Notes on a Cowardly Lion (2 page)

This was typical. At dinner, after he finished eating, Dad would sometimes wander away from the table without so much as a fare-thee-well; at Christmas, for which he never bought presents, the memories of his unhappy childhood made the ritual exchange of gifts almost unbearable, so he'd slip back to his desk as soon as possible. Now, just as his ravishing Technicolor performance was about to begin, he'd drifted off again, retreating into that private space.

That was irrefutably him up there, disguised in a lion's suit, telling us in the semaphore of his outlandishness what he was feeling in the silence of his bedroom. It was confusing, and more disturbing than I realized then, to see Dad so powerful onscreen and so paralyzed off it. “Yeah, it's sad believe me missy / When you're born to be a sissy / Without the vim and
voive
,” Dad sang, in words so perfectly fitting his own intonation and idiom that it almost seemed he was making them up. In a sense, the song was him; it was written to the specifications of his paradoxical nature by E. Y. (Yip) Harburg and Harold Arlen, who had already provided him with some of his best material, in “Life Begins at 8:40” (1934) and “The Show Is On” (1936).

“I got to the point where I could do him,” Arlen told me. And Harburg, who once said that he could “say something in Bert's voice that I couldn't with my own,” saw social pathos in Dad's clowning. “I accepted Bert and wanted him for the part because the role was one of the things ‘The Wizard of Oz' stands for: the search for some basic human necessity,” he said. “Call it anxiety; call it neurosis. We're in a world we don't understand. When the Cowardly Lion admits that he lacks courage, everybody's heart is out to him. He must be somebody who embodies all his pathos, sweetness, and yet puts on the comic bravura.” He added, “Bert had that quality to such a wonderful degree. It was in his face. It was in his walk. It was in himself.”

When the song began onscreen, Dad swiveled around in his chair to watch himself; once the song was over, he stepped forward and switched over to football.

“Dad!” we cried.

“Watch it in Jane's room,” he said.

“Is it gonna kill you, Bert?”

Dad's beaky profile turned toward Mom; his face was a fist of irritation. “Look Mildred, I see things,” he said. “Things I coulda . . . I'm older now. There's stuff I coulda done better.” Mother rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling. I returned us to Oz. Dad pulled the headphones up from around his neck and went back to the hand of solitaire he'd started. His performance was enough for the world; it wasn't enough for him.

Onscreen, the Lion was panic-stricken but fun; his despair was delightful. (“But I could show my prowess / Be a lion, not a mouesse / If I only had the noive.”) The Lion had words for what was going on inside him; he asked for help and got it. At home, there were no words or even tears, just the thick fog of some ontological anxiety, which seemed to have settled permanently around Dad and was palpable, impenetrable—it lifted only occasionally, for a few brilliant moments. “I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do” is the Cowardly Lion's mantra as the foursome approach the Wicked Witch's aerie. In life, Dad was constantly spooked, and his fear took the form of morbid worry. It wasn't so much a state of mind as a contingent over which Dad was the bewildered sovereign. Onstage, Dad gave his fear a sound—“
Gnong, gnong, gnong
!” It was a primitive, hilarious yawping, which seemed to sum up all his wide-eyed loss and confusion. Offstage, there was no defining it. The clinical words wheeled out these days for his symptoms—“manic depressive,” “bipolar”—can't convey the sensual, dramatic, almost reverent power of the moroseness that Dad could bring with him into a room, or the crazy joy he could manufacture out of it onstage. It was awful and laughable at the same time. We couldn't fathom it; instead, we learned to live with it and to treat him with amused affection. He was our beloved grump. He was perpetually distracted from others, and, despite his ability to tease the last scintilla of laughter from a role, he had no idea how to brighten his own day. “I listened to the audience, and they told me where the joke was,” he told me backstage at S. J. Perelman's “The Beauty Part” (1962) after he'd got a howl from a line that had no apparent comic payoff. Why couldn't he listen as closely to us?

When you kissed Dad on the top of his bald head—it smelled deliciously like the inside of a baseball glove—he didn't turn around; when you talked to him, he didn't always answer; sometimes he even forgot our names. That was the bittersweet comedy of his self-absorption. But the Lion confessed his fears, he looked people in the eye, he was easy to touch (even Dorothy, in their first fierce encounter, puts a hand on him); he joined arms with the others and skipped off down the Yellow Brick Road. At the finale, their victory was a triumph of collaboration. In private, as even our little family get-together made apparent, Dad never collaborated; he never reached out (in all the years I went off to camp or college, he wrote me only one letter, and it was dictated); he never elaborated on what weighed him down and kept us under wraps. But there was a gentleness to him bewilderment, which made both the audience and the family want to embrace him. His laughter was a comfort to the world; in his world, which was rarely humorous, we comforted him. All the family forces were marshaled to keep Dad's demons at bay and “to be happy,” an instruction that translated into specific behavior that would generate no worries—good humor, loyalty, gratitude, obedience, and looking good.

If Dad had had a tail, he would have twisted it just as the Lion did; instead, he had to make do with his buttons and with the cellophane from his cigarette packs, which he perpetually rolled between his fingers. What was Dad afraid of? We never knew exactly. Things were mentioned: work, money, Communists, cholesterol, garlic, the “Big C.” Even a fly intruding into his airspace could bring a sudden whirlwind of worry as he tried to stalk the pest with a flyswatter. “The son of a bitch has been hit before,” he would say, lashing at the fly and missing. Dad's global anxiety seeped into the foundation of all our lives; it was hard to see, and, when it was finally identified, it had to be fortified against. One of the most efficient ways to do this was to treat Dad as a metaphor—a sort of work of art, whose extraordinary and articulate performing self was what we took to heart instead of the deflated private person who seemed always at a loss. Any lessons Dad taught about excellence, courage, perseverance, discipline, and integrity we got from his stage persona. His best self—the one that was fearless, resourceful, and generous, and that told the truth—was what he saved for the public, which included us; otherwise, as every relative of a star knows, the family had to make do with what was left over. Even at the end of our Oz viewing, Dad brushed aside our praise, which seemed only to increase his anxiety. As he shuffled into the kitchen to get some ice cream, he glanced over at Mom. “If I'd made a hit as a
human being
, then perhaps I'd be sailing in films now,” he said.

When “The Wizard of Oz” opened in New York, on August 17, 1939, fifteen thousand people were lined up outside the Capitol Theatre by 8 a.m. Dad's photograph was in the window of Lindy's, across the street, and the
Times
declared his roar “one of the laughingest sounds since the talkies came in.” “Believe me it was a tonic for my inferiority complex which is so readily developed in Hollywood,” Dad wrote to Mildred, who would become Mrs. Lahr in 1940. As an animal, in closeup, and eight times as large as life, Dad, with his broad, burlesque energy, was acceptable; there was no place for his baggy looks and his clowning, eccentric mannerisms in talking pictures except on the periphery of romantic stories. Despite his huge success, Metro soon dropped his option. He signed for a Broadway musical, “Du Barry Was a Lady.” “Well, how many lion parts are there,” Dad said as he departed from Hollywood.

Over the years, especially after my son was born, in 1976, I'd catch glimpses of Dad as the Lion, but, perhaps out of some residual loyalty to his bias, I could never sit through the film. The hubbub around the movie irritated me, because the other accomplishments of the performers were swept away in the wake of its unique and spectacular success. I think Dad knew that he was a hostage to technology: a Broadway star whose legend would go largely unrecorded while, by the luck of a new medium, performers who couldn't get work on Broadway would be preserved and perpetuated in the culture. Nowadays, the general public doesn't know about the likes of Florenz Ziegfeld, Abe Burrows, Ethel Merman, Bea Lillie, Billy Rose, Walter Winchell, Clifton Webb, and Nancy Walker, whose stories intersected with Dad's.

What lives on is the Cowardly Lion. When I watch him now, I don't see just the Lion; I see the echoes—the little touches and moves—of those long forgotten sensational stage performances that Dad condensed into his evergreen role. His floppy consonants, slurred vowels, malapropisms, and baritone vibrato all derived from the collection of sophisticated operatic sendups he'd developed first for Harburg and Arlen's “Things” (from “Life Begins at 8:40”) and “Song of the Woodman” (from “The Show Is On”), to be perfected in “If I Were King of the Forest”:

Each rabbit would show respect to me,

The chipmunks genuflect to me,

Tho' my tail would lash

I would show compash

For ev'ry underling

If I, if I were king

Just king.

The Cowardly Lion's boxing bravado (“I'll fight you both together if you want! I'll fight you with one paw tied behind my back! I'll fight you standin' on one foot! I'll fight you wit' my eyes closed!”) and his woozy body language (the shoulder rolls, the elbows akimbo, the bobbing head) were grafted onto the Lion from Dad's portrayal of the punch-drunk sparring partner Gink Schiner, in his first Broadway hit, “Hold Everything” (1928). And when the Wizard awards the Cowardly Lion his medal for courage, even Dad's vaudeville act, “What's the Idea” (1922–25), came into play: he swaggered like the policeman he had impersonated while trying to both arrest and impress the hoochy-coochy dancer Nellie Bean. “Read what my medal says—‘Courage,'” the Lion says. “Ain't it de truth. Ain't it de
trooth
.”

In later years, one of many canards that grew up about the film was that there was a feud between the old pros and the young Judy Garland—that they had tried to upstage her and push her off the Yellow Brick Road. “How could that be?” my godfather, Jack Haley, who played the Tin Man, told me. “When we go off to see the Wizard, we're locked arm in arm, and every shot is a long shot. How can you push someone out of the picture with a long shot?” Although Garland wasn't pushed out, her “Over the Rainbow,” which became the anthem of a generation, was almost cut from the movie three times. According to Dad, Harburg hadn't like the original tune, which he found too symphonic and heroic. Years later, when I was working on a book about Harburg's lyrics, Arlen explained the deadlock, which Ira Gershwin had finally been called in to arbitrate. “I got sick to my stomach,” Arlen told me. “I knew Ira didn't like ballads. He only liked things with a twinkle. Ira came over, listened, and said, ‘That's a good melody.' I knew the heat was off. Yip tried out a few musical notions and came up with the lyric.” Another of their favorite numbers, written for “Oz,” was one called “The Jitter Bug,” in which bugs bite the travellers, who begin to dance with the trees and flowers. It was cut for reasons of pace and of balance, and though it gave Dad a big dance number, he never expressed regret over the loss of material. What he remembered was the hard work and the offscreen hacking around. “Smith's premium ham!” the old pros yelled at one another before takes. “Vic Fleming had never experienced guys like us,” Dad told me. Some legitimate directors can't imagine anybody thinking about something else and when he yells ‘Shoot!' just going in and playing.” He went on, “We'd kid around up to the last minute and go on. You could see he got mad and red-faced. Some actors try and get into the mood. They'll put themselves into the character. I never did that. I'm not that—let's say—dedicated.”

Dad died on December 4, 1967, the day I finished my book about him. He had never read any part of it. I saw him again in a dream on January 25, 1977. I'd been arguing about comedy with the distinguished English actor Jonathan Pryce, and had stepped out of his dressing room to cool off, and there was Dad in the corridor. “He was wearing his blue jacket with padded shoulders,” I wrote in my diary. “He smelled of cologne, and he felt soft when I hugged him. I said, ‘I love you.' I can't remember if he answered. But it felt completely real, with all the details of his presence—smell, feel, look, silence—very clear. I woke up sobbing.” I added, “When will we meet again?”

So far, he has not reappeared in my dreams; but, in another sense, as the reissue of “The Wizard of Oz” only underscores, he has never really gone away. He's a Christmas ornament, a pen, a watch, a beanbag toy, a bracelet charm, a snow globe, a light sculpture, a bedroom-wall decoration.” (Neiman Marcus's Christmas catalogue includes Dad in “The Wizard of Oz” bedroom—“the ultimate child's bedroom”—which, at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, is more than twice as much as he was paid for the movie.) In the space of only two days this fall, on the merchandise channel QVC, a new offering of Oz paraphernalia sold about a million and a half dollars, which seems to prove the claim on the Warner Bros. fact sheet that “ ‘The Wizard of Oz' has Universal Awareness.” I should be outraged by all this, I suppose, since Dad's estate gets no money. I should deplore the trivialization of him as an artist and bemoan the pagan impulse to make household gods of mortal endeavor. (When Dad took up painting, in his last years, and realized that there was a market for Cowardly Lion artifacts, even he got the franchise itch, and stopped doing flowers and vegetables in order to churn out lions, which he signed and sold to friends.) But, if I'm honest with myself, these tchotchkes comfort me. They are totems of Dad's legacy of joy, and of his enduring life in the country's collective imagination.