Notes on a Cowardly Lion (60 page)

There's no reasoning with him. The memories of the past, his own sense of theatrical tradition evoke no response.

“You want tradition? I belong to a club—the Players Club—that ninety per cent of those guys couldn't get in. What do I do when I go down there, anyway. Talk show business. Cut up a few touches? None of those fellows are my friends. Most of them haven't been in the theater for years.”

A telephone call interrupts the discussion. A Lambs Committee is forming in protest. Lahr speaks to the organizer. “It's no use, Lew. Thanks for your letter. Anything to tell them? Yeah—tell them to go fuck themselves.”

He hangs up and starts considering his future. “A couple of days a week I'll go down to the Players with Frank McHugh. And I'll take up painting. It'll pass a little time.” He stops and looks at the list of performers he had planned. “I would have liked to put on that show.”

We're going down to the Players—a long taxi ride from Eighty-fifth Street. Peering out the window of the cab, he sees the Plaza, which brings back the memory of The Mayfair and Billy La Hiff's Tavern. “If they tear down the Plaza that will be it. We'll go to Spain or some
nice place. Lester's secretary rented a villa in Greece for five hundred dollars a year. If it's that reasonable, maybe we could go there. All I need is a boat. I'll fish.” He shakes his head in disgust and, gazing out the window at new buildings, says, “Will you come and see me if I move out of the city?”

We ride the rest of the way in silence.

Dad's says he's doing a movie; but today he's scheduled for a medical examination for the company's health insurance. It is standard procedure for film companies, he says. There are more small humiliations in old age. He has worried about the examination all week. The last time, his blood pressure went up ten points in the doctor's office.

I wait for his call, but it doesn't come until late that evening.

“How did it go, Dad?”

“Oh, not too well.” His voice lowers. “I didn't sleep too well. My blood pressure is up.”

“Are they going to insure you?”

“Well, we'll see.”

The next morning he calls in a sunny voice to say that things have been “firmed up.”

“I met the producer at the Dorset,” he reported over the phone. “It's not a great part, but I think I get the sympathy, even though I'm around the edges.” He is talking about
The Night They Raided Minsky's
—a film about a type of burlesque he never knew. He hasn't worked for a while; and the script is better than average. He is interested.

“I told him I wouldn't do it unless the part was built up. He wouldn't commit himself. So after lunch, I asked him to take a walk up Fifth Avenue, figuring that people would recognize me. Sure enough, we started walking and people stopped. I could see them saying, ‘That's Bert Lahr.' That showed him I was still a drawing card.”

He writes out his lines to memorize them. He puts the sheets of paper away in his desk when we arrive. At dinner, he gets mad at himself for not retaining names or missing a key line in his script. “Isn't that terrible. I can't remember things. Yesterday, you know, I took an
injection of B-12. Well, I called up the doctor to ask him a question and I forgot. Luckily, I remembered about an hour later. I'm in a hell of a fix. I see people in a restaurant—intimate friends—and their names slip my mind …”

“Dad, you were doing that twenty years ago too.”

He goes on as if he didn't hear me. “And I don't remember their names. You can't look at them and say, ‘Pardon me, what's your name again.' I don't know. I just don't know. When I was young I could look at a script and get it just like that.” He snaps his fingers, adding somberly, “Now, it's labor. It's the goddamnedest thing. I can't remember … (forgetting)… pseudonyms.”

“The dog doesn't like me. I pet him. I feed him. I play with him. He won't even come near me.”

“It's just that when people are around he hasn't seen for a while, he gets excited,” Jane explains.

“Here, Barry. Here Barry.”

“Dad, that was our last dog. This one's Merlin.”

“What kind of a name is that for a dog—Merlin. Who's Merlin?”

“It was named for Oscar Wilde's grandson—Merlyn Holland.”

“You can't call a dog Merlin.” He swishes his shoulders like a hairdresser. “Here, Merlin. Here, Merlin. If I walk the dog, I'm not calling him Merlin. Suppose somebody stopped me on the street and asked me what the name of the dog is. How can I say Merlin? I'll call it Toto. Here Toto, here Toto.”

Dropped in on Mother and Dad today. Dad was in rare form. “This dog is a pest. Stop it, Merlin! All he wants to do is nip … Stop it!… Oh … Merlin, cut it out!”

We talked about his new movie, and he mentioned my criticism. “When you write the word ‘hooker,' it sticks out like a sore thumb, John. Use classical language—‘harlot' or ‘woman of the streets.'”

I apologized for not visiting more frequently. He tried to listen while patting the dog.

“Don't be silly. You're young and active. We don't expect you to be around all the time. We can't do that. We go out. We come home. We sit—that's our life now … Stop that, Merlin! God, this dog's a pest.”

A Beginning and an End

“During the last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one's own management, but today that is quite Impossible …

…Are you still fasting?” asked the overseer. “When on earth do you mean to stop?” “Forgive me, everybody,” whispered the hunger artist; only the overseer, who had his ear to the bars, understood him. “Of course,” said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with a finger to let attendants know what state the man was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hungry artist. “We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably. “But you shouldn't admire it,” said the hungry artist. “Well, then we don't admire it,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn't we admire it?” “Because I have to fast, and I can't help it,” said the hungry artist. “What a fellow you are,” said the overseer, “and why can't you help it?” “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “Because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.…”

Franz Kafka, “
The Hunger Artist”

AUGUST 12
,
1967
.We are going on an outing. Dad is taking me to the park. We are not visiting Central Park, which is right outside his apartment, but Carl Schurz Park, six blocks east on the River at Eighty-sixth Street. It is nearly sixty years since he has seen it. We are going by cab because he can't walk very far, and this will be the longest walk he's taken in a week. Our trip will take three quarters of an hour.

As we start for the elevator, I notice Dad is carrying his camera. “I'm gonna take pictures of where I lived.”

We get into the cab. He says in his adenoidal tone reserved for headwaiters and cab drivers, “I want to go to Eighty-first and First; then to Eighty-eighth between First and York. Hold your flag, Bill, I want to take a few pictures.” He always calls cabbies “Bill,” and I look at the real name of the driver: Seymour J. Million, number 4907.

“I'm lookin' at your face,” says number 4907. “You're very familiar. You're in the pictchahs?”

Lahr waits for a second. “I've done some pictures.”

The cabbie stares into his mirror. “I just can't place the face. You know I had Steve and Eydie in here last week … One of your ranks died a while back—Clara Bow.”

“I was never in silent pictures. I didn't know her …” But Clara Bow isn't so easily dismissed. Dad's eyes stop focusing on the storefront signs and people, and solidify somberly into a quiet thought. Clara Bow has been dead for two years. He didn't know her, but others, many others who represented his theater world, have passed away. Buster Keaton, Spencer Tracy, Sherman Billingsley, Louis Shurr—all dead, all younger than he. Now he prefaces all prospects for the future with a rap on wood saying, “God willing.”

The cab comes to a sudden stop, and Lahr peers out at a brownstone walk-up whose first floor is now a Chinese laundry.

“That's where I was born, John. I think it was—let me see. It was the second floor in the back, or was it the first?”

“It was the top floor in the back, Pop.”

“Yeah, I guess it was—the top floor in the back.”

He slithers out of the cab carefully and slowly, grunting as he pushes himself with his camera—a Japanese model with an instant light meter and automatic lens adjuster—out into the sunlight.

A minute or so later he is back. “Eighty-eighth and York.”

“Right down here, John,” he points due north on First Avenue. “Right down here, is it on this block?—No. Right
there
is where I went to school.” He is pointing to a vacant lot, soon to be covered by a modern apartment building.

He looks at the lot. “I guess it's been torn down.”

The façades have changed on First Avenue. “That used to be a candy store, where we'd load up before school. It was called ‘Cheap Jack's.' “

We are at Eighty-eighth Street now; and he is pointing in amazement at a corner bar now under Irish management. “That used to be Schmidt's.”

We stop in front of another brownstone walk-up with dark green iron lattice work on the doors and an elaborate fire escape that cannot camouflage the building's drab exterior.

“We lived on the first floor in the back.” He stares at it from across
the street. He has no desire to get nearer, but paces back and forth getting a good angle for his camera shot. Crouching low with his camera propped on the top of a parked Chevrolet, he focuses. The rim of his hat, usually tilted at a rakish angle over his face, is pushed upward like a press photographer's. He takes the picture, and then checks the intricate adjustments to make sure. The building has been recorded; he can file the picture away in the large wooden box of slides he keeps near his desk. He is satisfied; picture taken, mechanism checked—we move on. Grit from the hot summer day irritates his eyes; tears trickle down over the large pouches. He bends his head over the camera to examine the lens. The flesh beneath his chin expands in fine layers like pizza dough.

We have come to see the places of Old New York he has mentioned so often with his family at dinner. We have come here finally to pinpoint the store where, for a nickel, you could carry off a pail of beer and for the same price get a night's entertainment at the nickelodeon. Two blocks east is the park, bordering the river. He has reminisced about swimming the muddy currents and diving from the wooden pylons. He played in the park; he practiced tapdancing before he ever went on the stage. We have come to see all this.

We walk slowly down Eighty-eighth Street. He carries the camera in the crook of his left elbow like a baton. He can still remember the names of the friends he has not seen in sixty years, but not what they looked like.

“Tommy Lark lived right there, and Solly Abrahams lived across the street.” He points to the large corner building on York Avenue.

“Now the nickelodeon was around here.” He stops to survey the two corner stores. “It could have been that one there, too,” he says pointing to a butcher shop on the corner of Eighty-ninth.

“This must be the place,” he says, deciding on the butcher shop. “It cost five cents at night, three cents in the daytime. It was run by a contortionist called ‘Snakerino.' He dressed in snakeskin and performed between shows. They played silent movies, and there was a piano. We sang along as the pictures flashed on the screen. That's about all I can … oh yeah, and they had planks for seats—just wooden planks.”

He points to the white traffic line down the center of York Avenue. “They had trolley cars here and right there is where I was hit. I had to have fourteen stitches.” He taps his forehead.

“Let me see, I can't remember this street so well, but I know I came here often … it's all changed so much. I just can't visualize it …”

As we come to the park, he is looking for the ferry slip where he used to dive. He can remember the water and how he hid his clothes behind the rocks and spent hours leaping off the mossy logs, fighting the strong current.

“See, it was over there. It was right where the highway goes, I guess. I remember it used to be right down by the House of Good Shepherd … right over there.” He stops and smiles. “It was a home for wayward girls. They used to throw us money on a string and ask us to get cigarettes for them … Sometimes they used terrible language.”

As we walk into the park, he comes to a halt. “Let's stop here. I want to rest a minute.” He looks at his legs. He doesn't say anything about them except, occasionally, to recognize their independence from his body by announcing, “Legs!” and then shaking his head in disgust.

We pass Gracie Mansion, the residence of the mayor. It is being repaired so we have to detour around it.

“Now
this
was not here when I lived at Eighty-eighth … No, I don't remember this at all.”

I lead him back to the front of the house where a tarnished bronze plaque gives its history. “Built in 1799.”

A boy, palming a football, yells to his friend who bobs and weaves a few feet ahead of him. “Go out ten and cut to the trash can.” He completes it. Lahr watches.

“I was never very good at football. I used to make believe I threw the discus down where the ferry used to be. I mean I really threw it, but it was only a rock, you know.”