Notes on a Cowardly Lion (8 page)

Pearl called Lahr “Dog-face.” Their prankish association lasted a lifetime, with Lahr receiving phone calls in the thick German dialect of Pearl's Baron von Munschausen. Pearl recalls the tenor of Broadway life from the bottom. “Those jobs weren't there all the time for you. And when you did get one, you'd bargain. I'd say, ‘Can you make it $37.50 instead of $35?' The manager would say, ‘Take it or leave it.' So you took a $35-a-week job. Bert and I were very close. He never played any tricks on me, but the fellahs were always trying to make a little jealousy between Bert and myself. They'd say, ‘He's doing better than you are.' But we were such good friends we didn't care.”

Pearl's superstitions made him the brunt of many of Lahr's schemes. Pearl believed that if he was touched on the ear it was bad luck, and that he had to touch a person back to neutralize the curse. He once chased Lahr ten blocks up Broadway to break a “spell.” Another time Pearl and Lahr convinced a crony that a bowl of fruit would buy him an evening with a beautiful Indian. The boy bought the fruit; but when he arrived at the appointed place, he was chagrined to find an Indian of the wooden cigar-store variety. Lahr and Pearl shared the food and a good laugh.

The jokes and reminiscences overlook the hunger. Pearl used to line his shoes with cardboard to prevent the soles from wearing out; Lahr remembers the humiliation of his threadbare pants. He camouflaged the holes by walking casually with a newspaper behind his back.

In the evenings, if he had enough money, Lahr would leave the warmth of the Automat and set out for a theater where a favorite entertainer was playing. One November evening, while he stood gazing at a poster of Sam Bernard, his newspaper in its usual position behind his pants, a man approached him. Lahr remembers his careful diction. The man asked if he was a performer; when Lahr said that his specialty was Dutch comedy in a school act, the man expressed still keener interest. “He said he'd like to help me. He could see by my pants and by how I talked that things weren't going so well. He offered to pay me five dollars to show him my act. ‘Professional services' he said.”
Lahr found himself accompanying the gentleman to his hotel. “He told me that he'd play the school kid.”

Using the man's walking cane as a ruler, Lahr went into his routine; the man sat silently, watching Lahr's movements. “I remember how he looked up at me and said, quietly, ‘Hit me with the stick.' I was confused. ‘You're some kind of fruit!' I said to him.” The man persisted, putting two more five-dollar bills on the table. “I didn't know what to do. I told him I'd call the cops. He kept saying, ‘That's not very theatrical—Bert. Preserve the illusion. Preserve the illusion.' When I tried to run past him he pushed me back. I'll never forget it. He said, ‘Remember, my friend, you are an entertainer. You are owned—by managers, by agents, by the public, by me. Hit …'” Lahr was ready to swing at the man, when, instead, he suddenly kicked at the man's groin. He vaulted the table and made for the door. He ran downstairs into the street, his throat dry, his head feverish. He went back to the Automat, and waited in the yellow light alone, until the last customer had left. “Sometimes in those first two years, I didn't come home at night because I was afraid to tell my mother I wasn't working.”

There were other humiliations. “A young comedian called Sid Gold and myself tried out at the Amphium Theater in Brooklyn. We did a twoact. The Seven Frolics had split up, and there wasn't much work around for me. When I got to the theater, I had a stomach ache. One of the performers told me that cherry brandy soothed the spasms. I went around to a bar and had two before the show. I went back to the theater to put on my make-up. In those days you didn't put on pancake, you put on all kinds and blended them in. We used what they called “flesh color” and put on a little rouge. When I touched my cheek, my skin seemed to hang apart from my face. Gold asked me how I felt. I said ‘Fine.' We got ready to go on. I remember hearing our cue and coming out on stage. I got out there and the lights and the people blurred in front of me. I couldn't say anything. Gold kept adlibbing. I tried to speak, but what came out was incoherent. I could hear the audience laughing and coughing but I couldn't see them. It was the first time I couldn't see them. The manager yelled at us from the wings, ‘Get off the stage, you punks.' We tried to keep from going. He brought the curtain down on us and pushed us off the stage. I remember what he said when I tried to explain. ‘Don't waste your breath on me, kid. You'll never work the Amphium again. Get your things and get the hell out of here.'”

Two weeks after that disastrous performance, Lahr was approached
by the diminutive Joe E. Marx to play the Dutch comedian in a kid act. Marx, a veteran of five years of school acts, had wangled a big booking at the Hippodrome Theater in Chicago. The Seven Frolics, Lahr recalled, averaged ten dollars each. “You could live in a boarding house for five dollars a week, then they'd give you ‘night-lunch.'” But Marx's offer was more promising than any Lahr had ever received. The Hippodrome was a well-known vaudeville establishment with continuous performances from one o'clock in the afternoon on. Lahr had played the cheapest of vaudeville theaters, where three acts were interspersed with a nickelodeon show. “You could get in for a dime; and we'd get three or four dollars a day.” The Hippodrome was outstanding in comparison, despite a grueling five shows a day. Lahr had worked harder. “When I worked Jersey City with The Seven Frolics, we played two theaters in the same town. Four shows a day in each theater. We'd go from one theater to the other in horsedrawn carriages. We got a meager sum, and we dressed in the boiler room.” Vaudeville theaters were notorious among the performers for their bad conditions and the cruel pragmatism of the management. The Hippodrome was a big city theater; and the Marx's troupe could expect a better stint. The price was $350 for nine players with the cost of scenery, costumes, and travel coming out of the wages. In order to defer traveling expenses and break up the trek to Chicago, Marx booked a week at Gluck's New Castle Theater, in New Castle, Pennsylvania.

When the troupe arrived at New Castle, they were tired and inadequately rehearsed. The act did not go over well. After the performance, the manager called Marx into his office and informed him that all he could offer was three hundred dollars. Marx took the fifty-dollar cut in salary. This was not unusual theater practice. “There used to be a saying in vaudeville—‘Don't send out your laundry till after the first performance.' In those days, the manager could come backstage and hand you your publicity pictures, and say, ‘You're canceled.' If the manager was a kind man, he'd give you your fare back to New York. If he wasn't, he was not obligated. There were no dressing rooms in many of the theaters; you had no protection.” Marx was forced to play Gluck's New Castle for two weeks in order to make enough to continue to Chicago. In that time, Lahr was not so much obsessed with the exploitation of the performers as with one of the girls in the act, a pert blonde called Dixie Dunbar. She encouraged him, but Marx had laid down strict rules about dating. Nevertheless, Lahr persisted, much to the annoyance of Marx, who finally confronted him in the hotel lobby.
“I said there was no sketching! I'm fining you a buck.” Lahr talked back, but before he could finish a sentence, Marx punched him. The fight lasted less than a minute, with Lahr at the bottom of the skirmish. The battle didn't diminish his affection for Dixie. Lahr recalls watching her from the wings. “An acrobat who was also on the bill came up to me, and asked what I thought of her. I told him how she kept quiet when you talked to her and how kind she was. The guy followed us to Chicago and ended up marrying her!”

When the troupe arrived in Chicago, news of their performance at New Castle preceded them. The Hippodrome had canceled their booking. Marx, who also did a single act, got work at seven dollars a day. The wages fed the others.

Lahr and a friend took a room in a sleazy Southside hotel. After two days, their money ran out. They confided their despair to a lady who lived next to them on the third floor. Janet was her name; Lahr remembers her tattoo, the money she kept wedged in her stocking, which peeked out of a kimono smelling of perfume and cheap silk. The night Lahr and his friend confessed their dilemma Janet was drunk. She asked them to bring their luggage into her room and talk about it. Finally, after a few drinks, she made a suitable proposal. “Why don't you boys sleep with me!” Lahr tried not to smile. “I thought to myself ‘the guys are never going to believe this.' But she was plastered and pulled us down on the bed beside her. Anyway, she was bigger than me. Then she passed out. I looked at my friend. He looked at me. We got undressed, put our clothes over our valises, and went to bed.”

Lahr did not get much sleep. Janet tossed on the bed, her body slipped close to him. He lay awake. “I was thinking about the job. I'd been stranded in Massachusetts, in Albany, and now Chicago. It wasn't funny. I was thinking about Wilkins Avenue … and how my mother cried that time. Every once in a while Janet would toss from one side of the bed to the other. I could hear my friend snoring, then I felt the money, like a knot of wood, against her leg. I was very quiet; I slid my hand over her thigh. I reached for the money. I felt a hand—a hairy one. I looked up. My friend was trying to do the same thing. He grabbed the money; and we jumped out of bed. I was laughing too hard to get dressed. My friend whispered, ‘What are we going to do with the bags? They'll make us pay downstairs.' So we opened our trunks and put everything on. I had two pairs of pants and four shirts on. My toothbrush was in my pocket; I stuffed my second pair of shoes
under my belt. The noise woke Janet. She was still drunk but she knew something was wrong. We ran downstairs. I dropped a shoe. I wanted to go back for it, but I could hear her screaming down the hall for the manager.”

Outside they counted the money—seven dollars. The next morning Lahr swallowed his pride and wired his mother for ten dollars. When it arrived the following day, he borrowed another ten from a friend and bought a ticket home.

Lahr's failure in Chicago convinced Jacob that his worst paternal suspicions were correct. “I want a son I can be proud of. I want you in the business.” Lahr had no successes with which to rebut his father's claims, no tangible accomplishments to justify three years of perseverance. Nearly seventeen, Lahr nurtured private memories more thrilling and deliciously vulgar than he could express. It made him at once ashamed of show business and eager for a stage career.

But Lahr's reputation among performers around the Fitzgerald Building mounted. Five months after his return from Chicago, Bert Gordon asked him to join an act he was framing for one of the more successful kid-act entrepreneurs, Joe Wood. Gordon, another product of Wilkins Avenue but a few years older than Lahr, would go on to win national burlesque notoriety as the Mad Russian. He had originally cast Jack Pearl as the school teacher in “The Nine Crazy Kids.” Pearl's delivery was not eccentric enough; his voice lacked the strength to carry over the laughs and mayhem generated on stage. Gordon explained the problem to Wood, who suggested a wild, outrageous youngster named Lahr. The association that followed with Gordon was brief, but important.

Lahr may have still had many faults as a performer, but he was blessed with a voice that could carry to the farthest seat in any house. Gordon emphasized what Lahr as a performer was just beginning to realize—how to build a laugh. Gordon, a seasoned veteran of burlesque at nineteen, recalls the ideas he stressed to an eager, untrained comedian. “You can't let the audience fall back for a minute, Bert. Every time you get a laugh, you've got to top it with another one or you lose your pace. That means you've got to use your voice to get
over
the laughs, to keep it going.”

The tactics of comedy, in the beginning, were not elaborate. Lahr studied his audiences; and it was to their needs and their instincts that he adapted his comic spirit. Although Lahr never formulated any axioms for comedy (“I was always instinctive”), the rules that the
frizzy-haired Gordon stressed worked surprisingly well. The Nine Crazy Kids were professional enough to play many of the RKO theaters in New York as well as the larger cities on the Eastern seaboard. They made one big-time appearance at the Union Square Theater on Fourteenth Street. Although the “Crazy Kids” was not unanimously well received, Lahr could assure himself that a momentum was building, that his career, like his life, was taking shape.

The act (see Appendix 1) itself was a standard kid act of the day, cribbed, by Lahr's own admission, from the successful comedy formula developed by the Avon Comedy Four (which starred two comedians who would headline for decades as Smith and Dale). It included the standard social stereotypes, as reflected in the names of the characters—Isador Fitzpatrick, John L. Fitzcorbett, Sharkey, Reginald Redstockings. Also included was the boisterous teacher, who entered brandishing his wild Dutch dialect like a ruler.

The act was never written down, but Gordon still remembers the introductory song:

Nine o'clock, nine o'clock, don't be late for school,

Don't be late, don't be late, or else you'll get the rule.

Ring the bell, ring the bell, c'mmon hurry, let's run,

Nine o'clock, nine o'clock, strict attention's soon begun.

Lahr entered wearing a Prussian mustache and a putty nose.