Notes on a Cowardly Lion (23 page)

When Ziegfeld died on July 22, 1932, White became the unchallenged king of Broadway. During the remainder of the thirties, White reigned—a tattered royalty whose appeal would taper off drastically by the end of the decade. He carved a flossy kind of immortality for himself, not quite what he wanted, but a memorial nonetheless. One of his crucial ingredients was the comedian who had starred in Ziegfeld's last show—Bert Lahr.

Lahr has not forgotten the real beginnings of his association with White. Deep friendships were as rare for him as they were for the cantankerous producer, who had only a small coterie of acquaintances.
(Lahr seems amazed at the range of people who took a liking to him—Al Capone, who called Lahr “Ugly,” Harold Ross, Samuel Gompers, Will Rogers. As a funny-man and a loner, Lahr posed no threat and had no ambitions outside his craft. He accepted everyone at face value and made no judgments. He moved freely without being part of any particular world.) Occasionally, and much to his astonishment, he made contact with people who remained an enigma to the public. White was one of them. The moment their friendship took root is still vivid in his mind.

“When I did the
Music Hall Varieties
(1933) for George, we opened in Philadelphia in a house that had tremendous capacity, maybe four or five thousand seats. I guess it was an opera house. He'd brought a show in there a year before with Rudy Vallée, who at that time was the biggest thing in the country. He did tremendous business. White thought he could do it again. Well, I looked at that audience out front and there was nobody out there. I was friendly with White and money came easily, then. I could do vaudeville in between seasons and make five thousand dollars. Radio was just beginning too. I said, ‘Look, George, you don't have to pay me till you do some business with this show.' He looked at me—he almost had tears in his eyes. ‘Ham,' he said, ‘No actor's ever done this for me. As long as I live, you'll always have a job.'”

White produced thirteen
Scandals
. He owned each one outright. “A born gambler” is all that Abe Berman can say about his client of over thirty years. “He was Hungarian and gambling was in his blood.” White gambled with talent more successfully than he did with horses. He knew the value of songs. George Gershwin, his earliest find, wrote more than forty-five songs for the
Scandals
, including “I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise” and “Somebody Loves Me.” White hired him for fifty dollars a week for his 1920
Scandals
and fired him five years later when Gershwin asked for a raise from his $125 salary. Undaunted, White brought Lew Brown and Buddy DeSylva together. The importance of his gambling instinct is sometimes overlooked even by historians who understand the value of the
Scandals'
music. Robert Baral makes it seem much easier than it was in his discussion of the
Scandals
in his book
Revue:

The Scandals probably would have wilted early, if George Gershwin and the DeSylva, Brown & Henderson trio hadn't come through the door—
but they did
, and these tunesmiths ripped Broadway apart with their blockbuster scores.

With Ziegfeld and the Shuberts also competing for revue laurels, White tried to stay one step ahead. He went to Paris yearly, returning with the finest novelty acts. He also had his costumes made there, but not stitched, in order to save U.S. duty. He hustled after American entertainers even harder than he did after the continental acts. If Lahr joined the
Scandals
late in their evolution, he was still in good company—Paul Whiteman, Eugene and Willie Howard, Ethel Merman, Lou Holtz, Harry Richman, Rudy Vallee, W. C. Fields, and Ed Wynn. None of these performers remained close to White except Lahr.

Lahr could overlook White's domineering attitude by keeping in mind the results of his theatrical tyranny. He had observed his friend in more scraps than any other person. “George was a cocky little fellow. He wouldn't take anything from anybody.”

To outsiders, everything about the bantamweight producer was odious. Although photographs of him during the 1930's show him as he saw himself—handsome, affluent, chic—the façade hides a labyrinth of confusions. White's indifference to his many enemies and his outspokeness were always a source of amazement to Lahr, who once observed a delicious fistfight between Rudy Vallee and White where star and showman stood toe to toe. Through all the bluff, White managed to get off a feathery jab. Lahr was also present when an exasperated chorus girl, Jessica Pepper, crowned him with the
Scandals'
sheet music.

Despite all the vagaries of working with White, Lahr remained loyal to him. Their contract was a handshake. However, in
George White's Scandals
(1936), Lahr found that White's jealousy and cross purposes could overlook friendship. Lahr and Cliff Edwards headlined the revue along with Vallee and Willie Howard. Edwards and Lahr were good friends; but Edwards, enjoying great success as one of the most popular recording stars of the day, ran into trouble with White when he started dating one of the chorus girls. He was marked for revenge. “When White saw a guy with a pretty girl, he would say, ‘Look at that bum with a pretty girl—why can't I have her.' He'd go after every girl in the show, but nobody else was allowed to date them.”

When he discovered Edwards's transgression, White called the girl into his office and told her never to date the singer again while she was in the show. The girl, of course, had to tell Edwards when he asked for a date that night. Lahr, who shared a room with him on the road, was present when Edwards received the news.

“Edwards called White on the phone and said to him, ‘I'm coming
down there, White. Who the hell do you think you are … I'm coming down there and punch you in the nose.'” Lahr laughs at the thought. “Now you couldn't do that to White, who was a lightweight you know, but had a lot of guts. So White says, ‘You're coming down
here?
I'm coming up there.' Edwards began putting on kid gloves. ‘This is stupid,' I said, and called White on the phone. ‘Look George, I'm coming down.' White could hardly control himself on the phone and kept muttering, ‘Stay where you are, stay where you are. I'm coming up there. I'm coming up.'”

Lahr went to White's suite and reminded him that there would be a lawsuit, that the newspapers would get the story, and it would hurt the show. White finally calmed down. When Lahr returned to talk to Edwards, the singer was asleep. “If that was me, I would have been out of town …”

It was not easy to forget White's anger. “He would blush when he was angry and was at a loss for words.” If White couldn't find the words, he often found ways of expressing his disdain. “He was like an elephant, he never forgot.” He once got back at Vallee when Hollywood did a movie version of the
Scandals
and the crooner had a scene when he was momentarily suspended in the air. White kept him off the ground for nearly an hour during the rehearsal. After the altercation over the chorus girl, White tried to force Edwards to dress on the top floor of the theater. When Lahr interceded and allowed Edwards to use his dressing room instead of making the tiring trek up five flights, White conceived yet another scheme. “He was unpredictable. The fireman at our theater came into our dressing room one night cursing like crazy. ‘That son-of-a-bitch White just told me if I ever caught you or Edwards smoking to arrest you.' Now if he pinched me, he wouldn't have a show, but George didn't care.”

Lahr was flattered by White's nickname for him, “Ham.” But after the Edwards incident, Lahr admits trying a new mode of address. “One day I called him ‘God,' but I only did it once.”

Occasionally, the dividends of friendship were unfortunate. White asked Lahr to visit him at his rented penthouse at the Ritz Hotel in Atlantic City. On one visit Lahr met a lovely redhead. A few weeks later in New York, the girl came up to him at a nightclub and introduced herself. They left together; and a few days later Lahr contracted what he euphemistically refers to as a “social disease.” White consoled him, saying, “Why didn't you come to me about it—she gave it to me, too.”

Their other social activities were healthier, but often as coarse. Lahr, who in the early thirties rented a Connecticut home for his son and nurse, invited White for weekends. The group that convened were not performers, but a wealthier crowd that lived on the periphery of entertainment—restaurateurs, agents, theater owners. They were loud and funny and kind. When White made his appearance, he brought a satchel filled with cans of Campbell's soup. It was embarrassing to Lahr, who could tolerate almost all of White's eccentricities. The outspoken producer answered his queries about the soup with a philosophy reflecting his attitudes toward theatrical productions. “Ham, how much do you pay your cook here?” Lahr told him. “Right, well, Campbell's pays their chef fifty thousand dollars to make soup, so why argue with success?”

When Lahr goes back to those times, he can see White dressed for golf, baggy and outrageous in his knickers. He stood only five feet five, but made enough noise on a golf course for ten large men. Golf had become Lahr's major relaxation. He played a sound game with a handicap of one. But when he went around the course with White and an equally eccentric agent, Harry Bestry, his game was understandably off. White took pleasure in baiting Bestry, whose hearing defect often made it hard for him to know where the static was coming from.

White did outrageous things on the golf course, such as cutting holes in his pockets to drop golf balls farther down the fairway than he had driven them, stamping his opponent's ball into the turf so it could not be found, substituting weighted golf balls on the putting green. His pranks reflected his hatred of losing and his fiendish delight in annoying his more serious golfing partners. During such outings, Bestry, who had to do business with White, directed his rancor at Lahr. Once, turning to him as he was teeing up, Bestry screamed, “I'm gonna hit you across the head with this three-wood if you don't quit heckling me.” When Bestry turned back to his ball, White was urinating on it.

White's vulgarity, the brashness with which he met all conflicts, kept Lahr close to him. White was unpredictable in real life much the same way that Lahr was on stage. White's outlandishness, the mayhem his little body could create was exciting and irreverent in Lahr's eyes. They were both off the streets of New York; they had both risen to the top of their fields. Lahr appreciated White's gut energy and stubborn perfectionism. Lahr always pictured the young producer with his shirt sleeves rolled up, working with the dancers, grooming his property
into a brassy, low-down reflection of himself. White never made a gesture that didn't spark excitement or hatred. Ziegfeld had been different. His humorless nasal twang was always a disappointment; it never excited Lahr like White's bravado. Ziegfeld was cut from a more cosmopolitan mold. He was tasteful and cautious where White was garish and rambunctious. When Lahr worked with Ziegfeld, Broadway's most famous producer was sixty-three and ill. His orders, especially in the last months, often came via a special telephone hook-up from his hotel room to the theater or in those famous ten-page telegrams. He worked with a quieter intensity. Lahr watched him in the painstaking process of dressing his chorus line, sometimes changing a pair of shoes on one chorine because another girl's feet showed off the color better. He too was a perfectionist, but he kept a distance from his performers. He was a formidable entrepreneur whose aloofness made Lahr nervous and unsure.

“Ziegfeld usually didn't like comedians. I think I was one of the few comics he liked.” Ziegfeld admired Lahr the first time he saw him perform, at his debut on the Palace stage. In 1932, in the face of a depression and in an urgent attempt to maintain a name and a formula of entertainment begun in 1907, Ziegfeld picked Lahr to star in his last extravaganza,
Hot-Cha!

Ziegfeld contacted Lahr on the Hollywood set for
Flying High
, where he was making his first motion picture. “I was flattered at the call. I didn't think much of the films then, I was going well on Broadway, so I came East.” Ziegfeld offered him the added inducement of $2,250 a week plus a bonus of $250, the biggest salary Lahr had ever earned. To Ziegfeld, who was bidding high to maintain his reputation as a producer, the amount was insignificant. In a frenzied effort to keep the public's taste from changing, Ziegfeld attempted to glut it. Besides Lahr, he hired an astounding array of performers, including Buddy Rogers, Lynn Overman, Eleanor Powell, the DeMarcos, and the sensuous Lupe Velez, who was as popular in pictures as Lahr was on the stage.

Where White controlled his productions by his instincts alone, Ziegfeld, worn down and puzzled by the mediocrity of the script created by Lew Brown, Ray Henderson, and Mark Hellinger, could only turn to Lahr. Lahr cherishes the small moments of intimacy with Ziegfeld. “Did I ever tell you when Ziegfeld called me?” That call, perhaps as pathetic a gesture as Ziegfeld could make in his last years, is still memorable to Lahr. They met at Childs for coffee. “I'm not pleased
with the show, Bert. I'm not pleased at all. What do you think we can do to fix it up?” Lahr suggested bringing in new writers to doctor the script, but Brown, Henderson, and Hellinger vetoed the proposal. Ziegfeld was hamstrung.

Ziegfeld's indecisiveness and insecurity made Lahr skeptical. “We opened in Washington, D.C. I wasn't too happy with the show; neither was Mr. Ziegfeld. It wasn't up to the standards of the other things I'd done.” Nevertheless, Ziegfeld, like his revues, tried to whistle past the depression. He told the Washington
Times
(February 6, 1932):

I look upon the Depression primarily as a lack of confidence. One of the songs in
Hot-Cha!
deals with it. “There's just as many flowers, just as many trees.” It's all in the people's minds to a great extent. But people have less money and they spend it more carefully … There is still a market for a good product and maybe this Brown and Henderson song and Bert Lahr's comedy will help rid the public of fear. That will be worth doing.