Notes on a Cowardly Lion (15 page)

(Blackout)

When he came out on stage to take his bows, Lahr would defy the audience, slapping his club on the ground and yelling out at their approval, “What's the idea? What's the ideeeeaa?”

No matter how successful burlesque performers had been on the Wheel, there was no guarantee of immediate or similar success in vaudeville. The act had to prove itself. It meant adapting to a different format of entertainment and caliber of audience. The sketch usually went well, but in a nation whose tastes had not yet been made uniform by television, Lahr's raucous fooling sometimes infuriated local taste. His comic stance could make the self-conscious middle class bristle.

Comedy of a slightly lower type is offered by Lahr and Mercedes … The act is designed to appeal to the masses, but the classes can find plenty of things to be amused at …

Los Angeles

Occasionally, Lahr's mugging left the vaudeville audiences puzzled. In Chicago, a city accustomed to sophisticated entertainment and a wide variety of performers, one vaudeville reporter observed:

The audience was slow in getting the humor Bert Lahr tried to put across.… By the finale, however, the former burlesque comic held the audience in a fit of laughter.

The act completely eluded Texans when he played the Interstate Circuit there. He has no clippings from those bookings, and with good reason. “We did so bad,” he says, smiling, “they hissed us on the street.” The audience was confounded by the polyglot inflections and urban eccentricities of the act. My father refers to those nights when he had to milk a single curtain call, as “laying a cake—twelve eggs.”

The manager of the Houston theater had spotted Lahr and Mercedes after another comedy act, the “Hickey Brothers.” “I got finished putting on my make-up and I heard tremendous laughs from out front, but I didn't know enough about vaudeville then to realize that one comedy act right after another always hurts the later act. So I said to Mercedes, ‘Gee, that's a great audience.' Now I was made up in a putty nose and misfit clothes. I went upstairs to the wings. On the stage were two comedians, one was hitting the other over the head with a steel tray. They were wearing steel-plated wigs; their teeth were
blacked out, and they had boards in their back to give them broad shoulders. I looked like a straightman compared to them. They were a riot.”

When Lahr's turn came, the situation changed immediately. His sure-fire opening drew absolutely no response from the audience. “I said, ‘Stop in the name of the station house, stoooooooooppppp!' Nothing happened. I said it again. I couldn't imagine anybody not laughing at this.”

But the audience remained tight-lipped. Lahr worked hard, pressing for laughs, taking a few more pratfalls than the situation demanded. “Half way through the act it was almost like clairvoyance—I realized that somebody hated me. It's hypnotic. When they hate you, somehow you find them out. I looked up in a box and there is this girl with this man. She's pointing down at me. I imagine she was saying ‘This guy is awful.' Nothing was happening. I'd look up to those boxes, and there she was—incensed. When I sang ‘Peggy O'Neill' I'd crawl around and do it with the vibrato and everything. I did it a second time during the act. When I did it again, the woman stood up in the box and yelled, ‘You can't sing either!'”

Talent was not the only prerequisite for laughter; the environment was also important. “Sometimes climatic conditions could hurt comedy; if the people in the audience weren't comfortable. I loved to follow a big hit singer in vaudeville. The audience was set up for me. Once, I played the Hippodrome. It used to have extravaganzas. Animals would be paraded on the stage; you could see girls swimming in transparent tanks. We had to fill three to four thousand seats without microphones. I followed Houdini, and I didn't get on until six o'clock in the evening. After Houdini, everyone wanted to go home for dinner. When I came out, all I could see were backs.”

Lahr's most stringent critic was his father, who came to see him at the Hippodrome. “I said, ‘Pop, how'd you like it?' He said, ‘The horses were good.' He didn't get my humor. Later, when I did more of the vibrato, he'd take me aside and say, ‘Why don't you stop that gnong, gnong, gnong—it's undignified.'” But despite such criticism, the first year was successful. Vaudeville audiences and critics were taken by surprise:

Bert Lahr and Mercedes are the real hit of the bill. Their coming was not heralded by the program and their sudden descent upon the unwary audience was somewhat of a surprise. The title of their act
is “What's the Idea,” which is just about what the audience thought when they began their nonsense … Lahr as a comedy cop proves himself one of the most amusing comedians in vaudeville.…

Cincinnati

The act was so successful that bookers were asking them to play more than their forty-week circuit. They were popular enough to work every week of the year, and for their first two seasons on the Orpheum Time they nearly did. Yet, with each successful review, Lahr's passion for perfecting his performance and his dream became stronger.

“If anything went wrong in the act with Mercedes and myself, I never blamed myself, I always blamed her.”

This is his guilt and his burden. He never talks about it.

As he speaks about Mercedes now, he is eating a dinner that my mother prepared. He loves her and knows the care she takes to feed him. It is her pleasure, and she does it well. He takes a bite. “The meat's tough.” Mother looks up in nervous disgust. “Well, Bert,
mine's
all right.” He chews another piece. “I just got a tender one.” His face lights up; and he talks with his mouth full until he drips something on his pants. He has hurt Mildred in the same unthinking way he must have hurt Mercedes. He screws up his face to express his sudden pleasure. It is humorous, but also disconcerting. He can perceive a situation with chilling accuracy, and yet with those closest to him he often acts as if the person were simply an appendage of himself, responding to the same drives and demands. He shared his dream only once, and that was with Mercedes. In time, it destroyed her. This is the torment of his vision; it is totally his and no one—no matter how intimate—can ever share it again.

He still cannot assess the nature of his relationship with Mercedes.

“Did you get along, Dad?”

“I guess so. I mean, we had our fights, but we were a team. We were together nearly twenty-four hours of the day.” This is as much as he will volunteer. I try to cue him. “I never saw it. I never saw it,” is all he will add.

Their friends, however, have different recollections. Haley remembers meeting Lahr in Montreal at two in the morning. Lahr had a suitcase in hand. “Where are you going at this hour, Bert?”

“Babe and I just had a fight. I'm going to a hotel.” Haley laughs at the memory of Lahr in such a rage that he didn't even bother to take another room in the same hotel.

Jean Dalrymple, now the general director of the New York City Center, appeared one week with Lahr and Mercedes in Minneapolis during the 1924 season. Lahr's sketch followed her one-act play. She recalls standing in the wings and watching the act. “I felt I could learn something from him. He was rather taciturn even then. His mind was on the act. I know that I told him how much I admired him and how great I thought the act was and how amusing it was. He never was particularly ebullient about it.”

Miss Dalrymple remembers that week because the ten-foot snowdrifts kept people from the Christmas Eve show, and the cast had to have their dinner sent into the theater. They ate on stage. Mercedes did not eat with everyone else. Lahr brought her food to the dressing room. They had been arguing about the act. Their relationship made an impression on Miss Dalrymple. “They had a hard time getting along. I didn't really hear them quarrel, except for a few gruff words. It was mostly about her performance or his performance. I remember the people on the bill said they quarreled like cats and dogs.”

“I guess I was too demanding” is the only explanation my father gives for his disagreements with Mercedes. “We never fought about anything but the act.” However, since the act encompassed almost all of their experience, Lahr found himself not only monitoring her performances, but also taking charge of her wardrobe and appearance. He accompanied her to buy clothes and make sure she did not indulge her inclination for steaks and chops.

Later, her fantasies would try and reshape the pressures.

Sept. 15, 1933

Mrs. Lahrheim is naturally fond of jewelry and fine clothes. At present, however, she is wearing only a diamond ring on the third finger of the left hand. She says she has always liked to spend money for clothing, and when in the RKO and Keith-Albee Circuits frequently spent $20 for a pair of shoes, and bought sable fur and coats.

Despite their problems, in less than a year Lahr and Mercedes vaulted into the vaudeville limelight. By June of 1925 they were listed among the Keith-Albee All-Star acts. When they played the Palace in New York, the supreme test for every vaudeville performer, the critics
knew that the act had found its pace and maturity. Lahr played the Palace for five hundred dollars a week; five years later he played it three times in one year for five thousand dollars a performance. The effect of his first Palace appearance was hard to misread.

“What's the Idea” created sensational moments of comedy. Lahr drawing some of the most deep-seated laughs imaginable …This is their first appearance at this house, and they surely showed 'em something.

With his growing stature, Lahr began to move outside the chrysalis of his work. He joined the Friars Club and spent much of his free time with comedians whose friendship he had never had time to indulge on the road: Bert Wheeler, Eddie Foy, James Barton, and Jay C. Flippen.

Foy, who is known to make his exit from parties doing a “buck and wing” is still as irrepressibly gay as he was when he first met my father. He wears a jaunty colored cap and talks about the time he nailed every piece of his wife's clothing to the floor when she left him.

Foy recalls having drinks with Lahr at the Friars Club, just after he had been accepted as a member. Foy, Jay C. Flippen, and Joe Frisco were sitting at the table when Lahr entered. Frisco had never met Lahr, and when they sat down to the table the first topic of conversation was business. Lahr was excited about his reception in Kansas City, a notoriously difficult vaudeville town.

“I went over big,” he said. “Five curtain calls.”

The men were amazed, and said so. Frisco, however, could not believe it. “Tha—that's very s-strange, I couldn't get arrested when I p-played there.”

Lahr offered to buy drinks. “What would you like?”

Foy and Flippen asked for beer. When he turned to Frisco, the comedian looked up without a trace of emotion on his face, “I-I'd like to see your act, you bastard!”

The year was filled with good times. Mercedes and Lahr spent the money they earned lavishly. In New York, they stayed at the Forrest Hotel. If they were not registered, friends knew they were on the road. The company at the hotel off Broadway and Forty-ninth Street was always interesting—Damon Runyon, Jack and Mary Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie Allen, the Haleys. The excitement of that
time is typified by Lahr's trip to Canada with Bert Wheeler in search of sparkling burgundy. The comedians and their women conceived this craving one Friday evening and traveled to Canada the next day to quench their thirst. There they filled their hotel bathtub with the wine and drank until it was empty. They returned on Monday.

And there was Lake Hopatcong, with long hours of fishing and golf. Lahr remembers Mercedes around the campfire, shading her eyes from the smoke as she watched over the barbecue. She delighted in these cookouts; her food and the exuberance she had for these summer evenings earned her the nickname “Mom.”

Lahr had invited the dance team of Donald Kerr and Ephie Weston to spend a few weeks with them on the lake. Lahr and Mercedes had met them while playing many of the same bills during the year. Kerr and Weston, who were married, were a comedian's delight. Lahr enjoyed their private idiosyncrasies. When they tried to use the English language in a manner commensurate with their $750-a-week vaudeville pay, they inevitably got lost in the words. Many of the gags my father used around the house are derived from their search for the
mot juste
. “Pass the salt if I'm not too inquisitive.” “Get in my car and I'll drive you to your destitution.” Once when Kerr was touting his wife's dancing ability, he confided to my father, “She can kick the chanticleer.”

With Weston and Kerr in the next room, Lahr and Mercedes were treated to some unusual antics. After one night of drinking, Lahr heard Ephie proclaiming loudly to her husband, “Donald Kerr, you beast! You let me sleep with my clothes on, but my drawers are off!!”

Lahr had purchased a Hupmobile. He recalls a summer excursion with James Barton to Coney Island. “On our way, the car hit a steel hoop and began losing gas. The gas station attendant told me we'd have to have the gas line soldered. I said, ‘Well, I got an idea.' We went to a drugstore—they carried theatrical supplies in those days. Neighborhood theaters were in all sections of the city. Now nose putty is a product made of wax. You can mold it and put it on your nose. The body heat makes it stick. We used to wear it a lot in burlesque. I bought some and stuck it in the puncture. It held the gas. The car still wouldn't go because rust had somehow gotten through the gas line and clogged the carburetor. There was only one way to do it, bypass the filter and get gas immediately into the carburetor. I had another idea. We went back to the drugstore and bought a douche bag and cans of
cleaning gasoline. We drove to Coney Island and back with Jim Barton holding the douche bag and pouring gasoline.”

The giddy profusion of that year is reduced to snatches of dialogue and fragments of experience. After so many years of skimping, extravagance and waste suddenly held a childish appeal. Lahr's name was becoming better known, but vaudeville reputations were mercurial. He was conscious of friends moving into Broadway revues: Bert Gordon had performed in
George White's Scandals
{1921); Joe Cook had steady work with the
Earl Carroll Vanities;
and Jim Barton was scheduled for
Ziegfeld's Palm Beach Nights
(1926). Lahr brooded about his career and an elusive big-time reputation. As his act became more amusing with each technical “bit” honed for laughter, the nature of his humor escaped his own understanding. The reasons for performing were private and inscrutable; he felt vulnerable when he or others questioned it. When asked to analyze his craft, he sidestepped the personal aspect of laughter with commonplaces. He was handing out this kind of statement to reporters in 1926: