Notes on a Cowardly Lion (19 page)

“When I went to see
Harry Delmar's Revels
, I thought, ‘There's a
wonderful comedian and something new. He would make a beautiful contrast in his brazen manner to the little sweet trainer played by Victor Moore.'” That is Vinton Freedley's assessment nearly forty years after the show.

However, there was nothing funny about the show's initial reception. Freedley's million-dollar instinct—which led to the Gershwins'
Lady Be Good
four years earlier and would later mount such famous musicals as
Girl Crazy, Anything Goes
, and
Red Hot, and Blue
—was being severely tested. Originally budgeted at $65,000, the price of his venture had risen way above the norm of $125,000 by the time Freedley had absorbed the losses on the road.

“We opened in Newark. We lost ten thousand dollars and played to nothing. Went to Philadelphia and played to less business. I was very discouraged about the play. In the meantime, my then-partner, Alex Aarons (we had just built the Alvin Theater, which is named for him—Al, and me—Vin), had an extravagant production with Gertrude Lawrence and Clifton Webb called
Treasure Girl
. He looked down on my little flop as just one of those things I'd close up on the road. We changed our leading man to Jack Whiting and also hired a girl called Betty Compton whom Mayor Jimmy Walker saw in the show and later married. In Philadelphia, Brown and DeSylva came to me one night at the Sylvania Hotel with a couple of new numbers for the show. One was ‘Too Good to be True' and the other was ‘You're the Cream in My Coffee.' Those two songs plus the change in cast made the difference. We went to Boston and practically sold out. And then we came to the Broadhurst Theater and ran nearly two years.”

The comedy Lahr and Moore provided gave
Hold Everything
the necessary originality for a long run that the book, limpid and often sentimental for all its ingenious turns, lacked. Even “You're the Cream in My Coffee” left some reviewers rankled rather than humming:

“Hold Everything” has several tinkling tunes to help it along, but the best of them is burdened with the most inane lyrics yet heard on our long suffering stage. Here is what the authors ask us to hum on our way home:

You're the cream in my coffee,

You're the salt in my stew.

You will always be

My necessity,

I'd be lost without you
.

Part of the reason for the show's mediocre reception out of town had been Lahr's inability to take complete command of his part. He had always been a “slow study”; and Henderson recalls that DeSylva was very worried about Lahr when they reached Boston. Lahr was nervous, worrying constantly about his part. He sat staring out into space, twirling the middle button of his coat. DeSylva would come over to Henderson and confide, “He's on the button again.”

Whatever their apprehensions, Lahr had confidence in the Big Three. “I remember that DeSylva told the director, ‘Let that kid alone.' I worked a special way. Nobody could direct W. C. Fields in a show. They'd just edit him. When you take a gal like Fannie Brice or Bea Lillie—you couldn't say do it
this
way or do it
that
way. They were distinctive talents.”

The opening-night audience was treated to a brand of comedy new to the Broadway stage. Broadway had seen pratfalls and low comedians before, but Lahr's wildness and his dumb perseverance on stage were matched with vulnerability and pathos. The hilarity he could generate came from his ability as an actor to use his role rather than to go outside it. He was, in the true sense of the word “comedian,” a comic actor. Occasionally, when he pressed for laughs, he went outside his part. But the instinct for acting was conspicuous. (This was not always the case with America's funny-men. The brilliant and individual comedy of the Marx Brothers and Bobby Clark went outside the characters of the play or its actions. They played themselves rather than their roles. Their humor lay in their unrestrained spontaneity, which mocked the conventions of the play. Willie Howard was a polished version of the dialect comedian. Even Ed Wynn brought self-consciousness to his stance as the “Perfect Fool.”) With Lahr, the comedy was different. He had dropped his German dialect; and, while all his burlesque movements and bits of business were employed on stage, Broadway had never seen a comic so human yet so outrageous.

Lahr remembers peeping through the small hole in the asbestos curtain and seeing an impressive array of first-nighters. “Otto Kahn, who was a patron of the arts, was a backer of the show. He brought his friends. It was a high-class audience. A first-night crowd like I had never seen before in my life. I never played to anything like that in
Harry Delmar's Revels
. There were tiaras and diamonds. I was scared. But then when I came on stage, and I noticed after a few minutes Mayor Jimmy Walker almost falling out of his box laughing, that gave me confidence.”

His entrance as Gink Shiner was made not with a cop stick or the ridiculous shuffle of the vaudeville days, but on a bicycle. He wore a beret and checkered pants. He rode it as if it were a bucking bronco. He went out of control on the machine, skidding across the stage in front of his trainer. He crashed into a tree and came back holding the battered bicycle frame. Gazing wideeyed at the audience, he observed, “That's a hell of a place to plant a tree.” This was the line that introduced him to musical comedy, and it brought howls of surprised laughter.

The carnival spirit of the play was embodied in the title song, “Don't Hold Everything.” The action goes on around Gink as he struggles ridiculously to comprehend it. The comic world of
Hold Everything
was a safe and uncomplicated one, where people could sing—

All moody folks,

Sad, broody folks

Should read old Doc Freud.

For instance, his preaching is, his teaching is

“Friends, don't be annoyed,

Under no conditions

Hold your worries in:

You'll get inhibitions

That are tough as sin.”

So free yourself,

Just be yourself …

Gink tries to evade an infatuated woman and to summon enough courage and ability to get into the ring with Kid Fracas. Lahr's parody of the fighter's self-deception and his misguided confidence was similar to his treatment of the cop in “What's the Idea.” His statement is not only in words, but also in gestures.

In the last act, Lahr, sporting boxing trunks and knee pads, is in his dressing room waiting to fight.

Gink, dubbed “The Waterfront Terror” for the bout, talks with his manager, Nosey (Victor Moore). Nosey has been watching Gink shadowbox, plainly disgusted.

Nosey
: What you doin' now?

Gink
: (matter-of-factly) Practicing ducking!

Nosey
: What do you wear those pads for?

Gink
: Cause every time I fight, my knees get scraped.

Nosey
: Look out, you'll foul yourself.

Gink
: (excitedly) Leave me alone. I'm winning.

Nosey
: Come here! (Gink stops.) Sit down there 'til I give you the last rites.

Gink
: (sits forlornly) Nosey—something seems to tell me this fight is gonna be the turning point of my career (becomes depressed).

Nosey
: What are you feeling bad about?

Gink
: (shamefully) Well, I bet on Kid Fracas against myself.

Nosey
: (relieved) Don't give it a thought.

Gink: (breaking down and heaving his chest in despair) But I'm afraid I'm gonna win!

Gink is threatened by Kid Fracas's manager, who comes to look over the opponent minutes before the fight. Gink blusters at the manager, flexing his muscles in a tableau of hope over experience. After the manager leaves, Gink is aching for victory. His trainer tries to warm him up, throwing a soft jab to the belly. Gink sprawls on the floor, yelling “Foul! Foul!”

Gink marches off stage for his fight. When Gink enters after winning the bout, he struts like a peacock. His excitement is all arms and legs. “Did you see me?” Gink asks. “DID YOU see ME?” He prances around jabbing in the air, feinting courageously with his shoulders. “Didn't I flatten him pretty?” In the end, Gink not only gets the money, but the girl as well.

“I knew when the show was over,” Lahr begins, shaking his head with a pained certitude, squinting in recollection of that moment. “I
knew
I was a big hit.” He sat in the dressing room relaxing over a bottle of beer. He didn't want to go to the cast party. He felt private and exhausted.

Mercedes was not at opening night. Lahr thought of her, and decided to go home.

“I walked up Eighth Avenue. It was foggy. I saw a man throwing newspapers down from the tailgate of a truck. I went over and bought a copy of the
American
and opened it to the theater review.” The review is preserved in his scrapbook on a special piece of paper. He read just the headline and the first paragraph:

NEW COMEDY KING

CROWNED IN MUSIC

PLAY IN BERT LAHR

A new comedy king was crowned at the Broadhurst Theater last night. In fact, he was crowned several times with beer bottles, brooms, blackjacks, and other miscellaneous tools of the slapstick trade. But he emerged from the fracas with the laurel wreath of triumph resting jauntily on his grease-painted brow, and up and
down Broadway and for many a day to come you will hear talk of Bert Lahr
.

“New Comedy King.” Lahr's reaction to the review puzzles him to this day. “I continued up Eighth Avenue. The feeling I had was so strange. I felt—it's over. I did my job, and this is the way it was supposed to be. No elation. My whole life. All the hunger and the ambition and the fears and the hopes came to fruition. And then, when it happened, it was as if, well, it was coming to me. It was just a feeling … a feeling of …”

He returned to the Forrest Hotel and hurried upstairs to see Mercedes. “I said, ‘Well, I think I was a big hit.' She looked at me and didn't say anything. No reaction at all. It was as if … as if she didn't know me.”

The play did not draw unanimous raves, but the attitude of most critics was reflected in
Billboard's
notice:

Hold Everything undoubtedly … will go down in theatrical history as the medium that carried Bert Lahr to Broadway acclaim …

While some critics found Lahr's fun-making selfconscious and sometimes off the mark, they could not deny the freshness and boisterous energy he brought to the stage.

… This man is funny. He can make old, tired stuff seem new and original. Believe me or believe me not, Mr. Lahr can obtain laughter by merely distorting his features.
Isn't that the oldest kind of clowning?
It is. Yet Mr. Lahr, I solemnly assure you, is able to cross his eyes and twist his mouth and
make people laugh
. You would not have thought that was possible? I myself would not have thought it was possible had it not happened …

His resourcefulness is astonishing. He seems never to be at a loss for a way of making fun. If he cannot think of a facial expression, he uses a ludicrous utterance or some floppy posture, or, funniest of all, falls silent. The man, I repeat, is funny. His sparring business in the dressing room scene was so ludicrous that the entire audience was dissolved into laughter. This man is funny … there is more genuinely comic stuff in this piece than in all the other musical plays I have seen in New York put together.

St. John Ervine, Morning Telegram

“Jes—us, why didn't I keep a diary or something of those days? I
wish I'd written down all the things that happened to me during
Hold Everything
. I was in Seventh Heaven.” He stops for a minute, forgetting Mercedes, remembering only the “hunger.” “Rave reviews, a hit Broadway show, plenty of work. Seventh Heaven.”

When he thinks back to
Hold Everything
, he envisions Victor Moore standing flat-footed and chubby like a partridge. Moore, with his quavering voice, was a fine comedian, with a soft, poignant delivery. Lahr had seen him in vaudeville in “Back to the Woods,” an act he did with his wife. He was an important comic star when Lahr first met him.

“Young fellow,” Moore said in their first encounter, “You've got the part in the piece. There's nothing I can do about it. Now, I'll help you all I can in these comedy scenes. But don't you do anything not to help me.” Their rapport was instantaneous, and Lahr would always respect his professionalism and kindness.

In the reducing scene, in which Gink sweats off eleven pounds, Lahr spent most of his twenty minutes on stage in a ludicrous box that looked like a combination steam bath and laundromat. From inside the cabinet, only Lahr's head remained visible to the audience. When Moore applied the heat intended to hone him into championship shape, Lahr's face seemed to skitter out of control. Finally, the machine got too hot, and he disappeared into the box. When it exploded, the audience saw him with his face blackened, lying stunned in center stage. That was the end of the second act.

He devised many schemes to get a reaction out of the quiet comedian. “I used to break wind on stage to get Victor annoyed. You can't print that—some people will think it's disgusting. I did it purposely. I used to drink a lot of milk. One night during the reducing scene, Moore smeared Limberger cheese all over the top of the cabinet. It was in summer and very hot. We didn't have air conditioning. It was pretty uncomfortable. That was a hell of a way to get even with me. I didn't say anything. So I said to myself, ‘What can I do to this guy?' I waited a few nights and then wrote him a letter:

Dear Mr. Moore,

There are twenty-five members of the Moose Club of Patterson out front, who are devoted fans. Would you kindly mention a few names. I'm sure the boys would get a great kick out of it.