Notes on a Cowardly Lion (54 page)

In Philadelphia, Perelman was faced with the problem of creating a scene, adding vinegar to a section of the second act that dwindled to sentiment. Borrowing the setting—a hothouse—from the Raymond Chandler fiction he admired, Perelman conceived the Nelson Smedley sketch in which Lahr was an aged and cantankerous redbaiter, obsessed by the threat of imminent invasion. “When I read it to Bert,” says Perelman, “I thought he was a little frightened at first. He thought
that this was too political. He said to me, ‘Wait a minute, couldn't somebody think that this sketch was a defense of Communism?' I said, ‘Don't be ridiculous. As a matter of fact, everyone is so fed up with redbaiting that we might have some success with it.' I asked him to try it. He was wary, but we went ahead. The minute the laughs began to roll back I could see that Bert would never part with the thing. He took what was pretty wild stuff and gave it an extra dimension.”

Lahr's improvisations were especially important in the Smedley sketch. “The basic scene was Perelman's invention,” explains Noel Willman. “When Bert read this, I was enchanted with him saying to me, ‘Noel, now listen, you have to help me with this because I've never played an old man before.' I was terribly charmed, but doubly so when he proceeded to give one of the most stunning performances of an old man that has ever been given. In rehearsal, Lahr would suddenly take lines and change them, often to Perelman's rage. If you examine the sketch, there is less Perelman wit, less Perelman rococo. It is much simpler, closer to a burlesque sketch. There are two reasons for this. First of all, Sid did not have time to polish it; secondly, Lahr gave it this frenzied objective quality. When we began, the sketch had a lot of plot. By the time Bert had finished with rehearsals, we had cut it to the minimum plot line. I thought it was an amusing idea when Sid sat down to write it. I had no idea it was going to be the best thing in the show.”

The Beauty Part
opened on the brink of the 1963 newspaper strike. Although the critics received it warmly, publicity was drastically limited. In Broadway vernacular, it was a “laughing show.” “I sat there and watched people laugh and roll until tears came down their cheeks and they held their sides” was the testament of one critic. But the serious target of the laughter, the well-aimed barbs at America's cultural pretenders, was surprisingly new to Broadway entertainment. It confused some observers, who, while enjoying themselves, were quick to dismiss the play as a cartoon or draw the facile parallel between Perelman as literary satirist and playwright. The social questions raised by the play were almost forgotten by critics who found the laughter more easy to describe than cultural hypocrisy. As Robert Brustein pointed out in
The New Republic
, “The middle-class spectator, whatever his private affections, does not usually like to see money stroked in public.” Broadway was, perhaps, the wrong location to launch a debate about democracy and culture. But Perelman as a satirist wanted to bring his vision into the enemy camp. With Lahr as a vehicle of
exchange, he had a fine chance to infiltrate middle-class imaginations. Perelman was bold enough to place the show in front of the audience it was about. This was a moralist's tactic, as well as the instincts of a commercial writer. Lahr assured the good spirits and theatrical clarity; but the newspaper strike prevented
The Beauty Part
from reaching the audience it deserved.

The Beauty Part
was the most original script Lahr received in a decade. Its quick demise deprived Broadway of a theatrical satirist of immense potential and a comic performance of stunning range. Lahr's sadness about the show's closing did not intervene in his commercial considerations. Perelman wrote him frequently urging him to consent to a London production, where Perelman reigned as the King of American humorists, and where Lahr had never tested his talent. Lahr refused. “They just couldn't pay my price.” In 1966, when he was finally promised a salary that would have made him the highest-paid performer ever on the English stage (five hundred pounds a week), he agreed to perform it, only to have the opportunity fizzle. As a consequence, a fine show bowed to the demands of commercial theater.

Where was Lahr's stage future? At sixtyeight, the critics confirmed his significance to American theater history and their allegiance to him. When he weighed public enthusiasm against his theatrical prospects, he was faced with laughable conclusions. His way of working and the content of his comedy could not find a form to suit evolving theatrical tastes. The abrupt closing of
The Beauty Part
had shocked him, although he seemed outwardly resigned. He was too old a trouper not to know the theatrical facts of life. Times change, people change, even a comedian's ear numbs to acclaim. But unlike many of his comic colleagues, Lahr's career had not faltered, nor had his popularity plummeted. The public maintained him as a comic star and applauded his efforts. His comedy demanded a scope and popularity commensurate with that stardom. The revue format proved to be hollow; and satire had not won wide audience appeal. The term “commercial” saturated his imagination like cigar smoke—inescapable and faintly odious. His last Broadway venture would return to the formula of his early commercial success—the book musical, the first he had done since
Du Barry
(1939), when the word “book” was closer to betting than story line.

Lahr appeared in two versions of
Foxy
, a musical adaption of Ben Jonson's
Volpone
. The first took him to the Yukon in the summer of
1962; he did a revised version on Broadway in 1964, after
The Beauty Part
closed.

The original play is a masterpiece of comic construction in which a rich, wily old man (Volpone) feigns sickness and with the help of his henchman plays greed against greed to dupe the parasites who want to inherit part of his fortune. Besides the potential of the updated material, Lahr could go fishing in western Canada, where the show was being subsidized by the Canadian government for playing Dawson City, Yukon Territory.
Volpone
, in its adaptation, was set in a Gold Rush background, offering Lahr yet another chance to manipulate those essentials of low comedy—disguise, false dignity, avarice, and lust. To Ben Jonson, the appeal of his scoundrels lay in the delight and energy they brought to their machinations. Lahr's scheming was no less obsessive than Volpone's.

For a man nearing seventy, the trip to the Yukon was a physical risk. The journey was one day's travel by plane, but ten days by Lahr's route of train, bus, and boat. He packed his medicines, his fishing tackle, his rabbit's foot. He kept his new camera handy (he took a thousand pictures of the Yukon, two hundred of them of cloud formations). He traveled in the Grand Tradition of a super star of the thirties. According to
The New York Times
(which printed a map of the $7,500 trek) “it was one of the most esoteric, expensive and complex itineraries in the history of show business.” Lahr never thought of it as a “first”; this was simply the only way he could do the show.

There were many surprises during the eightweek run, not the least of which was Dawson City itself.
Foxy
was intended to lure tourists into the territory. To Lahr, Dawson City was a fossil from a grim, cold past. The shacks on the outskirts were dilapidated and gray with decay. The “tourist attraction” looked like a ghost town; even the freshly painted stores on the main street could not hide the chilled hollowness of the surroundings. Lahr photographed everything on that first day—registering his amazement and apprehension: the gravel road that had jostled him for fifty miles from Whitehorse to Dawson City; storefront signs reading:
MILK
75¢
A QUART
; the midnight sun that gave the evening the same jagged beauty as the days.

Dawson City was a town of physical extremes: violent colors and blanched, hard earth; rushing streams and arid, granite-faced mountains. Lahr recalled it with fondness. The townsfolk had warmed to the actors, inviting them to brunches and dinner parties. The actors themselves were bound together in a common experience; and Lahr,
replaying his film slides of that time, would be touched by the birthday party they gave him—recalling at once the countryside and camaraderie, the price of tomatoes flown daily into the town, and the Indians who stared at his antics from the front rows. In the Yukon, he had panned for gold, fished, and observed, with clinical precision, cirrus cloud formations.

The play was intended to reopen the city as a resort, but Lahr immediately saw the drawback. There were seven hundred people in the town, half of them Indians. There was only one road. The only convenient way to get to Dawson City was to fly from Fairbanks, Alaska. Lahr, an inveterate box-office watcher, tabulated the result. Weekends were the only days the four hundred-seat playhouse would be full. Although the grand premiere brought Canadian officials and Bea Lillie to Dawson City, tourists were not willing to make the pilgrimage. Many a performance would play to an empty house; and Lahr's city clowning was lost on faces cracked from facing into the wind.

In the theater, Lahr found himself with variables he had never considered. The old star came up against a new breed of actor who shared few of his traditions or concepts of the stage. The “book musical” was still as clumsy and simplified as it had been twenty years before; the audience had changed more drastically than their stage entertainment. When Lahr applied his axioms of comedy, forcing attention back toward himself, he could still dominate the stage, but this very power ultimately dispelled the musical's total force. Lahr spoke with fifty years of experience—and he began to realize that nobody in
Foxy
shared those insights or understood him; they had come from another generation—one that never geared itself to the demands of his comedy. The director, Robert Lewis, could not help Lahr; his suggestions and his unwillingness to allow him to improvise reinforced the fact that Lahr was on his own. Lewis, a director responsible for such Broadway standards as
Teahouse of the August Moon, Brigadoon
, and
Jamaica
, did not know how to cope with Lahr. Ring Lardner, Jr., and Ian McLellan Hunter had never written a Broadway musical; yet in their first play they wanted to retain both the theme of
Volpone
and their lines exactly as they had written them. The show was not social satire; written with Lahr in mind, it was a farcical entertainment that encompassed his broad, loose playing. The problem was simple. Without Lahr's laughter, the show had very little to offer—a mediocre book, fair songs, and choreography that rarely kicked an original leg. His laughter and his improvisations gave it a chance; and yet the authors bridled him with
language that was not funny and scenes that did not build to a comic climax.

Lahr raged with a venom he usually reserved for liberals. “I'm Bert Lahr. Bert Lahr … Don't try to be funny. You be real. I'll be funny,” he'd call down to the authors. His reactions were accepted by most of the cast, but not by Larry Blyden, his co-star, who was one of his greatest admirers. Blyden, a young, talented actor, understood Lahr, but talked back to him. Friction was inevitable: Blyden was arguing as much for an understanding of modern theater as for himself. There were no answers to the debate, but his position was one that could not be rebutted on rational grounds, but simply on the irrational credo of The Laugh.

“The authors were stubborn,” recalls Blyden. “They indulged Bert in all the things he must not be indulged in: hogging of time, temper tantrums, willfulness, trying to dictate everything to be done in his own self-interest. On the other hand, they never once allowed him to be brilliant. There was no other actor alive who could do what Lahr could on stage. They wouldn't have it. He would say things to them in analyzing a scene that would be so perceptive and so precise that there was no arguing with him. Sometimes, if they'd have listened to him, I would have been hurt in the writing, sometimes he might have been injured (although I doubt it, because Bert is never injured by anything he suggests). But certainly the scene would have worked better. They had their little idea of what was theatrical and what was honest; and they were all wrong. They also refused to admit that when Bert came out there and crossed his eyes, and did the first ridiculous, outlandish take, that that's the kind of play they had …”

Lahr's tantrums were frequent; he would argue and apologize and try to begin again, only to run up against the same conflict. He could harangue for hours, with decibels of invective that had their dramatic effect. Blyden recalls that Lahr “created an atmosphere so that people would do anything for him just to continue. It was one of his techniques.” Blyden refused to accept this temperament, which—right or wrong—denied problems other than its own. “Every time he does that,” Blyden told Lewis, “then I'm going to do it! And I did. We didn't rehearse at all. They would let him take time out for things that weren't important. Had they acquiesced where he was right and disciplined him where he was wrong (because he's a fair man), things would have been easier. He had no faith in the writers or in the director. They weren't as good as he was; he knew better, he just knew better. You'd
leave rehearsal, and you'd be bleeding at what they'd done to him. If I was bleeding, I thought, God, what he must be going through. He would go home and work on his lines all evening. He was the first one there in the morning and the last one out at night …

“Bert's characterizations are broad as hell and drawn very much from life. His sense of what somebody would do at any given moment is astounding. He has the guts of a burglar; he'll try something even when his instincts are off. And you'll die with it; it will be horrible. Then, he'll unload it. A lot of the time he would try to clown around in the early stage of
Foxy
. The clowning would bomb. It was a little repulsive actually, but he knew that, and he never did it again. His instincts took him there, and he tried it. Sometimes he would abandon the play completely for a funny line. He came up with dozens. They get laughs; God knows, they get laughs, but in a sense that is abandoning the play; the action is arrested to accommodate the laugh—that is an anachronism. The reality of that time, the people in that specific situation are forgotten. In addition, the life on the stage stops. Bert likes it to be still anyway, because that's his period, that's his day. Bert wants everything around him immobile—with as little life as possible. People are envisioned almost as posts for Bert—who are set in different places and given cues. He then is free to move among those posts, relating everything directly to the audience as he moves. So he has fixed objects who throw him lines which he can then clown on and react to. Life, then, ceases. I objected because I think there's a better way; I think it's better for him, too. Live people dealing with each other in a better way. He doesn't think so. He came up in a school of butchers. They were killers, those guys. You can't expect anyone who started at fifteen and is now seventy to change. People are props. He said to me, ‘Well, in this sketch we should do so and so …' Well, it is not a sketch. It's a book musical. There are scenes connected to each other. In a sketch you go from one laugh to another, then blackout. In his mind
Foxy
was a sketch …”