Notes on a Cowardly Lion (57 page)

The family knows he will tire of cigars, just as he grew weary of stereo tapes, Japanese television sets, and painting. These are pastimes, small pleasures to take his mind off work—or the lack of it. He indulges his interests without a thought of being judged. He speaks cryptically about something as if talking to himself and then falls back into an active silence. At his easel, he interests himself in his paints. He experiments with the canvas by turning out a dozen pictures of the same lion and signing each to give to his friends. He displays them on the large bedroom breakfront—pulling out drawers to prop them up. He ponders them like Jackson Pollock before an empty canvas.

“I think I'll paint one looking out over his paws with his body drooping down. I think I'll paint him with tears in his eyes.”

“Bert, you don't want a sad lion,” cautions Mildred.

“That's how I see him—with tears in his eyes.”

To his children, Lahr is a friendly absence, a man who, induced to reveal himself, is at once humble and childishly stubborn, concerned and curiously aloof. Lahr can greet Mildred at the door in beret and smock: or chase her, yelping, into the bathroom threatening to take her picture with a Polaroid camera. He is conscious of having given his family the best of possibilities—but whatever these advantages are, he seems to know only by rumor. When he appeared at Jane's school to receive a report on his daughter, he listened quietly with the three-pieced somberness of the rest of the fathers. After the report, Lahr confided to a teacher, “This is an innovation for Spence, isn't it?” “Mr. Lahr, Jane's been at
Dalton
for two years.”

He never knew what grade we were in; he dismissed good marks with bad (“I never got more than a C in my life, just so long as you pass I don't care”). And after bemoaning the cost of private education for as many years as he'd paid for it, his presence at graduations and other official ceremonies was now infamous. He missed as many as he made. At Jane's graduation from Bennett College, he sat through the stodgy ceremony eating an ice-cream cone. At Yale, where the students convene at their colleges, Lahr snuck behind the elm trees in Branford to photograph his son receiving a B.A. The eyes of two hundred parents were glued to him as he tiptoed behind the tree and waited with his camera. When I finally approached the rostrum, he dropped his camera. The crowd moaned in unison as if he'd fumbled on the one-yard line.

Always long-suffering at public gatherings, Lahr has been forced to go against his principles of nonintervention for the sake of Dr. Spock's vision of family harmony. He gave a graduation address marking my matriculation from sixth to seventh grades at Riverdale Country Day School. When he arrived, he was rushed into the Lower School corridors, notes in hand. “I've never been more nervous,” he confided to Mildred. He told us to concentrate during the summer “on hitting the ball a country mile, and catching a fish,” and a few other things he'd never done at that age. He appeared at only one official sports event and left just as his ten-year-old son was intercepting a pass against a bunch of oversized orphans. His only comment was “Why couldn't you have done it sooner?”

Bert Lahr has even traveled into the wilderness to observe his offspring at play. He was paying for the kind of air, leisure, and careful handling he had missed. He looked on with some amazement at tents, mosquito netting, and an organized schedule of activities more like the Army than fun. He came to a camp council fire, gazing glassy-eyed at his daughter, who sat crosslegged in an Indian headdress chanting the invocation: “… Oh, firemaker, light now our council fire so that we may have light, so that we may have warmth, so that we may sit in council tonight.” My father listened to the words, standing shivering and cornered by night bugs. “I finally sat down at the campfire and told the kids all about Indians. What do
I
know about Indians?” Besieged by campers, urged on by eager entertainment directors who insisted on greeting him and sending him off with a roundelay, Lahr could rarely muster the enthusiasm for the frontier spirit. Sometimes, it amused him. He watched a squat camper take aim at an archery target and then hit a bull's-eye three stands away. Flushed with excitement, she turned to Lahr and announced, “I wasn't even trying.” He tried to cover up his guffaw by asking her a question. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A horse.”

Coming back to New York, he pointed to a fire hydrant. “That was
my
summer camp.”

He once came to my aid and answered a sixth-grade essay question on “Why I would like to be an Eskimo.” He felt it was a foolish exercise but it was the first A he ever received in school. Only once was I summoned to his room for a discussion about sex. He began by saying, “John, sex is beautiful …” He tried to elaborate, but never finished
the sentence. Fumbling for words, he concluded the discussion abruptly, “It's beautiful … now get to bed.”

What does he think of his children? We are never certain. He can storm out of a room announcing, “All right, I'm off you.” Like milk and eggs, children go off; and Lahr has been known to ban them from court for as long as a week. He rarely assesses us to our face—he is vaguely proud; but, worried about the security of our futures, he remains silent. He bares his emotion as nervously as a grandmother showing a bit of leg. “They'll forget us, Mildred.” His suspicions of betrayal are unfounded but everpresent. He will shuffle into Jane's room when she is out and look at her work. Her interest in demonology and astrology amuses him. “Come home,” he told her on the phone, “We need a fourth at the ouija board.” When confronted with his ebullient, beautiful daughter he does not always know what to say, except that she inherited his nose—as big an onus as assuming the national debt.

“So you think I look better?” he asks Jane.

“I think you look beautiful, Bertram.”

“Aw, shut up,” he says, with a wrinkled stage grimace that means love. When I began to write articles about the theater, my father looked on with apprehension. For an actor to spawn a drama-critic son held as much potential disappointment as giving birth to a Cyclops—the latter perhaps being more far-sighted than a critic. “Don't be like Winchell, John. Be honest!” After his dictum on criticism, he retired to his bedroom and worried about his son in private. The telephone would ring in my apartment with a lobbyist's sense of timing. Once, he called me as I was about to review a splendid revival of
Annie Get Your Gun
. “John, I'm glad I caught you. I was thinking … don't pan Merman's age.” When I wrote a piece disputing Walter Kerr about the nature of criticism, he called me into his bedroom with the article in hand. “This is very well written, John; but Walter Kerr is the dean of critics now. He's been very nice to me.”

After six months he began to trust my judgment, and when I was published in a magazine that cost him $1.25 at the newstands, his faith was confirmed. He gave me scripts to read as potential vehicles for him. “This is very deep, very abstract. I don't know what it means”; or “This could be built up. It's commercial, don't you think?” Was he proud? Was he dissatisfied? No one knew. Sometimes he would read the articles as if scanning the want ads and at other times he would lavish more attention on them. When I handed him an article on Harold Pinter, he took it, with paternal tact, to peruse in the
bathroom. It began with a Pinter letter on Samuel Beckett and brought Lahr hobbling out of the bathroom, swathed in his robe and with his underpants around his ankles. “What are you, Allen Ginsberg or something?” When I explained that the language was not mine but Pinter's, he looked again and ambled back to read in pacified silence.

When he found out that I was teaching drama at Hunter College, his fears of his son languishing in the abyss of bankruptcy were assuaged.

“What do they pay?”

“It comes to thirteen dollars a class.”

“Hey, that's not bad. Let's see. If you could teach six or eight classes a day—you'd be in business.”

He balked when I asked him to come to a class. “I'm not a scholar, John: I wouldn't want to talk. We'll see.” But he did attend a lecture on
Waiting for Godot
, sneaking into the crowded Park Avenue building. He sat meekly in the back; but when I asked him questions about performing
Godot
he warmed to the enterprise. He enjoyed recounting his interpretation. At the end of the class, the students clustered around him, not to get his autograph but asking him to elaborate his ideas. He had sat, with Mildred, for an hour and a half. It was the first time he'd been in a classroom in a half century. He did not leave in the middle claiming an appointment with his agent or an extenuating rehearsal. He never said he liked the class; but his presence was a tacit nod of approval. After his visit, he always referred to my course as “Elizabethan drama.” Had he listened? He had, at least, been present. Through family silences, he would inquire during the year what I was teaching. When I tried to explain Ben Jonson's
Alchemist
, the words would echo off him.

“Bert, why don't you listen to him?”

“Whaddya mean, listen. I am listening!”

“How can you listen when you're not looking?”

“I can listen: ‘Ben Jonson's
Alchemist
…'” Shared moments are regurgitated in fragments of understanding. Teaching has an aura of respectability in his eyes that criticism can never have. The names of ancient plays have the weight of mystery and scholarly concern. He calls excitedly on the phone to announce he too has a chance to teach.

“John, listen to this.” He reads the letter slowly. “Any kind of course or, perhaps, direct a school production … Thirty-five hundred dollars a semester … Your title would be Adjunct Professor of Drama …”

“That's fantastic, Pop.”

“Yeah, but I don't know anything about drama. All I know is how to do it. I can't articulate. Maybe I'll see if they could use you.”

“Don't be silly—give it a try.”

“It's too much work; and anyway, what could I tell them.”

“I think you could show them a lot—maybe do some scenes and point out comic tricks …”

“Well, we'll see …”

“Congratulations, Professor.”

When I call him “professor” he chuckles. He is genuinely amused—Bert Lahr a professor. Perhaps there is less to this academic world than meets the eye. He hangs up, laughing at a world that must certainly be crazy. Universities want him as visiting professor! Museums write for costumes and clothes whose only value for two decades were to cover his pale skin. People he's never heard of write claiming to be distant relatives and requesting money. Everyone is willing to listen, he reminds us, except his children. “They'll never listen, Mildred; they're stubborn,” he mutters to himself. “Don't get mad at me for saying this, John. Believe me, it's for your own good. When a man goes on stage and he's well dressed, he's got seventy per cent of the audience licked. They give you immediate respect. If you notice me (what am I looking for—a woman?) I've got a clean shirt on every day, my pants are pressed, my shoes—you could see your face in them. And there's such a thing as cologne …”

From his closet he brings out a sweater. “But Bert, I gave you that for Christmas.” And shoe trees. “Keep the shoe trees. Here, when you buy new shoes, you can use these.” And his assortment of ties. (“You like them. Take one. Take two. Say, Mildred, whatever happened to that white Italian tie I got in Florida.”) He starts foraging through his closet. “I'll find it, Bert. Let me look.” In his random generosity, he has even tried to pawn off presents
I
had given him the previous years—a fishing knife, an indoor putting green. Invitations to dinner are handed out with warnings—“Your father says to dress nicely.” He expects, one imagines, that a hoary version of the Ancient Mariner will sit down at his dinner table. Style is threatened at every turn. “Everything's filth and vulgarity. Always the cheap angle. I walk along the street today and what do I see? Lots of kids with beards and girls with skirts up to their knees … What is it? Where has the taste gone? Now your sister brought a nice boy up to see me. He was quiet, and very intelligent, but he was dressed like you. You don't
take baths, you stink. I once said to Jay C. Flippen, who had an aversion to water like you, ‘You know they're going to have to take you to the hospital to break your socks off.' What is it with you kids? Ugh!”

A picture of Jane and me as infants now hangs in a cameo over the fireplace—cherubs framed in suitable baroque gilt. Memories of taking us to the Stork Club in our Easter outfits bring tears to parental eyes. But as adults, my father can never be sure what he's got. A son who is more interested in ideas than making money; a daughter who creates objects she doesn't feel like selling. “You kids think you know everything. Well, we're no idiots, you know. Experience counts for something.” In anger as well as illness, Lahr's face spills over its posturing into grotesque laughter. He shouts; he pouts; his nostrils flair wide like a gorilla's. He shoves his finger in the air to unleash a barrage of words from the ether, only to mispronounce them. His son the free-lance writer smiles kindly at his suggestions, but won't take them. “I've got an idea for you. Get pictures of menus from all over the country and reproduce them with menus of today. Talk about how prices have changed. The Free Lunch Era.” For days, he asked me to type up a special document. Finally, he took me into the bedroom and confided, “John, I want you to write this up for me and make a copy so I can send it to myself. I've got an idea for a hot dog parlor—you know. Every kind of hot dog, bratwurst, weiners … every kind. I want to call it the ‘Dog House.'”Bert Lahr, the Industrial Magnate, the landowner of twenty-five thousand acres of useless grazing land in New Mexico he's never seen, is captivated by the quick killing and disturbed that his offspring don't yearn for the “fast buck.” He can claim one of the most original ice-cream inventions since the popsicle. While in
Du Barry
he got Betty Grable and Lana Turner to endorse his ice-cream venture called “Tits on a Stick.” “We wanted Jane Russell too,” he smiles like the man who nearly broke the bank at Monte Carlo.