Notes on a Cowardly Lion (20 page)

John Angelo—loves his beer

Sam Carroll—likes the girls

George Simansky—always good for laughs

If you could make up jokes about them, I'm sure they'd not
only enjoy the show, but it will be something we'll talk about for many weeks to come.

Thanking you very much in advance
,

Joe Spivack

“So I went into his dressing room. And he's sitting there with a script in front of him figuring out where he can place the names. That night on stage, he'd come out with a line like, ‘I wonder if John Angelo is sober.' And there wasn't a sound. He kept throwing out these lines all through the first act, and there was no response.”

Lahr laughs elfishly at the sight of Moore looking out at the audience, expecting laughter, and not being able to locate the Moose Club. To a comedian there is nothing more fiendish than silence. He recalls Moore's words as he walked off stage after the first act: “I'm a son-of-a-bitch, if I'm going to mention another name.” Lahr never told him about the prank.

With
Hold Everything
a hit, Bert Lahr's name was now being mentioned by the public in the same theatrical breath as the Marx Brothers, Bobby Clark, and Ed Wynn. His familiar and humble circle of theatrical acquaintances was suddenly studded with friendships from the showbiz empyrean. Will Rogers befriended him, and Lahr remembers being so impressed that he asked if his ad libbing were really true. Rogers produced a slip of paper. “Bert,” he drawled, “here's my show tonight.” Mayor Walker, who had laughed so hard at him on opening night, came to see Betty Compton, and, during the courtship, he got to know Lahr. Even Noel Coward, then at the height of his long and brilliant theatrical career, came backstage after seeing Lahr's performance.

Hobnobbing with Broadway celebrities was not the only important gauge of Lahr's stardom. Other things marked his success—a bank account, his picture on the walls of the famous night spots, a fur coat for Mercedes. The mink coat was a special victory, a dream fulfilled from the vaudeville days. It was their first lavish indulgence, a luxury that had always been a symbol of the golden leisure which had now arrived. Having contemplated success for so many years, when his turn came, Lahr moved into the role with ease and enthusiasm.

How could he be so buoyant when Mercedes loomed in the shadow of every achievement? The answer is complicated. He gloried in his successes—the famous names, the reviews, the golfing. He took happiness also in the thought of the baby, and the possible good effect the
birth would have on his wife. He cared about her and was concerned enough to ask friends to watch her while he was at the theater. At the same time, his ambitions kept him at odds with himself. They made Mercedes seem healthier than she was, the situation more hopeful than it ever could be.

During these two years of Hold Everything, Haley and his wife, Flo, lived in the suite next to Lahr's at the Forrest Hotel. They watched Mercedes retreat into herself; they knew Lahr's bewildered anxiety and the immensity of his aspirations. “His whole life was show business,” Haley says. “His whole life. Now, in a way, it's just to get money. He hasn't told me this, but when I saw him after
The Beauty Part
, I could see it. There's a difference when you've got mileage on you, and you've been all down the road. You know you're not going to go any place. There's not going to be a bigger Bert Lahr than Bert Lahr was. You're not going to get bigger—just older.” But in 1930, Lahr's stardom was just beginning. Haley was there to observe the ambiguity with which he faced Mercedes and life itself. “In the early days, those were the times when he was fired with ambition. Fired with ambition—and fear.”

During her pregnancy, Mercedes was involved in an incident that confused and hurt Lahr. He claims that Mercedes fell asleep smoking, and that the fire which gutted their room was accidental. But Flo Haley, who smelled the fumes first, remembers the situation differently. “She set fire to the room. She was in there and the smoke was in there. It was like she didn't know it was on fire. We took her out in the hall. She wasn't crying. I said, ‘You've got to get out, there's a fire …'” But Lahr cannot face the fact that, when they found her, she was sitting on the sofa in her fur coat. She had set the coat on fire.

“Bert used to ask me and the other girls to keep our eyes on Mercedes,” Mrs. Haley explains. “In the beginning, before the baby was born, I don't think he realized what was happening. He was working too hard, rehearsing … She could fool you. She was like a little girl sitting in a chair. We'd play a card game called Fan-Tan and it would be her turn. I'd say to her, ‘Honey, it's your turn.' I'd try not to notice what she'd do. I'd ask her something, and she wouldn't answer me. Then I'd talk to one of the other girls, and she'd reply to my question. We knew something was wrong. I told Bert about it. I only remember her as an immobile—face.”

Lahr finally married Mercedes in August 1929, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

“Q. You have a little baby? Do you want to see the baby?

(Late answer): The doctor told me that I should not have had the baby.”

Lahr took his wife to the hospital when she went into labor. Jack Whiting had given him a bottle of rye in case he was nervous. He was so agonized by his sympathy for Mercedes's pain that he began drinking. “I got plastered. And then I passed out.” When he awoke, Herbert Lahr, a large and healthy child, was at Mercedes's side. Lahr staggered out of the hospital exhilarated. He and Whiting went to a local bar frequented by the press and theater people. Overwhelmed with emotion, he recalls explaining the happenings of the afternoon to the newspaper pundit “Bugs” Baer. “If I had known the pain women suffer in childbirth,” he said to Baer, “I'd have been a better son to my mother.” Baer could not abide such easy sentimentality: “C'mon Bert, think of what a porcupine has to go through.”

When Mercedes returned to the hotel, Lahr hired a nurse to care for the baby and also to watch his wife. Whatever his hopes for Mercedes and the child, it was apparent that his wife was not returning to reality. Like the doctors he consulted, Lahr was quick to rationalize her actions as postnatal depression. There was no other explanation for the curious indifference Mercedes showed toward her child. Even when Lahr saw that her motherly instinct was totally nonexistent, he did not realize that this had been foreshadowed in her previous behavior—in her laughter, in her forebodings about childbirth, and even in her intense love of her mother.

A few months after Herbert was born, Lahr was getting ready to go on stage when the nurse telephoned. “Mr. Lahr, your wife just tried to put the baby out the window.” Lahr was stunned; he told her to stay with Mercedes until he finished his work.

Flo Haley and her card-playing entourage had been with Mercedes when it had happened. “Mercedes was very nervous putting on the baby's clothes. I could see it,” she says. “The average person looking at her would not know anything was wrong until they spent some time with her. She walked over to the window. It was quite a wide window. She held the infant up as if she wanted to show him what was outside. But the window was wide open—it was summertime. That frightened me. I said, ‘Let me show you another way,' so when I took the baby
from her she followed me. He was awfully little. She didn't know. She thought she was going into another room, but she was going towards the window.” Mrs. Haley told the nurse about the incident when she arrived a few minutes later. An actor's wife herself, Mrs. Haley had refrained from calling Lahr because she did not want to interfere with his performance.

The incident made its impression on her. “Then I saw that she was really sick,” she says. “He was awfully worried about her. He sent for her sister. The doctors kept saying ‘This can't go on. You've got to put her someplace.' He did not want to put her away in the beginning. He didn't want to separate her from the baby, either.”

Whatever his emotions were when he left the hotel each night to perform, they are distilled now into a simple declarative sentence. “Sad. It was so sad.” Still, his performances got cleverer and better as the season progressed. “Lahr got laughs that we never expected,” maintains McGowan. Lahr's improvisation and growing confidence became something of a contest between the two men. “I'd buy aisle seats in the second row,” says McGowan, whom Lahr dubbed the “Great Infuriator,” “and every time Bert would get a laugh I'd point to myself. It frustrated him so. That mug of his would work overtime. I had him crazy doing this because I'd take the credit for the laughs he was getting. He couldn't take his eyes off of me. Every time he'd get a laugh, he'd look at me, and I'd point to myself and say, ‘Me, me.' He got even. He'd screw up the lines so that he got a bigger laugh on what he ad-libbed. Then he'd point to himself.”

The fun of performing transcended the personal problems. Off stage the question of marriage, his own sense of sexual identity, was not a laughing matter; yet each night the bumbling Gink would sing a duet with “Toots,” the girl he evades with a passionate fear of matrimony and a total ignorance of womankind. The joke centered around his clownish ineptness. Gink's song was ironic:

Sometimes I think that you hate me and

Sometimes I wish that you would.

I may be rough,

But I know my stuff,

You must admit that I'm good.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the depression that followed never touched my father. He never speaks: of the bread lines or the
poverty because the momentum of his career eliminated the fact of poverty if not the fear of it. He had his theatrical ambitions and his wife to occupy his mind. While people were setting up Hoovervilles in Central Park, Lahr could command five thousand dollars for a week's work in vaudeville when he was not in a Broadway show. The disparity never astounded him. No matter what the state of the nation, his salary did not seem illogical or curious. Perhaps a laugh-maker was never more valuable than during the bleak depression years. But since Lahr had no money in the stock market, he took only a cursory interest in its decline. People were still packing the theater.

Hold Everything
was purchased by Warner Brothers late in 1929, in a year when only a few of the shows rated as smash hits were bought by the industry. Warner Brothers wanted to use Lahr in the film, but Vinton Freedley, hoping to attract large audiences on the road, held him to his contract. If the studio could not get Lahr, it did the next best thing—copied him. Warner Brothers hired Joe E. Brown, a comedian whose capacious mouth and lined face resemble Lahr's. When he went to see the
Hold Everything
film version of 1930, Lahr was shocked to find his comic business borrowed for the screen.
Variety
chronicled what happened:

“Hold Everything” is probably the best comedy picture Warners has turned out since talking came in …

The basic point of the picture is Brown. On the strength of this effort he of the wide grin grabbed himself a long and sweet starring contract with Warners. Which should make it an event for Bert Lahr. The latter has now made two people—himself and Brown
.

Lahr was obsessed with the injustice. The week after the review of the movie version of
Hold Everything
Lahr answered it with a letter to the editor of
Variety
. His disgust at the incident can only be measured in proportion to his hatred of writing letters. He must have labored a full seven days over the one that appeared on March 28 under the headline:

BERT LAHR LABELS JOE BROWN “LIFTER”

I have read the criticism of the picture “Hold Everything” in this week's
Variety
.

I am greatly surprised and amazed to find that Joe E. Brown so boldly lifted my original business, mannerisms, methods, and phrases which I have been identified with for years and which I interpolated in the part of Gink Shiner of “Hold Everything.”

It seems an outrage that a comedian can gain profit and recognition by deliberately lifting and copying another comedian's style of work. This is hurting my reputation, livelihood, and future in talking pictures.

Surely there must be some redress for an artist who has worked these many years as hard as I have to establish and attain the reputation and recognition I have as an original comedian gained by my creative and original style of work.

I am writing this in self-protection to let the profession, the exhibitors and executives of the picture world understand that I am the originator of all business methods, mannerisms, and unique phrases used by Joe E. Brown in the talking picture version of “Hold Everything.”

Bert Lahr

The letter brought charges and countercharges by another comedian, who claimed that Lahr had imitated
his
style. Lahr wanted to sue for defamation of character; his lawyers advised him not to add weight to such absurd accusations by replying. Inaction may have been wise, but it did not assuage Lahr's temper. He stewed over the situation for months, his annoyance swelling with the success of the picture. In later years, he set a legal precedent for actors by winning a federal appellate decision (Lahr
v
. Adell Chemicals, 1962) protecting performers' mannerisms and speech against duplication for commercial purposes without their consent. In this case, his voice had been imitated in a cartoon for a detergent commercial in which a duck spoke with his intonations.

Lahr's annoyance was not without its humorous side. Joe E. Brown had taken more than Bert Lahr's mannerisms to the West Coast. His friend, Bert Wheeler, had been another victim. “Wheeler used to do a story; he was given permission by an old vaudevillian. He did it all over New York; he was recognized with the story called ‘Mousie.' When Brown went to California before he did
Hold Everything
, he was telling the story all over and got known for it out there. So when he copied me in
Hold Everything
, I sent Wheeler a wire: “
MOVE OVER, BERT, HE GOT ME TOO
.'”