Notes on a Cowardly Lion (36 page)

The musical had a golden ring to it, which few of his previous entertainments, despite their excellence, had. Cole Porter, the Alexander Pope of American musical comedy, created lyrics whose complexity captured the veneer and exuberance of a world as confident in its coherence as the heroic couplet. The producer, Buddy DeSylva, was as eminent in show business as he was successful. Lahr's co-star, with whom he shared eight per cent of the gross, was Ethel Merman. Her meteoric rise to Broadway lights was built around a voice and personality both unique to musical comedy.

There was little tinkering with
Du Barry
on the road. One song, Miss Merman's “Give Him the Ooh-la-la,” was added in Boston, where the supersophisticated show attracted an unlikely crowd of children and
parents who expected clean, wholesome fun from the Cowardly Lion.

The only complication in the book was getting the washroom attendant into the court of Louis XV. In Boston, DeSylva realized the transition was weak, and, trusting his old friend's sense of theater, he consulted Lahr. DeSylva called at any hour of the night and his opening sentence was always the same: “We're under it, Bert. Can I come and see you?” Lahr dressed and went down to the front door of his hotel where DeSylva met him in a taxi. They would drive around the city until they came up with a solution.

In this case, their answer came after only a few minutes of touring. As a lovesick washroom attendant, Lahr plays a scene with his protegé, Charley, in which he teaches the bathroom tyro how to brush a coat, to fill a wash basin daintily, and finally to snatch a tip with the voraciousness of a hammerhead shark. The laughs were strong (“We could have stayed on with it forever”), but just how Lahr and Charley, his rival for the love of May (Ethel Merman) would get their Mickey Finns mixed, move into the dream sequence, and get off with a laugh was a real problem.

“All I had to suggest was that the washroom attendant yell, ‘Get an ambulance.' Let the situation play it, and then go into the fantasy of the French court. The minute I said it, DeSylva laughed like hell. ‘That's it. Let's go home.'”

Lahr was beginning to understand that humor did not always come from pressing an audience or a situation. In the car Lahr pantomimed how he would say, “Get an ambulance.” His hands clutched at his stomach, his eyes went wide, and his body shook as if it were attached to a reducing machine.

When Lahr first heard the
Du Barry
score, he was not convinced of its excellence. The fault was in Cole Porter's piano playing. “Cole was a horrible piano player. Oompah, oompah. He played with a slow, wooden tempo. If you didn't know who it was, you'd have thought he was a learner. The same with Jerome Kern. I once heard him play at Billy Rose's house. It was embarrassing. You couldn't believe that the melodies which are part of Americana came from the same fingers.”

If the first full orchestra rehearsal proved that Lahr's fears about the music were groundless, Porter's bitchy, urbane lyrics raised another problem. His songs were riotous; but they contained bawdy overtones. Although Lahr appeared wild and spontaneous on stage, a sense of decorum modified his antics. The clown always had to please; and Lahr was always conscious of creating “sympathy” on stage. He balked at
some of Porter's words; DeSylva agreed. “If we use all of these lyrics,” he told Lahr, “they'll walk out.”

No matter how antiseptic the comedy song, both Lahr and Merman had voices and movements that brought any restrained lyric abruptly back to earth—Lahr with his mouthings and leers, Merman with that brassy coarseness she epitomized later in
Annie Get Your Gun
. In the dream sequence of
Du Barry
, Louis is trying to woo La Comptesse Du Barry (Merman). As Louis, Lahr had somewhat better luck in attracting his love than he did as the washroom attendant. “But in the Morning, No” is a sophisticated song of seduction set to a minuet. To see Lahr in highbuckled shoes, a lorgnette, and periwig ridiculed the fustian eighteenth century. The play of wit between Louis XV and Madame Du Barry puts the elegance of that time back in its proper physical perspective—close to the stomach.

DeSylva chose only four verses; the others, heretofore unpublished, were not sung. The song received encore after encore. “When Cole got dirty,” Lahr says, “It was dirt, without subtlety. Nothing I sang in burlesque was as risqué as his lyrics. It would never have been allowed on the burlesque stage.” Lahr's love of biological laughter had become tempered by a sense of propriety that came with theatrical success. But when he reads Porter's words to himself, he cannot stifle a laugh at nearly every line.

The song, with at least ten refrains, reached the epitome of stage ribaldry in this stanza, matched only by Porter's private performances in his early days at the Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice:

The Porter score was inventive and wry; and if Lahr worried about how the audience would react to an occasional line, the general effect was one of immense pleasure. The show produced no immediate “hits,” but through the years three songs emerged as “standards”: “Friendship,” “Do I Love You, Do I?” and “Well, Did You Evah!” which became famous when rewritten for the movie
High Society
.

Porter had written comedy songs before—but never for a comedian whose gestures and personality allowed him to pull out all the stops. Much of the comic material in his earlier shows had been provided by the male performers themselves. This was true, to a large extent, of Danny Kaye
(Let's Face it
, 1941) and Jimmy Durante
(The New Yorkers
, 1930;
Red, Hot, and Blue
, 1936). Although Porter had concocted comedy songs for Victor Moore in
Anything Goes
(1934), they hardly had the verve or wit he displayed for Lahr.

Lahr's own comic imagination—his instinct for the liberties he could take, his ear for funny sounds and words he could mangle—helped Porter sharpen the thrust of his laughter. Lahr's comedy was graphic and precise; Porter's lyrics, whatever his devilish intentions, were often wordily sedate. In collaboration, Porter's songs could play off not only Lahr's blundering stage coarseness, but also the impact of his physical presence. In “It Ain't Etiquette” Lahr was to expound on manners as a bathroom attendant with a taste for “class.” Where Porter inclined toward the general statement, Lahr pushed him for more specific song ideas that carried greater possibilities for movement and response.

A Porter stanza begins—

When invited to hear from an Op'ra box

Rigoletto's divine quartet,

Don't bother your neighbors by throwing rocks

IT AIN'T ETIQUETTE
.

The lines seemed improbable to Lahr, whose comedy thrived on the outrageously real. He suggested building up to something about a Bronx cheer. These lines, scribbled in the
Du Barry
prompt book, were the more effective alternatives.

If invited one night to the Met to hear

Rigoletto's divine quartet,

Don't shower the cast with a loud Bronx cheer,

IT AIN'T ETIQUETTE
.

Porter appreciated Lahr's uniqueness. The song's final stanza, written before he had worked with Lahr, began:

If a very proud mother asks what you think

Of her babe in the bassinette,

Don't tell her it looks like the missing link …

Instead of being cute, Porter was as blunt as Lahr's body. His revision acknowledges Lahr and gives the joke resonance:

If a very proud mother asks you to see

Her babe in the bassinette

Don't tell her it looks exactly like me

IT AIN'T ETIQUETTE
.

The element of fey surprise in Porter's lyrics was matched by Lahr's delivery, which, no matter how fastidious, mocked refinement. Off stage, Lahr balked instinctively at some of the Porter
double entendres
. But his image of himself as censor for the audience was laughably hypocritical.

His affection for Betty Grable illustrates this. Miss Grable, whose famous figure was as stunning as her face was sweet, had a fine time jesting with Lahr. “She was a lovely kid. When she opened in
Du Barry
, she was new to New York. She had a lot of vivaciousness. Then she got the cover of
Life
, and from then on she sailed.” The one fact that sticks in his mind is not her considerable beauty, but the delightful lamb-and-mutton image she could create in the same moment. To Lahr, a man who lived with artifice, this deception was hilarious. He laughs when he thinks about it. “Betty could say the filthiest things and they sounded … well, you never took offense.” This paralleled Lahr's own feelings about getting away with anything on stage as long as one did it with a sense of innocence. Both Lahr and Grable used to delight in mocking Broadway decorum while performing. “Under our breath, we used to say things that if the audience heard, they'd back up the wagon.”

Lahr was not as comfortable with Ethel Merman, whose talent he admired, but whose strength made him nervous. Lahr's humor depended on the reactions of others to him. He had difficulty with Miss Merman. “She's an individual with a special way of working. There was nothing vicious in what she did, she is a great performer. But she's
tough.
She never looks at you on stage
. She's got her tricks.” Lahr had his tricks too, and an inevitable, if friendly, friction developed. It fed their stage roles.

As a musical-comedy team, Merman and Lahr generated an energy and noise as unique as they were appealing. Miss Merman's brash truculence made her a perfect foil for the dimwitted, kind soul Lahr portrayed. On stage they moved within their own field, as forces that attracted and repelled each other. Both Lahr and Miss Merman created spectacles of excitement, gorgeous but strangely unapproachable. Lahr's body told his own intimate tale, always finally a lesson in loneliness and private failure. Miss Merman, firmly planted on the stage, challenged the stage life with a voice that dwarfed any frequency around her and that set her apart from the play. On stage, their personalities were radiant assets to each other; off it, they did not always mesh as well.

In
Du Barry
, their final number was “Friendship,” a song that had its own irony. Lahr never saw how close the good-natured stand-off that May sings to her unsuccessful suitor, Louis, mirrored the situation between Merman and himself. The fantastic success of the song was, in part, due to their own sporting criticism of each other. The wink at the audience was also a private jab in the ribs.

The song allowed Merman to marshal her finest clarion tones, and it gave Lahr a chance to embellish the words with burlesque dancing turns. During the chorus, he would pivot on an elbow with the pride of a ballet dancer or undertake a potbellied
pas de deux
. In Boston, the audience refused to let them stop. They hollered for more of Porter's barbs. Lahr had to yell, “That's all there is. Come to Philadelphia.”

They took two encores, and the nonsense lyrics of the final line were reiterated through the encore. As Porter wrote them, they were—

Chuck, chuck, chuck,

Quack, quack, quack,

Tweet, tweet, tweet,

Push, push, push,

Give, give, give,

Good evening friends …

But Lahr, experimenting, plumbed for funnier sounds. In his prompt book, he had penciled in his own clownish additions—

Zip, zip, zip,

Chuck, chuck, chuck,

Za, zu, zaz,

Razmataz,

Go, go, go,

Give, give, give,

Good evening friends …

His instincts directed him to the vaudeville routine he and Merman were incorporating into the body of musical comedy. He refers to the song as a “two-act,” and his lines underscore both its “showbiz” flavor and the low-comic prancing.

After the opening night performance, Louis Shurr burst into Lahr's dressing room. “I stopped a couple of critics on the way out, Bert. You'll be here forever.”

“Yeah,” Lahr replied. “But what do I do next year?”

The press was very favorable to both Miss Merman and Lahr, if not enthralled with the story. Brooks Atkinson devoted a Sunday
New York Times
piece to “American Comic: In Praise of Bert Lahr—Leading Zany, Showman, and Comic.” It was royal kudos.

… Bert Lahr is the most versatile comedian in the business …During the
years, Bert has quieted down. He still does something foolish with his right arm, but in moderation. And the brassy bellow, like a terrorized fire gong, has practically gone out of existence. What we have now is a nimble and roguish comedian who is still low enough to be good company and who can change pace according to the mood of the scene—laying it on thick when the occasion needs buffoonery, but simpering through the impish high society scenes.