Notes on a Cowardly Lion (56 page)

The show was a personal triumph for Lahr. The critics were never more lavish in their praise. But in their ebullience over Lahr was a curious hint of the paradox: he was a monument in the face of disaster.
The New York Times
began its review:

If you admire Bert Lahr and it's un-American not to, you know—“Foxy” is for you … It [Foxy] does not fret over refinements of plot and characterization, but it wears its crudities with a grin and has delightful professional gusto. And can more be asked for in this vale of crises than to have Bert Lahr back on stage, mugging shamelessly or being as delicate as a viscount at an unexpectedly rowdy lawn party?

The review, like every other statement about the play, attested to Lahr's position in the theater; it also pointed out the curiously old-fashioned form of
Foxy
. The enjoyment was primarily Lahr's doing; and the structure bore his fingerprints too.

But
Foxy
raised an important question about book musicals. The inability to support their talent forced performers back to a careerist attitude. As a result, the biggest Broadway musicals—
Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof
—became star showcases.

Without new material, Lahr, like so many other stars, had to settle for
tours de force
. With Lahr, the pointed pinky, the mock effeminacy were hilarious traits that audiences had been viewing for nearly fifty years, but now they demanded more.

Blyden's dissent had predicted Lahr's reception and also the stalemate that lay behind it. “Bert honestly believed that if he came off well in the show, it would work. That's not true. An audience wouldn't come to see just that. They had to know they were coming to see a whopping big show. They've seen Bert be great. Now, they're more
interested in seeing Barbra Streisand, they're interested in the new ones. The reviews were bad for the show, great for Lahr. For
Foxy
to be good, everyone else had to score. That meant they had to score when he was on. When he wasn't on, it was pretty deadly. There was a time when theater could have worked that way; but, unfortunately, that time is gone.”

However, Blyden learned by competing with an old pro. “Bert found a huge laugh for me in the show. I would never have thought of it. He said it to me on stage. The audience is out there—sixteen hundred of them. He whispered “After the next line, say ‘umlaut.' So I said ‘umlaut,' and the audience screamed. Then he bumped the laugh further by reacting to it. I never would have thought of it. Who thinks of saying ‘umlaut' in conversation for God's sake? He does. He thinks funny. One day he came up to me. ‘You're saying “Oh” in front of a line. Don't say “Oh”—you'll get a bigger laugh.' So I took it out; and I got a bigger laugh.”

Blyden began to understand when Lahr was going to improvise and how to stay with him. “I could feel him when he was going someplace. I didn't know where he was going. He'd go a step at a time; and I would try and go with him. Every now and then, I'd blow it; and he'd be
livid
with me. And then he'd get over it. He gets mad on stage. And when
he
misses a big one, he'll get the most disgusted look on his face and say, ‘Well, I blew that one.' He broke himself up on stage. Sometimes, when he gets mad, he'll quit. He's finished until the next scene.”

Blyden, forced to play fast and loose, developed routines for Lahr to follow. “One day on stage I said, ‘I'm going to try and follow you, you try and get away.' Lahr replied, ‘Do anything you want.' The game of tag began and the audience howled. Lahr chuckled under his breath, ‘That's good, kid, thanks.'”

Foxy's
reviews were strong enough to sustain a run. To a constant theatergoer like Walter Kerr, Lahr's gestures had a poignancy beyond the outcome of the show.

In any case, the spectacle of Mr. Lahr calling “halloo” to the Grim Reaper is a frightfully moving one … and as I watched him reveling … I sometimes yearned for that kind of free association musical in which you could really black out a scene as Lahr does when a hard-drinking miner passes out at his funeral. Mr. Lahr leaps from his repose and struggles to get the sodden fellow up, primly explaining, “I'm taking this drunk off the whisky, and putting him
on the bier!” There is nobility, and a delicate sense of just how outrageously a bad high pun ought to be, in that.

Blyden's memories notwithstanding, Lahr was not the only focus of critical praise. Magazines lauded the show as well as its star.
(Time:
“The whole show is as cheerful as any show ought to be which rejoices in the presence of the funniest man left alive.”) Many shows since
Foxy
have lasted on reviews much skimpier, and without the prospect of a summer World's Fair.

But
Foxy
, which had struggled so long to get to Broadway, found itself strangled by a management problem.
Hello, Dolly!
had opened a few weeks before, and the Merrick office, stung with delight over its popular success, had little interest in promoting the last of its flock. The poster for
Foxy
remained unframed or mounted on Merrick's wall for a long time after the opening. As one member of the office recalled, “Even if
Foxy
had been a great show, nobody would have cared.” The management maintains that there were no theater parties for
Foxy
and no “hit feeling” about the show. Lahr felt differently. “It's a wonder we played as long as we did with the treatment Merrick gave us.”

Foxy
closed after eighty-five performances. When the final curtain fell at the Ziegfeld Theater, the house was full. The audience gave Lahr a standing ovation. In the dressing room, Mildred raged, ready to storm Merrick's office in hand-to-hand combat with the dragon of Broadway. Lahr, like a bartered bride, seemed more resigned. “We could have made it, if the producer cared. He had money for advertising he never used.” The Merrick office would offer as many reasons for failure as there could have been for success. The theater was in the wrong district, they claimed. Set apart from Broadway, it could not do any street business. All-time greats, they added, do not sell tickets.

The Ziegfeld Theater had been one of Lahr's earliest memories of Broadway; and now he wondered if it would be one of his last. He could still make people laugh, but what was the commercial appeal of his laughter? In 1932, he alone could sustain a mediocre show when the top price was $5.50 and the galleries could be filled for $.75.

Lahr could still marshal the energy and an enthusiastic following, as his reviews indicated. However, the best ticket was $11.40 and a balcony seat more than the price of a movie. His fans—the ones who recognized him on the street or wrote for his autographed picture—could not afford the price. Merrick's distrust of his product and his
unwillingness to market it reflected a planned obsolescence built into the machinery of Broadway. The star's commercial value rested, in part, on his past; and yet, each show forced him, like detergent, to be “new” or “improved” without changing the actual content of the commodity. Lahr's comedy was not obsolete; the format was. Having survived so many changes of taste, Lahr had reached a point where it was no longer a matter of taste, but of the comic material reflecting the emotional, intellectual tenor of the society. As a merchandizer, Merrick knew the value of brand names as clearly as Lahr; but he refused to experiment with the potential. Lahr was both the victim and perpetrator of that attitude.

George White, Lahr reminded himself, never would have treated him that way; nor would Ziegfeld or even Hopkins. The theater was cruder to its performers now; the producer was not so much a man of theater as a man of the marketplace.

“The next time I do a show,” he told Blyden, “I don't want all the responsibility.” Had he learned from
Foxy?
Blyden and Lahr's family hoped so. “He may not believe it. I really can't see Bert being anything but the focal point of the show. For Bert's own sake, he's got to realize that if somebody else—man, woman, dog, goat, and the whole play work—he's better off. But you can't ignore him; you can't deny him.”

Three years later, Lahr stood by the Ziegfeld Theater while a demolition team crashed into its dome and television newsmen prodded him for recollections. Not a nostalgic moment or a teary one—but rather an incomprehensible erasure of a theatrical era already vague in his mind. On television his face was now familiar—associated with a product more substantial than the laughter that sold it and made it a brand name. The Ziegfeld had epitomized the spectacular, grand design of an earlier entertainment in which the clown's blackout bits were usually larger than life rather than reduced (as now) to sixty-second miniatures. The generic term for the Ziegfeld type of amusement had passed to advertising as well—“commercial.”

Foxy
was not forgotten. In May of 1964, Lahr received the Tony Award for the best musical star actor. A small silver disc, the award gave him more satisfaction than any other accolade. Broadway was honoring its own past. The
Herald Tribune
reported—

Despite the sweep by “Dolly,” the biggest most prolonged
applause of the evening was reserved for the beloved veteran of the comedy stage, Bert Lahr …

As he left the American Theater Wing after the ceremonies, a wino emerged from the shadows. Lahr bowed his head and shied away. The man came closer. His hand was outstretched; his eyes riveted on Lahr's face. He held out a dollar.

“Here, Bert,” he said. “And thanks.”

Dad

“Bert Lahr has been chosen Stage Father of the Year by the National Father's Day Committee.”

1964

“You had 'em, Mildred. You raise 'em.”

Bert Lahr

RESTING ON HIS
chaise lounge in his Dior bathrobe, Bert Lahr is an imposing patriarch. His wife brings him sweetmeats and his glasses; his children sneak him salted nuts (bad for his gall bladder) and report their news, which he cannot decide is good or bad. From his reclining position, my father dispenses his mandates and misgivings. Slow to speak, he sees himself as a quiet ruler, the most observed of all observers. When impelled to action, he is a master of innuendo.

“Bert, will you call Jane and tell her to come home for dinner.”

Lahr casts aside his Afghan and resolutely folds his glasses over the Sunday crossword puzzle. He stalks to the phone and dials.

“Hello, may I speak to … uh … is … uh …”

“Jane!” Mildred yells from her dressing table.

“Is Jane there?… Well, would you tell her to come home. Dinner is ready, and I'm hungry.”

A ruler can sometimes forget his subjects, and Bert Lahr is not infallible. He has introduced me to his Players Club cronies: “I'd like you to meet my son, Herbert.” When I remind him that I'm “John” not “Herbert,” he corrects himself and continues, only to phone his first son long distance and announce, “Good to hear your voice, John.”

Friends, who have come to the house regularly over a decade, marvel when he emerges from his bedroom and greets them by their right names. But even my father, whose home is a benevolent dictatorship, understands the political havoc such slips of the tongue can cause. When he appeared on the Joey Bishop night-time discussion show in California, he reminisced about vaudeville and Mercedes but forgot Mildred and the children in New York. Mildred watched the
performance at home with clenched teeth. At the end of the show, Bishop interrupted his sign-off message to wave frantically at the camera. “Bert wants to say hello to his wife, Mildred.”

At dinner, he enters to music provided either by his hi-fi system or his collection of tapes, both equally mischievous to handle, and both the private property of Bert Lahr. With the family seated and the food steaming on the table, he is still bent over the hi-fi.

“Can you hear it, Mildred?”

Mother stares despairingly at the ceiling as the music tumbles out in decibels that make the water glasses shake.

“Yes—that's fine, Bert. Come to the table.”

The music, as we have matured, has become more subdued; but the memories of ragout and radio news, Mantovanni and jellied madrilène still linger. When he leaves the table (as he does five minutes before the rest of us have finished), he totters to his room where he immediately cuts off the music. Dinner is officially over.

From the seat at the head of the table, he has demanded and received the special privilege of watching football games on his portable television set while the family concentrates on their buttered peas. He has arranged a tape recorder under the table and then baited Mildred about the food (“You call this meat? This is petrified wood!”) until, to our delight, Mildred informed him just how he could dispose of it. There have been moments when he has gone into a bravura imitation of an opera singer and done the “Shimmy Shawabble” to show Jane that the twist was a burlesque invention. While lecturing us sternly about manners, he has mistaken his tie for a napkin.

He protects his small pleasures with the adamance of a divine right. He discovered the cigar in his seventy-first year with as much enthusiasm as the Manhattan Indians took to firewater. He keeps a box in his drawer; and each time he opens one, Mildred shrinks like a slug held up to a hot flame.

“They make me vomit.” “They make me nauseous.” “They make me really sick to my stomach.” Gasping for air, she leaves the room. Surrounded by the blue-gray halo of cigar smoke, Lahr puffs on. Mildred's persistence and his peculiar sense of responsibility evolve a kind of compromise. If she begins to gag, Lahr moves his armchair close to the air conditioner, holding the cigar into the artificial breeze. The air bellows the smoke into the room, although Lahr inhales contentedly, assured that the currents are taking the smoke into the street. If Mildred continues to complain or if the smoke makes it difficult for
even him to breathe, he retires to the bathroom where he finishes his Perfecto in peace.