Notes on a Cowardly Lion (31 page)

“Working with him was not easy,” says Carroll. “We suffered a great deal because he suffered so much. We used to sit for hours looking at each other. I remember we were trying to get a name for an Indian tribe—Seminole would have done. I suggested Potowatami. I thought it was a funny name, with an explosive sound. For some reason Bert didn't like it. I don't know how long we argued the point, whether it should have been Mohawk or Onondaga, but you'd continually find yourself coming to a Mexican stand-off with him.”

Lahr's initial impulse in radio was to return to the burlesque raucousness which, in 1932-3, he had not yet abandoned on stage. He did not understand that the microphone would not accommodate his wild energy. “When we had these sessions,” recalls Carroll, “it was apparent that Bert was trying to translate the humor of burlesque into radio. It was too physical and, in many cases, too salty.”

Lahr's self-consciousness missed the moments of genuine fun that were broadcast. “Bert isn't much of a reader, although when he read a line wrong it was usually funnier than when he read it right. He tried very hard to be a good reader, and as a result, it came out at times a little childlike. It sounded as if he was actually reading instead of that free spontaneous play he did so well on stage.”

Because the radio audience could not see his uncomprehending squint, Lahr had to convey his physical responses with language. There was no way to signal the audience that something funny was coming, as he did on stage with a gesture. The best he could substitute was an affected “huh, huh” before every laugh line. Sometimes, in back of these radio situations, a cackle, small—almost elfish—could be heard. The sound was Lahr actually enjoying himself, instead of the dumb show with which he usually delivered his lines.

Carroll and the other writers found Lahr helpful when it came to mangling the language. “He was a great contributor of the ludicrous. When you got to a point where you needed something utterly absurd, it would generally come from Bert. Once, we did something about psychoanalysis, and he came up with ‘Don't probe into my subnoxious.' He was good at picking out the words that he could say, while looking funny as he said them. He's a mugger. He'd do a lot of it on radio to build a joke. The live audience was firmly pledged to him.”

Lahr's ability to invent language that created not only amusing sounds but also a vivid mental picture is illustrated in one of his ad-lib remarks on the Chase &Sanborn Coffee Hour. The writers created a character called Balzac, who was continually pestering Lahr. Balzac was a scamp who rarely talked, but played havoc with Lahr's good nature. Lahr always managed to get even. In one sequence, Lahr described a confrontation this way:

I woke up this mornin', the birds were tweetin' in the trees, the sun was shinin', the bees was buzzin' and I had to run into poison ivy
.

Carroll watched Lahr pace the Warwick carpets trying out the word “Balzac” in a variety of tones. “He was fascinated with the word. He could do funny things with his lips; his mouth would quiver like a bloater fish, and his face shrivel into an unexpected angle.”

Lahr's reading on the air could be very funny. “He did a lot of fumbling around,” says Carroll, “but that was part of what was amusing.” Lahr's tongue could never quite wrap itself around the words. A good comic ploy, it was also true to life. When he made a mistake on radio listeners were surprised to hear him exclaiming, “Lumpy printing” or “Now I'm reading my thumb.” When things went wrong on radio, a performer still had to say something. Lahr's ad libs, like his language, were always graphic. One can see a man reading his thumb.

Privately, Lahr considered his use of words to be a technical device he had developed for the stage. He was the most inarticulate man ever to consider himself adroit with words. But the combination of confidence and misuse made his passion for language valuable to his comedy. “I read a lot. In burlesque even, I read. Words. Words. I used to say, ‘You're a despot,' and I'd get laughs. I knew what a despot was. I put it in a situation where it was ludicrous. I could have said ‘You're a villain.' I used this a lot in radio. I sounded stupid on the air, and my use of big words was surprising to listeners and funny. When I did Louis XV in
Du Barry
I felt I knew how he behaved.” He raises his head regally. “I read about Napoleon. Very dainty, and the hands.” Lahr's fingers, usually lying like potatoes in his lap, flutter with frantic delicacy. He reaches out as if taking a mint. “Language. I'm a New Yorker. I've got a New York accent and give the impression of being terribly erudite. I don't say that I'm a scholar. I do a lot of crossword puzzles. I digest a lot of it. I'm not crass and coarse.”

The Chase & Sanborn Coffee Hour was a moderate radio success for Lahr. Certainly Carroll and the other writers did not consider it, as Lahr did, a total failure: “I don't agree entirely that it wasn't a good show. As writers we were limited to a fixed format which broke down to two or three individual scenes, so that we weren't in any position to do an extended situation or anything with a real beginning, middle, and an end—the kind of thing Bert was used to doing on stage. We thought we had to set up a premise, get a few laughs, and get off in about six or seven minutes. And then do another seven-minute spot later. The main reason Bert wasn't as good as he could have been was simply that he was conscious of what people will laugh at when they are looking at him rather than
listening
to him.”

One of his best radio broadcasts, on October 11, 1939, was with Fred Allen, the master of radio satire, whose cracker-barrel twang and wry wit made him one of the nation's foremost radio personalities. Lahr felt confident in his company and, privately, looked upon Allen with special amazement. Allen's carefully planned routine and the simplicity with which he controlled his life were a source of wonder to Lahr. He admired Allen's efficiency—a man who kept lists for everything from eating at a different restaurant every night to giving money to the many unemployed actors he'd befriended. “I never cared about the money when I worked with Fred.
I knew I'd be protected
. I mean the material would be there. Allen used to write it.”

On stage, Lahr had learned how to defend himself from the
audience and other actors. There was no recourse on radio, no way to recoup an error or ingratiate the faceless thousands waiting to be entertained. “Allen was wonderful to work with because he was so unselfish, he acted as a straightman to the comedian. He was most generous with other people.”

Lahr's radio style had matured. The Fred Allen broadcast was much more refined than his earlier ones. Lahr still read too fast, and his voice was still too loud for the microphone. He spluttered, howled, slurred his words; but the microphone could never let him run his vocal range. Lahr was now able to assume an aristocratic hauteur, missing in the old Chase &Sanborn shows. His facility with words had increased to the point where he could tickle the fancy with more difficult tongue-twisters than his burlesque “despot.” Allen tries it with “poltroonery.” The effect was hilarious. For radio, Lahr's physical image had to be replaced by a voice and material that conjured up the simpleton, the bluff egotist who didn't realize the consequences of what he was saying. Allen was able to get the most mileage out of Lahr on radio by steering the humor very close to his personal frustrations: laughter, Hollywood, love life, the stage. He saw instinctively what Lahr could never see—how much his comic character resembled the private one. Lahr was never funnier, as his friends understood so well, than when he was bemoaning his fate.

Lahr: …
   People think if one comedian is funny, two comedians should be twice as funny.

Allen:
   Oh, that's silly. Now, here we are. You're a comedian, and I'm a comedian. We're together. Are we twice as funny?

Lahr:
   (struggling with the words which are sounded out of his nose) To the contrary, to corn a phrase.

Allen:
   (laughing at Lahr's miscue) ‘To corn a phrase.” Well, let's stop the whole thing. Say, how come you left Hollywood, Bert, you must have had a reason?

Lahr:
   Yes, Fred, Hollywood went too far … It was up to me.

Allen:
   (laughing at surprise arrogance) What did you do?

Lahr:
   It was my turn to go too far. (laugh) So I got on a train and came East.

Allen:
   Oh, you mean out there, you were getting in a rut, artistically?

Lahr:
   Yeah, I was tired of being a great lover.

Allen:
   You wanted to get away from it all?

Lahr:
   Well, most of it. (laugh) There was a little blonde at Metro who might have intrigued me, but, huh, the silly little minx let me get awaaaaaay.

Allen:
   You must have taken it hard.

Lahr:
   I was momentarily frustrated. I denounced the human race. I sought solace in the animal kingdom.

The response to the show pleased Allen. Lahr enjoyed appearing with him, despite the fact that the money—as he kidded in the script—was considerably less than he could command. Two weeks after the performance Lahr received a note from Allen.

Dear Bert—

Thank you for the wonderful job. Please accept this token.

“That money was over and above my regular salary. I had never heard of anyone doing that before.” The gesture symbolized a kindness and generosity that radio, in general, never showed Bert Lahr.

The abyss between public approval and artistic accomplishment plagued Lahr in films as well as on radio. To the world, he was a success; privately, the specter of failure haunted him.

Lahr's career in movies was arranged by his agent, Louis Shurr, who had induced him to go to the Coast to do Buddy DeSylva's
Merry-Go-Round of 1938
and make a more lucrative career in films.

Louis is five foot three, and pale. Although styles have changed, he looks much the same as he did in the early thirties, when he was show business' most successful agent. He prefers conservative, custom-made suits and elevator shoes. Everyone has always called him “Doc” since George White first dubbed him that. And no one in the vicinity of the Brown Derby, where he lunches daily at table four facing the entrance, would ever deny that Doc Shurr has managed some of The Big Ones.

Marilyn Miller, Clifton Webb, Jack Pearl, and Lahr were “his” in that golden age of revues, which spanned the twenties and thirties. The stable of talent has dwindled since, but almost all the famous stars have passed through his wellcarpeted office. To the Brown Derby set who don't remember those halcyon days, he is associated more easily with Kim Novak, whom he discovered. They will tell you that he got himself photographed in
Life
pursuing Miss Novak on foot while she peddled through the Brentwood streets on a bicycle. They may also add that she doesn't work for him any longer. But there are others who still remain—names which have managed to bridge decades: Bob Hope, Betty Grable, and Lahr.

Shurr is a curious man. He lingers almost sensually on facts and
figures. He is not as smooth as the silk-suited young agents he employs, but he is very conscious of appearances. When Lahr thinks of him, the image is of a man checking his cuffs and collar to see if they are clean.

On the table beside his desk is an assortment of well-framed and carefully dusted photographs. Lahr is among them, an old picture from the late thirties. This is how Louis would like to remember him—a smooth, wealthy, “hot property.” Bob Hope is at the front with his arm around Louis.

“Your father and I have been together a long time,” Shurr says. “A very long time.”

He stops to consider their relationship and nodding sagely says, “If there was one thing I learned about him, he was a worrier. That's it mainly—a real worrier.” He swivels in his chair. “Oh, we've had our quarrels,” Shurr adds, “but he's a great artist.”

The phone rings. He turns away and reaches for a list that is taped to a small table insert he can pull out from beneath his desk.

“Yeh? How many weeks?… But they don't have to be that young for a Western … Yeh. Let me see. I can give you Andy Devine … No. Gabby Hayes? No. What about Bert Lahr?… Hey, I've got somebody here. I know I can work something out for you.”

Shurr turns back, smiling. “Like I was saying, your father is one of America's finest performers …”

There was a time, even after the scripts had stopped coming as frequently and Louis was no longer there at the train station to greet him on his trips West, when Lahr defended him vehemently to his family. “Don't tell me about my business.” But privately, he has always understood the problem of his management. When a script comes from California, Lahr eagerly opens it. He looks at the front page. An Elvis Presley picture. He goes back to his crossword puzzle. Later he exclaims, “Jesus, what does Louis think he's doing?”

The bond between Shurr and Lahr is memory, not understanding. Perhaps there was a point in Lahr's career when he should have sought subtler, younger guidance. But at seventy-two, it seems more important to keep things in order.

“As far as I'm concerned, if a call comes in for me, I guess he'll work on it, but he won't waste much time.” Even when Lahr was new to Hollywood, he was suspicious of the way he was being handled. “Louis was never a mentor, if you know what I mean. He was just an
agent. If they'd call him, he'd sell me. At the inception of my movie career, I don't think I was managed properly. He got me jobs, but he didn't care what kind of script it was. He'd give you a rubdown, and make you think things were rosier than they were.”

Lahr bumbled into associations. For the stage he could tell a good script and know how to improve a mediocre one. In other media, without his own knowledge to fall back on and with virtually no intimate friends to give him advice, he floundered. “When I went out to Hollywood, I was just a comedian, a caricature. Even now people think of me as I was in those days. But my main source of fame, if I've achieved any real recognition, was on Broadway. In radio I had many opportunities, but I never … Let's just say I was a Broadway specialist.”