Peter Glenville, who had directed the English production, saw Lahr as a spirit who gave a dimension to farce that Guinness, with his dry wit, could not bring out.
Hotel Paradiso
was a tale of romantic infatuation and confusion that unraveled with the precision of a mathematical equation. To Glenville, a Feydeau farce had the frenetic momentum of a Mack Sennett two-reeler. Lahr's athletic comedy and his maturity fitted the necessities of farce as Glenville outlined them in
Theater Arts Magazine:

The play has more in common with art and discipline of the ballet dance and acrobat. It also, of course, has to be illumined by the colors and personality of the actor, the latter has always to keep his eyes on the exact requirements of the scene. Rhythm, accent and timing are more important in farce than personal idiosyncracy no matter how diverting … When a great comedian lends his talents to these requirements, the results should be, in its own genre, a work of art …

French farce had gone out of fashion in the same way that low comedy in America gave way to the more sophisticated pretensions of
plays with “substance” and “message.” Glenville had been attracted to Feydeau precisely for the reasons many audiences spurned him: he spoke to the belly, not the head; he was good-natured and superficial. “He appeals to the child in us.” This of course was Lahr's terrain. The clown image, the anti-hero, had its resurgence in postwar American literature, but not on stage. The comedian had either intellectualized his role, like Chaplin, and lost the low-comic spontaneity; or, like Jerry Lewis and Milton Berle, developed into a sloppy, vulgar popularity. Lahr saw in
Hotel Paradiso
a chance to keep his burlesque spirit alive in a new form. He did not realize how far from burlesque farce would take him or how close the vagaries of the genre paralleled comic taste in America, which had dwindled to gracious and tepid archetypes of middle-class life.

If Lahr had never played farce, his artistry contained the dramatic elements the genre demanded. “The main point in classical farce is that the performer should have an enormous seriousness,” explains Glenville. “Boniface in ‘Paradiso' is not a farce part. It needs expertise, timing, sincerity. Lahr had a wonderful personality for farce. I had always been interested and amused by the underlying gloom of his comedy. His age, his attitude, his natural look toward a formidable woman. He had a pathetic, half-defiant stare toward dominating women, and also a naughty appreciation of the younger ones. This was all given to him. This was his own atmosphere; and it was absolutely right.”