Notes on a Cowardly Lion (3 page)

I'm an orphan now, but I'm full of gratitude for the world that made me. I get letters from older readers who knew my parents, and who tell me in passing how proud Dad was of Jane and me. It's nice to know. I think Dad loved us, but it was in the nature of his way of loving that the knowledge is not bone deep. So the marketed trinkets work for me like Mexican
milagros
—talismans that are extensions of prayer and are tacked by the prayerful onto crosses in thanks for the miracle of survival. I'm pushing sixty now, but I find that the conversation with one's parents doesn't end with the grave. I want Dad back to finish the discussion—to answer some questions, to talk theatre, to see me now. Almost anywhere in the city these days, I can turn the corner and run into him. I stroll past a novelty store on Lexington Avenue, and there's Dad as a cookie jar. I steal a peek at the computer of a young woman in the Public Library, and, by God, there he is as a desktop image. I go to buy some wrapping paper at the stationery store, and his face stares at me from the greeting-card rack. “Hiya, Pop,” I find myself saying, and continue on my way.

The first draft of this book was completed before my father's death. I have chosen to keep the tense in the present because his comedy and his conversation capitalized on immediacy.

J. L.

From the Wings: An Introduction

The curse of the theatre's financial vice is that one tends to look back more in sorrow than in anger on the many stirring or bad plays that might be memorable if they had been permitted to plant themselves and flourish in a healthy system … All in all, Bert Lahr was the most pitiable victim of the season for his play met the early fate of every other play that opened during the newspaper strike
.

“
The Beauty Part” showed him in the golden twilight of his preposterous maturity, the last and most marvellous of the American clowns cradled by burlesque. To see him on the Bench, a Justice Holmes from the Bronx wrinkling his anthropoid forehead … to hear his sparrow brain working over the great libertarian guarantees as they might affect a Los Angeles Hindu who made a human sacrifice … and then to hear the ruling: “I am here to presoive the right of every American to croke when they see fit, and not when some wog sets fire to 'm”—this was to be present at an historic exegesis of Western liberty, or Western hypocrisy, or something equally grand and fatuous.

Alistair Cooke
, Manchester Guardian

June 13, 1963

BERT LAHR STANDS
alone in the wings waiting for his cue. He wears a smoking jacket with a shawl wrapped formally around his shoulders. A woolen beanie is pulled down to his eyebrows. It is damp in the backstage darkness; linoleum muffles every step. Bert Lahr seems to blend into the dusty shadows. There is nothing in his manner or in his worn face that indicates success. And yet, in that body, dwarfed beside the stage house, is a humor that has weathered five decades of drastic shifts in American comic taste.

He waits patiently, looking continually at his feet or the leathery, freckled skin of his hands. From the wings, the sense of isolation that surrounds his craft is unmistakable. The heads of the audience jutt out from their seats like bleached rock faces, detached from their bodies. The glare of the stage lights blurs their identities.

This is my father's world, and where he comes mysteriously alive. The scene is the creation of S. J. Perelman; but the character, Nelson
Smedley, aged ice-cream tycoon, becomes Lahr's unique invention. He can never be certain how the character evolved. “I just play in it; then it's almost intuitive.”

His cue comes. He moves from the shadows into the white light of center stage, and the transformation is immediate and complete. His body finds new rhythms. His legs, pale and spindly at home, churn with furious energy. His fingers, delicate and langorous off stage, lash out, discovering the violence of senility.

“Get your paws off me! I can walk as good as the next man!” Nelson Smedley casts off his nurse, begins to take his first steps, and topples to the floor. The audience roars in response.

“Pushed me again, didn't you? Always pushing—push, push, push, puuuuuusssssh!”

To the audience, he is a slick professional—smooth, direct, with impeccable timing. They have always laughed at my father. They joke about his face—full of crags and mysterious angles, with a nose swollen like a gherkin. Even his eyes, penetrating and deep-set beads, can be manipulated into something outrageous. From the wings, his buffoonery, at sixty-eight, seems a much more personal and painful struggle than he allows anyone, even himself, to believe. If he rarely ventures outside his apartment, on stage he takes immense physical and emotional risks. He falls; his body unravels in flurries of contorted movement. The pratfall becomes the flesh's humiliation, and its redemption is laughter. The activity is hypnotic and strangely ugly; what is referred to so matter-of-factly at home as “business” becomes disciplined and controlled art. The gales of laughter that greet Nelson Smedley are not so much the product of the dialogue as of the gymnastics of his face, the bellowing and the slapstick antics that expand the words.

Lahr howls at the audience. The spittle from his slurred words sprays out against the darker background of the mezzanine. He has howled in his own way off and on the stage for many years. Gnashing his teeth, shivering in Smedley's paranoic rage, he crouches toward the audience, screaming. “Stop thief! Stop thieieieiefff!!” The noise is not rational. It leaps from his stomach like an animal's screech. Words are reduced to frequencies of fear. Like his theatrical trademark—“Gnong, gnong, gnong”—experience merges into a private language, a random conjunction of gutteral expressions. This never happens at home. The effect on an audience is magnetic.

At the finale, Lahr moves off to a volley of applause. As he comes
toward me his heavy makeup shines with sweat; his costume is gray with it.

“It went well tonight, Pop.”

There is no answer. He passes me. It is not unusual for him to be silent after a performance. He is exhausted from play, and the transition between worlds is too fast.

Lahr stops in front of the bulletin board. A green placard is tacked next to the opening-night telegrams from two months before. He squints to read the print. He turns and climbs the iron staircase.

There is nothing special about the dressing room. It is small and cluttered. Dust cakes the only window and the labyrinth of unpainted pipes. It reeks of rubbing alcohol and mothballs. My mother, beautiful in her middle age, sits nervously at the edge of the room's only chair. She twists a lace handkerchief. The valet, a towering, slouchshouldered ex-prizefighter, stands in the corner with a soft-drink bottle. He waits for the signal to uncap it.

“Hello, dear,” Lahr says obliquely to Mildred. Then, looking at me, he mumbles a greeting. He wipes his face vigorously with a towel and drapes it around his neck. A single light above his dressing-table mirror covers the room with an annoying whiteness.

“I'll have a soda tonight, Earl.” There is nothing but soda in the cooler. There hasn't been since the show opened.

“How did it go, Bert?”

She is on cue. This is the first question to her husband, now suddenly smaller and older in the cramped room than on stage. The phrase has been uttered in the same soft tones by the same woman for over twenty years. My mother has never questioned the formality or allowed it to dampen the care with which she surrounds her husband.

“We sold out,” he says, taking a swig from the bottle and then hesitating to belch. “It wasn't a bad audience for a Saturday night … It's better than those goddam theater parties we've been playing to all week.”

He drums the dressing table with his fingers and then looks away in thought.

“Did you see the notice, Mildred?”

“No. What notice?”

“It's posted on the board downstairs. I got a note from Ellis tonight. We close next Saturday.” He fumbles on his table for the producer's letterhead. He can't find it. Although my father is never optimistic, he
usually holds avenues open for new possibilities. Tonight, however, there is a finality in his voice.

Mildred paces a few short steps. “Well, Bert,
I
can't think for
you
. After all you've put into this show. It just makes me sick.” She wipes the traces of dampness from her forehead and chin with the knotted handkerchief. When she speaks the word “sick,” she closes her eyes. “This is a cheap show. The way they've been spending money, you'd think you were traveling with Ringling Brothers, Barnum, and Bailey …”

“Mildred, how many times do I have to explain that it's just economics. When I did
Du Barry
for Buddy DeSylva, he got off the nut in fourteen weeks. Today, a show costs between $350,000 and $400,000 to put on. De Sylva's show cost $85,000 in 1939; now it would probably run as high as $400,000. So if you're a hit, you've got to run a year before you get your money back. We grossed $19,000 this week, and we needed thirty-five grand to break even. It's economics … simple economics. It's just one of those things.”

“How can you be so passive? How can a man of your talent and stature in show business let all these other people call the shots. This show is no lemon …” She is perspiring heavily now. “After all, Bert.you've got to assert yourself once in a while.”

My father stops talking; he glances up at a series of publicity pictures on the wall. They are jaunty impersonations of Perelman's gargoyles. Hyacinth Beddoes Laffoon, the woman magazine editor, is his favorite. Dressed in a turban and ratty fur, Lahr captures her aggressive vulgarity. It is astonishing to look at the picture, and then down at the man gradually coming into focus not as Bert Lahr but as “Dad.” It seems to bother him, too.

“I thought if a show got good notices, Dad—the axiom was that it would run?”

“Look, pal, don't ask me to explain it. I don't understand it either … This is probably the best material I've had since the forties. We opened at the Music Box, but Irving Berlin, who owns it, could only give us ten weeks there. We figured we could get another theater, but until the eighth week we didn't have one, so we couldn't sell tickets. We finally got the Plymouth, but as you can see, we can't build fast enough. Once a show loses momentum, it's difficult to rebuild. There's not enough cash for an extensive advertising campaign to buck this newspaper strike—so we close. It confuses me, though. It's a lot of things, but the main thing is—well, it's such good material.”

He taps the red-grained leather folder that contains the script. He anticipates my question. “We could go on the road, I suppose. But I'm getting too old to jump from town to town. It was easy in the burlesque days. I liked it then. But now, well, it just doesn't mean much. I waited for this one; and once we move off Broadway, something's missing.”

Mother moves behind him and, taking a small hand towel, begins to wipe the make-up from the back of his neck. She kisses the top of his head. He says nothing, but stares straight ahead into the large dressing-table mirror. Taking the towel from her, he begins to dab cold cream around his eyes and mouth. He wipes it away. When he turns back to speak, only his lips and eyes have returned to their natural color. He looks like a panda. “I just can't understand it. Christ, I just can't. The play's good. I can feel it. You liked it, didn't you? I got good reviews, didn't I, John? And now something like this. What can we do?”

He stands up while Earl hands him his bathrobe. Lahr knots the black sash beneath his belly. In the cold light, his features are sharply detailed. A long scar on his forehead slopes from the top like a gently eroding hill. I know the gash came from colliding with a trolley car when he was ten years old. He alludes to it, but never talks about his past. His wrists are strange too. The left one is much larger than his right. It got that way, he says, from breaking falls in his burlesque and vaudeville days.

He rolls the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes between his fingers, saying, “You know something, Mildred, somebody must have put a jinx on me somewhere along the line.”

“Be serious, Dad.”

“I'm not kidding. Other shows have been the same. Sure. I've done O.K., but never as good as possible. That's why this one was so important. Because it was right for everybody.And now this. It's a hex.”

There are two ways to defeat Fate. One is by performing, the other by adhering to certain theater superstitions. There is no whistling in his dressing room, or throwing of hats on beds at home.

Lahr's stage aggressiveness has evaporated. “Well, what else can you call it but a jinx. The last show closed despite good reviews. And what about
Godot?
The same thing. They like me, don't they? Before, I could never come up with a property I was completely sure about. Now that I have it, we're closing. You heard them laugh out there, John. You never heard laughs like that!”

My father's enjoyment lies in planning comic situations. He asks
about the laughs after every performance, gauging his acceptance by the audience's response. Watching the audience from the wings, I understand the delicate balance of laughter. They laugh and are entertained, but their final expression is more than gratitude for an evening's entertainment. Their faces register a respect that is more than delight. It is the awe a physical feat inspires. On the stage he dares to fall and fail, turning his private inadequacies to public advantage.

Even the gratification at the audience's response has vanished from his conversation. He seems resigned.

“Bert, if we're going to Sardi's you'd better hurry. They're not going to hold our table forever …” Mildred moves toward the door. “I'll wait downstairs while you change. Don't dawdle.”