Notes on a Cowardly Lion (53 page)

On opening night, the family was in the audience and the spirit of nostalgia—even to the young—was unmistakable. At the end of the performance, Lahr in tuxedo and Miss Walker in evening dress sang a jaunty old-fashioned duet. When they took their bows, my father looked down at the audience to the fourth row, where we were sitting. It was the only time he acknowledged us from the stage. There was a thrill for us in that gesture.

“Hostility” could not salvage
The Girls Against the Boys
. The show lasted two weeks—a victim of material neither contemporary nor incisive.

In his next show, S. J. Perelman's
The Beauty Part
(1962), Lahr embodied satire pertinent to the contemporary society. In it, Perelman, who had sent the Marx Brothers through a series of merry escapades and who admired Lahr as the “last of the great clowns,” satirized the emerging middle-class preoccupation with culture. Perelman created a series of loosely connected vignettes in which the eager son of a rich garbage-disposal manufacturer marches into the world to meet culture in all its arenas. Voltaire had sent Candide to test his ideals against the world in much the same spirit.

Perelman claims that the play was born when an elevator operator, recognizing him as the famous
New Yorker
satirist, confided, “I'm having trouble with my second act.” He set about creating a play from a few of his New York short stories, using his special ear for the hilarious dead word and his precise eye for the dishonest. As a playwright, Perelman once defined his growing understanding of the craft, an explanation with special pertinence to his appreciation of Lahr. “A playwright is a tailor—he has to fit the pants to a man who will stand in front of a triple mirror. The actor has to get up and withstand the scorn.” Writing for Groucho, Perelman had learned the vicissitudes of the comic mind; Lahr was a different experience. “Groucho was distrustful of me because he thought I was too literary. We had constant fights about this subject. ‘Oh yes,' he'd say, ‘I like it, but what about the barber in Peru?' This was a fear of his—that the barber in Peru, Indiana, wouldn't understand the literary references. But with Bert Lahr, for
some happy reason, my material attained some kind of secondary value. He was able to take what I wrote and interpret it perfectly.”

Lahr portrayed five of Perelman's gargoyles, from a lady editor to the omnivorous agent-type whom Lahr knew so well. Perelman's fascination with cultural consumption had correlatives in Lahr's frame of reference. His children, growing into maturity, had surprised him. His dream of financial security for them was contradicted by their cultural interests. His daughter had become a sculptress, creating forms that astounded his sense of proportion. (“What's that? You mean that's a woman? That's no woman I've ever seen!”) His son showed an interest in writing. (“Do it in your spare time.”) Lahr himself had contemplated taking up painting—a pastime he later acquired, turning out lions to satisfy public demand. (“Of course, I'm not as good as Cagney. I need technique. Tonight, I'll try a flower. You think I could get money for these? No kidding!”)

The predicaments of the characters were as familiar as the general cultural boom. He understood the forces of greed and ego that whittled at their hearts. His favorite part was Harry Hubris, a conniving theatrical agent, a subject on which he was as outspoken on stage as off it. The judge, Herman Rinderbrust, appealed to him because he confirmed Lahr's worst suspicions about the legal system and the undermining of law and order. (“Some thug kills a guy and runs into a house. He could have enough dope to turn on Pittsburgh; but the police have to knock first and state their business. What is this, Amy Vanderbilt?”) The fine points of justice escape him, but his reaction to the fraudulent judge mugging in front of TV cameras is genuine. Even Nelson Smedley, a character frozen in paranoia about a vague Communism, brushed with Lahr's life. No comedian should ever be held to his political beliefs; but Lahr had been enlisted for good causes and bad. He rarely discriminated, justifying his appearance to testify as a character witness on behalf of Senator Joe McCarthy's right-hand man, Roy Cohn, in a suit brought by the attorney general's office in 1964 this way: “Well, I followed Cardinal Spellman.”

The rest of Perelman's cultural brigands were as humorous as the ones created for Lahr to portray. Perelman spared few targets. A book publisher and lecturer, whose company—Charnel House—specialized in big movie sales and promotion hokum left little doubt as to Perelman's prototype. Emmett Stagg, the publisher, is quick to acknowledge his real-life identity. In a phone call for the purpose of luring a
potential novelist (writing the story of the Civil War “as seen through the eyes of a Creole call girl”) into his establishment, Stagg confides:

Harry, I've got a book. No, I'm not going to let you read it. I'm just going to tell you one thing. (Chuckles.) It'll be a tidal wave, and I'm letting you in on my surfboard. You've got first crack at the movie rights for three hundred G's
.

Perelman could skewer Establishment celebrity in a line. As Emmett Stagg says, “In the aristocracy of success, there are no strangers.” Perelman also lowered his sights on foundations and the art sponsored by philanthropic money. A sculptress, played with tight-lipped ferocity by Charlotte Rae, creates objects in Castile soap on a Proctor &Gamble Fellowship. The hand of commerce sullies every aspect of the arts: a Mondrian painting turns into a bar; an action painter sells out to Hollywood for a percentage of the gross; an art collector buys her paintings so “they don't clash with the drapes.” Even Milo Weatherwax, Perelman's lecherous millionaire, shared with Lahr the vacant prestige of sending a son to Yale. But unlike Perelman's character, Lahr never knew what year of college his son was in.

When
The Beauty Part
tried out in Bucks County during the summer of 1961, it was apparent to Lahr that he had finally found a vehicle that cuffed the ears of his audience without bludgeoning them. The show needed reworking, but Lahr had complete faith in Perelman, the only living satirist who could bring tears of laughter to him on the printed page. Even before Lahr went into full rehearsal, he was telling the press: “This is the funniest material I've ever had.” When Jane and I hitchhiked to Bucks County to see the show and camped in the producer's corn field, my father joined us, eating hamburgers and telling us how to build a better fire. The fact that he took time off from work was significant to us; the image of him staring into the flames, his arm around Jane, his tweed rehearsal cap pushed to the back of his head, is memorable for its sense of quiet confidence.

Perelman and Lahr seemed an unlikely team. I remember them sitting in a coffee shop across from the Shubert Theater in New Haven when the play began its pre-Broadway tryouts in 1962. They confronted each other in avid discussion. Perelman, with brush mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, fitted the image of a dry littérateur, or a well-preened buyer for Sotheby's. Small and quiet, he spoke carefully, with a hint of hardness in his voice. Perelman accepted Lahr's suggestions and his worry with stoic kindness. Perelman's mind, like his choice of clothes,
was careful and stylized. Whatever his emotions, his image to the world was one of aloof propriety. Their rapport was immediate. In private, the civilized veneer of that relationship was sometimes questioned. “He's rough. He's rough. He wanted every line to stay just the way he wrote it. Finally, Noel Willman, the director, told him before we came into New York that some of them had to be changed.”

In New Haven, Perelman stayed close to the theater while Lahr took small tours of the Yale campus. From his Taft Hotel suite he photographed New Haven. He had paid his son's tuition; and now the property was his too. His own education had been a failure. But staring out at the campus he could see his accomplishment. He had brought his family a long way from the desolate possibilities of Yorkville. Yale was as stylized as his English shoes. He liked its customs, and its quaintness.

Serenaded by the Whiffenpoofs at Mory's or standing on the steps of the library, culture and “the top dollar” seemed hand in hand. He had opened many shows in New Haven, but never ventured inside the campus. Now, professors stopped him on the street; students from an academic world he could never imagine asked for his autograph. His work had created all these opportunities; the institution seemed to exist as a suave and polished reminder of his labor. Yet the ultimate joke and pathos about Yale, as for Perelman's Harry Hubris, was that the institution was valued as a commodity. Hubris, pointing to young Lance's university letter-sweater says, “Back to the ‘Y' and take a cold shower.” Lahr's work was a business that generations with more leisure and opportunity might study as art. But, like Hubris, he saw himself as a product, and the world as a marketplace where the gaudiest object earned the highest bid.

The show had a great many difficulties on the road: it was uneven, wordy, and, for Lahr, precariously political. The play's final gesture was money flung in the audience's face—as venomous a satiric statement as Broadway entertainment has ever seen. Milo Weatherwax, the millionaire patron, entered carrying a bassinet.

Yes, I'll fess up to same, hardened cynic though I am. (Clears his throat) Friends, this little bundle of happiness is everybody's joy. We must cherish it—share it with us, won't you?

In New Haven, people rushed up front to grab it. The moment was the culmination of Perelman's intellectual disdain. Lahr's munificence brought laughter and indulged his private fantasies, while, at the same
time, disturbing him. “I said things out there that were strongly against my politics. I didn't agree with many of Perelman's comments, but the man is adept with absurdities. He makes people laugh. I don't think the actor should voice his own opinions on stage. I don't think it's very important that I understand everything or give my views.”

Because Perelman turned burlesque situations to literate ends, Lahr referred to
The Beauty Part
as “egghead” entertainment. He was secretly suspicious, but there was a barometer by which Perelman could tell Lahr's sentiments. “He wore a cap at rehearsals, and when he became genuinely devoted to a comic suggestion, he would automatically turn it around like an old automobile racer.” In New Haven, many of Perelman's characters, like the woman editor—Hyacinth Beddoes Laffoon—were fleshed out. “I wrote the thing about Fleur Cowles, but by the time Bert translated it, it wasn't campy or at all offensive. I meant it to be offensive in another sense. Many comedians would have set your teeth on edge. Lahr didn't. He was portraying an old bitch there, a domineering old woman who kept knocking off the heads of her assistants.”

The sketch, according to Noel Willman, began brilliantly but didn't go anywhere; the weight of responsibility fell to Lahr. “He had wonderful ideas about it. He'd do something and one would say, ‘Bert, that's marvelous!' He'd stammer, ‘What did I do?' You'd think he really did not know and you'd wonder how to get him to do it again. This happened several times. There was one moment when he came around from behind his desk and sat on it. He's discussing a magazine idea:

A naked girl tied to a bed post and a chimpanzee brandishing a whip. No more punch than a seed catalogue.

“Bert used to do a thing there that was marvelously observed and imaginative. It had something to do with the way women with a choker necklace would suddenly free their necks from them. That didn't come from comedy, it came from acting. It was difficult to tell him that. He would get alarmed because he couldn't be quite sure what you wanted. You'd try and get him to do it again. I'd say, ‘No Bert, that's not what you did before.' He'd say, ‘Show me, show me.' He would try and do it, but it wouldn't happen. Because you would go at him, he would then go off in tangents and suddenly do things which were too extreme, too much, often vulgar. Bert had exquisite taste; it was when he tried to intellectualize, like remembering something he had done, that he went wrong. The same was true of his suggestions. The lines he would go
home and think about were invariably no good. If he suddenly improvised a line in rehearsal or performance it was invariably marvelous.”

At times, Perelman's ear for pompous verbiage had just the right meter for Lahr's nasal, baritone voice. When Milo enters to female squeals off stage, he says to his wife:

Now, look here, Octavia, I just had to give our French maid a severe dressing down …

However, Lahr had difficulty with some of Perelman's convoluted literary cadences. Perelman's combination of hifalutin English and Yiddish jargon could keep Lahr's exuberance from taking control. When Lance discovers to his chagrin, that his fortune comes from garbage, Milo replies:

Steady on, lad. After all, think of the millions which, were it not for our kindly ministrations, their homes would be a welter of chicken bones, fruit peels, and rancid yogurt.

Perelman struggled to adapt his most baroque rhythms to Lahr's vocal range. The tension was healthy but frustrating. Perelman's language took on an economy and dramatic impact it sometimes lacked on the printed page.

The play was well received in New Haven, but ran aground in the second act, unable to build to a proper explosive conclusion. Despite these worries, Lahr never was more confident of his material.
The Beauty Part
was his first comedy to venture so blatantly into the area of political statement. He felt a kind of creative danger in the play. He was also playing five different roles, most of them departures from his usual rogues' gallery. On the closing night in New Haven, I watched him rush to catch the midnight milk train to New York. Talking over his shoulder, his make-up still on, his valise trailing half a shirt sleeve—I was overwhelmed by my father's swelling energy, the hope that buttressed the hard work ahead in Philadelphia and New York.