Notes on a Cowardly Lion (47 page)

The family hardly saw him. Even when he moved from the hotel near the theater to the house where we were staying, his cloth rehearsing cap was always on his head and his mind was on his work. He would return late in the day and immediately hand Mildred the script to go over his lines. Since he could not always see the logical progression of ideas, memorizing was painful. Sometimes he would ask me to help him. He worked furiously, but was secretive about how the show was
going. Lester Shurr came down for the New Year's Eve Party a few days before the opening. Through all the festivities, Lahr remained somber. He went to bed at the same hour we did. The part, which we never saw him perform in Florida, seemed to sap his energy in a way that no other had done. We were sent home a few days before the opening—a gesture that should have told us what to expect.

The day of the opening, Schneider called a line rehearsal for six p.m. The cast was testy and anxious. During the rehearsal Lahr fell asleep. “Part of it was nerves,” explains Schneider. “Part of it was trying to get away from the play.” Neither the director nor the rest of the cast was pleased with Lahr's siesta.

Walter Winchell, who was in Florida for the premiere, came into Lahr's dressing room before the show. “What's this about, Bert?”

Lahr found himself saying, “I really don't know. It's very strange. We'll see.”

The opening night was as gala as Miami could make it. Among the audience moving past the huge fountain, down the thickly carpeted aisles, were Tennessee Williams, Joseph Cotten, Joan Fontaine, Gloria de Haven, Winchell, and Myerberg.

The next day the Miami
Herald's
headline recounted the devastating effect of the occasion—

MINK CLAD AUDIENCE DISAPPOINTED IN WAITING FOR GODOT

The audience, gilt-edged and giddy with expectation at the ‘“laugh-riot” the ads had promised, was completely dumbfounded by what it saw. As one local critic reported, “The audience was more in the mood for
Guys and Dolls.”
It was openly hostile to the event.

Lahr found himself living through a comedian's nightmare. He met a complete stone wall. “I have never experienced anything like this in the American theater. I don't think anybody has. Two thirds of the audience left after the first act.”

Lahr's horror at the audience's reception sent him into a frenzy of activity. “He tried to do a one-man show,” recalls Schneider. “He was trying to salvage the evening. There was nothing malicious in his gestures, but he would ride in on Tommy's laughs. I had to restrain Mrs. Ewell from going on the stage. Bert just couldn't believe that Vladimir could get laughs. The two of them ended up killing each other on the stage.”

Lahr could never comprehend Ewell's reaction to him. In his mind, Estragon demanded the movement he brought to the part. “Tom
thought I was moving on him; he'd wrap his arms around me on stage and hold me.

“I didn't do anything to him. I wasn't trying to hurt him. We'd been in this thing together—in fact, he'd finally convinced me to do the play. It was only a two-week run, and anyway, he was bigger than I was.”

The next day there was a line in front of the Cocoanut Grove Theater, not to buy tickets, but to demand refunds. Lahr himself began receiving protest mail. One day soon after the opening, he approached Schneider and held out a letter for him to read.

Dear Mr. Lahr,

How can a man, who has charmed the youth of America as the lion in
The Wizard of Oz
, appear in a play which is communistic, atheistic and existential.

After Schneider glanced through the letter, Lahr asked, “What does existential mean?”

But Lahr's intuitions about the play changed gradually during the two-week run. He began to understand parts of the play that Schneider's careful words had not been able to convey.

Although he swore to Schneider that he would have nothing to do with another production, he could not deny that the play spoke to a vast, inarticulate region of his experience. Beckett's limbo would elicit similar responses from convicts in San Quentin who saw the San Francisco Actor's Workshop production in 1957. Middle-class audiences, however, found the experience unsettling and treated the production with an aggressive dislike. Walter Winchell wrote the first of a handful of notices that would characterize their typical arrogant obtuseness. While Lahr could not forget the caverns of emptiness the play dramatized, Winchell illustrated the antagonism of a class that refused to recognize it.

As one of the most influential of the old guard on the Broadway scene, his hostility, verging on hysteria, is pertinent. Some, like Walter Kerr, dismissed it (“an intellectual fruitbowl”), but Winchell wanted to destroy it as if it were subversive and those who took part in it insane.

Waiting for Godot
will appear in Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia before it challenges New Yorkers at the Music Box. Lahr and Ewell are on stage throughout, trading double talk. The thing opens with Tom Ewell's trousers unzipped.… It ends
with Lahr's pants falling to his ankles. In between there is considerable chatter about madness, boredom, human suffering and cruelty …There are several profane utterances … some of which have never before been heard on the stage before …Even the vulgarians who people the premieres found the dirty words vulgar … “Unnecessary” exclaimed a hard boiled Broadwayite. George E. Engle, a multi-millionaire who loves theater people, renovated the Cocoanut Grove Playhouse and will play Broadway shows old and new. Mr. Engle is also the proprietor of 440 producing oil wells.

“What on earth possessed Myerberg to put on such a show,” he asked John Shubert the Broadway showman. “Don't underestimate him,” he said. “Myerberg was laughed at by experts when he put on Wilder's
Skin of Our Teeth
. He made so much money with it that he bought the Mansfield Theater!…
Life
photographers “shot” the elite audiences as the stars were taking alleged bows … If published, these pictures cannot help the new show since half the spectators fled after the opening stanza …

The debacle was completed when Myerberg canceled the out-of-town tryouts and folded the show. Much of the fault lay with Myerberg himself. He had billed the production falsely, mounted it outrageously, and brought it to a town with no sympathetic audience to sustain an experimental play. But Schneider had an even unhappier experience, for he was not asked to direct the New York production, as he had expected.

For Schneider, however, the real sadness was in not having done justice to the Beckett he understood. As he wrote in the
Chelsea Review
,

The failure in Miami depressed me more than any experience I had had in the theater, though I had for a time anticipated the probability and done all in my power to avoid it. It is typical of Sam [Beckett] that his response to Miami was concerned only with my feelings of disappointment and never stressed or even mentioned his own. Nor did he utter one word of blame for any mistakes I might have made along the way …We met several times. I told him the story of Miami as objectively as I could and he spoke to me of what he had heard concerning both productions. Somehow he made me feel that what I had at least tried to do in Miami was closer to what he wanted to do—though he never criticized the efforts of anyone else.…”

Schneider never saw the New York production.

The play's dismal reception in Miami never numbed Lahr's faith
in its fundamental theatricality. There were dimensions of the play he felt his performance had not been able to tap because of the director, the set, his own fear of the material.

“Everybody has their own interpretation of
Godot
. At one point in the play, you thought the tramps were waiting for God. But then Beckett would go off on another tangent. Then you knew it wasn't God. At the finish, they were still waiting. It was Waiting. Hopelessness. It was waiting for the best of life; and it never came. I think he meant the two characters to represent both sides of man. Estragon, my part, was the animal: Sex, Hunger, Eating, Sleeping. The other, Vladimir, was Suspicion, Inquiry, always examining everything. Intellect. He had kind of an animal's love for the other. He cared for him almost like a baby.”

Even Myerberg realized that “Lahr seemed to know the character better than anyone even from the beginning.”

What did Lahr know? Questions of the Bible, of philosophy, and social organization that the play raised had never crossed his mind. His theatrical friends urged him to scrap the idea of playing
Godot
. Yet he found himself defending the play without being able to verbalize its special force. In 1964, when Beckett went to London to oversee another production of
Waiting for Godot
, he discussed approaches to the play that might have calmed those who scoffed at Lahr's persistence.

This play is full of implications and every important statement can be taken three or four ways. But the actor has only to find the dominant one, because he does so, does not mean the other levels will be lost …

Sunday Times
, December 20, 1964

Lahr found his approach to Beckett; the audience's violent reaction in Miami had solidified his idea. “When I saw them walking out, I knew, I knew.” Many of Lahr's theatrical associates regarded his fascination with the play as childish. If he lacked the words to express his appreciation, his “instincts” would prove Beckett's statement correct, peeling layers of meaning and emotion from the play that neither actor nor author could have originally visualized.

A few weeks after returning to New York, Myerberg asked Lahr if he would do another production of the play. Despite Lahr's bad experience in Miami and his distrust of Myerberg, he agreed on the condition that he have final say about the director.

Two weeks later, Lahr found himself in Lester Shurr's Broadway
office talking to a director whom he'd never met and whose actingschool productions of
Waiting for Godot
he'd never seen—Herbert Berghof.

Berghof did not look like a man with a flair for comedy. He was heavy-set; his bald head and thick Viennese accent reminded Lahr more of a philosophy professor than a director. Berghof had come to the interview with a mixture of confidence and trepidation. He had directed
Waiting for Godot
in his acting studio and played the part of Estragon himself. Since he knew the play and had heard about Schneider's approach to it, he felt that he could offer an alternative. “Myerberg had said to me ‘It's all up to Mr. Lahr. If he accepts you, then it's fine.' I wanted to direct the play very much, but I was frightened of that meeting. I had seen Bert in all his great parts, and I was a fan of his. I was really frightened.”

Lahr stood at the window watching a mammoth cardboard Yogi Berra blow Camel smoke rings onto Broadway. He listened and nodded while Berghof explained his feelings about the play. “Although I had never seen the Miami production, I had very definite ideas about Beckett. My complete conviction was that the play was affirmative. There was nothing fanciful or strange in it. There was no raised finger. To me it didn't have the false significance of an arty play. In Miami, it was directed for style and crucifixion and I don't know what. I felt the play was comparable to clowning—the sublime clowning of Grok or the Fratellinis. The meaningless notions of Beckett are meaningful. We
do
eat carrots and go into delicious ecstasy about them. That gesture has meaning; it's not just being silly. In comedy, what matters is that you truly see. Take a drawing by Saul Steinberg, who is a metaphysical clown among cartoonists; he's able to X-ray something—emotionally, psychologically—with two lines. His illustration is true; he has captured an absurd moment of a human being, but with precise understanding. The same happens with Beckett's laughter. The play in Miami was directed for significances, meanings. My understanding of Beckett was different, more affirmative. Only somebody who loves life strongly could see all the flaws and weaknesses in an attempt to find out what it was all about. The exploration of existence becomes a sublime clown's act. There was no negation in Beckett's play; but the kind of affirmation you get when you love someone and see all their faults. Life to Beckett seems to have all these absurd, unexplained aspects; and yet, he is on the search because he loves life.” Berghof's conception of the play allowed for the comic leeway that Schneider's did not. Lahr
immediately warmed to it, expressing his humiliation and bewilderment at the Miami production.

Lahr described the elaborate set design. Berghof replied, “I think that's phony.”

“You're right. I wouldn't set foot on it again.”

Berghof understood clowning and directing comedy and could see immediately how the set imposed its own limitations. “There were very complicated ramps, which made it impossible to operate like a clown because a clown basically needs an empty stage. First of all, the complicated set detracts from Bert's gestures; secondly, the whole attitude of the play with platforms seems fanciful and out of order.”

Having found a sympathetic ear, Lahr confided, “I just couldn't walk or talk on it. What do you want as a set?”

“I don't want anything,” Berghof said flatly. They discussed casting, and again Lahr was surprised at how many of Berghof's ideas paralleled his own. “I did feel it was wrong to cast Tom Ewell with Bert. Their type of comedy is too similar—naïve, simple, innocent. Bert has this same radiance or innocence. I thought the character should be played by somebody who had comédie elements but was a sharper player, more intellectual. I suggested E. G. Marshall. He had a kind of New England acuteness, a cerebral quality to contrast with Estragon's vulnerability.”

Lahr, who had been cordial up to this point, became more involved. He moved away from the window and stopped pacing.

“I think it's music hall. But in Miami, I couldn't get a laugh for two hours.”