Notes on a Cowardly Lion (30 page)

Although satire is usually not the low comedian's stock-in-trade, Lahr has become a satirist with a comic strength that virtually annihilates the subject of his material … [with] his coarsely demure presentation of E. Y. Harburg's and Harold Arlen's “Song of the Woodsman,” the braggart baritones of the musical stage had better take warning. For it is the author's belief that baritone balladry is fraudulent stuff, that the masculinity is mendacious, and it is Lahr's belief that a bum song is a buffoon's triumph. This one is his. For the two B. L.'s (Bert Lahr and Bea Lillie) the carnival stage has individual ways of arriving at the same ludicrous conclusions.

The New York Times
, January 10, 1937

The Show Is On
solidified Lahr's comic reputation and brought him together with Bea Lillie. As a team they shared many gay moments on stage. They also suffered through their private torments. Bea was a confidante. She witnessed more than she will relate. She was present when Lahr received the letter from Mercedes asking to come to
The Show Is On
. The letter, scrawled in a delicate, halting hand, was addressed to the Winter Garden Theater. Her doctors had intercepted it and sent it to Abe Berman, knowing that his counsel would bring quicker results than Lahr's own intuitions.

Dear Mr. Berman:

I would sincerely urge that Bert answer this letter. It would satisfy Mrs. Lahr. She is always speaking to us about being cut off from outside contacts.

December 29, 1936

Dear Husband,

Please have your travel agent arrange for a transportation for me for the big city and also to see which day will be best for me to see your show. I feel very hurt you didn't let me know you were in town and that I had to wait to see you. Hoping you will see it my way and grant me this favor and with thanks. I will close sending my best love,

I remain devotedly yours,

Merc Babe

Lahr talked to Bea about it, and while she never offered suggestions, her quiet maturity consoled him. But he found no answers and sought no solace. He would have to see Mercedes. What could he say? “It was through by then. It was gone, what love I had for her. I felt pity. God
knows I took care of her—sent her to Europe, the best doctors there and in America—but, by then it was through.”

On March 16, 1937, Lahr received a letter from the clinical director that clarified Mercedes's position:

Mrs. Lahr has improved very much since coming to the sanitarium, especially since she has received the insulin therapy. My reason for writing to you is to get your reaction to having her leave here on trial for one week or so, during which time she would live with her sister, Anna. She has promised me that she would cooperate with this sister and not do anything which might incur your displeasure or embarrass you in any way …

The next week Mercedes and Anna visited Lahr backstage.

Standing in the white light of the dressing room, she must have looked even bigger than she was. She weighed 160 pounds. She wore a black dress, new for the occasion. Her lipstick was smudged. She didn't seem to notice the strands of hair that hung loosely about her head.

Her eyes would focus on objects in the room, and Lahr tried every conversational gambit to keep her animated. In each glance, he felt the guilt of the past. She gazed at the dresser. Had he put Mildred's picture away? Yes. And then, for a long time, while he asked her about New York and how she felt, Mercedes seemed preoccupied with the dressing-room wall. He recalled the last page of the report in 1935 that he had scanned for hopeful signs of progress.

One evening she was found sitting huddled up in a cold room with all the windows open and announced that she was cold because the walls were so bare
.

He could never read the reports after that.

Lahr talked nervously to her. He could not look at her directly, afraid that her glassy stare would somehow rivet on him, and that he would cry. She would not answer all the questions he asked. Her silence upset him.

When she did speak, her words were uttered with restraint. She talked to him about show business. When she spoke of coming back to the stage, her responses were quicker. She told him what she would express again to psychiatrists a year later when they came to visit her at the Martinique Hotel, where she stayed with her sister. “She said she thought she could take part in a musical revue, that she could dance and perform just the same as she had in the old days. We suggested to her that her physical condition had changed very much since the time
when she was actively on stage, that her weight had increased, that she had become flabby, but that didn't bother her.” As she talked, Lahr remembered that she sometimes danced at sanitarium parties and that, when she hurried up the stairs to her room, her new weight shook the staircase. Between the memories that flooded his imagination and his forced conversation, Lahr found himself silent. “I never talked about an annulment; I never talked about love. She wouldn't have understood. Most of the time she wouldn't answer my questions.”

Lahr recalls the meeting as the “saddest moment of my life.” Standing there, trying to be kind, but hopelessly incompetent with words and unsure of his emotions, he only wanted Mercedes and her sister to leave. When she was away from him, he could always hope that she would recover. Face to face with her, all the money, the dreams, the anxiety over her seemed hopeless. She had changed so much. As Anna was getting ready to take Mercedes back to the hotel, Mercedes broke the silence. Turning to her husband, she said, “Let's go home, Bert.”

“You go with Anna,” he said, “I'll be along later.”

He never saw her again.

Other Edens

“
Despite a few temporary excursions into radio and motion pictures, they have never forsworn their allegiance to the stage.
”

Brooks Atkinson on Lahr and Bea Lillie
,

The New York Times,
1937

“
How do you—an old Broadway Boy—like acting in the movies?” Mr. Lahr shrugged:

“
I like anything so long as I'm making money.
”

Lahr to Bosley Crowther
,

The New York Times
, 1939

WHEN MAURICE CHEVALIER
accepted a radio contract in 1931 for five thousand dollars a week, star radio was born. The next year Bert Lahr was on the air coast to coast. There are pictures of those days, Lahr standing handsome and nonchalant in front of an NBC microphone. He is smiling, and he holds a script at his side. His tie is undone. His hat (he wears it despite the fact that his coat is off) is cocked at a self-assured angle. In the picture, he is the image of control. As one of the bright new stars of Broadway, Lahr was an obvious attraction for the new medium. Many stage comedians made the transition to radio. Some, like Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny, did it easily; others like the raconteur Lou Holtz were mysteriously ineffective. Lahr had all the accouterments for a radio success: a big name, an unusual delivery, and a sense of verbal idiocy, all of which made the idea of a “Bert Lahr Show” viable.

He rarely talks about radio, which for more than a decade fed him at fees as high as $2,500 a performance but which often left him dissatisfied. Between 1932, when he featured in his own show for Lucky Strike, and 1938, he appeared regularly with the most successful radio personalities of the day: Fred Allen, Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee. By his own estimate, he was a guest on the Vallee show more than thirty times. His own verdict of his radio talent is harsh. “I wasn't on too long. I wasn't too good.” Whether he liked the medium or not, Lahr was effective enough to be in demand; and he never gave up radio. “I stayed with radio as long as it was fruitful. When television came in, then radio went out. The money wasn't there anymore.”

When he began his radio career, the medium was primitive. It had
not separated its technique from that of the stage, a fact symbolically illustrated by the audience at all studio sessions. Since tape was not extensively used by the industry until after World War II, it was not unusual for a show being broadcast to the West Coast to be performed twice on the same night. Different audiences were provided for each performance.

The difficulty in making the transition to radio rested in a failure to understand its uniqueness. Unlike the stage, it was graphic but not visual, private more than public. When Lahr made his radio debut on June 20, 1932, critics pondered whether his ribald humor could adjust to the larger, less sophisticated fireside audiences.

If Bert Lahr can project his own particular style into the air without having to use dirt—then he'll outshine any radio comic so far developed.

New York
Sun

But Lahr's maiden voyage into personality radio was disastrous, floundering not simply because of the material but because of the naiveté of radio personnel to their own medium. Lahr was headlining at the time in
Hot-Cha!
, and the radio director was intent on capturing Lahr's Broadway performance for the listening audience. “The director kept telling me, ‘I want you the way you work in
Hot-Cha!.'
I worked the same as I did on the stage. He kept saying, ‘Come on, come on, like the stage, just like the stage.' It was awful. I had a thirteen-week deal, and after four weeks they paid me off for all thirteen. The first experience was so painful that I think it gave me a mental block.”

Although Lahr was a darling of the press, the radio critics were not as easily overwhelmed as the Broadway first-nighters.

At first blush, Mr. Bert Lahr … gave me the impression that he hadn't quite grasped the radio technique. Possibly the same thought occurred to Mr. Lahr after the initial performance a week ago for he came to the microphone this weekend with more confidence and a greatly improved delivery
.

New York
Journal

The same thought
had
occurred to Lahr. At first, there was too much to worry about: the live radio audience, speaking with the right intonation, limiting his gestures, not biting his cues or hurrying his delivery. Years later, listening to replays of his performances, he would shake his head, mumbling, “I was reading too fast. I could have humored it more.” To Lahr this meant a way of reacting, the manner in
which he embellished his performance with glances, pauses, ludicrous sounds. But on the air, his boldness and security vanished.

Some performers, like Cantor, were fearless. Cantor even got into costume for his radio shows. His “I don't give a damn” attitude helped his comic delivery. Lahr's shyness came through all the bellowing. “Bert was always afraid it wasn't going to go,” says Carroll Carroll, one of the men who wrote his radio comedy. “His own timidity about his ability had an influence on him.”

While the writers sharpened the jokes, they could not resolve the fundamental problem. Lahr was a comedian whose laughter relied heavily on gesture. In front of a microphone with one hand on a script, he was as effective as a hobbled horse. “In those days, I was a fellow who was always moving. When I got in front of that microphone and had to hold a paper in my hand, I had fear. If I did it today, things would be different. But standing there, trying to read, I'd fluff something, and then I'd fight it.”

The importance of the body and movement as a buffoon's tool is never more apparent than when he is without it. “I was always ahead of my script. I couldn't read it because I wanted to move all the time. The same holds true of Bobby Clark, who was one of my favorite comedians. After years of working with a fellow named McCullough who stood in one spot through the whole act, Bobby couldn't keep still. He was a wonderful guy, but he just couldn't stay within a scene. He was always playing Bobby Clark. We did a scene together at the Lambs Club, it was one of the biggest laughs I ever got there. The situation was this: I was supposed to be in my bedroom at the Lambs. I was just ready to go on, and I was listening to the other acts getting tremendous laughs. It was a knife in my heart. (I played the part of a self-centered, nervous comedian who worries about the next act.) I didn't know what Bobby was going to do because we'd rehearsed without make-up. When he came on, he had everything—goggles, the coronet, the cane. So I said, ‘He has to work up an entrance to come into the bedroom.' In this scene he had to sit down with me, but I couldn't get him to do it. I ran downstage and grabbed him by the arm and said,
‘Bobby, stop underplaying!'
It was a big laugh. I was like Bobby when they put me in front of a microphone. I couldn't keep still.”

Lahr's mobile face, his impulse to pierce through a morass of words with a single gesture, made it difficult for the radio writers to forge an effective comedy image of him.

Carroll Carroll, who spent many long hours trying to solve the problem of Lahr's radio personality, recognized the dilemma. “As a writer
you were constantly trying to write something funny. At the same time you knew where Lahr was going to make a funny face. He could not resist doing that. Sometimes you might come up with a straight line which the studio audience would laugh like hell at because Lahr was mugging. It was a problem when the studio audience was breaking up and Bert simply said, ‘How are you?' It confused the listener.”

Like most of the best radio writers of the time—Herman Wouk, Parke Levy—Carroll's life was spent in long frenetic writing sessions. He was sympathetic to Lahr's comedy (he wrote the last television sketch Lahr ever commissioned) and knew radio's limitations. “What Lahr really thinks is funny are the things he does, the faces he makes, the articulations which have a relation to other people. He's an actor. His reactions to people are frequently more funny than anything he does or says. Of course ninety per cent of this was lost on radio.”

Nor was Lahr used to working with a team of writers. He liked to ponder his humor, plot his gestures, practice until he had found just the right word for every situation. But a Sunday show each week left no time for perfection. The writers met with Lahr at the Warwick Hotel. He strolled nervously around the room in his kimono, twisting a piece of cellophane in his hand and muttering, “I think I've got something.”