Notes on a Cowardly Lion (25 page)

(Butler enters with glass on tray.)

(Pater drinks.)

The transition to new comic terrain in
Life Begins at 8:40
was eased for Lahr by the buoyant, tasteful overseeing of John Murray Anderson, an energetic Broadway director. Lahr speaks of Anderson with words he rarely uses for directors. “He had tremendous taste.” Anderson's kindness and confidence helped Lahr control his material. The director had nicknames for everyone in the show. Harburg was “Zipper” (as opposed to his usual “Yipper”), Ira Gershwin was “Rock of Gibraltar,” Arlen was “Old Man River,” and his wife, Anya, was “Schmanda Fair.” “I used to call him ‘Punch,'” recalls Lahr, “because he had a chin like the Punch and Judy shows.” Anderson referred to his clown as “Euripides.”

The combination of the fine performers and inventive score had created great excitement on Broadway, and one of the wittiest sketches, “C'est La Vie,” had originated on a Lahr impulse. “I said to Yip, I'd love to do something with an Inverness cape. It gave him the idea for his song and sketch on the bridge. Being known as a low comedian to do something that was directly opposite made it funny. It's the same thing I gave Jimmy Durante for his nightclub act. I said, ‘Jimmy, why don't you come out in your act with a toupee under your hat. Just take your hat off, and say, “You can't fool your friends.”'He's kept it in ever since.” In the Harburg sketch, Lahr and Ray Bolger are found staring gloomily into the Seine from one of the picturesque Paris bridges. As they chat, both realize they have been jilted by the same girl. They decide to end it all and leap into the Seine. Suddenly, there is a screech of brakes and their goddess (Luella Gear) enters.

Brooks Atkinson's reaction to Lahr's comedy in
Life Begins at 8:40
is a sound barometer of the public's understanding of his development. Atkinson, whose subtlest criticism focuses on comedy and clowns, was reporting the beginning of a change he would analyze more critically in
The Show Is On
(1936). In 1934, new dimensions in Lahr's comic personality were emerging.

When he [Lahr] turned up in “Hold Everything” and a crimson edition of the “Scandals” several years ago, he roared, and pranced and mugged like a demented elephant. He is a low comedian. Most of the material in “Life Begins at 8:40” is too subtle in
manner
to release his native exuberance. Having more than one stop to his instrument of comedy, he does remarkably well with what he has.

The uniqueness of
Life Begins at 8:40
as a revue and the new content added to Lahr's comic façade were in large part due to the songs and sketches of E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen. At a time when Lahr was groping for a laughter to match the times, Arlen and Harburg appeared—with an appreciation of his comedy and a genius of their own.
Arlen and Harburg provided Lahr with some o£ his finest comic strategies. In his voice, they saw a wonderful opportunity to satirize the romantic and operatic stage clichés. Since they appreciated Lahr's theatrical acrobatics and his wit, Lahr's grimaces and grunts neatly punctuated their comedy songs. In
Life Begins at 8:40
, the lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Harburg managed to give verbal terms to the buffoon's self-deception and even capture the fundamental business of Lahr's leering good spirits. “I could say so many things through Bert's voice that I couldn't with my own,” says Harburg, who saw Lahr in a completely different light from the songwriting company who had precipitated his stardom. “When DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson were writing for him, they saw Bert as the low-down comic, the average ‘gnong-gnong' guy. He was the patsy; and implicit in that was the attitude of a semi-idiotic guy who always gets things wrong. I understood Lahr in a different way. In his comedy and personality I saw the little man; the pathos of a human being who is stuck with his society, who is put upon and exploited by it. His laughter is the laughter of a poor humanity, a sorry little guy who happens to be born looking like a comic and therefore everyone reacts to him not as if he were a human being, but simply a joker. All his reactions are those of a man society doesn't accept, but laughs at.”

For Harold Arlen, the show was an important one, and Lahr helped him make a point to the Broadway world. The man whose rich and original music has produced “I've Got the World on a String,” “Stormy Weather,” “Let's Fall in Love,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “It's Only a Paper Moon” wanted to write comedy with the inventiveness he had already exhibited with the blues. “This show
[Life Begins at 8:40]
really meant something,” Arlen says. “I wanted to set sail into Broadway. I wanted people in the profession to know that I could write things they didn't expect of me.”

They lavished attention on Lahr's comedy, finding just the right song for his stage personality. They came up with a take-off on a Metropolitan Opera baritone, singing a beautifully inarticulate song, entitled “Things.” It was to be sung straight with no emotion and certainly no delicate phrasing. When Arlen thinks of the song, he cannot help smiling at the idea of Lahr standing regally in front of a Steinway, his hand resting pompously on it. “Anything he sings becomes absolutely asinine.”

When Lahr sang in burlesque and even in the early Broadway productions, his wild, truculent movements were more important than his
mangling of the lyrics. The humor in his rendition of “Peggy O'Neill,” for instance, was its unabashed inarticulateness. With the Arlen-Harburg songs, the situation was reversed. The laughter came from his attempt at being coherent. In
Life Begins at 8:40
, Lahr was able to take advantage of the inconclusive lyrics and stiff operatic pose, joining the low comic bits of business with his monotone vibrato. The song was high parody. As Arlen recalls, “He fussed and fumed and was frustrated, and extemporized to get gimmicks into ‘Things'—for instance, his toupee falling a certain way. It was an endless game for him, until he finally got as many laughs as possible out of it.”

Lahr came on stage in a tuxedo and sporting a brown hairpiece that brought his hairline, like a dorsal fin, to an abrupt point on his forehead. A piano player sat beside him, elegantly poised for the recital. Lahr turned graciously to the small audience on the stage and began:

Ladies and Gentlemen, the first number of my second group was written in a little garret on the left bank of Giaconda Canal and is entitled “Things,” simply “Things.
”

Before he begins, Lahr's pinky shoots up to his tooth. He vibrates his finger like a tuning fork in the side of his mouth. He signals the piano player and smiles widely at the audience. His lips curl under, exposing an expanse of salmon-colored gums. His teeth are straight and clenched tight as if he were holding on to some terrible truth.

When I was but a little lad**

I used to think of things

The only joy I ever had

I had because of things.

But now that I'm to manhood grown,

Fond memory always brings

The utter, utter, utter

Loveliness of things.

His voice quavers with profound feeling at the word “things.” His hand is outstretched in emphatic declamation. “Things …” Suddenly, the wig falls down over his eyes. He pushes it back quickly in exasperation. The readjustment is unsuccessful. The toupee sits like a sparrow's nest on his head. He continues nervously:

Let others sing of Mandalay

Let others sing of trees,

Let others sing of mother
,

And the busy, busy beeeeezzz …

But I'm happier far than a million kings are

When my soul sings of things.

Things, sweet happiness of things.

Things that ease the rocky way,

Things that look at God all day,

Things, sweet misery of things.

From birth bed to the grave,

Aren't we all to them a slave

What makes all the ocean wave

Things (ah, ah), things (ah, ah, ah)
…

The piano player, carried away by Lahr's own emotional improvisations, embarks on an elaborate solo. Lahr scowls at the pianist as if to say, “I'm the artist.”

When the frost is on the punkin',

And the sun in the west is sinkin',

Can't you hear those paddles chunkin'…

His wig rebels again, falling completely over his face. His hands grope in front of his nose trying to locate the hair that has covered his eyes. He finally gets hold of it and tries to smooth it in place. He tries the last line again. The pianist forgets again and goes into a strenuous solo. Lahr picks his teeth delicately and waits for the conclusion.

Lickity split and to beddy for things

Fit as a fiddle and ready for things
…

When he says “ready,” he winks at a woman in the front row of the stage audience.

You can have your smoke pipe rings,

Your Saratoga Springs,

But give me
…

The trombonist in the pit hits a long note, so that he cannot finish the line. He turns and glares down at him. “Why don't you use a bellows!” After the statement, he forgets his lyric and looks helplessly at the accompanist, “Where the hell …” The piano player goes back to “smoke pipe rings.” Lahr counters angrily, “I
did
that!”

You can have your smoke pipe rings,

And your Saratoga Springs,

But give me
…

This time the violinist plays off key. Lahr yells down to the orchestra, “You must have a bad gut!”

Give me
…

The saxophone drones on again. Lahr, finally determined to finish the song despite the outrages of the orchestra, throws his hands up in despair, “Oh, go home!” And in a crescendo of baritone lyricism, he finishes emphatically,

Give
me
things!!

The woman on stage at whom he has winked and directed his suave innuendoes rises at the sound of the last tremulous note and hits him in the face with a pie. (Blackout)

“I always wanted to do ‘Things' so that when the baritone came out on stage his fly was open. The accompanist keeps pointing to it, and when he turns around to zip himself, his shirttail is out. But I never got to do that.” When John Charles Thomas, one of America's most famous baritones and a friend of Lahr's, came to the show, the parody took him by surprise. “I remember he laughed so hard that he got up out of his seat and left the theater. As he stood up, I could see him laughing. He yelled up to me, ‘You son-of-a-bitch' and left.”