Notes on a Cowardly Lion Read online

  Notes on a Cowardly Lion

  The Biography of Bert Lahr

  John Lahr

  For Anthea, who gave a new life to this book and to me

  Take the clowns … those basically alien beings, fun makers … their tumblings and falling over everything, their mindless running to and fro … the hideously unsuccessful efforts to imitate their serious colleagues … Are these ageless sons of absurdity, are they human at all? Are they, I repeat, human beings, men that could conceivably find a place in everyday life? In my opinion, it is pure sentimentality to say that they are “human too,” with the sensibilities of human beings and perhaps even with wives and children. I honour them and defend them against ordinary bad taste when I say no, they are not, they are exceptions, side splitting, world renouncing monks of unreason, cavorting hybrids, part human and part insane art.

  Thomas Mann,

  The Confessions of Felix Krull

  Hamlet: … Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.

  (II, ii, 500-3)

  Contents

  A Dramatic Chronology

  Preface: The Lion and Me

  From the Wings: An Introduction

  1. Roots

  2. Burlesque

  3. Vaudeville: Lahr and Mercedes

  4. Broadway Beginnings

  5. Scandals and Follies

  6. Buffooneries

  7. Other Edens

  8. “… But What Do I Do Next Year?”

  9. Back to Broadway

  10. Waiting for Godot

  11. A Decade of Moments

  12. Dad

  13. A Beginning and an End

  Epilogue

  Appendices

  Image Gallery

  Index

  Personal Acknowledgements

  A Dramatic Chronology

  1910 Enters show business

  1916 Tours with “The Whirly Girly Musical

  Comedy Success”:

  College Days

  Garden Belles

  1917 The Best Show in Town

  1919 Folly Town (summer-run burlesque)

  1920 Roseland Girls

  1921 Keep Smiling

  Tries out vaudeville act “What’s the Idea?”

  1922 Vaudeville

  1925 The Palace

  1927 Harry Delmar’s Revels

  1928 Hold Everything

  1929 Faint Heart (Vita-Phone), first film

  1930 Flying High

  1931 Flying High (M-G-M)

  1932 Hot-Cha!

  George White’s Music Hall Varieties (1933)

  Radio

  1934 Life Begins at 8:40

  Happy Landing (a Monograph film)

  1935 George White’s Scandals (1936)

  1936 The Show Is On

  1938 Hollywood:

  Love and Hisses (Twentieth Century-Fox)

  Merry-Go-Round of 1938 (Universal)

  Just Around the Corner (Twentieth Century-Fox)

  Josette (Twentieth Century-Fox)

  Zaza (Paramount), released in 1939

  1939 The Wizard of Oz (M-G-M)

  Du Barry Was a Lady

  1942 Sing Your Worries Away (RKO)

  Ship Ahoy (M-G-M)

  1944 Meet the People (M-G-M)

  Seven Lively Arts

  1945 Harvey (on tour)

  1946 Burlesque

  1948 Make Mine Manhattan (on tour)

  1949 Always Leave Them Laughing (Warner Brothers)

  1951 Two on the Aisle

  Mr. Universe (Eagle-Lion Productions)

  1954 Rose Marie (M-G-M)

  1956 The Second Greatest Sex (Universal)

  Waiting for Godot

  Androcles and the Lion (television)

  The School for Wives (television)

  1957 Hotel Paradiso

  Visit to a Small Planet (summer stock)

  1959 The Girls Against the Boys

  Romanoff and Juliet (on tour)

  1960 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, American

  Shakespeare Festival

  Receives Best Shakespearean Actor of the

  Year Award

  1962 The Beauty Part

  Ten Girls Ago (unreleased film)

  1964 Foxy, Wins Tony Award for Best Musical

  Actor

  The Fantasticks (Hallmark Hall of Fame)

  The Birds (Ypsilanti Greek Theater)

  The Night They Raided Minsky’s (United Artists)

  RECORDS

  Two on the Aisle (Decca)

  Waiting for Godot (Columbia)

  The Wizard of Oz (M-G-M)

  Great Moments from the Hallmark Hall of Fame

  Preface: The Lion and Me

  On November 6th, 1998, twenty-six years after “The Wizard of Oz” was last released and on the eve of its sixtieth anniversary, a spiffy, digitally remastered print of the film arrived in eighteen hundred movie theatres throughout the land. With a rub rub here and a rub rub there, “The Wizard of Oz,” which never looked bad, has been made to look even better. Dorothy’s ruby slippers are rubier. Emerald City is greener. Kansas, a rumpled and grainy black-and-white world, has been restored to a buff, sepia Midwestern blandness. And, since everything that rises nowadays in America ends up in a licensing agreement, new Oz merchandise will shower the planet like manna from hog heaven.

  The last time I watched “The Wizard of Oz” from start to finish was in 1962, at home, with my family. My father, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, was sixty-seven. I was twenty-one; my sister, Jane, was nineteen. My mother Mildred, who never disclosed her age, was permanently thirty-nine. By then, as a way of getting to know the friendly absence who answered to the name of Dad, I was writing a biography—it was published, in 1969, as “Notes on a Cowardly Lion”—and I used any occasion with him as field work. This was the first time we’d sat down together as a family to watch the film, but not the first time a Lahr had been secretly under surveillance while viewing it. The family album had infra-red photographs of Jane and me in the mid-forties—Jane in a pinafore, me in short pants—slumped in a darkened movie house as part of a row of well-dressed, bug-eyed kids. Jane, who was five, is scrunched in the back of her seat in a state of high anxiety about the witch’s monkey henchmen. I’m trying to be a laid-back big brother: my face shows nothing, but my hands are firmly clutching the armrests.

  Recently, Jane told me that for weeks afterward she’d had nightmares about lions, but what had amazed her most then was the movie’s shift from black-and-white to Technicolor, not the fact that Dad was up onscreen in a lion’s suit. Once, around that time, while waiting up till dawn for my parents to return from a costume party, I heard laughter and then a thud in the hall; I tiptoed out to discover Dad dressed in a skirt and bonnet as Whistler’s Mother, passed out on the floor. That was shocking. Dad dressed as a lion in a show was what he did for a living, and was no big deal. Our small, sunless Fifth Avenue apartment was full of Dad’s disguises, which he’d first used onstage and in which he now occasionally appeared on TV. The closet contained a woodsman’s props (axe, jodhpurs, and boots); a policeman’s suit and baton; a New York Giants baseball outfit, with cap and cleats. The drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet, which served as a wall-length bedroom bureau, held his toupées, starting pistol, monocle, putty noses, and makeup. In the living room, Dad was Louis XV, complete with scepter and periwig, in a huge oil painting made from a poster for Cole Porter’s “Du Barry Was a Lady” (1939); in the bedroom, he was a grimacing tramp in Richard Avedon’s heartbreaking photograph of him praying, as Estragon, in “Waiting for Godot” (1956).

  Over the decades, the popular memory of these wonder
ful stage performances has faded; the Cowardly Lion remains the enduring posthumous monument to Dad’s comic genius. While we were growing up, there was not one Oz image or memento of any kind in the apartment. (Later, at Sotheby’s, Dad acquired a first edition of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”) The film had not yet become a cult. Occasionally, a taxi-driver or a passerby would spot Dad in the street and call out, “Put ’em up, put ’em uuuhp!” Dad would smile and tip his tweed cap, but the film’s popularity didn’t seem to mean as much to him as it did to other people.

  As we grew older and more curious, Mom had to prod Dad out of his habitual solitude to divulge tidbits of information to us. So, as we assumed our ritual positions around the TV—Mom propped up with bolsters on the bed, Jane sprawled on the floor with our Scotch terrier, Merlin, me on the chaise longue, Dad at his desk—the accumulated knowledge we brought to the movie was limited to a few hard-won facts. To wit: Dad had held out for twenty-five hundred dollars a week with a five-week guarantee, which turned into a twenty-six-week bonanza because of the technical complexities of the production numbers; in the scene where the Lion and Dorothy fall asleep in the poppy field and wake to find it snowing, the director, Victor Fleming, had asked for a laugh and Dad had come up with “Unusual weather we’re havin’, ain’t it?”; his makeup took two hours a day to apply and was so complicated that he had to have lunch through a straw; he wore football shoulder pads under his twenty-five-pound lion suit; and his tail, which had a fishing line attached to it, was wagged back and forth by a stagehand with a fishing rod who was positioned above him on a catwalk. It was only memories of the Munchkins, a rabble of a hundred and twenty-four midgets assembled from around the world, that seemed to delight Dad and bring a shine to his eyes. “I remember one day when we were supposed to shoot a scene with the witch’s monkeys,” he told me. “The head of the group was a little man who called himself the Count. He was never sober. When the call came, everybody was looking for the Count. We could not start without him. And then, a little ways offstage, we heard what sounded like a whine coming from the men’s room.” He went on, “They found the Count. He got plastered during lunch, and fell in the latrine and couldn’t get himself out.”

  Dad, in his blue Sulka bathrobe, with the sash tied under his belly, was watching the show from his Victorian mahogany desk, which was positioned strategically at a right angle to the TV. Here, with his back to the room, he sat in a Colonial maple chair—the throne from which, with the minutest physical adjustment, he could watch the TV, work his crossword puzzles, and listen to the radio all at the same time. Except to eat, Dad hardly ever moved from this spot. He was almost permanently rooted to the desk, which had a pea-green leatherette top and held a large Funk & Wagnall’s dictionary, a magnifying glass, a commemorative bronze medal from President Eisenhower’s Inauguration (which he’d attended), various scripts, and the radio. On that afternoon, long before Dorothy had gone over the rainbow and into Technicolor, Dad had donned his radio earphones and tuned in the Giants’ game. “Bert!” Mom said. “Bert!” But Dad didn’t answer.

  This was typical. At dinner, after he finished eating, Dad would sometimes wander away from the table without so much as a fare-thee-well; at Christmas, for which he never bought presents, the memories of his unhappy childhood made the ritual exchange of gifts almost unbearable, so he’d slip back to his desk as soon as possible. Now, just as his ravishing Technicolor performance was about to begin, he’d drifted off again, retreating into that private space.

  That was irrefutably him up there, disguised in a lion’s suit, telling us in the semaphore of his outlandishness what he was feeling in the silence of his bedroom. It was confusing, and more disturbing than I realized then, to see Dad so powerful onscreen and so paralyzed off it. “Yeah, it’s sad believe me missy / When you’re born to be a sissy / Without the vim and voive,” Dad sang, in words so perfectly fitting his own intonation and idiom that it almost seemed he was making them up. In a sense, the song was him; it was written to the specifications of his paradoxical nature by E. Y. (Yip) Harburg and Harold Arlen, who had already provided him with some of his best material, in “Life Begins at 8:40” (1934) and “The Show Is On” (1936).

  “I got to the point where I could do him,” Arlen told me. And Harburg, who once said that he could “say something in Bert’s voice that I couldn’t with my own,” saw social pathos in Dad’s clowning. “I accepted Bert and wanted him for the part because the role was one of the things ‘The Wizard of Oz’ stands for: the search for some basic human necessity,” he said. “Call it anxiety; call it neurosis. We’re in a world we don’t understand. When the Cowardly Lion admits that he lacks courage, everybody’s heart is out to him. He must be somebody who embodies all his pathos, sweetness, and yet puts on the comic bravura.” He added, “Bert had that quality to such a wonderful degree. It was in his face. It was in his walk. It was in himself.”

  When the song began onscreen, Dad swiveled around in his chair to watch himself; once the song was over, he stepped forward and switched over to football.

  “Dad!” we cried.

  “Watch it in Jane’s room,” he said.

  “Is it gonna kill you, Bert?”

  Dad’s beaky profile turned toward Mom; his face was a fist of irritation. “Look Mildred, I see things,” he said. “Things I coulda . . . I’m older now. There’s stuff I coulda done better.” Mother rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling. I returned us to Oz. Dad pulled the headphones up from around his neck and went back to the hand of solitaire he’d started. His performance was enough for the world; it wasn’t enough for him.

  Onscreen, the Lion was panic-stricken but fun; his despair was delightful. (“But I could show my prowess / Be a lion, not a mouesse / If I only had the noive.”) The Lion had words for what was going on inside him; he asked for help and got it. At home, there were no words or even tears, just the thick fog of some ontological anxiety, which seemed to have settled permanently around Dad and was palpable, impenetrable—it lifted only occasionally, for a few brilliant moments. “I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do” is the Cowardly Lion’s mantra as the foursome approach the Wicked Witch’s aerie. In life, Dad was constantly spooked, and his fear took the form of morbid worry. It wasn’t so much a state of mind as a contingent over which Dad was the bewildered sovereign. Onstage, Dad gave his fear a sound—“Gnong, gnong, gnong!” It was a primitive, hilarious yawping, which seemed to sum up all his wide-eyed loss and confusion. Offstage, there was no defining it. The clinical words wheeled out these days for his symptoms—“manic depressive,” “bipolar”—can’t convey the sensual, dramatic, almost reverent power of the moroseness that Dad could bring with him into a room, or the crazy joy he could manufacture out of it onstage. It was awful and laughable at the same time. We couldn’t fathom it; instead, we learned to live with it and to treat him with amused affection. He was our beloved grump. He was perpetually distracted from others, and, despite his ability to tease the last scintilla of laughter from a role, he had no idea how to brighten his own day. “I listened to the audience, and they told me where the joke was,” he told me backstage at S. J. Perelman’s “The Beauty Part” (1962) after he’d got a howl from a line that had no apparent comic payoff. Why couldn’t he listen as closely to us?

  When you kissed Dad on the top of his bald head—it smelled deliciously like the inside of a baseball glove—he didn’t turn around; when you talked to him, he didn’t always answer; sometimes he even forgot our names. That was the bittersweet comedy of his self-absorption. But the Lion confessed his fears, he looked people in the eye, he was easy to touch (even Dorothy, in their first fierce encounter, puts a hand on him); he joined arms with the others and skipped off down the Yellow Brick Road. At the finale, their victory was a triumph of collaboration. In private, as even our little family get-together made apparent, Dad never collaborated; he never reached out (in all the years I went off to camp or college, he wrote me only one letter, and
it was dictated); he never elaborated on what weighed him down and kept us under wraps. But there was a gentleness to him bewilderment, which made both the audience and the family want to embrace him. His laughter was a comfort to the world; in his world, which was rarely humorous, we comforted him. All the family forces were marshaled to keep Dad’s demons at bay and “to be happy,” an instruction that translated into specific behavior that would generate no worries—good humor, loyalty, gratitude, obedience, and looking good.

  If Dad had had a tail, he would have twisted it just as the Lion did; instead, he had to make do with his buttons and with the cellophane from his cigarette packs, which he perpetually rolled between his fingers. What was Dad afraid of? We never knew exactly. Things were mentioned: work, money, Communists, cholesterol, garlic, the “Big C.” Even a fly intruding into his airspace could bring a sudden whirlwind of worry as he tried to stalk the pest with a flyswatter. “The son of a bitch has been hit before,” he would say, lashing at the fly and missing. Dad’s global anxiety seeped into the foundation of all our lives; it was hard to see, and, when it was finally identified, it had to be fortified against. One of the most efficient ways to do this was to treat Dad as a metaphor—a sort of work of art, whose extraordinary and articulate performing self was what we took to heart instead of the deflated private person who seemed always at a loss. Any lessons Dad taught about excellence, courage, perseverance, discipline, and integrity we got from his stage persona. His best self—the one that was fearless, resourceful, and generous, and that told the truth—was what he saved for the public, which included us; otherwise, as every relative of a star knows, the family had to make do with what was left over. Even at the end of our Oz viewing, Dad brushed aside our praise, which seemed only to increase his anxiety. As he shuffled into the kitchen to get some ice cream, he glanced over at Mom. “If I’d made a hit as a human being, then perhaps I’d be sailing in films now,” he said.

  When “The Wizard of Oz” opened in New York, on August 17, 1939, fifteen thousand people were lined up outside the Capitol Theatre by 8 a.m. Dad’s photograph was in the window of Lindy’s, across the street, and the Times declared his roar “one of the laughingest sounds since the talkies came in.” “Believe me it was a tonic for my inferiority complex which is so readily developed in Hollywood,” Dad wrote to Mildred, who would become Mrs. Lahr in 1940. As an animal, in closeup, and eight times as large as life, Dad, with his broad, burlesque energy, was acceptable; there was no place for his baggy looks and his clowning, eccentric mannerisms in talking pictures except on the periphery of romantic stories. Despite his huge success, Metro soon dropped his option. He signed for a Broadway musical, “Du Barry Was a Lady.” “Well, how many lion parts are there,” Dad said as he departed from Hollywood.