Notes on a Cowardly Lion (7 page)

After the performance, he removed his makeup, washed quickly, and wrapped his damp costume in the towel he had brought with him. As he stepped outside the stage door, he saw his friends huddled in the shadows of the fire escape waiting to greet him. They clamored together, chuckling about their friend who stood there, half smiling, half terrified at their presence. A friend sounded a note on his harmonica, as they did at Crotona Park.

Hooray for Swedish

Hooray at last

Hooray for Swedish

He's a horse's ass …

“I'll throw pennies at you bastards one day.” The rest of the words could not be forced through his anger. They were laughing at his performance and his vague hopes. He threw his towel at them. It flopped under the fire escape. He pushed his way past the boys and stalked alone into the streets.

Lahr's anger dwindled quickly. His moment on stage—and watching the other performances from the wings—was so much more vivid than the blurred memory of jobs not four weeks in his past. When Berado approached Lahr to be part of a fulltime professional act called “The Seven Frolics,” he had no second thoughts. He did not know what kind of performer he could be. He had a loud voice, which qualified him as a singer; his athletic agility could have made him an acrobat; and, of course, there was the clowning. The thought of becoming a “Dutch” comic and using the familiar German-American dialect
appealed to him most. “I don't know if I was impressed with the idea of the stage or not. You know, when you're a kid your thoughts are on women. What attracted me more than anything else on stage was that you'd see the comedian holding the women around the waist and walking them across the stage. And I said to myself, ‘Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could do it.' Just to be around the women, that impressed me more than anything.”

Lahr, with his wild shock of black hair and his jagged nose, was no more convinced of his attractiveness than of his talent. The theater brought response and a special kind of excitement, but he never romanticized its appeal. The theater was a practical concern. “I liked it the minute I got into it because performing was easy, and I was doing something I liked. Any job I ever had, I lost. I was lackadaisical. I was all mixed up. I had no ambition
to be
anything. My idols were the Dutch comedians—Solly Ward and Sam Bernard—because I was born in a German neighborhood and knew the accents. I copied Solly a lot when I was a German comedian. In those days, I couldn't wait until I got on. I would have done twenty shows a day. It was like a shot of—dope? adrenalin?… When I began to work steadily and travel, I found I liked living alone. I didn't have anybody waking me up with the words ‘Get up and go to work.' I just wanted to get away. I wasn't worried whether my parents loved me or not. I wanted to make some money and get away from that type of life. I wasn't happy at home.”

Lahr and The Seven Frolics could not have picked a better year than 1910 for their initiation into the entertainment world. The year climaxed a decade of extensive urban development. Between 1900 and 1914, thirteen million immigrants, accounting for forty per cent of the urban population, would make their way from Europe; eighty per cent of this number would be engaged in industrial and commercial jobs. The economy mushroomed in the decade between seventy-five and eighty per cent, although the workers' wages did not increase in proportion to the mammoth profits. The new wealth created leisure and a demand for entertainment among the middle classes, while the lower classes, as Lahr knew so well, sought the relaxation of the theater after the ennervating demands of a day's work. From honky-tonks to side shows, men with a sense of public demand and a flare for publicity made fortunes in packing the harried, entertainment-hungry public into theaters. New York had over two hundred theaters by 1910. Lahr
and his friends did not know the figures, but they caught the spirit of possibility that filled the theater world. “Anybody could get on. There were even people who made a living getting the hook. Almost anybody could get a professional tryout. When I started, things were pretty bad, even when I did get work.” It was a seller's market; and that knowledge gave every performer, no matter how mediocre, hope.

Lahr entered show business in the salad days of burlesque. After the somber nineties, burlesque rallied until, in January 1910, it reached the pinnacle of its popular acceptance with the opening of the Columbia Theater in New York. The theater represented a decade of building by Sam Scribner and symbolized a theatrical circuit of about forty theaters extending throughout America's largest cities. They provided the highest quality of burlesque entertainment. Many followed Scribner's example and established chains of theaters. Lahr had seen the names of these circuits on billboards—the Western Circuit, the Gus Sun Time, the Mutual Wheel—vague, awesome terms. Each handled its own performers and booked its own acts. There seemed to be so many outlets for entertainment that Lahr was sure The Seven Frolics would succeed.

The tedium of waiting for bookings around the Fitzgerald Building on Forty-second Street was alleviated by the rumors of sudden success that came to performers with less talent, but more luck, than The Seven Frolics. Lahr was always ready to believe the stories. Berado needed only to mention William Hammerstein and his low-brow variety “Nut-Houses” to keep his troupe pacified when jobs were scarce. Hammerstein had proved that while talent was an important theatrical commodity, it was not always necessary. He made show business headlines by booking Conrad and Graham, the two girls who shot W. E. B. Stokes in the Ansonia Hotel. The figure Berado quoted to his troupe was correct; the girls, with absolutely no experience, headlined at three hundred dollars a week, billed as “The Shooting Stars.” Hammerstein also featured freaks like “Sober Sue” and offered a thousand-dollar reward to anyone who could make her laugh. The best comics of the day tried. Not even Sam Bernard or Eddie Leonard could bring a smile to her face, which was understandable, since, unknown to the audience, her facial muscles were paralyzed. Occasionally famous athletes like Jack Johnson the boxer or the Olympic marathon champion, Dorando, were booked into the Nut House entertainments.

The luster of these stories and the flamboyance of Broadway characters filled Lahr's imagination. He and his friends spied on the Lobster
Palace Society, which made the famous Rector's its meeting place. Each immigrant group had its own heroes, but Lahr admired them all—Diamond Jim Brady, whose thirty sets of diamonds were a glittering indication of Broadway's prosperity; Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew, factory workers from his neighborhood who set up a chain of nickelodeons and went on to fabulous adventures and fortunes in the film industry. The possibilities were exciting; they filled him with a voluptuary's dreams, unspeakable fantasies of wealth and leisure.

Lahr had no idea at fifteen what his comic image was or would be. “I guess I did copy Solly Ward. All German comedians copied someone when they were young. I learned ways of working and delivery. Maybe I copied a few of their mannerisms, not to a great extent, though. I copied ways of carrying the body, maybe a catch line here and there. Finally, I found my own method and threw all those other mannerisms away.” In 1910, the theater
was
comedians. People wanted to be amused and, at no other time in the history of the American stage were there so many experts at making them forget or, at least, laugh at the gross inequities of the age. Ed Wynn, Hal Skelly, Ben Welch, Clark and McCullough, W. C. Fields, and Weber and Fields were among the many who reaffirmed Lahr's decision to become a comic. His body, with its wiry, ungainly humor, his protean face, his need for affection made the decision for him.

“My appeal has been that people identify me with the common man.” Lahr did not analyze it like that in 1910. The comic milieu that spawned him and the rest of America's great comedians dealt immediately with the elemental emotions—lust, fear, appetite, greed, misery. These spoke to Lahr's experience; he found a satisfaction in laughing at things that had been painful for so long.

The humor of the first decade of the twentieth century cut deep into the paradoxical fabric of the New World. It was at once a criticism and an acceptance of America's ideals. Lahr remembers seeing Ed Wynn perform and watching him jibe at the rich who could afford the luxury of private education. “Rah! Rah! Rah! Who pays the bills. Pa and Ma.” Although Solly Ward was the one important influence on his early comic identity, Lahr watched a great many comedians, all of whom had something to teach him. Tramp acts were successful in these early years, introducing some of the theater's brightest stars—W. C. Fields, Lew Bloom, Nat Wills. These acts laughed at the inefficiency of government and the paradoxes facing an unsophisticated immigrant populace. Lahr recalls Ben Welch, the finest of the early
Jewish comedians, whose mangled monologues dramatized the immense difficulty that foreigners had in adapting to a new idiom. American society could match its optimism with unexpected terrors. Lahr saw something intrinsically funny in the malaprop, in the same way that random violence on stage took on a ridiculous perspective it didn't have in real life.

In its passion to be entertained, the American public encouraged every form of entertainment. Young people like Berado and Lahr could go on the stage without experience or polished material. The most accessible formula was the kid act, satirizing life in the classroom. The young performers could write their own material or crib it from various acts, supplementing their skits from the plethora of material in “business” books like Joe Miller's
Joke Book
. If they sometimes lacked the words, they knew well the tedium of overcrowded classrooms and bad teaching and were able to improvise. There was a challenge in this kind of formula routine; its proximity to the adolescent world made it an exciting vehicle for Lahr and his friends. Many entertainers who would become important to America's theatrical history began in these raucous, simple skits. Jack Pearl, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Bert Gordon (the Mad Russian) and Lahr were among many who first discovered the theater through these routines.

The Seven Frolics, conceived in urgency and propelled by hunger, got only sporadic work. “We were playing Keeney's Third Avenue (Thirty-third and Third Avenue), the smallest of the small time,” Lahr recalls, “when a fellow came up to our manager and asked if we'd like a job in a circus sideshow. That was a great break. We had no money for a truckman to get our gear to the railroad station. So we bought penny wheels and penny axles and carted it to the station ourselves. We went to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where we joined Harry Six's Greater New England Carnival. Our show was called ‘The Little Red School House.' The man who approached us in New York was also the pitchman for the sideshow. He'd go out in front and say, ‘See The Little Red Schoolhouse. Remember when you were a child. See the eccentric teacher, and all the boys. Have fun in the schoolhouse …' We also shilled. We'd stand in front of a sideshow and buy tickets for the games throwing the balls against the bottles or shooting. It was sort of a come-on. The Saturday after we arrived, we went to collect our pay from the pitchman who had gotten us the job. He wasn't there; he'd run off with our money. It wasn't very much, but we were stranded. All the carnival people—I think they were the kindest people I ever
met in my life—got together and helped us. They helped us, kid. They gave us a mess book—a $2.50 meal ticket so we could eat. I remember sitting on a wall in front of a city hall. One of the carnival people came along. He said, ‘Have you eaten, kid?' I said, ‘No.' He gave me a quarter. They even bought us a ticket back home. It was a great experience! It gave me an insight into the real camaraderie among people who are supposed to be the lowest in show business.”

Theater meant community; and despite the hard times, Lahr found the unity of aspiration and the fellowship exciting. He daubed make-up on his collar (even when he was out of work) so that people could see he was a performer. With the theater he not only inherited a profession, but also a place in the geography of Manhattan that was the focus for his enterprises. The Fitzgerald Building, an ugly sand-brown edifice whose hallways reeked with cigar smoke and dust, was the center for small-time booking agents and theater-chain managers looking for cheap new talent for their low-priced emporiums. There were other buildings where the big stars and famous theatrical magnates like Keith and William Morris operated their multimillion-dollar entertainment ventures.

Lahr rarely had the full round-trip fare to the Fitzgerald Building and back to Wilkins Avenue. The bus or the subway was five cents one way; Lahr often set out with only enough to get him downtown, trusting to the generosity of a more recently employed entertainer to get him home. Everyone congregated on Forty-second Street. The waiting was never lonely. Berado was there, and other young hopefuls like the aggressive, cocky Joe E. Marx, and a quiet, good-looking boy who came from his Harlem home every day, Jack Pearlman. The organizers of the theatrical groups were no more than eighteen, with only a few years of sporadic experience.

The meeting place was the Automat across the street from the Fitzgerald Building. There, deals were made, dreams plotted, acts revised. It was there that Pearlman decided to change his name to Pearl, and Irving Lahrheim became Bert Lahr. “We had no money,” recalls Pearl. “We had nothing, just little kids trying to make a reputation in show business. Bert and I were both in kid acts. I went up to his house. I used to say to him, ‘Cut off your name, I'll cut off mine.' Everybody said, ‘Watch this kid, watch this Lahr.' We used to compete. Whoever made the funniest face would win. Well, Bert won, and he never made a face.”

The Automat was an appealing hangout. It represented an
unlimited source of food. Occasionally an actor who had found work doled out enough nickels so the group could enjoy coffee and sandwiches. When there was no benefactor Lahr had to rely on his own ingenuity. Investing a nickel for a ham and cheese sandwich, he would wedge a piece of gum in the corner of the small glass door so that it did not close completely but gave the appearance of being shut. After that, it was every man for himself.