Notes on a Cowardly Lion (50 page)

The obstacles farce posed to Lahr's comedy came from his theatrical training. He was used to creating laughs and inventing comic moments within a sketch. Farce was more rigorous; the performer had to bind himself to the author's strategy, where (as Glenville points out) “the lines are not merely jokes or even witty. The laughter is in the play's architecture—the momentum and situation.”

Having discovered a reality within the drama of the absurd, Lahr was now faced with achieving the stylization necessary for French boulevard comedy. He approached
Hotel Paradiso
like a swimmer, eager for the plunge but fearful of the chill. “Bert had a natural suspicion that these things were not in themselves funny,” says Glenville. “Practically every line I had to tell him where the laughs were. I knew that he could get a laugh on his own, but not a relevant laugh within the structure of the play. One had to work very hard never letting him be irrelevantly funny by means of funny faces, funny noises, little comédie details lovely in another context, but not right for
Paradiso
.

I said to him, ‘No, Bert, if you do nothing there, just look up innocently and say, “Come in,” you'll get an enormous laugh. The audience knows that on the other side of the door is an infuriated wife who you've escaped from. A little innocent look at the door is funnier than a grimace.' He was nervous because I would
never
agree that he could make a funny face where he thought there were going to be enormous passages of silence.”

Left to his own devices, Lahr might have turned
Hotel Paradiso
into a Columbia Wheel romp. Glenville pushed him into painful and uncharted areas of humor. He had to concentrate, as in
Waiting for Godot
, on the author's rhythms, not his own. He had to bridle his passion for play. Yet there were moments in Feydeau where the instincts of the author and the burlesque-trained comedian meshed. “He had a wonderful rapport with the audience,” says Glenville. “This immediate contact was part of the natural vocabulary of his comedy.”

The discipline of adapting to the precise demands of French farce was important to Lahr's development. He could be controlled more easily with a vehicle somewhat alien to him, like
Waiting for Godot;
but in a play whose intention was laughter, it took immense patience and acuteness to steer him away from formula responses. The effect of Glenville's tutelage is seen in Lahr's reactions. “Farce is almost a ballet. You overplay, but with sincerity.” Lahr acknowledges the proximity of farce to tragedy, the momentum of random events skirting cruelty for hilarious conclusions.

As he told
Newsweek
before the play opened in New York, “I'm anxious to see how the Feydeau thing goes. For one thing, I prefer situations to gags. In farce, you've got to be real. Outrageous things may be happening, but they're happening to a believable person. The moment you start to clown, the fun is gone. That isn't the rhythm of farce. You just keep going and let the audience play it.”

Hotel Paradiso
posed another problem for Lahr in terms of simple energy. The play was wildly athletic—and a group sport besides. Wolcott Gibbs referred to the direction as “roughly comparable in intricacy to coaching a football team.” As Boniface, the hen-pecked philanderer who seeks out a flea-ridden hotel for his tryst, Lahr had to leap upstairs like a teenager for the telephone, crash through chairs that collapsed as he took a seat, and escape nimbly through the side door. In a fast-moving Broadway revue, his energy carried the momentum of the entire comic situation. In farce, it had to be choreographed to the comparable frenzy of the other actors. Lahr could not simply invent
comic movements. Often, gestures had to be superimposed on his comedy to fit the situation. He could not roam the stage. His script indicates how unnatural the discipline of the genre was. Unlike musical-comedy scripts or revue scenes, it is marked in his own hand with reminders of where to stand and what gestures to make. “Take circular out of pocket.” “Throw a boot on desk.” “Climb on trunk.” “Sit on settee.”

Angela Lansbury made her first stage appearance in
Hotel Paradiso
, as Angélique, Lahr's wife. She remembers her amazement at watching Lahr work. “Bert had a whole set of things, a
shtick
… it was almost as if he were working by numbers which I knew nothing about. He would pick out of the scenes what he considered to be the funniest moment, because in his book that was the point you were aiming for and that was the laugh. Glenville, on the other hand, would say to him, ‘Yes … but don't you realize that there is an area here which is just as funny although it isn't immediately recognizable to you? Will you work on this area of the scene?' This was confusing to Bert. Working with him from the beginning, one could see it bothered him. He would often mutter to me, ‘I don't understand what this is all about.' But he was so open-minded and so trusting. Lahr was in an area where he was on thin ice. He was prepared to be shown.”

Glenville's success with Lahr was as immediate as it was complete. Lahr respected the director's knowledge of the theater—Glenville had translated
Hotel Paradiso
and had a successful acting career of his own. “Glenville was a great help to me. If I didn't grasp the meaning, he'd come up and show me. I'm not hard to direct, in fact I welcome direction; I search for knowledge, but not from people I know more than. He knew about acting, writing, play construction. He was thorough. He didn't learn his craft from a book.”

By cajoling Lahr and appreciating his additions to the play, Glenville surmounted the immense difficulty the language of farce played on Lahr's loose verbal patterns. In
Waiting for Godot
, Beckett's controlled prose was sparse; its philosophical implications made even those words difficult to speak. In
Hotel Paradiso
the situation was reversed. Language spilled out with insignificant and excessive banality. Lahr liked the vivid phrase, but his comic language functioned at its best when concise and distinctive. As Glenville pointed out in his
Theater Arts
article—

The characters don't utter witticisms or felicitous phrases but talk in the flat, exact tones of the middle-class to which they belong …

The onslaught of speech was difficult for Lahr. Angela Lansbury watched him with the lines. “Bert got terribly upset, terribly frustrated, absolutely tied up in knots. It took him weeks to learn the part. He'd walk around like the Mad Hatter repeating, ‘I've got to learn it by rote, I've got to learn it by rote. Once I learn it by rote, I can forget about the words!'”

A stage manager was assigned to help him. “In the beginning,” recalls Miss Lansbury, “he didn't understand the other areas of realism in farce. Lahr would say, ‘What would I want to do
that
for? You mean I do nothing there?' Then Glenville discussed it with him. He finally agreed. ‘All right, I'll try it.' You could see it was an education for him; it was like playing Restoration comedy. He was afraid to depend on the words; he thought he had to
do
something. He didn't; he found out …”

If Lahr had to contend with dainty fobs and tea sets in
Hotel Paradiso
, the play also provided him with vivid low-comic pleasure of writhing like a skewered fish when a steel drill pierced the wall of his hotel hideaway. Lahr lingered on the tip of that drill like a go-go dancer on a bar, pinioned in strenuous pain and curious pleasure. The image of Lahr shifting his weight with each revolution of the drill is theatrical history in itself. “The serpentine movements were his invention,” says Glenville. “Where the actor had to sustain one long sight gag was much easier for him. He loved it; and he understood it. The direction and his instincts were hand-in-hand.” Where once Lahr would have caterwauled and mugged, his voice now mounted gradually to his familiar bellow, his face dissolved into a montage of emotions. As Walter Kerr recounted the event, his face exhibited “every shade of terror, mortification, ecstasy, and refined paralysis …” In matters of the heart, Lahr was also allowed to indulge his passion for extravagance. Wearing tailored suits and speaking with clipped diction, Lahr was an improbable lover. Given a moment of intense passion with his mistress, Lahr's ardor expressed itself in words that were its denial: “I'm seething with molten lava.” The hypocrisy of marital righteousness shines through Lahr's façade of concern when he exclaims, “Treachery, doubleeyed treachery.” Kerr, in fact, noticed Lahr indulging Everyman's sense of make-believe in the part. “Mr. Lahr looks so happy when he thinks his wife has been kidnapped. You may want to share his bliss.”

Glenville had wisely allowed some of Lahr's outrageousness to prevail. He was, after all, a French bourgeois being caught with his pants nearly down. As Harold Clurman pointed out in
The Nation:
“The
New York production [of
Hotel Paradiso]
is louder, faster, closer to burlesque. The changes … help our audience which can more readily accept departures from realism when they are unmistakable.”

Lahr's memory of the show strictly concerns the reaction to his comedy. “I liked
Hotel Paradiso
very much—the reception was tremendous. The audience screamed.”

The audience's delight in seeing Lahr cavort and the burlesque machinery once again greased for action was best expressed by Brooks Atkinson, who ended his review with Mehitabel's words from Don Marquis's
Shinbone Alley:
“Wotthehell, wotthehell, there's a dance in the old dame yet.”

Lahr's energy and isolation were apparent to the cast. “Bert was very much alone,” explains Angela Lansbury. “He would talk and chat. He loved the camaraderie; but he still was apart, continually worrying. Although the part was physically grueling, I was never conscious of his age. He was like an indestructible man. I always remember him in his dressing room, taking off his jacket, and all he'd have on was his dicky. I thought, my God, how did he keep up his weight.”

Lahr was an important tutor for the other actors, although he cannot believe that people learned from him. And yet, years later, when Miss Lansbury sent him a Christmas card reading “To Bert—who has taught me all I know,” he saved it for his scrapbook. His presence provided a discipline. “He taught me about the craft of comedy,” says Miss Lansbury. “He taught me about the signposts and props that hold up a funny situation and how you build it. The rules have to do with movement. I can never forget him. He'd come off stage worrying like a bird dog. He defended and protected those comedy moments which he knew were sure laughs like a soldier with a bayonet. And we learned; none of us ever dreamed of breaking the rules. We learned, therefore, how to get our own laughs. Now, on the stage with
Mame
or Shelagh Delaney's
A Taste of Honey
, if I didn't get a laugh or someone else misses a laugh, I know what to tell them.”

For Lahr, the theater world went on long into the night. “They had a whole set of places they went to,” says Miss Lansbury. “They moved in a circle of people and places I knew nothing about. Downey's … Gallagher's … The Stork Club … Mildred always wore a mink coat. Suddenly, after a show, you realized that he was a big star.”

At home, the star mystique was rarely in evidence. On the surface, its pertinence referred only to Lahr's billing and the politics of getting the right table at “21.” Lahr had never been forced to defend the
system and he never analyzed it: from the beginning stardom gave him a life he felt could only have been possible in America. The struggle, the diligence, the generosity of reward were all part of something he vaguely understood as the American Way. Everyone who surrounded him—from friends to the hairdresser who arrived monthly to tint his hair brown—acknowledged the same beliefs. If Lahr believed in democracy as an institution, he saw no conflict with the privilege by which his “stardom” insulated and set him apart from the public. People, he knew, respected him for his talent. The money they paid into the box office was a token of their respect. Lahr's attitude about his profession paralleled his feelings about income tax. The more he could make, the more he deserved. Once during a family debate about the caliber of Broadway and our desire to see him perform in outstanding plays, Lahr put a decisive end to the discussion with a capsule summary of his philosophy: “Put me in a jock strap, and if I entertain people for two hours—it's a good show. I'm not an artist, I'm in business. Let a hundred thousand people hate my show; if it's a hit, that's all I care about.”

Angela Lansbury and the cast of
Hotel Paradiso
tolerated Lahr's attitude with the same kindness his family did. “He was very conscious of his star status and the very special attention he received. He's one of the old guard. They don't make them like that any more. There are no men coming up like Bert. Bert is one of the last of that special group of American performers. I think they deserve the star treatment; and one can't help but give them first place consideration.”

Although
Hotel Paradiso
boasted a popular star, good notices, subtle direction, it could not withstand the prospect of a hot New York summer and public taste. It closed in early June. Lahr's post-mortem on the play reflects the sad dilemma of burlesque farce, which not even his mastery could overcome. “Farce has nothing to say, no special significance. The audience roars with laughter; but when they leave the theater, there is nothing to think about. They've tried other farces since
Paradiso;
none of them have succeeded. They're too contrived. The only way it could hold up would be as a novelty in repertory.”

Lahr's first summer in repertory (1960) attested to his conviction that low comedy could exist only as a novelty. Touring with the American Shakespeare Festival, he took the parts of Bottom in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
and Autolycus in
The Winter's Tale
(which was
later dropped for economic reasons). Other comedians had tried the classics: Bobby Clark took a running stab at Restoration comedy; Jack Pearl once played Lear. However, Lahr was the most successful clown to adapt to the classics (and perhaps the only person to win the “Best Shakespearean Actor of the Year Award” without any knowledge of Shakespeare's writings or his tradition). Lahr's low comedy found an outlet in Shakespeare that commercial theater denied. Just as Shakespeare's famous clowns Tarleton and Kemp gave way gradually to more subdued clowning, so laughter in America, to be tolerated, had been forced to mind its manners.