Notes on a Cowardly Lion (24 page)

In Pittsburgh, Ziegfeld came backstage to Lahr's dressing room after the opening night. “He never said, ‘Good show, Bert,' or ‘I think we have something.'” He smiled wanly at Lahr and looked around the room. For a moment he focused on Lahr's costume—the epitome of the Ziegfeld opulence—a sequined matador's costume with gold brocade and imported cloth. He fingered the material. (“There was nobody who could dress a show the way Ziegfeld did,” Lahr says.) And then, he turned to the valet, saying, “Get a black bag for this outfit so the brocade doesn't tarnish.” The show was not first rate and Ziegfeld knew it. In Pittsburgh, he was stricken with influenza, and by the time
Hot-Cha!
reached New York, he had developed pneumonia. Necessity forced him to take a hotel room close to his investment. The night the show opened he was nearly in a coma. George White never attended
Hot-Cha!
or inquired about Ziegfeld's health; by July there would no longer be an impediment to White's claim to the pinnacle of Broadway fame.

Lahr found the comedy scenes in
Hot-Cha!
mediocre. When he tried to improvise, Ziegfeld clamped down on his ad libs, disappointed in the sketches but suspicious of any free-wheeling departures from them. He wanted the leering zany who had pleased so freshly in
Hold Everything
and
Flying High
. Lahr went beyond his trademark responses in his scenes with Lupe Velez. “Working with Lupe was quite an experience. She couldn't laugh. She cackled—like a duck. I'd say
things under my breath to her on the stage and she'd start to cackle.” He imitates a duck and recollects the svelte body of Miss Velez, which helped launch her film career playing opposite such sultry lovers as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. “Lupe never washed. When she'd go to the Mayfair or somewhere she'd just put on a dress. Nothing under it—nothing. So when I'd be clowning with her on the stage and I'd notice her dirty hands, I'd say, ‘You've got your gloves on again.' It would break her up.” Ziegfeld, who watched his performers like a petulant mother-in-law, got word of Lahr's joking. One day Lahr called him to inquire about his health. He and Ziegfeld had a friendly chat. That night Lahr received a long telegram from the producer, reminding him of his investment and scolding him for taking liberties with the script.

Ziegfeld's name insured a full fifteen-week run on Broadway despite mixed reviews, but that telegram was indicative of his own misgivings. “I think he liked me because in Pittsburgh he said, ‘Wait for me, Bert, and we'll drive to the station together …' He knew at the finish, that he'd lost his touch.” Even Lahr was not without trepidation. Soon after
Hot-Cha!
closed, Lahr asked Jack Pearl to take a ride in his new Packard. Pearl was commenting on how wonderful it was that both of them had worked for Ziegfeld. Lahr interrupted him.

“How many weeks did you get out of the
Follies
, Jack?”

“Forty-one.”

“I only got fifteen. Do you think Lew Brown tried to mess me up?”

“Don't be silly!”

“Jack—let me ask you this—do you think I've got a future in this business?”

Pearl began to laugh. “You want me to tell you.”

“No,” Lahr said. “I don't want to hear.”

His next vehicle was
George White's Music Hall Varieties
(1933). There was nothing “artistic” about Lahr's reason for doing the show. He had been riding high on Broadway, and despite his most recent tepid success, Broadway liked his brand of low comedy. He was prepared to serve them the same style as long as audiences responded. “I had nothing to do at the time. I thought it would be good for my career to be working with Harry Richman, who was a big star then, and Lili Damita, who was Errol Flynn's first wife. The show had George White's name, and it was just to make money.” Lahr's conservatism opted for the safe course; left to himself and without external
pressures, his comedy would probably have remained the same through the thirties, and he would have been forgotten by the end of the next decade.

George White, who stuck so closely to his own formulas for entertainment, encouraged his friend to experiment with a more satiric style to add another dimension to his performance. Too shrewd a businessman to demand that Lahr abandon his low-comic business entirely, he would, in the
Music Hall Varieties
, combine that with something untested in Lahr's repertoire—a satire on the popular English matinee idol, Clifton Webb, whose sophisticated and genteel dance routines seemed an unlikely target for Lahr.

Lahr balked at first. “I didn't want to do it because I'd never done anything like it before.” But Lahr respected White's instincts. When he was nervous and uncertain about his sketches, White always pacified him with an axiom: “Never worry about a comic on the road; the dancer or singer will always be your hit out of town.” White's dictum was well-founded. Lahr always needed practice to smooth his timing and flesh out his impersonations.

The Webb take-off, “Chanson by Clifton Duckfeet,” was a stretch for Lahr. He was forced to be elegant instead of bumbling, controlled instead of excessive. In the sketch, Lahr appeared, as Webb did, from behind the curtain at center stage. He was dressed dramatically in tuxedo pants, a white bolero jacket and top hat. A gold watch chain stretched elegantly across his waist. He spoke delicately and lisped in an attempt at the clipped English monotone. When the spotlight discovered him, Lahr was standing,
à la
Webb, with his legs tight together and his hand jammed nonchalantly in his left pocket. He took out a cigarette, and after fingering it, threw it away as he began to sing. His song recounted springtime in Paris and a chance meeting with a Parisienne:

'Til midnight we chatted—romantic the scene!

Adventure? Well, rather—my spirits ran high.

The French are so friendly—if you know what I mean—

After the first stanza of patter, Lahr went into a delicate soft-shoe, swiveling his hips and emitting delighted gasps at his steps.

A bottle and a bird …

White, in a box to the left of the stage, interrupted the song by
giving Lahr the raspberry. Lahr countered, “Duck to you,” and continued his tale—

We were alone, the hour grew late,

We sipped and sighed and sighed and sipped,

A rendezvous, a tête à tête,

For me pajamas—Alice blue,

For her—negligée—and fetching too.

I began to feel that “je ne sais quoi,”

The night was like a symphony,

And just as I began to unbend

She said, “How about fifty dollars?”

And I said, “
RIGHT NOW LADY THAT WOULD BE A GOD-SEND
!”

And though it may seem absurd, It goes to show what can happen—from a
BOTTLE AND A BIRD!

Lahr strikes Webb's confident pose, but the sound of a Bronx cheer fills the air. He does a disdainful double-take and makes a hasty exit through the center curtain.

In burlesque Lahr's ability to mimic people had been limited to a special socioeconomic class. Since that time, his mobility and range of interests had widened considerably. The
Music Hall Varieties
turned Lahr to other areas of comedy. “White saw that I had the capacity for satire. He thought I could do it, and he made me do other things.”

The final, if less revolutionary, concession Lahr made to White's comic instincts was a dog act. “I had liver in my pocket, just like the trainer,” my father says, winking. The skit began when he came out in a tuxedo to sing “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer. The liver was around his ankles. As he sang, the dogs rushed out on stage and sniffed around his legs. He continued to sing, kicking at them angrily. At the end of the song, the curtain behind him went up, exposing a fire hydrant. “There was even more liver around the hydrant.” The dogs immediately left his legs and turned their attention to the stump. At another point in the evening, Lahr, assuming his burlesque Dutch dialect, to parody the dog trainer's comic introduction, returned to a style and excess as low-down as any of his burlesque moments. He told the audience: “… Also you have to treat them with kindness and liver! And from there is where come the saying, ‘Bring 'em back a-liver!' Always I carry in the pocket the best liver what gives. [He shows a piece of liver.] See the liver? Special liver for dogs only [eats the liver] …”

Although the
Music Hall Varieties
pushed Lahr briefly into fresh comic terrain, its general formula did not stray too boldly from that of White's previous
Scandals
. Not even an enthusiastic comedy buff like Brooks Atkinson of
The New York Times
could be coaxed to give it precedence over conflicting openings. The
Times
notice underscores the general static quality of the show. While the unsigned reviewer fails to see the significant new area in Lahr's comedy, his response illustrates the still waters that White and many of the famous entertainers were approaching:

Mr. Lahr does not depart from his fantastic contortions of face or his impossible gutteral mouthings …

The material which goes to make up (George White's)
Varieties
has been tried and played so many times before that the performers don't need much rehearsal to go through with it.

But Lahr's first stab at satire was noticed immediately by most Broadway writers, and in
Life Begins at 8:40
, the following year, satirical content embellished his comedy. He was at ease with the more sophisticated material. When White contracted him for
George White's Scandals
(1936), it was precisely this urbanity which White had first nurtured that his shows could not, now, create on stage. In the interim between George White revues, Lahr found that he could say more with his pinky than a pratfall. He still took pratfalls, but the nonsense of his burlesque and vaudeville comedy was becoming more refined. He leveled his voice and face at targets foreign to his experience, like the British aristocracy.

The formula of White's
Scandals
allowed for a modicum of satire but not at the expense of spectacle. Satire was a special impulse that required a pace and subtlety the revues could not easily sustain. For White, everything had to be fast, funny, and please with good spirits rather than sophistication, even though the spectacle as Broadway entertainment was rapidly losing its public appeal. Movies could do it better; even radio's fantasy world was more successful than the revue's carnival spirits. White could not see the pressure of the other media on his work. In his urgency he stuck to his formula, while Lahr outgrew it. “If he could have realized that times change and treatments change, I think that White would be just as big today as he was years ago. But he wanted to do the old scenes; he would not change. He had a one-track mind.”

Lahr found himself disputing his friend's comic judgment. “When
we did the '36
Scandals
(it was the next to the last one George did), it just wasn't as big as the others. I thought of a comedy scene. I went to the authors. But we wouldn't let White know what we were doing because he would meddle in it now and ruin it.” The scene Lahr contrived was called “The Englishman and the Baby.” This was an extension of the dry underplaying begun in the
Music Hall Varieties
and matured in
Life Begins at 8:40
. White would have wanted broader burlesque, would have forced his own ideas into the writing. The sketch was finally played; White accepted it, grudgingly, into the show. “It was his own egotism, his own lack of perspective that finally finished White. Things were shifting and he never noticed.” Despite the attraction of Eugene and Willie Howard, Rudy Vallee, and Lahr, the revue managed only a modest run of 110 performances.

The sketch Lahr helped to write shows an attempt to remold his comic ground. The laughter is in the idea of Bert Lahr trying to assume the civilized airs of the English landed gentry. His instinct for parody assured him of a surprisingly realistic Oxford accent, but with a slight sibilance, he could take that reality and explode it. “It was an exaggerated Englishman. Everything very clip't, very adenoidal.” He flares his nostrils to emphasize the round, hollow tones. His eyes, instead of crossing, become fastidious beads, the fleshy furrows of his forehead rise two inches higher in a formal bow to his nose.

The sketch played on the stereotypes of the English upper-class indifference, adding an American robustness to the image of civilized control. Set in the plush surroundings of a London club, Lord Marleybone (Lahr) and his acquaintance, Lord Tottingham, have a jowly talk about women with an aplomb that glosses their cool amorality.

Tottingham:
   And what was the matter early this morning? Did you get out of the wrong side of the bed?

Marleybone:
   Quite the contrary, you old scullery mop. I got out of the right side of the wrong bed.

The men get progressively drunker, gossiping and talking about old affairs.

Tottingham:
   I was just glancing through the
Times
here—I see where the Duke of Marmalade had to give up his yacht.

Marleybone:
   I'm not surprised. He told me last time I saw him it would have to be either his yacht or his mistress. He couldn't stand the expense of hauling her up on shore every year and scraping her bottom.

At the finale, Lord Marleybone's wife calls to inform him that she is pregnant. Tottingham, she explains, is the father. Marleybone puts down the receiver, orders a Scotch, and casually dispatches Tottingham. “I'm awfully sorry, and I know you won't mind, but I've got to shoot you.”

Once the show found its rhythm, Lahr discovered that he was able to serve the impulses of both raucous and refined laughter. The pressure of refinement had its effect on Lahr's comic instinct. The sketch Lahr suggested to White for the
'36 Scandals
germinated in an understatement he had discovered painfully in
Life Begins at 8:40
, in a skit burlesquing those stereotyped English values: family, formality, stoic acceptance (see Appendix 4). In the scene, a much surer stab at class humor than Lahr's imitation, Lahr played the son, Richard, and Brian Donlevy was the father. Lahr enjoyed wrapping his tongue around English sounds—a luxury provided by the spareness of the language. He would learn from the experience; and then set out to find his own form.