Notes on a Cowardly Lion (16 page)

Laugh and the world laughs with you, is the truest saying in the world.… There's a lot of comedy in humanity, in life, everywhere … Look around as you ride on the trolleys or as you walk along the street. There's a funny character here, and something funny there, and lots to amuse you.

His enthusiasm for making laughter is not conveyed in such statements, yet his spontaneity toward life is grossly overstated. He is talking to fit the image of the public while refusing to speak about his own image of himself.

Lahr and Mercedes became headliners on the Orpheum Time toward the end of 1925. As one of the strongest comedy acts on the vaudeville circuit, Lahr took on added comic responsibilities. The circuit was grueling:

1926: Orpheum Time

Lahr teamed up with “the world's tiniest star,” a midget named Jeanie, to do an afterpiece (see Appendix 3). The sketch, “Beach Babies,” incorporated Lahr's fumbling braggadocio with Jeanie's pranks. The skit challenged his ability to be at once gruff and beleaguered, and yet to maintain the sympathy of an audience that saw Jeanie as a child. There was a special finesse in this kind of comedy that Lahr always appreciated. “Take W. C. Fields, who was a real horror off stage. On screen he always had a wife who was a dragon. If he did anything with a child, the kid was a brat and the audience wanted to stab him too. So you forgave Fields's rascality. He always got a form of empathy from an audience. Every comedian finds tricks. I found gutteral noises, ways of moving, doubletakes.”

Jeanie was an engaging performer, and although she was only thirty-eight inches high, she was in her late teens. Lahr and Mercedes would get her on the trains for half price, claiming that she was their child. Jeanie, who enjoyed the fraud, would skip or talk childishly for the occasion. Once, on their way to Pittsburgh, the conductor confronted Lahr. “Is that your little girl in the next compartment?” Lahr said “Yes.”

“Well, she's drunk and telling snappy stories.” He had to pay full fare.

When they were playing Chicago, a telegram arrived for Mercedes from her sister announcing that her son—Mercedes's nephew—had died of rheumatic fever. Anna Delpino was a few years old than Mercedes. They had both been in the
College Days
chorus line when Lahr first met Mercedes. Although Mercedes rarely confided in her sister, Anna was a good friend. She became, in time, Mercedes's only link with the past.

Anna talks now about those harrowing days as if they were a dream. “I had a boy twelve who died, and when Mercedes came home for the funeral that's when we first noticed something strange. She was nervous then. She acted nervously.
She didn't realize what was going on, I suppose.”

She remembers that Mercedes sat rigid, refusing to look at the boy. She didn't cry at the funeral, in marked contrast to her mother, who was inconsolable at Sonny's death. It is conjecture, of course, but perhaps Mercedes was silently taking her mother's grief on herself. The boy, who lived with his grandmother while Anna pursued her career, had been her mother's great hope, a hope held out against a world that had proved itself indifferent to her prayers and her rosaries. Mercedes herself had contributed to her mother's sorrow. She had first married at sixteen (a fiasco of a marriage, to a middle-aged booking agent, whom she left the day of the ceremony) to legitimize her escape from her mother's house and to ease her mother's fear about a career on the stage for “the joy of her life.” Anything, Mercedes had though then, would do if she could earn some money for the family. Now, she must have wondered, what solace could her stage gaiety offer to replace the humiliations her mother had suffered? And what were the reasons for those continuing sorrows? Wasn't she herself guilty of causing her mother pain?

“
The why and the wherefore.
” Later, walking down sanitarium corridors, in her Arizona room, Mercedes would repeat these words.She would say them cryptically to doctors and nurses, to inanimate objects, to her dogs.
The why and the wherefore
. She would repeat them to the picture of Lahr and herself that she kept—the same one they used on their vaudeville Christmas card.

Lahr, who reluctantly attended Sonny's funeral, did not find his wife's behavior peculiar. She had always been a quiet girl. She loved her sister's son and was absorbed in her mother's welfare. He put her silence down to natural grief. “I was so naive,” he says now. “I didn't know about those things. I was so young, you know what I mean. I couldn't distinguish. I didn't know what was wrong with her.”

If she continued to be self-absorbed off stage, her performances, once they returned to the Orpheum Time, were as professional as ever. On stage she was vivacious, playing as she had before Sonny's death. And there were other things for Lahr to think about.

Harry Delmar had approached Lahr about working in a high-powered revue on Broadway. Delmar first saw Lahr perform in Newark. He went on the recommendation of Charlie Allen, the agent, and what he saw pleased him. If Lahr and Mercedes could make people laugh like that for fifty cents, they could wreak the same kind of havoc for $5.50 on Broadway. Allen was certain of the talent he represented. “Harry, this Lahr is star material—keep your eyes on him.” Delmar was only twenty-seven, and though a successful vaudeville “hoofer,” his
aspiration was producing. He conceived the idea of an all-star revue and clung to it tenaciously. He saw himself being catapulted by one show, like George White, to the zenith of the theater world. He was staking all his money and his dreams on this one idea, and he needed attractions that would draw big money.

Delmar did not meet Lahr until 1926, four months after Sonny had died. They met in Washington, where they were both featured at the Keith Theater, and had adjacent dressing rooms. Lahr was well received in Washington, and Delmar was impressed. “After all,” he explains, “if a low comic could make the predominantly middle-class audience of Washington laugh and not blush at the coarseness of the material, then the New York stage was not far behind.”

Delmar remembers their first conversation vividly because the show, which would eventually bear his name,
Harry Delmar's Revels
, became one of the highlights of his career. Lahr, however, had remained cynically aloof to his proposal. Many important producers had watched him perform. Even before he played the Palace in New York, the Shuberts had put him under contract, then let it expire. Florenz Ziegfeld had laughed at his antics at the Palace, intending to find a place for Lahr in one of his extravaganzas, but he never approached him with a contract. So, when Delmar made his opening offer, Lahr was understandably skeptical.

“You let me know, Harry, when you get everything set up.” Delmar remembers those words with relish because, to the astonishment of everyone but himself, his dream was close to reality. He was to sign some of the biggest vaudeville attractions of the decade—Frank Fay, Winnie Lightner, Blossom Seeley. One star seemed to assure another, and his cast fell into place.

Nobody had suggested Broadway to Lahr before. The thought fascinated him. On his dressing table was a review from the Washington
Daily News
. Never before had he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by what the critics said.

I have reviewed Bert Lahr's act week in and week out. He had meant nothing in particular. He had just played.

Now Lahr, in his present act, comes out as one of the leading comedians of vaudeville. His new act is a Dutch, done first with a very handsome girl [Mercedes] and second with a child named “Jeanie” who is smart and adept.

Lahr, as I say, has loomed. He is now a headline comic. He has ease, poise, smash. He is a new Mahoney, a new Dr. Rockwell.
May Mr. Albee do right by this lad, and not starve and annoy him while he leaps. A new performer, my friends. If you have never seen this lad, now is the chance. He is the big time's new comedian.

He read the review over many times to himself and then to Mercedes. How hard they had worked for those words! In Washington, Lahr had to correct Mercedes's movements. He had to keep polishing; there was too much activity on his lines; it was cutting the laughs; they were not as big as they had been the opening night. He was worried about Mercedes's figure, too. She looked lovely in costume, but now she was putting on weight. Spanish women, he kept reminding himself, had a tendency to gain. “She had to look sexy and nice out there as the straight for my jokes.” He reiterated his worry to her daily. She listened, as she usually did, without argument. Every night there was some gesture, some laugh that could have been funnier. Once she threw a hairbrush at him in frustration. “She had a hot little temper, but it took a long while to come to the surface,” but usually, he thought, she took the criticism quietly, like a real professional.

Whatever daydreams the reviews and the possibility of working on Broadway may have inspired, they were suddenly forgotten in Washington when Anna wired Mercedes to return to New York at once—their mother was dying. Mercedes traveled alone to New York; Lahr finished the engagement in Washington and moved on to New York to their next booking at the Fordham Theater in the Bronx. Only five miles apart in the city, they made no plans to rendezvous. Mercedes did not seem to care whether Lahr was with her or not. Another girl in the show would take her place, and she would join him as soon as she could. Secretly, he preferred it that way because he hated funerals, and the thought of having to undergo another ordeal like Sonny's wake was abhorrent. Mercedes had packed only an overnight bag. She kissed him goodbye at the station absentmindedly. She seemed nervous, but he recalls that she did not cry. She was wearing the amulet she had worn at Lake Hopatcong. It was depressing, but Mercedes, Lahr thought, was a good trouper, a strong girl. When she returned her worry about her mother would finally be resolved. The act could continue.

Mercedes arrived home an hour after her mother died. Isabel was laid at rest in her bed. Mercedes stared at her mother for a long time. The other people in the room, weeping and praying in loud whispers, became shadows to her. She saw only the bed and her mother. She
began to sweat profusely. Anna came over. Mercedes stared blankly ahead of her. “What's wrong, Babe?”

“I don't know, Anna,” she said, “I don't know.” As she would relate to doctors later, everything was spinning. She was moving farther away from the people in the room and farther into herself.

Isabel had understood her daughter in a way Lahr could not. She had dwelt on her beauty and cared for her with a concern that was absolute. Bert was different. It was always the act, always the same words, which never reflected that personal insight. With her mother dead, Mercedes's whole framework of identity slipped away. Nurses would overhear her joking with herself about her name. She would laugh at her many faces. “Mercedes Delpino, Mercedes del Beano.”