Notes on a Cowardly Lion (26 page)

“I thought up the pie-in-the-face,” says Lahr, as if that touch were some cultural refinement. The pie was a good indication that Lahr's burlesque instincts were not eroded by his new image; but by underplaying them, the elements of surprise and shock were even greater. Both Arlen and Harburg conceived their songs for Lahr with a mental picture of his face, in the same way that Herbert Berghof would keep photos of Lahr pasted in his script of
Waiting for Godot
many years later. They knew instinctively the possibilities for his voice; but, more important, they understood the philosophy behind Lahr's clowning. Arlen, a modest man, maintains that “no one could write for him better than E. Y. and myself.” Many outstanding writers created material with Lahr in mind—S. J. Perelman, Abe Burrows, George S. Kaufman, William Saroyan—but none came as close to his buffoonery as Harburg and Arlen did. And although the Arlen-Harburg collaboration would not go beyond 1939, their special material for Broadway and
The Wizard of Oz
remained Lahr's trademark.

Even in satire, Lahr's humor found its way back to basic, physical situations. When the Arlen-Harburg lyrics were aiming their verbal dexterity at a serious idea, they used Lahr's foolery to give the songs
the comic resonance that their intellectual sleights of hand lacked. In
Life Begins at 8:40
, this combination was most effectively used in “Quartet Erotica,” in which four famous writers bemoan their decline in popularity. Originally subtitled “Rabelais, Balzac, de Maupassant, Boccaccio,” the alignment was switched so that Lahr, as Balzac, was at the low comic end of the list. Donlevy was the stylish de Maupassant, Ray Bolger the gay Boccaccio, and James MacColl played Rabelais. When Lahr mugged at the audience and announced his
nom de plume
the emphasis was always on the first syllable. “I was really saying ‘Balls,' so I'd say BALLsac.” His eyes gleam at the idea of saying “balls” to any audience. The song is an interesting contrast to the hokey, curiously passé material Lahr used the following year in
George White's Scandals
(1936).

We once won all the glories***

For writing dirty stories;

Sophisticated people thought our bawdiness immense.

We stopped all the traffic

With stories pornographic—

But we can see the handwriting on the fence.

Refrain

Rabelais, de Maupassant, Boccaccio, and Balzac—

Once we were quite the lads:

We thought that our erotica

Was very, very hotica—

But now we're only four unsullied Galahads.

Rabelais, de Maupassant, Boccaccio, and Balzac

Babes in the wood are we.

The dirt we used to dish up

Sad to say

Wouldn't shock a bishop

Of today;

A volume like “Ulysses”

Makes us look like four big sissies—

Rabelais, de Maupassant, Boccaccio, and Balzac—

Lost all our TNT.

We're not what we used to be.

In the early thirties, the performing moments were more vivid than the private ones. Lahr's son, Herbert, was already showing the scars of growing up without a mother and with a father who could not
handle him. Lahr tried. He was responsible in financial matters, but Herbert's face brought back his guilt. There was a Greenwich summer house for Herbert, a good school, fine clothes. But when he confronted his son, the boy seemed unruly and unpredictable. His son would imitate him not only in his voice but also in his gestures. When Lahr brought him to the theater, Herbert invariably would get himself involved in ludicrous escapades. He entered the girls' dressing room in
Life Begins at 8:40
, shut the door behind him, and then, knocking on the closed door, asked, “Are you proper?” Some of them were not.

Lahr could give nothing from his heart to his young son. In the same way, no one really shared Lahr's successes in those restless years, although two women tried. The marital pattern that seemed to be part of Lahr's material on stage was much easier over the footlights than away from them.

Mercedes tried to follow her husband's activities. Sitting stonelike in her room, she kept stacks of the
Daily News
by her bedside. In the spring of 1932, she was allowed to leave the sanitarium for a day to see
Hot-Cha
!

…
She went to see her husband's show at the Ziegfeld Theater. After coming home she made little comment except to say “Buddy Rogers is a hot number.”

Lahr meant to see her, but the memory of her lithe figure swollen now to nearly 170 pounds and the sudden stupor of her eyes kept him away. The doctors' reports verify the problem:

Mrs. Lahrheim has anticipated a visit from her husband for the past one week. He had just returned from Hollywood
[Flying High]
and had been telephoning her, but for some reason or other has not
ventured to call on her …
.

… She very often meets relatives, including her baby, indifferently and this disconcerts them. The more they prod her, the more stubborn she appears. She looks blankly into space, as if in a trance. When permitted, she wears old clothes and accumulates things …

… Husband says he calls her frequently on the phone but cannot see her because it is too upsetting. He wants her to be allowed to go to the movies or have any clothes or comforts within reason …

… The patient was visited by her husband today, and was much relieved when she was told that she was comfortable, happy, and more free from worry than he.

… She is inclined to answer most questions with a nod or interpretive facial expression. She says, “It is hard to get hold of Bert these days, he is so busy; “he said he wanted me to stay here for a couple of weeks more.
”

“When she was in the hospital, I did the best I …” Lahr stops, weighed down by an anxiety he can never verbalize. “I was reaching for something. She was confused. She was sick—mentally sick. There was nothing you could do about it. Later on, you'd censure yourself, but …” Even talking of himself in the second person cannot put Mercedes at a safe distance.

What made it doubly difficult for Lahr to respond to Mercedes was the companionship that had developed between himself and the quiet, moon-faced blonde whom everyone called “Mil.” Lahr met her soon after Mercedes had been committed. He saw her first in
George White's Scandals
(1931). At that time, he had asked to meet her. Although nothing was arranged, White did not forget Lahr's request.

Four months later, Lahr formally met Mildred Schroeder at a cocktail party given by White at his penthouse apartment at the Warwick in 1931. The chorus girls usually came alone, because White wanted them to be a decoration to his party, although he loathed the thought of them having any permanent attachment to his friends.

White liked Mildred. She was straightforward and simple. She combined a good-natured innocence with a well-scrubbed exterior. Once, they met accidentally in a bank where she was depositing her week's wages. White affected to be so impressed by this level-headedness that he matched the sum. Only twenty-six years old, Mildred was gullible, sincere, and parochial. She had been educated in a convent in Cincinnati and came to New York on a wave of confidence inspired by a long skein of first prizes in beauty contests. Sometimes when she felt insecure around the supersophisticates at parties like White's she would take a small clipping from her pocketbook and read it to herself:

Miss Schroeder has, in less than two years in Greater Cincinnati beauty shows, won eight firsts and three seconds, a record which is said to be unequalled in this section …

In her first Broadway show,
Fine and Dandy
, the brashness of the actresses shocked her. Dave Chasen, who gave up a successful career as a comedian to open a restaurant that made him world famous, remembers befriending her after finding her crying on the backstage
steps. “Those girls could really push you around. I just wasn't used to those aggressive types. I wasn't brought up that way.”

When Lahr met her at White's party, he was immediately attracted to her. She was not like the others there. She was nervous, twisting a lace handkerchief and smiling too easily at what he said. She was one of the most beautiful girls in the room, but one of the least polished. Her sincerity and shyness made her seem surprisingly oldfashioned.

Her features were stunning—a full, languid mouth, sharp, laughing eyes, and a body that was supple and energetic. Her voice was at once sweet and vibrant. Secretly, she only vaguely wanted the career that could so easily have been hers. A product of a broken, emotionally impoverished family, she longed for the kind of red-brick security that no actor could give. In fact, entertainers or anyone on the periphery of show business were not the people to whose company she aspired. Lahr was the first actor she had ever considered dating after two years on Broadway. “I never believed in marrying an actor. I thought that one should marry a businessman. I found Bert so different from my picture of an actor. He was a shy person, and that, I think, attracted me. I think he gave me his number, and I think I called him.”

On their first date the contrast between Mildred and the other woman Lahr had been seeing was apparent to him. Mildred wore a long white pleated Grecian dress, with a small pillbox hat. It was her lucky outfit. They went to the Mayfair Club. As she sat talking with Lahr, Rachel M., whom Lahr had not seen since walking out on her six months before, approached their table. She was drunk.

“Got another bitch, Bert? Another easy trick like me?”

She spat on his dinner jacket. Mildred rushed from the table. Lahr followed her out in the street and tried to explain. They finished the evening at another nightclub. “From then on, he was never away from me.” Lahr had found a companion.

Mildred, who believed in holding “good thoughts,” who liked long walks and dancing, enjoyed looking nice and being a fine hostess, was a change for Lahr. She was a girl whose gaiety could be tapped at any moment, whose physical resources of energy were as deep as her will power. She was affectionate without being vulgar and warm without being scheming. She gave Lahr what no other woman had ever offered him—her complete devotion.

From the beginning, there was no question of competition. To Mildred, the bumbling clown was a “gentleman,” a kind, soft, strange
person who was in trouble. She did not stop to analyze him or understand his complexities. But faced with an emotional rapport she could not deny, Mildred accepted Lahr—his genius and his obsession.She liked the idea of being able to contribute something besides her good looks. She was a kind of straightman—a stable center around which he could radiate. “He hasn't ever been funny with me. I don't think he's ever said any great things to me, either.”

Mildred was always there, after each performance, after the endless thirty-six-hole golf days, after the sad trips to see Mercedes. It was more than love that compelled her to stay with him. He was kind to her, but not thoughtful; gentle, but not spontaneous; loving, but strangely set apart.

Neither of them can remember any soft, romantic moments and only a rare present. What is recalled is the onus of worry that hung over Lahr and the kindness with which Mildred dealt with his continual “problems.” Inconspicuously, she handled his fan mail, paid bills he left unopened on his desk, and listened quietly while he explained new laugh lines or pondered what the next season would bring. She persuaded him to visit Mercedes more often and urged him to take more of an interest in his son. When she first met Herbert, he threw a bottle at her. But, as with everything else, she persisted. She was the mother, the organizer, the mirror for all ideas. In a short time, Lahr began to have a confidence in her that he had never felt with a woman before. He respected her taste in clothes and liked the way she dressed. Occasionally, she would help him pick out a suit or a tie—a gesture of real affection to a man so conscious of appearances. His friends responded better to Mildred than they did, sometimes, to him. She was thoughtful and kind, never boisterous in public, always good-spirited. She asked few questions, satisfied to be a part of an undeniable and difficult genius.

Ziegfeld had asked her to join the Ziegfeld chorus line for
Hot-Cha!
, but an attack of appendicitis kept her from signing with the producer and complications left her bedridden for several months. Lahr, who always regarded hospitals the way most Americans regard black cats, visited her daily. “He was very kind to me when I was sick. He came to see me every day, and he'd bring flowers or something.” That surprising attention was a debt of the heart that Mildred wanted to repay. She longed for the softness and understanding her own home life had lacked. In this comedian she saw a hint of it.

Mildred was healthy enough to make the trip to Washington, where
Hot-Cha!'s
opening was front-page news. Her exuberance about being with Lahr was hard for her to conceal. She had never dated any other actor, so the public approval of Lahr's ability and his fantastic success filled her with apple-pie wonder. In a wire to her mother, the excitement of the experience is reflected in her overstatement. The trip to Washington sounds more like the final chapter in the Lewis and Clark journals:

FEBRUARY 16, 1932

MOTHER DARLING AT LAST I GAZED ON THE CAPITOL STOP WASHINGTON IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE STOP CAME ON HERE FOR BERT'S OPENING IT WAS THE BIGGEST HIT EVER KNOWN IN ZIEGFELD'S LAST TEN SHOWS STOP I HAD A LOVELY BIRTHDAY WILL WRITE SOON.

Sometimes, Mildred's openness had its childish moments. Lahr's genuine affection for the eccentricities of Lupe Velez vexed her. Her unabashed sensuality made Mildred jealous. Once, after she and Lahr had passed hastily through a revolving door to greet Miss Velez, Mildred fell into a “faint.” Lahr was by her side immediately and never realized that Lupe had been upstaged.

They had an easy relationship, but there were small fits of possessiveness from Bert that showed her that she was strictly his property. Once in Bimini, while dining on Harry Richman's yacht, a burly, bearded man made conspicuous overtures. “They were overtures—not exactly a pass, but an overture.” Lahr was annoyed enough to speak up to the man who, somewhat embarrassed, introduced himself as Ernest Hemingway. In 1934, Sam Goldwyn, casting his film version of the
Ziegfeld Follies
, asked Mildred and her showgirl friend, Lucille Ball, to come to Hollywood to be in the picture. To her surprise, Lahr begged her to stay in the East. She remained willingly. “I think I could have made it in movies, so many of the girls who were with me like Lucy and Alice Faye did well out there.” But at a moment crucial to her career, she stayed with Lahr.