Notes on a Cowardly Lion (14 page)

At the end of
Keep Smiling
in 1922, when their burlesque contracts expired, they shifted to vaudeville with remarkable ease. Lahr remembers waiting outside the Seigel Building, where the Keith-Albee bookers and vaudeville agents worked, waiting to see his own agent,
Charlie Allen of the M. S. Bentham Agency. Another agent stopped Lahr in the hallway. “Listen kid, you don't know me, but they're talking about you at the office. You can get five hundred a week. Don't take less.” When Lahr confronted Allen a few minutes later and asked for that astounding amount the agent didn't even blink. “I'm not sure I can get it for you, Bert, but I'll try.” They met a few hours later. Allen looked dejected. “I couldn't get it, Bert. The closest I could come was $475—what do you say?” Lahr was astounded. He would have taken his summer-run salary.

Vaudeville represented not only a substantial increase in salary, but also a work day that was cut to an unbelievable thirty minutes. “I was ashamed to take the money, the work was so easy,” he says now.

The new leisure did not bring peace of mind. Lahr went back to reading. Improbably, he read books like
Pepys' Diary
, Boswell's
Life of Johnson
. The archaic and high-flown diction amused him, and he found he could work them into his speech both off and on the stage. He enjoyed the burlesque in the real life of these English men of letters as much as he did on the stage of the Columbia Theater. He also took up golf. But with his livelihood resting on one short sketch, Lahr would never believe that the act was as good as it should be. He brooded over the gags and his delivery in every hotel room and vaudeville house on the circuit. With more time to think about his comedy, he became even more self-conscious and obsessed with his craft. He would wake Mercedes in the middle of the night to improvise a line.

Lahr remembers fetching Wells's typed sketch from his valise and placing it by the night table, sitting up in his pajamas while Mercedes slept in the opposite bed. The comic taste he would acquire in time was then not always pertinent. He would ad-lib a line like “Oh, Mama, sock me in the puss with a wet sock.” Wells wanted him to take it out, but Lahr refused because he got a laugh. Looking back on it, he is amazed at the lack of subtlety. “It's the kind of line that, if you did it on Broadway, the audience would freeze up on you.” But without such considerations to bother him, he plowed into the script, trying to wring out every chuckle. The copy still exists. My father's continual experiments with the sketch can be seen scrawled on every page. He would write in the margins, in his slow, florid hand, talking to Mercedes without raising his eyes from the script.

“Babe, listen to this … Hey, Babe, wake up. I think this is much better for the finish.”

“Bert, can't we do it tomorrow?”

“Let's run through it, and see what it sounds like.”

“Bert, please.”

“Let's run through it now. C'mon, Babe.”

“Where should we start?”

“Start from where I say, ‘It was July. I was patrolling my vegetable.'”

“Vegetable?”

“I mean patrolling my beat.”

He tries to read his own writing.

“When suddenly I heard a woman scream. Did she scream loud! She screamed so loud she woke me up. Without a second's delay I rushed upstairs. When I reached the first floor, the yelling was louder; when I reached the second floor, it was still louder, and when I reached the third floor it was still louder. Then I stopped …”

He points to the line he wrote for Mercedes to speak.

“To get your gun?”

“No, I was in the wrong building. I rushed down again. Up the right building. Busted in a door. There was a man. In his hand he had a gun. He was going to shoot his wife with it. I said, ‘Stop!' He turned around, looked at me and laughed. Oh what a dirty laugh! Then he started to sneak toward me with fire in his eyes. Nearer and nearer he came with fire in his eyes. Four feet. Three feet. Two feet. He came with fire in his eyes. One step nearer he came, the laughter in his face, the gun in his eye …”

“Well, what did you do?”

“I sang ‘Peggy O'Neill' and he shot himself.”

He stopped reading. “Well, what do you think? I don't see why we can't get off with our song at the end of that bit.”

“Whatever you think, Bert—you're the funny-man. I just want to go back to sleep.”

“Do you like it?”

“Sure.”

“Let's get to the theater early and try it out?”

“Goodnight, Bert.”

She would lie back in her bed, and he would continue reading his lines in the shadows of his bed lamp, working out intonation and plotting added movements.

His comedy evolved through trial and error just as it had done in burlesque. This particular bit was tried and cut from the final
version. They also eliminated their singing exit in favor of a much more elaborate stage joke. After Mercedes's opening number, Lahr came on stage rapping his club on the ground and blustering: “Stop. In the name of the station house, stooooop!! What's the idea? What's the idea? What's the idea of massaging the atmosphere?”