Notes on a Cowardly Lion (35 page)

But Fleming's inquiries produced results. In the scene where Dorothy and her companions fall asleep in the poppy field and wake to
find it snowing, Lahr inserted a key line—“Unusual weather we're havin', ain't it?”

“Fleming couldn't see it,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Vic, I'm sure it's a laugh. He trusted me. In that situation, I was right. It was a big laugh.”

Many of the pieces of business that earned Lahr awards for his portrayal of the Cowardly Lion were the fortuitous consolidation of his Broadway experience. Lines ad-libbed in the picture stand out as interesting grafts from his stage performances. Assuming much the same boxing pose as Gink Shiner in
Hold Everything
, the Lion roars, “Put 'em up, put 'em
uuuup.
” The slurred words, the not-quite-articulate diction are all part of the stage comic's machinery. When Oz awards him a medal, Lahr reacts like the cop to Nellie Bean. “Read what the medal says, ‘Courage.' Ain't it de truth. Ain't it de
troooooth.
”

With the Arlen—Harburg score, Lahr's inability to keep up with the erudite, polished lyrics is part of the humor he'd mastered so well in
The Show Is On
. While a stage hand controlled his tail with a fishing rod from a catwalk above the set to keep him from tripping on it, Lahr even managed to sneak in a hint of his English accent when he proclaimed—

Yes—it's sad, believe me, missy

When you're born to be a sis

But I would show my prowess,

Be a lion, not a mouesse

If I only had the nerve.

Lahr's mugging of the Harburg puns forced
The New York Times
film critic, Frank Nugent, to exclaim, “Mr. Lahr's Lion is fion.”

Awaiting his audience with the “Terrible Oz,” the Lion pondered being “King of the Forest” in an elaborate excursion into nonsense verse. The song became Lahr's most famous comic gambit. (See Appendix 5.) Lahr delivered “King of the Forest” as if it were open season on lions as well as baritones. All the trills, dainty exclamations, and hoots are heightened in lion's costume; and Lahr's performance is more vibrant and complex than in his other films. His special comic spirit and excesses of gesture were easily incorporated into this “realistic fantasy.” The role that came closest to his imaginative life and stage energy became the public's finest memory of him on screen.

At the conclusion of the picture, Mervyn LeRoy recalls, the crew applauded the Cowardly Lion. Secretly, Lahr was confident in his
performance; but he could not forget a remark that Frank Morgan, who played Oz, made to him during the filming. “Bert,” said Morgan, “you're going to be a great hit in this picture. But it's not going to do you a damn bit of good—you're playing an animal.”

“If I'd made a hit as a
human being,
” Lahr muses, “then perhaps I'd be sailing in films now.”

With the picture completed, Lahr bided his time at home, nervously awaiting the studio's verdict and eager for work. “One day, I'm sitting on my lawn, and ‘Square-Deal' Grady pulls up at a light and yells, “Hi ya, Gnong-Gnong.' This surprised me. Grady and I had been friends in New York, but since he'd become an executive, many of the actors, including me, felt he'd upstaged us. Out there you know by the attitude of the executives what your fate is. When he yelled at me, I was surprised. It was the first time he'd given me a tumble since we'd been in Hollywood. I said to myself, they must have previewed the picture, and I'm a hit. So I called Louis, and he called the front office. He called back. ‘Bert, they've shown the picture. You're a real hit.'”

Hollywood was humming with the news of his performance. To Lahr it was sweet revenge on the Twentieth Century-Fox producers who had welcomed him to the lot only to mysteriously stop talking to him.

Louis Shurr suggested that Lahr do a Broadway show. Buddy DeSylva and Herbert Fields had an interesting property called
Du Barry Was a Lady
. “Lahr wanted no part of it,” Shurr recalls. “Bert said, ‘Metro's going to keep me for life after what I've done for this picture. I'm going to stay out here for a long time.” Shurr wanted Lahr to protect himself with a Broadway show. Lahr, never one for taking a risk with his career, felt his performance was protection enough.

He was astonished when Shurr brought him the gossip from Metro a few weeks after the preview. “I had just checked with Mervyn LeRoy. He said that Metro was going to stop making musicals at the moment for financial reasons. They're dropping your contract as well as Haley's and Bolger's.” Lahr couldn't believe it.

A month later,
The Wizard of Oz
opened in Hollywood. Lahr was so optimistic that he attended the premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater with Shurr, Mildred, and Buddy DeSylva. “He was the smash of the picture,” recalls Shurr. Walking out of the theater Lahr confided to him. “I'm not going to do a show. I want to stay out here and
make pictures!” Shurr, a man who understood the facts of Hollywood, could only defer to his client. “I told him I'd try to talk to the executives and see what I could do.” In the meantime Lahr went to New York, impatient at waiting for so crucial a decision from the studio and to wind up the painful technicalities of his annulment from Mercedes.

Lahr was in New York when
The Wizard of Oz
opened there at the Capitol Theater. His picture was in the window of Lindy's, directly across the street from the theater; the maître d'hôtel at “21” and the Stork Club recognized him as if he'd been away only a week. By 8:15 on the day of the opening, ten thousand people had lined up to see the film. By the evening,
The New York Times
was telling the city—“
The Lahr roar is one of the laughingest sounds since the talkies came in …
”

Lahr reported his pleasure to Mildred in a letter: “Believe me it was a tonic for my inferiority complex which is so readily developed in Hollywood.”

But the two weeks in New York also disturbed him. These should have been happy times, he kept telling himself. His movie was a success. His private life was straightening out—Abe Berman had explained how the Domestic Relations Law, Section 7, subdivision 5, would enable him to finally be free to marry Mildred early in the New Year. Everything seemed so straightforward; yet his future in a town that now knew him as one of its finest exports seemed as uncertain as it had been when he was much younger.

People were swarming to the theater;
Variety
was blaring the
Oz
grosses all over its Picture Section—and yet Metro was thinking of letting him go. He was loved by a woman, and yet after so many years of waiting, he was uncertain about marriage. In his self-absorption, Lahr never suspected that his relationship with Mildred had been in jeopardy. But the painful and complicated legal proceedings had frazzled Mildred's patience and made her apprehensive of any future with him. Lahr never knew she had written Berman about her marital prospects as late as December 1938.

Abe, how is BL's case straightening out? Do you feel that it is working out or is it proving a wasted six and a half years? I get so afraid when I think of going out on my own. But know that if I must do it, I cannot afford to wait much longer. I get older each year, and each year that youthful spirit I was endowed with weakens, and grows dimmer. I am certain by the time you come out here, you will know definitely
.

Berman could not tell her anything when he visited California, but she never left Lahr. He would never know, even with the success of the legal struggle, how close he came to losing her.

The annulment placed another financial burden on him that made a Metro contract imperative. He had spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars to cure Mercedes; and now he had to establish a fund of over $150,000 to take care of her. She would live in Arizona with her sister and son.

The bond of so many performances and private aspirations was reduced to a few pieces of legal foolscap. He would be able to return to California and tell Mildred that the papers for the annulment would be filed in the Westchester County Clerk's office.

In the last page of the fifty-page documentation, one of the examining physicians and a practicing psychiatrist for thirty-seven years, replied to crossexamination with a sad decisiveness.

Q:  Doctor, in your practice have you ever seen another patient suffering the same ailment as you have described this person (Mercedes Lahrheim) suffering from?

A:  I have seen post-encephalitic psychoses and I have seen lots of simple dementia praecoxes. I have never seen them both tied up together in this most interesting and unusual type.

Q:  Have you ever seen any patient that had it, that was eventually cured?

A:  No.

Q:  Do you know of any in the medical books?

A:  No.

Lahr could return to California with his life intact. If he thought of it one way, everything was good—he would marry Mildred; they had the house; he would continue in films. But, in truth, he saw himself stalled like the Cowardly Lion. He was heading back to California and away from the stage. He was going “home” to a career that was still in the hands of movie executives who threatened to drop his contract. He was making money; yet his financial responsibilities were suddenly graver. The business of comedy was now more pressing than ever. He had to work. But for whom?

His emotional circumstances scared him: there was a woman who
was now a mask, living in a silence he feared he had helped create, and there was her exact opposite, the buoyant, beautiful Mildred. She was still not legally committed to him. Would she change like Mercedes? Would a woman so stable, so patient, and so generous grow apart from him the way Mercedes had done?

When he returned to California, Louis Shurr confirmed what he knew before Lahr left—Metro was dropping his option. Lahr seemed resigned, but totally distraught. He talked with Buddy DeSylva, and a contract to do
Du Barry
was drawn up.

He signed for the show in Shurr's Hollywood office. Putting Louis's pen back in its jade holder, he glanced up at his agent. “Well, after all, how many lion parts are there?”

He would return temporarily to Broadway, where comedy and the name of Bert Lahr were still King.

“… But What Do I Do Next Year?”

AS FAR AS MRS
. Helen Schroeder was concerned, the telegram postmarked February 11, 1940, should have been written years earlier.

DON'T LAUGH JUST MARRIED

MILDRED AND BERT

But nobody was laughing. The relationship had undergone too much—even after Mildred had been granted a divorce on October 4, 1937. On January 4, 1938, the temporary injunction that had made it impossible for her to return to New York was finally reversed by the State Court. Up to that time, Mildred had been guilty of contempt of court and failing to obey injunction orders. Now, Mildred was exultant and secure. The gaiety of the telegram reflects her ebullience. But it was not funny to her mother, and certainly not to her new husband. It was he who chose to be married on a Sunday, in the quiet town of Elkton, Maryland, three days after an interlocutory judgment of the annulment of his first marriage had been filed with the Westchester County Clerk's Office. Lahr picked Elkton with the care he usually reserved for selecting a fairway wood. His desire for anonymity is an indication of how heavily his guilt about Mercedes and the legal battle with Robinson weighed on him. “We had to get married as quickly as possible. That
whole
thing would have come back at us.”

Standing in front of the Episcopal minister, the only one available when they reached the town at midday, was not what Lahr had imagined. He was uncomfortable; a spastic colon had developed during the annulment proceedings and, aggravated by his usual worries about a new play, was acting up. But the comedian who never got the girl on stage was finally taking the leap again.

True to his distrust of sentiment and his inability to sustain a romantic moment, Lahr suggested the mezzanine of the local hotel for the wedding. Amid smoke, musty sofas, and the clink of dishes, he and Mildred were married. As the proceedings were about to begin, the receptionist's radio bleated its own special irony. “The theme song from this radio program echoed up to the mezzanine. It was ‘Here Comes the Bride.' Everyone smiled, but then we heard the announcer give the name of the show, ‘I Want a Divorce.'”

Through the ceremony, Lahr noticed that the minister kept looking up at him and reading the ceremony very dramatically. After it was over, the Reverend asked the nervous groom, “Haven't I seen your face before?”

“Perhaps you saw me in
The Wizard of Oz.
” With Bible still in hand, the Reverend glowered and threw up his fists, “Put 'em up! Put 'em uuuuuuuppp!”

Afterward Lahr and his new wife had dinner in Wilmington and then returned to New York. He recalls only its uneventfulness. Too many thoughts about his emotional past and his theatrical future separated him from the day.

“I was fearful about the success of
Du Barry
. I don't know why. That was a time in my career when I was a little mixed up. As the show went on, I got more confidence.”

Eighteenth-century France provided the musical-comedy idea that eased his always troubled comic instincts. In
Du Barry
, he played Louis XV. When a subject bowed before him, Lahr, with a democratic good nature at the base of his comedy, dismissed him saying, “Skip the dip.” The phrase is Lahr's invention, but the eighteenth century was a world that amazed him and that he found both ribald and touching. He knew Boswell and Johnson, and for the show he had made a study of Louis XV.

In
Du Barry
, a washroom attendant (Lahr) wins a sweepstake ticket, and then, through a misplaced “Mickey Finn,” finds himself transported into that daydream of largesse, the elegant court of Louis XV. It was the first sustained parody of the upper classes Lahr had ever attempted, yet it came close to his frolicsome burlesque. The Hollywood country gentleman had come to court.