Notes on a Cowardly Lion (29 page)

At a time when all his friendships seem to be caving in around him, he found in the inimitable Bea Lillie a woman who inspired trust.

“Working with Bea was one of my great experiences in the theater. We never had a cross word. I never saw her make one bad move. She was entirely professional.” E. Y. Harburg, brought in to doctor the show, recalls Lahr's energy, not his peckishness. “Bert rehearsed like a darling child. He'd want to get every last bit of laughter out of the rehearsals. He never held back; Bea did. Bea got onto all his tricks; but she didn't come out with hers until the opening night in Philadelphia. She pulled about six or seven on him which floored Bert and broke him up on stage. He was worried about her. She represented elegance; he represented the low-down.”

The two seemed an unlikely combination. Bea Lillie, elfish and delicate, spoke with a fluttering urbanity. Her satire, like herself, inspired gentle, dry laughter. She was a lady; and the sense of refinement that filled her comic pose brought hilarious surprise on stage. She was not below using a Seltzer bottle or wearing a pair of roller skates underneath an evening gown; but when she used them, the laughter
came from the disbelief with which she viewed her own comic personality. In comparison, Lahr was wild, inarticulate, and loud. He was not used to underplaying. His energy contrasted with Bea Lillie's feyness.

Bea Lillie had always been a comedienne of manners; Lahr was evolving in the same direction. They both enjoyed deflating the pretentious. They delighted in playing off their comic personalities in sketches that took them into unfamiliar ground. Lahr learned a lot from watching Bea. Her gasps of laughter, like a child careening down a hill, her quips, her pillbox hats became familiar landmarks.

The admiration was mutual. “I liked everything he did,” says Bea Lillie. “And he liked everything I did. We thought the same about things. It took me a long while to know him personally—because he always looked so worried.”

Lahr's affection for the comedienne had a paternal tinge. He remembers the evening they headlined a special New Year's bill at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn, doing some of their vaudeville material. Each of them brought a sketch to do together. “
That,
” she says, winking, “was
quelque chose.
” Lahr is more explicit. “We had been warned that the second house on New Year's Eve might be a little rough. A lot of people in the gallery were drunk and giving the performers, as Bea would say, the
‘rahsb'ry,'
—you know, the Bronx cheer. Well, I went on first, and they gave it to me. I went down front and said something which was in good taste like, ‘Bad stomach?' When I came off, Bea was in the wings. She said to me, ‘Oh Bert, I'm frightened.'

“I had a few moments to think, and when we both made our next entrance I said, ‘You don't mind what I say if they do that to you?' She said, ‘No,' and we went on.

“The minute we began somebody gave the Bronx cheer. And I looked up and yelled, ‘I'd hate to be the guy who does your laundry.' The audience howled.”

“I didn't get it for a minute,” Miss Lillie confesses. But when she did, it hit her with overwhelming delight. “She yelled out that ‘eeeeeeh' laugh of hers and broke up on stage. It was such a big laugh that from then on they let us alone.”

Bea could have the same effect on him. Lahr visited her in England at her Henley estate. The first supper was served by a very distinguished butler (“and two maids in the kitchen, thank you very much”) who entered with the soup.

“Old retainer?” Lahr asked.

“I've never seen him before,” said Bea indifferently.

The next thing she remembers was seeing Lahr's face on the side of the table, crumpled with laughter.

“Sometimes she'd interpolate things on stage for me. There were types of humor that didn't impress her. If a story had something about getting hurt in it, falling off a chair or something like that, she'd say, ‘That's sad, how tragic.' She never thought that kind of business was very funny.”

In one scene of
The Show Is On
their good spirits got the best of them. “We did a scene where Bea was the ticket-taker at the Guild (‘the Geeeeld—it was veddy graaand'). In those days Cain's Warehouse was the place where all the shows that flopped would take their scenery. Anyway, in this scene, Bea was the ticket-taker and I played the advanceman for Cain's Warehouse. I came with a tape measure to take measurements of the scenery. On opening night, when the performers and the theater crowd came, the situation was a riot. At one point the audience laughed for five minutes. Bea said, ‘Do you move a show quickly?' And I replied, ‘We moved a show so fast the other night the actors had to take their bows from a crate.' The second night, the scene was just fair, and by the end of the week, when the regular customers came in, they didn't get it at all. So Bea and I started kidding around on the stage. She'd say to me under her breath, things like ‘Get off! Get off!' or ‘Drop your pants, maybe you'll get a laugh.' I'd whisper ‘You're not funny tonight, Lil.'” Whether the audience laughed or not, they had so much fun with it that the producer finally had to take the scene out because it was disrupting the momentum of the show.

Lahr's big number in
The Show Is On
was “Song of the Woodsman,” which became one of the treasures of American comedy lyrics and his trademark for many years. It was a parody of the famous bass, Chaliapin, and of the operatic sentimentalizing of the outdoors, which had been epitomized in Nelson Eddy's “Rose Marie.”

The song was written especially for Lahr by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg. Lahr had given them the general idea of what he wanted, hoping they could come up with a song that would beef up the material he had in the show.

“I always wrote Bert's material easily,” explains Harburg. “No lyricist is worth his salt if he can't get inside the personality he is to write for. Bert always had artistic hopes and feelings; but the life he was given squelched that. His comedy was always conscious of a lack of
privilege. He wants to be the artist; he wants to have the vignette of the enlightened guy. He knows he can never attain it; and so he laughs it off. The audience laughs with him, while he's slipping on an intellectual banana peel. Look at the first few lines of ‘Woodsman.'

The day's at the dawn,

And dawn's on the morn,

The morn's on the corn

The corn's on the cob …

I was parodying part of Browning's ‘Pippa Passes'—

The year's at the spring

And day's at the morn

The hillside's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snails's on the thorn;

God's in his heaven—

All's right with the world!

Bert is precisely at the opposite of that lipsmacking romantic instinct. He was exploding the pompous baritone. I couldn't write those words for anyone else. ‘Choppin' and ‘Chaliapin' for instance, is Bert Lahr language. To get a lyric to sound funny you need amusing sounds. To imagine Chaliapin chopping a tree is witty. The more fascinating the sound collection, the more interesting the song.”

“We made a record of ‘Woodchopper' after we had written it, and sent it to Bert,” says Arlen. “I got to the point where I could do him.”

When Lahr received the record, his delight and enthusiasm for the song was immediate. Bea Lillie was with him. “I remember when a record of the ‘Woodsman' came from California; I was so happy for him because it was a wonderful number, but I didn't have a good stopper myself. When he put it on, I guess my face dropped. Anyway, he sensed it, and after we'd played it a few times, he said to me, ‘Never mind, Bea, I'm going to get the boys to write you one too.' I never got over that.”

When the curtain came up, it uncovered an unlikely woodsman. Lahr was posed preposterously next to a scrawny tree with an ax in his hand. He wore a checkered hunter's shirt and a toupee matted on his head. He began raising both hands delicately toward his chest and then unleashing an outrageous sound.

After the first stanza, he stops to let the logic of the lilting words sink into his own befuddled brain.

All's right with the world

All's rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-rah-right, with the world.

O, a Woodsman's life is the life for me

With an all wool shirt, 'neath an all wood tree

For the world is mine, where 'ere I stand

With a song in my soul

And an a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ax in my hand.

The orchestra plays a throbbing melody. Lahr strikes an operatic pose.

For I chop and I chop and I chop

Till the sun comes up

And with every stroke the welcomes ring

When my truest friend, my ax I swing

What care I if the stocks should drop

Long as I can chop, chop, chop, chop.

Songs were made by fools like me

But only a baritone, a vari-bari-baritone

Can sing while the tall trees flop

So let me chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.

He backs away from the tree and shoulders his papier-mâché ax, swinging boldly at the tree.

Heave-Swing! Heave-Swing!

As he swings, a barrage of wood pelts him from the wings.

Heave-Swing! Heave-Swing!

Another bombardment. This time, as he covers his head to protect himself, his wig tips over his eyes. He tries to stick it in place. It is a hopeless struggle. He stuffs it on sideways and continues singing even louder to cover up the embarrassment.

There's no stoppin' me or Chaliapin

When we're choppin' a tree

When we're cho—opin a tree.

He pauses, fussing with his wig. Then, with eyes aflutter, he begins softly—

What do we chop, when we chop a tree?

A thousand things that you daily see.

A baby's crib, the poet's chair,

The soap box down at Union Square.

A pipe for Dad, a bat for brother,

An extra broom for dear old mother.

Pickets for the fence,

Buckets for the well,

Poles for American Tel &Tel.

Cribbage boards for the Far West Indies,

Toothpicks for the boys in Lindy's.

Croquet balls for you and me,

That's what we chop when we chop a tree.

His voice rises an octave in passionate declamation—

Whadda we chop when we chop God's wood?

And then, reverently—

Guns to protect our womanhood,

The better mousetrap, the movie mag,

The mast to hoist our country's flag.

Handles for the Fuller brush,

Plungers for the obstinate flush,

Comfort seats, all shapes and classes

For little lads, and little—lasses.

Modernistic beds built just for three

That's what we chop when we chop a tree.

Heave—Swing! Heave—Swing!

As he finishes his swing, he tenses up to receive the onslaught from the wings. Nothing comes. Again—

Heave—Swing, Heave—Swing.

He covers his head, and when nothing happens, he looks in disgust at the stagehands and continues—

For I chop and I chop and I chop

At the crescendo of his song, with his arms dramatically outstretched, he is bombarded again. He cowers, but struggles on—

Till the sun comes up,

There's no stoppin' me or Chaliapin

When we're choppin' a—tree.

(Blackout)

“They threw everything at me. Everybody backstage wanted to get into the act.”

“I couldn't wait to get in the wings for that number,” confides Bea. “I'd throw boards, brooms, anything I could get my hands on at him. I couldn't wait to see it.”

With the “Woodsman,” Lahr moved closer to a more controlled comic image. The sketch was economical, simple, and relied not so much on his fund of energy as on the attitude of mind he was parodying. Bea Lillie caught the difference in his comedy, which brought their work closer together. “I've never seen anybody as dignified as Bert Lahr when he plays Lord This or an Englishman. He is
so
grand in everything he does, if you know what I mean—even in his comedy. He has great dignity in chopping that tree. He took all that wood in the face with great dignity. There was no slapstick—and if there was—it was dignified. That's me, that's me—whatever happens I rise above it.”

Lahr did another sketch called “Income Tax,” which was very successful. What is interesting about the scene is how so many of the laugh situations parallel his own life. If he was not the obnoxious radio star, Bert Clarkson, trying to fasttalk the tax inspector, he was Bert Lahr who had been called down to the Office of Internal Revenue the previous year to explain a deduction of four hundred dollars for nose putty. When the inspector protested that four hundred dollars was out of the question, Lahr nonchalantly answered, “Well, I put rhinestones in it!” Unlike the character in the sketch, he did not have a nubile Indian traveling with him, but Mildred was waiting in California, and he was contributing to payment of her expenses.

The Show Is On
played 237 performances. Lahr was greeted with good reviews, which, much to his surprise, did not capitalize on the publicity of his private life. While there was something bold and courageous about facing an audience and the critics under the circumstances, it was safer than private recriminations. “The audience either laughed or they didn't; they loved you or you flopped. There was no in-between. Off the stage, there were so many complications and alternatives. So many ways to read the same facts. Nothing was quite as clear and immediate.”

While Lahr could not chart the changes in his emotional life, the shifts in his comedy were easier to read. Brooks Atkinson described the evolution in Lahr's humor over the previous four years to which
The Show Is On
gave new, important focus.

When Bert Lahr was fresh from burlesque houses, bellowing his ‘ung-ung-ung and throwing his arms out of joint, he was funny
enough for
comfortable theater going
. But he has gone through a considerable metamorphosis since those days. Now he dresses at times in ornate evening clothes or splendid livery and stands around the stage like a brilliant fashion plate …